Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_04

by Unraveled Sleeve

  One of the stitchers glanced up and saw Betsy looking, touched Sadie on the shoulder, and the two looked back at Betsy, Sadie with a big white grin.

  But Betsy’s ear was caught by a woman nearer, saying, not quietly enough, “I hear that when there’s a murder, the police always look first at the person reporting it.”

  Betsy felt a dash of cold anger. But she didn’t want to look around to see who said it, so she went back to her stitching. In her anger, she pulled hard at the Kreinik, which instantly broke. Sighing, she turned her fabric over and used her threader to work the broken end under other stitches on the back, rethreaded the broken-off strand, and tried again to work little x’s around the wedge.

  But her focus remained on the talk all around her. Nan’s voice rose into audibility. “I say, if Sharon is dead, she probably did something to deserve it.”

  And someone replied with a laugh, “If they look for motives, that would mean a lot of us are suspects!”

  Betsy suddenly flashed on seeing the dead woman on the bed, reliving her own reaction of terror, sorrow, and helplessness. How dreadful to dismiss a death so callously! This was too much, she took a breath and would have risen to relieve her feelings had not Jill forestalled her by saying gently, “The air in here is getting a little close. How about we take a walk?”

  Betsy glanced at Jill and saw a reflection of her own anger on that normally enigmatic face. She said in a carrying voice, “Yes, I think a walk out in the fresh air is just what I need!”

  They went upstairs to change into wool slacks (gray for Betsy, navy for Jill) and cotton turtlenecks (white for Betsy, cranberry for Jill), over which they put coats, scarves, hats, and mittens. They pulled on insulated boots, went down again through the dining room to the lobby, and out the door.

  The air was dry, very cold, and smelled of woodsmoke.

  Betsy looked across the parking area and saw a great wall of logs and cords of fireplace wood. “Is all that for the fireplace?” she asked.

  “No, they heat the lodge and its water with wood. That shed over there houses the furnace and boiler. This being March, the wood supply is nowhere near what it was back in October.”

  Betsy started across the parking and turnaround area. Though the sun was brilliant and the air calm, the tamped-down snow creaked under their feet, and Betsy could feel the tingle of bitter cold inside her nose and through her mittens. “This feels much colder than Excelsior. I wonder that the temperature is?”

  “About ten above, I think,” replied Jill. “Not too bad with no wind.”

  The furnace shed was about ten by twenty feet, corrugated steel painted a dull green. A metal chimney spilled fragrant smoke into the still air. Though a path had been cut through the snow to its wooden door, it had snowed after the path was dug, and instead of shoveling again, people had simply trampled the new snow down. Consequently, the path was icy and uneven, full of heel-shaped depressions, their edges worn smooth.

  “Treacherous footing,” Betsy noted, stepping carefully and keeping her elbows out to improve her balance.

  Snow had drifted three feet deep along one side of the shed, but the ground within a foot of the wall was bare, and Betsy could feel the air grow a little warmer as she approached the door.

  “Where are we going?” asked Jill behind her.

  “I want to see the furnace, to see if it’s big enough.”

  “For what?” asked Jill. “Oh,” she added.

  “Did the sheriff look in here?”

  “Yes. I kind of followed them around once I was released from guarding Mr. Owen’s door. But he was only in the shed for a couple of minutes.”

  Nearly to the shed, there was a thick V in the snow heaped beside the path. It looked as if someone had fallen to his knees. Other marks indicated he’d dropped what he was carrying and picked it up piecemeal. Betsy bent over the marks, expecting to see bits of garbage or wastebasket detritus, but she couldn’t see anything at all.

  The ground right in front of the door was covered with a sheet of plywood on which was laid a rope doormat, both of them frost-covered and marred with sooty footprints. There was no trash or litter to be seen—wait. Betsy stooped and pried up something in the trodden snow beside the wood. It was a skein of DMC 208 cotton floss with one of its two black and gold wrappers still around it.

  “I see they’ve already burned trash from today,” said Betsy. “I wonder who threw this away? It’s hardly been used. Pretty color.” It was one of the colors she was using in her pattern. It didn’t look dirty. She shook off fragments of ice and put it in her pocket.

