Elm Creek Quilts [06] The Master Quilter (22 page)

“Well—I think we should call again anyway. Sarah, may I borrow your cell phone?”

Sarah agreed and showed her how to use it. Cupping the phone in her palm to conceal the display, Agnes quickly dialed Grandma’s Attic and then her own home. Only answering machines responded.

She returned the phone to Sarah, who meanwhile had been going over the schedule with the others. “No answer,” she said, and pretended to listen as her friends debated how to cover for another absent instructor. They should call the police. Something was dreadfully wrong, and Agnes knew it.

Just then Gwen arrived, and cheerfully admonished them for huddling together rather than mingling among their guests. In response, Sarah asked her to emcee the evening program.

Gwen shrugged. “Sure. I thought Bonnie was doing it.”

“Maybe she will, but she didn’t show up for her workshop this morning, so I thought I should have a backup plan.”

“Didn’t show up?” Gwen pulled out a chair and sat down. “Why not?”

“No one knows,” said Agnes. But Bonnie had meant to come; they had spoken about her workshop at breakfast. “She didn’t call in, and no one’s answering the phone at the store.”

“You tried her at home, right?”

“Well, yes,” stammered Agnes, “but—well, she’s not there, either.” It was not exactly a lie; she had not wasted a call to the condo, but someone else had tried.

Sarah and the others explained the situation to Gwen, but Agnes sat silently with her own churning thoughts. She should tell their friends what she knew. Craig was a strong and unpleasant man, and he was furious with his wife. Bonnie could be in danger, and Agnes’s silence might prolong it.

As soon as Sarah finished with the schedule, Agnes hurried to the parlor, where she took a few deep breaths to calm herself as she flipped through the phone book for the Waterford College listings. She called Craig’s office. “Is Mr. Markham in?” she demanded.

“Yes, he is. May I ask who’s calling?”

Agnes recognized the voice of the blond woman she had met in the outer office and lowered her voice half an octave. “This is Jane in accounting. He was supposed to return my call. What time did he get in this morning? Did he just arrive?”

“He was here at eight-thirty when I arrived. I’m sorry he didn’t return your call right away. He probably didn’t realize it was so urgent. Please hold and I’ll transfer you.”

“Never mind,” growled Agnes and slammed down the phone, heart pounding. At least she knew Craig was not driving to Mexico with Bonnie tied up in the trunk of his car, but that did not mean he had not harmed her. Summer was on her way to Grandma’s Attic. If there was any sign of foul play, she would call.

Ordinarily Agnes had Wednesday afternoons off, but today she lingered at the manor, assisting Sarah to make up for the absent Judy, Bonnie, and now Summer, who did not call with news. Three times Agnes slipped away to call Grandma’s Attic and home, and once she even tried the condo, but Bonnie did not answer. At midafternoon, Gwen passed her in the hallway on her way out the back door. “I’m going to Grandma’s Attic if anyone needs me,” she said.

“Promise you’ll call,” said Agnes.

“I will,” promised Gwen, with a reassuring grin, “unless the phones have been knocked out.”

When Gwen did not call by supper, Agnes figured that was precisely what had happened.

She had no appetite, but Sarah had asked her to stay to disguise the dwindling numbers of Elm Creek Quilters. Diane had already left to feed her family before the evening program, so after the meal, Agnes asked Matt to drive her home in the Elm Creek Quilts minivan. It was almost seven by the time she unlocked her own front door and hurried inside. There was no sign of Bonnie, not downstairs or in the guest room. She returned downstairs to the dining room and, as her glance fell upon the split LeMoyne Star borders she and Bonnie had assembled together, she berated herself for putting Bonnie’s desire for secrecy ahead of her safety.

She hurried to the phone and dialed Craig’s office again. When only voicemail responded, she called the condo.

He answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”

“Craig? This is Agnes Emberly.”

“Oh. Hi.” There was wariness in his tone, but no hostility, no guilt.

“Bonnie didn’t come to work today, and we’re all a bit worried. I wondered if you might know where she is.”

“My guess is she’s still downstairs cleaning up the mess.”

“Cleaning?” Then she was all right. “What mess?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe a robbery. There were cop cars parked out front this morning.”

“My goodness,” exclaimed Agnes. “Are you sure Bonnie’s not hurt?”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s fine. She and a couple of other Elm Creekers keep coming out back to throw junk in the Dumpster. Looks like a lot of damage was done.”

Agnes bristled at the satisfaction in his tone. “It’s a pity you can’t find it in your heart to sympathize with your wife. You know how much that shop means to her.”

