Let it Sew (15 page)

Reaching forward, Beatrice grabbed a napkin from the top of the trunk and wrapped
her own cookie inside it, saving it, no doubt, for her young charge, Luke. “But who
would do that?”

“Ethan Devereaux,” Tori snapped.

Six sets of eyes turned in her direction, each depicting a varying form of shock at
the tone with which she’d spoken.

Uh-oh.

“I take it you finally met?” Georgina drawled between bites of cookie.

“Oh, yes. We’ve met.”

“And?” Margaret Louise prodded.

She considered downplaying her meeting with the handsome yet arrogant-beyond-belief
man, but in the end, she couldn’t. These women were her friends. Her lifeline.

Inhaling every semblance of courage she could find, Tori finally put into words the
fear she’d been harboring all day.

“
And
if Ethan Devereaux has anything to say about it, it’s very likely the board will
be looking for a new head librarian before the week is out.”

Chapter 20

For the second time in as many weeks, Tori found herself traveling down the narrow
two-lane highway that linked Sweet Briar with its neighboring Tom’s Creek. Only this
time, instead of making the drive from the passenger seat of Margaret Louise’s powder
blue station wagon, she was playing the part of pilot from behind the wheel of her
own car.

Each curve she took, each mile she drove, brought her closer to being able to ask
the questions that had made sleeping nearly impossible since finding Parker Devereaux’s
body. The list had changed, of course, since then, with certain questions elbowing
their way to the top while others underwent a complete overhaul, yet they were all
still there. Waiting. Begging to be asked and answered.

Had Charlotte even tried to tell Frieda about her husband’s body?

What was it like when Ethan came to visit Charlotte? Was there tension? Did it seem
as if they shared a secret?

And finally, what had transpired between Frieda and Ethan to make them hate each other
so much?

Yes, they were all good questions. Important ones, in fact.

She let up on the gas pedal as she reached the turnoff for Tom’s Creek and again when
she approached the parking lot for the center, the list of questions quickly prioritizing
themselves as she came to a stop next to a familiar four-door white sedan that served
only to make her visit more plausible if not a bit more nerve-racking.

“This time, just stick to the thank-you, Tori,” she chastised herself on the brisk
walk from her car to the center. “And whatever you do, don’t call anyone a jerk.”

“Do you always talk to yourself like that, Miss Sinclair?”

She stopped as she neared the corner of the building and looked to her right to find
Jerry Lee Sweeney returning from the Dumpster in back. “Oh, Mr. Sweeney, I didn’t
see you there. How are you?”

With a little hop, he left the pathway that led to the Dumpster and joined her on
the sidewalk. “I’m good. But you, my dear, look troubled. Is everything okay?”

Keenly aware of the fact that the true reason for her visit was most likely
inside
the center, she cast about for something to say that would buy her time until she
was where she needed to be. “I’m fine. I think you just caught me talking through
the trouble spots on my holiday shopping list is all.”

“Ah, yes . . . been there, done that many times. My wife, Sadie, is a tricky one to
shop for. Hit the jackpot last year when I bought her a pair of clip-on pearl earrings,
although she’s bound to lose one of them these days. She has a habit of taking them
off every time she drinks a glass of wine. Says they make her ears itch, if you can
believe it. Then again, if she loses them, I guess I can hit the jackpot again.”

She laughed. “Then you understand where I’m at.”

“I do, indeed.” He stepped around her as they reached the door and pulled it open
to allow her entrance. “But you’ve come to the right place.”

“Oh?” she quipped when they stopped inside the front sitting room, which was alive
with talking and laughter this time around.

Jerry Lee gestured toward a petite woman with reddish brown hair and large brown eyes.
“Deidre, honey? Would you get Miss Sinclair one of those special cookies you made
with Ms. Davis yesterday afternoon? I think she would love one.”

Deidre bowed her head but not before the shy smile gave away her pride at being asked
to secure a cookie for the unfamiliar visitor.

“Do you know that Ms. Davis is my friend?” Tori asked as the young woman peered up
at her.

“Really?” Deidre gasped. “Wow, she’s my friend, too.”

“Then we’re both very lucky, aren’t we, Deidre?”

“Yes. We. Are!” Deidre declared before disappearing down the hallway and into the
kitchen.

“She liked you.” Jerry Lee motioned Tori to follow him down the very same hallway
Deidre had taken. “And she—along with everyone else here—loves Margaret Louise. Wow,
getting her on board as a volunteer here was quite a coup for us, I’ll tell you.”

