Hanging by a Thread

by Monica Ferris

  She went in. The shop was warm, the air moist and redolent of small animals and pet foods. Canary and parakeet noises filled the air. The aisles were crowded with items—it was a small shop, but tried to meet the needs of a large variety of pet owners. Betsy went down the aisle that catered to cat owners, then to the front counter, where a curly-headed blond was allowing a man in a raincoat to hold a friendly parrot on the edge of his hand. The bird was gray with a red tail.

  “... two thousand,” the shop owner was explaining.

  “Does that include the cage?”

  “No, a good cage will run you another thousand. Plus you’ll want some toys. African greys get bored easily, and they have a poor response to boredom.”

  “Hmmm,” said the man.

  “I looove you,” crooned the parrot in the blond’s voice, and bent its head, asking to be tickled on the neck. The man complied and the bird made a low chuckling sound of pleasure.

  “He’s nearly two and already has a vocabulary of about a dozen words,” said the shop owner. “We call him Gray Goose, but you can change that.”

  Betsy, thinking of Godwin being unhappy in front of customers back in her shop, and Foster being desperately sad in the café, said impatiently, “I can’t find the lams Less Active.”

  “It should be right beside the Science Diet Hair-ball.”

  “The Science Diet is there, but no Iams.”

  “I’ll clip those for you if you like,” said the shop owner to the man, who was now lifting the compliant bird’s wing. She went back for a look and agreed there was no lams Less Active on the shelf. “I’ve got some down the basement, can you wait a minute?”

  “Sure,” said Betsy. She went back to watch the man ask the parrot to step from hand to hand as if on a Stairmaster, which it did obediently.

  But when four minutes had passed and the woman hadn’t come back, Betsy went to the open basement door for a look. The steps were thick old wooden boards. There was only silence coming from down there.

  Cautiously, Betsy started down. There were shelves and stacks of crates forming crooked aisles on the floor. The lighting was of the harsh fluorescent kind, but too widely spaced, so the place was full of sharp shadows.

  Betsy heard a rustling and dragging sound from halfway down a dark aisle and started toward it. Then she stopped and stared. “Hey!” she said.

  “What?” said the shop owner, turning around. She had two seven-pound bags of dry cat food in her hands.

  “The basement of this place is huge!” Betsy could see through the backless shelf the pet food had come off of. There was a wall made of rough old boards, but the boards were badly warped, and the ceiling light shone through them into a big space beyond. And judging by where the basement stairs were, the board corresponded to the wall of the pet shop above.

  “Oh, sure,” said the shop owner. “My store is the middle of three in the Tonka Building.”

  “Tonka Building?” Like most people, Betsy went around gawking upwards at buildings only on vacation. The buildings on this block formed a single solid row, and the entrances to each store were different in design, so she hadn’t realized three were in a single building. Betsy’s own building had three shops in it, but the building had open space on either side, making the arrangement obvious. Here, the Tonka Building was up against the next building, which was a beauty shop, which was next to the Waterfront Café. Were the beauty shop and café in a single building? Betsy had no idea.

  This was for a moment merely interesting.

  But if the pet shop was the middle of three, why, “Then Heritage II on the comer, your Noah’s Ark, and Excelsior Bay books next door are all in the Tonka Building.”

  “Sure. And a CPA, a dentist, and a chiropractor have offices on the second floor.”

  “Are you saying it’s possible to go from one of the three stores to another without going out in the rain?”

  “Not through the shops themselves.”

  “Not now ...” agreed Betsy, pausing hopefully.

  “Not ever, there never were any doors,” said the shop owner, handing Betsy a bag of cat food and picking up a third. She headed for the stairs. “Of course, there used to be gates between the board walls down here, but they were nailed shut years and years ago.”

  “Gates? There are gates? Are these walls original? Were there always gates in them? How long ago were they nailed shut, do you know?”

