Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_03 Read online

  Jill ran a professional eye over the group and said, “I don’t think any of these people are a threat.”

  They started two washer loads and sat down on a pair of orange plastic chairs that wobbled.

  Betsy said, “Tell me what you know about Mandy.”

  “From back when she lived here? Hardly anything. She seemed to be just an ordinary, average kid. She’s six years younger than me, so we didn’t go to school together. She was about thirteen when that mess with her parents happened, and I hardly saw her again after that. As for nowadays, I already told you her husband’s name is Dan, and they have a little boy whose name I can’t remember. Her husband manages a garden supply center in Golden Valley. I know all this because your sister told me. Margot was involved in getting Father Keane moved to a better nursing home, so she was kind of keeping track of the family.”

  Betsy said, “Doesn’t sound much like a murderer to me.” She reached into the bottom of her laundry bag and pulled out the thick tome on Christian symbology.

  “Want to see my notebook?” asked Jill.

  “Yes, please.”

  Jill pulled it out of a pocket and found the page where Betsy had been copying her notes. “Got a new idea?”

  “No,” admitted Betsy. “But it hangs in my mind. If Lucy was going to put her name on there, I think she’d put the letters in the right order. And if she was going to spell something with saints’ attributes, then why stick someone who was about as far from a saint as you can get at the end?”

  “Maybe she just wanted to show it was the end of the line. Hanging means that, too, you know. Like newspaper reporters used to put ‘30’ at the end of a story.”

  Betsy considered that. She looked at the list in Jill’s notebook, squinting as if distorting her view would reveal a plan or outline or … something. A pig, a horseshoe, an anchor, a whip. A shamrock, a lamb, a heart, an apple, a star. An apple for a teacher. A Star of David—but Lucy didn’t have a son, let alone one named David.

  Jill went to move wet clothing from the washing machine into the dryer. A dog, three crowns—there used to be a British coin called a crown. It was worth five shillings. There were twenty shillings in the pound, but that didn’t seem relevant here.

  The cat was Saint Yvo. Why were there two of them? As Jill said, Beats me. Betsy put the notebook in a pocket and went to help Jill.

  They’d barely gotten back to Betsy’s apartment when the phone rang. Betsy answered, and it was Godwin. “Can you come down? There’s someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Mandy Oliver.”

  “Hurray, we’ll be right down!”

  In the shop was a young woman with a handsome tumble of chestnut hair around a broad face set with a strong nose. She was tracing the intertwining of cable stitch on a sample sweater with a slim forefinger when Jill and Betsy came into the shop. Godwin indicated her with a tilt of his head. Betsy stepped forward and said, “Hello, I’m Betsy Devonshire. You wanted to see me?”

  The young woman turned and said, “Hello, I’m Mandy Oliver, Lucy and Keane Abrams’s daughter.”

  “How may I help you?” asked Betsy.

  “May I speak with you in private?”

  Betsy glanced around at Jill, who said, “Ms. Devonshire isn’t allowed to meet with anyone in private right now. But I assure you, anything you tell her won’t be repeated by me. Unless, of course, it has bearing on some crime.”

  To their surprise, Mandy turned white and would have fled if Jill, in one swift move, had not gotten to her and taken her by the elbow. “What’s this all about?” Jill said.

  “Take your hand off me!” said Mandy.

  “No, I think you’d better stay and explain yourself,” said Jill.

  Mandy gave her arm one unsuccessful yank, then said, “Oh! Do you think I have something to do with what’s happening to Ms. Devonshire?” She looked sincerely horrified. “No, no! This isn’t about that!”

  “Then what is it about?” asked Jill.

  Mandy looked at Jill a considering second or two. “It’s about—about my father. And that plan they’re working up to hang Mother’s tapestry in the Trinity library.”

  “What about it?” asked Jill, and Betsy came closer.

  “I can’t believe nobody’s said something already. I really don’t think they’ll be happy when somebody finally does say something.”

