Framed in Lace

by Monica Ferris

  “Years and years. I stopped making lace a long time ago—soon after Carl ran off. I had the store to mind and my son to raise, so I had to give up a lot of things.”

  Betsy turned and spoke from her heart. “I can’t imagine the hurt his disappearance must have given you. And now this.”

  Martha looked up at her with wounded eyes. “Yes.”

  Betsy sat down. “Was he a pig before he went away?”

  “A ... pig?”

  “That’s the word I use to describe my ex-husband. He was a tenured professor at Merrivale, that’s in San Diego, and had been cutting a swath through the undergrad women for years. I had no idea until I got a phone call from the attorney he’d hired to fight the case the university was bringing against him. Apparently, he’d dropped one student a little too abruptly in going to another, and she went to the administration. And it turned out she wasn’t his first. Other women heard about it and came forward to testify—one or two actually in his favor. There were nine—nine!—willing to talk; and God knows how many weren’t. I should have known, but I didn’t. I mean, I met him when I was a student in one of his classes, so I really should have been more suspicious. Only I made sure he was single before I let his advances advance.” Betsy looked over and saw Martha staring openmouthed at her.

  “I’m sorry,” Betsy said. “I came here to talk to you, not carry in the trash of my own life.”

  “I think perhaps you’re making assumptions about Carl and me, that’s what set off the confession,” said Martha.

  Betsy felt herself blushing. “You’re right, and I shouldn’t do things like that. I told Jeff and now I’ll remind you, I’m an amateur. I don’t know how to conduct a proper interrogation. I just ask whatever occurs to me. Was Carl a pig?”

  Martha smiled. “He was frisky, he had a terrible reputation for it, but it was all talk. He loved to ‘push the envelope,’ as they call it nowadays, but he never went outside it, as far as I knew. Certainly he never ran off with anyone before.”

  Betsy said, “If that skeleton belongs to Trudie, then Carl didn’t run away with her, either. It’s even possible, I suppose, that her murder and Carl’s disappearance aren’t connected. I wonder if perhaps Trudie thought he was serious, and he murdered her to shut her up.”

  “I don’t think Carl could commit murder,” said Martha. “He was a scalawag, everyone knew that and was used to it. But he wasn’t cruel or mean. He had a great many friends in Excelsior, and so did I; yet two women made it their business to tell me he was having lunch every day down at the Blue Ribbon and making time with Trudie. Jessie Turnquist was one of them—this was before we became close. I told her what Mark Twain said, that it takes two people to cut you to the heart: an enemy to slander you and a friend to tell you what the enemy said. Besides, I said, Carl would try to make time with a gorilla if he thought it was a female gorilla, he can’t help himself. So you see, if I knew, and wasn’t turning into a fishwife over it, why would Carl have to murder her?”

  “Did Carl know you knew?”

  “Indeed yes. I brought it up over supper that same day I heard about it. I said the whole town was talking, which hurt my feelings and might be bad for business. And he said something like, ‘Aw, they know I don’t mean anything.’ But then he didn’t come home the next night. It was late closing and I was tired, so I went to bed and didn’t realize he hadn’t come home till the next morning. I couldn’t imagine where he’d got to. I went down to the store thinking someone had robbed the place and left him tied up in back, but he wasn’t there. I called around and no one had seen him, so finally I called the police. It wasn’t until that evening, when Trudie didn’t show up for work, that people realized she was missing, too.”

  “That was the evening of the day they towed the Hopkins out and sank her,” said Betsy.

  “Yes. That’s why I don’t have any memory of them sinking her, because it wasn’t a year later, it was the same day Carl disappeared. I was so upset about Carl, I didn’t notice what was happening with the Hopkins. But looking back, I can see that by the time they realized Trudie had disappeared, too, the boat was already sunk. And everyone was so sure they’d run off together it didn’t occur to anyone to think one or the other’s body might be on the boat.”

  “The big thing we have to worry about is your handkerchief. We have to figure out who got hold of one and left it on that boat. And why.”

