Blackwork

by Monica Ferris

  Betsy said, “I’m thinking there were two ways. First, it could have been put in there before he got home. The door was not locked when he wasn’t there. The question is, how far in advance could the killer put it in there? Ryan was undressed and in bed when he was found, so the gas couldn’t have been very concentrated when he got home, or he would have passed out on the floor. And how would the killer know when he was coming home?”

  “He couldn’t,” Mike said. “When McMurphy was out on the town, he’d come home at all different times. He stayed either until he got thrown out, or the tavern closed. There was no way to tell in advance when he was coming home to that basement room.”

  “Well, that brings us to the second possibility. It might have been someone with a key, someone who waited until he was in there and asleep—or passed out—before entering to put the dry ice in a bucket. And they’d have had to use a bucket, I suppose, because won’t this substance damage a carpet or wood floor?” She turned around to look for the dropped pellets and used the plastic spoon to pick them up and drop them into the bucket. To her surprise, there was no trace of their presence on her Berber carpet. She stooped and ran her fingers over places they had been, looking for stiffness, bleaching, or other damage, and found nothing but two cool, faintly damp spots. “Humph, I guess not.”

  Mike said, “The candle tells us something. It was burnt just about halfway down when it went out.”

  Betsy said, “I lit one last night—the same kind of candle—and found out it burns at a rate of about an inch an hour. And they’re five inches tall, so halfway is two and a half hours. It went out two and a half hours after it was lit.”

  Malloy said, “The medical examiner says that Ryan McMurphy died around three in the morning. And I found someone who says he brought Ryan home around midnight, so figure he took half an hour to get ready for bed and light his candle and that’s about right.”

  “But that would mean someone came in right after he got into bed, which sounds unlikely. I would think the murderer would wait until he was sure Ryan was sound asleep.”

  “Oh, those time of death things aren’t an exact science,” said Mike. “I’d say there’s probably half an hour leeway on either side of that estimate. And I’d also guess, from the description of how drunk McMurphy was that night, that he was unconscious the second his head hit the pillow.”

  “Is three hours enough time for dry ice to fill that room?” asked Godwin.

  “It didn’t have to fill it to the top,” said Betsy, “just the bottom third should have done it.”

  Mike said, “I’ll check it out, how long it would take.” He gave a sharp glance at Betsy. “But you know what this means. Unless you’re going to try to prove them innocent.”

  “Not Shelly,” said Betsy positively. “I’ve known her since my first day in Excelsior, and she works for me part-time. Under no circumstances would I believe that Shelly did this.”

  Mike nodded at her. Unspoken between them lay Harvey’s name.

  Betsy had a thought. She said, “Mike, check to see if anyone heard the dog barking. Maybe Shelly and Harv were out, so the killer sneaked in. But Shelly says the dog barks.”

  “All right.” Mike made a note.

  Betsy turned to Godwin and Leona. “May I ask you not to repeat any of this conversation to anyone? Not about the dry ice as a murder weapon and especially not about who Mike suspects. Nothing is proven yet.”

  “I know only too well the power of unproven accusations in Excelsior,” said Leona with emphasis.

  After Mike and Leona left, Betsy put the extinguished candle, still in its globe, in a desk drawer. She put the plastic bag of dry ice into the bucket and took it out to the Dumpster in the parking lot behind the shop.

  “Goddy,” she said on returning, “don’t tell anyone about Leona taking the pain out of my hand.”

  “Why not?” he demanded. “It was a fabulous thing she did.”

  “Because one of the reasons she hasn’t been hounded out of town is that a majority of the residents don’t believe in witchcraft. Their disbelief is keeping her safe. You start offering them evidence to the contrary, all the dry ice in the county won’t help.”

  Fifteen

  A FEW customers later—Godwin biting his tongue with obvious effort to keep from telling about the marvel of Leona “drawing fire”—Billie came in.

  “I’m in a knitting mood,” she announced. “Wool me!”

