Unraveled Sleeve

by Monica Ferris

  But Betsy didn’t want to talk anymore about the Sharon Kaye murder. She waved at the women to go ahead, filled a plate with salads, and found an unoccupied table near the kitchen door, where the constant passage of wait people bringing refills made it undesirable.

  She sat down and began to pick at the cranberry–apple salad. She had barely gotten two bites when Sadie wheeled up. “So, who did they arrest for murder?” she asked cheerfully.

  “Nobody,” said Betsy repressively.

  “Why not? Did they decide it was some kind of accident? She fell into the waterfall?”

  “No, she was taken to the waterfall after she died. Mr. Owen was charged with moving her body and released on bail.”

  “Yes, I saw him come back. Did he say why he did it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he murdered Sharon Kaye?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you’ve been sleuthing, you must have an opinion. Are you seriously saying you don’t know?”

  “Yes, I am. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  So Sadie huffed—the exhalation could hardly be called a mere sigh—in disappointment and wheeled off. Betsy finished her lunch in peace, then went back to the lounge.

  Jill was sitting with the women she’d had lunch with. They were asking her about the cashmere stitch now, though when Betsy walked up, they all stopped to listen to what she might say.

  Betsy said, “I’ll be down at the other end of the room.”

  Jill nodded and immediately caught the attention of the women by saying, “Now here’s the real catch to that stitch.”

  Betsy went first to find her project bag, and then to a place at the far end of the long room. The little love seat there was empty and facing a door to the parking lot. She sat down, her back to the room, a position which suited her mood very well.

  She got out the black Aida cloth and tried to concentrate on the pattern. She checked and found the error in the previous wedge. She’d have to frog both wedges.

  Wait, no she wouldn’t. All she had to do was frog the last one she’d done, make a very slight adjustment in the pattern—leave out two stitches here, add a stitch there—and that last wedge would fit right in where it belonged. It wouldn’t make a very noticeable change in the shape of the wedge. She smiled to herself. “Real” stitchers often spoke of adjusting patterns, changing colors, or even removing whole elements, and here Betsy was doing the same thing. Her smile broadened. She was catching on to this stuff!

  With increasing confidence Betsy quickly undid and restitched the wedge, and held the hoop out to admire her work. The change she had worked in it was barely noticeable, not bad at all.

  She outlined it with Kreinik and was well into the last wedge when a secondary shadow fell across her pattern, blocking the light from the door, rather than the still-brilliant windows. She looked up to see Linda Savareid bent over from a polite distance, trying to see what she was doing.

  “Like it?” asked Betsy.

  “Very nice. Kreinik gives such a pretty sparkly effect. And an unusual pattern, too, kind of asymmetric.”

  Betsy frowned at her black Aida cloth. “It’s not asymmetric, it’s a circle. See? It just looks crooked because I’m not finished with it.” She handed the pattern to Linda, who turned it around for Betsy to look at. At this distance, it was easy to see the adjustment she had made did not disguise more serious errors in placement. Instead of a circle, the wedges outlined an egg shape. She bit her lip to keep from groaning out loud. Her anxious, placating brain said she could use that, make it an egg-shaped rose window; it would be pretty, all she had to do was continue making constant adjustments as she went along.

  Which was not remotely possible. First of all, it looked ridiculous shaped like that. Secondly, if she’d botched the stitching with a pattern to guide her, how could she make adjustments to a pattern as she went along?

  Linda, trying to keep from laughing, said, “So why should you be different from us mere mortal stitchers?”

  “Mere mortal—! Look at the beautiful work everyone else is turning out! I make a little adjustment to the pattern because I didn’t want to frog almost all of what I’ve done, but I only made it worse. I don’t know whether to go ahead and frog, or just toss the thing away.” She sighed. “Am I ever going to stop being a beginner?”

  “Sweetie, we’re all beginners somewhere in the needle arts. Each of us learns a little more over time, but only a very few master this craft. There’s just too much to learn. How long have you been at it? A couple of years?”

  “Four months.”

  Linda stared at Betsy. “Four months?”

  “Yes. I inherited a needlework shop from my sister—”

  “Crewel World! That’s who you are! Margot Berg-lund’s sister, right? I’ve heard about her—and you!”

  “Sadie Cartwright talked to you, huh.”

  “No, no, this was before I came to this stitch-in. Anyway, I don’t listen to Sadie, her tongue’s dipped in acid.”

  “Unlike several other people I could name.”

  Linda laughed. “Guilty, at least as far as Sharon Kaye Owen, Ms. Escapade Design, goes. Now there was a witch!”

  “Please—after all, she’s dead.”

  “Why does that matter? I never did get that business about not speaking ill of the dead.”

  “There’s a very old belief that the ghost of a dead person hangs around for a while, and making him angry by saying bad things about him causes him to wreak havoc.”

  “Good heavens! And you believe that?”

  “No, of course not. But that’s how it got started, not speaking ill of the dead.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My ex-husband was a history professor. Thanks to endless dinners and parties with his peers, I picked up scads of useless bits of information like that.”

  Linda laughed. “Has any of it helped solve mysteries?”

