Connor, bless his wise heart, didn’t argue, or even bring it up again.
* * *
ON Tuesday morning, Jill came in with a stitching project she wanted stretched and framed—finished, in other words.
“Wow, this came out really well!” exclaimed Betsy.
It was a counted cross-stitch pattern, a big one that took eighty different colors of floss to complete. Teddies and Friends was the name of it, from Artecy Cross Stitch, and it depicted two shelves piled with two teddy bears, a plush puppy, a toy duck, and two clowns, all in soft, realistic colors.
“For Erik’s room, I take it,” said Betsy.
“Well, yes . . .”
“Oh, have you decided to have another baby?”
“Not quite. Lars really thinks we shouldn’t wait.”
“But you’re still thinking of that PI license.”
“Yes, though Lars keeps coming up with reasons I shouldn’t do that.”
“One reason is that you probably wouldn’t have time for another big project like this one.”
Jill chuckled and obediently turned her attention to the piece of stitchery. “What do you think, double mat?
“Yes, I agree, but how about a modest frame, something narrow and dark?” Betsy suggested.
Jill put her hand, palm down, on the canvas and tilted her head a little sideways. “Hmmm, yes, I like it.” She got out her credit card and made a deposit on the estimated cost of the project and left.
A few hours later Betsy was cutting fabric into salable pieces when the phone rang.
“Crewel World, Betsy speaking, how may I help you?”
A man’s voice said, “Betsy Devonshire?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Pierce McMurphy, and my wife and I would like to come in and talk to you.”
Betsy was nonplussed for a moment. “All right,” she said at last. “When would you be able to come in?”
“How about right now? We’re parked less than a block away—it gives us less of a chance to chicken out.”
“That’s fine. We’re not busy right now. Come on in.”
“Thank you.”
“Who was that?” asked Godwin after Betsy had hung up. Clearly the look on her face had made him curious.
“Uh-oh,” he said when she told him.
Less than two minutes later the door rang its two notes and a medium-tall man with lots of gray in his dark hair came in behind a rigid-faced Joanne McMurphy.
Godwin was making a production of rearranging the knitting yarns in a basket near a wall, standing so he could keep an eye on the pair as they approached the checkout desk where Betsy was waiting.
“First of all,” said Joanne, speaking quickly and mechanically, “I want to apologize for losing my temper. I have some anger issues, and I want to tell you that I’m going to be doing something about that in the very near future.” Her tone made Betsy wonder how much of this apology was Joanne’s idea and how much was Pierce’s.
“And I want to thank you for not pressing charges against Joanne for her serious lapse of judgment,” said Pierce in his warm, deep voice. He had strongly marked and attractive features, and an athlete’s build. His eyes were sad, but his fists were clenched, and Betsy wondered if he’d ever had to express his gratitude before. She felt profoundly uncomfortable and couldn’t think what to say.
But then his wife turned to look at him, and he returned a smile so warm and tender that she fairly bloomed back at him.
Godwin, unable to see this exchange, spoke up. “Have you talked to Irene?” he asked.
“No, not yet,” said Pierce. “But we will.”
“I can’t think what came over me,” said Joanne without turning around. Her voice was smooth and gentle. Pierce rewarded her with a broader smile.
Betsy shot a quashing glance at Godwin, who had drawn a breath, doubtless to make a caustic remark.
“Is there anything we can do to show we’re really sorry?” asked Pierce.
“Nothing I can think of,” Betsy said.
But Godwin spoke up. “You can answer a question.”
“All right,” said Joanne, turning toward him. “What is it?”
“Godwin,” warned Betsy. She turned to Joanne then. “There’s nothing we want to ask you.”
“Did you murder Hailey Brent?” asked Godwin.
“No, I didn’t,” said Joanne, her voice calm but her face ashen. “I had no reason to murder her. I hardly knew her.”
“Godwin, that was incredibly rude!” said Betsy. “I apologize on behalf of my store manager.”
“I don’t think I accept your apology,” said Joanne stiffly. “Come on, Pierce, let’s go.”
“For heaven’s sake, Goddy!” said Betsy when the door closed behind the couple.
“Well, someone had to ask, and you didn’t seem about to. What do you think about them coming here like that?”
“I’m not sure.” Betsy turned and frowned at the closed door. She had never met Pierce McMurphy before, at least not that she could remember. But there was something familiar about him. She closed her eyes, remembering the details of his dark hair and eyes, his muscular build, his warm, deep voice—there it was.
Pierce McMurphy was the man behind the Green Gaia fence in a love quarrel with Marge Schultz.
* * *
“BUT the person Marge should have wanted to kill was her lover’s wife—Joanne, right?” said Godwin. It was later that day, and he and Betsy and Jill were sitting at the library table in the shop, eating sandwiches from Sol’s Deli. Jill’s son Erik was playing with Sophie the cat in the back. This wouldn’t distract him for very long; Sophie was far too lazy to be an agreeable game player with an active boy like Erik.
“No,” Betsy said. “Marge talked to Pierce about his divorce. She didn’t say anything about Joanne’s death.”
