Or was it something else, something Betsy could emulate?
But Maddy had been abrupt to the point of rudeness to everyone, and Betsy had found herself shying away from asking her questions. Not that there was a lack of opportunity. Maddy bought a lot of yarn and other stitching materials in Betsy’s shop. If she wanted something, she tended to buy it at once, only rarely waiting for a sale. Despite the amount of yarn and other items she purchased, she never asked for special consideration, such as a discount for buying in quantity. On the other hand, she was quick to return a product she found faulty or inappropriate for its intended use. Betsy was equally quick to make reimbursements, though she was careful not to overcompensate. As far as possible, she had wanted to keep both Maddy’s custom and her respect.
She could remember only one time Maddy came into her shop in such good humor that Betsy dared to banter with her. It was the day Maddy had won the bidding war on the Water Street property.
“Hello, Betsy!” she had boomed in her loud voice, her eyes sparkling and her long skirts snapping in the speed of her stride.
“Well, something’s made you cheerful this afternoon,” Betsy had responded, surprised.
“I took down two people who were giving me grief,” Maddy had said.
“Looks like they never laid a glove on you,” Betsy had dared to say.
“Oh, metaphorically, I’m all over bruises,” she had said, coming down to almost her usual brusque tone. “But unlike them, I’ll be more than fine. I want three more skeins of that green Appleton wool I bought in here last week.”
That was the only time she had been anything but abrupt. Too bad it was so shortly before her death; Betsy would have liked to look behind that shield to see what Maddy was really like. And now it was particularly sad to learn there was another, softer, side to the woman. It appeared she gave generously but worked always in the background, not just at her church but in the toy auction. She knit more toys for it than any other person. But she had objected strenuously to Bershada’s insistence that she sit in a place of honor for doing so.
I believe I was right, she was shy, thought Betsy now. Maddy hated being singled out, even for praise.
Betsy wondered what kind of childhood she had had.
But first, and more importantly, she wanted to find out if that gruff exterior and overweening ambition had created an enemy so angry that he—or she—had resorted to murder.
Chapter Fourteen
It was a slow time in the shop. Godwin had gone across the street to have lunch with Rafael in their condo. Betsy was at the big checkout desk writing checks for suppliers—and sighing over the numbers—when the door announced its opening with a bright chorus of “Anchors Aweigh.” She looked up to see Detective Sergeant Mike Malloy coming in. Backward.
Actually, he had turned around to stare in bemusement at the door frame. He held the door open until the tune finished. Then he closed it and turned to see Betsy looking bemused at him.
“You don’t know that melody?” she asked.
“Of course I do. Doesn’t everybody? But you are going to get very tired of it after a few dozen repeats,” he predicted.
“I won’t have time to get tired of it. Godwin changes the music at least once a week. He’s working his way down a very long list of titles.”
Malloy looked back again at the door. “That’s the Navy Hymn, isn’t it,” he said.
“No, the Navy Hymn is ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save.’ What you just heard is a traditional Navy drinking song.”
He looked at her. “You sure?”
She offered a snappy salute. “Ex–Navy WAVE here. I know at least two verses of ‘Eternal Father.’ I even know the countermelody to ‘Anchors Aweigh.’” She would have sung it to him, but he didn’t look interested. Instead, she asked, “How may I help you, Mike?”
“I’m here about the Maddy O’Leary case.”
“I’ll be glad to help any way I can.”
He smiled his thin smile and came forward, a slim man of average height with a densely freckled face. His hair was a shade of tan, which happens to some redheads as they age. His light blue eyes were tired.
“I made a fresh pot of coffee less than half an hour ago,” she said.
“Yes, thanks. Black.”
“Have a seat.” She gestured at the library table in the center of the room.
When she came out of the back, carrying two mugs, one of coffee and the other of an herbal tea, he was seated near the far end of one long side. On the table in front of him was a notepad with sewn-in pages and a fat ballpoint pen.
She put his coffee beside the notepad, put her own tea in front of a chair across from him, and sat down.
“Where do we begin?” she asked.
“Whose idea was this auction at Mount Calvary?”
“It was Bershada Reynolds’s idea. I can’t believe you don’t already know that.”
He nodded, but whether in agreement or not, she couldn’t tell. “Who supplied the yarn for those little canvas bags?”
“I did. And the bags themselves, too.” Surely he must have known that already, too. Aha, she thought, he’s asking questions he knows the answers to in order to see how I tell the truth. Or don’t. But that must be from habit; he knows me, and he knows I don’t lie. She looked at him and smiled.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Just recognizing your style of interrogation.”
“This isn’t an interrogation, it’s an interview. I interrogate suspects, I interview witnesses.”
“Noted, thanks. Next question.”