  The shed was empty of everything but the furnace, which took up nearly all the space. It was old and large, swathed in what looked like plaster. Its door was black cast iron, opened by lifting it clear of a stubby hook—“Ouch!” Betsy yiped, snatching her hand back—and hot to the touch. She took her mitten off and folded it in half to use as a hot pad. The inside of the furnace was half full of white-hot coals on which very pale yellow flames danced.

  Betsy looked around for a poker or a stick and didn’t find one. There was nothing else in the shed, not even chunks of wood. “I don’t suppose there’d be anything left by now anyhow,” she said, bending for a closer look. The air pouring out of the furnace was enough to singe her eyebrows.

  “Not so you could just look in and see it,” agreed Jill. “Close the door.”

  Betsy obeyed, and Jill continued. “The maintenance man comes out here pretty often to put more wood into that furnace. It’s not like coal or charcoal, wood burns fast, you’ve got to keep feeding it or the fire goes out.”

  Betsy said, “So if there’d been something in there that wasn’t wood, very likely he’d’ve seen something left of it in there when he came out to feed the fire.”

  Jill said, “Plus, remember the smell of woodsmoke when we approached? That isn’t what a burning body smells like. He’d’ve noticed that. It’s a very distinctive odor.”

  Betsy felt a prickling in her throat. “Don’t tell me things like that!” she said, swallowing.

  “Hey, coming in here was your idea. Make up your mind, Betsy! Let’s either go on investigating, or do what I suggested in the first place: Go for a walk.”

  “My mind is made up!” snapped Betsy. “Let’s walk!” But outside the shed she said, “Hold up a minute. I’m sorry. It’s turned into some kind of reflex, this snooping business. I sincerely do want to stop but I’m having trouble doing that. Please be patient with me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks. Now, where did you want to walk to?”

  Jill led Betsy back across the parking lot then across the lawn to the lakeshore. The snow on the lawn was well over a foot deep, with a thick, crunchy top that held their weight for a second or two, then let their feet break through to their knees. But cold as the air was, the lake was not frozen, not even along the pebble-strewn shore. It was a very dark blue and stretched out to the pale blue horizon. Toward the north—well, east, actually, Betsy told herself—the land rose to form dark bluffs. Lake Superior wasn’t Lake Michigan, running north and south, or the Pacific Ocean, where from San Diego one looked west; here it was a fat finger pointing southwest, and they were on the northern shore, where Minnesota formed a long, narrow arrowhead between the lake and the Canadian border.

  Jill looked up and down the beach. “Here’s where they put the Adirondack chairs Martha was talking about. It’s like meditation to just sit and watch the lake.”

  Watching big water was soothing, so they did that for a minute or two. Far out, the restless surface was growing swaths of dark lavender on its deep blue. The big patterns of color had smaller, more subtle changes included in them. The sun, still well south this time of year, made golden spangles here and great, molten-brass puddles there.

  Betsy’s attention shifted from aesthetic to artistic. How could you capture something like that in a needlework pattern? Uneven stitch, maybe, with silks and metallics?

  There was a quiet, st
accato gush of the waves on the narrow beach. The eagle appeared suddenly, flying low over the surface of the water, its wings wide, its high-pitched cry a surprise in so large a bird. Betsy watched as it went up along the shore, diminished to a silhouette, then soared without effort up the split face of the dark stone bluff. The bluff was topped with a mix of pine trees standing in snow against a bright blue sky, and the eagle rose higher than their highest tops, turning around, riding a breeze. Betsy had a sudden sense of privilege, of standing in a special place.

  She turned to Jill who, reading her face, laughed and said, “I see you’ve met Naniboujou.”

  “What?”

  “Naniboujou, the Cree god this place is named for. This is his country. He was their god of the outdoors, though if you read his legends you realize he was also a god of joy and pranks.”

  “I knew there had to be an explanation for the name of this place. Tell me about him.”

