Betsy took the photo and held it under the magnifier. “Maybe it’s an old stain that didn’t wash out. Funny I didn’t notice it Saturday.”
“Why funny?”
“Well, I do remember noticing how immaculately white they were. No, wait, he had a towel tucked into his belt to keep the grease off, so it would have covered these old stains up. Oh, and here’s-no.”
“No, what?”
“Not flecks of dirt, orts.”
“Where?”
“On his trousers, near the cuffs. Charlotte really could use one of those glass ornaments, she sprinkles orts wherever she goes. Her daughter Lisa came into the shop on Monday and I said I knew she was a stitcher when I saw the orts on her dress and she said they were her mother’s-though I was right about Lisa being a stitcher. Her mother is a nice, nice woman, but even I came home Saturday with some of her orts on my clothes. She kind of flicks them off the ends of her fingers.” Betsy looked again at the photo. She could not have said why she found the few tiny ends of floss clinging to Bill’s trousers so touching.
She gave the photos back to Jill and said, “I assume the police have the same two suspects I have. Do you know if they have more than two?”
“Our department is only marginally involved, so I’m not sure how many suspects Steffans at Minnetonka PD has. I hear he’d love Charlotte for this, but you gave her a terrific alibi.”
“He’d love her why, because they always look at the spouse?”
“That’s part of it. The other part is, they’re getting reports that the couple weren’t getting along, hadn’t been getting along for the past several years.”
Betsy said, “ Charlotte told me they were in counseling, and things were starting to turn around. Certainly she seemed affectionate toward Bill when I saw them.”
“Seriously affectionate or polite affectionate?”
“She patted him on the rump when she went to tell him she was riding with me to St. Paul.”
“If she was feeling so chummy, why didn’t she ride with him?”
“Because he was having trouble with the car, and she said it was jiggling so unevenly it was making her sick.” Betsy frowned. “Is that likely? I’ve never ridden in an old car other than Lars’s, and that old steamer has a very smooth way of going.”
“Lars told me that was a selling point, that the internal combustion cars of that period did jiggle. He says it was a combination of too few cylinders and no shock absorbers.”
Betsy nodded. “In Charlotte’s case, there may also have been the prospect of having to sit in the hot sun wearing all those clothes while Bill worked on it after it broke down on the road-I mean, he had trouble starting it, and when he did, it was still idling rough, so she probably guessed it was going to break down. Which apparently it did. He spent the whole time they were in Excelsior with his head under the hood.”
“So if not Charlotte, who are your suspects?”
“I hardly dare say they’re actual suspects, but the two I’d like to know more about are Bill’s son Broward and Adam Smith.”
“Who’s Adam Smith?”
“He was in charge of Saturday’s run,” Betsy said. She explained about the ongoing quarrel between him and Bill, concluding, “I don’t know how powerful a motive that is, but I do know Charlotte and I waited quite a long time for Adam to show up in St. Paul.”
“Who could you ask, do you know?”
“Not offhand, not anyone who wouldn’t go right to Adam and tell him I’m asking questions. He’s president of the Antique Car Club, and from the little I’ve seen, he seems to be very popular.” Betsy had gone to exactly one meeting of the Antique Car Club with Lars, just to see if it was something she wanted to get more deeply involved with. It had been interesting-but also obvious that this was one of those organizations that ate up all a member’s spare time, and Betsy didn’t feel she wanted to spend what little spare time she had on this organization. After all, she was not going to buy an antique car of her own. She told Lars on the way home that she would volunteer for this year’s run, because Lars was a part of it and she was Lars’s sponsor, but after that, he was on his own.
“Are you afraid that if he did it and thinks you’re closing in on him, he might come after you?”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Betsy said. “I don’t want to get people all stirred up about my thinking it might be Adam, when I really think he’s only a possibility. Being suspected of murder can ruin someone, even if it turns out he didn’t do it. If I knew more about antique car owners or the Antique Car Club, I might form a real opinion. Why do people collect them and how fanatical do they get about them? Adam would have to be totally invested in getting that Fuller to consider murdering Bill.”
Jill said, “They’re probably like every other set of hobbyists. Some are casual, some are intent, some are fanatical. You talked with Adam, which kind is he?”
Betsy remembered Ceil’s jeer at Adam’s remark that he might be willing to find a buyer for Joe Mickels’s McIntyre. “As if you’d let anyone else get their hands on it!” she’d said, or words to that effect.
But Betsy was unwilling to say anything out loud, even to Jill.
Godwin was in Shelly’s kitchen, doing the dishes, when the phone rang. “I’ll get it!” he caroled, wiping his hands on his apron. He lifted the receiver on the wall near the back door. “Hello?”
“Goddy?” said a man’s voice in a near-whisper.
“Who is this?” said Godwin, though he knew.
“Don’t be stupid, for heaven’s sake!”
“Why, hello, John,” drawled Godwin in as dry a voice as he could manage, though his heart was already singing.
“I’m concerned that I haven’t heard from you.”
“Well, you made it pretty clear-twice-that you didn’t want anything to do with me ever again.”
“I was angry. You made me very angry. Sometimes, Goddy, when you act like you don’t care about me, I just can’t stand it.”
“You suspected I didn’t care about you, so you stopped caring about me.”
“I have never stopped caring about you. Ever. Even when I’m angry-even in a jealous rage. Goddy, sometimes you exasperate me beyond endurance. You know you do. You know you’re doing it when it happens.”
“I wasn’t doing anything you could get mad about.”
“Goddy, I
Godwin hung up at that point with a satisfied little smile.
11
Wednesday morning Betsy’s alarm went off at 5:15. Sophie, who had been rescued from the street many years ago, retained a fear of abandonment. She became very much underfoot and vocal at this change in routine. Betsy reassured her, “Come on, I’ve been doing this for a week,” though it had been only three days a week, not enough to have sunk into Sophie’s unsophisticated brain.
Betsy put on an old swimsuit, over which she put a good linen-blend dress in a shade of pale rose and matching sandals, her going-to-work outfit. She packed underwear, shampoo, soap, and a towel in a light zippered bag and, ignoring Sophie’s anxious inquiries about breakfast, went down to the back door and out. She was going exercising.
Betsy had been meaning to take up horseback riding or maybe power walking, but with running her shop, trying to learn enough about roof repair to choose a roofer for her building, dealing with her tenants, volunteering with the Antique Car Run, and keeping up with household chores, she just hadn’t managed to add an exercise program.
She did manage a couple of hours for a physical a few weeks ago, and her doctor said she would have more energy if she would stop writing IOUs to her body and find some kind of exercise she would actually do. So Betsy investigated and found an early-bird water aerobics program that met three mornings a week. Betsy chose it partly
