Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_04 (3 page)

T
hey left early Friday morning. Betsy, still wan and heavy-eyed, was also helplessly annoyed as she walked to Jill's car. She was being followed by a tall, redheaded woman in a chartreuse coat who wanted Betsy to buy a portfolio of Internet stocks. The woman had a fistful of documents as vividly colored as she was, and was talking very rapidly about e-this and dot-that.

Jill, though not in uniform, got out of the driver's side of the car and said, “Eh-hrrrum!” The woman glanced at her, stopped in her tracks for a second look, then turned and hurried away.

“How do you do that?” asked Betsy, putting her two suitcases down. “I actually snarled at her, but she kept on talking. All you did was clear your throat.”

“I look at them like I think they may resist arrest,” replied Jill placidly. She went to the trunk of her car, opened it, and put Betsy's suitcases in beside her own.

There were other things in the trunk: a Dazor light, a sewing frame, a box marked
WINTER SURVIVAL KIT
, snowshoes.

Betsy pointed to the snowshoes. “What are they, antiques?”

Jill smiled. “Well, I did make them back when I was sixteen.”

“What, you liked to make reproductions of old things?”

Jill frowned very slightly. “No, people still use them. When you want to walk over deep snow, there's nothing as good as snowshoes.” She closed the trunk. “That state forest right across the road from Naniboujou has an interesting waterfall. I thought I might walk back in to see it.”

“What's so interesting about it?”

“Half of it disappears into a rock.”

Betsy couldn't think what to ask about that, so she looked at the cross-country skis fastened to the rack on top of Jill's car. There were two pairs, she noticed. Jill said, just a little too casually, “Grand Marais has some very easy cross-country ski trails.”

Betsy let her face reflect her thought:
As if.
She went to get in the passenger side of the big old Buick. She'd tried cross-country skiing with Jill and been surprised and disappointed at the exertion required. Like her cat, Betsy was not keen on exercise.

The wide, comfortable seat of the car welcomed her. Betsy fastened her seat belt and relaxed with an audible sigh as Jill pulled away from the curb. “Say, Jill,” she said, “would you consider being my bodyguard when we get back? Easy job, you'd just stand behind me clearing your throat at all those dreadful people who insist on a share of my money.”

“You don't need a bodyguard. Going off for a week to an unannounced destination will discourage most of them. When you're not there to hound, they'll go hound someone else. You're going to have to be firm and
persistent with the rest. Which I've seen you being, when you're in your detective mode.”

Betsy grimaced. “I hope you got a good look, because those are going to be mere memories from now on. I'm resigning my commission and turning in my badge. Neither of which I was ever issued, by the way.”

Jill gave Betsy a faintly surprised look. “I thought you liked detecting.”

“No, not at all. I certainly didn't go looking for cases, they just sort of happened. And I didn't know what I was doing. Clues more or less fell out of the air right in front of me.”

“Huh,” remarked Jill, then went wordlessly back to driving.

They went past the beautiful Victorian Christopher Inn, then over the bridge and onto Highway Seven, heading toward Minneapolis. Betsy looked out the window at trees and houses passing by. The road was clear and dry, white with dried salt—whiter than the crunchy honeycombed snow pulling its filthy skirts away from the verge. The sky was a light, cloudless blue.

“But that only means you're a natural,” said Jill, suddenly picking up the topic again.

“Yes, but I'd have to harden my heart too much to keep doing it, dealing with crime and criminals, and I wouldn't even want to know how to do that.”

“Do you think my heart is hard?”

That surprised Betsy. “No, of course not! But you—you're—” Betsy had to think for a moment. “You don't let things hurt you. You have this . . . I don't know, a kind of imperviousness. You don't get angry or scared.”

“I was raised to—not to let things get to me,” said Jill, and from the way that was wrenched out of her, however cleanly, Betsy knew it was a confession. Jill was as reticent about her upbringing as about her feelings. “But just because I don't break into tears or fall
into a rage every time I'm sad or angry doesn't mean I don't feel those emotions.”

Betsy, embarrassed, had to think a few moments before she could reply. “How do you deal with the ugliness you face every day?”

“It's not every day—this is Excelsior, after all, not Chicago or DC. And what I do is, I don't take it personally. I think of myself as a street sweeper or garbage collector, taking the crud off the streets. The rotten egg isn't stinking just to annoy me. And somebody has to clean it up.”

Betsy nodded. “I'm glad you can do it. The world would be impossible without police. But with me, it's different. I get involved at a personal level, because it involves people I know. And I can't do that anymore. Not when I dream all night about friends who turn out to be murderers.”

“Not all of us do.”

“But in a recent dream you were at the front of the pack, shouting at me to tell you whodunit. And I had no idea.” Betsy frowned. “That was probably the oddest part, you shouting. You have never shouted at me, ever. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard you shout at anyone.” She smiled. “But you clear your throat real good.”

Jill chuckled softly, then said, “See how unreal the dream was? In your dream you couldn't solve it, but in real life you can.”

“Please. I'm absolutely sure that next time I'm faced with a case, it will be just like what I dreamed: I won't have the first clue.”

“I take it you never solved a mystery before you came here and figured out who murdered your sister?”

“Absolutely.”

Jill fell silent. Betsy sighed and closed her eyes. The car was warm, the seat comfortable, Jill the kind of
driver who inspires confidence. Before she realized it, she dozed off.

She was on a train at night, looking out the window into utter darkness. Suddenly a man wearing a Richard Nixon mask slammed through the door into the car, and shot the woman in the first seat with a silenced gun. The woman slumped sideways, and the man ran away, but everyone else in the car immediately turned to Betsy. One said, “Who was that masked man?” in a serious voice, which at first terrified Betsy because she had no idea, then amused her so much she started to giggle, which woke her up.

