Tree of Life and Death (23 page)

"Did you ever get a restraining order against him?"

Trudy shook her downcast head. "I was afraid it would just make him do something worse."

"It would be hard for the police to think you went from doing absolutely nothing about his bothering you to suddenly killing him," I said. "It would be different if you had a long history of police involvement or you'd ever threatened him with violence if he wouldn't leave you alone."

"Well…" Trudy sighed. "There was this one time, when I was out window-shopping here on Main Street a few months ago, and Alan started following me and saying stupid things. I saw a cop coming out of the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery, and I ran over to see if he could help me." She nodded in the direction of Fred Fields, who was still just out of hearing range, talking on his phone. "It was the same cop who's watching over us today. I told him what was happening, but when I turned around to point out Alan, he was gone. I don't know if the cop will even remember."

Another cop might not, but Fred would definitely remember. The only thing I wasn't sure about was whether he'd mentioned it to Ohlsen yet. Fred might not think Trudy was a viable suspect, but Ohlsen would if he knew about the history between Alan and Trudy. And now I was starting to wonder about Trudy too. She was such a timid young woman, but I couldn't help thinking about the old saying that still waters ran deep.

*   *   *

The conscientious objectors were fine and didn't need me to hold their hands, so I headed back inside the boardroom to see if there was something useful I could do.

The quilters were getting restless as the work was wrapping up. Only two of the workstations were still operating: the one for quilting through the three layers of the miniature quilts, and the one with the machine that attached the binding and hanging loop. There were only about a dozen ornaments left to be layered at the first station, and the woman doing the binding was finishing them as fast as they were arriving at her table.

Jayne stood over the basket of the finished ornaments now, acting as a self-appointed quality-control inspector. She snatched the latest addition out of the basket and announced, "This is unacceptable. The hanging loop has some exposed raw edges. It needs to be ripped out and redone."

The woman who had made the offending loop acted as if she hadn't heard Jayne's shrill voice and picked up the next little quilt that needed binding.

Meg, on the other hand, must have heard the complaint, since she hurried over to intervene. She took the supposedly defective ornament from Jayne. "Oh, that's not so bad. I bet you could fix it with a few hand stitches and a little tuck in the binding."

"It wouldn't look good on close inspection," Jayne said.

"That's all right," Meg said. "These little quilts aren't going to be in a juried show or anything. No one will ever notice once it's hung on the tree."

"A quilt judge would notice."

"Not after you've worked your magic on it, especially if it's placed high on the tree, where no one can get a close look at it." Meg steered Jayne over to the abandoned cutting table. In addition to the rulers and rotary cutters, there was a pincushion, three sizes of cheap metal thimbles, and two spools of thread—one red and one white.

"I guess a temporary repair will do for now," Jayne said. "After the holidays, I'll take the worst ones home and do them right."

"Make sure to let the museum's director know that you're not stealing them," Meg said, "just fixing them."

Curious to see how the little imperfection would be hidden, I followed to watch as Jayne threaded a needle, created a tuck in the binding fabric, and then folded it over the tiny bit of raw-edged fabric that stuck out. Her stitches were so tiny they appeared to be part of the binding fabric. When she reached the bottom of the loop, where it met the top corner of the quilted ornament, the needle got stuck in the thick layers. Jayne grabbed the largest of the thimbles and stuck it on the tip of her thumb. It was too small, barely covering the tip of her thumb, but it was enough to allow her to push the needle past the sticking point.

And then it dawned on me. I knew why the leather thimble hadn't fit anyone during the tests. It wasn't designed for a finger; it had been worn by someone who used her thumb to quilt. It wasn't a common method, but I'd seen it a few times during my studies. That would explain why it was too big even for the largest-boned people in the room, Carl and Gil, and it had only fit the tip of Matt's fingers, flaring out too far at the knuckle.

