Old Maid's Puzzle (21 page)

Stewing about Shore, it wasn't until I was in the store, almost to my office, that I noticed something looked different.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother's smiling face. The hall, usually a dim space that led from the back door to the front of the store, was transformed. Pictures of all shapes and sizes were hanging on the wall. Overnight, the hall had become the Portrait Gallery of Quitter Paradiso.

It was hard to believe this was the same space where Wong, Buster, and I had stood twelve hours ago. The usually blank wall was covered in photographs. Lights, stuck on the ceiling, cast a glow.

I gasped to see a picture of my mother, wearing a newspaper hat, mugging for the camera with a much younger Ina at her side. Pearl grinned in the background. Next to that was a picture of Mom and Kym with a grinning Kevin throwing up rabbit ears behind both their heads. I touched a photo of elves for the Christmas in July sale and witches for the Halloween Monster Mash.

The history of the store was here, in photos.

"How? Who?" I said, my voice cracking. Vangie came out of the office at the sound of my voice. She was grinning, and I knew who was responsible.

"You did this?" I put my hand over my heart and patted it. Words were suddenly too difficult to form.

"I came in wicked early this morning. I didn't think I'd get done in time. It's a good thing you were late."

Her face was flushed prettily. Her dimples were so deep, I could have planted dimes in them. I hugged her tight.

"This is what you've been working on so secretly?"

Vangie said, "I wanted it to be a surprise."

Kym came out of the kitchen, blowing on a mug of hot chocolate. "She certainly didn't ask me," Kym said. "I think you're wasting valuable space with the photos. Space we could have used for merchandising."

"No, it's perfect," I said. "Our customers are a big part of the store. They'll love seeing themselves on the wall."

"Well, that one's crooked," Kym said, pointing to a frame as she walked into the store. She shouldn't be taking a beverage out there, but I was too happy to call her on it.

"There's pictures from every year of the twenty years," Vangie said.

I couldn't stop looking. All the troubles of last night melted away, as my eyes flitted around the wall, catching sight of another familiar face. My three brothers were represented, wearing redgingham aprons at one sale, jousting with packages of batting. In an old picture, the quilting frame was set up in the loft and a group of six quilters were seated at it, smiling into the camera. Celeste, Gussie, Pearl, Ina, and two others I didn't know. The original Stitch 'n' Bitch group.

I paced the hall, having trouble forming a coherent thought. I squeezed Vangie's arm as I walked by her. She grinned broadly, her eyes rimmed with tears.

"It's nice to see you so happy," she said.

I felt like I had a fever. I was sure my cheeks were flaming red.

"You must have been working on this forever," I said.

She nodded. "Your dad helped, giving me the old photos. I stored the images in the computer and printed them out, when you weren't around. It was all very 007. I even gave it a code name-Project 20something"

That was the name of the file I couldn't open yesterday. I was so glad now that I hadn't been able to get it open and spoil the surprise.

I scanned the wall. My eyes filled with tears again, and I swallowed a sob.

The best thing was, in all the pictures my mother was smiling. Every single one.

I wanted to stay here all day, but work awaited. I tore myself away. I grabbed Vangie again and hugged her hard. "Thank you.

"Back to work," she said, shooing me into the office.

My phone had been ringing, and I'd let it go to voice mail. I checked for messages when I got to my desk. There were two. One, from Buster. He was in L.A. The prisoner wasn't available this morning after all, so he'd be staying there until late tonight. His message was short, with no mention of the way Date Night had ended.

I swallowed my disappointment. I hated the way we'd left things last night, but I knew I wasn't wrong. I didn't want to take back what I'd said.

The other message was much more welcome. Felix Scissors had shipped. I should have the scissors Friday morning.

"Yessss!"

Vangie looked up.

I gave her a thumbsup. "I did it!" I said. "The scissors will be here in the morning." It felt so good to get something right.

"How'd you pull that off?" Vangie said. She held her hand up for a virtual across the room high five.

"I called the scissors place from my bed as soon as they opened."

"Buster didn't mind?" Vangie said.

