Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel

by Sullivan, Barbara

  Uh-oh. I suppose I should have tried to reach Gloria and let her know I dropped Abigail off at their home, but with what was going on at the hospital, I didn’t.

  “When did she get home?”

  Gloria sighed loudly. “Not until after six. I don’t know what to do, Rachel. She’s out of control. It was after dark! I’m having apoplexy.”

  It came out sounding like apple-proxy and I realized I was still hungry. She finally wound down and I asked a difficult question.

  Was I pouring oil on a hot fire?

  “Why did you decide to do homeschooling, Gloria?”

  “First off, we are eclectic homeschoolers, and it doesn’t mean Abigail isn’t receiving schooling, it means she’s receiving it in a relaxed atmosphere and tailored to her interests and abilities.”

  “And if she goes several months telling you she does not want to learn math, that’s okay?” I asked.

  “Well, to an extent. Eventually she has to cover the subjects but she has much greater flexibility than she would in an institutional setting. She’s in charge of pacing herself.”

  “She’s in charge…” I tried my old leading ploy. Of course it backfired.

  “Don’t play psychiatrist with me, Rachel. I’m the nurse, remember? In my country the State was all! Even after we revolted, the State had full control of our lives from the time we woke in the morning until the time we were finally allowed to sleep at night! I was not raising my family like that.”

  “You hated Communist schools, Gloria. American schools are....” I paused to let her fill in the blank. It took a nanosecond.

  “Worse! Much worse. They control every moment of a child’s life but they don’t even teach! Or they teach the latest political ideology. That’s what Communist schools do, they teach dogma from the mind of some power-drunk dictator! These American schools are teaching chaos theory, now.

  “You think American kids are learning anything about the world? They did away with geography a few years back. Before that they reinvented math. Now it’s not just groups of ten, it’s groups of three and four and any fool number at all. I have ten fingers on my hands! That’s why it’s groups of ten! And history! History is one big lie. I study the curriculums. There’s no music! There’s no art! These schools teach American children that they are bad and that their glorious history is nothing but a road map of imperial domination.

  “Now the idiots in charge are doing away with grades! Even some colleges. It’s all madness.

  “Pretty soon your doctors won’t need to have degrees anymore because degrees are too judgmental. I don’t want my child to learn this empty nonsense.”

  “Wait. Do, umm, eclectic homeschoolers grade their children?”

  Silence radiated from my phone until my ear caught fire. I switched the phone to the other side of my head.

  “I’m confused, aren’t I Gloria?”

  “No. Not you, Rachel…”

  She was thinking. I waited.

  “Okay, that was the Communist heart still feebly beating in my chest. You are right. I have problem with these ideas, still, even though I agree intellectually with them, part of me is wondering where this will all lead. Part of me is afraid.”

  Good. Thinking slowly and carefully is always a good thing. Maybe.

  She sighed audibly. “But those schools, Rachel…. I know what you are implying. I know you are saying Abigail is driving her education toward a public school. But those schools…”

  I had to admit to myself that I had been surprised by the open display of gangs in the hallways of the Pinto Springs high school, but I let her do the talking—or rather yelling. Besides, she wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to Abigail, who was probably on her bed covering her ears with pillows.

  I had great respect for Gloria Pustovoytenko. She had left a country that spoke and wrote in a radically different language and managed to attend college to become a nurse, all in English. Our two languages even have different alphabets.

  Time to move on. I asked another burning question.

  “Gloria, do you know of anything that might have happened in the home schooling group that Abigail meets with? Maybe something to do with the other kids? Maybe…”

  “No. She’s never had a problem with the kids,” Gloria was quick to reject that idea.

  “She only meets with them once or twice a week. We realize we have to do something to get our children out of the house and together with their peers. Usually they’re off on some field trip. And we share.

  “Just last month I had the group over to the hospital, taking them through pediatrics, discussing the medical professions available to them. The others do the same. They share their work place or their area of special knowledge. We have a chemist who regularly teaches them, and a writer who works on their English. Or maybe we take them to the museums and zoos. The local colleges have classes for homeschooled children too. It’s always something new, then when we get them home to our own houses we build on that experience to teach primary skills at whatever level they are.”

  It sounded great. I wished I’d had that kind of schooling.

  “One family I really love, they have a seven acre farm, about half the size of Hannah Lilly’s. But they have goats and horses and chickens everywhere. We spend a lot of time going there to learn animal husbandry. And gardening. I regret not having a garden here. And chickens. We always had chickens back in Ukraine.”

  Hannah Lilly was another of the Quilted Secrets bee women. The Quilted Secrets group has been in existence in Victoria Stowall’s family for hundreds of years, dating as far back as the Colonial days. I learned this at the first bee I attended, early this month.

  She prattled on for another half hour. By the time I got Gloria off the phone, I could actually understand her, she was so relaxed.

  There was nothing more I could do but urge her to work it out with her child. It was a process.

  Chapter 16

  I was back in the dining room sipping the last of my Two Buck Chuck and listening to Matt flip through our favorite cable news stations--doing news hopscotch, trying to find something he agreed with.

