Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02

by Framed in Lace

  “Good morning, ladies,” said Malloy. “What’s on your schedule for today?”

  “Good morning, Michael,” said the littlest woman, who was also the oldest. “We’re trying to map the location of the fire lanes. The city hasn’t kept up its claim to them where they touch the lakeshore, and there’s been a lot of encroachment. Some of it inadvertent.”

  This budding problem had made the news recently. When the Excelsior Fire Department was young, its pumper drew water from the lake, and so eight or ten narrow access lanes to the lake were marked off and maintained for its use. The installation of fireplugs in the ‘50s removed the need for the lanes. Some were turned into public access boat landings. But over the years the others blended into the lawns of the houses on either side of them. A quarrel was developing over what should be done about the lanes. Sold to the homeowner(s) who had encroached with garden or lawn? Divided equally between the properties on either side? Reclaimed by the city? Before anything could be settled, the city had to first discover just how much land was involved and where it was located.

  “If I might pull you off your work for just a few minutes,” Malloy said, “I’d like to know if you can tell me if there was a report of a woman gone missing in 1949.”

  “From just Excelsior?” asked the second oldest woman, whose name, Malloy suddenly remembered, was Myrtle Jensen.

  “Excelsior and the area close by—unless you can search other areas easily,” said Malloy. “And also, can you find the month the Hopkins was sunk? I assume it was summer, but it could have been any time there was no ice.”

  Myrtle pressed a crooked forefinger to her lips. “I can tell you that,” she said. “It was just before the Fourth of July. I remember because Jack brought up a bushel basket of sweet corn from Illinois—ours wasn’t ripe yet. We boiled it up and had a Fourth of July picnic in the backyard and a neighbor came by for an ear and said he’d seen the Hopkins towed out to be sunk. That was the best sweet corn I ever ate, and ever after, I associated corn on the cob with the Fourth of July, even though it’s never ready up here by then. We always have to buy it from people who bring it from down south. There used to be a man who would drive to Tennessee—remember him, Lola?—he’d fill his trunk and the backseat of his car and drive all day and night and park down by The Common and sell it. I remember my dad used to put about half of our garden in sweet corn, each row planted a week later than the one before, so it didn’t all ripen at once. We used to have a real big backyard garden. I remember being sent out to work in it when I was a child, weeding and picking caterpillars off the leaves. My brother’s son Jimmy worked in that garden, but Jimmy’s boy Adam went to college and he uses mulch and organic bug spray.”

  Malloy had patiently waited for her to run down, then reaffirmed the pertinent part of her remarks. “So it was July they sank the Hopkins.”

  “Didn’t I say that? Yes, early July, before the Fourth, because on the Fourth we heard it had been done, so a day or two before. It was hot that day, just blazing sun. Jack set up a cauldron outside, and was miserable tending the fire. Good corn, though.”

  The littlest woman said, “I’ve got a missing person story. Trudie Koch ran off with Carl Winters, or so everyone said. Maybe he murdered her instead and ran away.” Her eyes sparkled at the thought.

  Malloy looked at her. “Who was Trudie Koch?”

  “Waitress down at the Blue Ribbon Café. No better than she ought to be, remember, Myrt? Had a steady boyfriend, what was his name? Vern something. Mean fellow, gave her a black eye once in a while, not that she didn’t provoke him something awful. She dated a lot of men, and was very easy, or so everyone said. We were surprised that she ran off with Carl, or rather, that Carl ran off with her. He had a perfectly nice wife and a good job.” She looked at Myrtle. “Remember?”

  Myrtle was looking thoughtful. “But that didn’t happen the year they sank the Hopkins, did it? Those two ran off in 1948.”

  “I thought it happened the same summer. Are you sure they ran off in 1948?”

