The Devil's Puzzle (13 page)

Jesse speared an asparagus with his fork and lifted it but put it down again. He’d been doing that since he’d arrived, making one choice and then backing away from it. The result was that he’d been unusually quiet most of the evening and his dinner was still on his plate. Finally he looked up.

“When did you open the shop, Eleanor?” he asked.

“April 23rd, 1976.” She smiled. “It was a beautiful spring day. Not that I noticed it much. I was so scared. I thought that I was going to sit with all that fabric and no one to buy it. But Maggie came. She was my first customer. And then, of course, other women came. Nearly all the quilters in those days were women. It was tough going at first, but little by little the quality of fabric got better and we went from cutting our own templates to plastic rulers and rotary cutters. The books and patterns came out, and before you knew it there were quilt shows and magazines and, well, here we are.”

Oliver took her hand. “It’s given you many wonderful years.”

“I’m not retiring, if that’s what this is about. I have no intention of giving up that shop.”

“No one is asking you to,” Oliver said. “Though you might want to take a week off now and then.”

She looked at him for a moment, then laughed under her breath. “I knew there was some hidden agenda to this dinner.” Eleanor raised an eyebrow at me. “Nell’s been fidgeting all afternoon.”

“Actually, I was fidgeting because I’ve been wondering . . .” I started, but when I looked at Jesse I could see he was subtly shaking his head. I took a deep breath and started again. “I’ve been wondering if you would take a vacation, Grandma. Seeing as you trusted me enough to run the quilt show, I figured you might trust me enough to run the shop for a week or so.”

Eleanor looked at me suspiciously, then at Oliver and Jesse the same way. “I feel outnumbered. I don’t need a vacation. I enjoy going into the shop every day.” She paused. “But if it will make you all happy for me to take a week off, I’ll be happy to. Maybe in July. The shop tends to slow to a dead stop in the summer anyway. Some people have a hard time making a quilt when it’s ninety degrees outside.”

I looked over at Jesse and he nodded slightly. What was he waiting for? If he had some grand plan, he wasn’t letting me in on it. He just speared another asparagus, let it sit on his fork for a moment, then dropped it on his plate.

“Why did you open the shop?” he asked Eleanor.

She looked at him. “Why all the curiosity about Someday Quilts?” “I’ve always wondered. I just never asked.”

“Well, I guess since you are practically family, you have a right to know a little more about us.”

Jesse nodded as if his being family were already decided. I just sat quietly and bit my lip.

“I needed to make a living,” Eleanor said. “Grace had passed away in early August, so that job was over. It was harder than I thought to lose Grace. I’d been her aide, and her friend, for nearly ten years by that point. She had been so kind to me. And to the children. I felt like she’d given me a chance to reimagine my life and I didn’t want to waste it. Plus, I had the kids to support and this big house to run. I know I could have gotten a job somewhere, but I . . .” She paused. “Well, I guess Grace talked me into opening the store.”

“I thought you said she was dead?”

“She was. But in the months before she died, she and I talked about our lives. What we had done, what we’d failed to do. She taught me to quilt and I’d come to love it, and I said to her that someday I’d like to open a shop that had all the supplies in it a quilter would need,” she said. “In those days, quilt shops were a rare thing.”

Oliver nodded. “You were seeing the future, Eleanor.”

“I suppose I was.” She smiled at the compliment. “Anyway, Grace said that when you say, ‘Someday, I’d like to,’ you’re making a promise to yourself. She told me it’s just as important to keep the promises you make to yourself as it is to keep the ones you make to other people. So when she died, I decided that the best way to honor her was to keep that promise and open the shop.”

“Is that why you named it Someday Quilts?” I asked.

She laughed. “I thought I’d told you that.”

“No,” I said. “I always thought it was a reference to how all the fabric would someday be a quilt.”

“I suppose it does mean that now,” she said. “Or at least someday all this fabric will end up in a quilter’s stash, to be lovingly cared for and dreamed over but never actually used.”

