4 Plagued by Quilt (9 page)

She disconnected before I could say anything pleasant like
See you in the morning
. Just as well. Something unpleasant about her dismissive opinion of Granny might have come out instead, and she didn’t need my snippiness added to her problems.

*   *   *

The next morning started out feeling like a replay of the day before—gathering my notes and courage for the first textile and quilt session with the teenagers, driving to the edge of town through a soft summer morning toward the mountains and the Homeplace. As before, the gate stood open and I drove slowly through, crunching along the gravel. I didn’t realize how tense I was over this rerun until I felt the relief of seeing four other vehicles already parked in the lot beside the visitors’ center. My hands relaxed on the wheel, and I rolled to a stop beside a car twice as big and ten times shinier than my trusty, dusty Honda.

The relief was short-lived. Two of the vehicles were sheriff’s cars. Their presence probably wasn’t unusual—deputies were surely still investigating Phillip’s death and tying up loose ends. But as I got out of my car, a third sheriff’s car rocketed down the drive and braked
into a short skid. There’d been no siren, but from the way Shorty jumped out, slammed the door, and took off running toward the barn, it was clear something else had happened. I left my notes and materials behind and took off after him.

S
horty ran like a jackrabbit. I followed, but not with any hope of catching up or keeping him in sight if he didn’t slow down. It didn’t matter. When I rounded the barn, he’d joined a tableau posed along one side of the newest excavation square—a tableau of tan, brown, and starch. Shorty, Darla, and Clod, Smokey Bear hats in place, stood in a row at the edge of the pit, fists on hips, bent forward at the waist, staring at a feature Jerry and Zach were pointing at like proud parents. Jerry was on one knee, one long arm and index finger extended. Zach looked electrified. He stood, legs spread wide and with all ten fingers of his palms-up hands splayed toward the feature. The tableau became vivant when Zach said something I didn’t hear, since by then I was winded and puffing. It sounded as though he said, “Bite me.”

I did hear Shorty’s disgust when I panted to a stop on the adjacent edge of the pit.

“I friggin’ don’t believe it.” He took his hat off and slapped the brim against his thigh.

Zach fairly danced as he turned to make sure I appreciated their work. They’d dug down to the level of the elbow, only deep enough to see, not enough to rescue—
the elbow connected to the arm bones, the shoulder bones, pretty much the whole shooting match . . .

“Was she shot?” I asked. None of the “grown-ups” answered my question. Zach shrugged and bent to brush dirt from a scapula. I stared and couldn’t stop staring at the back of the skull, the framework of bones emerging from their pit. Thin. Fragile. Exposed after years under clay and unknowing boots and hooves and bare feet crisscrossing through lush grass above. They lay in the warm morning sun. Why didn’t they shiver?

“You had insider information,” Shorty was saying. He straightened and looked over Clod’s still bent back at Darla. “Had to be.”

“No, she did not,” Jerry Hicks said. “There is no insider information possible in an excavation like this. Darla won the bet fair and square.”

“Darla was
here
.” Shorty shot a finger at the pit. “And I was stuck looking for—”

Clod laid a hand on Shorty’s shoulder, and then he used that shoulder as though it alone helped him rise to his full height so that he looked down at the top of Shorty’s head. He took his hand off Shorty’s shoulder and took a moment to readjust Shorty’s sleeve. Shorty tightened his lips and made no further comment.

“What Shorty means to say, Deputy Dye, is that he’ll be happy to pay up. He’s a man of his word. And that’s the end of it.”

“What were you betting on?” I asked.

Darla gazed off into the trees to her left. Shorty clapped his hat back on his head. Zach, eyes bright and wide, looked from one to the other of the four and started to open his mouth.

Clod’s voice bulldozed right past Zach. “That’s the end of it. Nothing more to discuss. How much more time do you need, Hicks?”

“Until there’s nothing more to dig.”

“
Two
so far,” Zach exploded. “Darla guessed more than one and wins twenty bucks.”

“What?” I asked. “Two what?” But I already knew.
“Where?”

“Second skull.” Jerry showed me the rounded bone breaking the surface of the clay not more than a foot from the first skull. Occipital lobe? Parietal? Zach probably knew. “Deeper than our first guy,” Jerry said. “Maybe partially beneath. Too early to say.”

“Him?” I asked. “Male?”

“A guess.”

Our words clattered, as spare as the bones, but in my case that was because the images and possibilities the bones conjured ran wild and I had trouble holding them back.

“How many . . .” I waved my hands to finish that sentence.

