4 Plagued by Quilt (5 page)

“You can’t tell me you aren’t up to something,” he said. “So there’s nothing in your hands, but you are hiding something. I can see it in the way your eyes move when you’re thinking.”

Calm breaths. In and out.
In and out.
I made him wait while my sarcastic pressure came down. “Deputy Dunbar,” I said then, my voice even. With an effort. “Truthfully, I’m not hiding anything. But I’d venture to say that you’re hiding a
lot
.” Voice not so even there. I smoothed a wrinkle in my pants leg before continuing. “What happened to Phillip Bell?”

“We’re still in the information-gathering phase of the investigation.”

“No. Don’t hand me that.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “We are still gathering information.”

“Hooey.”

His eyebrows rose.
“Hooey?”

“It’s a perfectly good word, and I’m sure you know what it means.”

“I do. For instance, your Ms. Oh-so-cooperative act isn’t pulling the wool over my eyes. I saw what you were doing with that cold compress while you were recovering from your swoon—”

“I didn’t ‘swoon.’”

“Pardon me. While you were recovering from your near swoon. You couldn’t help yourself, and you let your stage prop droop a time or two so you could see what was going on.”

Our interaction was doing tremendous things for my character. So I told myself, as I bit the inside of my cheek
and tried not to show I was in pain. To Clod I said, “And I probably looked silly.”

“Nosy. You looked nosy.”

“And we both know that I am, although ‘curious’ sounds more polite. So what’s your point?”

He glanced toward the window, then at the clock on the wall, and back at me.

“Are you waiting for something?” I asked.

“No.” He still stood at the door, arms crossed again. Like a sentry.

“But are you expecting something to happen? Outside the window—where you said there was nothing to see and so you had me sit over here?”

“No.” He crossed his arms more firmly.

I debated getting up and looking out the window. Then someone knocked on the door and Clod gave a start—a suspiciously guilty start that he tried to cover with a harrumph as he turned and opened the door a crack. He only opened it a crack, though, as if he knew who would be there and didn’t want me to see. Or was I being paranoid?

While Clod and his visitor communed in low, official-sounding grunts, I decided to go ahead and illustrate the point about how naturally curious I was by sidling over to the window. There really wasn’t anything to see, though. Nothing obvious going on. How disappointing. I turned back to see if Clod had finished his conference.

He had. And he’d invited an unsmiling, uniformed friend to join us.

“M
s. Rutledge,” Clod said, “Deputy Munroe has one or two questions for you. Shorty, Ms. Rutledge has already told me that she had a meeting scheduled with the deceased this morning.”

“Oh, hey, are you Shorty?”

“Ms. Rutledge,” Clod said, at his most sententious, “I’d like to remind you that we are investigating a death.”

“Sure. Sorry. Nice to finally meet you, though, Shorty. I mean Deputy Munroe. Sorry. Go ahead and ask your questions.”

Shorty looked like an accountant. My idea of an accountant, anyway—slightly rumpled and soft around the middle, tired eyes behind round wire-rim glasses. His name hadn’t taken any imagination; he was taller than me, but not by much. He looked like a short, pencil-pushing version of Henry Fonda.

“Ms. Rutledge, how well did you know Phillip Bell?” His voice was pure Willie Nelson.

“I met him yesterday for the first time. Are you from Texas? Sorry. It’s just you remind me of—”

“Ms. Rutledge, how well do you know Fredda Oliver?”

“Who?” They both watched me so intently that I backed up against the windowsill. “What’s this about?”

Neither answered me, but Clod turned to Shorty. “Told you,” he said. “A built-in lie detector. I’d back her face against Fredda’s for telling the truth any day.”

“Who’s Fredda Oliver?” I asked. They didn’t answer.

“Heh,” said Shorty. “And don’t you wish we could get one of those genetically modified patents on an honest face like that?”

Clod slapped him on the back.

“Hey!”
My shout didn’t even make them blink.

Clod opened the door, and with a shooing motion said, “You’re free to go now, Ms. Rutledge.”

Shorty gave me a mock salute. “Nice to finally meet you, too, Ms. Rutledge.”

They smiled and didn’t wait to see if I returned the smiles—or even if I left the room—before falling into another grunt of private, exclusionary conversation. I thought about letting them know I was well aware that I didn’t need their dismissal, and that I’d been free to leave all along. I also thought about
demanding
to know who Fredda Oliver was and what conclusion they’d just reached about her, me, or both of us. They were busy, though, and annoying. And there were other, more satisfying ways of finding answers. I left without a word, a wave, or the raspberry they deserved. I was the epitome of Zach Aikens cool.

*   *   *

Zach Aikens and Jerry Hicks sat several seats apart in the front row of the otherwise empty auditorium. They were mirror images, with legs extended, chins on chests, sunk in thought. Zach looked up when I stopped in front of him. Jerry Hicks snored. So much for being deep in thought.

“A couple of old ladies said you might be arrested,” Zach said.

That could only be Shirley and Mercy Spivey. “Are you disappointed?” I asked. So much for giving up sarcasm.

