Cutwork (6 page)

“I saw that boy who was arrested going by my booth toward Mr. McFey’s, but that isn’t the order things happened in. There were other people at the booth first.”

“And you think one of them murdered Mr. McFey?”

“I don’t know that for sure. But there was an argument earlier, and there wasn’t any sound like that when the boy was there.”

“That doesn’t mean—well, wait a minute, maybe it does.” Betsy thought a moment. “Would you like a cup of coffee, or tea?”

“Tea, please. Do you have some of that delicious raspberry?”

“Yes, I think I do.” Betsy went into the small back room and filled two of her prettiest porcelain cups with hot water from an electric kettle, put a teabag each on the matching saucers, and refilled the kettle from a jug. She considered Irene’s words while she did that. Irene was a very imaginative person, and growing more so all the time. But she was also a keen observer of the passing scene, and while inclined to draw strange conclusions about the motives of the people she observed, she did not ordinarily lie about what she actually saw. Betsy added a soupçon of imitation sugar to her own cup, and went back to the little table.

“Who was the boy you saw?” Betsy asked.

“Mickey Sinclair. I knew he was up to no good, skulking around like he was. Looking for something to steal, I’m sure. There should be more police on duty at the fair—some of the jewelry items are easy to stick into a pocket, and are quite valuable.”

“Did you see him take anything?”

“No, of course not. I made sure he saw me looking at him, so he didn’t dare take anything. He saw me and all of a sudden he was just a boy on his merry way to someplace, not a thief looking for something to steal. He was very obvious about it.”

Betsy had a sudden recollection of a young man strolling the grounds, hands in pockets, whistling tunelessly, very ostentatiously playing the innocent. Was that Mickey Sinclair?

“What does he look like?”

“Well, he’s not very tall, and he’s thin, with curly brown hair that’s too long for a boy and a ring in his nose.” Her own small nose wrinkled in distaste. “He was wearing jeans with holes in them and a black T-shirt with a skull on it, disgraceful.”

That matched Betsy’s recollection.

“Did you see Mickey at Mr. McFey’s booth?”

“No, but he went past my booth headed in that direction.”

“And then you heard a quarrel?”

“No, the quarrel was earlier. Two men shouting. It wasn’t very loud or very long.”

“Could you hear what they were fighting about?”

“No. I think I heard one man say, ‘You can’t have it,’ or maybe it was, ‘You can’t take it.’”

“‘It,’ not ‘that’?”

Irene reflected while sipping her tea. “Yes,” she nodded. “I’m almost positive he said, ‘You can’t have it.’”

“And there wasn’t any sound like even one shout when Mickey Sinclair went past Mr. McFey’s booth?”

“No. That’s why I was so surprised when I went down there to look at his lion carving and found him.” Her hand with the cup came down involuntarily, the fingers twitching. “There was a great deal of blood, it was very disturbing. Even Mike Malloy, though he’s a policeman, was upset by it. When I tried to tell him to talk to you, he was rude to me.” She turned those shining eyes on Betsy. “But there’s no reason
I
can’t talk to you, and now I’m sure you’ll be able to discover who really murdered poor Mr. McFey.”

 
Betsy was in her shop after closing that night. A large box had been delivered right at five by UPS, and she decided to unpack it before going upstairs. Her super-size cat, Sophie, didn’t approve of the delay. The animal was in the back room beside the door to the back hallway, whining at intervals for someone to take her up to the apartment and feed her. Betsy ignored the whine.

She had tried to forbid food in her shop, both because it soiled fibers and because Sophie too often succeeded in garnering a share. In the last few months, by strenuous enforcement of the no-food rule, Betsy had reduced losses thirty percent and helped Sophie reduce her weight to nineteen pounds; the cat’s role had been to complain that she was fading away to a wisp. But the shop’s customers complained and so many persisted in bringing food along, especially when shopping during their lunch break, that Betsy had loosened the reins. And apparently believing Sophie’s complaints, they resumed slipping the occasional tidbit to the cat. Just this afternoon, Betsy had seen Sophie eat a corner of a Hershey bar, a quarter of a sugar cookie, and a fragment of lettuce leaf coated with ranch dressing. God knew what else she’d eaten without Betsy noticing; certainly over the past few weeks she had regained two of the lost pounds.

