Unraveled Sleeve

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either 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.

  UNRAVELED SLEEVE

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 by Mary Monica Kuhfeld

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0387-3

  A BERKLEY PRIME CRIME BOOK®

  Berkley Prime Crime Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the “BERKLEY PRIME CRIME” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: April, 2002

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Acknowledgments

  There really is a Naniboujou Lodge, and I wish to thank the owners and staff for allowing me to set this mystery there. And without the aid of Joan Marie Verba, the details, symptoms, and treatment of severe allergies would not have been so realistic. The many members of RCTN, an Internet newsgroup, have again proved themselves invaluable in keeping me on track with the esoterica of needlework. I would also, and again, like to thank my editor, Gail Fortune, for finding cracks in the original plot of this novel and making me mend them.

  1

  Through a ring of uniformed police officers, Betsy glimpsed the body of a very fat man. A ruby ring twinkled on the hand that loosely gripped a matte black gun. A beautiful young blonde draped in furs stood nearby, looking at Betsy slantwise through narrowed eyes. Beside her was an unshaven man in old-fashioned prison stripes. Next to him was an elegantly dressed man with a gray goatee, and clinging to the elegant man’s arm was a bosomy woman in a white silk blouse unbuttoned nearly to the navel.

  Officer Jill Cross, Detective Mike Malloy, and Godwin DuLac appeared suddenly, apparently from behind the circle of policemen. Mike barked, “All right, Betsy, who did it?”

  Godwin said cheerfully, “Come on, Betsy, you’re so clever! Tell him!”

  Betsy looked at the suspects, but nothing clever occurred to her.

  Jill said, “Mike needs to shoot the murderer. It’s important.” She began to shout, “Let’s go, tell Mike who did it, so we can all go home! It’s cold, Betsy, and we want to go home!”

  Everyone began shivering. Except Betsy—and the corpse. Betsy looked between the cops’ elbows, hoping the corpse would start shivering, which would mean he wasn’t really dead. Then she could tell them it was a joke. That would be clever. But he didn’t move. Betsy wanted to go home, too, but she had to answer them first. Who killed the man?

  In a rising panic, she realized she had no idea.

  “Maybe it’s you, Betsy,” said Godwin.

  Jill and Mike exchanged surprised looks that turned suspicious and then gratified.

  “I knew it, I knew it!” said Mike.

  “No!” said Betsy. “No, no!”

  “Why sure,” said Mike, and added something incomprehensible that convinced Jill and Godwin.

  “Wait, wait—” said Betsy, trying to think.

  “Now I’m the clever one,” said Godwin.

  Jill came to take Betsy by the arm. “I’ll hold her while you shoot her, Mike.”

  Mike drew a snub-nosed revolver and pointed it at Betsy, who couldn’t think of something clever to say to save her life.

  Just as the gun went off, Betsy sat up in bed with a gasp. Her heart was thumping painfully against her ribs. She was suddenly wide awake and breathing hard.

  It was a sunny March morning, the temperature already approaching thirty. Betsy went down the stairs from her second-floor apartment, through an obscure back door beside the stairs, and down a short hall that led to facing doors, one to the parking lot and the other into the back room of her shop. She unlocked the shop door and Sophie slipped through.

  “Goooooood morning!” chirruped a light tenor voice. “On time this morning, aren’t we?”

  “In body, if not in spirit,” said Betsy.

  “Are you awake enough to give me an opinion?” Godwin, a slim young man in a clingy cocoa brown sweater and black wool slacks, was striking a pose in front of the checkout desk. “What do you think?” he asked, doing a model’s turn.

  Betsy gathered her wits for a look at the sweater. Godwin had knit it himself of silk yarn. It had a barely raised pattern of diamonds across the middle of his chest that continued across his back, and the drape of the thin, soft material on his gently buffed arms and shoulders was exquisite.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Betsy honestly, “and the fit couldn’t be better.”

  “John says if I gain three ounces, it will show.”

  “That’s why I would never own a sweater like that,” said Betsy, who was sure she could lose five pounds without it showing.

  “You’re slimmer than you were back in December,” said Godwin, giving her a judicious look. “You’re dressing fatter than you are. You’ll be surprised when you buy that new wardrobe.”

  “You think so?” Even the thought of shopping for an entire new wardrobe could not brighten Betsy’s face.

  Godwin had two remedies for gloom. If Betsy’s spirits couldn’t be raised by shopping, then, “You need a change. Take a trip to a nice, warm place, get a tan, meet some fun new people.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve got to finish up some things here, first.”

  Betsy’s sister’s estate had finally been closed. As of nine days ago, Betsy was officially wealthy. She hadn’t done anything with the money yet except pay some overdue bills and take a few baby steps toward closing on the building her needlework shop and apartment were in. The current owner was a careful man, anxious not to give away anything more or sooner than necessary, so buying property from him was a slow process.

