“What?”
“I forgot to ask her that.” Betsy glanced at Jill and noticed a slight quiver of the shapely mouth. She smiled herself, and Jill’s quiver became a genuine grin.
Jill asked, “And did Vern Miller just pour his heart out to you, too?”
“No. What happened was, Shelly said he retired from the army after thirty years, came home and opened Miller Motors. His sign says, ‘Since 1978.’ If you subtract thirty years from that, you get 1948. So I went to talk to him. He said he was halfway through boot camp when he got a letter about Carl and Trudie running off together. He says he didn’t believe it, because Carl was a respectable businessman with a family and not likely to fall for someone like Trudie. Vern thought she might have accepted a ride from Carl to somewhere, but that’s all. He said he used to think about her waitressing in some other town, sassing the customers and going home to her six kids.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. He said she used to pick fights with him whenever he couldn’t buy her something she wanted, and then she’d temporarily take up with someone who would, then she’d let Vern back into her life. It sounds like it was a volatile relationship, and that can end in murder. And he did leave town at a very significant moment.”
“Hmmmm,” mused Jill. “You know, you have come up with two very solid alternatives to Martha. I wonder if there’s a way to get Mike to look them over.”
“You think I should go talk to him?”
“No, let me have a go, first. He didn’t like you poking around that first time, remember? And he wouldn’t listen to you until you had proof. Which you don’t have, right now. He’s pretty sold on Martha being the killer, you know.”
“I can’t believe he really thinks she did this.”
“Well, look at it his way,” said Jill. “Trudie works at the Blue Line Café, just yards from the dock where the Hopkins is tied up, waiting to be towed out and sunk. Carl is having an affair with her, he meets her after work that night in The Common, which is right there next to the docks.
“It’s all over town that Carl is messing with Trudie. Think how embarrassing that must have been for Martha! It’s not hard to see the obvious, that Martha comes roaring out of the darkness to smite Trudie on the head with a tire iron or a hammer—at least that’s the ME’s opinion.
“Now, rather than trying to stop her, Carl runs off—”
“The coward,” said Betsy.
“Well, if my spouse and my lover got into a fight, I might not care to interfere. Both of them might remember who they really should be mad at.”
“Oops,” said Betsy.
“Right. So Carl’s gone and Trudie is dead. Martha drags or carries Trudie’s body onto the boat, the effort shifting her dress around so a pocket opens, or a sleeve unrolls, and her handkerchief falls out. It’s dark, she’s busy, she doesn’t notice. And either when she’s moving rubble it gets covered up, or she steps wrong in the dark, and a piece of pipe rolls under her foot, covering the handkerchief.”
“But think of that big boat filled with rubble,” said Betsy. “It would have been an enormous effort for a woman to move enough of it away to uncover the deck and then move it back again in order to hide the body.”
“Malloy has found someone who remembers that they didn’t fill the boat at the dock, but hauled maybe half of it out on a barge, since they didn’t want the boat to tip over or sink before they got it out behind the Big Island.”
“Oh,” said Betsy, deflated.
“But there was enough that she had to clear a space, and enough that when she put it over the body, no one noticed when they tossed the rest in. It was hard work, but not an impossible task. Remember, she’s scared. I’m sure you’ve read the stories about women who have lifted whole automobiles off their husbands or sons after the cars fell off jacks onto them. Malloy has.
“Meanwhile Carl gets into his car, drives off—”
“The car!” exclaimed Betsy.
“What about it?”
“All these years Martha says she thought Carl had been mugged and his body thrown into a boxcar or into the lake. How did she reconcile that notion with the fact that his car was missing?”
“His car wasn’t missing,” said Jill. “It was found behind the dry cleaners. I’m assuming he drove down to the lake, and then drove back again. There was a pretty fine train and streetcar service out here in those days. He left his car behind the cleaners, then caught a streetcar or a train into Minneapolis, and caught a train out of town.”
“Oh,” said Betsy.
