“Now, wait a minute. First of all, there’s an official police investigation going on right now. They know the land, they know the people, and they have the proper tools. And second, it’s three hours to Longville. I’ve got a business to run right here in town. I can’t go running up to Cass County to look into this every time I get a clue.”
“Mama, Mama?” asked Emma Beth. “Are you going to buy floss?”
“Not today, sweetie.”
“Can I go look at the floss?”
“Floss!” agreed Airey.
“Here, I have a better idea,” said Betsy, who did not want a pair of unsupervised children pulling expensive and carefully sorted silk floss from spinner racks as if they were un-decorating a Christmas tree. She went into the deepest drawer in her checkout desk and came up with two pieces of bubble wrap. “Who wants to help me pop some bubbles?” she asked.
“Me, me!” shouted the children.
“You have to sit by yourselves at the table while you’re doing this job for me, okay? Honestly, I don’t know where all this stuff keeps coming from. I’m so glad I have you two to help me out.”
In about half a minute the two were seated at the library table in the middle of the room, making snapping noises, totally engrossed.
“It’s not just Cass County we want to look at,” said Jill to Betsy. “We need to find out what happened to Mrs. Farmer—and probably her husband, too. They could be anywhere.”
“And this will make it easier?”
“No, it means we use our computers.”
“ ‘We’? ‘Our’ computers?”
“I want us to work together. You can tell me where to look, and what to look for, and I can save you time by doing the work. Together we can figure this thing out.”
“I don’t know ...”
“Well, I’m going to try it on my own, regardless. But I’m sure I’ll do better with your help.”
Betsy smiled. “I believe you’ll be disappointed if the Cass County Sheriff’s Department gets there first.”
Jill shook her head. “No, I won’t. I don’t care who gets there first, so long as someone gets there. If they figure it out, that’s great with me. But I don’t want them to find it hard to solve and gradually let it slide, until we find ourselves with a cold trail.”
Betsy laughed. “Jill, this trail is already about as cold as it can be. Not so far from seventy years cold, in fact. All the adults who might have known something useful are dead.”
“Not all of them. Johanna, for one. I doubt she’s the only one.”
Betsy remembered the old men gathered at the bar in The Lone Wolf General Store, and nodded. “All right, not all of them. But it’ll be hard to find the time to go all the way back up there to talk with them.”
“I have a feeling I’m going to be working some extra hours pretty soon,” said Godwin, but not too unhappily. He loved being on the inside of Betsy’s cases, the first to know of clues discovered and conclusions formed. And Betsy, for her part, was careful to keep that bargain in mind.
“I can do the legwork, too, or most of it,” said Jill. “But where do we start?”
“With Helga, I suppose,” said Betsy after a moment’s thought. “Where did she go? Why did she go? Is she still alive?” She thought some more. “If I had to throw away everything I had here and run off . . . well, that would be hard. I could sell the business—to Godwin probably.”
“Hurrah!” said Godwin. “Not that I want you to do any such thing, but hurrah for thinking of me.”
Betsy ignored him and said to Jill, “So maybe Helga sold the cabin to a friend.”
“Arnold and Marsha Nowicki,” said Jill. “They’re the next owners listed.”
“Do we know where they’re from? Or where they are now?”
“No, but we can find out, I suspect via the Internet.”
“What do you think the Nowickis can tell us? If they weren’t friends with the Farmers.”
“You know how people talk while they’re waiting to sign papers,” said Jill, remembering. “ ‘So, where are you going from here?’ the buyer may ask. ‘Oh, we bought a farm in Wisconsin, not far from the Dells.’ Like that.”
“Not bad,” Betsy said. “You may be right. And say, another place to look would be family. I wonder if Helga had any siblings. My sister and I weren’t terribly close, but when I needed a place to stay after I divorced Hal the Pig, I knew how to contact her. I would think Helga would know how to contact her sibling or siblings. We can do the same, but we’ll need to find out Helga’s maiden name. One way to do that would be to research her husband’s military record—I know that’s available on the Internet. I have a customer who is a genealogy nut and she did that to find out about her great-grandfather’s military service. If we can find out where he was stationed when they married, then I’ll bet we can get the record of their marriage. And that will give us her maiden name.”