  “Yes, because that was the year Martha had to drop out as organist and they asked me to take her place. With her husband gone, she had to run the dry cleaning store all by herself and she didn’t have time for choir. I got in and stayed in. I got my gold pin for twenty years’ service in 1968, see?” She touched one of two tiny round badges pinned to her dress. Malloy took a look and saw the badge said Saint Elwin’s Choir and Twenty Years around its edge. A tiny gold chain led from the pin to a tiny rectangle with the year 1948 on it.

  The other badge was slightly more elaborate and said Saint Elwin’s Choir and Forty Years around its edge. The chained tag also read 1948.

  “I stepped down as organist after I got this pin,” she said, touching the second one. “My ears weren’t what they used to be.”

  “Sorry,” said Malloy, but carelessly. “Say, maybe the Hopkins was sunk in 1948?”

  “Oh, no,” said the youngest woman. She stood and went to a low shelf behind the table. She selected a slim, blue paperbound book and brought it to Malloy. “It says in here that the boat was sunk in 1949, and this book was written by the man in charge of raising both the Minnehaha and the Hopkins. He even took a picture of the Hopkins at the bottom of the lake.”

  Malloy paged through the book, which was locally published and had good black and white photographs in it. Sure enough, there was an old photo of a streetcar steamboat loaded with passengers, and another of an open hatch, this one taken under water. The accompanying paragraph said the Hopkins was sunk near her sisters off the Big Island in 1949.

  “Anyone know where I can reach the author of this book?” he asked.

  “He’s with the Minnesota Transportation Museum’s steamboat branch; their office is right down by the lake, in that little row of stores,” said Myrtle.

  “May I keep this?” he asked, displaying the book.

  “For $7.95, you may,” said Myrtle, producing a cash box, and the best Malloy could do was get a receipt and hope the department would reimburse him.

  4

  The Minnesota Transportation Museum Ticket Office and Souvenir Store was a little storefront, in a row of them behind Pizza Hut. There was a parking lot in front, and Malloy stood a minute looking at the lake across the street. A gentle slope ran down to the docks—narrow wooden walks into the water, supported on thick wooden piles—now empty in anticipation of winter. Malloy sometimes thought he would like to live in some state where winter didn’t take up so much of the year. They had bass lakes as far south as Missouri, didn’t they? But in Missouri, they didn’t go ice fishing, did they? And Malloy loved ice fishing almost as much as fishing from his bass boat.

  He turned, saw the sign, and went up and into the MTM store.

  Like most souvenir stores, MTM had lots of T-shirts and sweatshirts. There were also caps, some of them the old-fashioned, high-crowned, mattress-ticking variety that yesteryear’s engineers wore. There were bright-colored prints of the lake in its heyday, with streetcar boats taking on passengers in the foreground. Each boat was named after a town on the lake. There were also prints of streetcars, some in small-town settings back when Hopkins and Minnetonka were not merely suburbs of Minneapolis—though even then the main purpose of the streetcars was to take workers to the big city.

  A glass case held a big model of the restored Minnehaha, showing the peculiar long slope of her stem. Malloy remembered seeing photographs of the Great White Fleet back in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, where the ships had that same odd back end. He wondered what its purpose was.

  At the far end of the store was a counter behind which a young woman with short dark hair frowned at a computer monitor.

  He walked back and she looked up. “May I help you?” she asked. Her features were attractive, but she had made no effort to enhance them with makeup.

  “I’m interested in learning about the Hopkins,” he said. “What can you tell me?”

  “It’s no longer at the bottom of the lake,” she rep
lied with a twinkle.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “When was it sunk?”

  “1949.”

  “That’s what everyone keeps telling me. Who knows that for a fact?”

  She smiled. “If everyone’s telling you that, then everyone, I guess. What are you looking for, an eyewitness?”

  “You got one?”

  She looked around. There was no one there but the two of them. “Not here in the office.”

