Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_04 Read online

  “No, no, you can’t do that!” said Godwin.

  “Why not?” asked Betsy. “The drawers don’t go back far enough to hold the bigger canvases, some are curled up in there. And the veneer on the top is lifting.”

  Godwin said, “Honey, there are people who, if they walk in here and don’t see that dresser, will think they’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “Okay, we can find a carpenter who will build us a dresser just like the current one, only two inches deeper front to back.”

  Shelly turned and walked to the dresser. “But don’t you see? If you push out two inches into the walk space here, then you’ll have to cut two inches off the counter.” She turned and put a hand on the counter. “You can’t do that; I just love this old counter.”

  “So do several antique dealers who have offered me enough to pay for both a new counter and a new dresser.”

  “Oh, Betsy, please don’t sell this counter! Don’t change anything! This place is perfect as it is!”

  “I agree,” said Godwin, nodding sincerely.

  Tired as she was, Betsy understood what was really going on. Betsy’s sister Margot had founded Crewel World, had brought in the counter and the dresser, had put the wooden pegs on the wall and the curious set of canvas doors. She had been a compassionate but driving force in this town, with countless friends. So long as these things remained, Margot was, in a way, still here.

  Shelly looked a little ashamed. “I know, don’t say it, we don’t have the right to make demands like this. Crewel World is yours now, so you get to do whatever you want with it.” She looked around, her smile upside down. “At least you didn’t close it.”

  “For which there are a lot of grateful people,” added Godwin. “But you shouldn’t make any decisions about changes right now. You should go away for a week, even a couple of weeks, then you’ll see the place with new eyes, and be better able to decide what you really want to do.”

  “But don’t go anywhere Godwin suggests,” said Shelly. “His favorite places are like Animal House every night. In fact, go farther away than Mexico. Have you ever been to Spain?”

  “No, just England and France.”

  “Well, I went to the Costa del Sol one winter, and it was marvelous. It’s warm and sunny, it has sleepy little towns with winding narrow streets, and there’s the Mediterranean Sea to bask beside. Barcelona is nearby, with a cathedral you have to see to believe, and there’s a castle called Montserrat—”

  “Spain’s too far!” objected Godwin.

  “But that’s the attraction,” replied Shelly. “It’s far from here, way over on the other side of the Atlantic. And the Costa del Sol has these lovely little shops, nothing like here at home. I bought an alabaster statue of a medieval saint for about twenty dollars, very crudely done, but powerful, his eyes just glower at you—”

  Godwin said, “Yes, the very thing for someone haunted by bad dreams. Cancun is just as warm and it’s lively and never boring. Their beaches are really nice, and there are dolphins who will come and play with you.” He sighed. “Wish I could go there now myself.”

  “But Spain’s so exotic, and full of history, with—”

  The conversation, which was bordering on argument, cut off when the door sounded, marking the arrival of three members of the Monday Bunch. A group of women stitchers who met every week at Crewel World to work on projects, the Monday Bunch gave advice and support to one another, and indulged in Excelsior’s favorite pastime, gossip.

  Within a few minutes two more arrived, making six, counting Shelly. Stout Kate McMahon, with her graying red hair and broad smile, was finishing up a hardanger project. Betsy had thought to take up hardanger, and so she came to stand behind Kate and watch.

  “What is that, a satin stitch?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. I push the needle in here, coming up here, four threads up. You have to watch carefully, because this square has to match exactly the square across from it, and also line up with this square and this square. See, here or here is wrong.”

  Betsy leaned closer and felt her eyes cross. She couldn’t quite see what the difference was. “I think I need to be more nearsighted to do hardanger.”

  Kate laughed. “Yes, I take my glasses off when I do this.”

  Betsy went back to her chair and took out the needlepoint project she was working on, a pillow with rows of geese in various poses alternating with the heads of daisies. If it went on as well as it had begun, she planned to display it in her shop.

  Godwin, working on a lush and colorful counted cross-stitch pattern of a medieval castle, said, “Betsy’s thinking of taking a vacation. March in Minnesota is the pits, don’t you agree?”