  “To make it look as if I did it, of course,” said Martha.

  “No, that can’t be right. The boat was taken out and sunk for what was supposed to be forever,” said Betsy. “If someone wanted to frame you, the thing to do would be leave the body up on shore somewhere and drop your handkerchief beside it. Why hide the body and the handkerchief?”

  There was a thoughtful silence. “All right, perhaps they didn’t want to implicate me,” said Martha at last. “Maybe whoever dropped it didn’t murder Trudie, they were just there and dropped the handkerchief by accident. Certainly I did it often enough.”

  Betsy frowned. “But if it was just dropped casually, then it would have floated away. It was found on the bottom of the boat, after the last of the rubble was taken out. The only reason some of it was found at all was because it was tucked away under the rubble.”

  “What I don’t understand is how it got there to begin with. I know where all my handkerchiefs are.”

  Betsy asked, “How many did you have to start with?”

  “One,” said Martha, and she smiled at her jest. “I started making lace when I was fourteen; my grandmother showed me how. Her mother was from England and showed her how. My mother loved to knit and crochet, she made both knitted and crocheted lace.”

  “You can knit lace?”

  “Oh, yes, on tiny, tiny needles. I used to know how, but once I learned the techniques, I loved bobbin lace best. My grandmother left me her bobbins. I still have them. I’ve thought now and again about selling them, but I’d rather wait and see if there’s someone who would really appreciate them, so I could make a gift of them.”

  “That would be a very special gift.”

  “Yes, it’s a pity I couldn’t have more children; I’d have loved to teach a daughter how to make lace.” Martha sighed, but faintly; that was an old and no longer important sorrow. “But to answer your question, I made bobbin lace edgings for nineteen handkerchiefs. Each one’s a little different, but they all have that butterfly. My grandmother helped me design it. Her signature on her lace was a bee.”

  “Who else do you know who makes lace?”

  Martha thought. “Alice Skoglund used to do very nice work. But she says it gives her a headache to do it nowadays and so she quit.”

  “Did you see the design Alice made from the tangled mess taken from the Hopkins?”

  Martha nodded. “It’s mine all right.”

  “You say you know where all your handkerchiefs are? I heard you lost two of them.”

  “Well, I’m reasonably sure a pig ate one and the other went into show business.” She snorted genteelly and Betsy smiled, as much in admiration as appreciation of the joke. That Martha could jest in the face of danger showed she was a brave woman.

  “Suppose a lace maker, one who makes bobbin lace, had gotten a really good look at one of your handkerchiefs, one you’d dropped, say. Suppose she got a chance to really study it before she gave it back to you. Could she then copy that design in some lace she made herself?”

  Martha thought that over. “Maybe. She’d have to be looking at it with that in mind.”

  “Now,” said Betsy. “Think hard. Try to remember back all those years ago. Did Alice Skoglund ever return a handkerchief to you?”

  “Oh, yes,” nodded Martha. “Several times. She was the Reverend Skoglund’s wife, you see. And I left a hanky in church at least once a year. Sometimes the person who found it brought it right back to me. But not everyone knew about my butterfly, so they turned it in to lost and found. I distinctly remember one Sunday Alice gave it back to me sayi
ng she’d heard about my butterfly lace and so thought this was mine. We talked about lace for a few minutes. That’s when I learned she was a lace maker.”

  “So she would have had it a whole week to study, if she wanted to make a copy,” said Betsy.

  “Well, yes. Oh, surely you don’t think Alice had anything to do with this!”

  But Betsy was thinking of the woman who even in her seventies had arms and shoulders like a man.

  13

  Sunday afternoon Betsy went to see Alice Skoglund again, carefully choosing a time so Alice wouldn’t feel obliged to feed her. “I came to talk to you about making lace,” she said. “Someone told me you can’t make lace anymore because you had an operation to remove cataracts and can’t see well enough.”

