Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 (5 page)

“We're going to have to find a better way to keep up with inventory,” grumbled Betsy, shuffling through papers to look for Shelly's note. “This business of waiting till someone notices we're running low seems awfully chancy. What if no one notices? We'll find ourselves totally out of something and screw up a big sale one of these days.”

“Hasn't happened yet.” Godwin was smiling again, but this time she frowned at him.

“Come on, how can we tell ahead of time what we'll run out of next?” he asked reasonably. “We notice we're running low, and we order more of it. We could increase our inventory, but that ties up money you need to pay rent and our salaries. The system we have is a good system.”

“Yeah,” said Betsy sarcastically, “invented by someone with nine whole weeks' experience in the retail business.”

“You didn't invent this system, you inherited it,” said Godwin. “Your sister used the same method. We all know to write a note when we sell enough of a product to create a shortage. The problem happens when someone forgets to write a note. Which we didn't. So, do you want me to call the order in, or will you?”

“I'll do it.” She opened the center drawer and pulled out the spiral-bound address book. But before dialing, she put her hands on the open book and said, “Goddy, the Monday Bunch doesn't think I'm going to get involved in this skeleton business, do they?”

“Not once they think about it. I mean, you aren't a policeman, so it's not your job, and I didn't notice anyone coming in trying to hire you as a private eye to solve it. The last one was up-close and personal. This one has nothing to do with us, so why should we get involved?” Betsy was to remember those words in the days to come.

3

I
t was Halloween eve. Detective Mike Malloy was proud to know Halloween means All Hallows Eve (though he could not for twenty dollars have told anyone what All Hallows was). Therefore, he considered, the term
Halloween
eve redundant, so he corrected it in his head to
the day before Halloween.

Appropriate to the season, he was about to meet a scientist in his laboratory, which he pictured with stone walls, gurgling test tubes, spirals of glass filled with colored liquids, and a couple of those things like old-fashioned TV antennas making thin crackles of lightning between their rods.

He knew it wouldn't be like that, not really, but it was kind of disappointing to find it was a kitchen-size room, very clean, with microscopes and a personal computer. It did smell funny, which was something, but the scientist wasn't there.

Malloy was directed by a student in a stained lab coat to an upper floor and a small, cluttered office. It wasn't a cubicle, but a real office, with walls that went to the ceiling, and a door that shut. Which Malloy did.

The man behind the desk wasn't a disappointment to Malloy's Halloween-colored imagination. Dr. Ambling had the fluffy gray hair and thick glasses of every mad scientist from every movie the detective had seen as a kid. “Ah have examined the fabric you-all sent to me,” Dr. Ambling drawled—not in a thick German accent. Texas, thought Malloy, amused.

Ambling picked up two sheets of glass held together by strips of gray tape on the corners. Between the glass were four pieces of thin green fabric, three very small, the fourth roughly triangular in shape, about two and a half inches on a side. All the pieces were frayed, and there were fine threads knotted and tangled along two sides of the triangle. “The material is silk, partially edged with silk threads that may have been lace. The lace, if it is lace, was probably made by hand, and it was attached to the rest of the fabric after it was finished.” He put the glass down on a low stack of books and consulted a sheet of paper occupying a cleared space on his desk just large enough to hold it.

Mike had found a tiny, flattish, filthy, slimy thing during a search of the raised boat. A forensics expert from the state crime lab had identified it as fabric and recommended Dr. Ambling as the person to further identify it. Mike still wasn't sure if it was important, but the first thing a detective learns is not to assume something is unimportant just because it doesn't fit a theory you've been too quick to form.

“Ah,” said Ambling, finding his place. “It is impossible to tell what color the fabric was originally,” he continued. “The green color is from being pressed under something made of copper or a copper alloy.” He looked up at Malloy through thick lenses. “Did you find it under a piece of pipe?”

“No, it was in a puddle of muddy water. But they cleared away a lot of rubble before they raised the boat and more after they got it to the surface, before they found the skeleton. We don't know where on the boat it was hidden originally.”