Ohlsen needed to try the thimble on everyone in the room again, but wearing it on thumbs instead of fingers. This time, I suspected it would be noticeably too small for Carl, Gil, and Matt. I couldn't tell just by looking at Jayne's thumb whether it would match the leather thimble, but she'd just jumped to the top of the suspect list. She was easily angered, she had no alibi, and she'd given a false name when questioned by the police. Dee and Emma had said Jayne could get violent, at least to the extent of property damage, over quilting issues, and she'd admitted to being irritated with Alan Miller for his mistreatment of the Tree of Life quilt. Jayne's perfectionism might have an even darker side than what anyone had observed so far. I'd heard often enough during my stress support group meetings that perfectionism could be a killer, but until now I'd never thought the saying might be true in a literal sense.

I needed to let Ohlsen know that we'd been looking at the thimble all wrong, and that it might yet be the key to identifying Alan's killer.

Ohlsen hadn't returned to the boardroom, so I told the female officer at the door that I needed to talk to Fred, and she let me past without the hassle Faria would have given me.

Outside, the hallway was deserted, only the five empty chairs remaining at the near end of the hallway to indicate where the conscientious objectors had been seated. Fred must have been instructed to take them downstairs for transport to the police station. Apparently someone had forgotten to tell the officer inside the boardroom.

I was debating whether I should continue down the back stairs on my own, when Meg slipped through the doors behind me.

She smiled wryly. "You know where I need to go."

"Officer Fields has left," I said. "You'll have to let the officer inside know you're out here alone."

"I can't wait that long." Meg was doing the restless little dance of someone who really couldn't wait.

Talking to Ohlsen, on the other hand, could wait a couple of minutes.

"I'll go with you." If anyone questioned our being outside the boardroom, we could vouch for each other. It wasn't like either one of us was going to make a run for freedom, and even if we did, there were officers at each of the exits, prepared to stop us.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you," Meg said, her grateful smile making her look even more the very image of Mrs. Claus, even without her pinafore apron and red hat.

"No problem," I said.

We reached the point in the hallway where it was open to the two sets of stairs, one to the museum lobby and one to the parking lot. Meg glanced in both directions, as if at a stop sign, looking for oncoming traffic. The tension on her face deepened the lines around her eyes and on her forehead. Perhaps she was afraid of heights. The stairs were steeper than in more modern buildings and seemed to go on forever.

To distract her, I said, "Doesn't your bladder condition interfere with your more formal teaching events? I would think the students would get restless if the instructor keeps having to leave in the middle of an explanation."

"That's why it's so important to have a highly trained assistant," Meg said, continuing past the stairwells. "Jayne helps out whenever she's able to attend an event, and most of the time she's better at my techniques than I am. I was her very first instructor, and she soaked up everything I had to teach. I sometimes wonder if she might have gone in a different direction with her quilts if she'd latched on to a different instructor. She decided that whatever I did was the only right way to do things, and everything else was inferior."

My stomach lurched, the way it did when I was in the beginning stage of a stressful situation, before the nausea and light-headedness that presaged passing out. Usually, I knew exactly why my symptoms appeared, but there didn't seem to be any reason right now. Ohlsen had shown himself willing to listen to my insights today, I'd at least solved the mystery of the thimble to my satisfaction, and I even had a good idea of who was going to turn out to be the prime suspect. It would be particularly interesting to see how Jayne explained why she hadn't claimed the thimble when she'd first seen it in the hands of the forensics tech.

But something was wrong, my body kept insisting. Nausea rose, and I leaned against the wall halfway between the stairwell and the door to the ladies' room.

What on earth was going on with my nervous system?

One of the most frustrating aspects of a syncope event was that my thinking tended to go fuzzy as soon as the stress began, which then clouded my judgment and made it more difficult for me to think of a way to avoid the stress. A little cold water splashed on my face might help me to concentrate. I needed to be able to think straight when I got downstairs and told Ohlsen my latest insight about the thimble and its likely owner.

Meg stopped to peer at me anxiously. "Are you all right?"

"Nothing serious, but I think I'll use the ladies' room after you."

