Ferris - Buttons and Bones

Table of Contents

CREWEL WORLD
FRAMED IN LACE
A STITCH IN TIME
UNRAVELED SLEEVE
A MURDEROUS YARN
HANGING BY A THREAD
CUTWORK
CREWEL YULE
EMBROIDERED TRUTHS
SINS AND NEEDLES
KNITTING BONES
THAI DIE
BLACKWORK
BUTTONS AND BONES

PATTERNS OF MURDER
SEW FAR, SO GOOD

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Rita Mays for allowing me to use her wonderful log cabin as the model for the one purchased by Jill and Lars Larson in this book. There really is a Thunder Lake shaped like a duckling up in Cass County, Minnesota. My writers group, Crme de la Crime, again proved invaluable in their critiques of this manuscript as it was being written. The Longville and Ridgedale Public Libraries were helpful and valuable sources of information on the German POWs in the upper Midwest, as were Lucille Anderson and Helen Slagle. I want to thank Kevin Tschida, Donny Swede Hendrickson, and Rungwell Johanssen, coffee drinkers, for inspiring the set of characters at The Lone Wolf. Investigator Robert Stein of the Cass County Sheriffs Department answered lots of questions. My own dentist, Dr. Wallace Lunden, told me the difference between maxillary and mandibular molars. Tom Goodpaster of Blue Heron Investigations told me how hed go about finding a missing person. Violet Putnam McDonald and Wilma Griffin are real people, but Betsys conversations with them are fiction.

One

MINNESOTANS refer to any lake in the state as the lake. Since there are actually more than the advertised ten thousand, this can be confusing.

Say, I heard the Larsons went and bought that cabin up on the lake they were looking at, Phil said during the crochet class at Crewel World. He was referring to a cabin on Thunder Lake in Cass County.

Claudias mother said, Yes, they did. Theyre going to love it. A cabin up at the lake is the greatest place on earth to take kids during the summer. She was thinking of her own happy childhood at her parents cabin on Long Lake near Litchfield.

Meryls mother said, Were going up to the lake this weekend, meaning Lake Hubert up near Brainerd.

Betsy, owner of the shop, said nothing, although Jill had kept her abreast of the purchase, as well as the first couple of visits to the cabin.

Betsy was co-presiding over a Saturday morning class called Crochet for Kids. Five mothers were present with six childrenClaudia, nine, was there with her seven-year-old brother, Andrew.

The children were going to make cup covers, double crochet roundels with lacy edges weighted with beads. They were meant to sit on top of opened cans of soft drinks or glasses of lemonade at outdoor picnics to keep the yellow jackets out of them.

The students had begun by making a chain. Lottie was the best at thather chain grew over a yard long and gained speed with every stitch during that part of the lesson. Andrew was close behind, but poor Chloe couldnt even master How to Hold the Hook. Of course, she was only three and really wouldnt have been accepted in the class at all if her mother hadnt been a good customer and very insistent.

Now they were learning to make a round shape in single crochet. Little fingers thrust the size G hook through loops of worsted yarn, to drape the yarn over it, snag it, and draw it through. Little tongues appeared in the corners of small mouths, and the occasional high-pitched sigh or groan or giggle was heard.

And over the childrens heads, the adults gossiped.

Someone told me its a real log cabin, a hundred years old, said Lotties mother.

Then they had better brace the walls, said Chloes mother. A hundred years of wood borers can turn logs into paper lace.

I heard it doesnt even have indoor plumbing, offered Violets mother. Violet, darling, try using your left finger, instead of your thumb. Thats right. She gave the teacher a look of rebuke for making her correct Violet herself.

Teacher Godwin, who was also the store manager, turned the look aside with a sweet smile. His method of teaching was to tell once, show once, and then wait for the pupil to ask for assistance. Violet had been managing quite well using her thumb.

It has indoor plumbing, said Lotties mother. Jill told me that herself just last week, although they havent got the water pump up and running yet.

I hear the place is a wreck, that it stood empty for a lot of years, said Phil. An older man, without a child or grandchild accompanying him, Phil was himself a student. A knitter and needlepointer, he was seeking to add crochet to his needle working skills, and too impatient to wait for an adult class. He was using a heavy yarn and a big hook, suitable for his thick fingers and antique vision. He annoyed Betsy by adding, Right, Betsy?

She said, Ive heard something like that, and gave Phil a shushing grimace.

Betsy did not wish to be drawn into the discussion because shed done something against one of her own rules, and helped Jill and Lars acquire the property.

Some years back, along with the shop, she had inherited a small company called New York Motto. The company, established in Wisconsin and run by a partner, searched out and bought houses and small businesses whose owners had gone bankrupt. It could be seen as a sad thing, battening on to other peoples misfortune, and Betsy didnt care to get into a discussion of it.

It wasnt a difficult business to run, though it took some judgment to decide what properties to buy. The trick was finding them. Not many people knew where to look for these court-ordered bankruptcy sales, as they were usually advertised in obscure legal newspapers. Betsys partner in New York Motto was a former paralegal who had worked for a firm specializing in monetary matters. After years of experience, her judgment was honed to a fine edge. All she needed was the capital, which Betsys sisterand now Betsysupplied. Once purchased, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, New York Motto would inspect the properties, sometimes do minor repairs, then use the Internet and ordinary newspapers to advertise and sell them at a profit.

In good times and bad, New York Motto was one of Betsys more reliable sources of income; it was the reason she did not have to draw a salary on the profits from her needlework shop. Hardly any of Betsys friends or acquaintances knew about the company, and Betsy was reluctant to share for several reasons, one being that some might want Betsy to give them a special deal.

Jill Cross Larson was an exception, thoughand while she hadnt asked Betsy outright to help find her and Lars a bargain in lakefront property, theyd talked about the search she and Lars were conducting in language Betsy took as a hint.

So Betsy had started paying attention to buys the company was making on lakefront property well outside the Twin Cities, and when she found a couple of prospects, she let Jill know about them.

One, six acres with an old log cabin on it, was the more distant, three hours from Excelsior, only two from far-north Lake Itasca, source of the Mississippi River. The property came into bankruptcy court when the last legal owner fell into a terminal illness and mortgaged the placelong unusedto pay for medical expenses. He was, of course, unable to make payments.