“Listen, you don’t know anything about me or my wife or how that store has dragged us down. If this is what it takes for her to give up on it, that’s fine by me.”

“Bonnie deserves far, far better than you,” Agnes declared, but he had hung up the phone with a crash.

It was nearly midnight before Bonnie came home. She sank into a chair, wordless, exhausted, as Agnes ran to fetch her a warm quilt and fix a cup of tea. She refused Agnes’s offer of food, but Agnes made her a sandwich anyway, and when she brought it to her, Bonnie wolfed it down as if she had not eaten all day.

“I heard there was a robbery,” said Agnes, and Bonnie told her the whole story. Agnes listened with tears in her eyes as Bonnie described the destruction.

“The police think it was an inside job,” Bonnie concluded dully.

Agnes was not surprised, but she asked, “Why do they think so?”

“Because there were no signs of a forced entry, and because more was ruined than taken.”

Agnes took her hand. “Bonnie,” she said gently, “do you think Craig is responsible?”

“No.” Bonnie shifted in her chair and pulled her hand away. “I know he isn’t.”

Agnes remembered the satisfaction in his voice as he recounted the crime to her, and Darren Taylor’s suspicions that he had been planning the divorce for a long time. “He could have used the spare key in the condo. He’s entirely capable of something like this, especially given the circumstances.”

“He’s capable, all right, but he didn’t do it. I gave the spare key to Diane a long time ago so she could open the shop occasionally. He obviously didn’t use my key, since he hasn’t been near it in weeks.”

But before then he had had ample opportunity to duplicate it secretly. “Did you tell the police about the divorce?”

“The divorce, the debts, everything. They had so many questions. I heard Gwen tell them she thinks I forgot to lock the door last night, and they wrote that down, but I don’t think they believed it. I know I locked the door, but I wish I wasn’t so certain.”

“Why not?”

“If the police say it’s an inside job, the insurance company might refuse to pay.”

Agnes felt a chill. Suddenly she thought of the personal expenses Bonnie had charged to Grandma’s Attic in the past few weeks, the “debts and everything” she had confided to the police.

“Everything will be all right,” she said, embracing her friend, and wishing she believed it.

I
f Judy’s mother had not come down with pneumonia soon after Christmas, Judy might never have considered leaving Waterford, even though her mother lived alone and the long drive to suburban Philadelphia made frequent visits difficult. Instead Judy had often reflected that one day she might be forced to put her mother in a retirement community or bring her to Waterford to live with them, taking her away from her Philadelphia home and the close, nearly lifelong friendships she had developed within the Vietnamese immigrant community there. But that January—for the fourth weekend in a row—Judy felt as if she spent more time in the car than caring for her mother, and it occurred to her that life would be so much simpler if she, Steve, and Emily were to relocate.

She allowed herself to imagine, for a moment, rainy Saturday afternoons chatting over tea with her mother in the big house where Judy had grown up, Emily and her grandmother on the sofa reading a book together, Steve helping his mother-in-law tend her garden. Then she reluctantly dismissed the notion. She was on track for a promotion to full professor in the Computer Sciences department, Steve enjoyed reporting the local news for the
Waterford
Register
, and Emily was firmly attached to her second-grade teacher and circle of friends. Bringing her mother to Waterford was the far more logical solution, but Judy knew leaving her home would break her mother’s heart.

The first day of the spring semester, Judy proposed the move to Steve over breakfast, presenting it as a joke. To her surprise, he told her he had entertained similar thoughts, adding that he had long wished for an opportunity to work for a larger paper. Moreover, Emily would benefit from a closer relationship with her grandmother, and Philadelphia was nearer to his family, but still far enough away that they could not visit without advance warning. “I’m all for it if you are,” Steve assured her, but he regarded her curiously. “I can’t believe you’d be able to leave Elm Creek Quilts, though.”

“You’re right,” said Judy. “I couldn’t.”

Steve shrugged and finished his cereal so nonchalantly that she doubted he was genuinely disappointed. Still, she wondered why he had never mentioned his desire to work for a larger paper.

Besides, Steve was right. She could never leave Elm Creek Quilts. Her friends would never understand.