“He arrives in Omaha and decides to stay awhile,” continued Jill, picking up Malloy’s scenario. “He finds work, tries to forget. But fifty years later, the boat is raised, the skeleton found, and a story about it gets picked up by the wire services. The story says Martha is suspected. Carl is overjoyed. At last, he can come home and tell what really happened, see to it his wife is at last punished for her deed.
“But coming back opens old memories. Maybe, he thinks to himself, he’ll give his wife the same chance he took, to run off. He phones her from a nearby motel, telling her he’s back and she’d better get out of town. But Martha plays it cool, asks to come and talk to him. And she’s not leaving town. She goes out there with a gun and shoots him. She leaves the gun beside the body, thinking the cops will conclude it was an accident or suicide. But she’s no forensic expert; she doesn’t know from powder burns and angle of entry and all that sort of thing. Her hasty little plot doesn’t work. She’s found out; she’s going to prison.”
Betsy put down her cup of tea. That was very plausible. So plausible, in fact, that it might be true. Was it true? Was she on a fool’s errand thinking it was otherwise?
Jill went to the pig-shaped cookie jar and lifted the lid, then turned with it in one hand. “Do you mind?” she asked.
“No, of course not. I’d love to get rid of them; I’m trying to cut back.”
Jill put down the lid, selected a raisin oatmeal cookie, put it down, put the lid back on. As she did, she looked toward the dining nook and said, “That your counted cross-stitch project?”
“Yes, and I’m giving up on it. You want it?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
Betsy took her to the table. “I did what everyone said I should do, I basted the edges of the evenweave, and I marked off the divisions with more basting and I folded it per instructions so now it’s marked into the squares each ornament will fill. And I found the middle of the first square, and started stitching. After about ten stitches, I realized I’d counted wrong and had to frog—”
“ ‘Frog’?” interrupted Jill.
“Isn’t that a term? I see it on RCTN all the time.”
“RCTN?”
“An Internet news group for needleworkers. When they have to pull out stitches, they call it frogging. As in ‘rip it, rip it.’”
Jill actually chuckled. “That’s cute,” she said. “I’ll remember that. I’ve done some frogging myself.” She took a big bite of her cookie and drank some tea. “You’re lucky you’re not working with metallics. You can pick out the little raggedy ends floss leaves on your fabric, but metallics leave a mark you can’t see.”
“A mark you can’t see?” said Betsy, expecting a joke.
“It develops over time.” Jill saw the incipient laughter on Betsy’s face and said, “I’m serious. The metallic floss comes out clean and you think it’s gone, but in a few days or a few weeks or even sometimes in a few months, there are these dark marks, like dirt. And on that piece you’re doing, you leave some areas blank. So if you frog an area you should have left blank, pretty soon it will look like you were handling it with dirty fingers.”
“Oh. All right, I guess I should be grateful that these patterns don’t call for metallic. I’ve done this one part about four times, and there are two areas I crossed into territory I think should be blank. I’m about out of one color, and there’s not a stitch of it left on the
ornament.”
“You’ll have to buy some more.”
“No, I won’t. You see, you eventually get it right, but I don’t; I just keep getting lost in one direction, then another. I count and count and check and double-check and still I make mistakes. And these are supposed to be easy. I’m giving up.”
Jill picked up the patterns, which were printed all on one big sheet. “You shouldn’t be having all this trouble. I’ve done one set of these, and they aren’t all that difficult.” She looked at Betsy’s cloth. “Where’s your gridding?”
“Gridding?”
“Yes. I hate to have you do yet more setup, but if you mark off every ten squares on your cloth and every ten squares on the pattern, it’s a whole lot easier to keep count.”
Betsy looked at the cloth, then at Jill. “Well, dammit, why didn’t they suggest that in the instructions?”
“Because not everyone needs to grid. Especially on something as easy as these patterns.”
