Blackwork (20 page)

Mike took her hand. “That’s a bad burn,” he said frowning at it. “What’d you grab it for?”

“It was just instinct,” she said, squeezing her left wrist hard. “But how do I make it stop hurting? If it was a regular burn, I’d put ice on it.”

Leona said, “Let me see.” She took Betsy’s hand from Mike and held it gently. She closed her eyes and suddenly Betsy felt the pain go away.

“What—How did you do that?” Betsy asked.

“It’s a talent I got from my grandmother. It’s called ‘drawing fire.’ I wasn’t sure it would work on that, since it’s not hot, but I guess it does.”

Mike made a grimace of disbelief, but Godwin was awe-struck. “That is the most
fantastic
thing I have ever
seen
! It’s, it’s like a
miracle
!” He grinned. “Or is it magic?”

“No, it’s not magic, and it’s not a miracle, either. It’s just a natural talent some people have,” said Leona, her tone patient. “Like water witching, which my father could do. Now, my dear,” she continued to Betsy, “go on with this interesting experiment.”

Working more carefully, Betsy scattered four two-inch-long pellets of dry ice into the bucket.

“Now what?” asked Mike.

“Now we wait.”

“Aren’t you going to pour in a little water?” asked Godwin. “That’s how you get the vapor.”

“No, the water just makes the vapor visible. It’s there.”

It took about five minutes. The pellets dwindled just a little but the air around them didn’t look any different.

“Watch,” said Betsy at last, noticing the candle starting to fade, and the four heads came together over the top of the bucket.

Very quietly, and with no signs of a struggle, the candle’s flame grew smaller and weaker. It finally went out, sending a thin streamer of smoke upward.

“So?” said Mike.

“It was the carbon dioxide that smothered the flame,” said Betsy. “Dry ice goes directly from solid to gas, no liquid in between. And it replaces the air in the room, killing anything that demands oxygen, such as a candle. Or a human being. That’s why there was half a candle left beside Ryan’s body.”

“I nearly died when I got too close to the dry ice fog at Rafael’s party,” said Godwin.

“But you didn’t die—because you were found and moved into fresh air in time,” said Betsy. She and Godwin explained to Mike the incident at the party. She concluded, “There was no one to do that for Ryan.”

“But he would have seen the fog!” objected Mike. “I’ve been around dry ice fog lots of times. Even without water, there’s a kind of fog.”

Betsy pointed to the bucket. “You just saw it at work here. When the air is dry, there is little or no fog. And remember, Ryan was in no condition to notice a faint fog in the air if there was one,” she said.

“Light that candle again,” ordered Mike. “I want to see if that experiment works twice in a row.”

But they couldn’t light the candle again. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and it filled the bottom quarter of the bucket. Every time Betsy lowered a lit match beyond a certain point, it went out. She could lift the candle out and light it, but lowering it into the bucket was like lowering it into water: it went out instantly.

“Okay, how do you get rid of it?” asked Mike. “The gas, I mean.”

“It dissipates all by itself. That’s why Shelly could walk in the next day with no harm. Do you want to stay and wait to see how long it takes? In the sewing room it had the rest of the night and half the next day.”

“I don’t want to stand here for the rest of the day,” said Mike. He upended the bucket, “pouring out” the carbon dioxide. It took several tries and some forceful swirling of the bucket before the bottom was clear enough of the gas to support a candle flame. “How much dry ice does it take to kill a person anyhow?” he wondered.

“That’s not an experiment I’m willing to try,” said Betsy. “But it displaces the air when it first evaporates. They warned me at Metro Ice to use this only in a ventilated room.”

“Okay, but how did it get in there? The door was locked, remember? Shelly had to unlock it to get to McMurphy.”

Betsy said, “I’m thinking there were two ways. First, it could have been put in there before he got home. The door was not locked when he wasn’t there. The question is, how far in advance could the killer put it in there? Ryan was undressed and in bed when he was found, so the gas couldn’t have been very concentrated when he got home, or he would have passed out on the floor. And how would the killer know when he was coming home?”

“He couldn’t,” Mike said. “When McMurphy was out on the town, he’d come home at all different times. He stayed either until he got thrown out, or the tavern closed. There was no way to tell in advance when he was coming home to that basement room.”

“Well, that brings us to the second possibility. It might have been someone with a key, someone who waited until he was in there and asleep—or passed out—before entering to put the dry ice in a bucket. And they’d have had to use a bucket, I suppose, because won’t this substance damage a carpet or wood floor?” She turned around to look for the dropped pellets and used the plastic spoon to pick them up and drop them into the bucket. To her surprise, there was no trace of their presence on her Berber carpet. She stooped and ran her fingers over places they had been, looking for stiffness, bleaching, or other damage, and found nothing but two cool, faintly damp spots. “Humph, I guess not.”

Mike said, “The candle tells us something. It was burnt just about halfway down when it went out.”

Betsy said, “I lit one last night—the same kind of candle—and found out it burns at a rate of about an inch an hour. And they’re five inches tall, so halfway is two and a half hours. It went out two and a half hours after it was lit.”

Malloy said, “The medical examiner says that Ryan McMurphy died around three in the morning. And I found someone who says he brought Ryan home around midnight, so figure he took half an hour to get ready for bed and light his candle and that’s about right.”

“But that would mean someone came in right after he got into bed, which sounds unlikely. I would think the murderer would wait until he was sure Ryan was sound asleep.”

“Oh, those time of death things aren’t an exact science,” said Mike. “I’d say there’s probably half an hour leeway on either side of that estimate. And I’d also guess, from the description of how drunk McMurphy was that night, that he was unconscious the second his head hit the pillow.”

“Is three hours enough time for dry ice to fill that room?” asked Godwin.