Jill had picked up the notebook that shop employees used to record phone calls. She had turned to a blank page and was writing swiftly on it.
Betsy said, “Another thing the Nowickis can tell us is if both the Farmers attended the sale. One of the rumors going around up there is that he deserted the Army, then told her where he was so she could join him. If it turns out the two of them were there to sign the sale papers, that will destroy that rumor.”
“He’d have to be there anyway, wouldn’t he?” asked Jill. “Lars and I are both on the deed to the cabin, so we both had to sign our names. Major Farmer put Helga’s name on the deed with his, so I don’t think she could sell it alone.”
“If they both had to be there,” said Godwin, “that already spoils that rumor, doesn’t it?”
But Betsy said, “Power of attorney. If he was in the military, especially if he was going overseas, he might’ve given her a power of attorney so she could handle things while he was gone. I remember back when I was in the service how now and then there’d be a case of a sailor going on a seven-month cruise, and while he was gone, his wife would clean out their bank accounts, sell the house, and be long gone before he got back home.”
Jill’s eyebrows rose. “Nice of her.”
“Well . . . I know one case where he’d been asking for it the whole three years they were married. She sold everything, his guns, his truck, even his dog. That was mean, selling his dog.”
“Something else we’ll want to make sure of: the order of all this happening. It’s possible Dieter lived in the woods until it got too cold and then found this empty cabin to live in.”
Betsy struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Jill, you are a genius! Sure, think about it: Helga and the major sell the cabin and go off into the sunset, and Dieter finds this empty cabin to hang out in safe from the cold.”
Jill nodded. “Maybe it went like this: Major Farmer gets his orders and decides he doesn’t want to go into battle. He writes his wife to sell the cabin, which she does. Then he takes a thirty-day leave and turns up in time to sign the papers with her. That gave them a twenty-nine-day head start to disappear. Soon after, Dieter decides he just can’t take POW life anymore and walks away. He hides out in the woods for a few weeks, then there’s a hard frost and he needs some shelter. He finds the cabin, empty. So see, the Farmers could’ve been long gone before Dieter found the cabin.”
Godwin asked, “Then who murdered him?”
Betsy said, “Maybe some other tramp who had already taken possession?”
Jill said, “Maybe the Nowickis, coming to get the place ready for the winter. They came in and surprised a stranger, who attacked them, and they killed him in a fight. They, being new in the neighborhood, didn’t know about the German POW camp, and by the time they found out, they’d already hidden the body and laid the new linoleum down to hide the trapdoor.”
“You’d think they’d’ve figured it out from the big PW letters on his clothing.”
“If he’d been hiding out for weeks, he’d probably stolen clothing from clotheslines,” said Jill.
<
br /> “Gosh, clotheslines,” said Godwin, who had a peculiar fondness for old, once-ordinary things.
“Mama, what’s a clothesline?” asked Emma Beth. She held up a limp piece of plastic. “I finished popping.”
“It’s a thin piece of rope strung up so you can hang wet clothes on it to dry.”
“Oh.” Emma Beth found this information peculiar but didn’t know quite where to go with it.
Betsy took the plastic from the child. “Wow, you did a super job! Thank you!”
“You’re welcome,” said Emma Beth. “Airey’s not finished yet.”
Jill said, “Well, we can’t wait any longer. Go get him. We need to get going.”
“Yes, Mama.” She walked off.
“I wonder if we can find out from the pattern when that linoleum was laid. Boy, is there a lot we don’t know, to have so many theories about what really might’ve happened,” said Betsy.
“Then I’d better get busy,” said Jill.
After she and the children left, Godwin said, “Interesting how she’s gotten so keen on sleuthing.”
“Yes. I wonder if Lars knows about it.”
