Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_01 Page 10

  “Maybe, she got home at ten and I got home at eleven. But she was the kind who takes off her good clothes right away. She would put on something casual to lounge around in, or her pajamas if it was close to bedtime. But she was wearing her good clothes—” Betsy paused to swallow, then shook her head determinedly and continued, “So she hadn’t been home more than a couple of minutes. Now, suppose she heard someone breaking in downstairs and decided to go down and get a description for the police. Apart from that being one of the dumber things you can do, it’s beyond belief that she’d bring a cat along. Even if she did open the door and Sophie walked out, you’d think she’d have got in front of her and herded her back inside. Sophie’s a good cat, she lets herself be herded. Anyone with brains would have done that; you don’t want a big white cat going ahead and letting the burglar know someone’s coming, or hanging around your ankles and tripping you, or getting in the way in case you have to hurry back to the apartment and call the cops. Which is what she would have done in the first place, so I don’t understand why she ended up down here to begin with!” Betsy had been getting more heated in her argument as she became more convinced of its soundness.

  She turned away from Jill’s doubting look and walked toward the back. She paused by the big heap of yarn, floss, packets of thread wax, yarn organizers, scissors, magnets, and bead nabbers, leavened with counted cross-stitch graphs, needlework books and magazines, then turned to reach for the nearest upholstered chair and put it back on its feet facing the mess. She sat down and reached for a fistful.

  “This is just terrible!” she continued in the same angry voice, lifting her arm high and wriggling it to shake a packet of soft thimbles off. Soft thimbles belonged on the other side of the back area, with the counted cross-stitch stuff. So things weren’t just tumbled off shelves, they were kicked or even carried around and dropped. “It must have taken the burglar hours to get things this tangled up!” she grumbled.

  She looked again at the heap, dropped everything, and said in an entirely different voice, “Now, that’s really crazy.”

  “What is?” Jill had come to turn the other chair over.

  “All this stuff piled up here.” Betsy gestured at the mess in front of her. “If he was doing this for hours before Margot came in and stopped him, why didn’t she notice it when she came home? Because there would have been a light on. He couldn’t do this thorough a job in the dark.”

  “Flashlight,” said Jill.

  Betsy thought, then nodded. “Okay, flashlight. He sees her shape as she passes the window and turns it off. But how about this? When they brought me in to identify Margot, she was there.” Betsy pointed toward the back wall, where there was a dark stain on the carpet, which until now she had almost succeeded in not noticing. “And see the edge to the way this stuff is heaped up? It looked that night as if she’d been buried in it, and they had to uncover her.”

  Jill nodded. “They did, Mike told me that. And?”

  “So that would mean he kept on trashing the place after he killed her, dumping stuff on top of her. If he was angry there was nothing to steal, wouldn’t killing the owner be enough? I mean, doesn’t hitting someone over the head sort of take away anger and make you start to worry about going far away really fast?”

  For the first time Jill really looked interested.

  “No,” Betsy continued, “he was looking for something, that’s why he tore the place up. I think he came in here specifically looking for something. And he killed Margot and then kept on looking.”

  “But what?” said Jill. “There isn’t anything secret or hidden in the store. Margot kept her valuables upstairs. Are you telling me she had some kind of secret?”

  “If it was a secret, why would she tell me?”

  Jill said, mildly exasperated, “If she did have a secret, she wouldn’t go hiding an important clue to it in her shop, where people come and go all the time.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know it was a clue.”

  Now Jill was totally back to disbelief. “Yeah, right; Margot had a secret, and she had a clue to it she didn’t know was a clue; nevertheless she hid this clue she didn’t know she had in her store. But someone knew she had it and that it was hidden in here. That sounds like a plot for the worst mystery novel ever written.”

  But Jill’s sarcastic tone only fed Betsy’s stubborn certainty that there was something wrong with the burglar theory.

  On the other hand, she didn’t know what else to offer as proof. She said nothing, and got serious about picking up and sorting.

