Buttons and Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Shooting Stars

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Monica Ferris

  CREWEL WORLD

  FRAMED IN LACE

  A STITCH IN TIME

  UNRAVELED SLEEVE

  A MURDEROUS YARN

  HANGING BY A THREAD

  CUTWORK

  CREWEL YULE

  EMBROIDERED TRUTHS

  SINS AND NEEDLES

  KNITTING BONES

  THAI DIE

  BLACKWORK

  BUTTONS AND BONES

  Anthologies

  PATTERNS OF MURDER

  SEW FAR, SO GOOD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Mary Monica Pulver Kuhfeld.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47510-2

  1. Devonshire, Betsy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Needleworkers—Fiction. 3. Women

  detectives—Minnesota—Fiction. 4. Dwellings—Remodeling—Fiction. 5. World War,

  1939-1945—Prisoners and prisons, American—Fiction. 6. Germans—Minnesota—Fiction.

  7. Prisoners of war—Fiction. 8. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3566.U47B88 2010

  813’.54—dc22 2010029310

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank Rita Mays for allowing me to use her wonderful log cabin as the model for the one purchased by Jill and Lars Larson in this book. There really is a Thunder Lake shaped like a duckling up in Cass County, Minnesota. My writers group, Crème de la Crime, again proved invaluable in their critiques of this manuscript as it was being written. The Longville and Ridgedale Public Libraries were helpful and valuable sources of information on the German POWs in the upper Midwest, as were Lucille Anderson and Helen Slagle. I want to thank Kevin Tschida, Donny “Swede” Hendrickson, and Rungwell Johanssen, coffee drinkers, for inspiring the set of characters at The Lone Wolf. Investigator Robert Stein of the Cass County Sheriff’s Department answered lots of questions. My own dentist, Dr. Wallace Lunden, told me the difference between maxillary and mandibular molars. Tom Goodpaster of Blue Heron Investigations told me how he’d go about finding a missing person. Violet Putnam McDonald and Wilma Griffin are real people, but Betsy’s conversations with them are fiction.

  One

  MINNESOTANS refer to any lake in the state as the lake. Since there are actually more than the advertised ten thousand, this can be confusing.

  “Say, I heard the Larsons went and bought that cabin up on the lake they were looking at,” Phil said during the crochet class at Crewel World. He was referring to a cabin on Thunder Lake in Cass County.

  Claudia’s mother said, “Yes, they did. They’re going to love it. A cabin up at the lake is the greatest place on earth to take kids during the summer.” She was thinking of her own happy childhood at her parents’ cabin on Long Lake near Litchfield.

  Meryl’s mother said, “We’re going up to the lake this weekend,” meaning Lake Hubert up near Brainerd.

  Betsy, owner of the shop, said nothing, although Jill had kept her abreast of the purchase, as well as the first couple of visits to the cabin.

  Betsy was co-presiding over a Saturday morning class called Crochet for Kids. Five mothers were present with six children—Claudia, nine, was there with her seven-year-old brother, Andrew.

  The children were going to make “cup covers,” double crochet roundels with lacy edges weighted with beads. They were meant to sit on top of opened cans of soft drinks or glasses of lemonade at outdoor picnics to keep the yellow jackets out of them.

  The students had begun by making a chain. Lottie was the best at that—her chain grew over a yard long and gained speed with every stitch during that part of the lesson. Andrew was close behind, but poor Chloe couldn’t even master How to Hold the Hook. Of course, she was only three and really wouldn’t have been accepted in the class at all if her mother hadn’t been a good customer and very insistent.

  Now they were learning to make a round shape in single crochet. Little fingers thrust the size G hook through loops of worsted yarn, to drape the yarn over it, snag it, and draw it through. Little tongues appeared in the corners of small mouths, and the occasional high-pitched sigh or groan or giggle was heard.

  And over the children’s heads, the adults gossiped.

  “Someone told me it’s a real log cabin, a hundred years old,” said Lottie’s mother.

  “Then they had better brace the walls,” said Chloe’s mother. “A hundred years of wood borers can turn logs into paper lace.”

  “I heard it doesn’t even have indoor plumbing,” offered Violet’s mother. “Violet, darling, try using your left finger, instead of your thumb. That’s right.” She gave the teacher a look of rebuke for making her correct Violet herself.