ABOUT nine o’clock that evening, Betsy took a bottle of her favorite wine and two glasses and went knocking on Connor’s door. He was home.
Eleven
IT was getting on for bedtime. Jill was putting the last few stitches in some counted cross-stitch pattern she’d worked up with her usual speed and efficiency. Lars came to look over her shoulder at it.
“Nice,” he said.
“You sound like Airey.”
“Sorry. But it is nice.” He hesitated, then said, “Can I talk with you about something?”
She immediately put her needlework down. “Sure. What is it?”
“Are you serious about going sleuthing with Betsy?”
“Yes, I am. Why?”
“I’m wondering if you’re thinking of this as going back on the cops kind of sideways,” he said, using cop lingo.
“No, I don’t want to go back on the cops. At least I don’t think so. Not right now.”
“So what is this about?”
“I’m not sure. For once in my life, I’m going strictly on my feelings. And I feel like I need to do this.”
“Do you feel like you’ve outgrown raising the kids?”
“No, of course not. They’re my number one priority, my pride and pleasure. It’s just that here is our very own mystery. Our own skeleton in the cellar of our own cabin. I’m fascinated by it. I want to know how he came to be down there. I’m so glad Betsy is at least interested—and that she’s willing to let me help. And I’m actually of use to her. I never thought I had a head for investigations, but now I think maybe I do.”
“So if you do go back on the cops, you’ll apply for Mike Malloy’s job?”
“I told you, I don’t want to go back on the cops.”
“So what then, private eye?”
“Maybe,” she said. But he had a feeling that’s exactly what she was thinking.
But the next few days showed Jill how frustrating sleuthing could be. There were two other families with the surname Ferguson in Cass County—but neither was related to Harlan Ferguson, who had sold the cabin to Matthew Farmer. The neighbors around the Larson cabin had bought their cabins long after World War II, and knew nothing about the Farmers. Betsy had no more suggestions about where Jill should look.
Then came a break, and Jill called Betsy. “I found the Nowickis,” she announced.
“The right Nowickis?” asked Betsy.
“Yes, one of them is the grandson of the couple that bought the cabin from the Farmers. They’re both dead—the couple who bought it are dead, I mean. Murder-suicide.”
“Uh-oh. When did that happen?”
“Nineteen sixty-five, the year the cabin was sold to Buster Martin.”
“That’s a long time after Dieter Keitel’s body was hidden in the root cellar. Any idea what brought it on? Was one of them terminally ill, for example?”
“I don’t know. I just found the story in the back editions of the Star Tribune. It was a short article. There was no mention of one of them being sick, or a record of domestic abuse. I found their son first, and he refused to answer any questions. Then I talked with the grandson briefly and while he seemed standoffish, he agreed that he would talk with me or with the both of us day after tomorrow. His name is Robert and he lives in Morris.”
“Where is Morris?”
“About three hours west of here, almost to the South Dakota border.”
Betsy groaned softly, and Jill said, “Hold on, there’s good news. He’s coming here. He’s got some appointments in the Twin Cities, to interview nursing home managers on behalf of his mother-in-law. He says he’ll stay over so we can talk with him, if we’ll either put him up or pay for his hotel room. There’s something wrong about him, about the way he talks about his grandparents.”
“Small wonder, considering.”
“No, it’s not just the way they died. He sounded more angry than sad—even after all those years.”
“Ah. Then definitely a motel,” said Betsy.
“I agree. I’ll split the charge with you, but pick something inexpensive.”
“How about the Hilltop? It’s right on the edge of town and it’s clean.” That was about the best that could be said for it. “Or did he sound like the kind of person who would expect to stay at the Hilton?”
Jill smiled. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m sure he’d like to, but then so would I. I don’t think it’s necessary to put him up in first-class accommodations.”
But Betsy said, “Still, let’s have him stay at The Birdhouse Inn, all right?” The Birdhouse was Excelsior’s one remaining bed-and-breakfast; the other, Christopher Inn, had been sold to a developer, who made it part of a big condo complex.
