Murder on a Starry Night: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery (2 page)

M
AGGIE
H
ELMERS
, Crestwood’s favorite veterinarian. Is an avid quilter and collector of fat lady art.

______

Oliver Harrington II walked down the back staircase from his second-floor bedroom, one hand gripping the banister tightly.

The noises had come from the kitchen, Ollie thought. He wasn’t afraid, really. Things made him anxious sometimes, but not really afraid. In fact, Ollie couldn’t remember ever being afraid in all his fifty-two years. He didn’t get angry much, either. Hardly ever. But he was angry this time, more angry than he had ever been in his whole life. Because it wasn’t fair. None of it. That’s probably why he was hearing things—hearing the uncomfortable anger rattling around in his head.

Narrow windows along the side of the staircase looked out over the lawns and gardens of the Harrington Estate. But Oliver’s eyes didn’t see the lawns and gardens; immediately, almost as if beyond his control, they looked upward toward the heavens.

It was a deep, starry night, and Ollie could see the great Andromeda Galaxy with his naked eye. He paused on the staircase, his breath catching in his throat. Exquisite. Miraculous. Nearly 3 million light years away, and he could see it from this window of his home in Crestwood, Kansas. It was surely a miracle.

Finally, Ollie forced himself to breathe, but the dazzling beauty of the universe above him was almost more than he could handle. For as long as Ollie could remember, this was where he was the most comfortable — looking up into the universe and learning every single thing he could about how it worked. And the amazement he felt never dimmed, just like the North Star.

“Glorious,” he said and the single word traveled out of his mouth and pierced the still, predawn air, echoing down the hardwood stairs before him.

When Oliver was a boy, the back staircase had been the way servants got to the kitchen quickly and silently from their third floor rooms. He couldn’t remember when that had changed. Probably when he and his twin sister Adele were college age and Adele went off to her east coast school, but he couldn’t be sure.

Oliver had lived in the Harrington mansion nearly his whole life. He’d left briefly for junior college in the east, a school his mother chose carefully, one that would afford him attention and a chance to explore the things he loved — astronomy, writing. It hadn’t worked, though. They made him take other subjects that didn’t capture his mind and spirit, and Oliver failed. So after a year, Oliver came back home. And years later, he finally got the degree that would have so pleased his mother, a bachelors in science from Canterbury College. Or university as they wanted to call it now, though it seemed a little uppity to Ollie. And then the professors had let him stay on, taking any classes he wanted to take.

A bang beneath him halted Oliver’s body on the bottom step. Was there someone in the house? He could feel something nearby.

Probably some neighborhood kid playing a trick on me
, Oliver thought. Maybe he should start locking his doors—his friend Halley had been surprised when she discovered he didn’t lock up. But she didn’t grow up in a small town—she didn’t understand.
Halley worried about too many things
, he thought —wills and deeds and things that didn’t matter much to Oliver. Other people worried about those things, too, but Ollie just smiled and agreed, and that seemed to make everyone feel better.

His clear brown eyes fought the fog of darkness in front of him. Finally his bare feet felt the flat smooth surface of the floor and he moved to the wall, flicking on the light switch.

Yellow light fell on the wide planked flooring and bounced off the stainless steel counter and refrigerator. The kitchen was big enough to feed an army, Halley had told him the other day, but Oliver kept every surface clean and sparkling. He loved the stainless tops because you could see the perfect shiny surface, clear of even a thumbprint or a smudge. Oliver loved its orderliness, the pots hanging in order of size, the cups in the glass-fronted cabinets lined up in perfect symmetry. Oliver loved this house. It was way too big for him, he knew that, and all sorts of people were telling him that these days.
Move to a small condo, Ollie
, Tom Adler kept telling him.
I’ll find you the best in the city and take this monster off your hands
. But 210 Kingfish Drive wasn’t a monster at all. It was home. Always would be.

Ollie looked around the room and out across the wooded back yard, back toward the pond that Joe, his gardener, tended to. No branches moved in the Indian summer night. No sound. Only the silence of the stars. Silly. No one was here. Just in his dreams, that’s all.