"He went to L.A. early," I said. Vangie looked askance, but I ignored her and moved on to a safer topic. "Wonderful World of Quilts airs at ten thirty our time, and the shipment is guaranteed to be here by eleven."

"Perfect," Vangie opened up a screen on her computer. "I'll make the barcodes and print them out, so as soon as the scissors get here tomorrow, we can start selling them."

"Good deal." At least something was working out okay. One item off my to-do list. "I'll mail the check."

Now I needed to confront Kym about leaving the back door open last night. I went up front. She was bent over something and drawing.

I stopped. There were store things that needed to be done. She could vacuum the floor while there were no customers. The book rack needed restocking yesterday like I'd asked. The fat quarter shelves were low on inventory.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

She looked up. "Kevin put the light box together last night, so I'm setting up a display for the sale on Saturday." She showed me the applique design she was tracing.

I took a measured breath. The light box was so big, Kevin could have run his toy trains on it. "We don't have room for that."

I wasn't taking up valuable floor space to have her sit and draw all day. "No, final answer. Take it down."

This wasn't why I came out here. "Last night, Kym, I got a call that the alarm was going off. You didn't lock the back door."

"I thought you wanted to move forward," she said. "This is the future."

"The door, Kym?"

"It was locked," she said.

I let out a breath. "You couldn't have. The door came open, and the alarm went off. The cops were here and everything."

"Ask your brother," she said. "You know how anal he is. He went around and tried all the doors before we left for dinner."

That was just like Kevin. I knew my brother would not have left a door unlocked. Still, the alarm had gone off. "Are you sure that wasn't another night?"

Kym's hands flipped back her hair, first the right side, then the left. "Why are you always picking on me, Dewey?" Kym said. "I told your brother I can't do anything right in your book. You live to tear apart every little thing I do."

I gave up. Maybe Wong was right. Someone had made a key and broken in. That wasn't good. "Take down the light table," I said, leaving her. I felt her shooting daggers at my back.

When I came back in the office, Vangie was mumbling. She had the receipts from the day before in front of her.

"What's up?" I asked, alarmed by the look on her face. I could see Kym pull out a bolt of batik fabric and cut a yard of fabric for fat quarters. Finally, she was doing something useful.

"I'm balancing the drawer, and the cash is off." Vangie was chewing on the end of her pencil. I resisted the urge to knock it out of her mouth. I always avoided her pencil cup, not liking the feeling of teeth marks under my fingers.

"Let me see." I scooted my chair over to where she was going over yesterday's receipts.

She said, "It's weird. Eighty dollars even. I've looked through all the cash sales on the computer. The amounts received and the change match up."

I shifted gears, thinking about the sales yesterday. The store hadn't been very busy.

"It's as if someone gave back eighty dollars too much change," Vangie continued. "What kind of idiot would do that?"

My first thought was Kym, then my heart sank. It was me.

"Uh-oh. I had a customer who accused me of shortchanging her." I flipped through the open screens until I found the sale. "See. I entered that she had given me a twenty-dollar bill, but when I gave her her change, she insisted that she'd given me a hundred."

"And you fell for it?" Vangie's eyebrow peaked.

"Wait, I remember, she proved it was hers. The bill had a special mark on it."

Vangie had taken back the mouse, and was paging through the sale screens backward in time.

"Her husband had given it to her for her birthday, and he'd decorated it with a heart," I said.

"Look," Vangie said, pointing at an earlier sale. "Jenn took in a hundred earlier in the day. I'd bet you anything that was your sweetheart hundred."

Vangie looked up at me. "They must have been con men. Con women."

My heart sank. "But she seemed so nice," I lamented.

Vangie shook her head. "Face it. You were scammed."

Oh, man. Eighty dollars. That was a lot of money. Especially now. I was bleeding money left and right. I rubbed my upper arms, feeling a sudden chill.

"Should I tell the police?" I asked. "This is the kind of thing the Community Watch group is trying to prevent."

Vangie shrugged. "Up to you," she said. "I wouldn't. They're not going to catch them anyway."

I decided to tell Wong next time I saw him and went to work on the database. Vangie left to bank the deposit and get more coins and small bills for the till. I worked steadily until I heard Ina hooting and hollering in the back hall. "Look at us. Oh, my goodness, was I ever that young?"

