Seven Sisters (29 page)

He shot me an irritated frown. “My mother’s making me do this.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. So that was what the mysterious communication between him and Dove was about on Sunday. She had indeed gone over his head to his real boss. Unable to resist, I reached over and ran a hand over his ripply chest muscles.

“Nice and firm, aren’t they?” Edna McClun said. She rapped on his left pectoral. “Like a good melon.”

“The muscle definition is
muy bueno
,” Maria Ramirez. “All natural, too. No steroids.”

“He’s certainly prime cut,” I agreed, nodding solemnly. We all studied his chest closely. “I can’t find a flaw anywhere.”

“Would you people hurry up,” Miguel complained, his face a deep scarlet. “I’ve got a shift to work.”

We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dove said, walking by, the megaphone clutched in one hand. “I have connections with your chief who, by the way, will be Mr. April with chickens.”

I turned to her, my mouth open. “Gabe’s going to be in the calendar? He never told me!”

“Good,” she said, her face pleased. “Then I know I can trust him to keep a secret.”

“Mr. April? With chickens?”

“He won’t take off his clothes,” she said. “Says it ain’t dignified. So we decided to go for a sophisticated look. He’ll be in his tuxedo surrounded by baby chicks.” She elbowed me. “Surrounded by chicks, get it?”

“I get it. Am I right in assuming all the men loitering around outside are today’s models?”

She caught Elmo Ritter’s arm as he walked by and asked, “Who’s on the docket today?”

After adjusting his brown beret, he checked his clipboard. “There’s Miguel Aragon, San Celina Police Department, and white-faced calf—Mr. January; then Bill Connor, Arroyo Grande fire fighter, with baby ducks—Mr. March; Ty O’Brien, Highway Patrol officer, with lamb—Mr. August; and Josh Dunbar, county paramedic with shih tzu puppies—Mr. June. We had to reschedule Mr. February, the SWAT team guy, cause the Siamese kittens didn’t arrive. The cat lady called and said she couldn’t get here until Friday.”

“Fine,” Dove said. “As long as we get everything wrapped by Friday afternoon so we can get it to the printer’s next week.” She turned and yelled into the megaphone. “Are we ready for action yet?”

“We’re placing the calf now,” Edna said, helping the calf’s hairdressers position him in Miguel’s arms.

“Oh, shit!” Miguel yelled, holding the bawling calf away from him. “What’s this green stuff?”

The ladies jumped back from the splatter, laughing.

“Yes, it is,” Edna said.

“Oh, man,” Miguel moaned, looking down with dismay at the front of his jeans. “Don’t you have any, like, house-trained cows or something?”

“Oh, no,” Dove echoed. “Did you bring that extra pair of pants I told you to, Miguel?”

After getting him a new pair of jeans, Isaac cleared the barn set of everyone but him and Miguel.

While Isaac took Miguel’s picture and then developed the film in the small darkroom he’d set up inside the house, Dove and I served lunch to the hungry models and helpers.

“Have you seen Sam or Bliss today?” she asked, unwrapping a huge Pyrex bowl of her famous potato salad.

“I stopped by the bookstore and talked to Sam. He seems to be doing okay, though kind of sad. He says Bliss doesn’t want to see anyone right now, including him. He said to tell you he’d be back to the ranch tonight.”

“My heart surely goes out to them.”

A drop-dead handsome, black-haired man with eyes the color of blue jay feathers parked himself in front of Dove and held out a paper plate. He was dressed in jeans and an Hawaiian shirt.

“I thought you were on tomorrow’s list,” she said.

“Gotta work tomorrow. I called, and Mr. Lyons said he could fit me in today. Didn’t he tell you?”

“Probably, but my brain’s been a little full these days. Guess we do have to work around your schedule.” She looked him up and down critically before giving him a small scoop of potato salad and one thin slice of ham. His face fell in disappointment. With an apologetic look, I followed her lead and put one roll on his plate.

“You can have more after the shoot,” Dove said. “We don’t want any paunchy stomachs. The camera lens sees every bulge. Did you bring your uniform?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, eyeing her bowl of potato salad with longing.

“The shorts?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Not them baggy ones. The short, tight ones.”

“Yes, ma’am. Just like you told me.”

“Good, the Doberman puppies will look real nice with the brown.”