So while Betsy still fed Sophie her official dinner scoop of dry cat food, she felt no urgency in getting upstairs to do so.

In the box Betsy was unpacking were a variety of baskets. When her sister Margot Berglund had owned Crewel World, she had used baskets to display items such as skeins of yarn and small needlework accessories. The baskets had grown shabby, and some had become a source of snags for anything placed in them. Baskets were expensive, so Betsy tried to ignore the problem. But then a customer had indignantly displayed the splinter in her finger. The customer, a Band-Aid on her finger and a free skein of overdyed silk in her bag, had departed only somewhat mollified—and Shelly Donohue had come in with a basket on her arm.

Shelly was a good friend as well as a sometime part-timer in Betsy’s shop. She had a curvaceous figure, beautiful hazel eyes, and a great deal of light brown hair worn in a fat bun at the nape of her neck. A divorcee, she hadn’t married again, and Betsy sometimes wondered why.

The basket was neatly woven, about fifteen inches deep and with an unusually high handle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like that,” Betsy had said. “Where’d you get it?”

“In a place called Dell Rapids, South Dakota,” replied Shelly. “I collect baskets, and I used to just display them, but lately I’ve been using some of them. This is just right for a quick trip to the grocery store. I no longer have to choose between choking a fish or killing a tree.”

Betsy chuckled dutifully at the worn jest, and asked, “What were you doing in Dell Rapids, South Dakota? Is it near Mount Rushmore?”

“No, it’s a little north of Sioux Falls, where I went to visit some friends. There’s no needlework shop in Sioux Falls, but there’s a nice one in Dell Rapids. And the owner carries baskets made by a local woman, Marcy Anderson. I bought this one and a double-rim.”

Shelly gave Betsy the name of the owner of the needlework shop, and the owner in turn kindly gave Betsy Marcy Anderson’s address so Betsy could deal with the basket weaver directly.

And so the box Betsy was unpacking held a big round wool-drying basket on short legs, two double-rimmed baskets, an egg basket whose bottom was shaped like a human bottom, and a mitten basket.

She enjoyed making displays and soon was deep in design mode, humming to herself, loading the baskets with goodies, and trying out places to put them, when someone tapped on the door to her shop. The sound was as if the person was using a key or coin, and Betsy knew before she looked around who it was. She saw a pair of long, darktrousered legs and a light blue shirt standing at the door. The head was hidden behind her needlepointed CLOSED sign, but Betsy grimaced. It was Jill, all right.

She went slowly to the door and lifted the sign to see if she could tell how angry Jill was. There was no expression at all on the woman’s face, but Jill had a way with her face—the less it showed, the more she was thinking. Betsy braced herself and unlocked the door.

“Hello, Jill,” she said. “Come on in.”

Jill came in, removing her police cap as she did so.

“I thought when you got to be sergeant, you didn’t have to work nights anymore.”

“I’m just coming off duty, not going on,” said Jill.

“Then you’ll have time for a cup of coffee, or tea?”

“No. I just wanted to say . . . how disappointed I am in you.”

Betsy nearly put on a surprised face, but caught herself in time. “I’m disappointed in me, too. I’m sorry I broke a confidence, Jill. It won’t happen again.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Good night.” Jill put on her cap and turned for the door.

“Jill?”

She turned. “Yes?”

“Are we still friends?”

Jill’s expression had not changed throughout this conversation, nor did it now. “Of course.” She left the shop.

Betsy turned back to her task, but her heart was no longer in it.

At home, Jill sat down to her dinner of beef stew over a big biscuit. Jill never dieted; she wasn’t particularly slim, but hadn’t gained or lost an ounce since she was twenty. Tonight, however, she skipped the additional treat of frozen yogurt with strawberries she had planned on.

Though her surname was Cross, Jill was seven-eighths Norwegian, and had been raised in the cool-tempered traditions of that culture. Except to cheer at Twins and Viking games, she had never heard her parents raise their voices. When disagreements arose, the household settled into a frosty silence until someone was willing to apologize; and even then, there was a distinct chill until hurt feelings healed.