“What?” asked Jill.

“Stupid dream. Tried to be a nightmare, didn't quite make it.” Betsy yawned and looked out the car window. They were on a section of freeway lined with concrete walls, some striated, some smooth. The marked sections had remnants of vines clinging to them, demonstrating the purpose of the striation. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Six-ninety-four East, about to cross the Mississippi. Not even out of the Cities yet.”

“How do we get to the North Shore?” asked Betsy. “Follow the Mississippi? It originates in Lake Superior, doesn't it?”

“No, it starts as a brook you can step across in the upper central part of the state. But the North Shore does refer to Lake Superior. We drive about a hundred miles north to Duluth, then follow the Superior shoreline northeast to Grand Marais, then sixteen more miles to Naniboujou.”

“Grand Marais,” repeated Betsy. “That's a beautiful name. Is it a big city?”

“It's sometimes called the Scandinavian Riviera.” Jill smiled, as if at a joke.

“What?” asked Betsy.

“You'll see.”

“What happens at a stitch-in?” asked Betsy.

“It's like the Monday Bunch, only it goes on for two days. There's usually a class on some aspect of needlework, a time for show-and-tell, lots of friendly advice from people sitting near you, and plenty of time to make some real progress on a project.”

Betsy looked out the window. The land was nearly level, the pastures outlined with trees and shrubs, with shaggy farmhouses and newer suburban models tucked among more trees, their chimneys smoking faintly.

After a while she slept again. No dreams this time, or when, after a period of looking out the window, she dozed off. Again she woke, this time to a landscape only a little whiter than near the Cities, with small, well-kept houses, their chimneys steaming, set back among crowds of naked gray trees. She yawned. Was she never going to stop feeling sleepy?

Jill said, “It must be frightening to find that sleuthing is the talent God gave you, rather than one for counted cross-stitch or finding a good man. And you can choose to bury this talent if you like. But I'm not sure that will give you the peace you're looking for.”

Betsy, annoyed at Jill for nagging but too tired to argue, watched a long row of billboards approaching, advertising a casino. “Where are we?”

“Hinckley. About halfway to Duluth.”

She closed her eyes—really, this seat was almost too comfortable—and immediately fell back into a dream-troubled doze.

With a start, she asked, “Are we nearly there?” and was dismayed at the whiny-child tone of her voice.

“No, we're still half an hour out of Duluth,” said Jill.

They were passing a lake dotted with what looked like old-fashioned outhouses. Ice fishermen, she knew, were huddled inside them, poised over a hole chopped in the
ice, holding a miniature fishing rod. “Do ice houses ever fall through?” she asked.

“Once in a while. They're supposed to take them off the ice pretty soon—they're already off down in the Cities.” Jill glanced over at the lake. “I see they've ordered the cars and trucks off up here.”

Betsy said, “I remember somewhere in Wisconsin they used to put an old car out on a frozen lake and you could enter a raffle to bet when it would fall through.”

“They used to do that up here, too. Look, I was thinking while you were asleep, and I think I understand why you feel you shouldn't feed the dream-maker any more real-life crime. And I'll support you if you choose to do that. It's a shame, though; I've met exactly one other person with your talent for solving criminal cases.”

“Was he another cop?”

Jill nodded. “She, actually. A Saint Paul detective. But she wasn't like you, she's one of those people who operate at a whole different level than us humans. Another cop told me once that all she has to do is walk into a room and the perp will start sweating, and pretty soon the truth comes out of his pores, too. You're not like her because you're amiable, and because you solve these things like it's a game. But like her you're seriously good.”

“If this were a game, I wouldn't mind going on with it, because I wouldn't mind losing once in a while. But murder is serious, peoples' lives are at stake. If I accuse someone falsely—” She sighed and put her head back, closing her eyes. “I could not bear that.”

After a minute or two of silence, Jill said quietly, “All right, I promise I won't ask you to go sleuthing again, and I'll discourage others from coming to you.”

“Thank you,” Betsy murmured. Having received the support she felt she badly needed, Betsy relaxed—and suddenly didn't feel quite as exhausted.

Jill said, “Did I tell you Lars is selling his hobby farm?”

Lars was Jill's boyfriend, a fellow police officer and a workaholic. That he'd give up a source of hours of backbreaking labor surprised her. “No, you didn't. What's he going to do with the money, invest in something that's even more work?”

Jill laughed, and Betsy asked, “Does he ever take a vacation?”

“Not since I've known him. Oh, he takes time off, but it's just so he can concentrate on some major project, like refinishing every floor in the house that went with the farm he's about to sell.”

They were coming into Duluth, a city set on a broad and high terraced hill overlooking a magnificent harbor. I-35 swooped in a big curve down the hill, then ran near the lake. The overpasses had silhouettes of Viking ships carved into them.

North of the city, bluffs stood with their feet in the icy water of Lake Superior. I-35 ended and they picked up Highway 61, which ran through tunnels in the bluffs. Then the land opened out again, though now Betsy noticed something stressed about it, something very opposite from the lush farmland farther south. The snow cover was deeper, but Betsy sensed the soil under it was thin, as if bedrock were just a few inches below that. Naked granite poked up here and there, dark brown or rust red, ancient stuff, worn smooth between the creases. Trees, fewer in variety, looked to be struggling. Betsy told herself not to be foolish; for all she knew, the trees were young, the soil rich.

But knowing that in Mississippi and Georgia the azaleas were blooming, and in Maryland the tulips were nearly finished, while here one could still go ice fishing, troubled her adopted California soul. She was not bred to be icebound despite her youth in Wisconsin.