Sins and Needles

by Monica Ferris

  “Sure you do. You took it away from her and put it in a garbage bag.”

  “Oh, yes, I do remember.”

  “Well, I took it out again.”

  “Why?” Susan tried hard to make the inquiry casual.

  “Because I could see that the front of it was handmade, knit in a flag pattern. I thought perhaps Aunt Edyth had done it, and I don’t have any of her hand work, so I rescued it. I took it to Crewel World—Betsy does restoration work, did you know that?”

  “Yes, of course; she does excellent finishing, too. I always have her finish my counted pieces.”

  “Me, too. Anyway, I brought the pillow to her. It was so smelly and dirty—”

  “I know, that’s why I threw it away. Generations of mice! I was surprised I could actually take hold of it. Ewwww, if something had jumped out…I just hate mice! They’re worse than spiders—I don’t know why you’re afraid of spiders. They’re not dirty like mice.”

  Susan was yearning to talk of something, anything, else, but Jan was determined to talk about the map. “Well, look what was inside it.”

  “I don’t want to get near it, and I wish you’d take it off my nice, clean table!”

  “It’s clean. Betsy froze it for a couple of days to kill any fleas and then washed it thoroughly. Did you make it?”

  “Make it?”

  “The pillow. And the map that was inside it.”

  “No, of course not. What do you mean, map?”

  “This.” Jan touched the fabric, which she had not picked up off the table. “It’s a map.”

  “It is? A map of what?”

  “It shows this area of Lake Minnetonka: Gray’s Bay, Excelsior Bay, Lafayette Bay. And the Big Island. It’s a treasure map, we think.”

  “A treasure map? You mean like yo-ho-ho pirate’s gold?”

  “Mo-ther,” sighed Jan.

  “Well, after all…Let me see it.” Jan held it out and Susan took it quickly, lest Jan see her fingers tremble. She turned away, toward the big kitchen window, to examine it in natural light. Not that she needed to. The colors were bright and had hardly run at all. The edges were ragged, the lettering that formed a frame was not really decipherable. She turned it around twice, then asked, “What makes you think it’s a treasure map?”

  “Well, for one thing, the words around the edge seem to say, ‘Where your heart is, there will your treasure be.’”

  “Is that what it says?” She turned it around again, pretending to try to read it.

  “Yes. And if you look close, at the Big Island, there’s a tiny red heart. It’s near the tallest tree.”

  Susan searched for a few moments. “Yes, here it is.”

  “The question is, what’s buried there?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea.” Susan turned and gave the map back to her daughter with a sad, forced laugh. “Sorry.”

  “What did Aunt Edyth love above everything else?” asked Jan.

  Susan blinked, then frowned and thought. “Her independence.”

  “I mean something physical, some object.”

  “Well…I’m not sure. She really liked that motorcycle.” Susan smiled, remembering Edyth’s fierce joy in roaring over the winding roads around Lake Minnetonka.

  “Did she ever say anything about burying something on the Big Island?”

  “Not to me. Do you think she stitched this?”

  “Well, who else?”

  Susan shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t do embroidery, at least not that I remember.”

  “I know. Betsy wondered if the pillow was knit in 1959, because the flag has forty-nine stars. You would have been in high school and not staying out there anymore, right?”

  Susan nearly leaped onto that but stopped in time. Big lies were never a good idea. “Of course I still went out there! But Aunt Edyth and I weren’t as close anymore, because I was dating the young man who would become your father.”

  “You were awfully young, you know.”

  “Yes, but I was awfully sure.” Susan smiled, remembering. “Anyway, she wouldn’t have approved of a millionaire college economics professor who could walk on water, if he was also a man.”

  “She didn’t think much of Grandfather, either, I suppose?”

  “No, she rather liked him—but she knew Grandmother needed someone to take care of her, and the one way she knew of making sure that someone stuck around was to join them in matrimony. Grandmother was old-fashioned that way. She had higher expectations of me. Why are you so interested in all this? You aren’t thinking of going to the Big Island with a spade, are you?”