  Betsy threaded her needle through the edge of her fabric and released it from the hoops. “No. If my ex-husband had been a science professor, I might have had something I could use.”

  “Like what, for example?”

  “Well, like what kind of allergen is odorless and tasteless, and won’t show up in a lab test, but that nevertheless causes a fatal allergic reaction.”

  Linda sat down. “I can’t help you there. But is that what you think happened? Something was deliberately put on her floss?”

  “Yes. Because when I first saw her, she was fine. She wet her floss before she threaded her needle, said something I now think was, ‘I’ve got to go get my EpiPen,’ and when I saw her again, she was dead.”

  “So it also has to be something that doesn’t wash off easily.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said she wet her floss. Did she wet her fingers and run it down the floss, or use a sponge, like I do?”

  “She wet it with a sponge. But what I meant was, she stuck the end of it in her mouth. That’s how she . . . ingested the allergen.” Betsy sat back frowning.

  “Oh, a floss licker.” Linda nodded. “People who are making heirlooms don’t do that; saliva eventually damages the floss.”

  “It does?”

  “That’s the argument against it I’ve heard. But I figure by the time my work is old enough to be a treasured heirloom, if it ever is, which I doubt, they’ll have figured out a way to reverse saliva damage. Not that I’ve ever noticed any on my grandmother’s work, and she licked every piece of floss that went through the eye of her needle.”

  Betsy laughed, Linda laughed and went away, and Betsy, after sighing for another minute over her spoiled pattern, decided it was definitely a CASITA, not to be stood anymore. She folded it, put it into her project bag, and got out her knitting.

  15

  When Betsy would sit down to rest, or watch television, or just think, her mind would prod her with lists of things she ought to be doing. But knitting was doing something. Knittin
g, especially a simple pattern, didn’t take much brain power, so her mind was free to compare and ponder. And for the first time since she had come to Naniboujou, Betsy wanted to really think.

  She went to work again on the sleeve of her sweater, working on the last rows of the cuff. But this was not like the last time she sat in this lounge, going knit, purl, knit, in the deep and sunny silence. Now, distractions abounded.

  First, a monologue from Isabel caught her attention. “When Liddy broke her engagement to that nice man last Christmas, he was just devastated—and so was Frank. He was beginning to think she’d never move out, but Carla started encouraging her to try for that position at Nordstrom’s as a buyer. Carla says Liddy has the most exquisite taste, and she should know, Carla’s degree is in clothing design—it’s been kind of a bond between the two of them. She’s really very good for Liddy. And, of course, if Liddy gets the job, she’ll be traveling constantly, and that will give Frank and Carla the opportunity they need to form their own bond.”

  “Only if one of them doesn’t go to prison for murder,” Ingrid said, lofting selected words for emphasis.

  Betsy pulled her attention away, but it was caught by Nan saying, “She was a good person, so generous with her time.” This was amusing, compared to the last time Sharon Kaye was the topic of discussion, but all that came back was someone else saying fervently, “Yes, yes, that’s right.”

  Betsy pulled firmly on her attention as she began to concentrate on switching from the knit–purl of the cuff to the rice stitch of the sleeve. Here she had to add stitches to create fullness.

  Who had the best alibi? she asked herself, knitting a stitch, but not taking it off the left needle. She knitted it again, adding a stitch to the total. Who had the most to gain from Sharon Kaye’s death?

  She went back and forth three times, doing the rice stitch, and then began the complication of a twist of cable that would run up to the shoulder.

  Betsy had been surprised to discover that the cable stitch was formed by actually twisting the yarn where the two rows crossed one another. She had been sure it was an illusion, like the one that looked like woven strips of knitting. She got out the short plastic needle with the hump in its middle and knitted four stitches onto it, then moved the needle behind the sleeve while she knitted four more, then picked up the little needle and knitted the four back onto her big needles, then went back to the rice stitch. Four rows later, on her way back across, she did the same thing, only this time she put the little humpbacked needle in front while she knitted four stitches.

  She remembered when she was learning the cable stitch, how extraordinarily satisfying it was to look down and see the twist of lines running up the knitting. It wasn’t hard to do, not once you knew how. You just had to remember, this time in front, this time in back. Otherwise you had the curious illusion of the cable on top somehow coming from below, even though it had crossed on top last time, too. Like an Escher drawing. To look real, it had to be two lines crossing under and over one another.

  “Betsy,” said a voice.

  “Hm?” There, she had recaptured the hanging stitches.

  “Betsy,” it said, more firmly.

  Betsy looked up. It was Jill.

  “What’s up?”

  “The BCA is here to process a crime scene.”

  “What’s ‘BCA’?”

  “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state organization that investigates crimes. Particularly useful to small local law enforcement agencies that can’t afford the expense of a first-rate crime lab. Wanna watch?”

  Betsy bent down to put her knitting away. “Will they mind?”

  “Not so long as we keep our distance. But that’s not why I came for you. Guess where they’re going first?”

  “Well, I dunno. Frank’s room, I guess. Oh.”

  Jill’s smile had a hint of malice in it. “I want to see that criminal attorney’s face. Come on.”

