She smiled up at him. “Yes, I suspected that from the start.” He wanted to go back to that embrace, but she moved out of range, saying, “I’m keeping you from your work. Thank you for being patient with me.”

“Don’t forget Friday. I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty, if that’s not too early. I want to show you the lake at sunset.”

“I look forward to that,” she said, and continued toward the door. Then, just like Columbo, she turned with one last question. “Oh, how long was Margot in the storage area looking at the horse? We can’t find her sketchbook, but I’ll stop looking for it if I know she didn’t have time to make a graph of the pattern.”

He shrugged. “An hour, maybe? I’m afraid I don’t know how long it takes to make a graph.”

He frowned worriedly at the closed door for a moment after she left, but as he dug into the paperwork he had to work on he began to whistle. Someone was going to get kissed very thoroughly on Friday.

Chapter 17

17

Betsy retraced the route back to Lyndale and went up it, toward the towers of downtown. In a couple of stoplights she was driving past the Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church, with its circular nave and crown-like steeple, then past the Gothic St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, and saw ahead the entrance to 394, next to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Basilica, built in the Baroque style. If I’m going to live in this part of the world, maybe I need to start going to church, she told herself.

In another minute she was on 394, which curved around sharply and headed west.

What did it all mean? What was Joe Mickels doing in an Excelsior parking lot when he was supposed to be an hour away at a business meeting? Had he come back in time to murder Margot?

Irene Potter said she saw him, which meant she’d contradicted her own alibi of being at home doing needlework at the time of the murder. Was she so innocent she didn’t realize that? Or was she astute enough to realize that someone might have seen her, and so was getting in ahead of that witness?

Hud drove a car that at first glance or in the dark looked like an American model from back in the sixties. Why hadn’t she thought to ask his secretary if in fact he had taken her to dinner that fatal night? Not that there wasn’t time to have gone from dinner to Excelsior and parking his convertible in a parking lot only a couple of blocks from Crewel World.

And Hud was the Asian art curator, responsible for the T‘ang horse, the needlepoint representation of which was mysteriously missing.

The question was, why? Hud had no motive.