Oliver pressed the boiling water button on his sink and filled a china cup with the liquid, then scooped up a cup of loose herbed tea from the canister on the counter. He and Halley and Joe had laughed about that the other day—how Ollie made midnight trips to the kitchen for a cup of tea. They didn’t believe him that herbed tea solved all ills. But it was true. He’d sleep like a baby tonight. A cup of ginger tea and the fog in his head would clear. He was being silly. Hearing things.

His eyes slowly adjusted to the light and he looked around the spacious room, took in the wide island in the center of the room, the door leading out to a small enclosed porch where years ago the milkman left bottles of fresh milk and the Harrington twins lined up their boots after building snowmen in the backyard. The door to the porch was slightly ajar. Oliver frowned. Had he left it open when he let his cat back in the house before going to bed? He reached out and closed it with the flat of his hand, then jumped at the noise. Through a window in the door, he spotted a small cat on the porch, staring up at him with accusing eyes. “Neptune,” he said. Ollie smiled and let the sleek black cat in. Mystery solved. That’s what he’d heard, his sweet Neptune.

Oliver sipped his tea, staring out into the starry night, knowing he needed sleep and strength for what the new day would bring. He hated confrontations, but he couldn’t let this go. It was wrong. Against the law, he thought. He drained the last liquid from the cup and rested back against the counter, his thin bathrobe leaving his body unprotected from the cold marble edge. He’d go back upstairs, read that little collection of Loren Eisley’s essays that Halley had given him. Fall asleep with visions of galaxies filling his head. And he’d deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.

Oliver left his mother’s pink Limoges teacup in the sink and headed for the stairs. The tea had done its magic and a dreamy fog settled over him. He pulled himself up the first step, then another. Sleep. It was on its way.

Oliver reached the first landing where the steps curved back upon themselves and a small window lighted his path. He paused for a minute, taking in a breath of air, then frowned as the brightness of the stars beyond the window dimmed. An eclipse? No, of course not. But things were moving in slow motion. The tree branches, leaves falling. Humming.

So odd
, Ollie thought, and released his hold of the walnut railing. A dance. He was dancing, moving slowly through the air.

Neptune stood at the foot of the stairs, her green eyes watching as Oliver’s long slender body turned slightly, then bent at the waist, doubled over, and slowly somersaulted down to the wide-planked kitchen floor.

Neptune meowed, then walked over to Oliver’s face and gently licked his moist sharp chin with her gravely tongue.

News of Ollie Harrington’s death caused a ripple of deep sadness through the Canterbury University community and the neighborhood where his family had lived for generations. But a larger ripple—nearly a tidal wave, Po Paltrow thought— occurred when Ollie’s twin sister, Adele, elegant and self-assured, swept down upon the small town of Crestwood a few days later to bury her brother.

Shades of Isadora Duncan
, Po thought, the first day she spotted Adele speeding down Elderberry Road in her long elegant Cadillac convertible, a yellow scarf tied around her neck and flying in the autumn breeze.
She is certainly a whirlwind
. But the thought that Adele’s arrival would cause the chaos that followed, was beyond Po’s imagination.

Adele’s years away had made her an unfamiliar figure to most residents, but in the space of a week she had quickly and efficiently buried her brother, taken over the Harrington mansion, disturbed quiet neighbors with strident demands to trim trees and keep children away from her property, and alienated nearly everyone else in town.

Even in the back room of Selma Parker’s quilt shop on Elderberry Road, the Queen Bees quilting group, gathering for their Saturday morning session, felt the mounting tension.

“Like who would have imagined a quiet nice man like Oliver Harrington would have a sister like
that
!” said Phoebe Mellon, the youngest member of the group, as she looked around the cluttered table for a pair of scissors.

Eleanor Canterbury handed them to Phoebe. “It’s a shame. Adele came to bury her brother. But she’s doing damage to the Harrington name with her demands and rude manners.” A rare note of displeasure crept into the lively voice of the Queen Bees’ only octogenarian. Eleanor picked up a square of flowered red fabric and examined it carefully to see if she had left any stray threads hanging. Eleanor did all her piecing by hand—mostly because it was portable that way, she said, and she could take it with her to Paris or New Guinea or wherever she might be headed. Today she was finishing a table runner for a charity auction, and decided she had done a very nice job, indeed, on the crazy quilt design.