Knitting Bones (8 page)

“No,” said Godwin promptly. Then he frowned. “But I wasn’t thinking any of them might be lying. Anyway, this is not the same thing, Betsy. I
know
Bob Germaine is gay.”

Betsy and Jill did not reply and after a few moments Godwin said humbly, “But that’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? My not jumping to conclusions?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Betsy.

“Maybe I should go talk to them again?”

“Yes, but not right now,” said Betsy. “You need to talk to Sharon’s mother, first. What’s her name, anyhow?”

“Ramona,” said Godwin. “Ramona Tinsmith.”

Betsy said, “Tinsmith, that’s a nice name. After you talk with Mrs. Tinsmith, I’d like you to see if you can contact any of Bob Germaine’s coworkers.”

“He’ll need an excuse for that,” said Jill.

“The truth will do, I think,” said Betsy. “We’ve been asked to investigate his disappearance by his wife.”

“Something else,” said Godwin. “I want to get a better photograph of Bob from Allie before I go back to my friends at the Eagle. Is there anything you want me to tell her?”

“Oh, I wish there were!” exclaimed Betsy unhappily. “I can’t figure this out without listening to people!” She clenched her fists. “I
wish
I could get out and talk to people myself. I
wish
I could get down to my shop! I feel so
useless
up here!”

Godwin hastened to say, “You’re
not
useless! You’re giving me good advice right now. And, I come up here all the time with questions and the latest gossip from the shop. Which reminds me: A couple members of the Monday Bunch want to know if they can meet up here.” He leaned forward and added in a confidential tone, “Bershada says when she broke her ankle, all her friends came around and cleaned her house for her, and she wants to know if the Bunch can do it for you on Monday.”

Betsy, who had looked around her dusty, disordered apartment in a kind of panic at the prospect of the Monday Bunch visiting, turned now to Godwin and burst into grateful tears.

R
AMONA
Tinsmith was shorter and stockier than her daughter, but otherwise she looked very much like her. She had even dyed her hair the same light brown color. She was wearing a silky green housedress and old-fashioned white Keds.

Her voice was deeper and warmer than Sharon’s, and her blue eyes were surrounded by attractive laugh lines. She invited Godwin into her immaculate little kitchen, done all in black and cream, and without asking poured him a mug of coffee, then poured a second for herself. She sat down at a tiny round glass table in a corner and gestured at him to sit, too.

“Thank you,” Godwin said. He got out a little notebook—it had a flowered fabric cover and sewn-in pages—then, seeing she seemed to be waiting for something, politely took a sip of the coffee.

“Milk? Sugar?” Ramona asked, rising. All of a sudden she was avoiding his eyes, which was making him uncomfortable.

“No, this is fine. Good coffee.” Godwin took another sip. Since he rarely drank plain coffee anymore—he liked Starbucks’s half-caff triple grande nonfat caramel macchiato with whipped cream and nutmeg powder, with one Sweet’n Low and one NutraSweet—he didn’t know if he was lying or not. “Please, sit down. This won’t take long, and it won’t hurt a bit.” He chuckled. “I sound like my dentist.”

Ramona smiled and relaxed into her chair. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit nervous. Yesterday I was completely sure, but today not so much.”

Godwin let his mouth drop open in amazement. “I know
exactly
what you mean! I’m liable to say just about anything—until I see someone with a tape recorder or a notebook. Then I start dropping ‘almost,’ ‘maybe,’ and ‘some people think’ all over the place!”

Ramona’s laugh lines deepened as she lifted her chin and laughed. “You are so right! I’ve been getting more and more nervous about you coming over and asking questions, until by the time you got here I was almost ready to pretend no one was at home.” She took a deep breath. “But I’m over that now.”

“Good,” said Godwin. He found the pen in a shirt pocket and clicked out the point. “Sharon said you had something to tell me about the EGA banquet.”

“Yes.” Ramona nodded, then leaned forward. “I don’t think that was Bob Germaine up there accepting the check.”

