The Drowning Spool (A Needlecraft Mystery) Read online

  “How long? Is it really old? Like an antique?”

  Betsy leaned in for a closer look. She didn’t do Hardanger—she found its serious demand that every stitch be done perfectly intimidating. She thought it hard to believe the assessment by advanced stitchers that the craft was relaxing. But she’d seen a lot of it, and had sold a lot of copies of Janice Love’s book on advanced Hardanger, Fundamentals Made Fancy, so she knew complex work like this when she saw it. She recognized the pattern of one repeating segment as Spider in a Lacy Web, and another as the wonderfully complex and delicate Edelweiss. Geometric shapes made of satin stitch were set among the open work and were strong contrasts to the nubbly Dove’s Eyes. There were a lot of variants of Dove’s Eyes, and the edging was an incredibly complex broad strip of open work called Spider Web Flowers, in which the tiny cut-out squares were linked in rows and filled with tightly wrapped threads and Greek crosses. The whole thing made an intelligent repeating pattern that was simply ravishing.

  “It’s impossible to tell just from the embroidery itself,” Betsy said. “On the other hand, the sheet is badly worn, so it’s likely old. Perhaps more than fifty years. I don’t see a single bit of damage to the Hardanger, but work of this sort is often amazingly sturdy. It’s sad that the last owner of this didn’t realize that it could be moved to trim a new bedsheet.”

  “I was going to put it on a table runner.”

  “That would also be a good use for it. Then visitors to your home could admire it.”

  Betsy and the customer discussed how best to clean the Hardanger and safely cut away the ruined bedsheet. Then Betsy took one of her biggest plastic bags and began folding the sheet into it.

  Meanwhile, the customer looked around at the displays in the shop. She said, “I used to knit my sister a sweater every Christmas, but I haven’t knit anything for such a long time.” She paused. Then, “So long as I’m here,” she murmured, and the wistful look in her eyes turned to yearning. She walked over to touch the skeins of spring pastel yarns heaped in baskets. She hesitated a long while over the ones on sale, then picked out three skeins of wool so pale a yellow it was almost cream, another skein in earthy brown, a simple sweater pattern, and two pairs of steel knitting needles. She paid by check, and with an abstracted, smiling good-bye, as if already knitting and purling in her mind, she left the shop.

  Six

  THE next morning, Jill was standing at the door of Crewel World, waiting for Betsy to unlock it. The coffee was just starting to perk, filling the space with its warm, dark fragrance. Betsy had turned on the Bose, tuned at a low volume to a light jazz station. She unlocked the door to let her friend in. Jill paused for a few moments just inside the door, listening with pleasure. She was of Scandinavian descent, not the least intimidated by below-zero temperatures—which it was outside. But still, she was clearly enjoying the comforting warmth of the shop.

  “Sometimes,” she murmured, “on cold, starry nights in Minnesota, if you stand really still and listen really hard . . . you’ll freeze solid.”

  Betsy was surprised into laughter. “Is it that bad out?” she asked.

  “Of course not. It’s nearly the middle of February, the worst is over. Every morning the sun comes up earlier, and it goes down later in the evening. The sparrows are already squabbling and I expect snowdrops under our front window any second.”

  Betsy laughed again, because the sparrows were still silent and snow still rose nearly up to Jill’s windowsills. “So, wassup, girl?” she said, mimicking the slangy vernacular of youth.

  “I have some news for you. Well, more for Bershada and Ethan and his parents. Lars, among others, talked with Mike yesterday and Mike said something very interesting about the autopsy performed on that body in the pool.” Mike was Detective Sergeant Mike Malloy of the Excelsior Police Department.

  As had happened before, Betsy felt as if her ears had grown large, hairy points, which she swiveled in Jill’s direction. “What did Lars tell you?”

  “Two things. The first and most interesting is that when the medical examiner opened the victim’s body, she smelled lavender.”

  Betsy blinked. “What?”

