The Devil's Puzzle (10 page)

Larry stood up and sighed. “Well, you’d better be, Jesse Dewalt, or this town will be looking for a chief of police who cares about the welfare of its living residents.”

CHAPTER 15

T
o his credit, Jesse didn’t seem too worried about the mayor’s threat.

“He’s a little manic about this place,” Jesse reassured me once we’d left Jitters and walked across the street to Someday Quilts. “Sometimes he forgets he’s the mayor and imagines he’s the king.”

“When are you going to tell him that his pirate was wearing synthetic fabrics and had a poker chip in his pocket?”

“Not today, that’s for sure.”

“He’d be an idiot to lose you,” I said. “And if he doesn’t know that, then the rest of the town does.”

Jesse looked at me for a long time before gently kissing me. “I’ll see you at this dinner party tomorrow,” he said. “And I have a favor to ask. I need to send Allie over to the shop, just for a couple of hours this afternoon. My mom is doing some errands.”

“That’s not a favor. I love having Allie at the shop.”

“She loves being there. She told me she wants to be a quilter when she grows up.”

“She’s already a quilter. Eleanor has been teaching her. Allie will be at the Friday meetings before you know it.”

He laughed. “I’d say that was harmless fun, but I have a feeling a lot of dangerous talk goes on at those meetings.”

“You don’t want to know.”

We kissed again and I watched as he walked toward the police station.

Inside the shop a couple of women were wandering through the aisles of fabric. Eleanor was at the front counter ringing up a sale and Natalie was in back, working on the longarm machine, trying to finish a growing pile of quilts.

The quilting world used to be divided into two camps: the hand quilters and the machine quilters. Now there’s a third category, those who quilt by checkbook—people who make quilt tops and send them out to be quilted by someone like Natalie or me. The advantage of sending out a quilt top is, of course, that it will actually get quilted. For the folks who do it all themselves, making the entire quilt is a way to stretch their skills and create something completely their own. For those who send them out, it seems like the perfect way to make more quilts in less time. Personally, I thought they were both right.

I made ten phone calls to ten regular customers of the shop, explained about the quilt show, and got ten promises to make reproduction-style quilts to fit the theme of the show. As I picked out some fabrics for my devil’s puzzle quilt, I congratulated myself on how smoothly things were going. I even left a message for Glad telling her the theme, and how, not surprisingly, quilters from all over town were contributing their work to what I knew would be a great show. At least something was going right.

“Nell Fitzgerald, I want to speak to you.”

I was hoping I hadn’t spoken too soon. Just as I was feeling relaxed, Glad entered the shop. Even though she was dressed in a soft green skirt and matching jacket, as if she were stopping in on the way to tea, her whole demeanor was that of a woman ready to do battle.

“Hi Glad. What can I do for you?”

“It’s about this skeleton,” she started, “over at your grandmother’s.”

“What about it?”

“We cannot have that kind of scandal in our town with the anniversary celebration coming up. How would it look?”

“I don’t think it’s a scandal, exactly.”

I looked toward Eleanor, who was quietly moving toward her office. I was a little annoyed that she would leave me to deal with Glad alone, but I had to admire her ability to make a quick getaway. Barney, on the other hand, stayed by my side in a show of loyalty. Or maybe it was that he’d found a fabric cat one of the customers had made for him and he was having fun chewing on it. Glad looked down at him and scowled.

“Isn’t it against some health code to have a dog in a shop?”

“It’s a fabric shop, Glad. We don’t serve food here.”

“Still, an animal wandering around . . .”

“You wanted to talk to me about the skeleton.”

“Yes,” she sniffed, as if she’d suddenly developed an allergy. Barney, now walking around her feet, didn’t appear to take offense. But then, he never did. As I watched him, I noticed a mark on Glad’s leg. It looked like several long, narrow cuts on the side of her calf.

“What happened there?” I said, pointing to her leg.

Glad reached down and patted her leg through her nylons. “One of my sister’s many cats,” she said. Then she stood up straight and stared into me. “Nell, this skeleton is exactly the kind of bad publicity that we don’t need. We are a safe, quiet town with good people. People with values. People with manners.” Her voice, which had been getting progressively louder, suddenly turned into a whisper. “If people hear about this after everything that’s happened this year, they’ll think the whole town is full of killers.”

“The mayor . . .”

“The mayor is shortsighted.”

“So you know about his idea?”

“There is very little that goes on in this town that I don’t know about.”

I had no doubt about that. “Well, then you know there really isn’t anything I can do about it.”

“You can tell Jesse Dewalt to identify this . . . person as quickly as possible.”

“That’s what he’s trying to do,” I said.

“It should be his only priority to put this matter to rest as quickly as possible. Solved or unsolved. In fact, it might be the best thing for everyone if he just buried the bones of that poor person and let that be the end of it.”

“That poor person had a name, Glad, and Jesse plans to find it. And solve his murder. I know he’s putting every available officer on the case.”

“Tell him that it must be dealt with quietly, and with respect for the reputation of this town.”

“I’ll tell him what you said, but, for future reference, you don’t need to go through me to give Jesse a message. The police station is one street over to the left.”

She blinked her eyes slowly. “I realize the reason Eleanor foisted this assignment on you is that she didn’t want to spend time with Ed Bryant . . .”

“The theater owner?” I’d never heard my grandmother even mention his name, let alone suggest she disliked him.

“Obviously.” Glad was losing whatever patience she had with me.

“And since you are in charge of the quilt show, I’m hoping that you care about this town as much as I do, Nell. I’m hoping you want this celebration to be a success.”

“I actually left you a message with an update on the show and . . .”