  The woman stopped on the third step and turned to look at Betsy, surprised at her interest. Then she looked around the basement, thinking. “Well, it was divided like this when I started Noah’s Ark, and that was nine years ago. I’m pretty sure the walls between the basements went up shortly after the auto dealership moved out of the corner store, and that happened in the early sixties, I think. The building itself dates to the forties.”

  “But when were the gates nailed shut?”

  “They wouldn’t open when I moved in, so longer ago than nine years.”

  “Oh.” Betsy looked back along the shelves. They were sets of shelves rather than one long shelf, but were put right up against one another. They were made of dark gray metal with X bracing at the ends. They ran the parallel to the walls and formed two aisles. They were sturdy, which was good, because the one against the wall was crowded with bags and cans of pet food. That would, however, complicate the life of someone trying to come through from the gift shop. He would not only have to pry out the nails in the gate, he’d have to unload a shelf and crawl across it, then put it all back together again on his way back.

  “Hold on a second, okay?” said Betsy. She went quickly to the other side of the basement and found the situation even worse for a potential crawler-through; the shelves were laden with heavy and frangible glass aquariums and goldfish bowls, big boxes of filtering kits and lights, and weighty bags of gravel.

  “Come on, Betsy, if Goose hasn’t bitten Mr. Winters, I think I’ve got a book-balancing sale waiting for me.”

  “All right,” sighed Betsy.

  But upstairs, watching Mr. Winters write out a very large check while his new friend chewed the buttons off the epaulets of his raincoat, she had another idea and said, “Excuse me, Nancy, but may I ask you something?”

  “Certainly, in a minute. That’s right, Mr. Winters, with tax that comes to two thousand, two hundred thirty-six dollars and fifty cents.”

  “Those shelves down in your basement. They’re very nice. Where did you get them?”

  “At Ace Hardware, right across the street.”

  Betsy nodded. Ace Hardware’s building had suffered a fire and the store had pulled out of the building two years ago, but people talked about the hardware store as if it were still there.

  Nancy continued, “I’m sure they’re a standard item, so if you want to drive over to Highway Seven and 101, you’ll probably find them at the Ace there. They’re nice, because they’re strong, easy to set up, and on sale. I can’t remember how much they were, not that remembering would help, I’ve had them for about three years. Before that I only had a single row of wooden shelves down the middle of the room.”

  “Really?” said Betsy, and Nancy looked up from writing the sales slip, surprised that Betsy was pleased. “Listen, would you mind terribly if I went down for another look? Thanks, Nancy!”

  Before Nancy could object, Betsy went back down the stairs. Over on the side with the aquariums—“ Why didn’t she put these in the middle?” grumped Betsy—she began very carefully lifting items off the shelf where the gate was. The shelves blocked access to the gate, but Betsy leaned into the shelf opening where the gate’s handle would be. There were about two inches of space between the gate and the back of the shelf. Betsy grasped the handle—a thick wooden C that didn’t operate a latch—and pulled gently. The gate didn’t give. She pulled harder. Still no give. The reason why was right there, too; she could see the slotted backs of rusty metal screws that held the edge of the gate against its frame. Just like Nancy had said: nailed shut. Well, screwed
shut.

  Betsy backed out and carefully put things back where she’d found them.

  She went back upstairs, where Nancy was explaining to a new customer that the black-and-yellow canaries were a wild variety whose song was prettier and more varied than the domesticated solid yellow.

  She waved at Nancy as she went by, put seven dollars and change on the counter for the cat food, and hurried out. She went next door, to the bookstore.

  “Hi, Ellie-Ann, I’m in a hurry, but I need you to do me a really large favor.”

  “Certainly, if I can.”

  “Let me go down in your basement and poke around a bit. I’ll try not to move anything, and if I do, I’ll put it back.”

  Ellie-Ann looked doubtful, but Betsy said, “It’s about Angela Schmitt’s murder.”