“And in a roundabout way, for us at the Sweet Briar Public Library, too.” Tori peeked
into each room they passed en route to the kitchen, hoping and praying to see the
one face that had inspired her to drive to Tom’s Creek in the first place. At Jerry
Lee’s quizzical look, she filled in the blanks. “Margaret Louise told me about the
look-and-find books you’re donating to the library for our Cookies and Books with
Mrs. Claus event next week.”

His broad shoulders rose and fell beneath his thin khaki V-neck sweater. “I’d rather
see them being used than sitting in a closet gathering dust.”

She looked to the left mid-nod and stopped short at the sight of the woman seated
behind a desk flipping through a pile of charts.

Bingo . . .

“Frieda? Is that you?”

Charlotte Devereaux’s devoted nurse looked up from the chart in her hand, recognition
lifting the corners of her mouth upward. “Mizz Sinclair, what are you doing here?”

Veering from the course set by Jerry Lee, Tori stepped into the health room and extended
a hand in Frieda’s direction, the warmth of the woman’s touch bringing a smile to
her face as well. “I came out to thank Mr. Sweeney for something and, well, here I
am.”

She poked her head back into the hallway and waved at Jerry Lee. “If it’s okay, I’m
going to visit with Frieda for a little while.”

“Of course, it’s fine. I’ll have Deidre hold on to your cookie until you’re done.”

When he disappeared into the kitchen, she popped back into Frieda’s office and dropped
into the closest chair. “So how are you doing?”

The smile that failed to reach Frieda’s eyes told her everything the woman’s words
didn’t say. “I’m doing good. Keeping busy. Hoping to get a call on another job as
soon as possible.”

Tori waved her hand around the room, happily decorated in colorful posters trumpeting
things like healthy eating and good personal hygiene. “You don’t want to work here
anymore?”

“Oh, I love it here, Miss Sinclair. I always have. But this is volunteer. I need a
job that will keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach.” Frieda closed the
file she’d been studying when Tori arrived and placed it on the smaller of two piles.
“Fortunately for me, Mizz Devereaux was a very generous woman and she made sure I’d
have enough to tide me over for a few months after her passing. We just never counted
on it happening so quickly.”

She considered the woman’s words, a question forming on their heels. “But you knew
she was dying, right?”

Frieda pushed back in her chair and stood, her soft-soled shoes nearly silent as she
made her way over to the small window that looked out on the major thoroughfare through
Tom’s Creek. “I knew it would happen . . . eventually. But not as fast as it did.
She had more declining to do, or at least I
thought
she did. God saw fit to prove me wrong, I reckon.”

The hurt in Frieda’s voice was rivaled only by the defeated droop of the woman’s shoulders.
For a moment, Tori thought better of voicing the questions she’d come to ask, but
her heart won out over her head and forced her to press on.

“Do you think Charlotte knew what was happening to her?” It wasn’t the first question
she’d intended to ask, but it set the scene well enough.

Frieda turned from the window, her eyes wide in pain. “I don’t
think
she did, I
know
she did.”

She worked to hold down her reaction, hoped the relatively calm feeling in the room
would keep the conversation going as long as possible. “You mean, she knew she was
dying?”

“Yes. That’s how she was able to set aside a severance of sorts for me for when she
was gone and I was between jobs.” Frieda slowly breathed in through her nose then
leaned her back to the window. “But I also mean she knew she was fading in and out
of reality. It’s why she tried so hard to seize those precious moments.”

“I bet she shared a lot of special memories during those times,” Tori said. “Happy
times spent with her husband and sons . . .”

Frieda swiped a trembling hand across her brow. “Sometimes. But then there were times
she seemed to be upset about something that happened in the past. And for the longest
time, I thought those were her foggy times, making me hush away her panic with soothing
words and promises of clarity coming real soon. Only now, looking back, I have to
wonder if those
were
the clear times.”

Tori tried to tamp down her excitement, to show respect for the hurt Frieda obviously
felt, but it was hard. What she was looking for was finally within her grasp.

“So you’re saying Charlotte was panicked?” she prodded.

“At first she wasn’t. It was more like something was skipping in her brain. Like an
old record. She’d just say the same something every single time.”

“What did she say?”

Frieda clamped the bridge of her nose with the thumb and index finger of her right
hand and closed her eyes. “She’d say . . . ‘I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t stand to lose
them both.’”