“It was under a piece of rubble that was, or contained, some copper or brass or bronze—copper and its alloys are a good preservative of fibers. But they turn things green.” He went back to the report. “Judging by the shape of the surviving pieces, the fabric was wadded rather than folded and only partly covered by the metal. The biggest piece is the only one with the edging on it.”

“So what do you think, was it a dress? Or was it something smaller?” asked Malloy.

The man shrugged. “The fabric seems thin for a dress, but I don't know much about clothing from the forties. A handkerchief seems more likely, but I wouldn't testify to that as fact. It could be a fragment of sleeve, though you should check to see if lace edging was fashionable on sleeves in 1949. On the other hand, my mother used to crochet lace edgings onto her handkerchiefs. Very fine, very delicate work. That's what this made me think of. But it's only a guess; the fibers have been so stretched and pulled from the pressure of whatever was holding it down all those years, I can't see what the pattern might have been.”

“Could it just be string from the fabric? Maybe it frayed a lot, from the motion of the water or something.” Malloy bent over the glass for a closer look.

Ambling reached for a pencil, which he used as a pointer. “No, the fibers here and here are thicker and coarser than the rest of the fabric. And here and here and here, see? These look like knots. So not fraying, and not fringe, but trim of some sort, of a thicker fiber than the fabric, and attached to it—see, here and here. I'm quite sure these strands were formed into a pattern with deliberation. Could be crochet, but that's only a guess.”

“So a woman's handkerchief, right?” said Malloy. “I mean, a man wouldn't have a silk handkerchief, would he?”

“My grandfather carried a silk handkerchief every day of his adult life. But not with lace edging, of course. For that, you'd have to go back to the eighteenth century .”

“Hmmm. So a woman's handkerchief, or part of a dress. The sleeve you say? Why not the collar? That would be more likely to have lace trim.”

“A collar would be doubled over, and this was hemmed, not doubled.”

“Okay, I get that. This lace edging, is it silk, too?”

Ambling nodded. “Yes.”

“So this was an expensive article, right?”

“Possibly, but not necessarily. You have to consider the era. Handmade at this time meant homemade, and in the forties and fifties, only poor people wore homemade clothes. Of course, silk is another matter, as is lace. Poor people didn't make their clothes of silk.”

Mike picked up the glass and held it to the ceiling light. “No initials or anything,” he said. “So I guess even if we identify her, we'll never know for sure if the skeleton was the person who owned this.”

 

“Jill, you crochet and do stuff like that, don't you?”

Jill, coming out of the duty room, turned to see Mike Malloy with something flat in his hands. “No, sorry, I don't do crochet,” she said politely. “But I do needlepoint, if that's any help.” Malloy, she knew, wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he was her senior in rank, so she tried to treat him with respect.

He, on the other hand, knew she was very bright and suspected she was ambitious. But he couldn't bad-mouth her the way he could male officers with ambitions to his rank and job, not in this era of hair-trigger harassment suits, so he tried to treat her with respect.

With both of them behaving contrary to their beliefs, they tended to talk like actors in a poorly written play.

“Can I show you something?” he asked, approaching with the object held out awkwardly.

“What is it?” asked Jill, not reaching for it.

“A textile expert from the university says it maybe was part of a dress or a handkerchief. It's got homemade lace edging, he says. I want to know what you think. This expert guesses it's crochet.”

“Oh. Okay.” Jill took the glass sandwich with both hands, careful to hold it at the edges. She lifted it so the ceiling fluorescents could shine through it. “Hard to say,” she said after a few moments. “Actually,” she added, lowering the glass and handing it back, “I'm not an expert on lace. But I know where to ask for experts. Want me to bring you their names?”

“Are they in town?”

“Probably. All I have to do—or you can do it yourself—is go to Crewel World and ask for Godwin. He knows just about everyone in the area who does things with fibers.”

