A Murderous Yarn

the others were looking toward it, it was. She moved her jaw in a kind of yawn, trying to get her hearing the rest of the way back.

Lars said angrily, “Call and cancel! The car’s fine, and we’re fine!”

That was met with disbelieving silence.

“No, really,” said Betsy, “I’m all right. I’m not injured.” She looked at the Stanley, which seemed innocent of all wrongdoing, though the hood still stood upright. “But my God, Lars, if that’s what happens when the pilot light goes out, what happens when you run out of steam?” And she started laughing again.

“Hey,” he began, but she stepped back out of his reach.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, and in fact her knees seemed to have regained their strength. “Better see to your car.”

“Oh, it’s okay, really, it’s in perfect condition. We’ll let the fumes air out and relight the pilot light, and we’re back on our way.” He walked over to the front of the car and began looking at the squat white round thing where the engine in an ordinary car would be.

“What the hell kind of a car is that?” asked a stocky young man near the front of the small crowd.

A skinny old man said, “I believe it’s a Stanley Steamer.”

Betsy said, surprised, “You’re absolutely right. How did you know that?”

“My grandfather had one. Kept it in an old shed back of the barn. He used to fire it up and let me drive it over the pastures. It could climb out of the deepest ditch on the place. Ran her on diesel fuel and kerosene, if I remember rightly. But I burned the boiler dry a couple of times and it wouldn’t run after that.”

He was speaking to the crowd as well as to Betsy. Lars had walked around to the side of the car to lift the front seat and rummage around among what sounded like heavy metal tools.

“What are you going to do?” the man with the cell phone asked him.

Lars came up with a flashlight and a length of stiff wire. “Gonna clean out the pilot light,” he said. “If all of you will give me some room!” He spoke with annoyance weighted by the unmistakable authority of a police officer, and everyone decided to give him all the room he wanted.

“I used to use a coat hanger,” the old man said, and he was immediately surrounded by people who wanted to hear more about coat hangers and Stanley Steamers.

Betsy went to stand behind Lars, trying to see without interfering in what he was doing. She heard a car horn honking and honking and turned to see a big old Buick roaring up the road. “Here comes Jill,” she said.

Lars groaned. “She’s gonna make me sell it, I just know she is!” And then he groaned louder at the sound of a siren approaching. Several sirens.

The man who had waved the cell phone said, “I called and canceled! Honest!” Then he hurried into the passenger seat of his car and left.

The Buick slid to a stop across the road and Jill emerged, her face white. “What happened?” she demanded.

“The pilot light went out,” said Betsy, shrugging in further ignorance.

“Pilot light-?”

Lars said, slamming down the hood, “When the pilot light goes out, gasoline fumes collect, and if the boiler’s hot enough, it sets them off. You get a little bang, the hood flies up, the fumes escape, and you’re fine.”

Jill said, “I heard that ‘little bang’ three quarters of a mile from here. I imagine all of Excelsior, most of Shorewood, and half of Deephaven heard it. The 911 switchboard must’ve lit up like a Christmas tree.” She gestured back up the road at the approaching emergency vehicles, their sirens drowning out anything further she might have said.

The fire truck crew listened while Lars explained what was going on, the ambulance crew gave Betsy a cursory examination-Lars refused to let them examine him-and at last they departed. Most of the neighbors by then had gone back into their houses, though the old man hung out at a safe distance to watch Lars work.

Lars spent fifteen minutes clearing the pilot light tube, then reopened the valve to let Coleman gas reach it, lit a long weed stem, and squatted to poke it through one of the holes in the front of the hood. There was a whump that shot flame out both holes. Lars fell backward, landing on his hands and bottom, but said, “See? It’s fine, she’s starting up for me!” He kept his head turned awkwardly away from Jill, and Betsy, in a pretense of going to see if her hat was in the car, saw the reason. The latest explosion had left a blister in place of Lars’s right eyebrow. But the burner was hissing happily, and Lars continued the process of rebuilding a head of steam, which took almost no time, as the boiler hadn’t cooled much during the breakdown.

Jill insisted Betsy ride with her, that Lars drive very slowly; and she followed behind him, emergency lights blinking, all the way home.

3

In a Minnesota summer, nights can be gloriously cool. At 4 A.M. Saturday, June 12, in a dead calm, the temperature was sixty-three. By six it had risen to sixty-eight, and as the sun climbed, it continued to rise. A light breeze started flapping the pennants on the sailboats moored at private docks in St. Alban’s and Excelsior Bay.

The breeze caused the sailor heading out on Lake Minnetonka to reach for his jacket, but by the time he passed the Big Island, he had taken it off again. By 8 A.M., under a spotless sky, it was seventy-one.

Already the air around The Common, Excelsior’s lakeshore park, had begun to smell of grilled pork, hot dogs, cotton candy, smoothies, and deep-fried chicken tenders. Rows of white canvas booths were rising like geometrical mushrooms, filled to bursting with paintings, jewelry, sculpture, Japanese kites, birdhouses shaped like English cottages, and other exotica, as artists prepared for business. Excelsior’s annual art fair was hoisting canvas as it prepared to get under way.

The weatherman predicted temperatures in the upper eighties by midafternoon, but added that the continued light breeze off the lake would keep everyone at the fair comfortable.

Betsy came out of her shop around nine. The long block of Lake Street that Crewel World faced was empty of cars, but had a white canvas booth of its own set up in the middle of the street. Betsy headed for it. There were three people in the booth, a man and two women. Above the booth was a plastic banner with ANTIQUE CAR RUN printed on it in rust-brown letters.

The real Antique Car Run, from New London to New Brighton, was next weekend. Today, Saturday, a group of twenty-five drivers were in the Twin Cities on a publicity tour that included a run from the state capitol building in St. Paul to Excelsior and back.

It was rumored the governor would ride in one of the cars, a rumor the club was careful not to extinguish. Minnesota ’s eccentric governor always drew a crowd.

Both women in the booth were on cell phones, and both were gesturing so wildly that Betsy, approaching, felt a pang of alarm. But the man, a nice-looking fellow about Betsy’s age, winked at her and said, “They’re always like this just before things get under way.”

Betsy said, “Things are going according to plan, then.”

“Yes, the first car will leave in about five minutes.”

“Where do you want me?”

“Right here. But we don’t have anything for you to do until the first ones arrive, which won’t be for about two hours. Your tasks will be to note the time of arrival of each vehicle, and to point them at me in the booth so I can direct them to parking places along the curb.” He glanced up and down the empty street, which had No Parking signs tied to every pole. “I hear we’re not very popular with the committee running the Art Fair.”

Betsy turned to look up toward The Common, two blocks away. Starting before dawn, a slow-moving line of vans, SUVs, trucks, and campers bearing artists and their work had clogged this street, the last draining away into the fair only an hour ago. But now the street belonged to the Antique Car Run, so none of the many hundreds of visitors to the fair could park here today. This distressed those running the art fair, because every extra block visitors had to walk to the lakefront meant their feet would give out that much sooner, giving that much less time for the artists to extract money.

No, Deb Hart had not been pleased at a meeting of her art fair committee and the