  Alice grimaced angrily. “Like most gossip, that’s almost sort of true. I did have early-onset cataracts. I had surgery when I was only forty-five. And it did make lace-making difficult. Not impossible, only very hard. I bought a great big magnifying glass, and ordered a lamp that sat on a stand through a catalog. But in three weeks of trying, I made four inches of lace. And it wasn’t a difficult pattern or particularly fine thread, nothing like the one-twenty I used to be fond of. I can still make lace, but it’s heavy gauge stuff, and I have to keep stopping and checking the pattern, and I can’t see the pattern forming like I used to. When I finally realized I wasn’t getting any joy out of it, I quit. I do some knitting and crocheting, but they aren’t the pleasure lace-making was for me, and they aren’t as easy as they once were, either. The only thing I can do real easy anymore are those darn afghan squares. I can do those practically without looking. So I make afghans and put them into fund-raisers and rummage sales and gift packages made up for people who have lost their homes to fire. That way I feel like I’m still making a contribution.”

  “I’m sure there are a lot of people who feel you make a great deal of difference,” said Betsy. Then she screwed her courage to the sticking point and said, “You told me and Jill that you had never seen one of Martha’s handkerchiefs, the kind with a butterfly on it, but Martha told me that you did, perhaps more than once. She said she left them behind in church several times, and that one time you brought it to her yourself and talked with her about lace-making.”

  Alice threw herself back in her chair as if poleaxed, strong chin pointed at the ceiling, eyes closed. A sound almost like a snore escaped her throat. Betsy was about to panic, thinking the woman had had a stroke, when Alice abruptly flipped forward to say, “Well, I guess I am a liar! Do you know, I totally forgot about that? She’s right. I did handle one of her handkerchiefs that she had left in church. I told her she should enter it in the State Fair, it was so well done. I was a little afraid to talk to her, she was a superior sort of lady who simply ruled our choir, and I was a common sort of person, and my mother once told me I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But Martha was glad to talk lace with me. There weren’t many women in town who still had that old skill.”

  “Do you remember when that happened?”

  “Heavens no. Probably fairly early in Martin’s career, because I got less and less afraid of women like her as time went on. I guess I didn’t remember it because back when people carried handkerchiefs commonly, they were the single item most often left behind. I finally set up a table in the church hall and put items people forgot on that. People will leave the oddest things behind on those pews, we once found a set of false teeth and another time a dead fish—which of course, we didn’t put out to be reclaimed. There were also a lot of umbrellas and a surprising number of single overshoes.” Alice chuckled. “So it appears I did have a chance to examine the butterfly she put on the corners of her handkerchiefs. I forgot all about that until just right now.”

  “But,” said Betsy, “perhaps unconsciously you remembered seeing it, and when you were working out the pattern on the Hopkins fragment, your unconscious brought it out as an example.”

  Alice considered this, then shook her head and said slowly, “I don’t think so. I do remember now looking at the lace on her handkerchiefs—she did kind of flourish them—and thinking how beautiful it was. The work was so very fine, much better than anything I could do. But I don’t remember examining the lace trim on any of them with an eye to copying the pattern. I had my own patterns.”

  Betsy went next to see Martha Winters. She found her in her kitchen, peeling potatoes. The heavenly scent of roasting chicken filled the air. “My son and his wife are coming over,” Martha said happily. “I told them how the Monday Bunch believes in me, and how you are helping, and they decided perhaps I am not so terrible after all.”

  Betsy hugged her even while she hoped with all her heart that Martha’s faith was not misplaced.

  “I suppose you have more questions?” said Martha.

  Betsy didn’t want to say she was floundering, throwing herself in random directions hoping for a clue, a connection, something that would help. “A few,” she said.

  “Have you learned anything?” Martha asked in a low voice.

  “Well, it’s possible that Trudie was murdered by the man who was her boyfriend at the time. They had a stormy relationship and were in the middle of a quarrel when this happened. He joined the army right about then.”

  Martha beamed at her. “You are so good at this, Betsy!” she said.

  “Well,” said Betsy, “the problem is, why did he murder Carl?”

