Sins and Needles (16 page)

As she slammed the lid down, she became aware of raised voices coming from the shed—Terri and Stewart.

“It's no good like it is, and we can't afford to fix it!” Terri was shouting.

“It won't cost much to fix,” Stewart argued, “because I can do the work myself!”

“You'll try, and you'll fail, and the thing will sit on our front yard like a…like a junker car! Stewart, I won't allow that! Pick something else. Pick the Stickley table, or that Indian motorcycle. Pick the antique four-poster—something worth the money we can badly use! But not the boat; I won't allow that boat on our property!”

Jan started reluctantly for the shed, where Stewart could be heard saying, “Fine, I'll keep it in Jason's garage!”

Jason said, “Now, hold on a second. I don't want to be put in the middle here!” Jan felt a sad empathy for her brother. No one wanted to be involved in a family train wreck.

“Hold on, Jason, you already said I could!” Stewart objected.

“That was before I knew Aunt Terri was going to raise hell about it!”

“Oh, she'll come around when she sees how nice the boat turns out—won't you, sweetheart?”

Jan stopped at the door to the shed. Terri, white and shaking, was close enough to Jan for her to touch but didn't seem to know she was there. “No, no,
no
! This is too much! I am not going to permit you to get involved in another scheme that only uses up money we don't have to spare!”

CeeCee said, “We can sell my Remington horse to fix the boat! I'll give you my horse, Daddy.”

“That's awfully sweet of you, pet.” Stewart turned to his wife. “See how CeeCee believes in me?”

“You would actually permit her to make that sacrifice, wouldn't you?” said Terri in a terrible voice. She turned and walked away.

“No, of course not!” called Stewart, but Terri kept going. “I wouldn't take money from her. I only said it was sweet of her to believe in me!” When Terri still didn't turn around, he muttered, “Unlike my own wife, God bless her.”

“Uncle Stewart,” said Jan, “why do you want that boat so much?”

He turned to her, mouth opening to reply, then shut it again. He heaved a huge sigh. “You'll understand one day, Jan. I promise you, you'll understand.”

A
LTHOUGH
the shouting appeared over, the tension remained, and everyone began looking for an excuse to leave—not hard to do, since the exploration of the property was over. Stewart tried to jolly them all into a more comfortable mood; they were having none of it.

But when CeeCee whined, “Can we go home now?” Stewart took her out under a big cottonwood tree, stooped down, and began whispering in her ear. In about a minute, she began to giggle. He whispered some more, and she whispered something back, and the two came back to the door of the shed with identical smug smiles on their faces.

“All right,” said Jan, “what's the big deal here?”

“No big deal,” said Stewart, his smile instantly replaced with a surprised and hurt look. “I was just sharing a joke with my beloved youngest daughter.”

“Yeah,” said CeeCee, her smile refusing to go away.

“By the way, Jan, may I speak to you in private?” Stewart asked.

“What about?” she replied suspiciously.

“Oh, it's not urgent or anything. Maybe some time in the next few days?”

“I guess so.”

Stewart bowed. “Thank you.” He turned to Susan. “And you? May I speak to you?”

“Certainly. How about right now?”

“Now?” He looked disconcerted. “Well, uh, certainly, all right. Where shall we go?”

“How about that same tree beneath which you talked with your beloved youngest daughter, CeeCee?”

“All right.” Still looking disconcerted, he led his sister to the big cottonwood. There, out of earshot, he made some kind of pitch while the others watched. Susan became stiffer and stiffer until she folded her arms and began shaking her head. The more earnest Stewart grew, the more firmly she shook her head. Still, he never lost his temper. Nor did she. Finally, the two came back together, both breathing deeply and not even looking at one another.

Now the gathering really did break up, to a chorus of good-byes and car-door slams.

Jan, closing her mother's car door, said through the open window, “What did he want?”

“Three guesses.”

“Money?”

“Of course, money. What else could he possibly want?”

“What for? To repair that wretched boat?”

