Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02

by Framed in Lace

  “Sure, I get it.” People under attack would raise a hand or arm and it would get injured; Malloy had seen examples of that. Weird that there might be such specific evidence of something so momentary in a crime this old.

  But finding it meant this was a homicide, all right; there was no other way to explain the injuries. And then, of course, there was the hiding of the body on the boat.

  He continued to recite, “You say she was about five feet, two inches tall, not skin and bones or a fatso.” What Dr. Pascuzzi had said was that she had been neither emaciated nor obese, but Malloy liked his English plain. He went on, “You said that when a woman has a baby, it leaves marks on her skeleton, but you don’t find those marks on this one. I suppose if she was pregnant at the time of death, we could tell that?”

  “Not necessarily. If she were in the first trimester, there would be no way to know.”

  Malloy nodded and added a little note. “You said her front teeth were broken?”

  “Yes, and probably also at the time of death. I also noticed some problems with decay that might indicate she wasn’t fond of the dentist. Or, perhaps, was too poor to afford proper dental care.”

  “So a lower-class woman who maybe had been beat up some.”

  “Well …” Pascuzzi rocked his hand to indicate doubt. “Women who are abused regularly show other signs of it, healed broken ribs or fingers. I saw no signs of that. I do think her nose might have been broken, probably while she was in her early teens, but that’s all.”

  Still, this last severe battering to the face indicated rage or deep-seated hatred. A husband, maybe. Or a boyfriend. In either case, Malloy thought, what we probably have is an old-fashioned domestic that got out of hand. The Hopkins was sunk in 1949; it was possible the perp was still around. And that would for sure be a lead story on the evening news, with a camera shot of the cops rolling up to the nursing home to take him away.

  Dr. Pascuzzi asked, “Want more?”

  “Is there more?”

  “By the look of the wear on the shoulders, elbows, and wrists she did a lot of hard labor. On the other hand, there aren’t the changes to ankle and knee joints that mean prolonged squatting or kneeling. Not a char lady then, hauling water-filled buckets and kneeling to scrub floors. She might have been a farmer’s wife who helped out in the dairy barn. Or a waitress, staggering under heavy trays of food. When was the boat she was found on sunk?”

  “About fifty years ago.”

  “Not long after World War II, then. So perhaps she worked in a factory or drove a truck during the war. There are some small signs of malnutrition, not uncommon on the skeletons of people who grew up during the Depression. Apart from the nose, I find no sign of injuries or any illness that would leave its mark on bone.”

  Malloy grunted. That, plus the lack of dental work, was going to make positive identification difficult.

  “Enough?” asked Pascuzzi again.

  “For now. You’ll send me a copy of your report when?”

  “Couple of days. I may be able to come closer in my estimate of her age, weight, and height.”

  “Thanks,” said Malloy and left him to it.

  Malloy was right; the story of the skeleton received heavy play in the media. Small wonder that the following Monday, seven days after the discovery, the Monday Bunch gathered eagerly for its weekly meeting at Crewel World. Betsy, they knew, had been out on Lake Minnetonka watching when the Hopkins had come to the surface with its grisly surprise. Betsy had taken a major role in solving her sister’s murder, so they were sure she had come to some marvelous conclusions about this new crime and knew things that had not yet turned up in print or on television. Thrilled to have an opportunity to hear from her in person, the women turned out in force.

  The Monday Bunch was an informal group of women who loved needlework and were free at two on Monday afternoons. Some were retired, some were homemakers, some worked part-time or nights, one even arranged for a very late lunch hour. The numbers varied from week to week, rarely rising above four or five. Today, every current member was present, all eleven. Betsy had to bring folding chairs from the back.

  “Did you see it?” asked Alice Skoglund, a large woman, not just plump but tall and big-boned. She had faded yellow hair well mixed with gray and a lot of jaw. Her plastic-framed eyeglasses caught the light as she looked toward Betsy. Her fingers moved mechanically, crocheting afghan squares in bright-colored polyester yarn, dropping them as they were finished into a plastic bag already bulging with them. “The skeleton, I mean.”