“How did you select the yarn that went into the bags?”
“Bershada told me who the people were, and I asked them what kind of yarn they wanted.”
“How far in advance of the auction did you pull the yarn?”
“About ten or twelve days.”
“Was the yarn from your stock?”
“Yes. One person came in to look at what I had, and two people told me directly what they would like. Goddy, of course, picked his own yarn.”
“Which way did Ms. O’Leary go?”
“She asked me if I had dark blue merino wool. I did, so I turned the skein into a ball—”
“What? Why?”
She turned away in her chair. “Those are skeins,” she said, pointing to a basket full of fat ovals of yarn cinched in the middle by a broad paper wrapper. “It’s how yarn comes, in skeins. I have a device that will turn a skein into a ball. It’s easier to knit from a ball.”
“So why don’t they come already in balls?”
“Because balls roll away, and they unwind as they roll.”
He wrote that down, paused, brightened, and said, “I remember how in old movies a man would sit with yarn kind of wrapped or draped around his wrists while a woman pulled it off in a single strand to make a ball.” He held his hands about two feet apart, palms facing in.
Betsy nodded. “That’s the traditional method. You can also drape it around the back of a chair, but my device is much faster. It depends on what the knitter is after, a quick ball of yarn or a chance to sit and talk with someone. Interestingly, it was also used as a safe kind of courtship. The man and woman could talk at length, but they couldn’t get up to anything while his hands were engaged like that. Plus she got a ball of yarn with which to begin to knit him a pair of argyle socks.”
“That’s kind of nice,” said Mike, nodding thoughtfully, and Betsy recalled he had two daughters of dating age. One of them was a knitter.
But the task of writing checks prodded, so she pushed forward. “What else do you want to know?”
“Where were the bags kept after you put the yarn in them?”
“I have a storage room in the basement.”
“Is it locked?”
“No, but the fron
t and back doors to this building are, as is the door to the basement.”
“Who has the keys?”
“I have keys, my tenants have keys, Connor has keys, Godwin has keys. Only Godwin and I have the keys to the front and back door of the shop. We lend a key to the shop’s front door to an employee who is coming in early, but only that one key. And we take it back when we come in. All the locks are dead bolts.”
Mike, writing swiftly, nodded, then paused. “Your tenants have keys to the basement?”
Betsy nodded. “A washing machine and dryer are down there.”
“Would they lend their keys to a friend?”
“Maybe. I ask them not to when I give them the keys, but you know how people are. The Pearsons, who have the front apartment, have a big family who drop by a lot, so it’s likely their keys have been temporarily loaned out. It’s even possible they’ve made copies for them.” She frowned. “I should ask them about that.”
“So getting at the bags of yarn might have been inconvenient for a non-tenant or non-employee, but not impossible.”
“I would prefer difficult and complicated to inconvenient. But yes, not impossible.”
“Did you see any evidence of tampering when you took the bags of yarn over to Mount Calvary?”
“I didn’t take them over. Bershada came with another woman, and they took them out of the basement. Have you talked to her?”
“Not about that. When did the transfer take place?”
“The Wednesday before the Saturday auction.”
“Did you see the bags in the basement at any time before that?”
“Probably. I mean I went down to the basement a few times between putting them down there and Bershada taking them away. I think I would have noticed if they’d been moved around or some were missing.”
“Were they on a row on a shelf, or kept in a box, or what?”
“In a double row on a shelf. It was deep enough so the bags could line up two by two.”
“But plainly visible to anyone going into that room,” Mike said.
“Or just standing in the door, yes.”
“Was Ms. O’Leary’s yarn in the front row?”
Betsy thought. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. Godwin and I put the yarn and knitting needles in the bags and took them down.”
“You didn’t pack each bag yourself?”
“No. I had made a list of who got which ball of yarn. Goddy took the list, loaded the bags, and I took them downstairs. It didn’t take long, but I remember waiting till after closing that day, so he wouldn’t be thrown off stride by having to wait on a customer.”
“Do you know of anyone involved in the auction who smokes e-cigarettes?”
Betsy shook her head. “No.”
Mike sighed, made a note, sighed again, and closed his notebook. “Okay, thank you.”
“I take it you’re trying to clear Joe Mickels?”
“No, I’m trying to clear everyone else so I can arrest him.” He stood, looked into her shocked eyes, and said with a straight face, “If you believe that, you’re not half the sleuth I’ve taken you for.”
Relieved, she laughed. “And sometimes I need to remind myself you’re twice the investigator I used to take you for.”
* * *
“See, I told you he’s not the sharpest hook in the tackle box!” said Godwin.
“He was kidding, Goddy! Kidding! He’s out to find the person who killed Maddy. Right now he thinks it might be Joe. So do you, remember?”
