Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_04

by Unraveled Sleeve

  A woman across the way cleared her throat, and when they looked at her she said, “I’m doing the flower series she designed.” She held up her project, a counted cross-stitch pattern of five daffodils in a glass vase. “I’m Linda Savareid, from Albert Lea. This is the first pattern of hers I’ve worked, and I love it. Her design is so easy to follow.” Linda had streaky brown hair and the gentle, competent air of a grade school teacher Betsy had once loved.

  Nan said, “Getting on the cover of ANW was a real coup for her. If she ever comes up with something really fresh, she could become one of the shining lights of counted design.” She looked at Betsy over half-moon glasses. “Well, unless…” she said.

  “Unless she’s dead,” said Linda.

  “Yes.”

  Having broken the subject open, the women on the couch with its back to Betsy began talking about Sharon Kaye, and soon the women across from them joined in. Betsy shamelessly eavesdropped (and so she didn’t realize for some while that she was making some mistakes in counting her stitches).

  “I can’t imagine her dead,” said a woman with an interesting white streak in her russet hair. She had finished stitching a hardanger pattern of squares and was very carefully snipping out their centers. “She sort of took over any room she was in.”

  “I hope nothing bad has happened to her,” said one young woman dressed in a red sweatsuit. She was stitching the alphabet in bright silks on Quaker cloth. “She is so nice! When I was just starting out, she sat with me for half an hour and showed me how to grid and follow a pattern. She was so patient and so encouraging, it made me feel special.”

  “Well, good for you, Katy; she was rude to me every time we met,” said a young woman with several earrings and a glint in her eye.

  “Now, Anna,” warned Nan.

  “Humpf!” snorted Anna. “You know as well as I do, she could be damn rude when she felt like it, and what’s worse, she always had to have her own way about everything or she’d walk out right in the middle of whatever we were doing.”

  “She wasn’t well,” said Nan.

  “She was as well or as sick as she wanted to be,” retorted Anna. “All that stuff about being allergic! I saw her shopping at a mall once, looking healthy as a horse, then she turned up the next morning at a stitch-in wearing a mask and whining that someone present had eaten peanut butter. She positively enjoyed making us all feel guilty for having a life. Poo!”

  Linda Savareid turned in her seat to say, “I had a student in my seventh grade class who was allergic to peanuts—and believe me, it’s not a guilt trip. A fellow student brought an assortment of cookies as a birthday treat one day. Some had peanut butter in them, but none of us knew it. The allergic child ate one and stopped breathing. If he hadn’t had an EpiPen with him, he’d’ve been dead before the ambulance arrived.”

  “What’s an EpiPen?” asked Nan.

  “It’s a medical device designed to be used by nonmedical people,” said Linda. “It delivers a big dose of epinephrine to someone having a severe allergic reaction, and can keep them alive until they get to a hospital.”

  Nan said, “Sharon Kaye has one.”

  “I didn’t know she had allergies,” said a young man stitching a Norman Rockwell painting of a fisherman in a small boat in the rain. “She came to our store and was a wonderful teacher. But she never said a thing about being allergic.” He turned to the even younger woman sitting beside him. “Remember when she came to our store, Suzy?”

  The young woman nodded, but kept her eyes on her knitting. She was making an argyle sweater in four colors of wool.

  The young man continued. “Miss Kaye taught a class of six people just starting out in cross-stitch.”

  “When was this?” asked Betsy.

  “Right after we opened, eighteen months ago. She drove all the way to Fergus Falls, and got us off to a good start. We’re in our second year now, still doing pretty good.” There was a note of pride in his voice, and his back straightened. “It was all Suzy’s idea. I wanted to buy a farm. Right, Suz?” He nudged the woman beside him, who blushed becomingly and still didn’t look up. She looked barely out of high school, and Betsy wondered at the audacity of such young people opening their own business. Betsy also wondered why such a shy woman would decide to go into a business that demanded constant customer contact.

  “And you say she was a good teacher?”

  “She was wonderful,” murmured the young woman.