Godwin had begun writing this down, but stopped halfway. “Oh, now—” he began, and stopped. Betsy and Jill had leaned on him about this, hadn’t they? And he’d resented it just a little bit. After
all
—now, now. After all, maybe they were right.

He cleared his throat and began again. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

A
T
noon the next day, Godwin went to the Sol’s Deli next door and ordered a thick beef-on-rye sandwich with lettuce and tomato, a side of potato chips, two milks, and an extra pickle. He took the paper bag with him upstairs and tapped on Betsy’s door. “Come in,” she called in a slightly odd voice.

“Hello, hello, hello!” he said brightly, putting on a smile for her. But when he came in and saw her sitting in her overstuffed chair, wearing a silver peignoir that tumbled in lace over her knees, her hair washed and combed, her lips colored, the smile turned real.

Her head was turned slightly away as she tucked her knitting needles into a small ball of orange yarn. When she turned to look at him, he saw she was ashen, her eyes bright with unshed tears. He went at once to kneel at her feet. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing, nothing. Don’t I look better?”

“You. Look. Mahhhh-velous! Except around the eyes. There you look like you’re hurting.”

“Well, I am, a little. I’m cutting back on the pain meds. And see how it helped? I’m no longer lying like a beached walrus on the couch, I’m sitting up and taking notice. And noticing what I’ve been missing. For example, the fact that the ‘squares’ I’ve been knitting for the African blanket are not exactly squares.” She lifted the needles, which held a shape probably best described as a parallelogram.

Godwin was surprised into a snort of laughter. He reached and took the piece from her. “Well…” he said, thinking rapidly. “Maybe you could do a lot of these odd shapes, and put them together in a kind of patchwork, and it would look as if you meant to do them this way.” He looked closer, at the random increases and decreases, the dropped stitches and yarnovers, and handed it back. “Or not,” he concluded, getting to his feet. But he was still smiling.

Betsy looked up mournfully at his smiling face. “Oh, Goddy.” She sighed. “If I’d known how much trouble breaking a leg could be, I never would have done it!”

Godwin began to think she was still taking a few too many pills, then he saw her smile, and the two laughed heartily.

“Okay,” said Betsy, when they’d caught their breath, “what did you find out?”

“Lunch first.” He opened the bag and brought out the sandwich, offering half to her and draping a big paper napkin across her lap. He waited until she had taken a bite of her half and nodded in pleasure before he said, “First, I found out that your advice on interviewing people was really good. Thank you, thank you, thank you—and Jill, too.”

Betsy waved the sandwich half impatiently. “Yes, yes, you’re welcome. But—”

He interrupted, “Second, Ramona thinks it wasn’t Bob Germaine who stole the check.”

Betsy frowned at him. “Who does she think stole it?”

“Some other man. I mean, she thinks the man who gave the thank-you speech at the banquet wasn’t Allie Germaine’s husband.” He took a bite of his sandwich.

The frown deepened. “Does she have any idea who this man was?”

He swallowed and replied, “Not a clue. But she says she saw Bob Germaine at the hotel restaurant the day before—someone pointed him out to her, he was having lunch with his wife—and that the man up on the dais at the EGA banquet didn’t look like the same man.”

There were sparkles of interest in Betsy’s eyes. “Now we’re getting somewhere! I wonder if she could be right? But how would someone even think he could get away with a stunt like that?” Now she had that look she got when hot on the trail. “Wait, what we still need—” She leaned forward eagerly, then winced. But she waved the pain away to continue, “Who agrees with her about this?”

“Nobody. Ramona said she hasn’t told anyone but her daughter.”

“Why not?”

Godwin ate a potato chip thoughtfully. “I think because she’s waiting for someone else to bring it up, and nobody has. So she isn’t sure she’s right.”

Betsy was disappointed. “So it’s not a rumor spreading around?”

“Nobody’s come into the shop to tell me—and you know our shop is like a side room off Gossip Central.” Godwin meant the Waterfront Café, where people met to eat lunch and dish.