  Godwin helped her select two skeins of cherry red wool, a pattern for a spiral pattern scarf, and a new set of number eight bamboo knitting needles.

  Checking out at the desk, she said to Betsy, “How’s the investigation coming?”

  “It’s just about at a halt right now,” said Betsy, putting Billie’s purchases into a Crewel World plastic drawstring bag. “I think I know how it was done, but I can’t figure out who might have done it.”

  “But you know how?” Billie was staring at her. “You’re serious! You mean it wasn’t black magic?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “That sounds . . . strange. I’ve heard that Ryan locked the door to the sewing room when he was in there. That seems to mean it was Shelly or Harv. But that doesn’t sound like them at all. I mean, if they wanted Ryan out, all they had to do was tell him to leave.”

  “I know. That’s what makes it so depressing.”

  “So really you have no suspects at all,” said Billie, sounding disappointed.

  “Oh, no, I have suspects. It’s just that they have alibis. You, for example.”

  “Me?”

  Betsy smiled. “Yes, you. Someone told me you hated Ryan. Is that true?”

  “I didn’t hate him. Okay, I was mad at him for a long time. But hate? No. It’s a wearisome thing, and a waste of time.” She smiled. “Almost as tiresome a thing as the Halloween festival. Aren’t you tired of all the planning for it?”

  “Oh, yes. And I’m going to get tired of Christmas long before it arrives. It’s one of the sad parts of being in commerce. But why were you mad at him for a long time?”

  “Because he kept my daughter Cara out of the Naval Academy.”

  It was Betsy’s turn to look surprised. “How did he manage to do that?”

  “Well, he and Cara are cousins, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  Billie nodded. “His mother and my husband are brother and sister. Cara decided halfway through high school that she wanted to follow another cousin into the Naval Academy—Sunny is doing work she loves, and the education she got was simply superb. But Cara had slacked off during her sophomore year, and although she was working very hard to bring her grades up, things looked marginal for her. Sunny wrote a letter to our Congressman in Washington recommending her, and she helped Cara write her own letter. And, of course, her father and I also wrote letters, and got two of her teachers to write as well. And we got some very encouraging replies from Congressman Karlson.

  “Then Sunny and Ryan had a falling out—Ryan was always quarreling with someone or other—and he decided that the way to get back at Sunny was to bollix her attempts to help Cara get into the Academy. So when Representative Karlson sent some staff member around to see what sort of person Cara was, he made sure to spread the word about Cara’s shooting a deer out of season, making her sound like a poacher.”

  Betsy could only blink at this. “She poached a deer?”

  “Of course not! It was just a stupid mistake. There were these deer invading our vegetable garden, eating simply everything. We’d put up a fence but it wasn’t high enough. Cara wanted to enter some of her tomatoes and pumpkins in the County Fair, and what the deer didn’t eat, they trampled. So she sat up one night with her dad’s thirty-ought-six rifle, meaning just to fire over their heads and scare them, and one deer jumped the fence just as she fired and she brought it down. She didn’t tell us until the next morning, by which time she had it hanging in the garage, and her boyfriend helping her turn it into roasts and steaks. S
he was surprised we didn’t think it was just a funny accident and begged us not to report it, so we didn’t, but she’d already told some other friends. It wasn’t all that serious, though I didn’t agree it was a joke.” Billie smiled. “One thing it did do, the other deer left the garden alone for the rest of the growing season.

  “But Ryan told a colorized version to people, and he said she cheated on her final exam in calculus, and by the time his stories got back to Congressman Karlson’s representative, it was all exaggerated, like she cheated on all her exams and that she shot that deer on purpose. And so Cara didn’t get the appointment.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Yes, it was, and I was very angry with Ryan for a long while. But I told Cara to go to my alma mater and join ROTC”—Billie pronounced it Rot-Cee—“and she tried that, but there is an anti-ROTC culture at that university and she decided she didn’t like college after all. Now she’s finishing up a veterinary assistant course at Minneapolis Technical College and she’s doing well.”