  “How long did the class last, Mike?” asked another woman in somewhat absent tones. She was working on a canvas held firm with scroll bars. Rather than fasten it to a stand, she had made a big loop of ribbon, twisted it into a figure eight, ran it around her neck, and put a loop of the eight around each of the two top knobs of the scroll bar. The bottom of the frame was braced on her ample tummy, and she was using both hands, one to push the needle into the top and the other to pull it through. As a result, her bargello pattern—waves of various colors done in long, vertical stitches—was progressing very rapidly.

  “All weekend,” said the young man, “Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, three hours each. Every student who signed up came to both sessions.” He looked at Betsy, and she saw he had devastating green eyes.

  “I’m surprised Sharon lasted the entire weekend,” said Nan. Her voice was slightly squashed, as she was bent severely forward to poke around on the floor for a pair of dropped scissors. “Oof, there they are! It would be more like her to do what she did here, change her mind at the last minute. Or quit partway through. I’ve known her for years, and she’s always been what she calls whimsical. Whim of steel, if you ask me.”

  “Now be goot, Nan,” said a woman wearing a deep yellow cardigan. Her project was a tiny bouquet of roses being worked with a single thread of silk on fine gauze. She wore a very large magnifying glass attached to a gray headband. Her eye, then her nose, then her ear in succession were hugely magnified as her face turned past Betsy toward Nan, a disconcerting effect. When she spoke, it was fluently, but with a German accent. “She is not here to defent herself, so be kind.”

  “Oh, there’s no defense for what she does.” Nan wove her needle into a corner of her canvas so she could concentrate on this conversation. “In fact, there’s generally some mischief in it. Haven’t you ever noticed that, Ingrid? Charlotte’s in the hospital, so here’s her chance to make us all mad at Charlotte by walking out on her agreement to teach a class.”

  “But you’re not mad at Charlotte,” Betsy pointed out.

  Nan replied, “You just watch, next month Sharon will come to our stitchers’ meeting and be so contrite and sweet, and she’ll have such a clever explanation, everyone, probably even me, will be glad to forgive her. Charlotte hasn’t got that charm, and what they’ll remember next year, when Charlotte tries to organize another stitch-in, is that she promised us a surprise guest teacher at this stitch-in and didn’t deliver.”

  Betsy said, “And you think Sharon Kaye did that on purpose? To make the group mad at Charlotte?”

  Nan backed down at this blunt restatement. “Well, probably not. She and Charlotte are friends, after all. It’s just that’s always how things turn out around her. If some project gets in trouble, no matter how thickly Sharon Kaye’s involved in it, somehow she never gets any of the blame. Maybe it isn’t malicious, it could be that she just does whatever she feels like doing without any thought to how it will affect others. I’m sure if she agreed to come up here and teach a class she really meant to teach it. But then she got another invitation that seemed like more fun, and it never occurred to her to say something. Or she got here and saw someone she doesn’t like, and just went away without telling anyone about it.”

  Ingrid said, “I think it more likely she got here and something set off an allergic attack. She wouldn’t haff time to tell somebody about it, she would just go, quick, off to the emergency room.”

  “Emergency room—are her allergies that serious?” asked Betsy. “I mean, her ex-husband
told me she smokes, and I wouldn’t think someone with serious allergies would smoke.” Betsy was trying to pretend she wasn’t really interested in the topic of Sharon Kaye’s allergies by continuing to work on her cross-stitching. It was hard to see the openings in the weave of the black cloth when the background was her brown skirt, so she kept having to hold the fabric up toward the window to make the tiny openings in the weave visible.

  “Oh, it’s so aw-ful that she smokes!” Ingrid said. She had an expressive face and voice, eyebrows lifting, lip movement exaggerated, voice going up and down the scale, like the magnifying glass that caused the weave on her yellow sweater to swell then collapse again as the lens moved across it. “I haff told her over and over that she simply must quit, because she does have serious allergies that put her in the hospital sometimes, and smoking affects breathing, everyone knows that. And when she feels an attack coming on, it’s important she get medical attention immeeee-dee-utly. I once saw her collapse from—what is the word? Some kind of shock.”

  “Anaphylactic,” said Linda.