Tori stared at the woman on the other side of the room, her own thoughts running round
and round. “She couldn’t tell? She couldn’t stand to lose them both? But what did
that mean?”

With great effort, Frieda dropped her hand to her side and shook her head. “I don’t
know. But it was the same thing all the time. Maybe, if I’d been a better nurse and
a better friend, I wouldn’t have hushed her words away until so close to the end.”

Tori’s heart broke as tears made matching paths down both sides of Frieda’s dark face.

“But Mizz Charlotte, she said the same thing over and over and over again. I figured
she was just confused. You know, lost in her own mind the way Alzheimer’s patients
get. So that’s why I got her that notebook. I thought maybe she could draw her way
out of wherever she was stuck.” Frieda brushed first at the left and then the right
side of her face, only to have a new crop of tears prove her efforts futile. “And
it worked for a time. At least I thought it did anyway. But after that first picture,
everything was the same—from the perspective of her chair, day after day. Repeating
herself in pictures the way she did when she spoke.”

Tears turned to sobs as Frieda hunched her shoulders forward and cried into her chest.

Unable to maintain a respectful distance any longer, Tori rose from her chair and
walked to the woman, pulling her into an embrace and holding her until the sobbing
subsided. “Maybe she really was trapped in one place,” she offered.

“But she wasn’t. She was trying to tell me something, and I failed to hear her.” Frieda
stepped from her arms and pulled a tissue from the box on top of a nearby filing cabinet.
“I think she was trying to tell me something the one day her verbal mantra changed,
just the way she was trying to tell Ethan something with that one picture that was
different than all the rest.”

Her breath hitched. “What do you mean?”

Frieda wiped at both eyes with her tissue then quickly blew her nose. When she was
done, she took a deep, calming breath. “Remember how I said she said the same thing
all the time?”

“‘I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t stand to lose them both,’” Tori recited from memory.
“Right?”

“Yes. But the day before I bought her that notebook, she added one more sentence.
And that’s when her demeanor changed to seeming almost panicked. And that’s when I
came up with the idea of giving her a notebook to draw her way out of the issue. She
drew that one picture and then the record skipping started again, this time with her
drawing.”

Tori fisted her hands at her sides and worked to keep her voice steady. “What was
the new sentence? The one she added to the two others?”

Frieda tightened her hand around the crumbled-up tissue as her eyes took on an unfocused,
almost dazed quality. “She said . . . ‘but I was wrong.’”

“Wrong?” Tori asked with a voice that was quickly approaching shrill. “What was Charlotte
wrong about?”

“I wish I could answer that, Mizz Sinclair. It’s all I can think about. And then,
when she drew that first picture for Ethan, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I
don’t really know Sweet Briar all that well, so I didn’t realize it was a real place.
So I stuck it on the mantel on the off chance Ethan would actually come by to spend
some time with his mother.”

Tori recoiled at the name. “How did you know it was for him? Did she say that?”

“When she insisted I rip it out of the book, she looked me in the eye and said his
name.” Frieda shook herself back into the room and tossed the tissue into a small
rectangular wastebasket just below the window. “When I asked her if she wanted me
to give it to him, she nodded. Hard.”

“I take it he never came?” She heard the disgust in her voice and did nothing to try
to rein it in. There was no need. Because as strong as the disgust was in her voice,
it was a million times stronger on Frieda’s face.

“No, and I knew he wouldn’t. He was busy with whatever toy he’d just gotten, which
is the way it always worked. He’d show up, ask his mother for money for whatever it
was he wanted at the time, and then, once she gave it to him, he wouldn’t come back
until he was ready for the next big-ticket toy or trip. I knew this. I’d watched it
for nearly a year. Yet I still stupidly put that picture on the mantel where Mizz
Charlotte had to see it every day . . . reminding her again and again that Ethan hadn’t
cared enough to come.”

Tori closed her eyes against the countless pictures Charlotte had drawn of that rolled-up
picture on the mantel and the pain the woman must have felt knowing that, once again,
her words were being dismissed.

“I think that picture being there day after day caused her undue stress. Why else
would she have kept drawing that same picture again and again?” Frieda continued.
“At the time, I didn’t see the connection. I thought she was just repeating her pictures
the way she’d repeated her words for so long. But now, knowing what we know about
that first picture, I have to believe everything she said, everything she drew, had
been intentional.”