Despite the delay in getting out of town, Betsy took Highway 55 west rather than 12. Twelve was almost a direct line to Willmar, but she wanted a look at both Buffalo and New London, which lay on the other two sides of a triangle formed by the Twin Cities, Willmar, and Paynesville.
Still, she was surprised at how long a drive it was. She knew, on the one hand, that the route the antique cars would drive from New London to the Cities suburb of New Brighton was a trifle over a hundred miles-but the route wandered and meandered to avoid main highways and their traffic. On the other hand, apparently there was only so much meandering a route could do.
The early-evening air was cool, and she rolled down all the windows. Out past Rockford, some farmer had been cutting hay and the sweet scent was paradise. The sun was below the horizon but the sky was still blue when the speed limit dropped and signs announced Buffalo, where the antique cars would pause for lunch on Saturday. Betsy noted the turnoff for the high school was on the eastern side of the town, and marked by a gas station. She’d be coming here to help prepare and serve lunch on Saturday. The highway skirted Buffalo’s downtown, so she couldn’t tell if it was a brisk little city on the move, or a dying country town full of sad, boarded-up commercial buildings.
At Paynesville she turned south on Highway 23, which went past New London on its way to Willmar. By the time she got there, it had been completely dark for a long while, and she didn’t get even a vague impression of what New London was like.
By then she was tired, and Willmar was twenty long minutes away. She turned on the radio and found a talk show with a very aggravating host. Being annoyed got her adrenaline flowing, and she came into Willmar bright with anger.
In Minnesota it’s hard to find a city, town, or village that isn’t wrapped around, alongside, or divided by a lake. Willmar was no exception. Highway 23 joined a divided highway as it ran along the water. A frontage road appeared on the other side of the highway, and soon after Betsy saw the sign for her motel. She pulled into the graveled parking area with a sigh of relief, signed in, called Jill to report her safe arrival, and went to bed.
But she was still too annoyed to sleep. She got into her project bag and found she’d left her knitting in Excelsior-another annoyance. She’d been working on an infant’s sweater for a homeless program, and forgot she’d brought it down to the shop to show a customer. The counted pattern she had brought along was too complex to tackle for relaxation, so she picked up the Bay Times. There was no story about the antique cars on the front page, or the second page, or the fourth page-there it was, a two-page spread in the very center, with lots of photographs. One was of Lars, standing in streamers of steam like a character in a Gothic movie, his expression serious and his pose dramatic. Jill might like a print of that. Betsy made a note in the margin to call the paper and ask if prints were for sale. There were more than a dozen photos surrounding a short article in the middle of the spread. In an upper corner was the 1902 Oldsmobile, and there was the Winton, its cloche-hatted rider standing with one foot on the running board, needing only a machine gun to look a lot like Clyde’s girlfriend, Bonnie. In a lower corner was a white-flannel rump sticking out from under the hood of a Maxwell. “Getting to the seat of the problem,” read the caption, “an unidentified driver works on his Maxwell.” Bill Birmingham had said he didn’t want to be interviewed, Betsy remembered, and apparently hadn’t paused in his labors even long enough to give his name. Cute photo, in a way, and an even cuter caption-but too bad the last photograph of Bill had to be this ridiculous pose. Such a contrast to the noble look the photographer had somehow found in Lars.
Betsy yawned. Amusement had washed away her annoyance, and suddenly she was very tired. She folded the paper and put it on the nightstand, turned out the light, and in less than five minutes was sound asleep in her rented bed.
A loud noise startled her out of a dreamless sleep. For a moment she couldn’t think what the noise was or why the bed felt unfamiliar. Oh, Willmar, sure. And it was the phone, which made its harsh noise again, and she fumbled the receiver to her ear.
“H’lo?” she mumbled.
“Aren’t you up yet?” asked a chipper voice she recognized as Jill’s. “I was going to buy you breakfast if you were about ready to go.”
Up? Was it morning already? Yes, that seemed to be sunshine shining around the edges of the heavy curtain pulled across the window. Wow.
“Are you here in Willmar?” asked Betsy, blinking to get her vision going. She’d had laser surgery on her eyes a few months ago and was still pleased and a little surprised, once she pried them open, to be able to read the little bedside alarm clock without help. Six A.M. Wow.
“No, I’m in New London. There’s a nice little café on the main street that knows how to fry an egg just like you want it.”
“Poached,” said Betsy. “Can they fry it poached?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. In forty-five minutes then?”
“What’s the name of the place?”
“I can’t remember, but it’s the café on the main street, you can’t miss it,” said Jill. “Lars and I will meet you there.”
Must be a really small town, thought Betsy, hanging up and tossing back the covers.
