Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_01 (25 page)

Jill took a deep drink of her coffee; she was working a double shift because a colleague was ill. “That's not all of it. Hud's second wife used to be Margot's best friend, and when he dumped her for the woman who became the third Mrs. Earlie, Margot was furious. Eleanor—that's the second wife—moved away, and Margot was depressed about that. And when the third marriage broke up after only six months, she was even madder at Hud. Every so often he'd try to be friends with Margot, and she'd get mad all over again at him.”

“I suppose she thought it might have been better if Hud had just had an affair,” Betsy heard herself say, and was surprised at the defensive tone. Did she like Hud that much? She rubbed the underside of her nose with a forefinger and caught Jill's sardonic look. Or was she amused? Betsy still had trouble reading that enigmatic face.

Jill said, “I think this time she was mad because he and you seemed to have hit it off.”

Later, in bed, waiting to fall asleep, Betsy thought the conversation over. Margot had been furious with Hud for dumping his wife, Margot's best friend. That was interesting, but it didn't seem relevant. If anything, it might have been a motive for Margot to murder Hud, rather than for Hud to murder Margot. But not all these years later. Of course, it spoke ill of Hud, behaving that way. Hud's face, that confidence man's grin all over it, swam up before her, then Margot's face appeared, with a disapproving look. So Margot had spoken to Hud about her? How dare Margot think Betsy couldn't take care of herself!

She rolled away from the faces, seeking sleep—and after a bit, found it. In a few minutes she was dreaming that she and Jill were in a sinking boat, and she was frantically knitting a new paddle for the broken oar while Jill bailed.

16

Betsy woke with a start. Something energetic was playing on the clock radio, Groucho Marx being greeted as Captain Spaulding by the gritty sound track from the old movie. Betsy had first heard that song as the theme from Groucho's TV show,
You Bet Your Life,
and had been surprised when she heard it in the movie
Animal Crackers. Or was it Cocoanuts?
Never mind, it was a delightfully silly song to wake up to.

She had been surprised by KSJN's
Morning Show
because that radio station played classical the rest of the day, which in Betsy's opinion was the genuine, authentic, real stuff for easy listening. Still, she left her clock radio set to wake her to the
Morning Show,
because she was rarely annoyed by the music they offered. On the other hand, she never knew what they would play next. In this case, it was Glenn Miller's “Pennsylvania 6-5000.” Betsy smiled; she could remember her parents dancing to this; it had been one of their favorites.

What was more, the sun was slanting brightly through the window, it looked to be another pretty day. On those two happy notes, she began her morning stretches. Pennsylvania stretch, stretch, stretch!

The song ended. Dale and Jim Ed began one of their faux commercials—this being public radio, and they apparently felt a need to make up for the lack of real ones. They touted a company that, for a price, thought up weird excuses for why you could not come to work. Their current offering involved a rare mildew infection, and included a scientist who would call your boss to confirm the infection and give the recipe for the powerful cleaning solution needed to wipe down anything you had touched. “This way,” concluded Dale, “when you go to work the next day, not only have you convinced everyone you had a legitimate excuse for being off work, you will find your work area spick-and-span!”

And Betsy had thought California had a lock on weird!

Stretches completed, she relaxed for a bit. She felt the mattress jiggle, then lean into big-cat-size footfalls as Sophie came up alongside her. The cat fell weightily against her hip with a combination sigh and purr. The cat enjoyed these slothful morning minutes as much as Betsy did. Betsy closed her eyes and let her fingers wander through the animal's fur until she came to the special itchy place under Sophie's chin, where she paused to scratch lazily. Sophie put a gentle paw around Betsy's hand in case Betsy had any notion of moving it away. The purr became richer, deeper, deeper, deeper....

Betsy was brought back from a doze by a gentle but insistent tugging at her hand. She resumed scratching.

But when Betsy tired of scratching and tucked her hand back under the covers to try for another nap, Sophie turned the movement into a game of Mouse Under the Blanket, which finished that notion.

