Died in the Wool (6 page)

He seemed a bit nervous when he put the key in the keyhole. The door swung open with a creak, and he stuck his hands in his pockets. “There ya go,” he said. “Let me know when you're finished.”

“Wait,” I said. “Evan, I have no idea where the quilts are. Aren't you going to come in to at least show me where they're kept?”

“Nope,” he said. “Check in the bedroom on the second floor. The one on the far end that overlooks my house. That's not to say there aren't any others in the house, but that was her room. So I imagine that's where they're gonna be.”

“But…”

“Oh, and could you pull the shade down in Glory's room, while you're up there?”

“Sure,” I said.

He skipped off the front porch and disappeared around the back of the house. Geena gave me a quizzical look. “He swears the house is haunted,” I explained.

“Really?” she asked with a smile.

I held my hands up. “Hey, I'm just telling you what he's told me.”

She glanced back over her shoulder to where Evan had disappeared. “You're serious.”

“I don't think so, but he sure does.”

“Hunh. Well, let's go meet the ghosts.”

We stepped inside. I flipped on the light switch, since the house was dark. It wouldn't have been quite so dark if the shades and curtains had been pulled aside to allow the sunlight in, but I assumed this was how Evan wanted the house kept, so I didn't open them. The first room we stepped into was covered in that heavy Victorian-era wallpaper and had virtually no furniture in it.

“So, explain to me about the house,” Geena said.

“Well, I really don't know that much,” I said. “I'm going to do some research when we get finished here today. Evan is the second owner since the Kendalls lived here. He never actually stayed in this house for very long, but instead took up residence in the guesthouse in the back. From what I understand, the majority of the things in the house belonged to the Kendalls.”

We stepped down a hallway into a dining room, where cobwebs had made the crystal chandelier even more elaborate than it had started out to be. Then we moved on to another sitting-room type of room. Older houses often have rooms that we don't have uses for today, like sitting rooms and ballrooms. I guess they're the equivalent of our home-entertainment rooms. This one had clearly had some renovations done to it—new wallpaper and a new floor. “Obviously, though, Herbie Pyle, the man who lived here in between Sandy Kendall and Evan, tried to do some renovating.”

“Why would that person sell the furniture and things
with
the house? Why not take those things with him? Or maybe sell them separately?” Geena asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I think we're going to find what we want upstairs.”

“Right,” she said. She pulled two white bundles out of her blazer pocket and handed me one. “Here.”

“What's this?” I said. It was a pair of white gloves, like a bridesmaid would use. “Oh, for the quilts.”

“Yes,” she said. “No need in getting our oils on the fabric. Makes the fabric break down faster.”

“Right,” I said.

The stairway seemed overly long and ostentatious, coming from the heavens and spilling into the middle of the house with a wave of dark wood. We reached the first bedroom and found a chest at the foot of the bed. Good place for quilts to be, in a chest. So we opened it and found a gold mine of antiques, including the Civil War uniforms I had heard about. “Oh, my gosh,” I said. “These are amazing.”

“And these?” Geena asked.

“Medals of valor of some sort,” I said. “I'm afraid to move any of this stuff.”

“I know,” she said. So we just lifted a few of them to see if there were any quilts beneath the uniforms. There were not. There was a diary. Several diaries, to be exact. Oh, my fingers were itching to take those home and read them, but the deal with Evan was for the quilts and all things relating to them, not for the diaries. It was at moments like these that I realized I wanted to know about the who and why more than I wanted
things
. I'd much rather read those diaries than own those uniforms and medals.

We opened the drawers. Most of them were empty, but we did find a box of handkerchiefs that hadn't even been used and some other odds and ends. There were no closets, as was typical of some old houses. Usually closets were added later. Back then people tended to use things like wardrobes and large dressers and chests to store their things in, rather than closets.

When we opened the wardrobe, Geena exclaimed, “Eureka!” There was a pile of quilts.

“Oh, boy,” I said. “You know, some of these may not have been made by Glory, but rather by her mother or any number of quilting friends or family members. How are we ever going to know which are hers?”

“Well, we can take quilts that we know for sure she made, like the ones your friend has, and compare style and stitching and fabrics that she used. She may even have initialed the ones that were hers. With some, we may never know the maker, but we might come closer than you think. For one thing, some fabrics are going to be far older than Glory.”

“Yes, but couldn't she have had a stash of old fabric and used that? I have a box full of feedsack cloth from the thirties that belonged to my grandmother. If I made a quilt out of that now, who would know it wasn't an old quilt?”

“For one thing, your batting and backing would be newer and inconsistent with the wear of the other fabric,” she said, “and obviously, there are going to be things about antique quilts that you'll never be able to know for sure.”

Boy, I hated to hear those words. Those words drove me crazy.

“But one thing at a time,” she said. “First of all, we need to catalog them. Write down the obvious things like what pattern they are, the size of the quilt … We can't do this here. It's too dark and dusty. You think Mr. Merchant will let us take them elsewhere?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I mean, would you?”

“Well, Torie, you're not exactly just the average buyer. Are you purchasing these for your personal collection?”

“No,” I said.

“For a museum, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So where are you going to go? He knows where to find you, for crying out loud,” she said.

“True,” I said. “He might let us remove the quilts. Let's see how many we're dealing with for sure before I even think about asking him.”

There were seven in the wardrobe in the first bedroom. The second bedroom yielded none, since it was actually more like a den. There were built-in bookshelves and an old desk; there was even a gun rack with the guns still inside. Oh, those would be worth money to a gun collector. Hanging on one wall was a rack of swords. Two were missing.