Her mother fully recovered and soon insisted that Judy stop dragging her family across the state every weekend just to check on her. Relieved, and guilty because of her relief, Judy agreed, and soon she was too caught up in the busy routine of the new semester to think about moving. She might have forgotten about it altogether if not for an unexpected email from a former graduate-school classmate, now a full professor at Penn. He had read her most recent paper in the
Journal of Theoretical Computer Science
and could not believe she had not applied for the opening in his department, where they were just embarking on a more advanced stage of related research in a new, state-of-the-art facility. Had she missed the advertisement in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, or was Waterford College really treating her that well?

Judy never bothered skimming the want ads, and Waterford College treated her fine, but she clicked on the link Rick had provided to an online article from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Reading the description of Penn’s facility made her alternately admiring and envious. Waterford College’s computer systems were adequate to her needs, but Penn’s read like the catalogue of her wildest dreams. She could shave years of number-crunching from her current projects, which would allow her to develop her theories in ways she never could have otherwise contemplated.

“Rick, you are more fortunate than you know,” murmured Judy, recalling the brilliant but unfocused student who had never made it into the lab before noon and who had twice written half a dissertation before scrapping it for a new subject. On impulse, she went to the home page for the
Chronicle
and searched the archives for the ad. Rick was right to contact her; her experience and interests dovetailed with their criteria perfectly. She would be ideal for the job—as would hundreds of other professors at far more prestigious universities, professors who had not spent their entire careers at small, private, rural colleges much better known for their achievements in the liberal arts than anything in the sciences.

It was nice of Rick to think of her, but she was far too busy to apply for a job she had no chance of getting.

She tried to put Penn and its wonderful new research facility out of her thoughts. She didn’t even tell Steve about the job, knowing he would insist she apply anyway. Then, two days later, Gwen came to her office, angry and miserable. Once again the search committee had passed her over for department chair, this time with the asinine excuse that her research was irrelevant. As a scientist, Judy was hard-pressed to find any relevance in most of the papers churned out on that side of the campus, but Gwen’s research had always seemed to provide valuable, fascinating historical information. Judy wondered if other factors had influenced the decision, but Gwen was so depressed Judy decided not to pester her with questions.

She thought it over after Gwen left and decided her friend might have struck the infamous glass ceiling head-on without realizing it, deceived because the committee had, in fact, chosen a woman. They clearly thought Gwen had gone as far as she could, despite her past accomplishments. The same could one day be said about Judy, once scholars at other schools made advances in her field that her limited resources simply would not allow.

She told Steve about the position that evening, and he agreed that she would be foolish not to apply. Unfortunately, he also insisted she was guaranteed to get the job, which displayed a charming faith in her abilities and an overwhelming ignorance of the competition. “Don’t clear out your desk at the
Register
yet,” she begged. “And don’t tell the Elm Creek Quilters. They’ll take it personally. They’ll wonder what they did to make me want to leave, when to them, leaving is incomprehensible.”

It would also save her embarrassment later when she had to tell them she didn’t get the job.

She started assembling her application package that weekend, wishing she had updated her curriculum vitae long ago, wishing she had begun more than six days before the deadline. Unfortunately, she could not work at the office without attracting the attention of her graduate students, who would be dismayed to hear she would consider leaving them. Instead she took her laptop to coffee shops between classes and student conferences, and stayed up long after putting Emily to bed. Caffeine, Steve’s encouragement, and images of that gleaming new research facility sustained her until she ran headlong into her deadline. A former professor of hers had a saying: “Better finished than perfect,” and Judy repeated his words glumly as she dropped off her application package at the overnight delivery service the day before it was due. She sent Rick a confirming email, and then there was nothing to do but wait.

Wait, and catch up on all the work she had neglected in the meantime. A stack of papers awaiting grades collected dust on her desk, a graduate student needed to discuss his upcoming candidacy exam, and the first day of quilt camp was barely two months away. Judy had taught computer quilt design many times before and would need only to update her materials, but the Bindings and Borders workshop would be entirely new, and she had yet to finish a single sample. The block for Sylvia’s bridal quilt was due a week after the start of quilt camp, which Judy considered rather poor planning. They were all swamped at that time of year despite spring break at the college and, given that they had already missed the wedding, it would have been more reasonable to give themselves an extra week.

She knew the perfect pattern to use for Sylvia’s quilt, but since the sample quilts were needed sooner, she decided to complete the border examples first, snatching spare moments from her obligations to her family and the college wherever she could find them. On impulse she decided to sew her sample borders into a quilt top of ten horizontal rows and to finish each of the four sides in a different style. Days later, as she draped the completed quilt top on the living room floor for inspection, she couldn’t help laughing. It was without a doubt the most eccentric quilt she had ever made.