Jill said, “So Pierce was the one with a motive to kill Joanne.”
“Yes, but Joanne is alive and well,” Betsy pointed out. “Hailey is the person who is dead—and Pierce not only had no motive, he has a solid alibi.”
Godwin said, “So the question is, who had a motive to kill Hailey? Joanne, maybe? She certainly has the temperament for it.” He gave a dramatic shudder.
“But no motive,” said Jill.
“In her case, she doesn’t need a motive. Not much of one, anyway. Maybe Hailey looked at her funny while passing her on the street.”
Betsy ate a potato chip and said thoughtfully, “Maybe we need to look at what sets Joanne off. In my case, it was investigating Hailey’s murder. I don’t know if she felt personally threatened, or if she was protecting someone else—Pierce, for example.”
“But Pierce has an unbreakable alibi,” said Godwin.
“Maybe Joanne didn’t know about the alibi, or thinks it’s not unbreakable,” said Jill, after a sip of tea.
“Hmmmm,” said Betsy.
“You’re good,” Godwin said to Jill. “You should go back on the police force. You’d pass the detective test in a minute.”
Betsy said, “Jill is thinking about becoming a private investigator.”
“Lars is against it,” said Jill. “He says it’s too dangerous.”
Godwin looked surprised. “But his job is even more dangerous,” he said.
“All the more reason why he’s not in favor of it for me. We shouldn’t both have dangerous jobs.”
“So you’ve given up the idea?” asked Betsy.
“No, not completely. Not yet.” She smiled. “It’s just so interesting, trying to figure things out, drawing conclusions from an assortment of facts. It’s like reading a novel that has every other line missing.”
“And every tenth page missing, too,” said Betsy with a rueful laugh.
*
* *
ON Wednesday, Betsy decided it was time for another talk with Marge Schultz. She left Godwin in charge of the shop and drove over. Though a weekday, there were plenty of customers walking up and down the long wooden tables lined with potted plants. The warm and sunny weather certainly wasn’t hurting business. Many shoppers were carrying plastic baskets, and some were wheeling shelved carts filled with their selections, the carts’ tiny wheels juddering over the uneven ground. The season had marched ahead, and the plants were blooming: petunias, lilies, marigolds, Indian paintbrush, and some that Betsy couldn’t identify.
Betsy found Marge consulting with two women in the marigold section.
“We just love marigolds,” one woman was saying. “They’re so hardy, and they bloom right up until frost. And the deer and rabbits won’t eat them like they do our other plants.”
“I think they’re like shards of sunlight,” said the other, poetically. “The pure yellow ones are like noon, and the different shades of orange ones are like sunsets. Let’s buy lots of them for edging.”
“Marge?”
The woman turned, and her eyes widened. “Oh, hello, Betsy! I didn’t see you standing there. What can I do for you?”
“I need to talk with you.”
“Right now? I’m kind of busy.”
“It won’t take long, just a couple of questions.”
“Is it about—um?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Hannah, Mimi, you just bring those into the shop when you’re ready and someone will cash you out.”
“Thank you,” they chorused.
“Follow me,” Marge said to Betsy, and she led her to the small, cluttered office in the back of her shop. “Here, sit down. Now, what’s this all about?”
Betsy took a breath and plunged in. “How long have you and Pierce McMurphy been lovers?”
Marge’s mouth fell open. She said, “What on earth?” in a strange, high voice, caught herself, cleared her throat, and tried again. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“I overheard the two of you talking.”
Marge stared at her. “When was this?”
“When he told you that you shouldn’t see each other until after his divorce. You sold him a blue spruce.”
The stare continued. “But you weren’t—I didn’t—How could you—?”
“I was in Hailey Brent’s backyard, by the fence.”
“Spying on me? How dare you!”
“I wasn’t spying on you. I was at the estate sale at the Brent house, digging up lily of the valley to plant behind my shop. I recognized your voice, but not Pierce’s—at least not until he and Joanne came to talk to me yesterday.”
“Oh my God, you didn’t tell them—”
“No, of course not. I’ve had a glimpse of Joanne’s temper.”
Marge sat back in relief. “This is awful, this is so awful. Now you must think—”
“I don’t think anything, except that I happened to be by Hailey’s fence, and if I could overhear you speaking, then she could have, too. Really, you two ought not to have revealing conversations where other people can overhear what you’re saying. Is that what happened? Did Hailey find out about you two and threaten to tell Joanne?”
“We never talked back by the evergreens before, so I don’t know how she could have overheard us. She never told me she knew about Pierce and me. You think I murdered Hailey, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“But I didn’t! I came to you to help me prove that!”
“I know. The problem is, this looks very bad. Killing Hailey might seem an intelligent thing to do to keep Joanne from finding out about you and her husband.”
“But I tell you she didn’t know. All right, she’d been hinting around that she knew something bad about me, but I didn’t know what it could possibly be. Pierce and I have been so very careful it didn’t occur to me that she was referring to our relationship. She didn’t want me to file a complaint with the police about her stealing flowers, and I thought she was trying to prevent that by pretending she knew something bad about me. If I thought she knew about Pierce and was willing to share that knowledge, I would have told her, told the police—I would have told everyone! I would have taken out an ad in the paper: Marge Schultz and Pierce McMurphy are lovers. That would have stopped her gossipy mouth.”
