Stitches In Time (44 page)

Then the lines smoothed out and his clenched hands loosened and his breath went out in a long slow expiration. He took one step back, and then another. "You won't do it," he said quietly. "You can't do it. Put the gun down, Rachel, and come here to me."

The threads of the unfinished pattern stretched and grew taut, poised and quivering, before they slipped smoothly into place. The gun fell to the floor and Rachel turned blindly into Adam's outstretched arms.

She woke to find herself lying on her own bed with Adam holding her, and with no conscious recollection of what had happened after she stumbled into his embrace. He was fully dressed and sound asleep, but the moment she stirred he came awake. His arms tightened and he studied her face anxiously.

"It's all right, honey. Nothing happened."

"How did I get here?"

"You don't remember?"

"I remember everything up to ... It is all right," she said, thinking how inadequate the trite phrase sounded. There should have been trumpets. "Did I faint?"

"I guess that's what it was. You were completely out of it and limp as one of Megan's floppy stuffed animals— except for your hands. I couldn't pry them loose, even after I had carried you upstairs and tried to put you on your bed."

Her hands were relaxed now, resting against his chest. Rachel opened his shirt and saw the marks her nails had
left, even through the wool fabric. Her lips touched each of them in turn and came to rest on the largest bruise.

Adam groaned. "Don't do that. A polite 'thank you' will suffice."

"Who is Rosamund?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," Adam said wildly. "What do you think you're—"

"You wrote her a letter."

"Oh. Oh, that. A former teacher. Old. Retired. She likes to get—"

"That's all right, then." Rachel kissed his throat and chin and jaw, and then his mouth, and finally his arms closed around her and his lips shaped themselves to fit hers.

She didn't hear the knocking until Adam breathed into her ear, "There's somebody at the door."

"Mmmm," said Rachel.

"It's probably Kara."

"Who cares? Don't stop," she added dreamily.

"It's now or never," Adam said, on a breath of stifled laughter. "Release me, you shameless hussy. I didn't lock the door."

"Oh, hell."

She watched him move toward the door, wondering how she could ever have thought him clumsy and homely. Even his back looked wonderful.

Kara didn't so much as blink when she saw Adam, large and looming and
there;
she had other things on her mind.

"Did you get that quilt off the line?" she demanded.

"No, I forgot. Guess I'd better."

Adam stretched and yawned, and Kara said suspiciously, "You look like the cat that ate the canary. What's going on?"

"Nothing," Adam said. "Nothing at all. Isn't that wonderful?"

"You're drunk. Dammit, Adam—" She stopped, cocking her head to listen. "That's Tony, what's he doing up so early? I've got to get down there. Hurry."

The activities of the next few hours reminded Rachel of one of the more improbable plots of light opera, with characters running on and off the stage, constantly interrupted and being interrupted, never completing the conversation that would resolve the ambiguities and bring the play to an end. The conspirators were unable to exchange more than a few whispered sentences. Tony was rested and bright and in a convivial mood; he wanted to talk to all of them. Distracting his attention while Adam sneaked out to retrieve the quilt and restore it to its place involved maneuvers that would have been funny under other circumstances. The phone kept ringing—Cheryl, demanding to chat with everyone in turn
-
Mark, who had heard of Tony's arrival and announced he was coming out to take them all to dinner—Tom, wanting to discuss the case with Tony and angling for an invitation, which he didn't get.

"There are too damned many people here already," Pat said disagreeably. He and Ruth had arrived shortly after eight, and Adam's disjointed references to the events of the previous night had left him totally bewildered and wild with curiosity.

"The more the merrier," Tony said. "It sure is good to be home."

His affectionate smile included Rachel, who returned it with interest. She knew she was behaving like an idiot; she couldn't seem to stop smiling. Her behavior worried Pat. He kept staring nervously at her.

Mark's arrival finally gave them the chance they wanted. He and Tony settled down to watch a football game, and since Mark favored the Patriots and Tony was a fanatical Redskins supporter, they graciously allowed the
unconverted to withdraw. Kara refused to be in the same room with them. "They yell all the time," she explained.