The third bedroom was so disturbing that Geena could not enter. This was the room with the blood on the wall, the room that Sheriff Mort had said had bloodstains from one of the suicides. It wasn't just the blood that was so disturbing, though. It was the mass of words and pictures scribbled all over the walls. Drawings and sketches of wounded and bleeding men had been drawn all the way up to the ceiling in some places. Men with arms and legs missing. Men lying sprawled in a trench; that one ran the length of one whole wall. The fear on their faces, the feral look in their eyes … The drawings were everywhere.

On the bedposts were old ropes or restraints of some sort.

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered.

“God, Torie, let's hurry,” Geena said from the hallway. “This house is so damn dark.”

“Right,” I said. “I'm looking.” There were no quilts in this room, but I did find a few photographs of a young woman. Beautiful, ethereal, gazing into the camera with all the innocence of a child, but the sexuality of a woman. The photographs had probably been taken about 1915. I turned one of them over. The back read:
Be brave, my one true knight. Your loving sister, Glory Anne.

I took the photographs with me. I know it was wrong, and if Evan really wanted me to give them back, or if he wanted me to pay for them, I would, but I would need photographs to go with the quilt display. Besides … I don't know, call it my Super Torie Sense, but there was one hell of a story here. I'd been doing this a very long time, and I could feel the story in this house trying to squeeze its way to the surface for somebody,
anybody,
to hear.

If I wasn't determined at that point to get to the bottom of what had gone on in this house, the next thing that happened sealed it. The door to the bedroom had nearly shut behind me when I came in, so as I turned to leave, I got a real good look at the inside of the door. There were claw marks all over it. Somebody had locked somebody in this room, and from the looks of it had tied him or her to the bed. I could deduce—by not taking too much of a leap—that when the individual wasn't restrained, he or she had picked up a pencil and drew the nightmares in his or her head … and then at some point had bled all over the wall.

“Torie, come on!” Geena called from down the hall.

There was another bedroom, which yielded four quilts. Finally, Geena beat me to the last bedroom at the end of the hall. The one with the shades and curtains open. Glory Anne Kendall's room. Geena stood by the window, soaking up the sunlight. “This house is a tomb,” she said. “And you want to buy it?”

“Well, if I buy it, I'm not going to leave it like this,” I said. “For one thing, these big ugly curtains have got to go.”

“I don't even want to spend another second in this house,” she said.

Glory's room was bright and pink and full of finished quilts, partially finished quilts, fabric, pieces cut out but not yet sewn together, and all of her sewing equipment, including a machine. There was even a quilt still in the frame that she had clearly been in the middle of quilting.

“I can transport everything back to the Gaheimer House,” I said. “I'm almost afraid to take the quilt out of the frame, though.”

“No,” Geena said. “We'll leave it in the frame and take it out last.”

Quilting frames come in all shapes and sizes. I remember my Grandma Keith's quilt frame hung from the ceiling in her living room. It was on a pulley system. She'd pull it up to the ceiling during the day, and at night after all the other work was finished, she'd pull the string and let it down and quilt.

The three layers of a quilt—the decorative top layer, the batting, and the backing—all have to be pulled taut and then basted together with thread or pins so they won't move. Otherwise, when you go to quilt it, the layers will pucker. In order to pull them tight, you have to set them and hold them in one position, thus the frame. With a wooden frame, the quilt would be loosely basted to the pieces of wood, and then the wood could be rolled—with the quilt—as you quilted until you just had a small strip left to work on. There were lots of methods to achieve this. Nowadays, there are quilt frames made out of PVC pipe, and I even use a big embroidery hoop to quilt on my lap.

Glory had a standard wooden frame that stood on the floor. Luckily for us, it was rolled pretty tight and only had a little bit left to quilt, so it would be easy for us to transport it to the Gaheimer House. There we could put it in one of the big drawing rooms and then take it apart. Or who knows, maybe we'd just leave it as it was, so people could see what it was like to quilt back then.

“I think the easiest way to transport this is for you and me to just carry it over to the Gaheimer House. It's quite a few blocks, I know, but it's not heavy.”

“All right,” she said.

“Look, I made the deal with Evan for
all
needlework, so anything pertaining to that, we can take and pay him for.”

“I found a box of her patterns in the trunk,” she said. “It's not very often you actually find the patterns to go with the quilts. You've got quite a treasure here, Torie.”

“Well, I want him to get every penny that they're worth,” I said. “I'm not interested in making money on this, Geena. I want Glory's quilts to be seen—and I want the Kendall family story to be told.”

She hugged herself close and got to work gathering quilts and notions. Suddenly she stopped, hovering over the opened chest in the corner.

“What?” I asked.

“I think it's a quilt diary,” she said.

“A what?”

“It is! Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Look, she has hundreds of swatches of fabric in here. Dates when and where she bought the fabric, what she would use it for … Oh, Torie, this is amazing.”

It hit me then. This wonderful quilter, who spent so much time recording all of her hard work in a diary, just one day up and ended her own life. Why would she have done that? Why would any of the Kendall children have done it? Okay, well, whoever had been in the psycho room down the hall clearly had problems, but the other two? I suddenly wanted to throw up.

“Torie, look at the quilt on the bed.”

It was a plain quilt. Sort of brownish, made from big blocks. Nothing fancy. Nothing fancy at all. No appliqué, no frillies, no flowers, no clever interlocked pieces. Just big brownish squares. “Why would a woman who could create absolute art with a needle choose to put that on her bed?” Geena asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

“I need air,” she said. With that, Geena grabbed a stack of quilts and ran out of the room and down the stairs.

I gathered up the remaining quilts and all of the other things that I wanted to take and met her out on the front porch, but not before I pulled the shade on Glory's window as Evan had asked.

I found Geena standing by the morning glory, clutching the quilt diary to her chest. “We have to find out what happened to her,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“You can do that, can't you? I mean, this is what you do best, right?”