  “That’s right, anaphylactic. She has carried that device you were talking about that can inject medicine ever since that time she collapsed right in front of us, and nobody knew what to do. It was very frightening!”

  Betsy said, “Did anyone ever see her use the pen? I should think if she carried it, she wasn’t pretending to have allergies, because what would happen if she used that pen and wasn’t really in anaphylactic shock?”

  Linda said, “It’s like a big dose of amphetamine, so surely it would be dangerous to use it if it wasn’t a real emergency.”

  The EpiPen Betsy found in the lodge office had been full of medicine, unused. She said, “She didn’t become ill while I talked with her, or at least she didn’t seem ill. Could she tell when an attack was coming on? She just said she had to go meet someone, not that she was having an attack. I thought perhaps she was having a nicotine fit.”

  “Trust me,” said Ingrid, “she would never mistake a nicotine, ah, what did you call it, ‘fit’ for one of these attacks. It was very important to her to keep track of those things, because first she turns red, then she turns blue, then poof! Collapse, and perhaps she is dead.”

  Betsy remembered the dead woman’s blotchy face and blue lips. And the blush when she had mentioned her honeymoon. Maybe she was starting an allergic reaction then. Now don’t make too much of that blush, she told herself. Maybe she’s the sensitive type. And maybe she just got bored and walked out. Anyway, if she did die here, they’ll find her. And if not, be grateful. So don’t think about it anymore. She looked at her stitching: she’d gone over two threads instead of one. And trying to unstitch it by going back through the same hole caused the floss to snag and fray. This stupid Aida fabric! She unthreaded her needle and used its tip to tease the floss out of the fabric. Trying not to think about Sharon Kaye was making her head hurt.

  Nan said, “Are you all right?”

  Betsy squeezed her eyes shut and murmured, “Just a bit of a headache.” This part of her stitching was starting to look really wrong. She picked up the pattern to do some recounting.

  “Say, Anna, where’s Parker?” asked Nan.

  “Prying agates out of the ice on the beach,” said Anna. “He’s writing a paper on the geology of the North Shore. We were here last summer and he made me hike to the Devil’s Kettle and back—those stairs!”

  “Agates?” said Betsy, thinking of marbles.

  “Beautiful stones you find along the shore of Lake Superior,” said Anna. “Dull brown on the outside, but slice them with a saw and they are magnificent inside.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen them!” said Betsy. Glassy layers of delicate color, sometimes with a hollow center, agate slices were for sale in gift shops down in the Cities. “I wondered why I saw three men in the dining room and only two here in the lounge.”

  The talk went on to vacations and tourists and hiking.

  It was nearly an hour later that Jill came in.

  Betsy looked up and said, “What did they find?”

  Jill replied, “Nothing. No sign of Sharon Kaye.” She spoke quietly, but Nan overheard her and immediately turned and passed the word along, and in a few seconds the room was abuzz with the news.

  Betsy felt giddy, whether with relief or distress she didn’t know. She said to Jill, “So what are they going to do now?”

  “Nothing. The sheriff and his crew have gone away.”

  “But—” Betsy rubbed a spot over her left eyebrow, where the headache was really pounding. Why hadn’t they found anything? Had they looked absolutely everywhere? Was there something else she could have told the sheriff, some other question she could have asked? No, no, no, stop it! This no longer involved her. She had done her duty. But… She stood. Jill said, “What now?”

  “I have to ask Isabel something.” A dim notion had made its way out of the thicket of pain. She stooped beside Isabel to ask, “If Sharon Kaye had an allergic attack, she might have asked someone to take her to the hospital. Is there someone who signed up for this event who isn’t here?”

  Isabel said, “That’s what the sheriff asked me. I told him no. Everyone who signed up is here.”

  So even that dim light was extinguished.

  “Here,” said Jill from behind her, “you’re looking tired. I think you should lie down for a while. I’ll get our things and walk you up to our room.”

  As they walked to the door beside the big stone fireplace, Betsy asked, “Did they do a really thorough search of Frank’s room?”

  “Yes, Goodman’s crew was very professional.”

  Betsy said, “What I don’t understand is why the door to Frank Owen’s room was unlocked when I went up there the first time. If I had a dead body in my room, I’d sure lock the door until I got rid of it.”