“That’s fine. Thank you.” She smiled at me, though it was clear that she wasn’t happy. “You can tell me all about it at the organizers’ meeting tomorrow. You do remember we’re getting together promptly at four p.m. to discuss our progress, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know . . .”

“Well, you do now. You’ll be there?”

“Absolutely,” I said—to no one, because Glad had walked out of the store, slamming the door behind her.

I walked into Eleanor’s office, where she was ordering fabric, and Barney followed, bringing his fabric cat with him. I shook my finger at Eleanor. “Chicken.”

She looked up. “That woman scares me.”

“Nobody scares you.”

“Glad does.” Eleanor looked through the door of her office, as if she were making sure Glad was gone. “When I met her, she was a child, and she was just as forceful then. Her father was the town banker. And I think the mayor for a time. She thought she owned the place then. She thinks she owns it now.”

“She’ll have to fight it out with the current mayor. He’s gotten awfully possessive of it.”

“Larry’s just a nice man who wants to make his mark,” Eleanor said.

“He worked for his success. Glad thinks she got hers by divine right.”

I looked back at the door that Glad had slammed just moments before. “How old would she have been in 1975?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

“I don’t know. Maybe seventeen or eighteen.”

“Was she athletic as a teenager?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t recall her being on any sports teams. She seemed more interested in shopping. When Grace and I would go into the bank to check on Grace’s investments, Gladys and her sister, Glee, would often be there, getting money from their dad.” Eleanor shook her head. “He was a soft touch. ‘Anything for my girls,’ he’d say. I don’t think he ever said no to them.”

“Glad has a sister named Glee?”

“Mrs. Shipman, Mary Shipman. The woman who lives in that big house near the highway. I don’t think you’ve ever met her.”

I shook my head.

“She keeps to herself these days,” Eleanor continued. “Funny you should ask about Glad being athletic. Mary was the athlete in that family. I remember she played softball and girls’ field hockey, I think. She was quite good, too. She even held a protest march, one woman strong, if I recall, about getting on the wrestling team. To prove she was up to it, she pinned one of the local boys to the ground. Not that he minded.” She laughed to herself. “It didn’t get her on the team, but you had to admire her spunk.”

“Is that why everyone called her Glee?”

“Everyone didn’t. Her mother called her Glee for some reason. Strange mother, if I recall. Very theatrical.”

“She named her daughters Glad and Glee. Maybe she was just happy.”

“Well, if she was,” Eleanor said, “she didn’t pass it on to her children.”

CHAPTER 16

J
esse’s daughter, Allie, dipped her hands into the pile of bolt ends and other fabric scraps we kept in a large box labeled DISCARD PILE. We said it was there for anyone to take needed fabrics, but the truth was, we didn’t have a discard pile. We just told Jesse that. He insisted on paying for any fabric Allie used from bolts on the sales floor, so Eleanor, Natalie, and I had started cutting small scraps of brightly colored fabric and putting them into a special “Allie pile,” so she would be free to play without Jesse feeling obligated to pay for anything.

Allie loved going through that pile and getting her first taste of what addicted most quilters: the endless choice of fabrics. When she found a piece she liked, she would place it on Barney’s back, using him as a kind of display wall. She would stand back and stare at the fabric as he stood perfectly still, letting her decide if it was worth keeping. For Allie, a pretty piece of fabric was always worth keeping, so she would add piece after piece to Barney’s back. After a few minutes he ended up looking like a circus clown. Not that he minded. He followed Allie around as if she were his secret crush.

“Can I put purple polka dots with green stripes?” Allie asked me.

“You can if you want to,” I told her. “There aren’t any rules about what goes with what when you make a quilt.”

“Are you sure?” She scrunched up her face worriedly. Even at six, she had reason to doubt that a place without rules existed.

“It’s your quilt. You can do what you like.”

She looked up at me with the same serious expression that Jesse had whenever he didn’t quite believe what I was saying. “I’m not making the quilt for me, Nell,” she said. “It’s kind of for Daddy, so it has to be colors he would like.”

“He’ll love whatever fabrics you choose.” Eleanor came into the room and grabbed Allie, sending the little girl into a fit of giggles.

“What do you mean it’s ‘kind of ’ for Daddy?” I asked.

“It’s for you and Daddy when you get married.”

Eleanor and I exchanged surprised glances. I was glad to see from the look on her face that it wasn’t my grandmother who had put the idea into Allie’s head.

“Well, then you have plenty of time to choose colors,” I said, without any idea of what else to say.

“But I want to make you a wedding quilt,” she said. “That’s what you do when people get married.”

I could feel my face turn red. “It is,” I agreed. “But . . .” I looked toward Eleanor for help.

“If I help her, maybe we can figure out what to make,” Eleanor volunteered. That wasn’t exactly the help I was looking for, but for Allie’s sake, I just smiled.

Natalie, who had been working quietly in the back of the room the whole day, stopped quilting at the longarm machine and came over to us, stretching her arms tiredly. “I think that’s all I have in me for the day,” she said. “The baby is kicking up a storm and it’s wearing me out. Nell, do you want to grab a quick cup of tea at Jitters before I head home?”

“I’d love the break,” I said. “Is it okay to leave Allie?” I asked Eleanor.

“Okay? Allie and I have a quilt to plan.”

“Don’t get too carried away,” I said, but she wasn’t listening. She and Allie were walking through the aisles of the shop adding fabric to the polka dots and stripes.

“This is getting out of hand,” I said to Natalie when we entered Jitters.

Carrie looked up and smiled. “This is your fourth time today, Nell. Even for you, that’s a lot of coffee.”