  He laughed, but then produced identification, which stopped the banter as it widened her light blue eyes. Then she turned abruptly and reached for some books tucked into a shelf under the counter. “These are stories about the lake and the towns on it, and here’s one about the streetcar steamboats in particular. They all say the Hopkins—well, it was renamed the Minnetonka by then—was sunk in 1949. This one even has some pictures of it on the bottom of the lake.” This one was Salvaged Memories, the blue paperback Malloy already had a copy of.

  Still, he took the books and went to a corner of the store that had a chair and looked them over. They all agreed that the Minnetonka III, née Hopkins, had been sunk on the north side of the Big Island in Lake Minnetonka in 1949.

  All right, he’d accept that. He got the phone number for the author of Salvaged Memories and left.

  Diane Bolles was sorting through a thin stack of cardboard signs when a customer came to the checkout counter. Distracted, she glanced up without at first recognizing the woman, who had a half dozen old books. “May I help you find something else?” she asked—then blinked. “Oh, hello, Shelly!”

  “You must have something else on your own mind today, Diane,” said Shelly Donohue.

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I’m thinking of changing the name of my store.”

  “What’s wrong with D. B. and Company?” Shelly looked around at the store, which looked like an old-fashioned general store in layout. There was even a penny candy counter next to the checkout. But elsewhere were silk flowers, old-fashioned tea sets, doilies, vases, jars, and over by the door a large cement statue of a frog.

  “Nothing, actually. Except it doesn’t describe the store.”

  Shelly giggled. “I don’t see how you would describe this place in one sentence, much less one word.”

  “We sell the final touch for your decor, in the house or the garden.”

  “Oh. Well, yes. In fact, you put that so well, you must already be writing your new radio ad.”

  “Not until I get the new name.” Diane picked up the cardboard squares. “May I try some out on you? I’ve sorted it down to these, but I don’t know which one I like best.”

  “Sure.”

  “Belles Choses, which means Beautiful Choice in Italian. Or, there’s Nightingale’s, after the bird. Or Near Midnight—I like that one because it’s romantic. You know, midnight, the bewitching hour. Or Chenille—did you know that’s French for caterpillar? And last, My Favorite Year, which was my favorite this morning. This evening I’ll like a different one.”

  Shelly said, “I like Nightingale’s. The bird was a symbol of home and hope to the British during World War II, and it has a very beautiful song. I did a counted cross-stitch of a nightingale a couple of years ago for a friend who was born in England, and she just loved it.”

  “That reminds me. I was thinking of expanding into antique and vintage clothing. And then I found my grandmother’s embroidered tablecloths and brought them in to decorate that table with the antique dessert dishes.”

  Shelly said, “Your grandmother made those? I can’t believe you’re going to sell those, Diane; they are heirlooms. The embroidery on them is wonderful; those strawberries are almost three-dimensional.”

  “Oh, they’re not for sale, they’re just decoration. But I’ve gotten so many inquiries from customers that I think I should add stitchery to my line.” She cocked her head. “Do you still work part-time in that needlework store down on Lake?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Maybe I should stop in there and ask the new owner if she can put me in touch with people willing to sell their work.”

  “Well…” said Shelly. “Actually, she probably can’t help you. She’s a terrific person, I really like her, but she’s not only new at needlework, she’s not from here.” There was a subtle emphasis on that last part, not from here.

  “Ah,” said Diane.

  “On the other hand, you could talk to her one full-time employee, Godwin. He knows everyone in the area who has ever done any kind of needlework. But you know something?” Shelly leaned forward in a mockery of her own posture when imparting a tantalizing tidbit of gossip. “So do I.”

  Diane’s eyebrows raised in surprise, then she laughed. “Well, of course! So where do I go? Who do I see? I’m looking for vintage, antique, and new items. Not a big selection, just a few things.”

  “Tell you what. Let me think about it, maybe ask around. I’ll draw up a list. And I think you should come to the shop anyway, meet Betsy—she’s really nice. I’ll consult with Godwin. He can probably suggest some names I miss. Let’s see, today’s Tuesday. I’ll need about a week, can you wait that long?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll come by sometime next week, maybe on my lunch break.”