“All right,” agreed Jill. It cost more than the Hilltop, but was far nicer. “Where shall we meet to talk with him?”
“How about we take him to dinner? I read somewhere that people are friendlier over a shared meal. Is Patisserie Margo open in the evening?” The Patisserie was new in town, offering homemade soups, muffins, breads, and croissant sandwiches. The croissants were huge and thick, with a dark and flaky surface; Jill and Betsy both loved them. Since the town bakery had closed, the Patisserie was particularly welcome. Plus, it was just two blocks from The Birdhouse.
“No, right now they’re only open for lunch. How about Ming Wok? Everyone likes Chinese.” It was four blocks from the inn.
“Fine with me.”
“I hope Robert can tell us something about the cabin,” said Betsy.
“I’m sure his parents took him to it while he was growing up. And told him stories about it—maybe about how their parents came to buy it. That would be useful to us.”
GODWIN came in to work the next morning very down. He slouched through the opening up operation, hardly saying anything. Betsy finally asked, “What’s the problem, Goddy?” expecting to hear of a quarrel with Rafael.
But Godwin said in a voice of doom, “Golf.”
“But you like golf!”
“Not anymore. I’ve developed a slice. No matter what I do, zoom!” He gestured forward then off to one side. “The ball goes sailing off to the right. I spent half of my game yesterday playing the ball from the rough and twice on the next fairway over.” He bowed his head, and his lower lip actually trembled. “It was very embarrassing, and Rafael laughed at me,” he concluded in a low voice.
With an effort, Betsy kept from laughing, too. “Poor Goddy,” she said then, with real compassion, and came to put an arm around his waist.
He turned and hugged her, wetting her shoulder with his tears. “Oh, what am I to do?” he sobbed. “I—I love him, and I even love his silly, stupid game, and I’m so bad at it!”
“There, there,” she said, hugging him back. “You’ll get better, you know you will. Isn’t Rafael a good teacher?”
“Yes, of course
he is! The best! He’s so kind, and so, so patient with me.” When upset, Godwin used a lot of italics.
“That’s right, you told me about that. Was he impatient yesterday?”
“No, of course not—at least, not that I could tell. But he must be! I’m so slow and stupid about this wretched game, I don’t understand it, I just don’t get it! I was doing so well just last week!”
“How long has Rafael been playing?”
“Oh, his father started taking him golfing when he was about four! He’s been good at it for so long, I don’t think he remembers being bad at it! So what am I going to do? I was such an embarrassment yesterday! I think I should just quit!”
Betsy stepped back and took Godwin by the shoulders. “And then what will you do on sunny afternoons when Rafael is out on the course? Or will you try to get him to quit, too?”
“Oh, I would never try to get him to quit! Golfing is too important to him!” Godwin thought. “I don’t know what I’d do. They won’t let people who aren’t golfing on the course, so I couldn’t just follow him around.”
Betsy smiled. “You wouldn’t like that anyway. By the third hole you’d be begging to borrow a driver and hit just one ball, just once. And when it went sailing down the fairway, straight and true, you’d kick yourself for not bringing your clubs along.”
Godwin nodded, and a smile started forming on his lips. “You’re probably right. Especially if it went sailing straight and true.”
“And of course it would, that’s the perverse nature of golf.” Betsy had never played, but she was sure that was right, because it was true of a lot of things.
Godwin laughed bitterly. “That’s just exactly what it would do.”
“So don’t quit. Try to figure out why your drive is hooking—”
“Slicing.”
“Slicing, or listen to Rafael tell you what you’re doing wrong, and fix it. Maybe before you go out with him again, go to a driving range, and hit a couple of hundred balls to see if you can get it fixed before you play again.”
Godwin nodded. “That’s a good idea.” He cocked his head at her. “You always give me such good advice. Maybe you should listen to yourself next time you and Connor have a quarrel.”
Buttons and Bones Page 9
