Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_04 Read online

  When he’d finished and the couple went up the hallway beside the staircase, she said, “The room at the top of the stairs from here has a fireplace, right?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Is it painted green?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s in there?”

  James checked his register and said, “Frank Owen.”

  “By himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come with me a minute,” she said, unconsciously using her cop voice, and started back into the dining room. James, frowning, hustled to catch up.

  “What’s this about?” he asked, and she explained Betsy’s mistake.

  When they got back to their table, Jill said to Betsy, “The fireplace room in the east wing has been reserved by a man as a single. No wife or significant other along.”

  James said, “Mr. Owen used to be married to a woman who might match the description Ms. Devonshire gave, but—”

  Betsy interrupted, “They came here on their honeymoon.”

  James’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Yes, that’s right. That was before we bought Naniboujou, but they told me about it, said they were glad we could take it over and keep it open.”

  “This woman I saw was his ex-wife. She’s here, or she was here. She said they were going to try for a reconciliation. She’s the woman I saw dead.”

  “But he didn’t reserve for two,” James said.

  “Maybe she came to surprise him here,” said Betsy.

  Jill asked, “How did she know he was here to surprise?”

  “How should I know?” demanded Betsy, exasperated. Heads at nearby tables turned toward them, and Betsy said, more quietly, “Maybe he always comes here this time of year.”

  They both looked at James, who shrugged and said, “He comes up two or three times a year, usually in the summer, but yes, also in winter. They used to do a lot of cross-country skiing, until his wife got sick. I think he’s taking it up again, in fact.”

  “Sick?” echoed Betsy, and Jill remembered Betsy’s description of a very thin woman.

  “She’s got a lot of allergies,” said James. “It started with something she came in contact with as a nurse, and it kind of spread in every direction. She’s allergic to pollen, dog dander, pork, dairy products, wheat, and I don’t know what all else. She had to give up all her sports. And he gave up doing them, too, to take care of her. But eventually they divorced, and so now he’s going back to skiing, at least.”

  Jill said to Betsy, “But didn’t you say she went out for a cigarette? Isn’t smoke one of the big things people with allergies stay away from?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” conceded Betsy.

  “Mrs. Owen smokes, or used to,” said James. “We’re smoke-free, and she used to complain about having to stand outside to have her cigarettes.”

  “Yes, she said that,” said Betsy.

  James continued. “I don’t know if she still smokes; after their divorce she stopped coming; she hasn’t been here in years.”

  Jill had nothing else to ask, so he went away. Betsy said, “Maybe we should go ask Mr. Owen what he did with his wife’s body.”

  Jill studied Betsy, her tired face with its frightened eyes. “He’ll say he hasn’t seen her, of course. If he’s murdered her, he’s not going to admit it. And if she never was here—”

  “No, she was here. Too many things fit. His room is where I saw her, and the description matches, according to Mr. Ramsey. Unless I’m psychic, and I don’t think I am. Maybe if we talk to him he’ll say of course she was here, he found her ill in his room and took her to the hospital. I’d like that; I can stop worrying that I’m going crazy.” Betsy looked around the dining room. “Maybe he’s here, having dinner.” Among the two-dozen or so women were three or four men.

  “No, I asked James to point him out, and he said Mr. Owen wasn’t in the dining room.”

  “What does he look like?” asked Betsy.

  “Beats me, I didn’t think to ask. All right, let’s go.”

  They went out into the small lobby, and feeling James’s eyes on them all the way to the first landing, went up the narrow wooden stairs to the second floor.

  Again there was that feeling of funny angles as they went around a not-ninety-degree turn and across the oddly shaped landing and came into the painted hallway. There, an echo of their own hallway, was the door set at yet another angle. After a moment, Betsy became aware of Jill’s questioning regard, so she nodded. This was, in fact, the hallway she had entered, thinking it led to her and Jill’s room.

  Jill walked to the angled door and knocked brusquely.

  A man’s voice inside said, “Come in.”

  Jill turned the knob—the door was not locked—and opened the door. She felt Betsy close behind as they went in.