“Sit down, why don’t you? I’ve got a marking pen somewhere, I’m going to go get it.” She walked away, muttering, “Of all the damn, dumb, stupid things. Why didn’t I think of doing that myself? I’m never going to get counted cross-stitch. I don’t know why I keep trying.”
When she got back, Jill was looking at the color pictures of finished patterns. “I did the duck first. The one I like best is the polar bear with the Saint Lucy wreath on its head. There’s a town in Ramsey County—that’s where Saint Paul is—called White Bear Lake. Very nice place to live. I’ll give the white bear to the tree.”
“Thanks,” said Betsy. She sat down with the marker and a ruler and began counting the paper pattern.
“What’s this?” asked Jill after a minute, picking up the postcard. “Someone you know likes bats?”
“It’s a joke. When I told my friend Abbey back in San Diego that I was moving to Minnesota, she said, ‘Are you bats?’ ”
Jill turned the postcard over and read the message. She asked, “So, are we driving you bats?”
Betsy laughed. “Too early to tell. It sure is different here.”
The wind outdoors threw a handful of sleet against the window, and Jill said, “Tell me about it.”
Betsy laughed but thought she heard an invitation as well as a comment in that, so she put down her marker pen and said, “San Diego has the perfect climate, it really does. Warm all year round, but not hot in the summer. There’s only about ten degrees’ difference between winter and summer, so there’s not a big change in the seasons like here. Even in dry season, with that wonderful ocean breeze the air is always fresh and clean, the sky an incredible blue. And then when it rains, everything flowers. It’s rainy season now, so every leaf, every flower is pouring out a scent, the air is like perfume.”
“Mmmmm,” said Jill covetously, and Betsy wondered why she had thought Jill unemotional.
“It’s a military town, a lot of sailors and marines, so by California standards, it’s conservative politically. But not by, say, Montana standards. On the other hand, it’s not L.A., which is dirty, crazy, only ninety miles away, and approaching fast.”
“Is the ocean nice? I’ve always wanted to swim in the ocean.”
“The water’s too cold to swim in, at least for me. Even surfers wear wet suits. But I miss the beaches, especially Coronado Beach, and I miss the sun, and the fruits and vegetables being so cheap and having more varieties. I mean, I went to this great big grocery store up the road. Big as a warehouse.”
Jill nodded.
“And when I looked over the fresh vegetable section, I just about cried. Apples, potatoes and onions, unripe peaches, sweet bell peppers, and four kinds of lettuce if you count iceberg. Oh, and, carrots. Pitiful!”
“Pitiful,” echoed Jill, but this time her voice was dry.
“I know, I know, I can almost kind of remember my childhood, when fresh fruit all but disappeared during the winter. Still, I looked and looked and couldn’t find a mango or a cactus pear…” Betsy sighed. “And I miss Balboa Park. There’s this big tree, I love to go visit it, it’s like a friend, all spreading branches like it’s holding out its arms. An army could camp under it—” Betsy stopped, dismayed to find her eyes filling with tears.
Jill said, “When the money comes, are you going to move back?”
“I don’t know. Yes, I do. I can’t go back. It was my life for fifteen years, but my ex-husband poisoned the well for me. We did so many things together, and his college world became my world, and it’s all still there. Everything I’d see or do would remind me of the pig, and he was such a pig. The pig.” Betsy sobbed once, and took a gulp of her tea to forestall another.
“A real pig, huh?” Betsy looked up and saw Jill looking back so gravely that she had to giggle. Jill’s mouth quivered, and suddenly the two of them were laughing.
When the laughter slowed enough to talk again, Jill said, “I’ll take you cross-country skiing in a few weeks. I know a place so quiet and so beautiful, the air smelling of pine, you will actually start to fall in love with Minnesota.”
“Yeah, I think we missed our chance to ride herd this year.”
“Oh, I have a friend who has horses, so we can still ride, if you like. But I think you’d better get hardened up to the cold first. Downhill skiing, or cross-country skiing, will do it. I love both.”
