A Quilt in Time (A Harriet Turman/Loose Threads Mystery) (16 page)

“Sarah?”

No one was in the living room. Lauren stepped toward the kitchen then shook her head.

Bedroom
, Harriet mouthed.

An unearthly wail came from that direction, and Harriet dropped all pretense of stealth and ran the last few steps to the room. Lauren slammed into Harriet’s back as she followed; Harriet stood frozen in the doorway.

“Sarah, what happened? Are you okay?”

“What’s wrong?” Lauren asked. “Why aren’t we going in?”

Harriet leaned to one side, and Lauren gasped.

“I think we better call the police.” Harriet finally moved into the room, stepping carefully to the end of the bed.

Sarah bent over Seth’s lifeless body; where she lay beside him, tears falling onto his limp form. He lay on his back with his arms flung wide; not a position someone would ordinarily choose for sleeping, but with the amount of blood soaked into the Baltimore album quilt underneath him there was no possibility of his being asleep—or alive.

“Sarah,” Harriet said softly. She reached out and put her hands on Sarah’s shoulders, examining her for evidence of further injuries. “Come on,” she said and pulled, trying to get her away from the lifeless body beside her.

“What happened, Sarah?” Lauren asked in a surprisingly gentle voice. She moved to the other side of the bed, carefully avoiding the body, and helped push Sarah toward Harriet. “I’ve called the police, so you need to tell us before they get here.”

“You called the police?” Sarah cried. “They’ll arrest me!”

Harriet eased her into sitting on the edge of the bed—she couldn’t tell if Sarah was able to stand on her own. She looked at the nearby chair and gauged the distance but wasn’t sure she could get Sarah that far away from her fiancé’s body.

“Did Seth hit you again?” A purple bruise was blossoming across Sarah’s left temple, a large lump forming under the bruise. The hardware sticking out of her cast was twisted at an unlikely angle. Sarah nodded and cried out in pain at the movement.

“I didn’t kill him,” she whispered.

“Can you tell us what did happen?” Harriet asked her.

Sarah shuddered.

“Lauren, see if there’s ice in the refrigerator.”

Lauren returned a moment later with a blue ice pack wrapped in a kitchen towel.

“Here.” Harriet held it gently against Sarah’s temple. “Now, can you tell us what happened?” She tried to keep her focus on Sarah so she didn’t have to look at Seth.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know, Sarah? If we’re going to help you, you need to tell us exactly what happened. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s a police siren we’re hearing.”

Sarah sighed and began to cry. Harriet rubbed a hand in circles on her back.

“I was going to go to the shelter, but I needed to get a few things from here, in case I didn’t get to come back. I called a cab to bring me here. I had some pain pills from before, so I took two—my hand hurt so bad. I got sleepy, and the next thing I knew, Seth was waking me up. I’d slept for hours.

“He made me a smoothie, and then he brushed my hair.” She glanced at his supine body. “Seth could be really sweet. He said we could start over, forget about all this.” Sarah looked down at her damaged arm.

Lauren rolled her eyes skyward but kept quiet.

“Go on,” Harriet encouraged.

“I need a lot of help right now. It’s hard to take a shower or button a blouse or open food containers. And it was impossible to cook.”

“He expected you to cook?” Lauren blurted.

Harriet held her hand up.

“Go on.”

“Tonight, he was tired. My injury, his job, everything. He came home in a bad mood. Nothing made him happy. He said he couldn’t sleep here. He said I cried in the night. He said he was going somewhere else, and he wouldn’t tell me where. He told me I better not try to call him.

“I just asked him if he could help me wrap my arm in plastic before he left so I could shower. He said that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and then he…he…he must have hit me. He was yelling, and then the next thing I knew, I woke up, and he was…” She looked back at his body.

The sirens were getting louder. The police had to be climbing the last part of the hill.

Harriet stood up. “Do you own a gun?”

“Or does Seth?” Lauren added.

“No,” Sarah said with a sob. “Why would you even think that?”

The dead body lying beside you
, Harriet thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

“Was anyone else here? Or did anyone else ever come here while you lived here with Seth?”

Sarah shook her head slightly as she cried.

“He wasn’t big on friends. He said we didn’t need anyone but each other.”

“If you didn’t kill him, someone else must have been here,” Harriet pressed, but Sarah was spared having to reply by the arrival of the police.