  “Oh, my God, really? Then go ahead, go ahead. Here, let me show you where the light switch is.”

  The entrance to the basement was through the far end of a storage closet behind the checkout counter, which was near the center of the north wall of the store. The stairs were concrete, and the basement was clean but cluttered, like a storage place not open to the public tends to get. There was a wooden plank table with a microwave and small office refrigerator on it, and in boxes all around were surprisingly few books, some bright book posters, a supply of stuffed animals and puppets (a feature of the Excelsior Bay Bookstore), props for their display window—Betsy recognized four slender, white-barked birch trees from last spring—and the teapots and coffee urns brought out for author appearances.

  There was a clear space along the boards that divided the bookstore’s basement from the pet shop’s. Betsy found the gate to the pet shop near one end of the clear space. It didn’t open to a push from this side, either, though there were no screws in evidence here. She looked across the pet shop space—Betsy had neglected to turn the lights off—and wondered if, in the gate on the opposite wall, there were screws on the gift shop side or the pet store side.

  A voice behind her said, “What are you looking for?”

  Betsy jumped and came down facing Ellie-Ann. “Mercy, you scared me!”

  “Sorry. Is that what you were looking for? Yes, it’s a door; no, you can’t open it, it’s been nailed shut since before I took over the store; yes, there’s another one on the other side of the pet shop; no, it hasn’t been tampered with, either.” Ellie-Ann was obviously repeating replies to questions she’d been asked before. She smiled and explained, “Mike Malloy looked at it after Angela was killed upstairs.”

  “Ellie-Ann, what did you think of the investigation? Were they really thorough? Could they have missed something?”

  “I’m no judge, of course. But actually, they did miss something. They had to come back and do a better search before they found it.”

  “Was it something to do with the gate?”

  “How could it be something about the gate? It’s there, it doesn’t open. No, it was a shell casing. When Mike didn’t find one the first time, he said the gun was a revolver. But they found shell casings at Paul’s house after he was shot, so they came back and they searched some more, and they found one.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Is it? It made me wonder if they didn’t miss something else. I was pretty sure Paul shot Angela, y’see. That is, until I saw in the paper that Paul was murdered; and with the same gun, which they couldn’t find. So I guess it wasn’t another of those dreadful murder-suicide things.”

  “Did you know Angela was having an affair?”

  “No. I suspected she and Foster Johns were attracted to each other. He developed an interest in books he hadn’t shown before Angela started to work here, and she always seemed especially pleased to see him. But I had no idea it was a real affair. I don’t know how they managed it. Paul kept such careful track of her, it was ridiculous.” She added, almost irrelevantly, “Paul did some good things in that gift shop, but he was rude to browsers. Once he insulted a man dressed in dirty jeans, who turned out to be the mayor’s brother, visiting from Arizona, and a very wealthy man. He’d been helping Odell paint his boat when he suddenly remembered it was his wife’s birthday.” She chuckled. “He came in here instead and bought a copy of every book about Minnesota I had in stock and asked if there was a jewelry store and a flower shop in town, and left at a fast trot.”

  Betsy tugged at the wooden handle of the gate, which still refused to move. “Why were there gates here in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ellie-Ann. “Maybe in case of fire?” She shrugged. “The man I bought the bookstore from said the doors were nailed shut when he moved in, and that was eleven years before I took over, and that was six years ago. So it’s at least seventeen years since you could go from one basement to the next.”

  Discouraged, Betsy went upstairs to retrieve her bag of lams Less Active. As she went out the door, Ellie-Ann called, “Betsy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please, solve this one, will you? Angela was a sweet person, and she didn’t deserve to die.”

  13

  The next morning Betsy, feeling much fresher after a good night’s sleep, came down to find another new customer waiting in the doorway. She was an elderly woman in a long, dark blue coat, a red knit hat pulled down over her ears. She huddled close to the door because, while the sun was shining painfully bright, there was a cutting wind blowing and the temperature was in the mid-twenties.