The others retreated to the workroom. Pat settled his wife in the rocking chair and himself in the only other chair the room provided.

"Talk and talk fast," he growled. "I'm on the verge of a stroke."

Cross-legged on the floor, with Rachel next to him, Adam talked. As he later said, he had never had or was likely to have such an attentive audience.

Kara was the first to comment on the story. Her voice shook. "I could kill myself for forgetting about that gun. You took an awful chance, Adam."

"I didn't think of it that way. It was just the only thing to do."

"The pattern had to be worked out," Ruth said. "Completed."

"So it's really completed?" Kara asked. "She's gone?"

"She was never here," Rachel said. "Not until the very end. What came through to me were isolated memories or emotions—strong enough at times to obliterate my own consciousness—but they weren't all of her, only the feelings that had lingered. At first I couldn't even remember them. Later..."

"You began to identify with her," Pat said. "I was afraid of that. I didn't mention it because the warning itself might have put the idea into your head. But it was already there. As time went on she became increasingly part of you—"

"No, it wasn't like that at all. I always saw her as something apart from me, and when I visualized her, she was so ... so small. Crouched, hiding—on the defensive. The first time you questioned me she reacted as any threatened creature might do; terror produced unthinking violence. After that night she could only work with me and through me. It took me a long time to realize that the emotion I
had felt most often and most strongly wasn't hate. It was fear."

The expletive that burst out of Pat brought a murmur of reproach from Ruth. "I was applying it to myself," he explained. "That was what I felt, the day I..." He cleared his throat self-consciously and glanced at Ruth. "I didn't tell you about that, honey. I was afraid it would upset you. I—uh—well, I grabbed Rachel by the shoulders, I was just going to give her a friendly little shake, the way I do with all the girls—"

Perched on the table, feet swinging, Kara said, "I hate it when you do that."

"You do? Why didn't you say so?"

"We put up with your grosser habits because you're so adorable in other ways," Kara said with a grin. "I didn't want to hurt your poor little feelings."

"Go to hell," Pat said amiably. "Anyhow, she reacted as if I had made a really gross advance. It scared the—uh— the devil out of me. That wasn't you reacting, was it, Rachel? You were reliving an experience of hers."

Rachel nodded. Even now, with Adam's hand warm on hers and her friends around her, the memory was painful. "I remember thinking the night the burglar was in my room,
'You
can fight back.' She couldn't. Except—" She indicated the bundle that contained the mutilated quilt. "The hate and the fear were there. She sewed them into the quilt. But the hair and the fingernail clippings and the other trappings of black magic were rather childish, really; feeble substitutes for action. The things I did under her influence weren't directly homicidal either. The canopy was the most dangerous, but it was a very haphazard way of killing someone. It might have fallen of its own accord, or caused minor injuries. No one would have taken more than a single bite of the cranberry sauce, the pieces of glass were large enough to be visible. The black liquid in the bleach bottle—"

"Dye," Pat said. "I got the report yesterday. Black dye and Drano. It would have ruined the laundry and raised blisters on Cheryl's hands if she had spilled it."

"Spiteful and childish," Rachel said. "Like the grit in Cheryl's makeup. Oh, she hated them all right—the woman who had taken her lover, and her lover too, after he cast her off. But she would never have attacked either of them directly. Adam saw that last night. I didn't stop her, I couldn't have stopped her. She made the decision—a decision she never had a chance to make in life. Something happened to prevent it, something that broke the pattern."

"She died?" Ruth suggested.

"Something worse, I think. Murder or suicide. A natural death wouldn't have left such an imprint on time. She died believing herself guilty. Guilty and damned."

"It does make sense," Pat said grudgingly. "In the literature of the supernatural, violent death is a standard explanation for psychic survival. It's the fear I don't understand. Why couldn't she fight back against something like attempted rape? Women had few enough rights at that time, God knows, but defending their virtue—"

"You're missing it, Pat," Adam said. "It seems obvious to me, but maybe it's because I know something you don't. That cemetery next to the old lady's house? It was a slave cemetery."

"What does that have to do with ..." Pat's jaw dropped. "My God," he said feebly.