  There were four of them, two men and two women, none in uniform. They were carrying black, heavy cases and mounted the stairs behind James with heavy, patient tread. Jill and Betsy braved the cold to run around the lodge without coats, coming up the back stairs to enter the hall just as James was knocking on the door to Frank’s room.

  The door was answered by the attorney, who managed to overcome his stunned silence at the sight of their badges to say that he was that very minute going to call Sheriff Goodman and arrange for Mr. Owen to surrender.

  The lead investigator said, “Uh-huh.”

  Beside Betsy, Jill sniggered softly.

  A deputy came out to collect Frank and his attorney, and the BCA crew went to work. They spent about an hour in Frank’s room, and then went down the back stairs. Betsy and Jill had come closer, standing outside the room to wait for results, but the team refused to say anything. Still, they could not prevent them from observing at a distance, and when Betsy, standing on the landing, saw them pluck a tiny bit of something from the back door frame, Jill murmured, “Fibers, probably. With luck it’s from her sweater, because that will be easy to compare.”

  They went out the back door and Betsy asked, “What are they going to look at next?”

  “Her car, I’d guess.”

  “Can we watch that, too?”

  “Too cold to stand out there long. Let’s ask Amos if we can stand very small in his kitchen and look out a window.”

  The kitchen staff was busy clearing the counter and the tables, bringing things into the kitchen. Carla, Douglas, and Liddy were still sitting at a table, using the excuse of not-finished desserts to remain there.

  In the kitchen, a dishwasher was making grinding noises. The aromas were of applesauce and roast pork; dinner preparations were already underway.

  Through the window Betsy and Jill could see Sharon Kaye’s sky blue Volvo with the team of four BCA investigators standing around it. They wore the heavy gear of people who spent a lot of time outdoors in a Minnesota winter. One had a video camera and was walking sideways around the car, camera to one eye. He went over every inch of the car, from door handles to license plates to tire tread to the splash of freeze-dried road slush on the roof.

  When at last he was done, he said something to one of the women standing beside a very large black tool chest. She replied, nodded, and opened the chest.

  She reached confidently in, then with a look of surprise looked inside, moving things around. Still squatting, she asked something of the man who wasn’t videotaping. He turned from a conversation with the other woman to gesture at the box, and she looked again. When she still couldn’t find it, she called to him again. He came over in that way men walk when they’re exasperated. He stooped to reach into the box. The exact same surprised look crossed his face when he, too, couldn’t put his hands on whatever they were looking for.

  The two of them began taking things out of the box, little things that looked like dentist tools and tweezers in clear plastic holders, and big things like pry bars and hammers, and medium things like spatulas and little paint tins and small glass jars full of black or silver powder, and a throwaway camera. But not what they were looking for. The man, naturally, left the woman to put the things back in the tool chest. He went back to the other woman, who appeared angry, and he apologized and for some reason glared at the man with the video camera, though he wasn’t doing anything at all right then.

  “Wait here,” said Jill.

  “Uh-uh!” said Betsy. The two hurried up to their room, Jill moving with the swift grace of the athlete, Betsy panting behind. They grabbed their coats, went down the hall to the back stairs, and outside, Betsy still fumbling with her buttons.

  “Need a shim?” asked Jill as she approached the quartet.

  “How’d you know?” asked the woman who had been angry with the man. She was tall and dark, with suspicious eyes and a mouth thinned by authority.

  “We were watching out the window.” Jill gestured toward the kitchen, and the woman turned to look at the window set in the black shi
ngles of the lodge as if she suspected it of larceny.

  “You got one?” asked the man with the video camera.

  “Yes, it’s in my kit, in my trunk, right there.” Jill pointed toward her big old Buick three cars away.

  “What are you doing with a shim?” asked the other man in a voice with handcuffs in it.

  “Opening doors of cars with the keys locked inside. I’m Officer Jill Cross, Excelsior PD.”

  “God, you guys still offering that service?” said the woman, finishing fitting things back inside the toolbox.

  “Oh, it’s sweet little Excelsior,” said the man with the video camera. “What else are they gonna do to justify their existence?”

  “You want the shim or not?” said Jill, and they all four looked at her. But her amazing poker face absorbed their looks like a desert floor sucks up water, leaving no trace behind.

  “Yes, thanks,” said the tall woman.

  Jill went to her trunk and returned with a flat bar cut into the shape of a hook at either end. She handed it to the woman beside the box, who took it to the driver’s side of the Volvo and worked it down behind the rubber seal on the bottom of the window. She moved it around experimentally, and finally hooked something, and on the second try, the door lock button lifted.

  Betsy, careful not to catch the eye of any of the investigators, watched while the big wicker basket was searched. No coat, no purse, no project bag, just two smaller baskets. One held a collection of plastic containers of evenweave cloth, cardboard bobbins wound with varying colors of floss, and stapled sets of graph paper, some blank and some with simple patterns; the other a collection of sets of more coarsely woven cloth, small scissors, white cotton floss in two thicknesses and stapled sets of instructions. In the bottom of the basket was a large tablet of blank paper and a ZipLoc bag of markers. Sharon’s materials for her two classes.