“As I said.” Clod didn’t move, but his words crossed their arms and lowered their brow. He waited. When we were all looking at him, he said to Jerry, “Keep me informed.” Then he looked at me. “I meant what I said. There is nothing more to discuss. When we do know more, the sheriff will issue a statement. I’d appreciate your discretion in this matter. That goes for you, too, Aikens.”

Zach brushed dirt from between two ribs, bending close.

“You’re Ty Aikens’ boy, aren’t you?” Clod asked. “And Isaac’s little brother? Your daddy’s still in for
misdemeanor theft, isn’t he? Third offense? But I hear Isaac got out last month. My advice? Stay away from both of them.”

Jerry got down on one knee and faced Zach on the other side of the skeleton, his broad back making an effective barrier between Clod and the teen. “Let me show you how a professional does it, dude.” He took his own stiff brush from a back pocket. “Concentrate on the surface and the shape.” He brushed around a kneecap, speaking loudly enough for the three deputies behind him to hear. “Be aware of what’s going on around your artifact, but focus your attention here. After a while, it’s like the rest of the world goes away. Been my experience, anyway.”

If a smile touched Zach’s lips, it disappeared before Clod or Shorty saw, when they passed him on their way back to their cars. I waved to Darla, who remained on excavation sentry duty, and followed Clod and Shorty.

Clod had said he’d appreciate my discretion about the second set of bones. I understood his request. Of course I did. That’s why I waited until he and Shorty were far enough ahead that they couldn’t hear me. And then I made a discreet call to Ardis.

“Two,” Ardis said with a disbelieving cluck. “Will this make it easier?”

“Or twice as hard? I don’t know.”

*   *   *

When I got back to the parking lot, two of the sheriff’s cars were gone. The day looked brighter already. I carried my materials inside and dropped them off in the education room, then went to find Nadine. Her office door was closed and she didn’t answer a knock. Yet she must be in the building. The front door wasn’t locked. The lights were on.

I stood in the long hall listening and heard muffled voices. In the auditorium to my left? Or down the hall to the right? Down the hall, to the right, in Phillip’s office? Without much effort, I convinced myself the voices might be coming from Phillip’s office. And I should go check. Make a security check. As a good volunteer.

Hesitating only slightly, I turned my back on the more obvious voices in the auditorium and walked quickly to Phillip’s office door. Nothing stirred. I put my ear to the door to be sure—quiet inside—then tried the knob. It turned. I cast a clichéd look left and right, slipped inside with another scan of the hall over my shoulder, and pulled the door shut behind me.

Clod sat at the desk.

“Oh.” I could be remarkably eloquent. Eloquent enough to stun Clod, anyway, because he didn’t say anything. Or maybe his silence was due to my sudden, not to say sneaky, appearance in the office of a dead man. Clod looked at home behind the desk and oddly academic, pulling a pair of half-lens reading glasses to the end of his nose. He almost looked safe. “You should wear those more often,” I said. “Suspects will probably relax and tell you more.”

“Is there more
you
want to tell me?”

“Oh. No.” I tried to look and sound offhand. “I came to check on the copier. Because I’ll need to make copies later. For my quilting program.” I pointed to the machine I’d seen sitting on the filing cabinet the day before. I followed my pointing finger over to it. “Ah. A copier and printer combination. That’s a nice feature. Looks standard. We shouldn’t have any problems.” While I driveled, I glanced down the front of the filing cabinet. Nothing about the labels on the three drawers jumped out at me.
Loan documents in the top drawer . . . But what did I think I’d find? A label pointing me in the direction of a letter marked “In the Event of My Murder”?

“Now that you’ve hunted down the elusive copier, can I help you find anything else?”

“No, thanks. I’m good. This should work.” I lifted the lid of the copier in a last effort to lend verisimilitude to my terrible acting. A document lay on the glass. It took all my willpower not to react, not to pick it up, to lower the lid, and turn around.

The long arm of the law intervened. “Interesting,” Clod said. He’d moved fast, coming up behind me. His arm reached over my shoulder. His hand kept the lid from closing. “Were you looking for this?”

“No. But people leave things in copiers all the time.” He was standing too close. I moved sideways. “What is it?”

“Did you know your voice gets tighter and higher when you’re telling stories?” He turned toward me and held his hand up. “Before you go off on me, I did not say ‘lying.’ Your song and dance about looking at the copier might be true enough. But what you said about people leaving documents in copiers? That’s when your voice sounded normal for the first time since you broke in here.”

“I
didn’t
break in.”

“And now you’re showing honest, spontaneous emotion. Makes your voice huskier.”

He still hadn’t taken the paper off the glass. He looked from me to the copier, then smiled and closed the lid. “It’s probably not the clue you’re looking for. A document left in a copier? Not usually a case-breaker.”