  “Because Carl saw him,” said Martha, surprised at her. “He saw him murder Trudie and he ran for his own life. Then all these years later, he finds out I am suspected of the murder and he comes back to testify on my behalf.”

  “Did he say anything to you that might show this was what he was thinking?” asked Betsy.

  “Ah ... no. As I told Sergeant Malloy, I didn’t want to talk to him and pretty much hung up on him.”

  “Did Carl and Trudie know each other long?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He might have met her at another restaurant or diner when she was waitressing there, but there wasn’t any talk until just before it happened. Why he picked on Trudie, why he went all the way down to the Blue Ribbon, I can’t imagine. Our dry cleaning store is five blocks from the lake, so Carl would have had to walk past the drugstore fountain and two perfectly nice cafés to get there. I don’t know what possessed him, I really don’t. It was as if he deliberately set out to do something crazy and break my heart in the bargain.”

  Betsy thought about that but was even less able to make sense of it than Martha. Then she said, “Where was the Blue Ribbon Café in relationship to the lake? Was it near the amusement park?”

  “It was part of the amusement park. The two men who managed it shared Christopher Inn, which had been made into a duplex for them and their families. The amusement park ran all along the lakeshore, from City Docks down past where the little ferris wheel is. They had a roller coaster and bumper cars, and a really nice merry-go-round, a big one with beautiful horses.”

  “Martha, did you know Trudie at all? Would you have known her if you’d seen her on the street?”

  Martha nodded slowly. “Probably. This habit we have of gossiping about everyone isn’t new, you know. We’ve always pretty much kept track of one another in Excelsior. I’m sure she must have been pointed out to me. In retrospect, I wonder if she was as terrible as everyone said, because she never took any sudden little vacations or went to nurse a sick relative in another state.”

  “I don’t understand—oh. You mean she never went for an abortion or to have a baby. Gosh, remember when families used to do that to girls who got pregnant?”

  Martha nodded. “When the father couldn’t be forced to marry her, they’d send her away till it was all over, and put her baby up for adoption.”

  “Times sure have changed, haven’t they?”

  “Oh, they’ll change back, probably. Nothing works, you know. We just keep trying one thing then another and then the first thing again.”

  Betsy sighed. “You’re rig
ht, what we think of as progress is sometimes just the swing of a pendulum. But you say Trudie either wasn’t as awful as everyone thought, or was perhaps more careful than most young women of her type. You’ve known Alice Skoglund for a very long time, haven’t you? Did she have any quarrel with Trudie?”

  Martha smiled. “I doubt if those two ever spoke more than three words to one another—and Trudie was in high school with Alice. That’s funny, when you think about it. If Trudie were alive today, she’d be an old woman, like Alice.” She made a face. “Like me. Like Jess.”

  Betsy said, “The older I get, the older people have to be before I think of them as old. I don’t think of you as old at all.”

  Martha smiled faintly, taking the compliment for what it was worth. “My grandson told me that when you think of a policeman or your doctor as young, then you’re getting old. I reached that stage twenty years ago. I wish I could be of more help to you.” This last was said with genuine pain. “Ask me something that I can answer, something that can really help.”

  Betsy, floundering some more, said, “That piece of needlework Jessica made for you. Can you show it to me?”

  “Of course, if you like.” Martha went away and came back a minute later with a small framed object about ten by twelve inches.

  Betsy took it. The pattern was a pink heart surrounded by little blue flowers—“forget-me-nots,” said Martha. Under the heart, in golden letters, was the word Forever. Inside the heart was MW & CW. The CW was worked in gold, the MW and ampersand in a green that matched the tiny stems and leaves of the forget-me-nots.

  “She did Carl’s initials in gold because I kept insisting he must be dead. When she gave that to me, I cried and cried, I was so touched. People had been avoiding me, not knowing what to say.” Martha sniffed. “They all thought he’d run off with Trudie, and I suppose they thought I was a little crazy, insisting it wasn’t true. But I just couldn’t believe he wouldn’t write to me, explain where he was or at least try to justify what he’d done. So I was sure he was dead.”