“Yeah, well, he hasn’t had your experience with Joe, so what does he know?”
“He knows plenty—and he’s had the training to see it properly. Plus, he has the backing of a very large set of scientific testing methods we have no access to. Let him do his thing.”
“Yeah, okay, maybe you’re right. But we’ll do our thing, too, right?”
“Of course.”
“So where do we go next, kemo sabe?”
“I want to talk to people who knew Mr. Whiteside and Ms. O’Leary.”
“Looking for what they were like?”
“Looking for who hated them.”
Chapter Fifteen
Later that day, Betsy wondered again what would happen to the property on Water Street. She called her attorney, Jim Penberthy, to ask.
“Real estate, especially commercial real estate, is not my area of expertise,” he said. “I think the property belongs to Ms. O’Leary’s estate. But let me check and I’ll call you back.”
Betsy returned to the struggle to assign her part-timers slots that met her needs and the desires of her employees. One never wanted to work on Wednesdays, another wanted to work only half days, and the third wanted to continue working even though she was two weeks overdue in her pregnancy.
So it was a relief to take a break when the phone rang. But it wasn’t Penberthy. It was Bershada.
“Welcome home!” Betsy said. “How was the wedding?”
“Don’t ask. And now Chaz is hanging around my house making me crazy. I finally sent him to the store, but he’ll be back in a few minutes. Will you please take him off my hands for a couple of hours? He would be wild to talk about Maddy with you, if you’d care to ask him.”
“Yes, I’d like that very much. I was going to ask him to talk to me about her, if he would. What would be a good time?”
“Well, what are you doing this evening? Could your menu possibly stretch to a third person? Be warned, he eats like a horse.”
“I think we’re having beef stew. I’ll call Connor and ask him and call you back.”
Connor said he’d make biscuits to stretch the stew and prepare something with Jell-O to fill in the cracks. “Do you want me to make like a hoop and roll away after dinner?” he asked.
“No, please don’t. You have a good ear for things; you might pick up something I miss.” Betsy called Bershada back to say yes, and she said, “He’s right here, talk to him.”
In a few seconds a very pleasant man’s voice came on the line. “Hello? Mom told me about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever met you.”
“Not formally,” said Betsy, “but I saw you at Maddy’s funeral and was impressed, plus I’ve often heard good things about you. Are you available to talk this evening? We’ll feed you supper.”
After a brief, surprised pause, he said, “Well, sure! Okay! What time?”
“About six thirty?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Now, can I talk with your mother again?”
“Sure.” His voice faded as he talked away from the phone. “Mom, she wants to talk to you some more.”
In a few seconds Bershada came back on. “What is it?” she asked.
“You said you helped Harry Whiteside’s second wife pack her clothes when she left him.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Were you and she friends?”
“Yes, she volunteered at libraries all over the nine counties that make up the Twin Cities, and the first time she came to Excelsior, we struck up a friendship. I didn’t pry too much, and she liked that. But we talked about everything else. She was especially good with children, which was my area of expertise at the Excelsior library. She started coming regularly, and every time we’d wind up talking nineteen to the dozen, at work, over lunch, even sometimes over dinner. She was a kind woman, with a silly sense of humor the children loved.”
“Did she talk about her husband?”
“Not at first. If I asked her about him, she’d say, ‘Oh, he’s so busy with work, I’ve almost forgotten what he looks like.’ Or, ‘I’m glad I’ve got my volunteer work. Harry doesn’t want me to work for pay, and I’d go crazy just sitting at home, especially now all the boys are gone.”
“So how did you find out she wanted to leave him?”
“She came to work with a bruise th
at went from just above her left eye nearly to her jawline. She’d tried to cover it up with makeup, but it wasn’t just black and blue, it was swollen. I marched her into the ladies’ room and ordered her to tell me what happened. She tried to say she’d fallen, but I could tell she was lying, and she started to cry. He didn’t often hit her, but when he did, he’d do it where the bruise didn’t show. And he was always telling her she was worthless and stupid—all the things that that kind of man does to his wife. She absolutely refused to make a police report, I think because she was afraid he might kill her. She said she’d been secretly saving money and had just barely enough for a bus ticket to Columbus, Georgia, where her sister lived. But this hit on her face was absolutely the last straw. I drove her home and helped her pack and took her to the station and sat with her until her bus was called. She wrote me a few weeks later, saying Harry had found out where she was and called, but her brother-in-law told him that if he came down there, he’d introduce him to his backhoe in the east forty and nobody would ever see him again.”
Bershada chuckled and said to Betsy, “He must have sounded very convincing, because Harry didn’t even come down to contest the divorce.”
“Do you still correspond with her?”
Knit Your Own Murder Page 7