Both Eleanor and I laughed. We knew that quilters fall in love with fabric, love having it, folding it, and looking at it. It’s calming just to be around fabric, strange as it might sound. While the goal is to turn all the fabric you own into quilts, a beautiful piece of fabric, even if it’s never used, is still worth having.

“I’m surprised Glad’s father gave you a loan with no business experience, no money, and no idea that quilting would grow the way it has,” Jesse said.

“He wasn’t that much of a pushover. I had to put the house up for collateral,” she said. “Now, who would like a piece of chocolate cream pie?”

CHAPTER 20

T
he air was still warm from the day as Jesse and I took Barney toward the river for his nightly walk. I took in a long, deep breath. I loved the coming of summer. The days were long, the wind soft, and there was color everywhere.

“Have you been digging around the hole since we found the skeleton ?” Jesse asked.

“Digging?”

“Or maybe Barney?”

“Why?”

“I stopped by here earlier and I happened to notice a few odd things in the dirt,” he said. “An old key chain and a few coins. They weren’t there when we recovered the body, so I was wondering if you found them when you were searching the hole for evidence.”

I smiled. “I haven’t been. Hadn’t thought about it, which in retrospect is a missed opportunity. I guess Barney could have been digging in there, but these days he mostly sits. Do you think they were from the skeleton?”

“Maybe. The weird thing is the coins are Civil War era and the key chain is from a drugstore that went out of business in 1948.”

“So the skeleton is a Civil War soldier who owned a drugstore in the forties?”

“Who knows? I’m chasing my tail with this case. I feel like as soon as I sit down to really think it through, something pulls me away from it.”

“I heard about the library and the book with the torn pages.”

“
The History of Archers Rest
,” Jesse’s voice boomed in a mockserious tone.

“Do you know what was torn out?”

“Sort of. I spoke with Glad about it. First she spent twenty minutes telling me that her father was an amateur historian, just like she is. Then she told me she remembered what the pages said.”

“She remembered? She doesn’t have any copies of the book?”

“Not a one. But she did say the missing pages were about John Archer’s days before coming up here. According to Glad’s father, Archer was plagued by rumors of various kinds . . .”

“Witchcraft.”

“That, and apparently he killed a neighbor and buried him in the yard.”

I slapped Jesse’s arm. “You’re kidding me? Just like our skeleton.” “Do you think you’ve solved the case?” He laughed. “I should go down to the graveyard and arrest John Archer. He does seem like quite a character.”

“I think he was just the victim of a lot of stupid rumors,” I said.

“If you ask me, that’s why he came up here. To get away from gossips and create a town where he was free to be himself. Too bad he died the first winter.”

“Which is really the only fact we have about him,” he said. “And the funny thing is, Archer died in about 1661 and we know only a little less about him than we know about what happened in this garden in 1975.”

I leaned into Jesse’s shoulder and kissed his neck. “So why didn’t you just ask Eleanor directly about Winston instead of all those questions about the quilt shop?” I asked.

“I was wondering, I guess,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s odd that your grandmother came to live with Grace in 1965 with no money, debts from her late husband, and two children to raise, and ten years later she had enough money to buy a four-bedroom house on five acres of land?”

“She probably saved money from her salary.”

“How much could she have earned? She was living here—probably her food was paid for. When you have live-in help, usually the salary is really small, just spending money.”

“You have a lot of experience with live-in help, do you?” I smiled playfully, but I wasn’t really feeling playful. I was getting the distinct impression that Jesse was suggesting Eleanor had done something wrong. As we passed the hole still left in the rose garden, I started to worry about what
exactly
he might be thinking she had done.

I stopped him, grabbed his waist, and pulled him toward me. “You’re just wondering about Eleanor because the skeleton is Grace’s son.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Are you looking into it?”

He smiled at me. It was a warm, romantic, maybe slightly amused smile. “Yes, Nell, I am looking into it.”

“What have you found out?”

“Not that you’re interested in the case, right?”