After he took his food outside, I asked, “What agency...?”

“UPS,” she said.

I laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“You know any woman who isn’t half in love with her UPS man?”

Before I left for my quilting class, Isaac showed me the contact sheets of Miguel. “He’s gorgeous,” I said. He’d managed to make Miguel appear both dangerously sexy and adorably boyish. The calf’s dark shiny eyes matched Miguel’s, and the delicacy of the animal’s fragile pink nose and gangly feet was a brilliant contrast to Miguel’s smoldering sexuality. Dove’s idea about men and baby animals was right on the mark. Just based on Miguel’s photograph, I’d buy this calendar in a heartbeat. And one for each of my friends.

“A photographer’s only as good as his subject,” Isaac said modestly.

I checked my watch. As fun and distracting as this interval had been, I had to get to my quilting class. My stomach churned, remembering what I had to accomplish there today.

“What’s going on, Benni?” Isaac asked. His discerning photographer’s eye had caught the change in my expression. Then again, I never have been the queen of deception.

I explained what Detective Hudson wanted me to do and my mixed feelings about it.

“Maybe you should talk to Gabe,” he suggested.

I shook my head no. “He doesn’t need that right now. It would just cause a big fuss between him and this detective and maybe some problems between the departments. What can it hurt to just quiz the ladies about the past? Knowing them, they’d bring it up anyway.”

“Sounds like you know what you’re doing, then.” The doubt in his face was evident. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Not really, but you could do me one big favor.”

“Name it.”

I handed back the contact sheets. “Just don’t make my husband look
too
sexy, okay? I’ve got enough competition as it is.”

He leaned down and kissed my cheek. “You don’t have a single thing to worry about. I guarantee you’ve wrestled that man’s heart to the ground and hog-tied it for life.”

I laughed, hoping what he said was true. “And without a bustier or a garter belt. Thanks, Isaac, you always know just the right thing to say.”

“Old age and lots of bad road gives a man a certain cockeyed wisdom, I guess.”

“Cockeyed or not, it works for me.”

PERCHED HIGH ON a hill overlooking the twisting two-lane highway to Morro Bay, Oak Terrace Retirement Home was a group of salmon-colored buildings where many of San Celina’s senior citizens were living the final years of their lives. It had an ambulatory side where the seniors shared rooms and ate in a communal cafeteria, but for all intents and purposes were on their own. Most of the rooms peered out over alfalfa fields and pastures where the seniors watched the cycle of life in the cattle that dotted the scrubby range. Then there was the hospital side. Death Row, the ladies in my quilting group called it without a bit of compunction.

“We’re sorry,” said Thelma, who at one time owned the largest feed store in the county and had sold me my first pair of spurs when I was seven years old. “We forgot you’re a civilian.” That’s what they called the world outside their exclusive group. Now that I was married to a cop, I was used to their gallow’s humor, though I’ll admit the first time they called it Death Row, the shocked look on my face caused joyous titters to ripple through my group of eight regulars. Even the term
civilian
reminded me of how Gabe and his colleagues viewed those who didn’t carry a badge.

And I guess what these ladies had was a badge of sorts. The badge of time, of making it this far with the ability to still laugh at and enjoy life. So when I proposed we name our group, since we basically functioned as an in-house quilt guild, the fact that they chose Coffin Star Quilt Guild didn’t surprise me one bit. We even had black sweatshirts printed with our guild’s name in fluorescent pink letters, which each of them was wearing today. The first time I took the ladies to a quilt show wearing the matching sweatshirts, we caused quite a stir and a whole lot of laughter.

They were all set up in the craft room when I arrived. We were working on baby quilts for Gabe’s officers to carry in their police cars to give to kids taken out of violent home situations by Social Services. My function was less of a teacher than a bringer of news, donated quilting supplies and fabric, ideas, patterns, magazines, and gossip. There was nothing they enjoyed more than hearing everything that was going on at the folk art museum, Elvia’s bookstore, the police station, and the Historical Museum. They especially loved it when I was involved in some crime, as I’d been a few times, and were generous with advice on how I should proceed. People’s love lives intrigued them to no end, though Elvia and Emory’s static romance was frustrating them, and Gabe and I had been getting on too well to suit them. So, just to prime them, the first thing I did was tell them about Bliss and Sam, their secret romance, her unplanned pregnancy, Lydia’s arrival on the scene, the engagement party, Giles’s murder, and then Bliss getting shot and losing the baby.