Betsy, sipping milk through a straw, lowered her little carton to muse aloud. “But surely there were people at the banquet who know Bob. If the man who took the check wasn’t Bob, how come nobody else noticed? Like, for example, the people who handed the check over?”

“Well, the woman who was supposed to hand the check over was at that meeting with Allie and the other officers of our local EGA—and with officers of other EGA chapters, plus the Regional officers.”

Distracted, Betsy asked, “What was that meeting about?”

“I don’t know, they haven’t told us. Which means it’s bad news, an increase in dues or something like that.” Godwin swung back on topic. “Allie doesn’t bring Bob along to many EGA events, you know.”

Betsy took a pinch of potato chips. “Yes, that’s right. So whoever took his place probably looked enough like him, height, coloring, build, that the people there just took it for granted it was Bob.”

“But how did the imposter know Bob’s wife wouldn’t jump up and say, ‘What did you do with my husband?’”

Betsy grimaced. “Yes, of course. That kind of makes Ramona’s story a mistake, doesn’t it?”

A little silence fell. Betsy chewed a bite of her sandwich moodily.

Godwin said, “But it’s about the only alternative we’ve got, isn’t it? Either Bob Germaine is a crook or it wasn’t Bob who accepted the check.”

Betsy said, “And Allie has asked us to find out the truth. When we do, that may tell us where Bob is.”

Godwin thought about that and felt a little stab of dismay. “No matter what, this doesn’t look good for Bob, does it?”

Betsy sighed. “No.” She dusted her hands onto her napkin. “All right, if anyone comes into the shop who was at the banquet, ask if they know Bob and what they thought of his acceptance speech at the banquet. Don’t ask if they think it wasn’t Bob at all, just see if they come up with that notion all by themselves.”

They talked awhile more, then Godwin had to get back downstairs. Betsy had drawn up a grocery list and Godwin took it with him. Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables on it, he noted with a fond, brotherly interest. But he added “yogurt” and “calcium supplement” at the bottom; Betsy had probably just forgotten to write those down. She knew it was important to build strong new bone, but for him it was becoming urgent, too.

He had thought sleuthing would be fun. Finding out that a great deal of time was spent being flummoxed was a big disappointment. He wanted her to take that job back from him.

A total of three customers came in who had been at the EGA banquet. All of them were scandalized about the theft of the check, two of them already knew a stop-payment had been put on it, and none of them thought there was anything odd about the man who gave the brief, eloquent thank-you speech.

Godwin also wanted Betsy to come back to running the shop. Decision making was all right until it became important. For example, what to do about the costly hand-dyed yarn Betsy had ordered from a local woman whose samples had been gorgeous. A big box of it had come in while he was gone, and he had eagerly opened it, to find that while the colors were still gorgeous, the wool had been so carelessly prepared for dyeing that it still had little pieces of straw stuck to it—and maybe something worse; Godwin didn’t care to inspect it too closely. He closed the box and set it aside. He’d tell Betsy about it tomorrow, when he had calmed down enough to refrain from shrieking. There were several customers all excited about buying the yarn. What to tell them? He’d much rather Betsy face them.

Then there were the “badgers.” There seemed to be an unusual number of them the past couple of days. Badgers weren’t customers from Wisconsin, whose state animal was that noble creature; these were customers who imitated the badger in its ability to dig fast and deep. They would disappear around a corner and pull things out of cabinets and baskets and off shelves, and leave the disorder for the help to discover. God knew what they were thinking; they seemed to root for the sheer joy of it, not in search of something.

It wasn’t until Godwin restored order to a drawer of out-of-print cross-stitch patterns that he realized the motive of one badger: theft. It was only in putting things back that Godwin realized three patterns were missing.

And then he couldn’t remember which badger it was who had gone pawing in that particular drawer. Betsy, he was sure, would have known. He felt incompetent, an unusual emotion for him.

At least his part-time help that afternoon was experienced and cheerful—and a real help in closing up. Marti ran the vacuum cleaner while he restocked; she straightened out the baskets of yarn while he ran the cash register; she even volunteered to take the day’s money to the bank with a deposit slip Godwin made out. Godwin blessed her, told her to tuck the money bag inside her jacket to escape casual gaze, and sent her on her way, then went to the back to scrub out the coffee urn and set it up for the morrow.