“Oh, no, the boat's only the beginning. He also wants me to finance the opening of a tourist fishing-guide operation. He's spent so many years fishing on Lake Minnetonka that he's convinced he knows all the best spots and that he can rent boats and take fishermen out and simply
coin
money. It would only take several hundred thousand dollars of start-up money, and he's sure he could pay me back out of the profits in a few years.”

Jan stared at her mother. “Is he serious?”

She shrugged and started her engine. “He sounded serious.”

“You aren't—” Jan recalled Susan's folded arms, her head shaking back and forth, beneath the big tree. “No, of course you aren't.”

“And neither should you, when he approaches you.”

 

T
HE
next day, Jan came into Crewel World holding a white plastic bag. “Hi, Betsy,” she said. “I think I have a job for Sandy here.” Sandy Mattson was Betsy's “fix it” stitcher; she could take raveled knitting or poorly done needlepoint and mend it invisibly. At a price, of course—but one many stitchers were willing to pay.

Jan opened the bag and rolled it down to reveal the terrible remains of the pillow found in the old boat. “Gosh, it didn't smell that bad when I packed it!” she said, as both she and Betsy stepped back, waving their hands in front of their noses. “Sorry, I'm sorry!” Jan, blushing, stepped forward to grab the bag, hold it up, and put a long twist in it.

“What do you want done with that, besides to deodorize it?” asked Betsy.

“Never mind. I'll take it home and try to get the stink out.”

“Well, no,” said Betsy. “I have some connections in that area. And methods of my own, for that matter. What is it, anyway?”

“It's a pillow with a knit cover. I think my aunt Edyth made it, so I was hoping to get it restored. Obviously, mice have been living in it, plus I think it once had mildew—it was found in a storage cabinet in an old boat. If you want to have a go at taking out the smell as well as restoring it—the knitting is badly raveled along two sides—I'll be very grateful, and I'll pay whatever it costs.”

Betsy nodded. “All right. Let's write it up. Are you in a hurry? I'd like to talk to you about something else. It's important.”

“You sound serious.”

“I'm afraid it is serious.”

“Then of course I can stay.”

Betsy wrote up the work order and had Jan sign it, which she did with a little flourish. “Now, what's the matter?” she asked, as she handed the pen back.

“I had a long talk with Lucille. Do you know she really thinks she's your sister?”

Jan smiled. “No, that's kind of a game we're playing—”

“No, she has what she thinks is a good reason to think she is actually your sister.”

Jan stared at her. “You're joking!”

“I am not. She collected the evidence a few years ago in Houston, at a medical conference you both attended.”

“We did?”

“Certainly. You said something about it to me, about being accused of attending under two names? Or was it having a twin?”

“Was that in Houston? Well, I suppose maybe it was. But what does—oh, you mean Lucille was the other person?”

“That's right. She had just found out she was adopted and was beginning her search for her biological parents when her laboratory sent her to the conference—it was in her home state, remember.”

Jan said, “I don't remember talking to her there.”

“No, you never spoke to one another. But she stole your hairbrush from your room. The maid let her in—she thought she was you. The maid, that is.”

“She stole my
hairbrush
? Why?”

“So she could have a DNA test done on the hair caught in it. If you hadn't brought a hairbrush, she was prepared to steal your toothbrush.”

“She faked her way into my room in order to steal something?” Jan's nostrils flared, and an angry frown was forming.

“Yes. She was feeling pretty desperate.”

“I guess so!”

“She was probably in that same state of mind Molly was in last year.” Molly was a mutual friend who had recently discovered that her big sister wasn't her big sister at all, but her mother. Molly had gone through stages of denial and anger for months before arriving at acceptance.

Jan looked thoughtful. “All right, all right, I can see that. And finding out you're adopted only after both parents have died would be worse. You can't talk to them about it. So I guess some people would go a little crazy.” She thought some more. “So
that's
why she was talking so much about DNA the other day when we went shopping! She wanted me to catch her hint! I thought we were talking medicine because I warned her I was in a funny mood and there were other things I didn't want to talk about.”