  Betsy hastily unlocked the door and let her in. “Good morning,” she said. “Come on, sit down. If you can be patient a few minutes, I’ll finish getting open for business. There will be hot coffee or tea soon, too.”

  “Thank you,” said the woman, easing herself gratefully into a chair at the library table and pulling off her red mittens. Sophie jumped up onto “her” chair, the one with a powder-blue cushion, and looked the customer up and down briefly before deciding this was not a Person With Goodies. The cat settled down for a nap.

  Betsy busied herself with lights and cash register, then went into the back, and soon the warm smell of coffee brewing wafted into the shop.

  “Now,” said Betsy, coming back to the library table, “what can I do for you?”

  The woman said, “My name is Florence Huddleston, and I am a retired school teacher. Alice Skoglund said I should come and talk to you, because Paul Schmitt was a student in my seventh-grade English class many years ago.”

  Betsy pulled out the chair next to Ms. Huddleston, turning it so it angled toward the woman, and sat. “What can you tell me about Paul?”

  “Nothing as an adult. But I remember him quite well as a seventh grader. He was a bright boy but an average to poor student, because he was lazy. I once told him he should grow up to run a charm school, because he could be very charming when it suited him, and he was forgiven too often. But his real talent was in laying the blame for his misdeeds onto others, and for getting others to behave badly while maintaining his own—what is the modern word? Deniability. I’m certain these traits continued into adulthood, as many do. Certainly they seemed innate in Paul. And another thing: He wasn’t really brave, of course; people like him never are. But he had a curious ability to ignore pain that made him seem brave. He once broke his left wrist in a lunch-time wrestling match, but on his way to the nurse’s office he stopped in my classroom to say why he wasn’t coming back this afternoon. He pulled that horrible arm out of the front of his shirt and displayed it like a trophy to the two girls I was tutoring. There was no doubt it was broken, it was swollen and the fingers were purple. But he so enjoyed shocking and frightening me and the girls, he couldn’t resist the opportunity.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a very charming boy to me, if he could do things like that.”

  “Surprisingly, even I sometimes found him charming. He was very popular among many of the students and even some teachers. He was generally helpful, taking half of a load, opening doors, picking up after people, and he was always smiling and polite. That charm was as rea
l as his deviousness. But I remember he used to fascinate a certain set of boys and even some girls with a gruesome collection of true crime stories.”

  Betsy, blushing faintly because of her own helpless fascination with crime, sat back to absorb this for a moment, then asked, “You didn’t by chance know Angela Schmitt—well, she wasn’t a Schmitt back then—the girl who married Paul?”

  “Angela Larson. I know she was in my class, but I can’t remember her at all. She came into the classroom on time, did her homework, scored well on tests, but never volunteered anything in class. Teachers love students like her, the invisible ones, because they make the larger classrooms bearable. I only know about her because I looked her name up in my class records after she was murdered. According to my diary, she was a B-plus student who wrote a rather good paper on The Mill on the Floss.”

  “How about Foster Johns? Was he also a student of yours?”

  “Yes, he was.” The old woman touched her mouth with slender fingers, picking her words carefully. “He was a very bright young man, but aggressive, impatient, and hotheaded, a dangerous combination. He was a very competent artist, but he wasted that talent drawing cartoons of, er, scantily-clad women with extraordinary physical endowments. He was funny and popular, but with that streak of wildness, I often wondered how he would turn out. I was pleased to learn he’d tamed his creative talent by going into architecture, but sadly disappointed to discover his impetuous affair with a married woman, and worse, that his temper led him to murder both his mistress and her husband.”

  “So you think Foster Johns murdered Paul Schmitt?”

  “Yes, of course, and Angela as well. Isn’t that what you have set out to do, prove it once and for all?”

  “I’m trying to discover the truth, and I’m not convinced Mr. Johns is guilty.”