  Teacher Godwin, who was also the store manager, turned the look aside with a sweet smile. His method of teaching was to tell once, show once, and then wait for the pupil to ask for assistance. Violet had been managing quite well using her thumb.

  “It has indoor plumbing,” said Lottie’s mother. “Jill told me that herself just last week, although they haven’t got the water pump up and running yet.”

  “I hear the place is a wreck, that i
t stood empty for a lot of years,” said Phil. An older man, without a child or grandchild accompanying him, Phil was himself a student. A knitter and needlepointer, he was seeking to add crochet to his needle working skills, and too impatient to wait for an adult class. He was using a heavy yarn and a big hook, suitable for his thick fingers and antique vision. He annoyed Betsy by adding, “Right, Betsy?”

  She said, “I’ve heard something like that,” and gave Phil a shushing grimace.

  Betsy did not wish to be drawn into the discussion because she’d done something against one of her own rules, and helped Jill and Lars acquire the property.

  Some years back, along with the shop, she had inherited a small company called New York Motto. The company, established in Wisconsin and run by a partner, searched out and bought houses and small businesses whose owners had gone bankrupt. It could be seen as a sad thing, battening on to other peoples’ misfortune, and Betsy didn’t care to get into a discussion of it.

  It wasn’t a difficult business to run, though it took some judgment to decide what properties to buy. The trick was finding them. Not many people knew where to look for these court-ordered bankruptcy sales, as they were usually advertised in obscure legal newspapers. Betsy’s partner in New York Motto was a former paralegal who had worked for a firm specializing in monetary matters. After years of experience, her judgment was honed to a fine edge. All she needed was the capital, which Betsy’s sister—and now Betsy—supplied. Once purchased, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, New York Motto would inspect the properties, sometimes do minor repairs, then use the Internet and ordinary newspapers to advertise and sell them at a profit.

  In good times and bad, New York Motto was one of Betsy’s more reliable sources of income; it was the reason she did not have to draw a salary on the profits from her needlework shop. Hardly any of Betsy’s friends or acquaintances knew about the company, and Betsy was reluctant to share for several reasons, one being that some might want Betsy to give them a special deal.

  Jill Cross Larson was an exception, though—and while she hadn’t asked Betsy outright to help find her and Lars a bargain in lakefront property, they’d talked about the search she and Lars were conducting in language Betsy took as a hint.

  So Betsy had started paying attention to buys the company was making on lakefront property well outside the Twin Cities, and when she found a couple of prospects, she let Jill know about them.

  One, six acres with an old log cabin on it, was the more distant, three hours from Excelsior, only two from far-north Lake Itasca, source of the Mississippi River. The property came into bankruptcy court when the last legal owner fell into a terminal illness and mortgaged the place—long unused—to pay for medical expenses. He was, of course, unable to make payments.

  The property was in a State Forest and on the shore of long, narrow Thunder Lake. Lars, experienced in buying and restoring property, drove up with Jill for a look and declared it a perfect location and the cabin suitable for restoration. Betsy took Lars’s word for it and directed her partner to sell it to the Larsons with the caveat “as is.”

  On the other hand, since Jill was Betsy’s best friend, Betsy sold it to them for what the company had paid for it.

  But now, because she was not anxious to start a stampede of requests or rebukes, she allowed the gossip and speculation at the crochet class to wash over her without comment.

  Betsy was attending the class because she, too, wanted to expand into crochet. She’d bought a couple of books on how to do it but, as usual, found she needed to actually sit in the presence of people who already knew how and watch how their fingers moved.

  She could make a chain, slip stitch, and single and double crochet, after a fashion; that is, slowly and painfully, and with the instruction book propped up in her line of sight. What she couldn’t do was crochet in a circle. It was like back when she could knit but not purl. Reading the instructions didn’t help, even when they were accompanied by illustrations. Nor could she hold the yarn properly in her left hand. She’d wrap it around her little finger, bring it up and over her index finger, and set off, and within four or five stitches the yarn would have slipped off her fingers. Though it was currently easier to crochet this way, she knew that if she was to advance in the craft, she had to learn to do it properly.

  Despite his lackadaisical attitude toward beginners, instructor Godwin agreed that Betsy needed to do it right. Talking to her earlier in the week, he had compared it to his golf game: At first he swung at the ball any old way and was happy to reach the green in six to nine strokes. And that was fine—at first. But to get into really playing, lowering his score, and breaking a hundred, he had to learn the odd stances and peculiar movements of the game, practicing them until they became natural.