Betsy nodded. “She was setting you up to talk about your DNA and hers.”

“But you can't prove two people are siblings with DNA. She knows that.”

“Yes, she does. But do you remember why Lucille had a problem carrying babies to term?”

“Yes, we talked about that, too. She has a balanced translocation on two genes.”

“And I remember you mentioning at the sock class that you'd had pregnancies end without warning. Lucille was there, too, remember?”

Jan grimaced. “Gosh, you'd've thought I'd've caught the hint!”

Betsy smiled. “She was certainly hoping you would. She told me this particular translocation doesn't cause much of a problem in the person it happens to, except that it makes the carrier more likely to have early-stage spontaneous abortions.”

Jan's eyes closed, then opened. “I was so focused on the pattern I was going to knit I just didn't pay attention.”

Betsy nodded. “When she started a search for her genetic parents, she found that she was born in Minnesota, but the trail stopped at the St. Paul hospital where her newborn self was dropped off, apparently by a sorrowful mother who could not care for her. She couldn't get beyond that. Then, about a year ago, her company sent her to a medical conference in Houston.”

“You know, I would have talked to her if she came up to me. Why didn't she approach me?”

“She was afraid to approach you without more knowledge. All she had was your looks and where you were from—and a big dose of wishful thinking.”

“Still, I wish she had said something. It would've been fun to discover this together. I would have given her some of my hair, or a swab from my mouth.”

“Would you? A perfect stranger walks up and says, ‘I think I'm your sister. May I borrow some of your saliva?”

“Oh. Well, she may have been right. I mean, you hear all the time about people about to come into money besieged by formerly unknown relatives.”

“Or estranged ones wanting to make up,” nodded Betsy, whose ex-husband had made a determined effort to win her back when he heard of her own inheritance. “But you see the real problem here. Given that you both were born in Minnesota and that you look very alike, the DNA results improve the odds tremendously that you are natural sisters. And if you are, that is going to complicate the inheritance situation enormously.”

“I suppose that's true,” said Jan. “No, if it's true, it means our inheritance is cut by a third.”

“She has a daughter, you know.”

Jan's eyes closed. “My God, you're right. It cuts it in half. Oh, this is…amazing.”

“Yes, but it gets worse. If she did know about the inheritance, she becomes a very likely suspect in Aunt Edyth's murder. She was up here when it happened.”

Jan went white. She grabbed a chair as if it were a life-line, pulled it out, and sat down. “Oh, my,” she said. “It seems I have a sister…who may be a murderer.” She looked at Betsy, her blue eyes huge and blank. “Does she know about the inheritance? Oh, of course she does. We talked about it at the sock lesson, and it's been in the papers because it's such a strange will. But she might not have known before she came up.” She touched her forehead with her fingertips. “But wait, if she is my sister…when? She's five years older than I am; Mother would have been—” She calculated, eyes half closed. “Fifteen—no, sixteen. That's old enough. But I asked Mother if anything had happened she never spoke of, and she said ‘No.' She didn't sound as if she was lying, but she must have been. I always wanted a sister, and now I have one—a big sister. How odd. This is disturbing. This is amazing. Lucille is my
sister
. And oh, I'm an aunt again, because she has two children, a son and a daughter. I can't even remember their names. But what if Lucille knew, if she came up here because she knew about Aunt Edyth? Then maybe she did it. I don't
want
that! My head is just spinning, and why can't I stop talking?” A cup of tea appeared on the table in front of her, and she picked it up and took a hasty sip—then sucked air over her tongue, because the tea was too hot. But it stopped the nattering.

Betsy sat down at the table beside her. “The next question is, what are you going to do?”

“Oh, I think the first thing to do is tell Mother! She may be able to explain how it can't be true. Or, if it is, why she lied.”

“You'll need to do another DNA test on her, you know; that will prove one way or the other if she is your mother's daughter.”

Jan said, “And if it proves she is, we'll have to tell Sergeant Rice.”

“No,” said Betsy, “we'll have to tell him now. Because true or not, Lucille believes it and may have acted on that belief.”