  Jan laughed. “That does sound kind of crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. Whatever the treasure was, I’m sure it’s long gone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, my dear, it was a very long time ago when she would have been capable of going out there and digging a hole. I’m sure that whatever she buried decayed into dust decades ago.”

  “Decades? When did she use the boat last?”

  Susan thought. “Early sixties, I think. Now, you had better be on your way. I’ve got a few things to do before company arrives.”

  “All right.” Jan reached for the map. “May I have this?”

  “Certainly.” Susan could have bitten her tongue off for that too-quick response. She tried, and failed, to find a reason to change her mind.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?” said Jan.

  “Fine. Maybe we can go shopping on Saturday, have lunch at Antiquity Rose.”

  WHEN Betsy came into The Malt Shop, a fifties-style diner in St. Paul, she saw a tall, light-haired young woman in a booth looking at her and lifting a hand tentatively. Betsy waved back—no one else in the place could remotely have fit the description Alexandra gave her.

  The place certainly evoked places Betsy could remember from her early youth, with its red vinyl and chrome décor and poodle-skirted waitresses—well, except the jukebox was playing a Beatles song that would have been more appropriate in a head shop reeking of incense, whose customers wore tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottom trousers.

  “Are you Alexandra?” Betsy asked, walking up to the booth.

  “Yes, but call me Lexie. And you’re Betsy, Aunt Jan’s friend.”

  “Yes,” said Betsy, taking a seat.

  Lexie was nodding her head to the music. “Don’t you think John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ is the most noble and true song ever written?”

  “No,” said Betsy.

  “But you were alive when the song was written!” exclaimed Lexie.

  “I’m not sure what that has to do with it.”

  Lexie chuckled. “You’re right. I guess we tend to think of everyone from that era as being a flower child.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t love that song when I was your age,” said Betsy. “It’s that I’ve changed my mind. Anyway, thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”

  “I promised Aunt Jan that in return for a hamburger and a malt, I’d answer any questions you asked. So let’s order, and then we’ll talk.”

  Over their lunch—Betsy privately promised to work extra hard at aerobics next week—she asked, “Did your father talk to you about what you should choose from Aunt Edyth’s house?”

  Lexie hesitated, the pupils of her light blue eyes widening just a little. “Who told you that?”

  “Your aunt Susan. She thinks your father did research on the contents of Edyth’s house so he could select the most valuable items for you and your sisters to pick.”

  Lexie asked, in a tone that betrayed her defensiveness, “Why would that be so awful?”

  “Because she thinks he will ask you to sell your choices and give the money to him to start his fishing business.”

  This time Lexie’s amazement was more genuine. “What a stupid idea! It’s not true!”

  “You picked the Navajo blanket, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is. What
are you going to do with it?”

  “My parents will keep it for me until I finish school.”

  “And then?”

  “I…I’m not sure. I’d love someday to display it in a home of my own.”

  “It would make a centerpiece of any room. But do you know what it’s worth?”

  “No. I’m assuming from what you just told me it’s a lot.”

  “The best estimate I could find is a hundred and forty thousand dollars.”

  Lexie gaped at her. “No!”

  Betsy nodded. “Yes. I talked to a gallery in California specializing in Native American artifacts, and its owner wants me to ask you if you’re willing to let him be your agent when you sell it.”

  “Dad said it was more valuable than it looked, and if one of us liked it, she should ask for it.” She looked thoughtful. “That’s so much money. I’m going to have to reconsider keeping it. I could pay off my college loans and pay for the rest of my studies and have money left over to start a college fund for my own children, which I plan to have some day.” She smiled. “Aunt Edyth would be horrified if she knew how many children I want.”

  Betsy smiled back. “Does your father know?”