  Suddenly, Matt said, “So how’s Gloria? She married a Stowall too, right? Have you gotten over being related to them yet?”

  He’d had more than one glass of wine.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t feel like arguing with him about my new Quilted Secrets friends. I got up to clear the table. What Matt was referring to was the fact that I’d been given a Stowall genealogy at the end of the last bee (my first bee with the group) and it turned out one of my distant relatives was on it.

  It was scary thinking I was step-cousin to a group of people who were frankly weird, especially Victoria Stowall’s branch. But I feel the need to add here that I am a twelfth cousin to Victoria Stowall. Through several marriages. And I take after my mom’s side of our tree. My connection with Victoria is through my father’s side. Just so you know.

  Why did this feel like I was saying I was only a distant relative of the human race? Because if we follow either of the current theories on where the human species came from it all leads back to one profound beginning. So we’re all related.

  At any rate, it turns out all of the women who sew together at the Quilted Secrets are connected to the powerful Cleveland County Stowalls. And, that fateful bee had led to my most dangerous case to date, unraveling the genealogical and genetic secrets that Ada Stowall had stitched into her mysterious quilt. I still didn’t know who ran me off the road in a big, white truck during that assignment.

  On the other hand, being related to Victoria Stowall and her mixed up brood also meant I was related to Hannah Lilly and Geraldine Patrone, two great gals. And Gerry was Marshall Patrone’s wife, the billionaire owner of the San Diego major league soccer team.

  And Matt was a major soccer fan. So his next question fit.

  “Have you gotten an invite to dinner with our cousins the Patrones, yet?” I grinned. Then I LOL’d. That was the firs
t time I’d realized we were related to a billionaire.

  “No, but I’ll keep working on it.”

  I bent down to place my empty glass in the top rack of the dishwasher and rediscovered my neck didn’t want to go in that direction anymore. I cried ouch and sucked in a deep breath as I tried to absorb the lightning bolt that had just electrified my brain.

  Matt came up behind me and straightened me up.

  “How’s your pain level? Maybe you should go back on something stronger than Ibuprofen.”

  “No way. I just need to remember…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence, another pain struck. Matt took my elbow, and moved me down the hall where I laid down on our bed to take the pressure off. Prone was good.

  “You have to tell those women you aren’t going to sew next month, Rache. No way I’m letting you…”

  I let him ramble, reminding myself that Marines talked like that.

  Sometimes I would engage and argue, but right now all I wanted to do was stop the pain in my torn cervical muscles. It radiated from inside my weary brain all the way down to my shoulders, and then spread out from there into an upper body dull ache.

  Matt had been campaigning for me to leave the Quilted Secrets group ever since the evil white truck first tried to drive me off the road three weeks ago.

  And the next bee was only a week away. I needed to heal faster. I didn’t want to miss it.

  You might think I’d want to skip it, in fact all of them, after what I’d just gone through because of those women, but I was eager to sew with them again. They were…my new family. They were exciting, and female. That second item is important when you are working in what is essentially a male world. Private investigation is dominated by males, just as crime is. And I missed being immersed in the library world—my last career, one that I’d worked in for more years than I can remember before taking an early retirement to follow Matt west to train in PI work and eventually open our own company.

  “Here. Take these.” Matt was attempting to shove a couple of white horse pills in my mouth.

  “What are they?” I grabbed the pill bottle out of his hand. “Oxycontin! Where’d you get these?”

  “I called the doctor, told him how Gloria had thrown your pills away. He wrote another prescription.”

  I just stared up at him from the bed. He was close to spilling the glass of water.

  “Matt. What are you thinking? I was almost addicted to these.”

  He was thinking nurse Gloria had interfered with my medical care. I was thinking nurse Gloria had saved me from drug addiction. We’d had this conversation already.

  “I’m thinking you should be lying flat on your back for at least another month. And so is the doctor.”

  “The doctor said I should stay flat on my back?”

  He glared at me. I gently pushed the pills away.

  “Throw them away, Matt. They’re dangerous. I’ll be okay. The pain has already subsided. I just get tired at the end of the day. Besides, I just finished a glass of wine.”

  He straightened and withdrew his offering with a sour look on his face. “I’ll take over with Gloria and Abigail. You stay home and I’ll have Will and Luis help me.” He was really freaking out, poor dear.

  “I’ll be fine in the morning, Matt. But we need to talk about how you feel about my new friends.”

  He left to channel surf. I closed my eyes and the next thing I knew it was morning.

  Chapter 17

  Saturday, October 25

  I don’t want to leave the impression that Matt and I are having marital problems. This tug-of-wills war game has been going on since before we married—thirty-three years ago this summer. So this isn’t exactly a fly-by-night relationship. It was the real deal. We would work things out. But sometimes I had to work around him.

  So when Abigail called me this morning--this being Saturday, the day after my miserable attempt to connect with her while spiriting her away from school—I didn’t turn her over to Matt.

  This was women’s business. She was one of my sister quilters. Matt would have to forgive…again. Besides, he was off with Will spying or something.

  “Rachel? I need…you said we could talk. Anytime.”