Soon after, she drove into New London across a beautiful curving bridge over a big old millpond. It dropped her off in downtown, which was two blocks long and did not in any way resemble its namesake. There was a needlework shop, Betsy noticed as she got out of her car, and a gift shop, a restaurant, a gas station, and a café. The café was full of people, and the air was heavy with the old-fashioned, pre-cholesterol-scare smells of bacon, sausage, fried eggs, toast, hash browns, pancakes, and hot, maple-flavored syrup. There was a counter, whose seven stools were made of red plastic and stainless steel, and pale, Formica-topped tables along the other walls. Pictures of wildlife adorned the smokey blue walls.
At a table along the wall were Jill, Lars, and Adam. Lars and Adam were facing the door, and so raised their hands when Betsy came in to show her where they were.
Betsy sat beside Jill, who handed her a menu. “They can poach you an egg if you like,” she said. “I already asked.”
Lars and Adam were digging into platters laden with Canadian bacon, fried eggs, and hash browns, with toast on the side.
Betsy ordered a poached egg on a slice of whole wheat toast, and coffee. Jill had a gigantic sweet roll with pecans glued to it with melted brown sugar.
Adam smiled at Betsy. “Ready to go for a ride?”
“What, you mean with Lars?”
“Okay, if you like. But there are other cars making the short trip to Litchfield today. You can hitch a ride with one of them, if you like, maybe on the way out or back.”
“Gosh, thanks!” said Betsy, glancing at Lars to see if he minded.
He shrugged and smiled around a mouthful of potato.
“Do I have some duties to perform today?” Betsy asked Adam.
“Not really. We’re not logging people out for Litchfield, it’s an informal trip.”
“Are you driving to Litchfield?” she asked.
“Yes. You want to ride with me? I’m driving my 1911 Renault sport touring car. You won’t see another like it in your life.”
Betsy asked, “Do you mean because it’s restored so beautifully, or because it’s rare?”
Adam grinned. “Both.”
“Well, how can I turn down a double once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Though I probably won’t appreciate it like I should. I’m so ignorant about this car-collecting business.”
Adam’s grin broadened. “Just watch the envious eyes on us, and you’ll know all you need to know.”
Lars said, “You want to make the return trip with Jill and me?”
Betsy looked at Jill. “You’re finally coming to terms with that car, aren’t you?”
“I suppose so. I went for a ride in it a few days ago, and I have to admit, it’s slick.”
“Next year, in costume!” announced Betsy happily. To Lars she said, “Yes, I’ll be glad to ride with you.”
Jill asked Adam, “Is there a layover in Litchfield, or do we just go there and come right back?”
“Whatever you like. Since we don’t note departure times for these little practice runs, you’re entirely on your own. But if you’re interested in staying awhile, Litchfield has a nice Civil War museum, and some antique shops.”
Betsy wondered what sort of Civil War museum there could be in a place so far removed from the battle sites-and decided she’d take a look and see. She looked at Jill and thought she detected the same notion.
Lars did, too. He sighed. “All right, we’ll take a look at the museum.”
Betsy smiled at yet another instance of someone knowing someone else’s mind very well. “What time are you leaving, Adam?” she asked.
“About ten, if things are running all right at the Boy Scout building. That’s our headquarters here in New London.” He checked his watch. “I’d better get over there. See you at ten.” He smiled at Jill and Lars. “You, too,” he said, rose, and departed.
As soon as he was out of earshot, Lars said, “So what have you found out so far?”
“About what?” asked Betsy.
“About this murder,” he said impatiently.
“Nothing.”
His light blue eyes widened. “I don’t believe that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You’re too clever to have gone around asking questions like you do and not found out something.”
Jill said, mock-proudly, “And you thought he was just another dumb blond, didn’t you?”
Lars guffawed, but his eyes remained expectantly on Betsy.
“All right. I have been told by two of her children that a friend of the Birmingham family was hopelessly in love with Charlotte. I think she returned that love, and may have been having a long-term affair with him. His name is Marvin Pierce, and I have a sad feeling that since Charlotte wouldn’t divorce her husband for him, he may have found another way to set her free.”
“If they were mutually in love, why wouldn’t Charlotte divorce her husband?” asked Jill. “From what I’ve heard, Bill Birmingham was a workaholic, and when he did come home, he was a tyrant. Why not leave him? Divorce is easy enough nowadays.”
Lars said, “Maybe she was afraid of Bill’s reaction. If he was bad-tempered, was he also abusive?”
“I don’t know,” said Betsy. “I haven’t heard anything on that order.”
“Well, what else do you know?” asked Lars.
Betsy said, “Bill Birmingham was a very wealthy man, wealthier than Marvin. If it wasn’t me supplying the alibi, I’d certainly be trying to poke a hole in it, because Charlotte is the obvious suspect. On the other hand, Bill’s death came at a bad time. It seems a substantial part of his income was the profits from his company. When Bill had a ministroke, he invited his son Broward to come home and take over the business. Bro has all kinds of ideas for expanding the company, and he’d been plowing the profits back into it. Bill was trying to stop him, but not only had Bill turned the management over to Bro, he had to give half the company to Bro to get him to agree to come home. Bill was taking steps to stop or at least slow Bro down when he was killed.”