  The room was painted a medium green. The windows and four-poster bed were the same as in their own room, down to the paisley pattern on the comforter.

  There was nobody on the bed. A slim man with thick, coarse graying blond hair and a heavy mustache was sitting at the little desk, a half-eaten slice of pizza in one hand. The room was redolent of cheese, sausage, and spiced tomato. “It’s from Sven and Ole’s in Grand Marais,” he said, lifting the slice a little. “I always get one of their pizzas when I’m up here. May I ask why you’re here?”

  “Where’s your wife?” asked Betsy.

  “I don’t have a wife,” he replied.

  “Are you Frank Owen?” asked Jill.

  Betsy said, “Eddie Owen, you mean.”

  The man said, “My name is Frank Owen. Who are you?”

  “My name’s Jill Cross and I’m with the Excelsior Police Department.”

  “Kind of a long way from home, aren’t you?” Owen’s voice was quiet and warm, with no hint of tension and only a little puzzlement.

  “I talked with your wife earlier today,” said Betsy—and was disappointed when there was no guilty start, only a mildly surprised look—“and she told me she was here with you in hope of a reconciliation.”

  Owen’s mustache shifted just a little, in either a grimace or a little smile. “She’s not here, I haven’t seen her.”

  “Has she talked to you about reconciling?” asked Jill.

  He nodded. “We’ve tried it, several times. It never works. It took me a long time to realize it was never going to work. Are you two friends of hers?”

  Betsy shook her head and Jill said, “So you did at least talk to her.”

  “Not today.” Owen shook his head and put down his slice of pizza, accepting that he wasn’t going to finish eating it anytime soon. “I wouldn’t dream of telling Sharon I was coming up here, and I certainly didn’t invite her to stay with me. She did call a couple of weeks ago, hinting she wanted to see me, but I wouldn’t agree to that.” His voice was firm, his blue eyes almost too guileless.

  “Where were you this afternoon?” asked Jill.

  He looked at her for somewhat longer than it should have taken him to remember his whereabouts that recently. But there was no annoyance in his face and voice when he replied patiently, “I got here around noon and had lunch in the dining room. I came up to my room and unpacked, then lay down for something over half an hour, maybe an hour. Then I got up and drove to Grand Marais. I did a little shopping—my daughter collects Inuit art, and there’s a gift shop in town that sells it—but I didn’t buy anything. I shopped for a new set of ski poles and then took a nice run on one of the Pincushion trails, came back to town, bought this pizza, came back here, and was having a quiet little supper when you two knocked on my door.” He looked at Betsy. “Who’s she, by the way?”

  “She’s with me,” Jill said, and hoped Betsy wouldn’t add anything.

  Betsy didn’t, but Owen asked her, “What else did she say?”

  Betsy shrugged. “Not much. Does she smoke?”

  Owen grimaced. “Yeah. She keeps trying to stop, her doctor’s all over her about it. She’s allergic to damn near everything
else, you’d think she’d be allergic to tobacco.”

  “Are her allergies serious?” asked Jill.

  Owen nodded and sighed. “She lives on lamb and a special diet supplement without soy or dairy in it, she can only wear silk or cotton, and despite being very careful she’s in the hospital two or three damn times a year—” He cut himself off, having grown heated and abruptly realizing it. “It’s a damn shame,” he said, more quietly. “When we first got married we used to go rock climbing, cross-country skiing, adventuring, and run marathons. She was great, I had trouble keeping up with her. Then she got this latex allergy—she’s a nurse, it was the gloves she had to wear—and it was like dominos falling. I tried to be helpful, I tried to keep up with all the new rules, but she got to be such a witch about it—” He blew lengthily through his mustache, cooling his temper again. “It was at least partly my fault, I just couldn’t go along with the constant changes in the rules.” He looked longingly at his pizza. “At least now I can have things like this in the house again.” He smiled up at Jill and Betsy. “And peanut butter. You wouldn’t believe how much I missed peanut butter.”