  Alice Skoglund, a broad-shouldered woman with a strong chin and a tendency to verbal faux pas, agreed. “I hate early spring. That’s when the snow starts to melt and uncovers all the little animals that died during winter.”

  “Mercy, Alice!” exclaimed Martha Winters.

  “Well,” she said, only a little abashed, “it is.”

  Bing! went the door to the shop.

  “That’s why I like to fly away to Cancun,” said Godwin, consulting his pattern and grimacing at the number of half stitches in the section he was working. “I’ve suggested Cancun to Betsy.” He glanced up toward the door. “Oh, hi, Jill. We’re talking about a getaway for Betsy. She really needs one. Can you join us for a while?”

  They all looked at Officer Jill Cross standing just inside the door, big in her uniform, her smooth pale face looking back placidly. “For half an hour,” she said, lifting a bulging plastic bag with the Crewel World logo on it.

  “I think Betsy should go to romantic Spain,” said Shelly.

  “Too far,” said Godwin. “Go to Mexico—you don’t have to worry about your internal clock getting all wonky.”

  “I think she should go to Hawaii,” said Kate. “It’s tropical, but it’s also America.”

  “There are Minnesotans who winter in Mexico,” noted Martha, around the end of a piece of floss she was moistening in her mouth. “You might find yourself in the middle of Old Home Week down there. That would be nice.”

  Betsy frowned at the thought of Minnesota sales reps on a vacation won by never missing an opportunity. Suddenly distant Spain seemed more attractive.

  Shelly spoiled that by saying, “Liz and Isobel are going to Spain. Actually, so is Father Rettger—but I think he’s going to Compostella, not Costa del Sol.”

  Godwin, seeking to change the subject, said, “Martha, some people think it’s not nice to lick your floss.”

  Martha, complacently relicking her floss before threading her needle, said, “Some people should find more important things to worry about.”

  Jill came to the table with a small sheet of paper in her other hand. “Here,” she said, putting it in front of Betsy.

  Betsy picked up the sheet of paper. It was an announcement for a stitchers’ retreat. “Where did you get this?”

  “Off the mirror on your dresser.” Jill gestured with a minimal nod of her head toward the front of the store. “I saw it when Godwin put it up there a couple of weeks ago, but it got covered up by that announcement about CATS.” CATS was a big convention for stitchers coming to Minneapolis in November.

  “May I see that?” asked Kate, and Betsy handed her the flier. “Oh, Naniboujou! I’ve heard of that place.” She twisted around to look up at Jill. “But it’s way up on the North Shore, isn’t it? Practically on the Canadian border.”

  “Brrrr!” Godwin shivered dramatically. “It’s still the dead of winter up there!”

  “It’s still the dead of winter down here,” said Betsy, surprised.

  “No, it isn’t,” said several women, equally surprised. Pat said, “Why it’s only March and there’s bare spots on the ground already, and if you look at the branches of the trees, you can see the buds are swelling. I’m expecting a crocus any day now.”

  “I’ve been to Naniboujou,” said Martha Winters, working
her needle under some finished stitches on the back of her linen before starting to stitch—she might be a floss licker but she would never tie a knot at the end of her floss. “Only in the summer, of course. But it’s a beautiful place, a lodge with a big dining room that serves wonderful food, right across from a state park with miles of hiking trails. Lake Superior is right outside your window, and they have these old-fashioned Adirondack chairs down on the shore, so you can sit with a glass of iced-tea and watch the waves.”

  “Just the thing to do in March on the North Shore,” said Shelly. “Wade a mile or two through six feet of snow in a state park, and rest afterwards on the lakeshore with a glass of iced tea while watching the next blizzard blow in from Canada.”

  Even Martha laughed at that.

  “Did they have a band on Saturday night?” asked Godwin.

  “No band, no bar, no television,” said Martha. “Not even a phone in your room.”

  Kate handed the flier back to Betsy. “The application is still on this. Which isn’t surprising, nobody we know would want to head north this time of year, would they?”