“Where does that leave the grieving widow?” asked Lars.
“Not as well off as she’d have been if she’d killed Bill before Bro came into the picture.”
“Ah,” nodded Jill.
Lars asked, “Where was Bro Saturday morning?”
“I don’t know. Is there a way to find out, maybe from Sergeant Steffans? I don’t want to ask Bro myself-he has his father and grandfather’s bad temper.”
Jill pulled a notebook from her shirt pocket-Betsy was amused to notice that even out of uniform Jill carried one-and made a note. Writing, she said, “I wonder if Marvin is as eager a lover now that Charlotte’s not rich?”
“Well, I’m not sure how not-rich she is. I’d like to find out the situation with Bill’s estate. Surely there’s more to it than the business and a set of antique cars.”
Jill made another note. “Looks like I’ll have to take Sergeant Steffans to lunch next week.” She was so busy writing she missed the massive frown that slowly formed on Lars’s broad forehead.
Sergeant Steffans ran his thumb and long, knobby fingers down either side of his narrow jaw. He was standing in Marvin’s small office in the Lutheran Brotherhood Building downtown. Lutheran Brotherhood was a large insurance company with headquarters in a blood-red building with copper-coated windows, one of a set of buildings apparently colored by a comic-book artist on the south end of downtown Minneapolis. Steffans grew up in St. Paul, whose sedate old skyscrapers and narrow streets show plainly why it considers itself at best a fraternal twin to Minneapolis’s broad avenues and sci-fi buildings.
Marvin Pierce was about five-nine, with light brown hair in a very retro crew cut. He was trim and athletic in build, dressed Friday casual in Dockers, sport coat, and blue dress shirt without a tie. His face couldn’t carry the build or the hair, being very ordinary and middle-aged. His blue eyes were wary.
“It’s just routine,” Steffans said. “We have to check and double-check every possibility.” He could see Marvin didn’t believe that, but it was true-most cases were broken by following a well-marked routine.
“I didn’t see her Saturday morning,” Marvin said, “so I don’t know what time she left her house. I know she was home by five-thirty, because that’s what time it was when I checked my watch when I was in her kitchen heating water to make her a cup of tea. I’d been there about, oh, I’m not sure, twenty minutes? But of course, by then, Bill’d been dead for hours.” He bit his lip and stroked the top of his head, yanking his hand away when he encountered the bristly haircut. New style then. Was that important? Steffans wrote a very brief note-he was a thorough note taker-while Marvin mused, “God, what a mess! I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“How long had you known him?”
“Years.” When Steffans held his pen ready and looked inquiring, Marvin calculated and said, “Twenty-six, twenty-seven years. Maybe twenty-eight. I worked for him for a while, foreman in the plant.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“Got a better offer, which wasn’t difficult. Bill Birmingham hated to pay a man what he was worth. Not a bad boss, a little hard, and tight. Good businessman and better friend. Liked him, liked his kids, liked his wife.”
“You married?”
“Twice, once right out of high school, lasted ten months, no kids; then nine years to Alice. Three kids, all girls, all doing fine, turned out nice. ’Course, a lot of that is due to Alice’s second husband, a good man, walked the second two down the aisle when they got married.” Marvin was looking inward, a half-smile on his lips, and half of that was pained.
Steffans made another note. “Did you murder Bill Birmingham?”
That directness surprised Marvin; he looked up, mouth half-open, eyes wide. “No,” he said.
“Do you know who did?”
“No!” This came out a bit sharply, and he grimaced. “No way I could know that,” he said. “I wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Where were you?”
“At home.”
“Alone?”
Now he was amused. “Yes, as it happens. I had some friends over the night before and we sat up late, playing poker, shooting the bull, drinking beer. I got up Saturday, but I was feeling so bad I had to call Buddy Anderson, who I was supposed to meet for golf, and beg off. I don’t know if it was the beer or the sandwiches, but I was pretty sick all day Saturday. I stayed home with the TV, so I was there when Char’s son Bro called me late in the afternoon with the news, and asked me to come over. Char was taking it hard, he said, and asking for me.”
“Were you surprised?”
“Hell, yes! I thought that when old Bill went, it would be a stroke, him having high blood pressure and all.”
“No, I mean that Charlotte Birmingham would ask for you.”
“Oh. No, not at all. I’ve sat up with her and one or another of the children many a time. Been there for the good times, too. Done it so much people are surprised to learn I’m not a member of the family.”