  “Oh, him. He thinks I should wait until I’m thirty-five to marry and then have one child. But every time he says that, I can see in his eyes he wishes he’d had more daughters. One of his favorite song lines is, ‘I am a man who’s rich in daughters.’”

  Betsy said, “Oh, I’ve heard that song! Doesn’t it end with the man saying he’s thinking about getting him another daughter?”

  Lexie laughed. “That’s the one. I hope Katie’s baby is a girl. Dad would just dote on her.”

  “Maybe take her for boat rides, if he gets that business up and running.”

  “Yes,” said Lexie, but her smile faded away.

  “Do you think he could actually succeed in getting this one off the ground?”

  “Sure he could!” she replied, too fast and too loud, then blushed. “I’m sure he’ll do just fine,” she reiterated, and took a hard pull at the straw in her malt. “It’s something he loves, something he’s always loved. And CeeCee is old enough now to take care of herself, so he’ll be able to concentrate on business.”

  “Have you thought about going into a partnership with him?”

  “Partnership?” she echoed, as if the idea were new to her, and the blush rose again.

  Really, Betsy thought, life would be so much easier for the police if every liar gave himself away like this. “Yes,” she said. “You could sell the blanket and invest the money in your father’s business. Then when you finish school, you could be vice president in charge of operations or head bookkeeper or something.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “I have a feeling your dad’s ideal day in the business would be to go out on the lake with the anglers, showing them the best spots. Or giving rides in the restored Edali.”

  Lexie’s head came around. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes,” said Betsy. “It’s a beautiful boat, but I suspect it’s going to cost a great deal of money to restore.”

  “Dad says he can do the work himself. He says the boat was famous in its day, lots of people knew about it and watched for it. Great-aunt Edyth would take it out and simply outrun any other powerboat on the lake. He says the sound of its engine is not like anything we’ve ever heard.” Her eyes were sparkling now. “He says it can still go faster than anything on Lake Minnetonka, that the best seat is the one all the way at the back, with the spray coming up all around and the engine just roaring.”

  Betsy smiled. “I wonder how far in advance you’d have to buy a ticket for a ride on her?”

  Lexie’s smile broadened. “It really could be a successful business, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes—if he could find someone to do the hard parts: keeping records, paying taxes, doing upkeep, budgeting for advertising, all the boring parts.”

  Lexie grew serious. “Yes, those are the hard parts. And you know about them, don’t you, since you own your own business.”

  “Yes. When it comes to owning your own business, what most people see is the pretty bird floating on the water—they don’t realize that underneath, the bird is paddling like mad.”

  Lexie laughed, but sadly. “Yes, that’s the part that trips people up, isn’t it? Like that beautiful blanket I chose. What I saw were the colors and the pattern. What I didn’t see was that it was a rare result of hours of labor that make it a costly souvenir.”

  SUSAN was a distracted card player that evening. She played two very bad games of bridge, explained to her guests that she had a headache, and sent them home early. Then she set her alarm for three a.m. and went to bed.

  By three thirty, she was pulling into a driveway near Echo Bay. It was a long driveway, and the house it led to was hidden in trees. She unfastened the bungee cords that held her canvas kayak to the roof of her car, and carrying it over her head, threaded her way between the house and garage to the lakeshore. A dog two houses away barked briefly. She waited until it shut up, then slid the craft into the water and climbed into it.

  Susan was almost as familiar with the lake as her brother Stewart. She had sold the motorboat a few years after David died—Stewart had one big enough for family outings, and Jason had a speedboat. But she’d kept the kayak. It was light to carry, easy to right if it tipped over, and a pleasure to paddle. She’d taken it up to the Boundary Waters a few years ago and come home a week later, satisfied that she could still paddle five days in a row, four hours in the morning and three in the afternoon.

  And she had excellent night vision.