  “I suppose she was angry at Ryan?”

  “Oh, lord yes.”

  “Billie, is it possible that Cara is responsible for Ryan’s death?”

  Billie went white. “Of course not!”

  “Do you know where she was the night Ryan died?”

  “How dare you even think—wait a minute!” Billie brightened, her expression turning in an instant from that of a mother bear protecting her cub almost to glee. “She was in Chicago at a science fiction convention. Didn’t get home till Tuesday noon. Whew! For a minute there, you really scared me.”

  “Let me scare you again: Where were you?”

  But Billie wasn’t worried. “Oh, I was home. I get nervous when Cara’s traveling, I wake up three times a night, and my getting up wakes Sam—he’s such a light sleeper. ‘What the hell time is it now?’ he’ll ask. So he can tell you I was home in bed, out of bed, back in bed with him all night every night starting the Thursday before. Sunday night we went to bed around ten-thirty, after the news.”

  Betsy wasn’t sure Sam wouldn’t lie for his wife, but she didn’t say so.

  Billie said, “Are you all set for the parade? Do you know the marching order yet?”

  Betsy picked up a notebook and turned to a page full of cross-outs, interlineations, notes, lines and arrows, and listings. “I’m going to make a clean copy of this before the parade, of course. We’ve got three bands now. That should be enough, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, probably. Do you have enough candy clowns?”

  “I’ve got a half dozen. One of the clowns has a pretty scary costume. Is that all right?”

  “Depends on how scary. They’re going to be marching along the edges of the parade and coming close to the children to toss them the candy. If it’ll scare a three-year-old, you’d better lighten it up.”

  Betsy made yet another note on the page. “Okay.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Joey Mitchell wants to drive the fire engine. I told him to contact LuLu McMurphy, since the truck is hers now.”

  “He did that, and she said she didn’t care who drove it, so I told him he could.”

  “Good,” said Betsy, making yet another note.

  “Anything else?”

  “No, everything else seems to be in order.”

  And it was—the parade part, anyhow. The investigation? Not so much.

  NEAR closing time, the door to Crewel World opened and Harvey came in, his face white and set in a grim expression. “Ms. Devonshire, I want to talk to you,” he said in a low but angry voice. He took her by the arm and marched her through the back of the shop, where there were no customers, into the tiny back room, closing the door behind them.

  “Where the hell do you get off telling Mike Malloy you think I murdered Ryan McMurphy?” he demanded, his voice even angrier than before.

  “I did not tell Sergeant Malloy that I thought you were a murderer,” Betsy replied in as level a voice as she could manage. “But someone brought a poisonous substance into Shelly’s sewing room the night Ryan died, probably after he went in there and locked the door. There were only two keys to that door, and Ryan had one of them. The conclusion was not hard to draw. I didn’t have to point anything out to Mike Malloy.”

  “But I didn’t have a motive!”

  “Didn’t you? Mr. Fogelman, are you a married man?”

  He sucked air through his teeth. “Who told you that?”

  “No one. But when I suggested blackmail to you in Chanhassen the day before yesterday, you ran off like a scalded fox. And Shelly is starting to wonder if you’ll ever ask her to marry you. The Hennepin County records of marriages and divorces indicate that you married one Melissa Jean Brooks nearly thirty years ago, but not that you divorced her. Nor is there a record of her death. The conclusion is obvious. Less obvious is why you insisted that Ryan be permitted to remain in Shelly’s house when he became a drunken, obnoxious menace.”

  He stared at her, and suddenly his anger drained away. “I didn’t kill him,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t think Shelly did,” she said.

  “Shelly? Of course not!” He sounded shocked that Betsy could even suggest such a thing.

  “Then who else had a key?” she asked.

  Just then, the door to the back room opened and Godwin stood there with a heavy stitching frame in one hand. “Is everything all right in here?” he asked in his deepest voice, hefting the frame.