  “Well, let’s see. Oh, I know: One time, when Naniboujou was young, he saw a large flock of geese resting on the water of Gitche Gumee, which we call Lake Superior. He loved goose dinner, but he was such a large god, one goose would not make even a snack for him. And if he shot a goose with his bow and arrow, the others would fly away. So he pulled a length of bark off a white pine tree and braided a long, long twine from the fibers inside it. Then he slipped under the water, swimming up to the geese, and there he began tying their feet one to another’s. Now this happened long, long ago, when Naniboujou was young and greedy, and he could not stop at nine or twelve or twenty; he had to capture the whole flock, every single one. But when he was reaching for the left foot of the last goose, he couldn’t hold his breath anymore and burst through the surface to take a breath. Well, of course, the geese all flapped up into the sky. Naniboujou had hold of the end of his twine and he didn’t let go, thinking he could hold them. But there were so many geese tied to that twine that instead they lifted him up into the air with them. He considered that he was a very large god, and they would soon tire and come down, but he was the one who got tired, and at last he had to let go. Down, down he fell, right into a marsh—kersplut! Up to his elbows in muck. Wet and covered with duckweed, he had to go home hungry. But to this day, geese fly in a long skein, their feet still tied together with Naniboujou’s twine.”

  Betsy was delighted. “Is that a real story from the Cree?”

  Jill nodded. “Mr. Greenfeather told it to me.”

  Betsy said, “That painting of him laughing must be from before he fell into the swamp and went home wet and hungry.”

  “Not at all—he laughs because he loves pranks, even on himself. They say if you go hunting or fishing, you should give him a pinch of tobacco or he’ll run the deer off and frighten the fish away.” Jill looked out over the water again. “But he isn’t just a prankster, he’s a god of peace, too. There was never a war fought around here, between Indian tribes or the Indians and white people.”

  Betsy sobered. “That makes it all the more terrible, what’s happened here now.” They looked out over the water until Betsy’s troubled spirit grew a little more calm, then she asked, “Do you go swimming when you come up here in summer?”

  “Gosh, no,” said Jill. “Lake Superior is never warm enough to swim in. It stores up cold all winter.” She stepped off the snow-covered lawn onto the narrow, thickly pebbled beach. “Well, actually I suppose it might be warm enough for a short dip in September, after absorbing heat all summer. But by then the air is too chilly. Superior holds on to its summer heat so well it never freezes when winter comes again. At least this part of it doesn’t. Further north cars can drive on the ice out to the islands. And of course Duluth Harbor freezes. They make a big deal of the ice finally going out in the harbor, so shipping can resume.”

  She stooped to pick up a stone, rub it with a mittened thumb to see if it was worth keeping, and throw it far out into the water. She threw like a man, putting her back into it, and the stone went surprisingly far. “The average life expectancy of someone falling off a boat into Lake Superior is eight minutes.”

  A great swath of lake began lightening into a sky blue. “Why do big bodies of water change colors like that?” asked Betsy.

  “Beats me,” said Jill. “But have you noticed how each one seems to have its own set of colors? The Gulf of Mexico has a light green you never see up here, and there’s a shade of blue on Superior I haven’t seen anywhere else.”

  “Yes, it’s about a what, DMC 312?”

  Jill laughed. “And you still think you’re not a stitcher! And that’s not all stitching has taught you, Miss Sharp Eyes. Come on, let’s follow the shore this way.” Jill walked south—well, west—okay, southwest—along the shore, past the snow-covered lawn to where naked, red-stemmed brush choked the land, to where the gravelly beach widened. The brush thinned out and Betsy realized they were coming to the mouth of a river.

  The river was frozen, its ice lumpish under the snow. At its mouth, Betsy could see water flowing from under the ragged edge of ice into the lake.

  Jill said, “This is the Brule, and not quite a mile from where we’re standing is the Devil’s Kettle Falls.”

  Betsy looked up the river. “Have you seen them?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s a nice waterfall, all set in rocks and coming down in two stages. There’s a trail up along this side of the river to it, but at the end you have to go down some stairs.”

  “It is a big waterfall?”

  “Pretty big. Each stage is maybe fifteen feet high. A lot of water comes over it, thousands of gallons a minute.”