  Betsy had never been rich before, but she had heard of people who won a big lottery prize only to be worse than broke a year later. She was determined to not to make that mistake herself. But in her current state of chronic exhaustion, she was in no condition to make wise choices.

  When her sister died, Betsy had found herself sole proprietor of Crewel World, and had been struggling with the two steep learning curves of needlework and owning her own business. But she found she enjoyed the challenges, and especially liked being her own boss. So far, the shop had stayed in the black. But now there was the added burden—a surprise to find it was actually a burden—of being sole inheritor of three million dollars. It would be so wonderful to just close everything down for a month, get really far away, think about what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go.

  Or would she go anywhere? She liked Crewel World. Her customers were such nice people, most of them, loyal and patient. Besides, while needlework wasn’t what Betsy would have chosen as a hobby, much less a care
er, it was surprisingly engrossing and created such beauty that she was no longer sorry it had been thrust upon her.

  She looked around the shop. It had a big front window, splashed with counted cross-stitch patterns and needlepoint canvases—mostly in green because St. Patrick’s Day was near, but also tulips and other spring flowers, and Easter-themed projects and patterns. Back here it might have been dim, but well-placed track lighting put light everywhere it was needed. A dividing set of shelves cut off the rear portion and disguised the long, narrow shape of the shop.

  Then she noticed the warm smell of coffee. Betsy went to pour herself a cup. “Did you put up the canvases that came in yesterday?” she asked, and was surprised at how slow the words came out. She was tired. Actually, more than tired, she was exhausted.

  “Not yet. Look, why don’t you take the morning off? Go back upstairs and sleep some more.”

  She shuddered. “No, I don’t want more sleep. The problem is not getting to sleep, it’s the nightmares.” She went to the big desk that was the shop’s checkout counter.

  “Pretty bad?”

  “Awful,” she said frankly. “Terrifying. I might have known this would happen; I’m not cut out for murder investigations. Twice now, people I knew and liked have turned out to be murderers. And another one tried three times to murder me. I don’t want to do this anymore—” Betsy turned away from Godwin’s look of compassion. It wasn’t sympathy she was after. She thrust her fingers into her hair. “Have you vacuumed yet?”

  “In a minute. I’m sorry sleuthing is making you so miserable, because I love it when you prove you’re so much more clever than everyone else, even the police. And I love it that you’re so good about telling me first. In a gossipy town like Excelsior, that makes me Queen.”

  Betsy couldn’t help smiling. “You mean King, don’t you?”

  “No, honey, you’re the King. Queen is my place, and much more my style.” He winked at her and strolled to the back room to get out the Hoover.

  Still smiling, Betsy took the deadlock key from a desk drawer, went to the front door to unlock it and turn the needlepointed sign around so OPEN showed through the window. She paused at the white-painted old dresser just inside the door. Ads for stitching retreats, classes, and conventions were tucked into the frame of its dim mirror. One was for a stitch-in to be held in Fort Myers, Florida. Don’t I wish, she thought.

  Thrust out from the opposite wall was an old, white, glass-fronted counter. On top were three sample sweaters with patterns next to them, and a plastic chest with little transparent drawers filled with beads of every size, shape, and color, along with threadlike beading needles. There were two books on beading leaning against it, but the woman who had loaned Betsy her beaded purse had picked it up on Friday and Betsy hadn’t managed to borrow another beading project to replace it. She was not remotely skilled enough to do beadwork worthy of inspiring a customer.

  However, that forest green sweater was hers. One of her customers, Rosemary, was an excellent teacher, and Betsy was especially proud of the cable stitching. Betsy gave it a little rearranging tug as she went by. The glass-fronted cabinets held back issues of stitchery magazines, the more expensive and fragile wools that couldn’t bear the repeated touch of fiber fondlers, and unperused needlework books for customers who insisted on extra-fresh editions.

  Betsy went back to the checkout desk to put the key away and place the forty dollars opening-up money in the cash register.

  The shop’s front door opened with an electronic bing and Betsy turned to her first customer of the day. It was Mrs. Savage, who hoped to match a tomato red shade of needlepoint wool. Betsy directed her to the triple row of wooden pegs on the long wall, hanging with loosely knotted skeins in what only seemed like every possible color.

  Betsy took a thin stack of painted needlepoint canvases from the desk to the rack of fabric doors hanging on a wall and began to attach the canvases with drawing pins.

  Bing went the door again and Betsy turned to see a hearty-looking man with an outsize attaché case grinning at her. “Ms. Devonshire?” he said, and when she nodded faintly, he came forward, hand extended. “I am very, very glad to meet you!” he said in a deep, rich voice that ran up the scale to glad and then back down again, shaking her hand with a grip that stopped just short of painful.

  He swung the case up onto the desk and opened it. Inside were eight-by-ten color photographs of houses. Big houses. “I’m sure you must be thinking about moving out of that small apartment of yours into something much more suitable for a person of your income,” he began.