  Betsy asked, “Does your ex-wife have a black or dark blue coat, kind of shiny? And a big black purse?”

  “I have no idea.”

  A few minutes later, on their way up to their room, Jill said, “What’s this about a shiny coat?”

  “I suddenly remember seeing a shiny coat, a full-length one, draped across a chair when I came up and found Sharon’s body. It was some dark color.” Betsy was frowning, trying to remember. She hadn’t of course, been really looking at anything but the body. “Or maybe it was the black lining I saw, like it was turned or folded so the lining was showing. And there was something else, a big black purse, I think. Both of them were on the chair Frank Owen was sitting in this time. What do you think about Mr. Owen?”

  “He’s mad at her, which is understandable. He married an athlete and wound up with an invalid. Tough bounce for both of them.”

  “I wonder how long ago they divorced. When I talked to Mrs. Owen, it sounded as if it hadn’t been long, but I got the feeling from him that it’s been a while.”

  Jill asked, because Betsy had an uncanny feel for such things, “So what do you think? Did he murder her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s Sharon Owen’s body I saw—though whose else could it be? Did you notice he didn’t slip once?”

  “Slip on what?”

  “He always referred to her in the present tense.”

  5

  The bed was big, so each woman had enough room to spread a little without danger of encountering a leg or something even more intimate. Nevertheless, Betsy lay on her side close to the edge and told herself firmly not to sprawl.

  She composed herself to sleep, but it wouldn’t come. The napping in the car, and the nap in the lounge, combined to make her wakeful. Plus there was the uncomfortable thought that she might wake in the night, become aware of someone else in the bed, and think it was Hal, her ex-husband. And forgetting all that had happened the last few months—no, that was ridiculous. Still, it had been a long time… Whoa! Where that might lead had her very wide awake indeed.

  Jill, on the other hand, was already asleep. Must have a clear conscience, thought Betsy with a wry smile. She slipped carefully out of bed, but stood a moment, unwilling to turn on a light. It was dark in the room, and there was no noise out in the hall. Betsy thought, I’ll getmy knitting bag and go into the bathroom—Oops. She’d left the bag down in the lounge.

  She pressed the button on the side of her Indiglo watch. It was ten-thirty, not very late. On the other hand, things were scheduled to begin early tomorrow morning. Perhaps everyone had gone to bed. She stepped carefully across the room, feeling her way with hands and toes. Finding the door, she leaned against it, listening. Silence.

  She felt her way back to the bed and the robe at the foot of it. She loved her robe, a real antique of gray flannel with broad maroon stripes. It was much too big for her, covering her ankles and crossing deeply in front. She liked to think it had once belonged to Oliver Hardy. She tied it on, pushed her feet into her felt slippers, then went on noiseless feet to the door again, and out.

  The hallway was dimly lit, the stairs down to the dining room a little brighter. The dining room itself was an immense dim cavern, its sole source of light the lounge, which was brightly lit. There were about twenty stitchers at work in there. Betsy paused outside the doorway. The stitchers were all dressed, and here she was in night-clothes.

  No, wait, there was a woman in a velour nightgown. And there, another woman in a lovely peignoir. So now Betsy felt frumpish.

  And then she felt annoyed. She wanted her knitting, it was in that room, she wasn’t naked, so why shouldn’t she go get it? She straightened her spine and walked in.

  Some of the women smiled at Betsy, but most just gave her an incurious glance and continued with their work and talk. “I call them CASITAs, Can’t Stand IT Anymore,” one woman with flashing blue eyes was saying. “You know, an acre of blue or sixteen yards of backstitch. I keep them in a big drawer.”

  The woman she was talking to laughed. “CASITAs, I like that, Melly! I keep mine at the bottom of the pile of UFOs, hoping I’ll never work my way down to them.”

  Betsy found her bag sitting on one of the coffee tables. She retrieved it and made her escape.