  “Something about what?” said Jill.

  Mandy bowed her head and said so quietly Betsy had to strain her ears to hear, “My father was a thief. He stole money from his discretionary fund, and when that was gone, he started another fund, saying it was to help poor people pay their rents in emergencies, but he kept that money for himself, too.”

  There was an odd noise. Betsy looked over to see Shelly staring at Mandy with big, avid eyes.

  “Shelly …” Jill said.

  Shelly gestured. “Fine, I won’t say a word to anyone. But somebody better tell the people at Trinity, and soon. And then Patricia is just going to die!”

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  Betsy said, “But is it true? Who knew about this?”

  Mandy said, “The old vestry knew, they fired Dad for it. My mother knew. She was furious. I heard her tell Dad he had to pay back the money. The church took every penny of our savings, but it wasn’t enough to pay back all he stole. Dad and Mother were terrified he was going to go to jail.”

  “But he didn’t,” said Jill.

  “No, he had that terrible stroke and Mother found him and had a heart attack trying to lift him off the floor. And they—the vestry—thought the scandal would be too awful, so they forgave him.”

  “What did your father tell you about all this?” asked Betsy.

  “Nothing, he never got a chance. We moved out of the rectory into another house. It was just three days later when—when I came home from school and found them—” Suddenly she put both hands over her face and broke into noisy sobs.

  “Here now, here now,” said Betsy, coming to put an arm around the young woman’s shoulder, removing her from Jill’s grasp. “Come with me, there’s a nice chair back here out of the way.” She led Mandy to the area behind the box shelves. She gave Shelly and Godwin a look that warned them not to follow, then seated Mandy on one of the upholstered chairs. “Would a cup of coffee help? Or tea? Or cocoa?”

  Mandy shook her head. “I-I’m sorry for losing control,” she said with an effort.

  “That’s all right. Did your mother have a weak heart?”

  “Oh yes. She’d been sick for over a year. She couldn’t climb the stairs anymore, so she moved into Dad’s den on the ground floor. I had to do the heavy housework, like mopping and laundry. She was taking pills, and the doctor had talked to us about a heart transplant, but Mother said she wouldn’t consider it.”

  “And your father?”

  “Oh, that came with no warning. He was fine when I went to school that morning …” She stared at nothing, or perhaps at what she’d walked into, coming home from high school a dozen years ago.

  “I’m sorry, Mandy,” said Betsy, putting her hand over the young woman’s.

  “Thanks,” she said. “It was a long time ago, and I’d pretty much gotten over it, and then—I wish Patricia hadn’t found that tapestry!”

  Betsy said, “Actually, it wasn’t Patricia, it was Phil Galvin. He found it in a basement room off the church hall that had been closed off. Have you any idea how it got there?”

  Mandy grimaced. “Probably someone from the vestry stuck it back there. I mean, they were willing to forgive Dad, but I don’t think they wanted any reminders of us around once he was gone.”

  “What made you decide to come to me about this?”

  “Well, I remember how busy priests get when Christmas is coming, so at first I decided I’d wait until after Christmas to talk to Father John. But it’s been like a balloon getting bigger and bigger inside my head. I just had to talk to someone. I called Trinity, but Father John is at
a luncheon in the city with the bishop, and Patricia isn’t at home, either, so at last I came here.” She looked up at Betsy. Mandy was more handsome than beautiful, but there was character in that face, and her hazel-brown eyes were lovely, even spilling tears.

  “You were right to come to me,” said Betsy firmly. “We’ll think of some way to handle this without an explosion, you’ll see. Everything will be all right.” She went into the bathroom and brought back some tissues for Mandy to blow her nose into.

  “Oh, I don’t think it will ever be all right,” said Mandy. “I loved my father’s church, but I joined my aunt and uncle’s so I wouldn’t have to face the people at Trinity. And I joined my husband’s church for the same reason. I was so sure lots of people knew, when I heard about this plan to name the new library after Dad, I was just amazed. I thought at first of not saying anything, but I knew the farther along the plans got, the bigger the mess when they found out. Shall I try again to get hold of Patricia?”

