The Devil's Puzzle (6 page)

I could see Eleanor at her desk in the tiny office at the back of the shop. Barney, as usual, was curled up at her feet and there were piles of newly arrived books sitting on the edge of her desk.

After I finished waiting on Kathryn, I walked back to Eleanor, looking for an excuse to talk.

“Do you want coffee?” I asked.

Eleanor looked up at me, startled, as if I’d woken her from a dream. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, more to herself than to me.

CHAPTER 9

“A
bout what?”

She blinked at me a moment, then seemed to wake up. “About all this work I have.” She took a breath. “Did you want something?”

“I asked if you wanted coffee.”

“Desperately,” she said. “And I’m guessing you could do with a cup yourself. You didn’t get home until early this morning.”

“Four,” I admitted.

I yawned. I hadn’t slept well the night before, as I rarely did on nights I was with Jesse. After the movie, we’d gone back to his place so he could be home in time to put Allie to bed. Jesse and I would take turns telling her stories and then, when we were sure she was asleep, we’d retire to his bedroom. Problem was, neither Jesse nor I were sure how Allie would feel if she found me there in the morning, and we weren’t ready to find out. So it had become my routine to spend the first part of the night at his house, then drive back to mine and catch the last few hours of sleep in my own bed.

“Maybe you can make an early night of it,” Eleanor suggested as she saw me yawn a second time. “I’m sure the girls won’t mind if you miss the meeting.”

It was Friday, which meant our weekly quilt meeting. And while I loved hanging out with the members of the group, I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and close my eyes. But I knew that on this particular Friday, I couldn’t.

“The quilt show,” I reminded Eleanor. “If I’m going to get it together I’ll need everyone to start helping tonight. Even with help I have no idea how I’m going to manage.”

“Well, you shouldn’t volunteer for things if you don’t have the time.” I could see the corners of her lips turn up as she tried not to laugh.

I threw a skein of decorative yarn at her, which she caught and dropped on the desk.

“Wasn’t someone going to get coffee?” she reminded me.

I sat on the chair opposite her. “That would be great, Grandma. I’ll take mine black.”

She met my smile with one of her own. “I guess I deserved that.”

“That’s almost an apology. What’s your angle?”

“No angle. I just realized that I should enjoy you while I can. Once you’re a bride-to-be, you’ll be too busy for your old grandma.”

“It does take a lot of time, planning a wedding.”

“It can. You and Jesse will try to keep it simple, I imagine, but these things have a way of becoming big and complicated.”

“Was your wedding big and complicated?”

“No. It was your grandfather, a minister, my sister and parents, and his brother. We got married in the church at ten in the morning and then we all went to lunch.”

“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”

“Niagara Falls.”

“Was it nice?”

“It was a honeymoon. It would be a crying shame if it wasn’t nice. And yours will be nice, too.”

“So you and Joe were in love?”

“Yes. We were very young. I was eighteen. He was twenty. We didn’t know a thing about what marriage really was, but we were in love.”

“What was he like?”

She leaned back in her chair. “He was a football player in high school, so he had a strong build. He was very athletic. He played baseball and tennis, and really any sport he was interested in. And he was good at all of it. He liked to watch them, too. He used to take me to New York to see Yankees games and tell me how his dad had seen Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play. He knew all the statistics. We used to have so much fun.”

“That’s where you got your love of baseball,” I said. The only time I’d ever heard my grandmother swear was when the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in extra innings. “What else did he like?”

“Lots of things. He was smart. Not an intellectual, but he had a curious mind. He was good at reading people. He could tell if someone was ready to buy insurance or wasn’t.”

“That’s right, he sold insurance. I’d forgotten that.”

“And he was popular. He knew everyone. We’d walk into a store and he’d know the owner, the owner’s wife, the owner’s dog.” She laughed. “It was strange when I first moved to Archers Rest because nobody knew him. That’s when I realized he was really gone.”