  “Lavender. As in bath salts. As in, the victim was drowned in a bathtub, not a therapy pool. There were bath salts in her lungs.”

  After a startled moment, Betsy smiled. The smile began at the tips of her toes and broadened as it flowed upward to her face. “Well then! What great news! So she wasn’t drowned in the therapy pool! And that means Ethan isn’t to blame!”

  Jill nodded. “She must have been brought there after she was dead. Probably to make it look as if she drowned there, not at home in her tub.”

  “Or in someone else’s tub,” amended Betsy. “But never mind, Ethan would hardly bring a dead body along with him to work. So he’s cleared.”

  “Well, he’s cleared of killing her and of bringing her to Watered Silk. But not of letting someone else bring her in.”

  That dashed icy water on Betsy’s glee. “Ah, I see. Yes. Well, that’s a puzzle yet to be solved. But we progress. What’s the other thing Mike said?”

  Jill said soberly, “She was ten weeks pregnant.”

  They looked at each other in shared heaviness of heart. Here was a double human tragedy. Betsy said softly, “Oh, how awful! Two lives lost—did she know, do you think?”

  “I would think so. Ten weeks, that’s two and a half months. Unless she was totally oblivious, she would know.”

  “Husband?” asked Betsy.

  “She had never been married.”

  “Was she seeing someone?”

  “That hasn’t been established yet, or at least Mike didn’t say anything to Lars about it.” Lars was Sergeant Lars Larson, Jill’s husband and an officer on Excelsior’s small police department. Since Teddi, the drowned woman, was from Excelsior, Mike Malloy was now involved in the investigation.

  “How was she identified? By her parents?”

  “Her roommates had reported her missing and gave Mike a link to her Facebook account, and the photo on her Facebook page was a match. Her parents have been notified—they live out of state.”

  “That pregnancy could be a motive, couldn’t it?”

  “Sure. That’s probably where Mike is focused.”

  “But now we know Ethan didn’t kill her, right? This will be such a relief to Bershada and his parents! Or do they know? Has anyone from the police spoken to him?”

  “I don’t know. This changes the way this case has been handled up till now, but I don’t know who is telling who what.”

  An hour later the phone rang, and Godwin picked up. “Crewel World, Godwin speaking, how may I help you?” He cocked his head, listening. “Certainly. Hold on.”

  Godwin called Betsy to the phone. “It’s Thistle Livingstone.”

  Betsy took the phone. “Hello, Thistle. What can I do for you?”

  “Wilma Carter has asked me to ask you if you can get her a counted cross-stitch pattern called A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden.”

  “Does Wilma do counted cross-stitch?”

  “She told me she does. Or did.”

  “Hmm,” said Betsy. Perhaps that was a skill she had retained. “I don’t think I know of that pattern. I don’t suppose she knows the designer or manufacturer?”

  “She didn’t mention one.”

  “Let me do a search. I’ll call you back, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  Betsy was pretty sure the pattern wasn’t called A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden, but she did an online search anyway. She wasn’t surprised when it didn’t come up.

  “Goddy,” she called at last, “did you ever hear of a cross- stitch pattern called something like A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden?”

  Godwin came out from the back of the shop, where he’d been putting a new shipment of patterns into a display. His expression was thoughtful. “‘A Psychic’—are you sure?”

  “I’m sure that’s not the name of the pattern, but it’s tickli
ng my memory somehow.”

  “Try Psyche,” said Godwin. “Isn’t there a pattern about Psyche and Cupid’s garden?”

  “Ah, you’ve got it! And so, I think, do we.” She called up the shop’s inventory, and sure enough there was the pattern, already in the shop. Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden was a big, elaborate pattern, 188 stitches wide by 300 stitches tall, done in 92 shades of DMC floss, designed by Abracraftdabra. It was a close copy of a painting by Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse, and depicted a woman in a pink, sort-of-ancient-Greek gown, pushing open a wooden door in a cut-stone wall into a garden with a temple in the background. The detail was exquisite. It was not something Betsy would even attempt to do herself.