She stood up and walked around the bed to the spot where Seth must have been standing before he’d fallen on the bed. She looked around while Lauren sat beside Sarah.

She pulled the curtain aside with her flashlight, being careful not to touch anything, and exposed a broken windowpane. Glass littered the floor. She coughed, and Lauren made eye contact then looked at the window.

“Sarah, honey.” Lauren gently rubbed Sarah’s uninjured hand. “How did your hardware get so mangled? Did Seth push you into the window?”

“No…yes…I don’t know what happened.” Sarah started crying again.

Harriet came back around to Sarah’s side as someone came in the front door.

“We’re back here,” she called out, and two paramedics she didn’t recognize came into the bedroom. She moved out of the way so they could verify Seth’s demise and tend to Sarah.

Lauren had called nine-one-one, but she’d also called Jane Morse. Detective Morse arrived at the same time as the uniformed officers.

“You two, outside,” she ordered. “Wait for me on the porch. Don’t touch anything or go anywhere. And please tell me you didn’t touch anything in the house.”

“We touched Sarah,” Harriet said.

“I got an ice pack from the kitchen for the bump on Sarah’s head.”

One of the paramedics hustled out, returning with the gurney from their ambulance.

“We need to transport the woman,” he said to Morse in passing; and, true to his word, a few minutes later, he and his partner wheeled Sarah out the front door.

Lauren zipped her fleece and sat down on the porch bench.

“What do you think happened?”

Harriet joined her, sitting on the other end of the bench.

“That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question, isn’t it? We better tell the rest of the Threads what’s happened.” She pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I’ve got a couple of bars. I’ll call Aunt Beth and Mavis. You start with Robin and Connie. They can all spread the word.”

She touched the phone icon and started dialing.

“So, where has Sarah been all this time?” Mavis asked when the majority of the Threads were assembled around the table in Harriet’s dining room. Jorge came from the kitchen, a coffee pot in one hand and a teapot in the other, followed by Aunt Beth carrying a tray of mugs.

Lauren leaned toward Harriet, who was sitting beside her at the table.

“Did Jorge become a Loose Thread while we were gone?”

“I heard that, señorita,” Jorge said and poured tea into the mug Beth set on the table in front of Robin. “If you must know, Beth was helping me laminate the pages of my new menu. The pages lace into the covers and some of the laces were broken. She found some gold cord to replace them, and we were at the restaurant putting them back together when Harriet called, so tonight you get the two for the price of one special.”

“You should be happy he’s here,” Beth told them. “He’s been experimenting all day with a new tres leches cake recipe, and he brought three of the test cakes with him.”

Lauren leaned forward. “Welcome to the Loose Threads, Jorge. You need me to get plates?”

“That would be very helpful,” he said with a smile.

“I’m going to have a heart attack right here at this table if somebody doesn’t tell us something right now,” Mavis said when everyone had a piece of cake and a mug of their chosen drink in front of them. Harriet noted that even the diet-conscious Robin had accepted a sliver of cake.

She stood up behind her chair.

“We found Sarah, and it’s not good. She was at her cabin—with a very dead Seth.”

Connie gasped, “Diós mio.”

Carla put her hand over her mouth.

DeAnn set her mug down on the table after taking a sip.

“What happened?”

“We’re not sure,” Harriet said. “Sarah was a mess, as you might expect. She says she doesn’t know what happened. She has a big knot on her temple and that hardware in her hand was all mangled. Seth was mad at her, he probably hit her hard enough to knock her unconscious, then she woke up with him bleeding out.”

“Where is she now?” Robin asked, all business.

“They took her to the hospital,” Lauren said.

“Has she been at the cabin all this time?” DeAnn asked.

Harriet walked from one end of the dining room to the other, carrying her mug with her. She was much too wired to sit quietly and talk about what had happened.

“According to her, she left the senior center while we were at the open house. She had Joe’s Taxi Service drive her to the cabin, where she says she took some pain pills she had stashed there and went to sleep. Seth found her hours later and has been taking care of her ever since.”

“Until he got tired of being a nurse,” Lauren added. She took her stress out on her mug of tea, stirring her spoon in time with Harriet’s pacing.

“You two stop that,” Mavis told them.

Harriet froze in mid-stride.

“Sorry,” she said and sat down at her place at the table.

“Sarah must have thought her drugs weren’t safe at the senior center if the first thing she did when she got back to the cabin was to gobble down a double dose of pills she knew were good,” DeAnn said.