Murders on Elderberry Road: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery (4 page)

Eleanor laughed again and took Leah’s arm. In her other hand she gripped a carved walking stick that helped her along uneven sidewalks and foot paths. She also used it often in heated conversations. “A little excitement in paradise. But let’s think big, Leah. Perhaps there’s a dastardly deed been done on Elderberry Road. And if so, my dear, I most definitely don’t want to miss out. Onward.”

Kate looked down the street at the small crowd gathering on the corner across from Selma’s shop. She spotted Phoebe immediately, her loose hair wild and lit by sunshine. She was standing on the edge of the crowd, staring at the quilt shop. “Phoebe,” Kate called at the top of her voice and pedaled fast down the street toward her friend.

“What’s all this?” Phoebe demanded to Kate.

Kate slid off her bike and propped it against the lamp post. “I don’t know Pheebs. I heard sirens,” she said. “And a police car nearly ran me off the road.”

The two young women stared across the street, shielding their eyes from the sun and trying to see through the plate glass windows. The crowd began to spill over into the street and in minutes, the others were there — Leah, Eleanor, and Maggie — all hovering around the lamppost like moths. “I tried to park my truck where I always do on Saturdays — in the alley behind the store,” Maggie said. She was slightly out of breath. “But I couldn’t get through — there’s an ambulance back there — right outside Selma’s back door.”

“Is Selma all right?” Leah asked.

“I haven’t seen her — they won’t let anyone in,” Phoebe said.

“Where’s Po?” Kate pushed her sunglasses into her mass of auburn hair and stared across the street. She wrapped her arms tightly around her chest, squeezing back the fear.

“There she is!” Phoebe pointed across the street. And with great relief, the covey of quilters strained to see through the shop window. Several uniformed men and women scurried back and forth in front of bright bolts of fabric. And there in the center of it all was Selma Parker, a calm solid figure in the middle of the tempest, Po at her side. Eleanor squinted through her thick prescription sunglasses. “They both look fine.”

“Susan!” Phoebe yelped, anxious to account for each Queen Bee. “Can anyone see her in there? I can’t see with all the police in the way.”

Susan Miller had been a godsend to Selma, hiring on as assistant manager of the store the year before and allowing Selma to take an occasional day off, here and there. The Queen Bees had promptly adopted her, pulling her into the group to fill a space left by Helga Hansen, who had moved to Omaha. Susan’s artistic eye, her innate sense of color and her flair for pushing a piece of traditional into a patch of extraordinary had urged the Bees on to new and adventurous ways of quilting. They still loved their traditional patchwork projects, but often, under Susan’s guidance, they played with new ideas — transforming photographs into quilt patterns, combining appliqué, patchwork, and needlework into single projects. Susan kept things fresh and exciting.

“Susan’s okay. I see her, but she looks a little distraught.” Kate pointed to the west side of the store where a slender figure was bent over in a straight back chair, her head in her hands.

At that moment, Po emerged from the store and scanned the crowd. She spotted the Queen Bees and quickly crossed the street.

“I have sad news,” she said quietly, before anyone had a chance to speak or to ask her what was going on inside.

Kate’s heart rose to her throat. Phoebe’s eyes grew larger. Leah stared at her friend. “Out with it, Po,” Eleanor commanded.

“Owen Hill has died.”

Kate stared at Po. “What do you mean, died? That’s impossible. I just saw him yesterday afternoon on campus.”

“Well, he wasn’t dead then, Kate,” Po said. “But he is now.”

Leah blanched. She had known Owen Hill since coming to Canterbury College as a young professor fifteen years before. He had been a mentor and friend. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “What happened, Po?”

“We don’t know yet. Heart attack, maybe. It looks like he fell hard and hit his head. They’ve just now taken him away.”

“When did it happen?” Phoebe stuck her hands into the pockets of her jeans and lifted herself onto the toes of her tennis shoes, straining to see any new developments across the street. “Po, this is so awful! Poor Selma — a man dying in her store.”

Maggie edged in between Kate and Phoebe. “Is Selma all right, Po?”