  Eyes looked everywhere but at Betsy, most at the needlework in hand. They all wanted details, too, but were embarrassed that one of their number was so open in her inquiry.

  “No,” said Betsy. She sat at the head of the table, where she could see the front door in case a customer came in. A cordless phone stood handy in case a customer wanted to call in an order from home. She was still working on that first mitten. Last night’s flurries had melted, but under a gray sky the temperature struggled to reach forty.

  “It must have been exciting out there,” said Martha Winters, a pleasant-faced woman who at seventy-four worked only part-time in her dry cleaning shop, but whose eyes were still sharp enough for her to do counted cross-stitch on twenty-four-count evenweave. Flick, flick went her needle, and a chickadee had a beak.

  “Oh, not so much,” said Betsy. “Well, it was exciting to see the boat actually come up, but we waited a long time for that to happen.”

  “And when it did come up, who found the skeleton?” asked Martha’s bosom companion, Jessica Turnquist. Jessica was three inches taller but twenty pounds lighter than Martha. She had a long face with large, slightly bulgy eyes, and a patrician nose over a mouth pressed thin by years of firm opinions. Jessica was crocheting a white baby blanket in swift popcorn stitch; it looked as if a cloud were forming on the table in front of her.

  “Some divers. They swam over and climbed on the boat, and suddenly one of them shouted to Jill and Lars that they’d found a skeleton. Jill went aboard for a look, then told Lars to radio for help.” Betsy looked at her incipient mitten, made a noise, and undid two stitches.

  “Is the skeleton a man or a woman?” asked Godwin, who was working on a magnificent needlepoint Christmas stocking.

  “I heard it was a woman,” said Alice, the woman with the manly jaw.

  “That’s right,” said Betsy. “Jill told me the medical examiner said that. I think I saw him out on the boat, but there were so many investigators and police and all, I couldn’t say for sure. I didn’t realize finding a skeleton would create such a fuss. He may even have arrived after Jill arranged for someone to bring me back to the dock, a nice man with a perfectly enormous boat.”

  “Any idea who?” asked Jessica, who could crochet without looking.

  “I think his name was Dayton. Luke? Matt? Something like that. Very handsome and polite.”

  Several of the women coughed as if to cover chuckles, and Jessica said, “No, I mean who the skeleton is.”

  “No, there weren’t any clothes or a purse or anything. Just the bones.”

  “How could they even tell it was a woman?” asked a very pregnant young woman named Emily, new to the Bunch. She was knitting a crib-size afghan in blue, pink, and white. “I mean, a skeleton is a skeleton is a skeleton, right?”

  “Not at all,” said Martha the dry cleaner. “Don’t you watch The Discovery Channel? They have a wonderful show about autopsies and things. They can tell all sorts of things just from a leg bone, the age and sex and everything; and here they have the whole skeleton.” Martha had curly white hair around a sweet face; that she was interested in forensic anthropology was surprising.

  “Was she murdered?” asked Alice.

  “Oh, no,” said Godwin in his most faux-dulcet voice—for which he must hold several international records, thought Betsy, amused—“it’s a suicide, obviously. She crawled under the floor boards and waited for the boat to sink so she could drown.
”

  “Tsk,” went several women, but the rest giggled. Godwin’s sarcasm was part of his fame.

  “When did the Hopkins sink?” asked Emily. “Maybe she was a leftover from the accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” said Godwin. “The streetcar steamboats were sunk deliberately.” When Emily tried an uncertain giggle, he continued, “I’m not joking. They didn’t need them anymore, so the company sank them. Happened during the roaring twenties.”

  “Not the Hopkins,” said Patricia Fairland, a handsome woman in her thirties with dark hair held back by a headband. She was crocheting a lacy edging on an embroidered table runner, using a number-ten steel hook and yarn thin as sewing thread, her long, delicate fingers darting swiftly.

  “Sure the Hopkins,” disagreed Godwin, glancing up from his Christmas stocking. “They sank them all about the same time, 1920-something, when roads were tarred and everyone could afford a car, and public transportation wasn’t absolutely necessary anymore.”