“If it has to do with Eleanor, I’m interested.”

He nodded. “Winston Roemer was alive and well early in 1975, and nothing since. No use of his Social Security number. No loans. No bank accounts. No credit cards. No property bought or sold. No crimes committed by or against him. And there’s no death certificate that I can find. At this early stage of the investigation, it looks like a strong possibility that Winston may be our man.”

“And what does that have to do with Eleanor having enough money to buy this house?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

I hugged him closer and whispered in his ear. “She didn’t kill him.” He leaned his face against mine. “Of course she didn’t.”

“So why don’t you go in and ask her about him right now?”

“Because I need to know more about the case before I question any . . .” He stopped.

“Suspects.” I finished the sentence.

“Witnesses.”

“That’s not what you were going to say.”

“Nell, you said you were staying out of this. I can’t tell you that you have to.” He smiled. “I guess I could, but you wouldn’t listen anyway, Nancy Drew.”

“Enough with the jokes—what are you leading up to?”

“I’m just asking that you not talk to Eleanor about Winston being our victim just yet.”

“Why not?”

His jaw clenched. “Because I’m a good cop and you trust me to find the truth and you know I will include you in anything pertinent to the case.”

“I like how you made that something I would not be able to argue with,” I said.

“Good.”

“So when can I talk to her about Winston being buried in her backyard?”

“When we know it’s him—how about that?”

I could tell that was all he was going to say on the matter. Jesse had a soft, kind voice when he and I were alone, but when he was on duty or when he was shutting me off from an investigation, as he was doing now, his voice was authoritative and deep. There was no room for disagreement at those times, unless I wanted to turn the discussion into an argument.

“You know who you should be looking into?” I said. “That new intern, Molly O’Brien.”

“She wasn’t even born when Winston disappeared. And she’s not from town. What reason would I have, exactly, for checking her background?”

“I don’t know, but it’s just . . .” I hated when I couldn’t explain my hunches. “Glad doesn’t like her.”

Jesse laughed. “Glad doesn’t like you. Or me. Or anyone as far as I can tell.”

“Maybe. But there’s something.”

“Okay, Nell.” Jesse leaned in. “But I still have to look into people who were actually alive at the time of Winston’s disappearance.”

Just as he was about to kiss me, Barney came toward us, tired and wanting to go inside. Jesse gave me a peck on the cheek and said, “We’re on the same side.”

I wanted to be reassured, but somehow I wasn’t.

CHAPTER 21

“I
t was a nice dinner,” Eleanor said once the men had left.

Oliver usually would have spent the night at the house, but he was making sketches for the painting that would be auctioned at the anniversary celebration, and he was aching to get to his studio to work on them. Jesse wanted to check in at the station before heading to his mother’s to pick up Allie. And I wanted to talk to Eleanor alone.

“I always think of you as so strong and independent,” I said.

“I would say thank you, but I have a feeling you don’t mean it as a compliment.”

“I do, actually. I just forget that you must feel overwhelmed sometimes, the way I do.”

“You never feel overwhelmed, Nell. You barge into every situation with all the optimism and curiosity of a puppy.”

“Now
that
doesn’t sound like a compliment,” I said. “And I do feel overwhelmed sometimes, and scared.”

“What’s this about?”

“When you were talking at dinner about opening the shop, it got me to thinking. It must have been so hard for you, moving into a stranger’s house after having a house of your own.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “I suppose.”

“Did you know anyone in Archers Rest at the time?”

“No. Your grandfather and I both grew up about an hour’s drive from here. But you know that, Nell.” She handed me a dirty plate. “Load the dishwasher, will you? I’m tired.”

“Keep me company,” I said. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

She sat at the kitchen table, and Barney immediately rested his head on her lap. “Did you and Jesse have a nice walk?” she asked.

“We did.”

“Did he ask you anything? Is that why you’re suddenly feeling so overwhelmed?”

“We talked, but not about the future,” I said. “We talked about the past.”