“Nah. Some of the others believed it, but just because people are old doesn’t make them right. Do you know those two have identical varicose veins on the backs of their calves?” He shuddered.

I liked this kid more and more. “What’s up with Mr. Hicks?”

“Said he had a late night, not to bother him.”

“And is everyone else in the education room? I thought Ms. Solberg was meeting with you in here.”

He shrugged and let his chin sink back onto his chest. It suddenly occurred to me he might be having trouble with Phillip’s death. Wasn’t this the kind of situation where counselors would be called in if this were a school?

“Um, do you want to talk about what happened?”

“Do you
know
what happened?” With his chin still on his chest, he appeared to be looking at me over a pair of glasses—reprovingly—and that made me want to be accurate in my hedging.

“I know the end result,” I said. “Mr. Bell died. I don’t know everything that happened.”

The twist of his lips didn’t tell me if that answer disappointed him or confirmed something.

“What made you start digging in that spot yesterday?” I asked.

“Nothing
made
me. I saw an anomaly and made an educated guess.”

“Sure, but didn’t that anomaly beg you to come over for a look? Didn’t it tease you to tickle the dirt away? And then, even if you’d tried, you couldn’t have helped
yourself? That’s how I feel when something grabs my attention. And then it starts whole trains of thoughts, although my grandmother called them skeins.”

Zach’s cool shifted ever so slightly toward alarm.

“Anyway, has Mr. Hicks made any guesses about how long the bones have been there?”

A minimal head shake no.

“And this might be too much to hope for, but as you scraped the dirt away yesterday, did you see anything
other
than dirt? Anything indicating the presence of deteriorated textiles, for instance?”

“The old ladies also said you think you’re a detective.”

“Oh yeah? What else did they say?” And why hadn’t Clod or somebody in less-irritating authority sent the twins home? Why hadn’t Nadine?

“Everybody’s a detective, kid,” Jerry said, rousing and yawning. “We’re all trying to figure something out and we’re all following clues. Some people just wear badges to prove it to themselves. As for the bones, I haven’t formed any opinions—none that I can share with the public at this time. Much as I appreciate the public’s interest. Kid, have they got a pop machine around here somewhere? Never mind. I’ll go see if I can detect one.” He rose, stretched, scratched, and left.

“And I guess I’d better go find Ms. Solberg.” Not that Zach cared. “No word yet on when excavation can start on the skeleton?”

“Jerry says he’s giving it time, that archaeologists are born optimists.”

“Huh. Does that make them excavation-pit-half-full kind of people, or half-empty?”

Zach repeated his reproving look.

“Sorry. Do you think Jerry will let you help dig?”

“I’m optimistic.”

“Good answer. And if the others are in there”—I pointed at the door to the education room—“it’s all right for you to be in here?”

“I’m cool.”

*   *   *

But the education room was empty. Or so it appeared. The clever camouflaged connecting door between it and the auditorium opened in such a way that someone—or some two—wouldn’t be seen, if they were standing behind it. As though standing in wait. As were Shirley and Mercy Spivey, the not-quite-enough-times-removed twin cousins of my late, much dearer grandmother. Shirley and Mercy had never broken the habit of dressing as twins. This time they wore almost identical knee-length muumuus, the likes of which I hadn’t seen in real life since . . . ever. Dark puce predominated in the flowers of one muumuu and bilious chartreuse in the other. Catching sight of the identical varicose veins on their calves wasn’t an immediate worry, because the twins faced me. Aggressively.

“Not arrested after all,” the nearer one said before I had the wits to jump back through the door and slam it.

“A perk of dating the deputy,” said the other.

“Only the one time, though,” said the first. “Now she’s dating his brother.”

“Which amounts to the same thing.”

“It does not,” I said. “And it isn’t.”

“We’re happy for you either way,” said the nearer twin. “And happy you’re still breathing free air. We have something to show you.”

Free air, I might be breathing, but it was tainted by the awful cologne that only Mercy Spivey ever wore. She
must be the nearer twin. I stepped back and made a show of looking at my wrist.

“Gosh, I’m not sure I have time right now.”

But they weren’t paying attention, and my wrist didn’t have a watch on it, anyway. Mercy quickly turned around, and I realized they’d been standing so I couldn’t see what was on the table behind them. She turned back holding a white muslin bag out on her arms, as though making an offering.
Don’t fall for it
went through my mind.
That might be a quilt bag, or it might be a Spivey trick
. I took another step backward. But that just gave Shirley enough room to perform the sleight of hand they must have worked out between them. She slid her hands into the bag, under the contents. Mercy pulled the bag away with a flourish. Shirley laid a muslin-wrapped armful down on the table behind them, and the two of them hovered over it with their backs to me. They flipped and unfolded and then stood back to reveal a crazy quilt of vibrant velvets, silks, and embroidered embellishments.

“Wow.”

“I told you she’d like it,” Shirley said. Her breath caught when Mercy’s elbow found her ribs.