“How about a snowmobile ride?” asked Betsy, who wasn’t big on exercise.
“I don’t like snowmobiles,” said Jill. “Too noisy and smelly. And some snowmobilers get drunk and try to cross the road ahead of cars and trucks. Talk about poisoning the well; those crazy snowmobilers totally put me off the sport. Especially when it got to be my turn to tell the next of kin.”
“You’ve done that?”
“Twice. Once the jerk survived, but with about half the brains he had that morning. And that wasn’t a whole lot to start with.”
“Jill, why do you do this job?”
“Because it makes a big difference. It’s important—no, it’s essential. I always was a take-care, take-charge kind of person, and this way I can put that trait to good use.”
“But sometimes it must break your heart.”
“Sometimes it does,” nodded Jill. She finished her tea and said, “Would there be any way to prove what day Vern Miller joined the army?”
“He says he can produce his service papers.”
“Why would he still have his service papers?” asked Jill.
“Because he stayed until he could retire, and he gets all kinds of benefits, but he has to be able to produce his service record on demand. I still have mine, because if I get sick I can go to the Veterans Hospital, even though I was only in four and a half years.”
“Four and a half—?”
“President Johnson extended every service person’s enlistment six months during the Vietnam War.”
“So I guess that makes you a veteran,” said Jill with a note of admiration in her voice.
“Ha! I never got any closer to Vietnam than San Francisco, and I personally don’t think of myself as a veteran. But that’s not the point. Vern Miller may be the real point of this discussion. I wonder if he has a gun. I didn’t think to ask. I keep focusing on Trudie Koch’s murder, but maybe I should look at what happened to Carl Winters.”
“I think it’s likely they were killed by the same person,” said Jill. “And Carl was probably killed because he knew something about who killed Trudie, or why she was killed, and came home to tell what he knew. So you’re not mistaken to focus on Trudie.”
“Oh, something else. Myrtle Jensen told me Alice had cataracts removed some years back, and she can’t see very well. Alice said her eyes had gone bad and that’s why she quit making lace—not that she couldn’t, but that it was painful. That makes me wonder if she might not have fudged a little bit about figuring out that lace pattern for Sergeant Malloy. She showed me some samples of the lace she used to make. It’s really beautiful, so she does know what she’s talking about. Are
you sure she didn’t know about the butterflies in Martha’s lace?”
“If she was a lace maker, I should think she knew. Martha didn’t keep it a secret, and as a fellow lace maker, it seems to me Alice would pay attention to things like that. I wonder if her husband knew Trudie was blackmailing her.”
“Oh, I don’t think she told him. Think of the climate back then, prefifties. I bet Martin Skoglund, seminary graduate, wouldn’t have married her if he knew what she’d done, so I don’t think she could have told him about Trudie.”
“What did she—?” Jill raised both hands. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean to ask. But I am curious.”
“I know. And I’m sorry I can’t tell you. Did you know Pastor Skoglund? What was he like?”
“He was my pastor while I was growing up, and as a kid, I liked him. He seemed like one of the good grown-ups, big and strong, but kind and friendly. A little bit distant, too important to be teased or to tell a joke to. Like what I imagined God to be. My mother loved his sermons, but if he was coming for a visit, she cleaned for two days and treated him like royalty.”
“Yes, I see. Poor Alice; he might have been giving off unconscious messages like, ‘Don’t get messy,’ or even ‘I don’t want to know.’ ”
“Pastors get messy stuff all the time. Other peoples’ troubles are his work. Like cops. Which reminds me—” She looked at her watch and stood.
“Jill, thanks for coming over. Just talking to you helped a lot.”
“I’m glad you asked me over. Do it again, any time you need to talk.”
“Do you ever need a shoulder?”
Jill hesitated. “Once in awhile.”
“Then call on me. I’m glad you’re my friend, and I’d like to be one to you.”
“Thanks,” said Jill, and she left.
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