  “If you like,” said Betsy, “but they’re getting ready to go out of town. Patricia told me they were flying to Phoenix to spend Christmas with her mother-in-law. Perhaps they’ve already left.” She looked inquiringly at Jill, who shrugged.

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  Mandy said, “When my father went from the hospital to a nursing home, it was as if he’d died. I thought it was because everyone knew, the way they stayed away. The nursing home wasn’t very good, and it got worse as time went on. Margot—” she smiled through her tears at Betsy—“your sister was so wonderful! She held a fund-raiser to get him moved to a better place, and that shamed the bishop into finding some money somewhere so Margot didn’t have to keep on raising money. But still hardly anyone came to see him.” She wiped at a fresh flow of tears with her fingers.

  Jill said, “But he wouldn’t know anyone anyway, would he?”

  Mandy nodded. “They tell me that. But I think somewhere, down deep, he’s aware that something terrible has happened to him, and he wonders where all his friends went.”

  “Nobody visits him except you?” asked Betsy.

  “Patricia comes once in a while. I don’t know if you know this, but there was a time when she and her husband were really struggling. She was trying to put him through law school and worked practically till labor pains set in, and then went back to work almost the day she got out of the hospital. I remember my mother saying how tired and sad she looked, and Dad said he’d see what he could do. He said there was money in the Fairland family, and it was a shame that Peter’s parents wouldn’t help out. I don’t know exactly what he did, but Patricia is still grateful all these years later.”

  “Does anyone else come to see him?” asked Jill.

  “Well, Father John, of course. And Phil Galvin. Dad’s grandfather was a railroad engineer back in the 1800s, and Phil loved to hear Dad talk about him. Now, Phil’s the one talking, and I think it does Dad good. I don’t know if there’s anyone else, certainly no one else comes regularly. I kind of assumed it was because they all knew Dad was a thief.”

  “That tapestry your mother made for Trinity,” said Betsy. “When did your mother make it?”

  “She designed it before I was born, when Dad was rector at Saint Boltolph’s in upstate New York. The Trinity vestry started talking about installing a columbarium, and she remembered the design and decided to make it to hang there. It took years to stitch. She called it her therapy piece. She said that doing needlework was better—and cheaper—than a visit to a shrink. She was often unhappy but would never say why. I wonder now if my father had stolen money before. I remember that other women of the parish would come over a couple of afternoons a week to stitch on it and talk. It was finished just before Dad resigned. Well, actually, it was finished a week or two before, but Mother was doing that thing needleworkers do, you know, going over it and finding missed stitches and so forth. I never saw it once we moved out of the rectory. I don’t think it was ever hung in the church.”

  Betsy asked, “Have you talked with anyone else about it? Or has anyone come to you with questions about it?”

  “No.”

  Jill said suddenly, “I hope the restoration project continues. The tapestry doesn’t have anything to do with your father, and it’s a beautiful thing, very appropriate for the columbarium.”

  Betsy said, “But maybe it does have something to do with Father Keane. Maybe that’s what that all saints theme in the halo is about.”

  “What all saints theme?” asked Mandy.

  “She worked tiny attributes of various saints on fabric and applied them between the double gold lines of the halo.”

  “She did?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  Mandy shook her head. “I don’t remember seeing anything like that. But I was a teenager and didn’t like needlework. Maybe Mother talked about it at supper three nights a week. I was full of teen angst and not paying attention to anything but myself. Then our whole world crashed in, Mother died, and Dad—well, all that would just run things like her tapestry out of my head.”

  “I understand. Now, this may sound like an odd question, but did your mother ever hide a message in her needlework?”

  Mandy grinned. “Did you find one in the tapestry?”

  “No, but I think there may be one.”