  “Yes, we’re fine,” said Betsy.

  “I have to go,” said Harvey, and he brushed roughly past Godwin on his way out.

  THE shop was closed, and Betsy was taking out the trash. She lifted the heavy, creaky, squealing lid of the Dumpster and got a noseful of something acidic and tingling.

  “Whuff!” she said, backing away. Then she went for a more careful look and, to her amazement, the plastic bag of dry ice was still mostly full. Water vapor was curling up and out of the bucket. The inside of the Dumpster was damp—not from the rain but condensation—and very chilly, colder than the outside air.

  The effect on her nose made her think of the times she’d been too eager to get a swallow of Coke after opening a can. It wasn’t cola up the nose; it was freshly released carbon dioxide. How interesting to learn that!

  And also how interesting about the condensation. That was very likely the explanation for Shelly’s rusty needles.

  But most interesting of all was the fact that the dry ice was still there. It had been sitting in the Dumpster for hours. She stood there a minute or two, thinking. If it always took a long time to evaporate, that meant the dry ice could have been put into Shelly’s sewing room far earlier than she had originally thought. Hours earlier. Shelly had been using the room when Ryan was out; it was locked only when he was in there. She needed to find out if Shelly had been in the room on Sunday.

  She hustled back into the shop and called Shelly on her cell. But when Shelly answered, her voice sounded strange. Betsy could tell she was in tears.

  “Shelly, what’s the matter?”

  “It’s Harv. Betsy, he’s married. He just told me.”

  “Oh, Shelly, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “He’s been trying to find her. She moved out of town years ago, and he doesn’t know where she is. He didn’t used to care; he didn’t want to get married again. But now he does, and he needs to find her to file for divorce. I knew something was wrong, but I never figured it was this! He just came in a little while ago and he was all upset. He was almost crying, and it took me a while to get it out of him, but now I’m all upset, too! Oh, Betsy, I’m so unhappy! What are we going to do?”

  Betsy shoved her fingers into her hair. “I don’t know what to tell you. What else did he say? Has this got anything to do with Ryan?”

  “What could it have to do with Ryan?”

  “Well, I wonder if Ryan knew and that’s how he persuaded Harv to get you to let him move into your sewing room.”

  The
re was a shocked silence. Betsy could tell that Shelly was considering the possibility.

  “Shelly, where were you and Harv that Sunday evening?”

  “Oh, Betsy! How dare you think—”

  “Shelly, please! I’m trying to help you, don’t you understand that?”

  Silence fell again. Then, in a very subdued voice, Shelly said, “We were out. We went to see my Aunt Sally. I don’t think you’ve ever met her—she’s a retired schoolteacher and she lives in White Bear Lake. We had dinner at her place and then sat and talked until probably close to ten o’clock. Then we came home and went right to bed.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Both of us.”

  “What time did you leave for White Bear?”

  “Around five-thirty.”

  White Bear Lake was to the north and east of Saint Paul, a good forty-five minutes from Excelsior.

  “Who knew you were going over there for a visit?”

  “Oh, gosh, lots of people. Going to see Aunt Sally is a real treat, and both of us talked about it.”

  Betsy thanked her, told her not to worry, and hung up.

  So the two of them were out of the house until near eleven o’clock Sunday night. That brought them home a little more than an hour before Ryan.

  Was that enough time for Shelly to go to bed and fall so deeply asleep that Harvey could get up without waking her to go put dry ice into the sewing room?

  Could he have put it in there before they left?

  Which brought another thought: Where did he keep it? Not the freezer, Shelly might see it. So possibly an ice chest down in the basement or on the back porch, because who opens an ice chest in October? But where—and when—did he get it? It used to be, you could get dry ice at any store that sold regular ice, especially if it also sold live bait—fishermen used dry ice to keep their fish fresh on the sometimes long journey home. But when Betsy went looking for dry ice on the Internet, she couldn’t find a regular business that sold it, only wholesalers. And they weren’t open on Sundays.