Joe, my grandfather, had been dead since my mother was six and my uncle Henry was five. There were photos of him in my grandmother’s bedroom, but she rarely spoke about him, and growing up, I never heard my mother mention his name. He was a ghost in our family. A man who had big plans, big ambitions, but ended up with his car wrapped around a tree after a night out with friends. He left my grandmother a widow at twenty-six, with two small children and a pile of debt.

“Did he make you happy?”

“We were kids, with kids. We didn’t think about being happy.” She paused. “But I guess we were.”

“Was he the love of your life?”

“When did you become a romantic?”

“I’ve always been one.”

“I would have thought you had more sense.”

“I have enough sense to believe in love,” I said.

“I’m sure Jesse will be happy to hear that.”

I sighed. “I just don’t know if I’m ready for all of that. I feel like I’m just beginning to grow into myself. But I do love Jesse,” I said, “and I know you love Oliver. I’ll bet he’s the love of your life.”

“Not everyone has that kind of happiness, Nell. Or deserves it.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m going to get that coffee before you fall asleep.” She got up and walked to the door of her office. “Jesse is a good man. He’ll be good to you, and you’ll have a nice life together—you, Jesse, Allie, and whatever children you bring into the world. If you want to be happy, you will be. It’s more of a choice than you think.”

I nodded. So why wasn’t she choosing to be happy, I wondered as I waited for her to return. Was the specter of my grandfather, or the long-ago pain of losing him, keeping her from marrying Oliver? Or was it as simple as feeling too old and too settled to become a wife again? Or was it something else? Whatever the answer, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t hear it from Eleanor.

CHAPTER 10

“O
kay, no time for gossip,” I said once all the members of our quilt club had arrived. “We have serious quilting business to discuss.”

Carrie and Natalie were both at the counter eating oatmeal raisin cookies, but stopped when I spoke. Natalie sat next to her mother, Susanne, the award-winning art quilter in our group, and Carrie sat next to Maggie, my grandmother’s best friend and the only person I knew who could win an argument with Eleanor.

“I thought we were going to talk about the skeleton,” Bernie said. Bernie was our local pharmacist, an ex-hippie, sometime psychic, and my go-to person whenever I needed cheering up.

“We’re not talking about the skeleton,” I said. “We’re talking about the quilt show that I somehow got roped into organizing.”

I looked over at Eleanor, who shrugged.

These Friday night get-togethers had been going on long before I moved to Archers Rest, but I was welcomed as a member before I even knew how to quilt. Theoretically we gathered to share quilt ideas, show off new projects, and spend some uninterrupted time engaged in our favorite hobby. But soon after I joined the group I came to realize that the quilts everyone brought to a meeting served mainly as an alibi for outsiders. We did talk about quilting once in a while. But what made our meetings a not-to-be-missed occasion was the opportunity for seven women to share the events of their week, and whatever gossip happened to be floating around town.

“I heard he was a gambler,” Susanne said, ignoring my plea to talk about the quilt show.

“They found a poker chip in his pocket,” I told her, “but I don’t know if that makes him a gambler.”

“There’s a casino not far from here,” Carrie said.

Bernie shook her head. “Oh, that was built less than ten years ago, and he’s been in the ground for at least forty.”

“Why do you think that?” Maggie asked.

“Well, he had to be buried there when Eleanor moved into the house or else she would have noticed someone digging in her garden.”

Carrie turned to my grandmother. “When did you move in, Eleanor?”

“Nineteen sixty-five,” Eleanor said. “And the garden was in good shape for several years.”

“You don’t remember anyone digging in it?” Carrie asked.

“No one but the gardeners, Larry Williams, and his father.”

“The mayor?”

“He was a teenager then. His father was a gardener. These days I suppose you would say he had a landscaping business, but back then he was just handy with a garden hoe. Larry would tag along with his father and help as he could. When he got to be a teenager he took over tending to the place. He kept that rose garden in beautiful condition.” Eleanor smiled at the memory of it. “It’s a shame I didn’t keep it up, but after Grace died and I bought the place, there were so many other priorities . . .”

“You did the best you could,” Maggie jumped in.