“But the rest of it’s my idea,” said Mercy.

“Tell me about the quilt.” Bravely, I stepped between them. I was in love, and neither Mercy’s elbow nor her cologne was threat enough to stop me.

“It’s family,” Shirley said. “Yours and ours. Rebecca, as was our great-grandmother and Ivy’s grandmother—”

“It’s called the Plague Quilt,” Mercy said, lopping off the family tree.

“Rebecca was your great-great-grandmother,” Shirley said. “She made this. She must be where we all get our textile talents from. What do you think of it?”

“She’s not listening,” Mercy said. “She’s hooked. She is in awe of the Plague Quilt’s beauty and transfixed by the very wonder of it. She can’t even bring herself to touch it.”

“That’s her training,” Shirley said. “She’s taken an oath not to touch or breathe on artifacts of a historical nature.”

“
An
historical nature,” Mercy said with an elbow that caught me instead of her sister. “Oh. I am so sorry, Kath. You can pass it along if you like.”

I couldn’t be bothered. The quilt was a gem. The colors glowed, and every eccentric piece of velvet and silk was a canvas for embroidered art—intricate flourishes grew into tiny flowers or delicate insects, and extravagant repetitions of looping and feathered stitches surrounded the pieces and drew them together into a carnival of colors. Best of all were whimsical touches such as a pink-and-gray mouse crouched at the edge of a mouse hole–shaped piece of black velvet, nibbling at an adjoining triangle of cheese-colored silk. The whole thing measured only about five feet square, typical of ornate crazy quilts made in the late nineteenth century, but I wished Great-Great-Grandmother Rebecca had let it go on and on.

“Why do you call it the Plague Quilt?” I asked.

“It’s what Great-Granny Rebecca called it,” Shirley said.

“Do you know why she did?”

“We do,” Mercy said as she started to refold the quilt.

“Wait—”

“And we’ll tell you why, and let you look at it again,” Shirley said, holding the bag open as Mercy carefully slid the quilt inside, “for a small consideration.”

“In exchange,” said Mercy.

I made my pact with the twin devils—they would be allowed to join the TGIF volunteers helping with the quilting portion of Hands on History, and I would be allowed to spend an equal number of hours alone with the quilt. They were right; it seemed a small enough consideration—the word “sacrifice” sprang more immediately to mind, but I wasn’t going to quibble—if they were letting me get my hands on that beauty. I did ask if they would leave the quilt with me in the meantime.

“We’d better not,” Shirley said after tut-tutting and shaking her head.

“We’ll bring it back tomorrow,” said Mercy.

I watched them go, and sent a silent plea to whatever entity watched over optimists that Zach would forgive me for ensuring a continuing plague of the twins in his life.

*   *   *

When I found Nadine, she was sitting at a desk in what must have been Phillip’s office. Less generous than Nadine’s, this was the kind of office I was more familiar with in small museums—uncanny in its resemblance to a glorified supply closet. At least the room had a window at the far end, with a view of the gravel parking lot. If Phillip had pressed one cheek to the window frame and squinted, he could have seen the mules or Portia and her piglets when they were outside in the pens on this side of the barn.

“I wondered how much longer Deputy Dunbar was going to keep you,” Nadine said, looking and sounding relieved to see me.

A coat tree stood in one corner. Phillip’s wide-brimmed felt hat hung on it. There was no sign of the purple frock coat Nadine had told me about. A bookcase
with a few dozen reference books stood against one wall. A banjo leaned against a filing cabinet on the other. A copier or printer sat on top of the filing cabinet. Nadine had been leafing through a binder when I came in, but now she watched me as I looked over the room.

“I didn’t even know he played the banjo,” she said. “I wonder if he sang?”

“I’m sorry we won’t get the chance to find out. Are you going to want help sorting through things here?” I hesitated, then added, “Or in the cottage? I’ll be happy to do what I can.”

“I’ll let you know, Kath. Right now it’s one more thing that has to wait until they tell us something. I hate waiting, but not knowing what’s going on is even worse. Did Deputy Dunbar say anything useful?”

“Sorry, no. But I’m sure he didn’t think I said anything useful, either.” I hoped that would at least make her smile. It didn’t.

“I sent the students home,” she said. “I only told them there was an accident.”

“That was probably best.”

“And I probably came across as completely without feeling for what’s happened.”

“I don’t think so. I doubt anyone thinks that.”

“Because the only thing I know to do right now is move forward. I told the students we’d start back in tomorrow and that we’ll try to make up for missing today.”

“Good. I’ll let the other volunteers know.”

“Grace told them before they left.”

Grace
. Talk about a lack of feeling—I hadn’t given her any thought, hadn’t thought about how Phillip’s death might affect her. “How’s she taking this?”

“She came in this morning before I had a chance to call her. You just missed her. She and Wes stayed until the students were picked up, and then she went home.”

I thought about the woman with Phillip the night before. “Were they still seeing each other?”

“Wes and Grace are seeing each other?” Nadine asked. “Where did you hear that? I really don’t think they are.”