  So Betsy watched Godwin’s hook flashing at top speed as it pulled yarn through the fingers of his left hand for a few moments. Then she gamely rewrapped the yarn through her own fingers and continued circling around her cup topper in single crochet—it had turned out that joining two ends and continuing to circle was far easier than holding the yarn properly.

  “I heard they’re going to tear down the log cabin and build a year-round residence—and then move up there permanently.” This tidbit was offered by Meryl’s mother.

  Since Lars was a sergeant on Excelsior’s little police department, a job he loved, Betsy doubted that very much. But she bit her tongue, thrust the crochet hook through a stitch, and reached for the yarn with her hook. She pulled it through so there were two loops on her hook, reached for the yarn again, and pulled it through both loops.

  All those loops and it was called single crochet!

  Of course it was a very solid, attractive stitch. Betsy looked at it admiringly. Just a few hundred more and she’d have a cup topper of her very own.

  Two

  BETSY was humming to herself as she closed up the shop. Connor was taking her out to dinner at a nice restaurant in Wayzata. She was pleasantly aware that things between the two of them were moving nicely; tonight he was going to bring his adult daughter Peg along to meet her.

  Her smile grew complacent as she thought about Connor. He was very much her type: tall without being towering, strong without being muscle-bound, good-looking without being a true hunk. He had a keen mind, a sweet smile, and a wicked twinkle in his eyes. A retired Merchant Marine captain, he had a store of tales of life at sea that she found, in turn, moving or hilarious or exciting. Betsy, a former Navy WAVE, had always been attracted to things nautical.

  Even better, Connor seemed to find a divorcee who was not tall or gorgeous or brilliant just his type. Maybe it was because his first wife had been all of those things, and it had not been a happy marriage. Betsy had been startled when he showed her a photograph of the first Mrs. Sullivan, who was a real beauty.

  So maybe he was only pretending to court Betsy because she was his landlady and he was going to try for a reduction in his rent—she chuckled at the idea; he seemed to have all the money he needed to live comfortably, if not expansively. He had taken the smaller of the two rental units in her building last year, not because that was all he could afford but because that was all he needed. He had been born in Ireland, though his accent was, if anything, vaguely British at times.

  A naturalized citizen of the United States, he had moved from Boston to Excelsior because his only daughter was in a graduate program at the University of Minnesota, and he wanted to be near her. She had been drawn to the university by a famous forensic anthropologist—her field of graduate study was biological anthropology.

  And that gave rise to her sole worry about him. It appeared Peg was the only member of his immediate family still on friendly terms with him. His two sons had sided with their mother when the divorce finally happened, and though it had gone through five years ago, there were still hard feelings.

  Betsy claimed she understood the family divided against itself, and she did, though not completely. She had no children from her two marria
ges, but while she might have no residual ill feelings about her first brief marriage, after all these years she still thought of her second husband as Hal the Pig.

  She hoped the daughter was pleasant to know. The fact that Connor was ready to introduce the two of them was an excellent sign.

  She had just finished running the credit card machine when the door sounded its two-note warning that someone was coming in. She looked around, prepared to greet Connor, and saw instead an ethereally beautiful young woman with alabaster skin and smoky black wavy hair. She was very slim, with long legs encased in denim. She wore low-heeled sandals and a sleeveless silk blouse in a shade of green that exactly matched her eyes. But her full mouth turned down at the corners, and a frown made a tiny crease between her flawless brows. She looked to be in her early twenties.

  Betsy was so taken aback by her that she didn’t notice at once that Connor had come in on her heels. He spoke first. “Betsy, I want you to meet my daughter, Margaret Rose Sullivan. Peg, this is my very dear friend, Betsy Devonshire.”

  Wow, thought Betsy. She extended her hand. “How do you do?”

  “How do you do?” replied the young woman, not taking the hand. She turned to her father. “Well, Da, she’s just as you described her.” She had a lovely, lilting Irish accent.

  “Are you about done here?” Connor asked Betsy.

  “Just a few more minutes,” promised Betsy.

  “I hope so. I skipped lunch and I’m really starving,” said Peg.

  Betsy kept her promise, and in five minutes they were in Connor’s car, heading up Highway 15 toward Orono. It skirted big Lake Minnetonka with its many bays and small towns along the way.

  “The lake is beautiful,” said Peg. “How big is it?”