“What’s so funny?” Emily entered the room and took her hand, inspecting the quilt top. “Wow, Mom. That’s great.”

Judy put her head to one side and studied the quilt top critically. “Do you really think so?”

“Yeah, I like the colors and how every row is different.”

“You don’t think it’s a little too bizarre?”

“Uh-uh. Can I use it in my room when it’s done?”

Judy smiled, thinking of how the exotic batiks would clash with the pastel floral decor Emily had selected three years before. “It doesn’t really go with your room.”

“I could paint the walls. Please? I’ll do it myself.”

Judy laughed. She should not have been surprised that Emily, who over the past year had developed a keen affinity for German opera with no encouragement from her tone-deaf parents and who had more recently begun wearing her straight black hair in two asymmetrical braids bound by anything from yarn to bread bag twist-ties, would appreciate her quilt enough to redecorate her bedroom to suit it. “No way I’d let you paint your room by yourself,” Judy said, “but your dad and I will talk about it.” When Emily cheered, Judy added, “Remember, this quilt isn’t finished yet, and I’ll still need it all summer at quilt camp.”

Disappointed, Emily said, “Maybe I can use it before quilt camp. When are you going to finish it?”

“As soon as I can.” She glanced at her watch; on Saturdays, Grandma’s Attic stayed open until five o’clock. While Emily went off to her room to dress for soccer practice, Judy found Steve working in the computer room and asked if he would mind taking Emily so Judy could shop for backing fabric and batting in the meantime.

Steve agreed, adding, “Are you finally going to use that gift certificate?”

“Absolutely not. You know I can’t set foot in the Fabric Warehouse. It’s incredibly disloyal to Bonnie. What if someone I know sees me?”

“That’s not likely, since none of your friends will shop there, either.” Steve grimaced in sympathy. “I know how you feel, but my mother has been bugging me ever since Christmas.”

“I wish she had never bought it for me.”

“I’m sure to her it seemed like the perfect gift for a quilter. Look at it this way. If you spend the certificate on batting and backing, you’ll satisfy my mother without acquiring any fabric you’ll use in a quilt top later. The Elm Creek Quilters will never know.”

It still seemed traitorous, but Steve’s mother had already paid for the gift certificate, so at least Judy wouldn’t be giving them any of her own money. As for her guilt and the money she otherwise would have spent at Grandma’s Attic, she would just have to make up for them with an extravagant shopping spree that would leave Bonnie gaping in astonishment.

The Fabric Warehouse took up most of a strip mall on the northwest fringes of town. When Emily was a toddler, Judy used to shop at the children’s clothing boutique next door, whose windows were now empty except for a sign announcing the space was available for rent. Judy’s last trip to the mall had occurred years before, when she and Summer had accompanied Bonnie on a scouting mission during Fabric Warehouse’s holiday sale. Bonnie had ordered them to disguise themselves in head scarves and dark glasses, which only drew attention, made Judy feel ridiculous, and probably fooled no one.

Once inside, Judy steered her shopping cart directly to the batting section and chose two large rolls. Determined not to browse, she went straight to the shelves of fabric bolts along the far wall and selected a cream tone-on-tone print similar to one she had seen in Grandma’s Attic. Beneath the fluorescent lights, it looked good enough for the back of a quilt, and if her friends happened to see it, they would assume she had purchased it from Bonnie.

She joined the line at the cutting table where two unsmiling employees in long green aprons unrolled bolts of fabric and snipped away at them with shears. The wait troubled Judy less than the realization that she had not seen such a long line at Bonnie’s shop since her last fall clearance.

“Don’t I know you?”

The voice behind Judy was unfamiliar, so she ignored it and waited for one of the ten people in front of her in line to turn around. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. Stifling a groan, she turned her head enough to take in a woman in a red wool coat and a platinum blond pageboy. “Hi, Mary Beth,” said Judy weakly. “How are you?”

Mary Beth eyed her with suspicion. “Surprised to see you here, that’s for sure.”

Judy gestured to her shopping cart. “My mother-in-law got me a gift certificate for Christmas.”

“I would kill for a mother-in-law like that. Mine’s always buying me these horrible tacky sweaters.” Mary Beth shrugged, then brightened. “Does this mean you’re no longer in with Bonnie Markham and that gang? If that’s the case, you’re always welcome to rejoin my guild. Those Elm Creekers are so high-and-mighty, don’t you think? Expecting everyone to drop everything and make their precious Sylvia a quilt block. What is she thinking, getting married at her age? What is she, eighty-five or something?”