  Back upstairs, she opened the door to the room as quietly as she could, and found the light on and Jill sitting up with a magazine. “If you weren’t back in another two minutes, I was going to come looking for you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” apologized Betsy. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You couldn’t have helped it, I’m a light sleeper,” said Jill. “What’s up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, and then I remembered I left my knitting downstairs. I was going to sit up awhile in the lounge, but there’s a whole group holding a session.”

  “Well, this is a stitch-in. There are women in attendance who will get maybe an hour of sleep a night. James will probably lose money just on the coffee. But I’m glad you’re back, I want to show you something.” Jill closed the magazine and handed it to Betsy. “Here, look at the cover.”

  It was American Needlework Magazine, and the cover featured a piece of linen with a bouquet of cross-stitched pansies surrounded by hardanger squares. “I brought it because I’ve been thinking of trying hardanger,” Betsy said. “Kate does it, you know.”

  “Yes, but that’s not what I mean. Look at the designer, her picture is up in the corner.”

  There was an inset in the upper left corner of the cover, a head-and-shoulders photo of a painfully slender blond woman wearing a blue and white Scandinavian sweater with silver fastenings. The cover announced an interview with Kaye of Escapade Design, and an original pattern designed by her for the magazine’s readers.

  “Oh, my,” said Betsy.

  “She’s even wearing the same sweater you described, down to the pewter fasteners.”

  “Yes, I see that,” said Betsy. She opened the magazine and found the interview with Kaye and skimmed the first few paragraphs. A larger photo of Ms. Kaye in a sunlit room accompanied the article—the cover shot had been cropped from this photo. Betsy said, “I read this article. When I read about the mystery teacher, I remembered Kaye lives in Duluth and was hoping it would be her.” The literature had announced a class but, hoping to stir up interest, said the nature of the class and its teacher would be revealed at the stitch-in.

  “See? You were hoping she’d be here, and so you dreamed she was. And because you’ve been having bad dreams, you dreamed she was murdered.”

  Betsy sighed and closed the magazine. “Now I do feel like an idiot. Poor Mr. Owen, what he must have thought of us! I’m sorry, Jill, dragging you into this—but it seemed so real!”

  “I’m sure it did. Well, don’t worry about it. I’m going back to sleep. You?”

  “Yes, all
of a sudden I’m tired.”

  And this time, despite her concerns, despite the naps, despite a fear of nightmares, she’d barely closed her eyes before she was asleep.

  But no matter how many times she fled up the stairs, she always found herself in the lobby. James was behind the counter, his friendly eyes gone cold and his smile evil. Betsy would make some feeble excuse and flee up the stairs, only to step back into the lobby at the top. She knew she’d been going up these stairs for a while. And she knew that one of these times he was going to bring out a great big knife and stab her with it.

  But there was nothing else she could do but run despairingly up the stairs.

  Here she was again—and there was James, and this time he had a Crocodile Dundee knife in his hand. He put it crosswise in his mouth, like a pirate, so he could use both hands to climb over the counter. She turned toward the stairs. But her legs were moving slowly, as if mired in molasses.

  She yelled and struggled, but he was beside her, saying her name.

  He grabbed her by the arm, she struggled to pull free—and someone had taken her by the shoulder and was saying her name.

  “No! Help, no, leggo!” Betsy said, or shouted.

  “Betsy, Betsy, wake up, wake up!”

  Jill’s voice.

  It was all right, it was Jill.

  “Oh! Oh, my goodness, wow! Gosh, what a nightmare! Thank you, Jill!” Betsy sat up. Her hands were trembling, her heart was racing. “I thought… I thought James was going to get me that time.”

  “James?”

  “Yes, he was behind the counter in the lobby, and the lobby was at the top of the stairs, or the bottom, it didn’t seem to matter.”

  “I see.” Jill’s tone was very dry.

  Betsy shook her head. “Well, I guess you had to be there.” She lay back down. “Whew!” she said. Then, “Sorry about that. Was I very loud?”

  “More thrashing than noisy. You mentioned stairs, so I guess that’s what it was, climbing stairs.”

  “Yes, lots and lots of stairs, but none of them got me away.”