T
ONY
thought he should go to the bank before he went to his place of employment, but an old friend called and invited him to lunch. Tony thought it was time to see some friends. But Vicodin had made him sleep in and it took some time to make himself marginally presentable, so there wasn’t time to hit the bank before lunch.

He made it to the restaurant only ten minutes late, where, despite his best efforts, Jeff said, “Well, I’m
shocked
. You look dreadful, simply dreadful, you poor thing.” Tony didn’t think he looked all that bad, but Jeff himself looked pretty good dressed all in teal, a great color on a man with red curly hair and large blue eyes. But, Tony reflected with a slightly malicious smile, Jeff’s looks were spoiled by a heavy, petulant mouth, and Tony’s wounds would heal.

But all Tony said was, “You’d realize how much better I look now, if you’d visited me in the hospital,” his tone making the complaint light, because he planned to stick Jeff with the check.

Jeff’s eyes widened. “Oh, hospitals!
Dreadful
places, I never go into a hospital, unless I’m in an ambulance, which hasn’t happened yet, thank
God!
But I just know I’ll keep my eyes closed the
whole time!
Ew, just the
smell
of a hospital gives me cold shivers!” Jeff twiddled his shoulders and lifted his hands, palms forward. “I don’t know
how
you stood it!”

“Drugs,” said Tony. “They give you lots and lots of lovely drugs.”

“Well, yes,” said Jeff, nodding. “Yes, drugs would certainly help.”

They had a pleasant lunch until Tony refused to engage in a tussle Jeff clearly expected over the check, which enlarged Jeff’s pout. Then Tony had to walk over to the Heart Coalition, because Jeff wouldn’t drive him.

So he was a few minutes late. He clipped his ID badge to his jacket, nodded at the guard behind the high, round desk, and took the elevator to the basement.

He found Pissant Mitch in the mail room along with a man in a dark suit, whom he recognized after a couple of seconds as Colin Roose, Mitch’s boss. And standing a little behind Mr. Roose was a very large man in a dark uniform who at first looked like a cop. There wasn’t a gun on his hip, so he must be a rent-a-cop.

Still, Tony didn’t like the looks of this
at all,
so he paused in the doorway. Then he slightly exaggerated the difficulty he had in managing on one crutch, and bit his underlip to show he was in pain, and came into the room. He’d almost forgotten how claustrophobic it was, windowless and much deeper than wide, with red-brown tile on the floor and tan walls harshly lit by four fluorescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling. The lights gave a sinister cast to the features of the three men waiting for him. Or maybe it was his suspicious mind, telling him he was in big trouble.

“Hi, Mitch!” said Tony, trying on a smile.

“Mr. Milan,” said Mitch, not smiling back.

So Tony dropped the ploy like the dead thing it was. “Okay, what’s the problem?” he asked.

“Well, for one thing, you’re fired,” said Mitch.

“What? You can’t fire me for not coming to work, I was in an accident!”

“You’re not fired for being absent, Mr. Milan,” said Roose. And the rent-a-cop worked his shoulders—not like Jeff, shaking off a fake tremor of fear, but like a thug preparing to hit someone in the face.

Tony began to feel there was not enough air in the room. “What’s this all about?” he asked, trying to sound calm.

“You’re a thief, Tony,” said Mitch.

Tony had to swallow hard before he could say, “No, I’m not.” Then he had to swallow again before he could ask, “What do you think I stole?”

Roose consulted a small slip of paper Tony hadn’t noticed was in his hand. “An iPod, a Chinese take-out order, various amounts of loose change, a gold ring set with a small garnet, a woman’s purse containing three credit cards and sixteen dollars—” He paused and looked hard at Tony. “Shall I go on?”

Tony was so relieved he didn’t know what to say. He cleared his throat and looked around. There was an orange plastic chair off to his left. He moved a few more steps and collapsed into it. “Um…” he said.