Then, thumping along on her cast, Sophie led the way into the kitchen, where she sat pointedly beside her empty food dish. But Betsy started the coffee first. It was her sole victory in the mornings nowadays and she was determined to hang on to it.

When it was a little before ten Betsy went downstairs to open up, eager for customers.

But by noon she had added another four inches to the knitted scarf (including errors unraveled and reknit properly) and nothing to the till. Only two people had come in. One wanted something the shop didn't carry. “Try Needle Nest in Wayzata,” Godwin said, adding to Betsy, “They send people to us.” The other person was merely curious about Betsy's sleuthing, and she firmly put him off. As she told Godwin, perhaps he was on Detective Malloy's list of informants.

At last Betsy announced she was going to call the part-time help and tell them not to come in for the afternoon shift.

Godwin, taking down some outdated announcements on the mirror by the front door said, “Don't do that. Take a half day yourself. Margot always took Wednesdays off.”

“I don't have anywhere I need to go,” she objected, thinking perhaps she should give Godwin the half day and save his salary, too.

“Yes, you do.”

“Like where?”

“First, you should go back upstairs, have a little lunch, and find Margot's sketchbook, the one with the red cover. I can do the needlepoint, if Margot did a graphed drawing of it. I'll work it like counted cross-stitch, only in needlepoint. It's a thousand dollars for the shop.”

“Less what I'd have to pay you to do it.”

“I'll do it for nothing. For the sake of the shop. For Margot.”

“Oh, Goddy ...” Betsy felt guilty for even thinking of shorting Godwin's paycheck.

“Now don't get mushy. Besides, here's where you really need to go this afternoon,” he added, bringing a new flyer back to her. “Look, there's a Kaffe Fasset exhibit just opened.”

“Who's Kaffe Fasset?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Only one of the best needlework designers in the world. Needlepoint to cry for, knitting to die for. People who see the exhibit or read about it will be coming in to buy his patterns and it will help if you can talk intelligently about him.”

He put the flyer in her hands. The front flap had a color photo of a magnificent sweater, knit in a pattern of subtle, earth-toned stripes under an Oriental-looking pattern of flowers.

“Hmmm,” she said. “This is at the Minneapolis art museum. Yes, you're right, I think I need to go see this.”

“Upstairs first. Go on, go right now.”

Because it had been Shelly who found the slash jacket and Irene who had noticed the T‘ang needlepoint horse missing, Betsy considered she, perhaps, was not the one to be looking for the sketchbook.

But she told herself sternly that since she obsessed about Margot's murder, and was therefore the sleuth, however amateur, she had a responsibility to prove herself capable of sleuthing.

Unlike Betsy, Margot had been a neat and organized person. (Already the apartment shows that, Betsy thought, and sighed.) Presumably there was a place she kept such things as the notebook she used when designing pieces. Betsy had been living in the apartment long enough to know that if the notebook were kept outside Margot's bedroom, she would have come across it by now. And she hadn't.

Therefore (Betsy smiled to herself, this was rather like a syllogism, and she'd been rather good at syllogisms), the notebook was in Margot's bedroom.

She stood a quiet moment inside the door, feeling suddenly that her sister was quite close, that this was an important moment. She stopped the shallow breaths she'd been taking and instead took a deep one, letting it out slowly.

If I were Margot, she thought, where would I keep a sketchpad on which I was designing a copy of the blue horse?

Filed away under
T‘ang,
came the prompt answer.

She went to the wooden file cabinet and slid open the bottom drawer, labeled M-Z. Under T, she found T‘ANG HORSE. The file folder was slender, containing only the handwritten note about the order for the copy Mrs. Lundgren had placed. No, wait; in the bottom of the folder were two sets of three slim packets of Madeira blue silk embroidery floss, each held together with a rubber band. They were numbers 1005, 1007, 1008, 1712, 1711, and 1710. One packet was dark, medium, and light shades of midnight blue; the other, silver blues.