As she drove behind Jill and Lars around the millpond, Betsy noted small houses of the post-World War II variety, then a wide, grassy field full of motor homes, closed trailers, and antique cars. Jill turned there, and a little farther along were some enormous, modern sheds on one side of the narrow street and on the other an old cemetery. At least some of the enormous sheds were bus barns, their big open doors showing that inside were not city buses, but the luxury kind that are rented to groups making jaunts. Except one of the barns had antique cars inside and in front of it.
There were more antique cars parked on a sandy verge along the narrow lane.
Betsy was so busy looking around that she almost failed to notice that Jill, on making another turn, had immediately pulled onto that scrubby verge. She slammed on her brakes as she went past Jill’s car, and pulled in at the far end of the row, beside a sky-blue vehicle the size of a Conestoga wagon. It had blue and white striped awning material for a roof. The hood was small for a car that size, and the radiator sloped backward from its base. Like most of the antique cars, its wheels were wagon size, with thick, wooden spokes. When she got out, she could hear that the car’s engine was running, but in a very peculiar manner. Every antique car she had met so far had its own motor sound, but this one had to be the strangest. Brum-sniff, brum-sniff, brum-sniff, it went.
Jill and Lars were walking up to an old, white clapboard house. There was a big sign, BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA, over a screen door marked only by a small concrete slab. Betsy took two steps to follow, then turned to listen some more to the huge car’s motor. Yes, it was inhaling sharply between short engine sounds, brum-sniff, brum-sniff, brum-sniff. A man in jeans and blue checked shirt who had ducked around Lars on the walk now came angling toward Betsy.
“Whaddaya think?” he asked as he stopped beside her.
“What is it?” asked Betsy.
“A 1901 Winton. Single cylinder. This is the car that made a transcontinental crossing of the United States, New York to San Francisco, before there were paved roads or gas stations.”
“Wow,” said Betsy. “The pioneering spirit was still alive then, I guess.”
That remark pleased him. “And I own a hunk of it.” The man got in and put his machine into reverse. Whining and tilting dangerously, it backed onto the lane, but then rolled smoothly on down toward the bus barns. Apparently it only sniffed while idling.
Must be a heck of a big cylinder, thought Betsy, if you can hear it sucking wind like that. Of course, to move something that big, it would have to be one heck of a cylinder.
She went up the walk and through the screen door-which made a very nostalgic creak when opened and a satisfactory slap when it closed. But this wasn’t a home. The floor was faded linoleum tile; the walls were dotted with Boy Scout posters and an old black bearskin.
They had come in through the long side of a rectangular room. Tables of assorted sizes and styles were scattered around it. Behind a long one made of plywood, under the bearskin, stood three women and two household-moving-size cardboard boxes. On a nearby table was a stack of the banners drivers were to put on their cars, canvas squares with ANTIQUE CAR RUN, the soft drink symbol, and big black numbers printed on them. Ties ran off each corner.
The women behind the table were all wearing big green T-shirts with the logo of the Antique Car Run printed on their fronts. Half a dozen men and four women waited patiently in two lines in front of the table. Lars and Jill were among them.
One man at the head of the line was laughing at some jest he’d already made, and as the woman handed him a shirt and a clear plastic bag of materials, he asked, “What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?”
“What?” asked the woman.
“Anyone can roast beef!” he said. She made a “get away with you” gesture at him, and he turned to leave, laughing heartily. I bet he started out as a traveling salesman, thought Betsy.
On the long table was a big computer printout listing each driver’s name, hometown, kind of car, and number of passengers. When it was his turn, Lars announced, “I’m Lars Larson, number sixty-three,” and one of the women ran a finger down the list. When she found it, she ran a highlighter mark through it.
“Welcome to New London, Lars,” she said. “Are these your two riders?” she added, smiling at Betsy and Jill.
Jill nodded, and Betsy said, “No, but I’m a volunteer. I’ll be logging departures tomorrow.”
Another woman, very brisk and tiny, asked Lars, “What size T-shirt do you wear, dear?”
“Two-X,” he replied, and she asked the same question of Jill and Betsy, then turned to one of the enormous boxes, which came up to her armpits, to dig around until she found examples in the right sizes.
“We’ve got to get these sorted out,” she remarked to the woman with the marker. “Or I’ll fall in reaching for one and never be seen again. Here you go, dears.” Then she turned to lift out a clear plastic bag from the other box. It held maps and instructions.
The other woman said to Lars, “Tie your banner on the left side of your car. That’s where the monitors will be standing, and they’ll want to be able to find your number quickly if you come in with several other cars.”
Lars grinned. “I won’t be among several other cars, I’ll be way out in front.”
The woman frowned severely at him. “Remember, this is not a race.”
Jill snorted faintly and Betsy smiled. Not officially, no. But the cars were mostly being driven by men used to overcoming competition, and who did not like losing.