  “No, I’m not,” said Betsy.

  His surprised chuckle started high and ran steeply down the scale, and Betsy smiled, not because she liked it, but because it reminded her of Throgmorton P. Gildersleeve—old-time radio’s most famous pompous ass. “Very nice, you have an interesting sense of humor,” he said. “I almost believed you there for a second. Now, I have a house—not too large, but a beautiful house, built just over a year ago, right on Lake Minnetonka, not ten minutes from—”

  “I am not interested in buying a house. I like living over my shop.”

  “You can’t possibly mean that.”

  “Why not? My sister lived upstairs, and the money I inherited came from her.”

  The woman seeking tomato red wool came over to the desk. “What do you think, Betsy? Is this a match? Or is this one closer?”

  “I beg your pardon, but Ms. Devonshire and I are discussing—”

  But Betsy interrupted him, saying to her customer, “Let’s go stand by the window, Mrs. Savage. We can tell better in natural light.” She said over her shoulder to the salesman, “Please go away, can’t you see I’m busy?” Anger put steel in her tone, and by the time she and Mrs. Savage agreed that one of the skeins was a near perfect match to the sample Mrs. Savage had brought in, the salesman had gone.

  “He must be new to the real-estate business, quitting that easy,” remarked Godwin after Mrs. Savage had also left. “I thought that fellow on Saturday was going to set up camp.”

  The phone rang, and Betsy answered it. The caller mispronounced Betsy’s name (“Devon-shyre” instead of “Devon-sheer”), and wanted Betsy to know that another American Family would become homeless every minute they talked, and would Betsy care to make a substantial contribution to an organization whose goal was to build a tent city on the grounds of Minnesota’s state capitol building—

  Betsy kept a lot of American Families in their homes by hanging up at that point.

  By noon the shop, while crowded, had exactly two paying customers. The other people were there to sell Betsy a Lincoln, a Chrysler, land in Arkansas, Florida, and Mexico; to collect for crippled children, blind adults, homeless horses, and women whose emphysema was caused by secondhand smoke; to double Betsy’s inheritance in six months or six weeks; to reminisce about how she and Betsy had been best friends in grade school, where they had promised that if one ever got rich she would share it with the other; and to sign Betsy up for cellular phone service, cable television, satellite television, and a professional interior decoration of the new house this gentleman with him wanted to build to Betsy’s specifications on land he was also prepared to sell her.

  Staring around wildly, Betsy began to cry, which caused Godwin to lose his temper and chase them out with a steel knitting needle.

  “That decorator I think I could’ve taken,” Godwin said with a snort when the shop was empty of all but the woman walking her fingers through the counted cross-stitch patterns in the half-price box. Betsy’s tears turned to laughter at that, but the laughter died instantly when she heard that infernal bing that meant someone else was coming in. She turned a stony face to the front door.

  Shelly Donohue was standing there, looking startled. “Wow, something’s got your underwear in a knot,” she said, a half-formed smile fading.

  Shelly was a medium-sized woman who worked in the shop part-time. She was about thirty-five, with long hair pulled into a
n untidy bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a full-length, down-filled coat and boots that looked suitable for walking on the moon. In honor of the sunshine, the coat was open.

  “It’s all right for me to be here,” she said, because school was in session and she taught fourth grade. “My students are on a field trip to the Minneapolis Art Museum this afternoon. What’s wrong, anyway? You don’t look well.”

  “I’m just tired,” said Betsy, shoving her fingers into her hair, a gesture she was afraid might become habitual.

  “And every sales rep on the planet is on the phone or here in person, trying to cut himself a slice of Betsy’s inheritance,” said Godwin. “I’ve been telling her all morning she should go to Cancun for a week, get away from all this. She could soak up some rays by day and party by starlight. Enough strawberry margaritas will scare away the nightmares while she gets a break from the money mongers.”

  “Nightmares?” echoed Shelly, coming to put a hand on Betsy’s arm. “How awful! I just hate it when I have a nightmare.” A smile with a trace of envy in it appeared. “What are you dreaming, the IRS is after your money?”

  Godwin said, “This is serious! She’s dreaming about death and corpses—”

  “Oh, ish!”

  “Hush, Goddy,” said Betsy, adding to Shelly, “They’re about what you’d expect after what I’ve been through lately. Kind of a delayed reaction to December, I guess.” Around Christmas, someone had tried to murder Betsy. “I’ll be all right pretty soon. I’d take Godwin’s advice, but we’re shorthanded as it is, and Joe is being difficult about selling me this building, and anyway I’ve got some ideas for changes I want to make in the shop, so I need to talk to an architect or—” Shelly and Godwin exchanged swift glances of dismay. “What?”

  “What kind of changes?” asked Shelly.

  “Nothing drastic,” said Betsy. “I was thinking of replacing that dresser up by the front door—”

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