  Jill apparently didn’t know what else to say, either, and went back out front to work. The two continued sorting wool and cotton yarn, thread, and floss by color, picking up canvases and fabric and smoothing them on the table, finding magazines that were only rumpled instead of torn, putting crushed baskets into a pile, sorting thimbles (soft and metal), knitting needles and crochet hooks on the desk, and wrapping loose yarn around their hands. At two, they heard someone knock at the front door.

  Jill went to unlock and open the door, and stand back to let three women and their umbrellas come in. They were middle-aged ladies in slacks, complicated sweaters, and bright head scarves, each carrying a bulging canvas tote bag. They stood inside the shop, staring with dismayed faces at the wreckage.

  Jill introduced them as “Patty, Alice, Kate,” and said they were from the Monday Bunch.

  Betsy came to say an uncomfortable hello. She was in no mood to host a gathering, and in any case didn’t know what was expected of her with this group.

  “We are so dreadfully sorry about Margot,” said one of them, starting them all off on expressions of sympathy.

  Betsy didn’t know what to say to that, either. “Thank you,” was all she could think of, said over and over.

  “Well,” said the stoutest of them at last, putting her bag and purse on the table. “Where do you want us to start?”

  “How about you go up in front, Pat,” said Jill immediately, “and pick up all those buttons and the bead packets. Put the whole packets into this basket, and the loose beads into this jar. And you, Kate, sit down here and I’ll bring you the loose yarn as I gather it, and you can start making balls. If it’s dirty, set it aside—here’s a wastebasket. And Alice, come over here, we’ve got all this perle cotton on the floor, see what you can salvage.” Jill went back to rescuing canvases and Betsy to sorting and smoothing graphs. With five people working, in half an hour there was a noticeable difference in the shop.

  Betsy was glad she was in the back of the shop so her inability to contribute to the conversation going on up front wasn’t as noticeable. The women discussed the best catalog source for patterns, how old the grandchildren had to be before teaching them to stitch, whether or not aida came in twenty-five count, what to do when your knitting yarn starts to kink, needleworkers who had shamefully messy backs on their projects, overdyed versus watercolors, small laying tools—until Jill (apparently hearing the silence from the back of the room) said, “Can’t we talk about something besides needlework?” which surprised them as much as it gratified Betsy.

  Obediently, one said, “I saw they caught that man who stole that painting.”

  “What painting?” asked another.

  “A famous one. It was being delivered to Sotheby’s New York for an auction, and he took it right off the truck. A Monet?”

  “It was a Manet,” said Betsy, glad at last to be able to contribute. “And they found the painting first, which led them to the thief. Apparently the buyer reneged.”

  There was a silence. Betsy looked around the shelves to find them all looking at her inquiringly. “Margot wrote to me about it,” said Betsy. “She said that when a valuable painting like that disappears, it very often is stolen to order. When someone with more money than morals wants a Rembrandt or a Monet or a Rubens, he mentions it to the right person, who will arrange to steal it. In this case, the buyer got scared for some reason and backed off. So the thief had to try to get rid of i
t through a dealer, and the dealer turned him in.”

  One of the ladies said, “How interesting,” but not as if she meant it.

  They worked in an uncomfortable silence until Betsy announced she was going to start the coffee urn perking and, for good measure, go upstairs for cookies. When she got back, the women were comfortably deep into a discussion of which was the best evenweave: luguna, jobelan, or jubilee.

  Jill saw her coming and gave her an “I tried” shrug, to which Betsy replied with an “I understand” shrug back.

  The women broke off their work and came gratefully to the table to drink and eat. “Nice coffee,” said one.

  “Good cookies,” said another—kindly, because they had been bought at the bakery four days ago and there is only so much a cookie jar can do.

  “I don’t know who was responsible for that funeral, but it was quite, quite wonderful,” said one of the women.

  “I don’t think I ever—” started another.