  “Want me to kit it up?” Godwin asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Surely Wilma couldn’t stitch this. Maybe it was something she had done before she became ill, and she was just remembering it.

  “Who’s it for?”

  “Wilma Carter. She apparently used to do fine needlework. I know people with Alzheimer’s sometimes retain old skills, but whether she is one of them, I don’t know. I feel bad about her botching the class on punch needle, so I’d like to do this favor for her. But let’s not pull the floss for it until I make sure it’s something she can do.” The chart was only twelve dollars—twenty in large-print format—but ninety-two skeins of DMC floss would bring the price up to something like a hundred and fifty dollars.

  Betsy put the large-print version into the attaché case she took to the stitching class. She wanted to talk with Wilma.

  Then she called Bershada and invited her to meet for lunch at Sol’s Deli, right next door.

  They sat together over thick sandwiches of three kinds of lunch meat and two kinds of cheese. Betsy asked, “Have you heard the autopsy results?”

  “Have they got results? What do they say?”

  “The woman, whose name is Teddi Wahlberger, didn’t drown in the therapy pool, but in a bathtub full of lavender-scented bubbles.”

  Bershada put down her sandwich hastily, as if fearful of dropping it in her surprise and confusion. “What?” she said.

  “She drowned in a tub of scented bath salts. The medical examiner smelled lavender during the autopsy and found traces of bath salts in her lungs. Teddi wasn’t drowned in the Watered Silk pool but somewhere else, and then brought to the pool.”

  “But . . . why?”

  “That’s not known yet. My theory is that she drowned—or was drowned—in a bathtub, and someone wanted it to look like she drowned somewhere else.”

  Bershada shook her head as if to clear it, the frown still in place. “Why would someone want it to look like she drowned at Watered Silk?”

  “I don’t think Watered Silk was chosen on purpose. A lake or river would have been fine. But there isn’t any open water this time of year, so she was brought to the therapy pool.”

  Bershada’s brain kicked into gear. “That means it had to be someone who knew about that pool. I mean, it’s not like they advertise on television and radio that they have a pool.”

  Betsy nodded. “And it must have been someone who knew Ethan would let them in.”

  “No! Girl, Ethan did not know anything about a drowned woman in that pool! He was as surprised as he could be over it! He never saw that woman before, he never let her or a friend of his or a stranger into the complex that night, he swears to it!”

  Betsy studied her friend’s adamant face. “Okay, I believe that’s exactly what he told you.”

  “Betsy, what he told me is the truth!”

  “Did he let anyone through the front door that night?”

  Bershada started to say no, but thought better of it. “I don’t think so. Maybe. Why?”

  “Maybe the person responsible works at Watered Silk. Or lives there. No, wait a minute, employees and residents have their own keys.” Betsy rubbed the underside of her nose vigorously. “I wonder if they’ve reviewed the camera tapes that record activity by the doors. Probably, probably. But why didn’t they find something to help them with this? After all, that woman didn’t come up out of a drain or down a chimney; she came through a door in somebody’s arms.”

  “Or in a laundry cart,” said Bershada.

  “Laundry cart?”

  “You’ve seen them, they’re big things, made of white canvas, with little bitty wheels at their four corners. Of course Watered Silk has them, right? A body would fit into one of them, if it was folded up good. And you could cover it up with laundry.”

  An image swam up before Betsy’s eyes. She’d seen those very carts in hospitals and hotels.

  “Sure!” she said. “Of course! Someone could wheel that thing in one of the back doors and no one would think a thing of it! Bershada, you’re a genius!”

  Seven

  SERGEANT Malloy was brought into the august presence of Ms. Felicia Colt, administrator of Watered Silk. The office, on the first floor and overlooking an attractive walled garden with a tall fountain in its middle, was large enough to accommodate a mahogany conference table with six chairs and a big antique wooden desk.