“You’re not going to look at it? Phillip thought he
knew who’s buried out there. He was going to share his notes with me. What if that’s one of his notes? What if it tells us something?”

“
Me
. It might tell me something. Highly doubtful, though. And
I
will look at it after I finish with the desk. Call me a methodical plodder, but I like doing things in order. These are all bona fide detective tips, by the way, in case you want to write them down.”

Calling him a methodical plodder wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. “I thought you had Grace all stitched up for Phillip’s murder. What are you looking for?”

“Stitched, huh?” He put his fist on his hip and leaned artfully to one side, as though he’d practiced his John Wayne look in a mirror. “Clever. And quilting? That’s why you’re hanging around here again? I’ll put this in terms you’ll understand, then. I’m looking for the odd pieces. Tying off loose ends. See? I know your jargon. I used to watch my grandmother quilt. I’m not without needle skills.”

“
Needle
skills? Good for you.” That sounded only half sarcastic. “Why were you needling Zach Aikens out there? Why did you embarrass him like that?”

“You don’t know his family.”

“He can’t help who he’s related to, and he’s a smart kid.”

“Then he’ll take my message as cautionary. But you met him, what, yesterday? Day before? You don’t know
him
, either. Now, if you don’t mind, I have official business to attend to. Please shut the door on your way out.”

It took most of my self-control not to slam the door. It took a soupçon of what was left to leave the door very . . . slightly . . . open, and walk away.

*   *   *

With my nerves hovering on the brink of a Clod-induced simmer, I went back down the hall to the education room to see if my volunteers had arrived. Shirley Spivey, or it might have been Mercy, hovered inside the door as though waiting to pounce on me. When the twin saw me, she struck a pose with one hand artfully indicating the mobcap on her head and the other spreading the fabric of her ankle-length patchwork skirt for maximum effect. Mercy’s unpleasant cologne didn’t spread in cloying waves with the spreading of the skirt, so in my role as keen detective, I deduced that this was Shirley.

“Oh.” Really, my eloquence knew no bounds.

“Good!” Shirley exclaimed. “You like it. We weren’t sure you would. But we thought we should rally to the spirit of the program and dress the part. It’s good for the kiddos to see how we did things in the olden days.”

“You used to dress like that? When?”

“Not us, per se, but you know what I mean.”

No, I didn’t know what she meant, and even my eloquent “oh” failed to cover for me. I tried blinking as though in accord, instead. Then I looked more closely at Shirley’s skirt—eccentric pieces of embroidered velvets in colors so deep they approached black until they caught the light as Shirley moved. “Shirley, your skirt’s beautiful. Where did it come from?”

Mercy marched over before Shirley answered. Her mobcap had slipped down the back of her head, revealing her badly permed gray hair, and she wore the twin of Shirley’s skirt. Both skirts looked as though they’d been fashioned from an antique crazy quilt.

“The kiddos have started arriving and that woman with the bee up her nose—”

“Mabeline,” Shirley said.

“Nadine,” I said.

“She asked where you were,” Mercy said. “Is she always that uptight? Or do you think that’s because of the murder? Come to think of it, that’s probably it. Some people can’t handle that kind of stress. Anyway, don’t worry. We covered for you.”

“We found the notes and materials you left in here,” said Shirley. “I organized the notes, and Mercy distributed the needles and fabric around the tables.”

That worried me, but I had another question for them. “Should you be wearing those skirts?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid something will happen to them? Where
did
you get them?”

“Tell her,” Mercy said, nudging Shirley with her elbow. “We made them. As for wearing them, we don’t like to keep our light under a bushel.”

“Crazy quilting is our forte,” said Shirley.

“I’ll say. I’m . . . I am so impressed. Why haven’t I seen these skirts before?”

“You might be surprised how few occasions there are for taking our light out from under the bushel,” said Mercy. “New Year’s Eve is about it. This seemed appropriate.”

Hardly. There was nothing historically accurate about the skirts as clothing and they weren’t practical for working—or volunteering—at a historic site. But I wasn’t about to argue. I wanted to fall into the blue blacks, inky emeralds, and deep purples of those skirts. I wanted to trace their feather stitches and running daisies.

“What else have you made?” I asked. “May I?” I backed into a chair at one of the tables, and sat, leaning
forward, my elbows on my knees. Shirley swished closer and stood in front of me. Mercy moved in beside her. Their crazy quilt velvet skirts took up my entire field of vision. Even Mercy’s cologne didn’t matter. I clasped my hands between my knees and drank in those skirts. “This velvet is silk, isn’t it? I mean, with no synthetics. Is it old? And what about the embroidery threads?”