  “Sophie’s gone missing,” interrupted Jill firmly, her eye caught by a pleading look from Betsy.

  “What?”

  “Yes, we’ve looked everywhere and we can’t find her,” said Betsy.

  The ladies stared at Betsy.

  “I’m sorry,” apologized Betsy, not sure for what.

  “Did you call the humane society?” asked one of the ladies, the one who had been rolling yarn. “That’s where they take found animals.”

  “N-no,” stammered Betsy, now aware of what she should be ashamed of.

  “Of course she didn’t, poor thing,” said Jill. “She’s had far bigger things on her mind.”

  The lady who had been rolling yarn put it down, went to the checkout desk, found the phone, and dialed a number. “I volunteer over there,” she said while waiting for someone to answer. “Hi,” she said into the phone. “We’re looking for a lost cat—yes, it’s me; hi, Merle. A lost cat. Last Wednesday, in Excelsior. A white Persian cross, pastel tortie on top of the head, along the back, and all of the tail. Big cat, close to twenty pounds, female spay, no front claws. Very friendly. No collar. Answers to Sophie and any sound that means food. Yes, I’ll hold.” She smiled at the others, and they all waited in silence. After a while she said, “Thanks,” and hung up. “No cat matching that description found.”

  There was a collective sad sigh from the Monday Bunch.

  “We can still get an ad in the weekly paper,” said the woman who had been picking up buttons and beads. “And maybe if we put up posters—is there a photo of her?”

  Betsy shrugged. “I don’t know. I could look, I guess.”

  “I’m sure there is,” said Jill; and to the bunch: “Remember those pictures Margot took at the Christmas party?”

  That brought smiles and comments.

  The humane-society volunteer said, “Give me the best one. I finally figured out how to use that scanner on my computer, and my son gave me a really nice publishing program for my birthday, so I can make up some attention-getting posters. We’ll put them up right away. Why, it wouldn’t be the same store without Sophie in it.” She looked around, saw the faces looking back, and a little silence fell. It wasn’t going to be the same no matter what, they all were thinking.

  And Betsy didn’t have the heart right then to say there wasn’t going to be a shop at all.

  9

  The shop looked almost normal, if you didn’t look too close. Jill shut off the vacuum and one of the Monday Bunch pulled the plug. It was close to five o‘clock. They had turned away six people; one, a part-time employee, was coming tomorrow to help with inventory.

  “Count up what you have left, how much is ruined, and all that,” said Jill, with a look in her eye that warned Betsy it still wasn’t time to tell anyone she planned to close the shop.

  “I think—” Betsy started to say anyway, but was interrupted by another knock at the door.

  This time it was a handsome man of about thirty with fine dark eyes. He was standing under a big black umbrella, though it had stopped raining. He was wearing a good gray suit and carrying a large briefcase that looked older than he was.

  “Hello, Mr. Penberthy,” said Jill.

  That was the name, this was Margot’s attorney. Betsy had meant to call him today but hadn’t gotten around to it.

  “Ms. Devonshire?” he said, looking at Betsy.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I was out of town, closing our cabin at the lake, and so missed this entire sad business of your sister’s death. I was shocked to hear the news, and I hope you will accept my belated condolences.” He spoke with a formality that somehow made him seem even younger.

  “Thank you,” said Betsy.

  He made his umbrella collapse. “I hope you don’t mind my just stopping by. I’ve been calling your apartment today without an answer, then someone told me you were in the shop.” He put down his briefcase while he fastened the umbrella shut. “I live right across the street from you, so I decided to stop on my way home. Perhaps you know, I was Margot’s attorney.”

  “Yes, I’d heard your name; how do you do, Mr. Penberthy?” Betsy extended her hand.

  Penberthy had a nice, warm handclasp. The Monday Bunch began to make hasty excuses for leaving. Pat—was it Pat?—went out waving the photo of Sophie and promising, “All over town by nightfall!” which made Penberthy blink after her.