“Oh, my,” Martha Pickering said, her hand digging in her sweatshirt sleeve for a violet-embroidered handkerchief. She dabbed at her white powdered temple. “That’s more than a month of stories on
All My Children
.” The others nodded in agreement, their fingers still quilting on the Tumbling Blocks quilt in the frame.

“That Brown family,” Juby Daniels said, shaking her head. “They’ve certainly had their share of baby troubles through the years.”

“Starting with Rose herself,” Leona Shelton said. Leona was turning ninety-two this year and was our oldest guild member. Though I had to thread her needles for her, she still sewed a straighter, truer quilt stitch than I ever would, using her experienced fingers to guide her as much as her washed-out-denim blue eyes. She’d been San Celina’s seamstress of choice for years and years. Her tiny shop downtown across from the courthouse had been the premier place among the rich and powerful for hearing about who was cheating on who, who was having a baby, and often whose baby it
really
was. She still remained a virtual encyclopedia of information of San Celina’s citizenry. If you’d put her and Mr. Foglino together, they could have probably blackmailed the whole town.

“Do you remember when her babies died?” I asked casually.

Her pencilled eyebrows moved a notch upwards. “You know about them?”

I stopped stitching and sat back in my chair. “One of her great-granddaughters, JJ, is a quilt artist at the co-op. She told me how the Seven Sisters ranch got its name.”

“I surely do remember,” Leona said, turning her eyes back to the red and brown quilt. “Rose Brown about went crazy. All them funerals so close together. I made the christening gowns for every one of them babies. Hand-stitched lilies of the valley around the hems. Three hundred-count imported Egyptian cotton with Belgian lace trim. Some nun went blind making that lace, mark my words. Each of those babies was buried in them. I think about that sometimes, my beautiful stitches, that lovely lace, being eaten by worms.”

The others nodded, murmuring at the waste. I flinched inwardly at the graphic scene it painted in my imagination. “So, how did they die? JJ didn’t know.” I looked back down at the quilt. It wasn’t exactly a lie. JJ hadn’t known how they died.

“Oh, they say it was just natural causes,” Leona said, pushing her needle in and out, in and out. “But there was rumors.”

“Really?” Martha said. “I was only fifteen at the time, but I don’t remember people talking.”

“It was kept pretty quiet. Those Browns were prominent folks even back then,” Leona said, stopping to cough into a crumpled tissue. She wiped her mouth delicately and continued. “He was a judge, you know. Quite the ladies’ man, let me tell you. Good-looking as that husband of yours, Benni, and with none of Gabe’s scruples. Rumors were he could have any woman he wanted in their crowd and heard tell he practically did.”

“What were the rumors about the babies?” I prompted.

“That somebody killed them, plain and simple,” Leona said with a quick nod.

“Oh, my . . . oh, dear . . . oh, Leona, really,” the women around the quilt exclaimed.

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Leona said, sniffing. “That’s what they were saying behind closed doors.”

“But who would kill four innocent babies?” asked Mattie Lee Jones, who was the progeny winner of the group with 27 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren to her credit. She took great pride in constantly reminding the group of her huge, supposedly close-knit family.

“Mattie Lee,” Leona said, “get your head out of that sandbox you call a life. Not many families qualify as the Waltons. Not even your messy group of misfits. Every day of this old world babies are hurt and sometimes killed by their own parents, sisters, brothers, and who knows who else. Why do you think we’re makin’ these quilts for the police department? And it’ll be that way till Jesus comes back.”

“Well, I just can’t imagine it,” Mattie Lee said, her pointy chin jerking up, insulted. “I think you’re just spreading vicious old rumors without substance. And as for that remark about my wonderful family, I think—”

“Who cares what you think?” Leona said. “As a matter of fact, why don’t you think about kissing my—”

“Leona! Mattie Lee!” Thelma said, her voice sounding the way it did when she caught us kids jumping on the expensive hay bales in back of her store. “Now, let’s not set a bad example for Benni here. She’s still at an impressionable age, you know. We have a responsibility.”

Leona looked over at me and winked. Mattie Lee’s chin moved an inch higher. I bit my lip trying not to laugh.