By now Betsy had seen enough of needlepointers to know that a needlepointed rose was often four or more shades of red. So why not a horse six shades of blue? She started to put the folder back, but changed her mind and kept it out.

There was no sketchbook in the file cabinet, of course; she had realized as soon as she opened it that the sketchbook was too big to fit in the drawer—Betsy had seen the sketchbook, it had a thick red cover with spiral binding across the top. Any other notes Margot had made on the original horse she'd either thrown away or taken with her to the museum, where she'd probably added a few new ones. And she'd never gotten a chance to put them back into the folder.

They were probably with the sketchpad.

Which wasn't in the closet. It wasn't tucked behind the file cabinet or the dresser, either. Or under the bed. Or under the comforter pulled across the bed.

Betsy searched the other closets, cabinets, bookshelves in the apartment with equal lack of success. She went out to the kitchen to spread a dab of peanut butter on a slice of the Excelo Bakery's excellent whole-wheat bread and do some thinking.

Betsy had overheard some conversation between Margot and a customer about using a computer to design patterns. Margot had sounded knowledgeable on the topic; maybe she did that herself.

Betsy put down her bread half-eaten and went back to the bedroom. She booted up and looked for a publishing or artwork program. The first one she found didn't have anything connected to needlework in it. The second one was for designing needlework, but there were no files in it. She searched around for a while, found no other design program, and finally summoned the word-processing program.

The computer burped and gurgled at her, and instead of a screen ready to accept text, offered something called
What Are You Supposed to Do Today?
It had a list under it, beginning with some general notes:
Betsy's birthday, October 15,
for example. Under that were specific dates.
Wed, Aug. 19, 11 am—See Hud at museum,
read the first of those entries. Under it, indented:
2 pm, Penberthy, sign papers;
and under that:
7 pm, City Hall, bring report on art fair.

Betsy smiled. She had not been able to find a physical date book because Margot kept her appointments on her computer.

Thursday, Margot was supposed to see if Eloise was back in town and ask her if she would run the food shelf this winter. Friday asked,
Told Betsy yet?

Betsy sat frowning at that. Tell Betsy what? She thumped the screen with a knuckle. Tell me, she thought at the screen, as if it had ESP and would respond. But it didn't.

Betsy scrolled down the screen. Margot had a date with Mayor Jamison for the Last Dance of Summer at the Lafayette Club on Friday. The date of the fund-raiser, also at Lafayette Club, was noted, and there continued a steady stream of things to be done, running right through the end of this year and into the next, including that spring art fair she'd gone to talk about at City Hall.

She pressed the exit button and the computer wanted to know if it should save the calendar, noting that no changes had been made. Betsy punched N for no, and on getting a blank screen asked to see a list of files.

The contents were mostly letters, including one to Mrs. Lundgren about the T‘ang-horse needlepoint, saying that it would be ready Tuesday of Thanksgiving week and reminding her that the one-thousand-dollar price was due on delivery.

But there was nothing else about the T‘ang project in the files.

Betsy shut down the computer and finished her sandwich before going back down to the shop, frowning with discontent.

Godwin was no help; he had no idea what might have happened to the sketches or any other notes Margot might have taken about the needlepoint project. Or what papers Margot was to sign at Penberthy's office.

“You could call and ask,” he suggested.

Feeling a little foolish, she went behind the desk and phoned Mr. Penberthy. He was out, but his secretary remembered Margot coming in. “She was here to sign the incorporation papers.”

Well sure; Penberthy had told Betsy that! And of course that was what Margot had meant to tell her, that she was an officer of the new corporation.

Betsy said, “Margot had this big sketchbook, a kind of tablet with a red cover. She didn't by chance leave it behind when she was there, did she?”

“Now, funny you should ask,” said the secretary. “Because she did leave it behind. I had to run out of the office to catch her and give it back to her. We had a nice laugh about it, like she was getting real absentminded lately. Which of course she wasn't.”

“Do you know where she went from your office?” asked Betsy.