“Yeah, I should have thought of that myself.”

Malloy being self-deprecating was unusual, so Jill's stiffness thawed a little. “Say, is this connected to that skeleton we found on the old
Hopkins
?” Jill had just been part of the crowd control aspect of the crime scene, she had no role in the investigation. But she was curious.

“How'd you know?”

Jill smiled. “Well, that thing you showed me is the color of algae.”

“As a matter of fact, it's that color because it was under a piece of copper for fifty years—and okay, at the bottom of the lake, on board the
Hopkins
.”

Jill bloomed a little bit over being right and Malloy smiled, but not unkindly. She asked, “Was it near the skeleton?”

“Not really. The skeleton was near the stem, the fabric was found more amidships, near where the engine used to be. But with all the tumbling it might've got while those divers were removing rubble, it could've started out anywhere.”

“Amidships?”

Malloy's prickliness appeared. “Yes, and deck and gunwale and ladder and so forth. What of it?”

“Oh. Nothing, I guess. I thought you picked up that word talking to the divers, but I guess it's for real with you. What, you were in the navy?”

His small eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

Jill shrugged. “Hey, no reason. It's just that the current owner of Crewel World is also a navy vet.”

“That woman who thinks she's a detective?”

Jill wanted to remind him that Betsy had been the one who came up with the solution to Malloy's last case, and so was, in fact, able to detect. But she bit her tongue and then said, “You remember Betsy Devonshire, then. I'm sure she'll help if she can, do whatever you want.”

“Yeah, I'd like that, so long as she doesn't get enthusiastic and go charging around looking for clues.” Malloy sighed. “Still, thanks again for the suggestion, Jill.”

 

 

When Jill took her coffee break at Crewel World a few hours later, she found that Malloy hadn't been by yet. She described what Mike had shown her to Betsy and Godwin.

“I'm surprised he's letting us in, after the last time,” said Godwin.

“Hey, slow down, he's not letting you in,” said Jill. “He doesn't want you to sleuth, he wants you to answer some questions about something he found on the
Hopkins
.”

“What kind of lace do you think it is?” asked Betsy.

“I don't know that it's lace at all. It didn't look like anything but a tangle of threads to me. Mike said the textile expert thinks it might be crochet, though how he figured that, I don't know. But like I told Mike, I bet there are some customers at Crewel World who can look at it and know whether the expert is right or not.”

“Are there lace makers around here?” Betsy asked Godwin.

“Heavens yes. Tatting and crocheting and even old-fashioned bobbin lace. Martha Winters used to make beautiful bobbin lace. And Lucy Watkins still does, and tatting besides. Patricia does gorgeous crochet work. There are probably others who do or know someone who does. And most of them are Crewel World customers, because hardly anyone who does one kind of needlework does only one kind. Even you, Miss Knit, have branched out into needlepoint. After all that complaining, I watched you do a beautiful row of mosaic this morning.”

“Oh, all it took for that was learning how to interpret the illustrations in the book,” said Betsy. “But I couldn't do it without the open book right there.”

“Uh-huh,” said Godwin, “just like the rest of us. And tell Jill how you've expanded into counted cross-stitch.”

“I'm still kind of only thinking about it.” Betsy continued to Jill, “Those big patterns Shelly does intimidate me, but The Stitchery catalog had some darling Christmas tree ornaments that looked about my speed, so I ordered a set.”

“The little squares of animals wearing Santa Claus hats?” asked Jill.

“Yes, aren't they adorable? The set came over the weekend, but I haven't had a chance yet to take a good look at it.”

“You'll like it. I'm working on my second set. I've decided to enclose one or two with some of my Christmas cards. And I'll donate one to the tree.”

“What tree?”

Jill looked at Godwin, who shrugged back. Godwin said to Betsy, “Margot used to put up a little artificial tree, and her customers would make ornaments for it, and on Christmas Eve she'd take it to someone who otherwise wouldn't have a tree.”