“She’ll be okay,” Po said. “She has her hands full right now. The police answer those emergency calls as well as the ambulance, so there are plenty of folks crawling around inside our quilt store.”

Leah’s oval face was pale and her clear brown eyes registered distress. “Owen and I were on a committee together this semester. I saw him nearly every day on campus. You don’t think about people like Owen Hill dying.”

“Why was he at Selma’s?” Eleanor asked.

Eleanor’s practical question released a stream of others:

“Is Susan okay?”

“Where was Mary?”

“Where did he die?”

“What can we do?”

Questions flew like quilting needles, drowning Po’s voice. Finally she shushed the Queen Bees with a fanning of her hands. “I think there actually is something we can do. We can gather our quilting equipment, head to my house, and get to work planning this anniversary quilt for Selma,” she said. “That’s what we can do.”

The Paltrow home, where Po had lived for over thirty years, was everyone’s favorite place “to stop and flop,” as, Kate put it. The rambling white frame house, surrounded by a sixteen-foot-wide porch, was just a short mile from the Elderberry shops. It was in the heart of a gracious old neighborhood, filled with comfortable homes, giant elm trees and old maples that turned the yards into fiery paintings each fall. Many professors from nearby Canterbury College had raised their families in the closely-knit neighborhood. Po and Sam had raised their own children there, but often said it was the village of which Hillary Clinton spoke — and Sam had joked that it had taken every single one of those villagers to help them raise their three.

Phoebe, Kate, and Maggie squeezed together in Maggie’s truck, with Kate’s bike rattling around in the back, and were the first to reach Po’s. Turning into the drive, they cruised past the bordering crabapple hedges and pulled to a stop in front of the three-car garage.

“I love this house,” Kate murmured, looking up at the battered basketball hoop, the scene of many late-night games of H.O.R.S.E.

“Me, too,” Maggie said. She tossed her keys into an enormous leather purse and followed Kate and Phoebe around to the back door. “It’s the kind of house that looks at you, opens its arms and says, ‘Hey, you, whoever you are — come on in. Be safe. Be comfortable. Be happy,”

Kate smiled. Safe. Comfortable. Happy. She had been all of those things in this house. Her mother and Po never went more than a day or two without getting together, and when she was little, Kate was always in tow.

“I think the first time I ever met you was right here on this lawn,” Kate said to Maggie. “You were with Po’s daughter, Sophie.”

“And Po told Sophie and me that we had to watch her best friend’s little girl while they talked girl-talk in the sunroom. So there we were, stuck with this scrawny, gangly little kid,” she snorted, “with orders to treat little Katie Simpson like a gentle lamb.”

“Gentle lamb, my foot,” Kate laughed. “And I was never scrawny, Maggie. You know that.”

“Oh, shush, you’re gorgeous. Always were. Disgusting but true.”

“And what did you do, Mags? Ditch her?” Phoebe asked. “That’s what my brothers always did with me.”

“Nope. Kate was ornery enough that we couldn’t get away with that. But we did send her in to ask for Cokes and cookies because Po spoiled her rotten.”

Phoebe laughed and Kate pushed open the door. Like many of the neighbors, Po never locked her doors, a fact Kate took for granted growing up. But now, after living in Boston for a few years, it made her cringe.

Maggie and Phoebe followed her into the sunny kitchen and family room combination that stretched across the entire back of the house. Hoover, Po’s contented Irish Setter, was sprawled across the couch.

“Hoover,” Kate called over to him. “Shame on you.”

Hoover’s tail flopped joyfully on the pillows, inviting gentle ear scratching and accepting no blame for his indiscretion. Maggie walked over, sat down on the edge of the sofa, and happily complied.

The sunny room was filled with years of memories for Kate. Beyond the wall of windows was the wide back porch, cluttered with comfortable wicker chairs and porch swings, huge wooden paddle fans, and a lush, rolling backyard that had once been a woods. When the house was built, Po and Sam had insisted that as many trees be kept as possible, and it was filled with river oak, fifty-foot pine trees, and a thick, brambly blackberry patch that yielded the fruit for Po’s famous berry cobblers.