“But what about Joanne?”
“If something happened to me, the police would know who to arrest.”
“So you had no idea what Hailey was hinting about.”
“Well, after a while I thought maybe she really did know something, because she was so gleeful about it. But I was sure it wasn’t about Pierce and me. I know my employees wondered why I didn’t make a police report, especially after Hailey took about a quart of my red marigold blooms.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t want even more trouble than there was between us. You know how marigolds bloom: a week after she took them, the plants were covered with flowers again. She didn’t strip the plants of all the flowers, and she didn’t damage the plants; she was careful about that. Like I told you before, she was more of a nuisance than anything.”
Marge leaned forward. “Please believe me. I didn’t know Hailey knew about Pierce and me.”
But Betsy was remembering Philadelphia saying Hailey knew something about Marge she called “illicit.” That was a term often used about an adulterous love affair. On the other hand, if Hailey knew, surely her hints would have clued Marge in to what she knew. Right?
And there the case seemed to come to a halt.
Thirteen
THE Monday Bunch was in session. An informal club of stitchers, its members gathered early Monday afternoons in Crewel World to stitch and gossip. Present at this session were serene Patricia, earthy Bershada, naive Emily, stalwart Jill, bluff Alice, friendly Doris—and rakish Phil, the lone male member.
Phil wasn’t a hanger-on, he was a committed counted cross-stitcher. Normally, he worked on train-themed pieces, but he’d been taken by Winter Retreat, a twelve-by-sixteen-inch Gold Collection outdoors pattern, and was working hard on it. It featured four boldly marked Canada geese standing in a field of tall tan grass beside a body of dark water. There were glints of gold in the grass and a gray, overcast sky into which more geese were vanishing. It was a finicky piece, he was finding, with lots of changes of subtle colors in the grass, sky, and water. Working on the piece was stretching his talent and his patience to their limits. Which, after all, was not a bad thing.
Betsy had an errand to run and so she wasn’t there when the meeting convened.
“Anyone know how Julie’s doing?” asked Doris in her husky voice. She was working on a small needlepoint canvas of two swans, a gift for a friend who liked birds.
“She’s home from the hospital,” said Jill, who was crocheting a tiny cap to be donated to a neonatal care unit. “But she’s not able to drive yet.”
Phil said, “She’s already got a plastic thumb and a pacemaker; with that new hip she’s turning into a geriatric Barbie doll. Damn.” He consulted his pattern, grimaced in confirmation, and began to unpick a couple of stitches.
Bershada looked up from the birth announcement she was cross-stitching and said, “You better pray you don’t need a joint replaced one of these days.”
“Why? I might enjoy being a bionic Ken!” He lifted his chin and looked sideways to give them all the benefit of his profile. While he might once have been a rather handsome young man, he was, now in his seventies, looking a bit shopworn. But his wife, Doris, smiled tenderly at him.
Patricia paused in her work on a very intricate candlewick pattern of snowflakes to ask quietly, “How is Betsy doing?”
After a pause, Jill said, “She’s not ha
ppy with the way the Hailey Brent case is moving.”
“Because it’s not moving very well, is it?” said Emily diffidently. She was knitting the second of a pair of sky blue mittens for her second-oldest daughter, who was on a growth spurt and might not even be able to wear these bigger ones come November.
“No, it isn’t,” said Jill.
“Poor thing,” said Emily.
Alice put down the afghan square she was crocheting. “Godwin,” she called in her deep voice, “does Betsy seem depressed to you?”
“Not especially, why?” Godwin came out from the back, where he’d been sorting a shipment of cross-stitch patterns to be put into bins. “Have you noticed something?” He looked concerned.
“I think we all have,” said Alice, looking around the table. The others seemed as if they’d like to disagree, but none did.
There was a little silence, then Doris spoke up. “I think we’re all worried about Betsy’s investigation into Hailey Brent’s death.”
Phil nodded in agreement. “This thing is taking a long time, longer than any other case she’s tried her hand at.”
“Is she making any progress at all?” asked Bershada.
“She’s made a lot of progress,” said Godwin stoutly. “It’s just taking a while to pull things together. And important parts are still missing.”
“Like what?” asked Bershada.
“Yes, maybe we can help,” said Phil.
“Well, I know for one she would like to be able to interview Walter Moreham.”
“Who’s he?” asked Emily.
Godwin gestured while he considered how to explain, a book of cross-stitch patterns in one hand. “Randi Moreham’s husband. Hailey was trying to persuade Randi to get a divorce, and when Hailey was killed Randi realized she really didn’t want one. And Walter had said from the start he didn’t want one, either, so now they’re working on staying together. But you see, that gave Walter a motive for removing Hailey’s influence.”
“So why doesn’t Betsy just go talk to him?” asked Emily.
And Then You Dye Page 11