  “The other five, yes, but not the Hopkins,” insisted Patricia. “It was sold to the Blue Ribbon Café, and they renamed it the Minnetonka III, painted it white, and used it to give rides to tourists until 1949. I’m a member of the Minnesota Transportation Museum, Steamboat Branch. It’s in several books, about the Hopkins.”

  Betsy said, “When it came up out of the water, I could see it used to be white, not that mustard color the Minnehaha was restored to.”

  “You can tell she’s new to this business,” remarked Jessica with a smile, “because the rest of us would have tried to decide whether the color is closer to DMC 437 or 8325.”

  “Oh, DMC 437, definitely,” said Martha. “You know, I remember the Blue Line buying the Hopkins. They painted it white after they converted the engine to run on oil instead of coal. My Aunt Esther and Uncle Swan celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with a ride on it in 1938. I’d forgotten they renamed it. I think everyone from around here still called it the Hopkins most of the time. My Carl used to love to watch it out on the lake. He said it was the prettiest boat he’d ever seen. It’s a pity he didn’t live to see it brought up again.”

  “Maybe he isn’t dead,” said Alice. “Nobody knows, right?” Blinking behind the lenses, she looked at Martha, and there was a little stir in the group; it wasn’t polite to bring up old scandals when the scandalee was present.

  Jessica said, “She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  But Martha said, “It’s all right, Jess.” She said to Betsy, with an air of making a statement for the record, “My husband left our house for work one summer morning in 1948 and never came home. Some people think he ran off with another woman, but I think he was mugged and the robber killed him and pushed his body in the lake or buried it somewhere or threw it in an empty boxcar so it got taken away. Because no trace of him was ever found. His disappearance was a great shock to me, but it happened a long time ago, and I’m pretty much over it.”

  “But he never knew they sank it,” persisted Alice, frowning over her afghan square, “if he disappeared before it was sunk.”

  “I don’t remember them sinking the Hopkins,” said Martha, pausing to consider. “Maybe because it was just an old wreck they finally got rid of, not a news story. But I definitely remember Carl disappeared in July of 1948, and if the Hopkins was sunk in 1949, then of course he never knew.” She looked around with uneasy defiance. “And yes, a woman who worked at the Blue Ribbon Café disappeared at the same time. Some people assumed they ran off together.”

  Jessica gave a sniff of support without looking up from her crocheting.

  Patricia said, “There was all kinds of talk, I suppose, about Carl disappearing.”

  Kindly shifting the focus from Martha, Godwin said, “I hear the boat was very hard to sink. They had to fill it with stones and concrete to make it go down.”

  Betsy said, “That’s right. Jill told me the divers said it was a real job to remove that rubble before they raised her, and I saw them throwing the last of it overboard just before they found the skeleton.”

  Martha, who had stopped work to think, said, “You know, it’s a funny thing my not remembering them sinking that boat. I remember all kinds of other unimportant things. Like it being damaged by ice two or three years earlier. It sat against the shore over by the dredging company not far from our house. My neighbor’s little boys used to fish off the back of it.” She smiled at Betsy. “The younger one grew up to be mayor of Excelsior.” She frowned. “But I don’t remember anything about them sinking the Hopkins.”

  Patricia said, “It’s interesting how everyone still calls it the Hopkins. Because it sailed the lake from 1926 to 1949 under the name Minnetonka III.”

  Betsy said, “I understand how you know these things, Pat, being one of the volunteers who run the boats, but how do you know so much, Godwin?”

  “Because I am not from here and therefore am interested in local history,” said Godwin loftily. Then he grinned. “Besides, John is a member of the museum, and he puts their monthly magazine in the little stack of reading material in the bathroom. They did a long article on the Hopkins in the last issue.”

  Martha chuckled. “My husband used to call the bathroom the reading room.”