  “What she would usually put is just her name, my name, or Dad’s name and sometimes the year into the pattern. More than once she did it by using a color barely a shade darker, so you couldn’t see it unless you knew where to look. Once, she did a Noah’s ark for my bedroom, and the animals coming up the ramp were monkeys, aardvarks, newts, donkeys, and yaks.”

  “Oh, that’s clever!” said Betsy. “And were they in that order?”

  Mandy frowned a little. “Of course. Why not?”

  Betsy sighed. “Yes, why not? How else would you know it spelled Mandy?”

  “That’s right. It was clever, but some of my friends thought the newts were salamanders and the aardvarks looked a lot like pigs. Why are you asking me this? Is there a name hidden in those symbols?”

  “If there is, we can’t find it. Would she always put just a name?”

  “When Uncle Will was young, he was a radioman in the navy. He used to send my mother letters that had some of it written in dots and dashes—Morse code. She got a book on Morse, to translate and to write some things back to him. So when she made him a scarf, she knitted a pattern down one edge and up the other that said something like Thoughts of You Are Warm as a Good Wool Scarf. If you didn’t know, it was just a broken line in yellow on the green. Are you thinking she hid a message like that on the tapestry?”

  “I was hoping you knew if there was,” said Betsy. “There are twenty-some attributes on the halo, enough for a brief message.”

  Mandy shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. She must have been upset, but she never said a word, so I think she probably just picked things at random to fill the space.”

  “Well!” said Betsy after Mandy left. “So the sainted Father Keane wasn’t such a saint after all.”

  “And where does that leave us?” said Jill.

  Betsy replied, “I think it depends on who knew. It was only ten or twelve years ago. Surely most if not all of those vestry members are still around. I wonder why they decided not to tell the parish. There must be a record somewhere, like minutes of their meetings or something.”

  “If they left a record, where is it?” asked Jill. “Because this is all news to me, and I’ve been a member of Trinity since I was baptized. I never heard a word. Patricia’s a member of the current vestry, so she certainly should know, but she’s the one gung ho about renaming the library after him.”

  “Then they must have decided not to tell anyone,” said Betsy. “And having decided that, I can see why they’d be upset if it got out now. But what I don’t see is why they’re coming after me.” Betsy gnawed at her bottom lip. “Maybe it’s Patricia trying to keep us from finding that out. He
’s her hero.”

  “But then the person to kill is Mandy, not you,” Jill pointed out.

  Betsy said, “She’d better act fast. Mandy will get hold of Father John or Patricia—or both—later today.” She looked at Jill. “Uh-oh.”

  Before she could say anything more, Jill was out the door. She came back a couple of minutes later, breathing hard. “I caught her. She’s going straight home and won’t talk to anyone about this until we tell her she can. I asked her what she said to the receptionist at Trinity, and she only told Crystal that she’d call back.”

  Though Godwin and Shelly were obviously eaten up with curiosity, Betsy refused to tell them more. And to keep them from speculating together, she sent Shelly on an errand. A little Christmas tree on the checkout desk that had been decorated with donated needlework ornaments was to go to a patient at a local nursing home. “Better get that over there now,” Betsy said.

  Back upstairs, Betsy said to Jill, “All right, let’s look at the actual attributes, copy them all down in order.” She called Trinity. Father John was doing hospital calls. Betsy said to Crystal, “I’ve got some more wool I want to try to match to the tapestry. May I come over and see it?”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Devonshire, but I don’t know where it is. It was in the church hall, but they cleared that out. I know they didn’t take it with them because Mrs. Fairland called yesterday wanting to see it, and when I said it wasn’t in the church hall anymore, she called all the people who volunteered to help clear things out, and none of them had moved it. Our janitor says he didn’t move it, either. She’s pretty upset, but I could only tell her what I’m telling you: I don’t know where it is.”

  “Well … ah … thank you.” Betsy hung up and turned, frowning, to Jill. “Remember when you said that if the tapestry had a message that accused you of something, you’d get rid of it? Apparently someone has.”