  “So would I.” Jill nodded.

  “Maybe the murderer didn’t have a key.” They started up the stairs, Betsy leading.

  Jill said, “So you’re still thinking maybe Frank Owen wasn’t responsible for the body? Then what was it doing in his room?”

  “I don’t know. Because the murderer needed somewhere to put it and that room wasn’t locked?” She stopped and turned around on the stairs. “But that would be stupid, wouldn’t it? Why carry her upstairs to hide her? Why not just take her out the back door? I thought he might have planted the body in Frank’s room, but if that was his plan, why come back and move it? That wouldn’t make sense—but nothing about this does.” She turned away and started up again, dizzy from the pain in her head. “Am I going crazy? I don’t want to investigate, so why can’t I leave it alone? What’s the matter with me? Is this what a nervous breakdown feels like?”

  “I don’t think you’re having a nervous breakdown. I think there are obvious questions occurring to you, as they would to anyone who found a body. I also think you need to get a little distance from it for a while. A nap may help.”

  In their room, Betsy took a couple of aspirin, then removed her shoes and lay down on the bed. Jill shut the blinds and folded the quilted coverlet over her.

  “Jill?”

  “Yes?”

  “I saw an EpiPen in the little office off the lobby. Could it be Sharon’s?”

  Jill came to look intently at Betsy. “Was it used?”

  “No. I found it on the floor under the desk.”

  The intent look went away. “Did you ask James about it?”

  “No, he wasn’t in the lobby, so I just left it in the office.”

  “Maybe it belongs to someone who works here.”

  “Yes, of course.” Betsy closed her eyes—she was so very tired!—and tried to block out the thoughts vying for her attention. But in they trooped, pushing and shouting and waving their arms. Her head felt squeezed in a vise.

  “I’m allergic to cigarette smoke” was a common complaint, even among people not allergic to other things. Yet Sharon Kaye smoked.

  Was she one of those people who claimed to be al
lergic just to gain sympathy? Then what about the collapse Ingrid had described? Suppose the EpiPen Betsy found was Sharon’s. If Sharon had an allergic attack, why wasn’t it used? What was it doing in the office? That office door was kept locked; Sharon couldn’t have put it in there herself. Was James somehow culpably involved in all this?

  Or was it possible Sharon hadn’t been here at all, that this had been a dream after all? No, she must have been here, her car was here. The car made it real.

  If Sharon had been here, why did she leave? Someone had suggested that Sharon had left because she saw someone she didn’t like. Who didn’t Sharon like? More important, who didn’t like Sharon? Certainly some of the stitchers had been acid-tongued when speaking of her.

  Was it a coincidence that Sharon’s ex-husband chose this weekend to come here, the same weekend Sharon agreed to come and teach a class?

  Maybe it was learning he was here that had sent Sharon away. Certainly Betsy would not stay in a hotel, especially in a remote location, if her ex-husband turned up.

  What was Hal up to now? Thank God he’d stopped sending flowers. The pig.

  Was her headache a little better?

  What was the cause of that water leak in the shop? Was she right to trust Godwin to handle it?

  Was Godwin taking good care of Sophie?

  If he forgot to give Sophie water, could the cat perhaps turn on the faucet in the bathtub and refresh herself?

  And, of course, not being able to turn it off, the water would run and run, and the tub would fill and overflow.

  And Godwin was upstairs in her apartment, lifting buckets of water out of the tub and pouring them onto her living room carpet while shouting, “Get an ax, chop a hole in the floor before Sophie drowns!”

  And the cat was swimming neck deep in water toward a toy motorboat whose engine was idling over by the window. Sophie was too big for the motorboat, she would tip it over and sink it if she tried to get aboard. Betsy didn’t have an ax; she took a meat cleaver from the kitchen and stepped into the living room and sank in over her head, and swam down, down, reaching for the carpet, cleaver at the ready, holding her breath, but by the time she got down to the carpet, she was already in need of air, so she dropped the cleaver and started back up, kicking desperately for the surface, which was too far away, she needed to breathe, she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she would have to open her mouth and breathe water, she was going to drown.