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  Betsy looked up at Jill. She was a tall woman, strongly built—though most of her bulk was from the bulletproof vest under a heavy shirt and winter-weight jacket. She had ash blond hair and equally pale eyebrows on a face that rarely showed what she was thinking. She was looking at Betsy now with that calm, unreadable face.

  The calm transmitted itself to Betsy. Nobody I know, no television, and no phones, no phones, no phones, thought Betsy. “If the stitch-in is this weekend, can we still get a room?” she asked.

  “I called in my reservation six weeks ago,” said Jill. “And got the last room. I had to take one of the expensive ones, with a fireplace. It’s also a double. The stitch-in is just for the weekend, so you can move into your own room on Monday. I’m staying a week; I had to take some vacation or lose it, and I thought I’d get in some cross-country skiing.” Jill was made for Minnesota; Betsy was sure she considered summer to be a sad break from winter sports.

  Betsy looked again at the brochure. The room had knotty pine walls, the bed looked comfortable. One whole week—She looked at Godwin. “Can we get enough part timers for you to manage a whole week?” she asked.

  Godwin sighed dramatically—but he did everything dramatically. “Well, I don’t know if I should try to help you, if you won’t take my advice and go someplace warm and fun.” Then he smiled and said, only a little less dramatically, “All right, Cancun won’t go broke because you don’t go there this year. And of course we’ll manage. Didn’t two of our part-timers complain last week that they weren’t getting enough hours? We’ll manage just fine.”

  2

  They left early Friday morning. Betsy, still wan and heavy-eyed, was also helplessly annoyed as she walked to Jill’s car. She was being followed by a tall, redheaded woman in a chartreuse coat who wanted Betsy to buy a portfolio of Internet stocks. The woman had a fistful of documents as vividly colored as she was, and was talking very rapidly about e-this and dot-that.

  Jill, though not in uniform, got out of the driver’s side of the car and said, “Eh-hrrrum!” The woman glanced at her, stopped in her tracks for a second look, then turned and hurried away.

  “How do you do that?” asked Betsy, putting her two suitcases down. “I actually snarled at her, but she kept on talking. All you did was clear your throat.”

  “I look at them like I think they may resist arrest,” replied Jill placidly. She went to the trunk of her car, opened it, and put Betsy’s suitcases in beside her own.

  There were other things in the trunk: a Dazor light, a sewing frame, a box marked WINTER SURVIVAL KIT, snowshoes.

  Betsy pointed to the snowshoes. “What are they, antiques?”

  Jill smiled. “Well, I did make them back when I was sixteen.”

  “What, you liked to make reproductions of old things?”

  Jill frowned very slightly. “No, people still use them. When you want to walk over deep snow, there’s nothing as good as snowshoes.” She closed the trunk. “That state forest right across the road from Naniboujou has an interesting waterfall. I thought I might walk back in to see it.”

  “What’s so interesting about it?”

  “Half of it disappears into a rock.”

  Betsy couldn’t think what to ask about that, so she looked at the cross-country skis fastened to the rack on top of Jill’s car. There were two pairs, she noticed. Jill said, just a little too casually, “Grand Marais has some very easy cross-country ski trails.”

  Betsy let her face reflect her thought: As if. She went to get in the passenger side of the big old Buick. She’d tried cross-country skiing with Jill and been surprised and disappointed at the exertion required. Like her cat, Betsy was not keen on exercise.

  The wide, comfortable seat of the car welcomed her. Betsy fastened her seat belt and relaxed with an audible sigh as Jill pulled away from the curb. “Say, Jill,” she said, “would you consider being my bodyguard when we get back? Easy job, you’d just stand behind me clearing your throat at all those dreadful people who insist on a share of my money.”

  “You don’t need a bodyguard. Going off for a week to an unannounced destination will discourage most of them. When you’re not there to hound, they’ll go hound someone else. You’re going to have to be firm and persistent with the rest. Which I’ve seen you being, when you’re in your detective mode.”

  Betsy grimaced. “I hope you got a good look, because those are going to be mere memories from now on. I’m resigning my commission and turning in my badge. Neither of which I was ever issued, by the way.”