  Ms. Colt, on the other hand, was almost a little person. Probably not quite five feet tall, she had dark hair in a Dutch bob, a white silk blouse with a big collar, and a black suit that fit her tiny frame exquisitely. She came out from behind her desk to put a tiny hand into Malloy’s big one. Her grip was warm and surprisingly firm. Her voice, when she spoke, was equally firm, with a hint of warmth—a good voice for a person in charge.

  “I hope I can be of use to you in your investigation,” she said, taking him in approvingly with her fine dark eyes. “Please, take a seat.” She went back behind her desk and managed to climb up into her executive chair in a single graceful movement. Its seat was high enough that she did not appear dwarfed by the size of her desk.

  Mike chose one of the comfortable leather chairs facing her desk. “Thank you for agreeing to see me with such little notice,” he began.

  “This is a terrible thing that has happened to us,” she replied. “We need to get to a solution quickly so we can move on.”

  “We would like to solve this quickly,” he said. “But I personally am not in favor of making an arrest just so we can declare it solved.”

  “You don’t think, then, that Ethan Smart had anything to do with Ms. Wahlberger’s death?” she asked him.

  “No, ma’m, I don’t. It is not possible that he let someone into the pool. For one thing, he didn’t have a key to the pool room door. For another, a quick review of the tapes from the camera that night do not show anyone coming in the main entrance carrying a body or pushing a laundry cart or dragging a trunk big enough to contain a body.”

  “So whoever brought that woman’s body into the building must have come through one of the other entrances,” said Ms. Colt.

  “Well, we are reviewing the other tapes from cameras trained on the other doors, but so far we haven’t seen anyone coming in with a body-size bundle or container. Is there an entrance not guarded by a camera?”

  She shook her dark head. “No.”

  “Something on the roof, perhaps?”

  “No. There used to be a big entrance down in the machine room, back when this place was a silk factory, but it’s been boarded up for decades—since long before we came here.”

  Malloy nodded. He had seen that pair of heavy double doors blocking the entrance from the alley, high and broad enough for a truck to drive through. The beams holding them closed were huge, fastened with iron bands, dirt and dust ground into their grain. They had obviously not been used in many years. It would take a week of work to get them to open or—if someone was in a hurry, with a body to get rid of—a dozen sticks of dynamite.

  “So how do you think they got the body of Ms. Wahlberger into the pool?” Ms. Colt asked.

  “I think if we could find that out, we’d know who to arrest.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Whoever brought the body
here must have known about the pool. In fact they were so familiar with the place, they knew a way in that even you don’t know about. That means somebody here is connected to the murder. Somebody here, an employee or a resident, is either the murderer or knows who the murderer is. What I’d like you to do is get out your list of employees and your list of residents and run your eyes slowly down them. See if a name doesn’t jump out at you, even a little bit.”

  “All right, I will do that, and I’ll contact you if a name does leap to my attention.”

  “Thank you.” Malloy stood. “Meanwhile,” he said, daringly, because it was really none of his business, “you might reconsider the firing of Ethan Smart.”

  “I will take your recommendation under advisement,” she said, in a chilly voice. Clearly she was offended at his putting his oar in where it did not belong. But maybe it would have an effect.

  • • •

  ON Wednesday Betsy came a few minutes early to her water aerobics class, this time to have a quick talk with the instructor, Pam, standing short and slim in her Speedo swimsuit at the deep end of the pool.

  “What are you doing right after class?” Betsy asked.

  “Working out some routines for special-needs clients. Why?”

  “Could I talk with you for just a little while? Maybe fifteen minutes or so?”

  “What about?”

  “Finding the body of Teddi Wahlberger.”

  Pam literally took a step back, and her eyebrows lifted. “What makes you think I’d answer any questions about that?”

  “I’ve been asked by a member of Ethan Smart’s family to look into the circumstances of her being brought to the pool.”

  Pam looked slantwise at Betsy and said accusingly, “You’re not a police officer.”

  “No, I do this as a private citizen.”

  “A PI? I thought you owned a shop that sells embroidery stuff.”