Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 by Framed in Lace Page A

Hopkins , did it? Those two ran off in 1948.”
    â€œI thought it happened the same summer. Are you sure they ran off in 1948?”
    â€œYes, because that was the year Martha had to drop out as organist and they asked me to take her place. With her husband gone, she had to run the dry cleaning store all by herself and she didn’t have time for choir. I got in and stayed in. I got my gold pin for twenty years’ service in 1968, see?” She touched one of two tiny round badges pinned to her dress. Malloy took a look and saw the badge said Saint Elwin’s Choir and Twenty Years around its edge. A tiny gold chain led from the pin to a tiny rectangle with the year 1948 on it.
    The other badge was slightly more elaborate and said Saint Elwin’s Choir and Forty Years around its edge. The chained tag also read 1948.
    â€œI stepped down as organist after I got this pin,” she said, touching the second one. “My ears weren’t what they used to be.”
    â€œSorry,” said Malloy, but carelessly. “Say, maybe the Hopkins was sunk in 1948?”
    â€œOh, no,” said the youngest woman. She stood and went to a low shelf behind the table. She selected a slim, blue paperbound book and brought it to Malloy. “It says in here that the boat was sunk in 1949, and this book was written by the man in charge of raising both the Minnehaha and the Hopkins . He even took a picture of the Hopkins at the bottom of the lake.”
    Malloy paged through the book, which was locally published and had good black and white photographs in it. Sure enough, there was an old photo of a streetcar steamboat loaded with passengers, and another of an open hatch, this one taken under water. The accompanying paragraph said the Hopkins was sunk near her sisters off the Big Island in 1949.
    â€œAnyone know where I can reach the author of this book?” he asked.
    â€œHe’s with the Minnesota Transportation Museum’s steamboat branch; their office is right down by the lake, in that little row of stores,” said Myrtle.
    â€œMay I keep this?” he asked, displaying the book.
    â€œFor $7.95, you may,” said Myrtle, producing a cash box, and the best Malloy could do was get a receipt and hope the department would reimburse him.

4
    T he Minnesota Transportation Museum Ticket Office and Souvenir Store was a little storefront, in a row of them behind Pizza Hut. There was a parking lot in front, and Malloy stood a minute looking at the lake across the street. A gentle slope ran down to the docks—narrow wooden walks into the water, supported on thick wooden piles—now empty in anticipation of winter. Malloy sometimes thought he would like to live in some state where winter didn’t take up so much of the year. They had bass lakes as far south as Missouri, didn’t they? But in Missouri, they didn’t go ice fishing, did they? And Malloy loved ice fishing almost as much as fishing from his bass boat.
    He turned, saw the sign, and went up and into the MTM store.
    Like most souvenir stores, MTM had lots of T-shirts and sweatshirts. There were also caps, some of them the old-fashioned, high-crowned, mattress-ticking variety that yesteryear’s engineers wore. There were bright-colored prints of the lake in its heyday, with streetcar boats taking on passengers in the foreground. Each boat was named after a town on the lake. There were also prints of streetcars, some in small-town settings back when Hopkins and Minnetonka were not merely suburbs of Minneapolis—though even then the main purpose of the streetcars was to take workers to the big city.
    A glass case held a big model of the restored Minnehaha, showing the peculiar long slope of her stem. Malloy remembered seeing photographs of the Great White Fleet back in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, where the ships had that same odd back end. He wondered what its purpose was.
    At the far end of the store was a counter behind