Kara stiffened, her eyes widening. "My God is right. After all the nasty cracks I made about your chauvinist prejudices ... I know about African-American quilts, they're quite different from the Anglo-American variety, a different tradition, one that has been overlooked and undervalued until recently. Our quilts weren't in that tradition, so it never occurred to me that . . . But I should have remembered about the sewing women. Slaves; skilled
seamstresses who did much of the endless sewing required to clothe and equip a large household. The mistress couldn't have done all of it herself. That would explain the bride's quilt! Mary Elizabeth didn't make it for herself; her sewing woman made it. Her slave—a woman of extraordinary talent, whose skills would have been noticed and encouraged—"

"Wait a minute!" Pat waved his arms wildly. "Never mind the quilts, I want to hear about the cemetery. I am not going to ask you how you know, you sneaky little bastard, I am going to ask why the hell you didn't tell me this before."

"Since you aren't asking me how I know, I'll tell you," Adam said calmly. "The burials weren't those of field workers; they wouldn't have rated even such paltry memorials as I found. These people were probably house slaves. The coffins, what was left of them, were plain, cheap pine. The builder had covered the ones he found, but he hadn't buried them deep. I also found two stones. That was the giveaway. They were small and crude, with no ornamentation, just the name and the dates. A first name, like that of a—a beloved pet. One of the names was Elijah."

He paused, looking at each of their faces in turn, watching their expressions alter as they anticipated what he was going to say.

"The other name was Rachel. She was seventeen years old."

They buried the mutilated remains of the quilt, and the things it had contained, in a corner of the MacDougals' dead garden later that night. Kara and Mark were spending the night with Tony. When Adam announced that he and Rachel were going out for a while, Tony had given them a paternal grin and told them to have a good time.

Kara had declined the invitation. "I've had enough black magic to last me for a while. And I think I need to spend some time with my husband."

Clouds moved in slow procession across the moon; the light dimmed and brightened. The wind whispered in the branches of the enclosing trees. It would rain before morning.

"Hurry up," Pat ordered. "Ruth is shivering."

"I'm not cold," Ruth said. "The wind is rising."

Adam was, of course, doing the digging. "How deep?" he asked.

"Good and deep," Pat said. "I hope you realize, Rachel, that you could blackmail me for years. If my so-called colleagues ever heard about this—"

"We decided this was the right thing." Rachel held the quilt cradled in her arms.

"I agreed, didn't I? That should do it, Adam."

Adam drove the shovel into the ground. It stood upright, quivering. "Do you want me to—"

"I'll do it." Rachel knelt and lowered the tightly wrapped bundle into the hole he had dug. Rising to her feet, she gathered a handful of dirt from the piled-up earth and let it fall. She nodded at Adam, who began to fill in the excavation.

"There is something of her there too, isn't there?" Pat said quietly.

"Her hair," Rachel said. "She used it to veil her rival's face and feather the arrow that pierced the two hearts. Long, dark hair. I was going to remove it before you destroyed the quilt, but perhaps this is better. I think we should say something. All I know is 'Now I lay me down to sleep,' and the Lord's Prayer. Pat?"

It was an odd, brief little ceremony, and after Pat's deep voice had faded into silence they started back to the house.

"How about a nightcap?" Pat asked.

"My dear, how inappropriate," Ruth exclaimed.

"Why? We're celebrating the triumph of good over evil, life over death, heaven—if there is such a thing—over hell. Let's hope she made it. Poor little devil," Pat added. His voice was gentle, as if he were speaking of a hurt child, and Rachel thought that her namesake might have had worse epitaphs.

Adam politely declined the invitation. "It's late."

"Not that late," Pat began. Then an evil grin spread across his face. "Oh, I see. Run along, then, my children and enjoy yourselves. I have nothing to offer that could possibly compare with—"

"In that you are correct," Adam said. "The thing is, we've got to be up early."

"Why?" Pat demanded. "Kara will be there, and Ruth and I will come and help you clean the house and hide the evidence."

"You mean you'll stand around and watch while the others do the cleaning," Rachel said. "Adam and I won't be there. We'll be chained to a bulldozer."