  In the middle of the nods and laughter that remark drew, Emily began to look funny and once the ladies found she’d been having these kind of cramplike pains every twenty minutes or so, a part joyous, part worried fuss began of notifying her husband and her doctor and arranging for her to get to the hospital—all despite her protest, “But when the cramp lets up I feel just fine!” And by the time Emily was safely on her way, the Monday Bunch meeting was over.

  “Godwin,” Betsy said when the last woman was out the door, “why do you keep building me up so those ladies can put me down? You keep telling me how well I’m doing—”

  “You are, you’re doing beautifully!” insisted Godwin.

  “Sure I am. Did you see how they laughed when Jessica pointed out I don’t use DMC numbers to identify colors? I’m sure they all saw how I had to keep going back and picking up dropped stitches in that mitten. Thank God they don’t yet realize how bad it really is; how little I know about all sorts of needlework—or running a needlework business, for that matter.”

  “Oh, pish-tush; I repeat, you’re doing just fine.”

  “I wish I could believe that. Especially late at night, when I’m trying to fall asleep after suffering through Quicken and the checkbooks and withholding, and could just cry. But the little failures hurt, too. I thought Shelly was going to have a stroke trying not to laugh out loud when a customer asked if I thought she should do the background of her project in oriental or gobelin.” Shelly was a part-time employee.

  “What did you tell the customer?”

  “I got out my book of stitches and looked up both stitches and said I thought the oriental would be better.”

  “And what was wrong with that?”

  Betsy hesitated, then smiled. “Nothing. In fact, when I saw the finished project last Saturday, it was beautiful.”

  “See? And honey, if Shelly does something like that when I’m around, I’ll remind her of the time she forgot to figure sales tax on a five hundred dollar order. Who cares if you haven’t mastered every needlepoint stitch? You can do this. You are doing it. You have to do it. If you put this shop on the market, Irene Potter will buy it, and the first person she’ll fire is me.” He reached out a slender hand to touch her shoulder. “Think of it as a memorial to your murdered sister.”

  Betsy twitched away from his hand, not sure if he was being melodramatic. It was still too soon for her to endure casual reference to her sister’s death.

  “No, listen to me!” said Godwin. “I’m serious. You solved her murder, you are a heroine and a sleuth and a role model. You are the happy-ever-after person; you can’t quit.”

  Betsy smiled; she couldn’t help it. Godwin’s charm was as warm as it was silly. She went behind the big old desk/chec
kout counter. “Have we got enough Madeira silks on hand?” she asked. “I see here you sold an awful lot of them to Amy yesterday.”

  “I wrote you a note about that. No, we don’t. We should order some more right away. By the way, Shelly says we’re also low on DMC pinks and blues. There should be a note from her on that desk somewhere.”

  “We’re going to have to find a better way to keep up with inventory,” grumbled Betsy, shuffling through papers to look for Shelly’s note. “This business of waiting till someone notices we’re running low seems awfully chancy. What if no one notices? We’ll find ourselves totally out of something and screw up a big sale one of these days.”

  “Hasn’t happened yet.” Godwin was smiling again, but this time she frowned at him.

  “Come on, how can we tell ahead of time what we’ll run out of next?” he asked reasonably. “We notice we’re running low, and we order more of it. We could increase our inventory, but that ties up money you need to pay rent and our salaries. The system we have is a good system.”

  “Yeah,” said Betsy sarcastically, “invented by someone with nine whole weeks’ experience in the retail business.”

  “You didn’t invent this system, you inherited it,” said Godwin. “Your sister used the same method. We all know to write a note when we sell enough of a product to create a shortage. The problem happens when someone forgets to write a note. Which we didn’t. So, do you want me to call the order in, or will you?”

  “I’ll do it.” She opened the center drawer and pulled out the spiral-bound address book. But before dialing, she put her hands on the open book and said, “Goddy, the Monday Bunch doesn’t think I’m going to get involved in this skeleton business, do they?”

  “Not once they think about it. I mean, you aren’t a policeman, so it’s not your job, and I didn’t notice anyone coming in trying to hire you as a private eye to solve it. The last one was up-close and personal. This one has nothing to do with us, so why should we get involved?” Betsy was to remember those words in the days to come.