  “Sophie’s missing. Margot’s cat,” explained Betsy. “They’re going to put up posters.”

  “I hope you get her back,” said Mr. Penberthy politely, and followed her through the shop and up the back stairs to the apartment.

  The lawyer declined the offer of a cup of coffee or a cookie, saying his supper was waiting.

  He took a chair at the little round table in the dining nook and opened his briefcase.

  “How much do you know about your’s sister’s financial condition?” he asked.

  “Almost nothing,” replied Betsy, and when she saw him notice how her fists were clenched on the table, she dropped them into her lap.

  “Do you know the names of any heirs besides yourself?” he asked.

  “I don’t think there are any.”

  Penberthy nodded. “Yes, Margot once told me there was only her sister. That’s the reason I could not persuade her to make a will, because everything was going to come to you in any case.” He pulled a thick file folder with the name Margot Berglund on it from his briefcase. Betsy stared at it, then at Mr. Penberthy, who was smiling.

  “This won’t take long,” he reassured her. “Most of the papers in here have to do with her ongoing quarrel with Mr. Mickels, the owner of this building.”

  “Yes, Margot told me about him, about how he’s trying to get her to move out and suing her for things. She said you were taking care of all that.” She added bitterly, “But I suppose he’s won, now.”

  “That is not the case at all,” he said.

  Betsy hastily suppressed a triumphant smile. “I don’t see how,” she said.

  “Well, first of all, there is this rather strange lease,” said Penberthy, picking quickly through the documents and finding it. It had been typed as an original on ordinary typing paper, rather than filled in as a form or properly done on legal-size paper. “This lease was, I believe, drawn up rather carelessly, probably by the original owner himself. It is my opinion that the lessor at that time felt the lessee would not stay the full term of the lease.” A glance showed she did not understand, and he started again. “That is, I don’t think the original Mr. Mickels thought your sister would stay in business very long. That’s why the rent was set so low, and that’s why there are some curious omissions in the terms of the lease. For example, he failed to include a restriction on the assignment of the lease. That’s where the current situation arises.” Again he noticed she didn’t understand.

  “Normally a lease will state that the lessee—the renter—can’t turn the lease over to someone else without the prior, written consent of the lessor—the landlord. This leas
e does not have that restriction. When your sister incorporated, she assigned the lease to the corporation, so it remains in force.”

  “What corporation?”

  “Crewel World. Your sister incorporated herself, and named two officers, herself as president and you as vice-president.”

  “She did?”

  “She didn’t tell you about this?”

  “No. When did all this happen?”

  “She began the process some weeks ago, and only signed the final papers last Wednesday.”

  “She came to see you the day she died?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Why, yes, she did die on that Wednesday evening, didn’t she? How … dreadful.”

  “I thought you were out of town that day.”

  “I left right after I finished with her, and didn’t get back until late Sunday evening. Long Lake is three hours from here, and my cabin has no phone or electricity. My grand-parents bought it in the twenties and added two rooms on to it, but preferred to get right away from modem conveniences. I spent many summers up there as a boy. When I inherited it, I kept it just as they had left it. It’s a dozen yards from the lake, and there have been loons nesting near the dock for as long as anyone can remember—” Penberthy brought himself back from his vacation with a little start. “Sorry.”

  “Margot never mentioned incorporating to me,” said Betsy.

  “Perhaps she meant to tell you once it was all done, and … and never got a chance.”

  “Yes, that might be. What time did she come to see you?”

  Penberthy took a few seconds to think about it. “Her appointment was for two o‘clock, but she was about five minutes late, which isn’t like her. She apologized, I remember.”

  “How long was she there?”

  “Not very long. Perhaps half an hour. I had closed up and was on the road before three.”

  “Did she say where she was going next?”

  “No, I assumed it was home.” Penberthy looked around. “Are you going to keep the apartment, too? It hasn’t got the same kind of lease the store has, you know.”