I joined Ina. She'd set down her purse and gotten out her reading glasses. She perched the red glasses on the end of her nose, and leaned in.

"Can you believe it?" I said. "Vangie got these old pictures from Dad, scanned them and printed them out."

Ina's eyes glittered with tears. "It's really fabulous."

I warned, "Don't start. You'll make me cry. Again."

Ina sniffed. Her voice was thin. "It's almost too much to take in. I mean, these are the last twenty years of my life."

"There's the proof that it was good times."

Ina clapped her hands. "Look, there's Margie, and Patsy. I loved them. They're gone now."

"Dead?" I asked quietly.

Ina looked at me askance. "No. Moved to Mesa, Arizona."

Whew. I looked for the shot I'd seen earlier. "Isn't that the Stitch n' Bitch group?" I had a quick sense of a buried memory of these women teaching me to thread a needle.

"That's us. That was the first raffle quilt we did for the shelter."

They had a lot to show for their time together. At least twenty raffle quilts, and thousands of dollars donated to the shelter.

In this picture, the group looked happy, arms slung around each other. Dressed in matching Hawaiian shirts and straw hats, it was hard to tell them apart. Gussie and Celeste were hand-in-hand. Even in the picture, it was easy to see how close they were. Or used to be.

Ina tapped on another picture. "There's the sidewalk sale last July."

That had been my favorite weekend of the past year. The local business association had decided on a neighborhood-wide sidewalk sale. It was the first event I'd planned at Quilter Paradiso from start to finish. We'd dragged tables outside and set up lastchance displays. I'd marked down fabrics and notions and patterns. We'd handed out yardsticks with our logo to every passerby. The day had not been a big money-maker, but it had been great community relations, and I'd gotten rid of a lot of old stock. Plus, I'd had a blast.

The shot was a candid one of the crowd. Parked just past the store, in front of the burrito place, was a yellow Taurus. The car that Gussie had been waiting for at the bank. Celeste's Larry.

"Was Celeste's boyfriend at the sale?" I asked. I'd like to get a look at the man who had dumped her so completely.

"Hmm?" Ina said, moving down the row. "Larry? I don't remember." She'd moved on to another picture and was smiling at some private memory. I looked for the Taurus. There were no more shots of the sidewalk sale.

After a few minutes, Ina shook herself and clapped her hands. "Enough already! I've got to get back to working on the raffle quilt. Pearl will be here soon."

"What about Celeste and Gussie? Are they coming?" I asked.

She nodded. "They should be here. We could use their help."

I wondered if Larry had shown up after all, or if Gussie had found another way to get the money to Jeremy in Redding. I was curious about Larry and wondered if there was a better picture of him in our photos. Vangie'd taken a lot of pictures at the sidewalk sale. They were all on her computer.

Vangie wasn't back yet, so I turned on her computer, looking for her pictures folder. I saw the password protected folder that had baffled me before. Now the name made sense. 20something. Not her age or peer group as I'd thought yesterday, but twenty years of pictures from QP.

Without the password, I'd have to wait for her to see if more pictures from the sidewalk sale were in there.

I was too impatient. I tried her birth date. The file wouldn't open. I tried the store password. No go. I decided to call her. I dialed her cell number. To my surprise, I heard it ring nearby. I found her phone on the corner of the desk next to the stack of CDs from Pearl. The CDs gave me a new idea. I tried Janis67. Sure enough, the file opened.

Bless Vangie and her organizational skills. All the pictures she'd taken in the last year were in folders named by the event and date. There were a hundred and twelve from the sidewalk sale. I skipped the shots of the setup. Vangie kept those as a record of how we'd decorated. About twenty thumbnails in, the people pictures started. I hit the arrow button again and again.

There. In a shot framing the shop taken from the corner, the yellow Taurus drove by. A few pictures later Celeste appeared. Her distinctive hair style was captured.

I didn't see her again for a few shots. Then Vangie had taken a picture of Celeste paying. I could see part of an arm. I opened the next thumbnail. There! A man stood next to her. I zoomed in for a closer look.