“Good night.”

3

It was Saturday, late in the afternoon; the sun was going down, its reddening beams streaming through the open door of the back bedroom. Betsy had spent Friday resting, talking with Margot or her employees down in the shop, unpacking, and going for a brief swim (the water wasn’t salty, the waves were nonexistent, and the beach could be walked end to end in about a minute).

Now she was secretly enjoying a cream-filled sweet roll from that very nice little bakery on Water Street in the privacy of the apartment while Margot, unaware, sold floss and evenweave fabric downstairs. She wished you could still see the lake from the living-room window—it really was a pretty lake. But lakeshore property had surged in value, Shelly had told her; new houses were being built that had kitchens bigger than the cottages they replaced. So the little wetland across the street had been filled in and a condominium built on the site.

The price of a condo must be very high if it never occurred to Margot to buy one.

Betsy sat at the small round table in the dining nook drinking a glass of orange juice with her sweet roll, and thinking.

She’d been here three days, if you counted her day of arrival as one, rather than the less-than-half it was. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but Excelsior wasn’t a disappointment, yet. If this were still the fifties, Excelsior would be positively typical of a Midwestern country town, down to the lack of used-car lots and warehouse shopping outlets siphoning shoppers from the little downtown. They must have draconian zoning laws around here, she thought.

The people in Excelsior she had met so far were friendly, and the worst teenager she had seen had not been scary, only very oddly dressed. Thoroughly pierced, of course, with hair colored Kool-Aid red. But even he had offered a halfhearted wave.

Crewel World was a going concern, so far as Betsy could tell. Who would have guessed one could make a living selling embroidery floss, hand-spun wool, and bamboo knitting needles? But there had been a steady trickle of customers yesterday while Betsy watched. Two of them had spent lavishly, buying “canvases,” stiff white fabric woven so loosely the holes showed, with paintings of dolls, Christmas stockings, cute animals, woodland scenes, or whatever on them. That the customers then also bought yarn and flosses so they could carefully cover every inch of the paintings with wool or cotton or silk only made Betsy sure that they were crazy, especially since the artists who painted the pictures charged so much for their work.

Of course, there was a trick to the store as well, Betsy had learned. Margot had somehow wrangled a lease at an extraordinary rent, even at upper Midwest prices. With the rent so low, it was easier to show a profit. Certainly the furniture in the apartment was of a quality to indicate the opposite of poverty.