  Jill gave Betsy a faintly surprised look. “I thought you liked detecting.”

  “No, not at all. I certainly didn’t go looking for cases, they just sort of happened. And I didn’t know what I was doing. Clues more or less fell out of the air right in front of me.”

  “Huh,” remarked Jill, then went wordlessly back to driving.

  They went past the beautiful Victorian Christopher Inn, then over the bridge and onto Highway Seven, heading toward Minneapolis. Betsy looked out the window at trees and houses passing by. The road was clear and dry, white with dried salt—whiter than the crunchy honeycombed snow pulling its filthy skirts away from the verge. The sky was a light, cloudless blue.

  “But that only means you’re a natural,” said Jill, suddenly picking up the topic again.

  “Yes, but I’d have to harden my heart too much to keep doing it, dealing with crime and criminals, and I wouldn’t even want to know how to do that.”

  “Do you think my heart is hard?”

  That surprised Betsy. “No, of course not! But you—you’re—” Betsy had to think for a moment. “You don’t let things hurt you. You have this… I don’t know, a kind of imperviousness. You don’t get angry or scared.”

  “I was raised to—not to let things get to me,” said Jill, and from the way that was wrenched out of her, however cleanly, Betsy knew it was a confession. Jill was as reticent about her upbringing as about her feelings. “But just because I don’t break into tears or fall into a rage every time I’m sad or angry doesn’t mean I don’t feel those emotions.”

  Betsy, embarrassed, had to think a few moments before she could reply. “How do you deal with the ugliness you face every day?”

  “It’s not every day—this is Excelsior, after all, not Chicago or DC. And what I do is, I don’t take it personally. I think of myself as a street sweeper or garbage collector, taking the crud off the streets. The rotten egg isn’t stinking just to annoy me. And somebody has to clean it up.”

  Betsy nodded. “I’m glad you can do it. The world would be impossible without police. But with me, it’s different. I get involved at a personal level, because it involves people I know. And I can’t do that anymore. Not when I dream all night about friends who turn out to be murderers.”

  “Not all of us do.”

&nb
sp; “But in a recent dream you were at the front of the pack, shouting at me to tell you whodunit. And I had no idea.” Betsy frowned. “That was probably the oddest part, you shouting. You have never shouted at me, ever. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you shout at anyone.” She smiled. “But you clear your throat real good.”

  Jill chuckled softly, then said, “See how unreal the dream was? In your dream you couldn’t solve it, but in real life you can.”

  “Please. I’m absolutely sure that next time I’m faced with a case, it will be just like what I dreamed: I won’t have the first clue.”

  “I take it you never solved a mystery before you came here and figured out who murdered your sister?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jill fell silent. Betsy sighed and closed her eyes. The car was warm, the seat comfortable, Jill the kind of driver who inspires confidence. Before she realized it, she dozed off.

  She was on a train at night, looking out the window into utter darkness. Suddenly a man wearing a Richard Nixon mask slammed through the door into the car, and shot the woman in the first seat with a silenced gun. The woman slumped sideways, and the man ran away, but everyone else in the car immediately turned to Betsy. One said, “Who was that masked man?” in a serious voice, which at first terrified Betsy because she had no idea, then amused her so much she started to giggle, which woke her up.

  “What?” asked Jill.

  “Stupid dream. Tried to be a nightmare, didn’t quite make it.” Betsy yawned and looked out the car window. They were on a section of freeway lined with concrete walls, some striated, some smooth. The marked sections had remnants of vines clinging to them, demonstrating the purpose of the striation. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Six-ninety-four East, about to cross the Mississippi. Not even out of the Cities yet.”

  “How do we get to the North Shore?” asked Betsy. “Follow the Mississippi? It originates in Lake Superior, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it starts as a brook you can step across in the upper central part of the state. But the North Shore does refer to Lake Superior. We drive about a hundred miles north to Duluth, then follow the Superior shoreline northeast to Grand Marais, then sixteen more miles to Naniboujou.”