  Betsy stared at Jill. “How big is the hole in this rock the water goes into?”

  “About ten feet across.”

  “A hole that big, and thousands of gallons a minute? Parker Lundquist must be thinking of an enormous aquifer! No, he’s got to be wrong, the water has to be just pouring out somewhere, if not downstream, then somewhere else.”

  “I assure you, it doesn’t. The Brule and its waterfall is in a state park visited by thousands of people who tramp over every square foot of the place, and none of them have ever reported finding a previously unknown spring or river that water could come out in.”

  “Maybe it feeds a lake, and the water flows in from the bottom, so the dye they put into it was never seen on the surface.”

  “There are no lakes in this area. None. Well”—she turned and looked out over Superior—“there is this one humongous one. Anyway, dye floats, so someone would have seen it coming out no matter where. No, the water just disappears down this big old hole, like a drainpipe into Hades.”

  Betsy walked a few yards up the shore of the river to look and listen some more. A ten-foot-wide hole that had no apparent bottom… Upriver, she could see a bridge that took the highway over the river, but not beyond that. Nor could she hear anything. “You said there’s a trail? I don’t see one.”

  “It starts on the other side of the highway, in the park. But it’s no good for cross-country skis. Too narrow, with lots of low branches and underbrush.”

  “Who wants to ski up it? But we could walk up it, couldn’t we?”

  “You saw what it was like to walk across the lawn back there. You want to do that for a mile going in—and another mile back? No, we’d have to use snowshoes, and if you think cross-country skiing is a workout, just try snowshoes.”

  “Is there a road we can drive up?”

  “No. Do you seriously want to go up there?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Well, we can ski up the river.”

  Betsy looked at the uneven surface of the river and said, “Is it safe? I thought Parker said the falls aren’t frozen.”

  “And they probably aren’t. But you can see that the river is. I’ve done it before, the ice is safe. It’s an easy trip, not so many ups and downs as the trail. We’ll get off the river before the falls, climb up the bank, and look down into the kettle.”

  Betsy sighed surrender. “I knew you were going to find
some way to get me on those skis,” she groused.

  Jill laughed like Naniboujou’s portrait, head back and mouth open. “All right, let’s go get the skis. And tell James where we’re going.”

  “Why does he need to know?”

  “Because if we fall and hurt ourselves, we don’t want to lie there until that almost-a-ranger decides to come along and finds our frozen bodies.”

  9

  Betsy went with Jill, back to the lodge then out to her car, where they donned light, narrow skis that fastened to their boots only at the toe. Each taking a pair of poles, they started back along the lawn toward the lake’s edge. It was a lot easier skimming the surface of the snow than crunching through and having to lift one’s feet high to take the next step, Betsy decided.

  “What’s this?” she asked, stopping beside some marks in the snow. They came from the distant highway across the lawn, swooping close to the back door, down nearly to the lake before turning around and going back the way it had come in. It was the ski trail she had seen earlier, but now she noticed a difference from the trails she and Jill were leaving. The skis that made this were wider, deeper, and set well apart. And the skier had apparently dragged something behind him that fit neatly between the skis.

  “Snowmobile,” said Jill. “There’s a constant fight going on in the legislature about whether to expand or cut back on the snowmobile trails, especially in the state parks. Meanwhile they run everywhere, in the parks, across private property, and along the shoulders of roads. Snowmobiles are noisy and fun, but dangerous when the driver is a child or drunk. People either love ’em or hate ’em, nobody’s neutral.”

  But Betsy thought perhaps she might be neutral. She understood the desire for a wilderness experience unbroken by the stink and snarl of engines. On the other hand, a snowmobile was a fast, easy, exciting way of getting far back into the woods. One could always shut the engine off to enjoy the silence after one arrived.

  They went back to the mouth of the Brule, skied alongside it for a while, then edged gingerly onto the snow-covered ice. Up here were the tracks of several skiers who had done likewise, avoiding the thin ice near the lake. By the time they were as far as the highway, they were in a head-high rock canyon. The river narrowed as they went up it, but on the other side of the bridge it was still over twenty feet across.