"I'm used to people following in my footsteps," Meg said with a self-deprecatory smile. "Usually, it's in quilting techniques though, not bladder control."

I needed to stop thinking about the nausea and concentrate on something pleasant and soothing. Like a whole room full of quilters copying Meg's quilting techniques while creating amazing works of art for me to appreciate. I pictured Jayne and Trudy and Dee and Emma and even Stefan, all lined up, mimicking their instructor. First, the cutting, then the stitching and ironing and machine quilting. And finally a few hand stitches to secure the hanging loop, using their thumbs to push the needle through the thick layers of fabric.

As the image came into focus, I sucked in a startled gulp of air. Had Jayne been copying Meg when she used the thimble on her thumb? If so, that put Meg right up at the top of the suspect list with Jayne. Meg had no alibi for the time of Alan's murder. She'd claimed she was in the ladies' room when Sunny screamed, but I had no way of telling if that was true. Meg had definitely had the means to do the murder; I'd seen her put a pair of Sunny's scissors in the pinafore apron. I'd thought she'd discarded the apron and hat as inappropriate for the aftermath of the murder, but there could have been another reason for getting rid of it: it had Alan's blood on it.

Perhaps most damning of all, Meg had tried on the thimble exactly as directed, fighting the muscle memory that, assuming I was right about where Jayne had learned to use a thimble, would have automatically called for wearing it on the thumb. If I was wrong, and Jayne hadn't learned that technique from her favorite teacher, Meg still would have known that Jayne used a thimble on her thumb, and I thought Meg was enough of a natural-born teacher that she wouldn't have been able to help herself from sharing that information with the forensic tech.

The only thing missing was motive. Why on earth would Meg have killed anyone, least of all a young, down-on-his-luck guy trying to do a nice thing for his grandmother? Without some explanation for why she might have wanted Alan dead, it would be difficult to convince Detective Ohlsen to search Meg's vehicle for the missing quilt and the pinafore apron. Especially since now I was working more from intuition—and the evidence of my hypersensitive nervous system—than from logic.

I wasn't even sure I could explain my theory well enough for Ohlsen to take me seriously, not with my head swimming.

"I really need to go," Meg said. "Will you be all right here by yourself?"

It hadn't been that long since Meg's last trip to the bathroom. Less time than any of her previous trips, I thought.

There was something other than her bladder behind her urgency. I needed to stall until I could figure out what was going on.

"Just give me a minute for my head to clear."

Meg glanced in the direction of the ladies' room, but she didn't leave me. Either she was truly concerned about me or she knew it would be suspicious if she acted too callously.

If she didn't actually need to use the toilet, why was she so desperate to get to the restroom? What if she had stashed evidence of her guilt there? Like her pinafore, which surely would have had at least some of Alan's blood on it if she'd stabbed him. Meg could have tossed the scissors in the trash, stowed the quilt in her car, and headed back inside the museum before she realized she was wearing incriminating evidence. Even if someone had seen her dashing toward the ladies' room to get rid of it, no one would have thought anything of her actions.

If I was right about Meg being the killer, then the apron had to be in the ladies' room, and I had to keep her from destroying it. Gil would definitely give the police permission to search there, so no warrant was necessary. Then forensic testing would confirm that the blood had belonged to Alan Miller.

"You know," I said, "perhaps we should go back to the boardroom so I can sit down before I end up needing paramedics."

Meg transformed suddenly, no longer looking even remotely like Mrs. Claus, unless Santa had married a vicious serial killer. Her eyes were narrowed, and she reached out to grab me by my arm. I tried to pull away from her, but I was too light headed and dizzy to free myself.

It was probably a good thing that Faria had confiscated all the scissors as soon as he'd arrived. Except he hadn't thought to confiscate the rotary cutters, and Meg had just pulled one out of the back of her waistband, where it had been stowed like a gangster's illegal gun.

I froze long enough to confirm that the safety guard had been retracted and the blade was fully exposed.