“This place was our playground,” Kate said, looking across the yard, then around the well-stocked kitchen. At the far end of the open area was a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace and soft comfortable couches with a table between. Sam Paltrow had made the coffee table himself — an enormous square chunk of oak, worn to a shine over the years and host to many a Scrabble game. Overstuffed chairs were grouped in a pair near a thick bookcase on another wall, and a third sat close to the wide French doors that led out to the porch.

After years of hide-and-seek on all floors of the Paltrow home, Kate was as familiar with it as her own. She loved the wide polished hallways and the cozy den at the front of the house. It was paneled in thick walnut with built-in bookshelves that climbed all the way to the ceiling, and to this day, it still smelled of Sam’s Swisher Sweets cherry-scented cigars. There, while adults clinked glasses and chatted in front of the fireplace or out on the porch, a small body could make its way easily into the cabinets below the bookcases. And wedged in between stacks of musty-smelling National Geographics, poker chips, and jigsaw puzzles, Kate would shush herself into quiet while the older kids ran through the house looking for her. She loved it here.

While Kate rummaged around in the refrigerator looking for Po’s coffee beans, Phoebe pulled her cell phone out of her backpack and called home, checking on Jude, Emma, and Jimmy. Kate had long suspected that as much as Phoebe savored her Saturday mornings with the Queen Bees, it wouldn’t be quite so lovely if her three loves, as she called them, weren’t connected to her frequently used cell phone.

“News travels fast,” said Phoebe, snapping down the lid of her phone and slipping it into the pocket of her jeans. “Jimmy said three neighbors and a lawyer from his firm had already called to see if we’d heard the news about Owen’s death. Peter Finch — he lives next door — said that Selma had a lot of things going on in that back room, drugs maybe! And maybe that’s why Owen Hill had a heart attack.”

Just then, Leah and Eleanor arrived, balancing white bakery boxes and satchels of quilting materials. “Phoebe!” Leah scolded. “What trash.”

“Of course it is,” Phoebe said. She walked over and flopped down on one of the wide corduroy-covered couches. Her tiny body was nearly lost in its cushions. “It’s preposterous, is what it is, and that’s exactly what Jimmy told Peter. He also told him a little about slander suits and said that he was offering Selma a special on them if she was interested.”

“That’s our Jimmy.” Leah smiled and began taking blueberry muffins and Marla’s cinnamon rolls out of one of the boxes, placing them on a large platter. Maggie straddled a chair at the thick dining table and picked at the stray crumbs that fell onto the tabletop.

Kate waited for the comforting gurgle of the coffeemaker, then sat down opposite Phoebe and unzipped her backpack. “I’d almost forgotten how much people gossip in this town.”

“People gossip, sure,” Leah said. “But people also care. Sometimes that’s at the root of it.”

“But to imply that drugs were involved because a lovely man dies of a heart attack? That’s just crazy. I love this little town, but that kind of thing reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents knew before I got home at night, whose car I’d been riding in,” Kate said. “Or if I’d sneaked a cigarette with a friend down by the river — nothing was secret.”

“There’s that side of it. But I still think it usually comes down to concern, at least more often than not. I’ve lived on both coasts and had great friends there, but I love the caring of near-strangers here.” Leah finished arranging the muffins and sat down on the couch next to Eleanor.

“Not to perpetuate the gossip, you understand,” Phoebe said, “but what was Owen doing at Selma’s, anyway?” She began pulling small pieces of fabric from her quilting sack and lining them up on the large coffee table between her and Kate.

“Po said there’d been a meeting of that corporation the shop owners formed,” Leah said. “All the shop owners were there — we’ll have to wait for her to tell us more.”

“Where is she, anyway?” Kate asked.

“Selma and Susan called her back over to the store just as we were getting ready to leave. She told us to go on without her and she’d be here soon. She’d catch a ride with someone,” she said. Leah sat at the large trestle table, lifted her square, hand-made quilting case onto the table, and unsnapped the strap that held it together.