Jill used to envy people who shouted at one another over trivialities, then quickly got over it and embraced as warmly as they’d quarreled. She was pleased when she started dating an Irishman raised in that kind of family. But she quickly came to dread the no-warning flare-ups and found she had to fake the hasty, easy, sentimental making up that followed. She let the Irishman go and started dating Lars Larson, whose dogged, low-key emotions matched her own.

Lars had been asking Jill to marry him for well over a year, but Jill knew he didn’t just want a wife: Lars wanted children, lots of them. He once confessed that he hoped Jill would get pregnant on their honeymoon.

This would have been fine with Jill, except that she was a patrol cop. It was very difficult to chase fleeing suspects or handcuff angry, struggling drunks while pregnant. So Jill had wanted to wait until she got a desk job.

Well, now she had the desk job, or anyway mostly a desk job, or at least she was no longer engaged in foot pursuits. To get the job, she’d passed the sergeant’s exam.

Then came the catch. Excelsior had a no-fraternization rule. If Jill and Lars had been married, or even engaged, there would have been no problem. But they weren’t. So unless one of them quit the police force—which wasn’t going to happen—they couldn’t date anymore. Well, if Lars passed his own sergeant’s exam, then they could date, but that wasn’t going to happen, either, because Lars refused to take it on the grounds that he loved the variety and action of patrol.

Interestingly, it never occurred to either of them to break the rule and see each other secretly. This was first because they were Scandinavians, who were second only to Germans in their passion for obeying the rules; but also because Excelsior had a citizen spy network second to none, and they never would have gotten away with it.

Which brought Jill to her second serious disappointment: Betsy Devonshire.

Jill had been introduced to Betsy by Betsy’s sister Margot. Margot had been Jill’s friend for seven years, her best friend for nearly four. Then Margot had been murdered, and Jill drew closer to Betsy for Margot’s sake. The tie had strengthened when Betsy uncovered Margot’s murderer. It was perhaps because the tie had never been questioned or even tested that Betsy’s betrayal of Jill’s trust had been so shattering.

That’s how Jill saw it, as a betrayal. Even though she was a civilian, Betsy had successfully involved herself in criminal investigations and so, in Jill’s mind, had a special status. So naturally Jill had told Betsy that a juvenile had been arrested for the murder of Robert McFey.

And Betsy, like any common gossip, had told the Monday Bunch meeting in her shop. Which would have been all right, but she had let slip that Jill was the source of her information. Within hours it was all over town.

The fault was partly Jill’s, too; she should never have told Betsy about the arrest. In fact, she hadn’t specifically told Betsy not to repeat it. So all right, the fault was mostly her own. The thought was enough to make her dinner a cold, unpleasant lump in her stomach.

Chief Nygaard had not been pleased. Jill had been reprimanded a time or two when she first joined the force, but for nothing more serious than mistakes any rookie might make—and far fewer of them than normal. Never before had an error of hers been called to the attention of the chief.

Even now, remembering his words (which were few) and his tone (which was cold), Jill felt a painful blush rise from her throat and spread upward to her ash-blond hairline.

It said much about Jill’s integrity that she hadn’t decided never to see or speak to Betsy again, but rather had gone to see her and in a calm voice expressed her disappointment.

But it would be a while before she could feel the same warm attachment.

And dismayingly, she couldn’t go for comfort to Lars.

4

Betsy tried to continue arranging the baskets, but at last shrugged and shoved some yarn in the remaining three of them, scattered them all around the shop, then went upstairs to feed her cat and herself. Like Jill, she didn’t much appreciate her meal, and had no appetite for dessert.

After dinner, to remind herself she’d turned from proprietor of her shop to a student in it, she changed into jeans and a pink cotton shirt before she went back down to wait by the door for people to come to an evening class.

Charlotte Norton arrived first, as befitted the teacher. Char, a trim woman in her early forties with dark brown hair and hazel eyes, had been a customer of Crewel World long before Betsy had inherited it. Betsy had discovered that Char knitted and was fond of small, quick counted patterns, which she did as gifts for friends. But Char also bought a lot of white, green, and natural linen and a large number of balls of number five and number seven DMC Perle cotton in white and ecru—but nowhere near enough patterns to account for this amount of material. It wasn’t until she asked if Betsy had a certain brand of scissors—Davos—which she didn’t, that Betsy decided to ask just what it was Char was stitching.