  Diane began to ring up Shelly’s selections. “Do you collect old children’s books?”

  “No, I’m going to encourage my students to read them. I think it’s helpful to expose even young children to a variety of reading experiences,” said Shelly. She had a variety, all right, from the sweet and innocent Pokey Linle Puppy to a pre-Disney version of The Three Liale Pigs that had the wolf eating the first two.

  Diane put the purchases into a bag and handed it to Shelly, who wasn’t finished talking. “You know about the skeleton on the boat they raised?”

  “Yes, I read about it. How dreadful for the divers, finding something like that.”

  Shelly nodded. “We’re involved again.”

  “Who is?”

  “The shop, Crewel World.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know how we solved the murder of Betsy’s sister for the police, of course.”

  Diane started to object to that but changed her mind and only raised a mildly doubting eyebrow.

  “I know the police are acting as if they solved it themselves, but they would still be looking for a burglar if it wasn’t for Betsy Devonshire! She has a nose, or is it an eye, for crime solving. And so they’re practically begging her to help again. They’ve left a big clue in our shop, and people are being asked to look at it and see if they can identify it.”

  “What kind of clue?”

  “It’s a piece of silk with lace edging, or rather a picture of it. It was found on the boat, which means it went down with it in 1949. No one has come up with anything yet, but you just watch. Of course, Betsy won’t suspect you or me, because we weren’t around in 1949.” Shelly laughed, embraced the paper bag a little tighter, and left, not noticing the way Diane frowned after her.

  The Saturday after Thanksgiving is traditionally the best day for American retailers, but for needlework shops, it’s the Saturday after Halloween. That’s when the procrastinators realize that unless they want to offend their mother-in-law again with a store-bought gift, they’d better get down to Crewel World and see if there is something that looks as if it took more than two months to finish, but doesn’t.

  For the first time, Betsy began to believe she could actually make a go of the little shop. Customers were waiting outside for her to open, and it was nonstop from then till closing. Fortunately, Shelly was able to join Godwin and Betsy.

  Shelly was slim, not yet thirty, with long, thick, straight brown hair pulled into an untidy bun at the nape of her neck. She had beautiful eyes, intelligent and compassionate, and was a skilled counted cross-stitcher, a hard worker in the shop—but an incorrigible gossip. “… Linda chose that same cream-colored linen,” she was tellin
g a customer, “and frankly, I think iris-blue and purple silk would go even better for your sampler than her shades of pumpkin.”

  Meanwhile, Godwin was saying, “If the Ott table lamp is too small, you might want to try a light by Chromalux; it’s a floor lamp, and comes already on a stand. And if you stitch in the nude—like I do—you’ll appreciate the heat it puts out.” The customer giggled, and Godwin reached for a catalog. “See, here’s a picture of it; we can order it for you …”

  Betsy stopped eavesdropping and looked at the completed piece of counted cross-stitch, Mermaid of the Pearls, lying across her hands. “Wow,” she said sincerely, “this is much prettier than the picture of it I saw. Let’s look at the sample mats to pick a color to match, and then we’ll choose a really nice frame. You’ll want to do justice to this, I’m sure.”

  While Betsy was writing up the order, her customer noticed the Xerox taped to a corner of the checkout desk. When Betsy saw her bend over it, she asked, “Recognize it?”

  “What’s it supposed to be?” asked the customer.

  “Lace edging on a collar or handkerchief or sleeve. It was hauled up from the bottom of the lake, and we’re hoping someone who does lace will be able to tell something about it.”

  “Looks like a spill of spaghetti to me,” remarked the customer, taking her slip and looking at it. Betsy held her breath; the finishing, mat, and frame came to over two hundred dollars. But the customer only said, “You’ll have this back in three weeks? Good, I can get it in the mail on time, then. Thank you, Betsy.”