  The night was cloudless, with a half moon well up in the sky. She paddled out a few yards, then sat still, moving her double-ended paddle only enough to keep her position in a light onshore breeze. In a few minutes, her eyes fully dilated and she could see the dark mass of the Big Island clearly against the starry sky. It was barely fifty yards away. She paddled for it, stopping a dozen yards from the shore to reconnoiter and find where she was in relation to the shore, then circled to the north. She made virtually no noise at all and rode low enough in the water that she could not be seen by a casual viewer.

  As she came around to the northeast side, she slowed and listened. This place on the Big Island was a traditional gathering place for party boats—on summer weekends there were often so many boats that one could jump from one to another half the length of a football field with no difficulty.

  But this was three a.m. Friday morning, and everyone was at home, resting up for the weekend to come.

  She paddled closer to shore. There was a dock there—possibly the dock she remembered from so many years ago. She found it, went just beyond it and stopped to look at the shoreline outlined against the sky. There it was, the tallest tree on the island. Leafless—that’s right, it had died a few years ago, she’d forgotten that. But its bare limbs still reached a dozen or more feet higher than the surrounding trees. She drifted along the shore, pulling in about halfway between the dock and the tree.

  There used to be a narrow, one-lane road along here. Funny, it was gone, replaced by a path. She stepped off the path on the inland side, looking for the road, and nearly fell into a marsh. She had to sit down hard to keep from floundering into the cutgrass and mucky water.

  “Whew!” she murmured, and struggled to her feet, rubbing her hip ruefully. “Getting too old to be gadding about in the dark,” she muttered, then put a hand over her mouth to remind herself to keep silent.

  Hanging around her neck was a short, waterproof flashlight, and as she got back to the path, she turned it on. The terrain had changed from when she’d been here last, many years ago. She walked up and down the narrow ridge, looking for landmarks, but the landscape had changed so much she couldn’t find any. If it weren’t for the little cottage back near the dock and the big tree, she might have thought she’d come ashore in the wrong place.

  She went back to her k
ayak and climbed aboard, wincing at the pain in her behind from the fall, but well satisfied. The marsh had eaten the road, obviously, and the box with it. Even if Jan were so foolish as to come looking for it, there was nothing for her to find.

  Nineteen

  ON Saturday morning Betsy was in the shop at ten with Godwin—the scheduled part-timer, Marj Fahr, woke up ill, and fortunately Godwin was available—and they were discussing a redesign of the layout of the shop over cups of tea.

  “Well, I have a feeling the next emphasis in needlework will be on crochet,” Godwin said. “So we need to get in some more books with crochet patterns, more crochet needles and threads, and maybe hold a class for beginners.”

  “Crochet?” said Betsy. “I haven’t seen any increased interest in crochet. We’ve got a limited amount of space. I think we should change the layout again so our customers will walk in and have to relearn their way around, and maybe stumble on something new, but I don’t see adding to our crochet stock. What do you think about tatting?”

  “Tried it. Crochet is easier, and I’m bad at crochet. But I’m serious, I think it’s going to be the coming thing.”

  The argument might have continued, but the door sounded its two notes, so they turned to see if they could assist their customer.

  It was Jan, and she’d brought Jason with her. They both looked worried. Jan had a Crewel World paper bag in her hand.

  “Is something the matter?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Jan. She went to the library table in the middle of the room and slid the map out. Godwin went immediately to it, unfolded it—it was backside up—and after a moment, turned it over.

  “Say,” he said, “this is part of a map of Lake Minnetonka!”

  Betsy blinked at him. “Wow, it took me a while to realize that! You are good!”

  “Yes, I know,” he replied, not very modestly. “But what’s the matter with it?”

  “We think it’s a treasure map,” said Jan.

  “Really?” Godwin eagerly began to study the map. He quickly figured out the lettering around the edge. “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also,” he said aloud after a minute or two of study. “I think you may be right.” He looked the map over carefully, then found the red heart along the north shore of the Big Island. “There it is, a teeny heart—is that where you’re going to dig?”