  “Yes, I did, Abby. And I meant it. Anytime.”

  I heard sniffles and a heavy sigh. “This isn’t gonna work for me, Rachel.”

  “I know, hon. Can you tell me why? Can you explain to me why you need to go to public school?”

  There was a pause. It went on until I thought we’d slid into the void.

  Finally she said, “I need friends my own age and my own intellect. Most of the kids in the Academy are…well they’re smart and all. I like that about them a lot. But…they’re…”

  The void grew closer, I waited.

  “It isn’t fair to call them nerdy, but that’s how they make me feel. At least the boys do.”

  “Boys are always slower to mature Abigail. I’m sure you’ll find this to be true at the high school as well,” I said, hoping I was sounding neutral. But of course I was sounding motherly. I felt motherly.

  “Freshman boys are. But I don’t really belong in the freshman class. I guess, well they want to test me…next week. You know, a placement test. I’m thinking maybe I should be in the junior class. Junior boys are….”

  I filled in the blank. Sexy.

  “Any particular junior boy?”

  The void gained some more ground. I hoped it didn’t swallow our call up entirely. She needed to talk. I needed to hear.

  Another deep sigh. At least she wasn’t sniffling.

  “I have to meet them, of course,” she said.

  That wasn’t an answer. So move on.

  “When’s your birthday, Abigail?”

  “December. Why?” Defensive.

  So she was almost fourteen. “Planning my calendar. Are you online? I mean are you on Facebook?”

  “Of course not. That’s over. I tweet, on twitter.com”

  Over? I’d just joined. Bummer. But Luis would need to know what social media Abigail was on. He was our resident IT geek, one of our two apprentices. So I lied again, telling her I was on twitter.com too, and asked her what her ID was. Fortunately she didn’t ask me for mine.

  Luis’ formal name is Marvin Luis Lewis. (His parents thought they were comedians.) But he hated the name Marvin so he was making the best of what was left, Luis Lewis, by inventing catchy online IDs. Louie-Louiee was the one I liked the best. Lewee-Lewee was another version. And Lou-Lou was another. His girlfriend Sandra, who we have yet to meet, didn’t like the Lou-Lou one.

  But my current concern was that even if Abigail wasn’t crying anymore, she sounded really down. I was hoping he could find and follow her on Twitter and see what she was telling her friends.

  Then it hit me.

  “Hey, Abby. I’ve got an idea. Do you want to go shopping? You know, get out of the house a bit?”

  The void withdrew a bit.

  “Maybe. That is if Gloria will let me out of prison. My grandma is watching me right now, but we can’t even communicate so I just tell her what I want and she believes me.”

  Grandmas and grandkids were often familial co-conspirators. If I lived closer to mine I’d be in a heap of trouble with my three daughter-in-laws.

  “Think it would be best if I cleared it with your mom.”

  In the background I heard a gravely voice.

  “Just a minute Nana. I gotta go. Let me know if the Ukrainian Lioness says I can get out of my cage.” And the void swallowed her.

  So maybe they could communicate. Maybe the teenager Abigail didn’t want to admit she could talk with her Nana because the other kids didn’t think it was cool for her to have a foreign born grandmother. Kids could be like that.

  I called Gloria, and when I’d finally connected with her in ICU she groused the whole time about how Abigail was due to go on a field trip to “the farm” today. I reminded her she wanted me to connect with her daughter and she fina
lly relented.

  Chapter 18

  Worried about Abigail’s state of mind, I decided to bring Hannah Lilly into the loop with a quick call. She of the chocolate voice.

  She was Zen. And she was a New Age farmer living in Vista with her husband Peter and three small children.

  Last month, Hannah and Gerry Patrone had joined me in my search for Ada Stowall’s killer. Ada Stowall was the quilter whose place I’d taken in the Quilted Secrets group after her death. Initially I’d been hired to research her quilt and study her genealogy. At least that’s the way I saw things. But ultimately it all got tangled, quilts, genealogies and murders.

  To cover Hannah and Gerry under my private investigator’s license, I hired them each for a dollar--and they surprised me by accepting. This was after I’d been hired to investigate the death of Ada Stowall.

  During the course of that investigation I learned that Hannah’s mother Ruth was Victoria Stowall’s sister, while Ada Stowall had been Victoria’s daughter-in-law. I point this out here so that you know that Hannah is also related to the mysterious Stowalls. And she appeared to be as uncomfortable with her fairly close relationship with them as I was with my distant one.

  Gerry Patrone, as it turned out, was another relative. Like every other member of the Quilted Secrets Sisterhood, she too was related to the Jake and Victoria Stowall clan. Her maiden name was Beardsley, which was a branch of the clan.

  Another line of the Beardsley branch of the Stowalls married Gloria Pustovoytenko, and thus Abigail was also related to this enormous and very weird family. I had yet to figure out the kinship of the others who sat with us at the once-a-month bees. But I was working on it.

  The genealogy they’d handed me at that first bee the beginning of this month—October--ran across one whole wall of our spare bedroom, and partially onto the next. It was still hung for me to ponder whenever the mood enveloped me—a bit like a heavy fog.