“It didn’t have to fill it to the top,” said Betsy, “just the bottom third should have done it.”

Mike said, “I’ll check it out, how long it would take.” He gave a sharp glance at Betsy. “But you know what this means. Unless you’re going to try to prove them innocent.”

“Not Shelly,” said Betsy positively. “I’ve known her since my first day in Excelsior, and she works for me part-time. Under no circumstances would I believe that Shelly did this.”

Mike nodded at her. Unspoken between them lay Harvey’s name.

Betsy had a thought. She said, “Mike, check to see if anyone heard the dog barking. Maybe Shelly and Harv were out, so the killer sneaked in. But Shelly says the dog barks.”

“All right.” Mike made a note.

Betsy turned to Godwin and Leona. “May I ask you not to repeat any of this conversation to anyone? Not about the dry ice as a murder weapon and especially not about who Mike suspects. Nothing is proven yet.”

“I know only too well the power of unproven accusations in Excelsior,” said Leona with emphasis.

After Mike and Leona left, Betsy put the extinguished candle, still in its globe, in a desk drawer. She put the plastic bag of dry ice into the bucket and took it out to the Dumpster in the parking lot behind the shop.

“Goddy,” she said on returning, “don’t tell anyone about Leona taking the pain out of my hand.”

“Why not?” he demanded. “It was a fabulous thing she did.”

“Because one of the reasons she hasn’t been hounded out of town is that a majority of the residents don’t believe in witchcraft. Their disbelief is keeping her safe. You start offering them evidence to the contrary, all the dry ice in the county won’t help.”

A
FEW customers later—Godwin biting his tongue with obvious effort to keep from telling about the marvel of Leona “drawing fire”—Billie came in.

“I’m in a knitting mood,” she announced. “Wool me!”

Godwin helped her select two skeins of cherry red wool, a pattern for a spiral pattern scarf, and a new set of number eight bamboo knitting needles.

Checking out at the desk, she said to Betsy, “How’s the investigation coming?”

“It’s just about at a halt right now,” said Betsy, putting Billie’s purchases into a Crewel World plastic drawstring bag. “I
think
I know how it was done, but I can’t figure out who might have done it.”

“But you know how?” Billie was staring at her. “You’re serious! You mean it wasn’t black magic?”

“No, of course not.”

“That sounds . . . strange. I’ve heard that Ryan locked the door to the sewing room when he was in there. That seems to mean it was Shelly or Harv. But that doesn’t sound like them at all. I mean, if they wanted Ryan out, all they had to do was tell him to leave.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so depressing.”

“So really you have no suspects at all,” said Billie, sounding disappointed.

“Oh, no, I have suspects. It’s just that they have alibis. You, for example.”

“
Me?
”

Betsy smiled. “Yes, you. Someone told me you hated Ryan. Is that true?”

“I didn’t hate him. Okay, I was mad at him for a long time. But hate? No. It’s a wearisome thing, and a waste of time.” She smiled. “Almost as tiresome a thing as the Halloween festival. Aren’t you tired of all the planning for it?”

“Oh, yes. And I’m going to get tired of Christmas long before it arrives. It’s one of the sad parts of being in commerce. But why were you mad at him for a long time?”

“Because he kept my daughter Cara out of the Naval Academy.”

It was Betsy’s turn to look surprised. “How did he manage to do that?”

“Well, he and Cara are cousins, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

Billie nodded. “His mother and my husband are brother and sister. Cara decided halfway through high school that she wanted to follow another cousin into the Naval Academy—Sunny is doing work she loves, and the education she got was simply superb. But Cara had slacked off during her sophomore year, and although she was working very hard to bring her grades up, things looked marginal for her. Sunny wrote a letter to our Congressman in Washington recommending her, and she helped Cara write her own letter. And, of course, her father and I also wrote letters, and got two of her teachers to write as well. And we got some very encouraging replies from Congressman Karlson.

“Then Sunny and Ryan had a falling out—Ryan was always quarreling with someone or other—and he decided that the way to get back at Sunny was to bollix her attempts to help Cara get into the Academy. So when Representative Karlson sent some staff member around to see what sort of person Cara was, he made sure to spread the word about Cara’s shooting a deer out of season, making her sound like a poacher.”

Betsy could only blink at this. “She poached a deer?”

“Of course not! It was just a stupid mistake. There were these deer invading our vegetable garden, eating simply everything. We’d put up a fence but it wasn’t high enough. Cara wanted to enter some of her tomatoes and pumpkins in the County Fair, and what the deer didn’t eat, they trampled. So she sat up one night with her dad’s thirty-ought-six rifle, meaning just to fire over their heads and scare them, and one deer jumped the fence just as she fired and she brought it down. She didn’t tell us until the next morning, by which time she had it hanging in the garage, and her boyfriend helping her turn it into roasts and steaks. She was surprised we didn’t think it was just a funny accident and begged us not to report it, so we didn’t, but she’d already told some other friends. It wasn’t all that serious, though I didn’t agree it was a joke.” Billie smiled. “One thing it did do, the other deer left the garden alone for the rest of the growing season.

“But Ryan told a colorized version to people, and he said she cheated on her final exam in calculus, and by the time his stories got back to Congressman Karlson’s representative, it was all exaggerated, like she cheated on all her exams and that she shot that deer on purpose. And so Cara didn’t get the appointment.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“Yes, it was, and I was very angry with Ryan for a long while. But I told Cara to go to my alma mater and join ROTC”—Billie pronounced it
Rot-Cee
—“and she tried that, but there is an anti-ROTC culture at that university and she decided she didn’t like college after all. Now she’s finishing up a veterinary assistant course at Minneapolis Technical College and she’s doing well.”