“She did,” I agreed. “And she did a wonderful job. But that isn’t why we are here. I’m in serious trouble unless we figure out what we’re doing about the show and start dividing up the work. So we have no time for investigating mysterious deaths.”

Bernie laughed.

“I’m serious.”

Carrie nodded. “She is. She says she’s staying out of this one.” “Jesse can handle it,” I said.

“What else is there for him to do?” Bernie jumped in. “Aside from keeping Nell happy, which I’m led to believe is a full-time job . . .”

“It is.” Eleanor laughed.

“But what about the break-in at the high school?” Susanne said. “There were a couple of windows smashed early this morning. Nothing was taken, but I think Jesse was there most of the day.”

“One small break-in,” Bernie said. “That’s probably the most excitement we’ll have in town all year.”

“We’ve had lots of excitement,” I reminded her. “Even in the shop.” I nodded toward the door, where we had once found a local man dead. “Frankly, I would think you would all be frightened to hear about another odd death in our little town.”

“This is different,” Maggie said. “This is a skeleton. There’s no killer walking around.”

“Exactly,” Susanne spoke up. “It’s more like town history than murder.”

There was a general chattering of agreement on that point—chattering that would get out of hand unless I put a stop to it.

“If we’re done with the town news, we have a quilt show to put on,” I reminded the group, feeling like a broken record. “I’m a little freaked out by how much work this is, but I may have an idea, and I need your help. I had a conversation this afternoon with one of the shop regulars about how much the history of this country is reflected in the history of quilting. And it got me thinking. I want to do something that’s tied in with the history of Archers Rest,” I said. “I think that would work well with the idea of it being the 350th anniversary.”

“Maybe we can do a quilt that celebrates different events of the town,” Susanne suggested. “We could do appliquéd blocks. Each block would represent people or events. Sort of a Baltimore Album. I’ve always wanted to do one of those.”

“I have to admit I’m not sure what that looks like,” I said.

“It’s a style of quilt made of ornately appliquéd blocks, with floral themes, ships, animals, things like that. It was done in Baltimore in the 1840s, for just a short time,” Susanne explained.

Eleanor leaned forward. “You’ve seen them, Nell, it’s just that you’ve seen ones with holiday subjects and contemporary fabrics. Beautiful quilts, really. It would be nice to make one.”

“It will take too long. It can take months, even years, to do one of those,” Bernie said. “We’ve got how long?”

“Seven weeks,” I told her. “What if we do quilt patterns that were popular in the past, maybe tied to a particular decade? We could use reproduction fabrics to make quilts to represent the Civil War, the Depression . . .”

I could see everyone getting excited.

“I have a crazy quilt I made,” Susanne said. “It’s really beautiful silks and satins and hand embroidery. They were popular in the 1870s to the end of the century.”

“And I could do a broderie perse to represent the early years of our nation,” Maggie offered.

That one I knew. Broderie perse quilts were made from cutting flowers and other images from a fabric and appliquéing them onto a different fabric. It was a way to use up the scraps of beautiful printed fabrics at a time when imported prints were expensive and hard to get. Now it’s a great shortcut to appliquéd quilts.

“I’d like to do a Hawaiian quilt with pineapples and flowers. It could represent the late 1950s when Hawaii became a state,” Bernie jumped in.

“Aren’t they complicated to make?” Natalie asked.

“Simple, really,” Bernie assured her. “You just fold a piece of fabric into eighths, cut out an image, and unfold the fabric. Presto, you have a circle of repeating images, kind of like making a paper snowflake or string of paper dolls. It’s fun.”

“We would need something contemporary,” Eleanor said. “I’d like to put my name on something modern, something that speaks to the future of quilting. It’s important people realize that this isn’t just a piece of history, but a part of our present lives and our futures.”

“And not just bed quilts, but pieces of art,” Maggie agreed. “It’s a pity so many wonderful quilt artists are unknown to us because they didn’t think to sign and date their quilts. We’re left guessing who they could have been. I suppose they didn’t understand how valuable those quilts would be to future generations.”