Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel

by Sullivan, Barbara

  “Gloria, have you contacted the police about Abigail’s absence?”

  “Yes. Called dem ven I got home—had to do a couple a hours at verk to cover lunches and breaks, so I vasn’t back until after four. And den I tought she was upstairs. My mother never even told me….”

  She put her hand up to cover her face, then quickly turned to the fridge and opened the door to pretend she was busy retrieving something. I waited a moment for her to calm.

  “Did they send anyone over to take a report?”

  “Yeah, some young guy, told me not to verry. Here’s his card. Told me to call dem if she don’t show up before ten. Smartass started telling me kids her age are out all hours of the day and night now. I lost it. I tink I’m doing more harm dan good. Maybe you and Matt….”

  Her voice trailed off again, and this time she used a dishtowel to blot her eyes.

  “Dis is not like her, Rachel.”

  “I know. We’ll press our case again, Gloria, as soon as Matt calls. But you’ll have to deal with the authorities. They’ll expect it. We can help you though.”

  I left her then and returned to the others, feeling less panicked. At least Gloria had started the ball rolling. But now I was thinking we had to contact Learner. He at least knew the seriousness of what was going on at the high school. He’d understand that there could be connections here.

  I could see Andrea’s brain mulling over whether to continue her customary harassment of Elixchel or not. But Gloria saved us by saying, “Come on out to the sunroom and take a look at my daughter’s art.”

  She was talking to me.

  It was then that I noticed the two paintings adorning the living room wall behind the couch. They were huge renditions of lilies, one done all in white and green tones and the other almost a mirror picture with the lilies in shades of lavender and purple. Her painting was exceptionally good, just as I’d been told it was.

  “She’s in her floral period now,” Gloria said as she led me to the mystery room I’d wondered about. “Before the flowers she mostly painted horses and dogs.”

  Anne followed us along.

  The sunroom--actually a closed in porch that led down from the living by two steps--was enormous, running the full depth of the condo and twenty feet wide, it also seemed to have the night sky as its ceiling it was so tall. The two solid walls—the front wall and the shared wall with the rest of the condo--were covered with Abigail’s wonderful recreations. Not just lilies, but daffodils, tulips, sunflowers, roses and even a humble dandelion—in mauve on midnight blue.

  The other two walls of this room were broken up by large windows, but even there Abigail or Gloria had hung some of her smaller paintings.

  “Does she use oils or acrylic?”

  “Mostly acrylic, it’s easier to work with than oil. A couple are done in chalk; a few in watercolor.”

  And then I spotted Victoria in a recliner chair in the far corner of the room. She moved, and the light next to her switched on.

  Chapter 60

  This was the exact way I’d first met Victoria at her house last month. I was frightened by the sight of her then and was reminded of that fright again now.

  Victoria looks like Stephen King’s grandma. Fat, wrinkly, dressed like someone’s nightmare, she wore what could only be called a “house dress”. It was colorless in the near dark. Over that was a baggy white sweater with stains around the wrists. Sprouting from black leather walking shoes was a pair of dark brown knee high stockings reaching for her thick knees.

  I retrieved my satchel from the living room and opened it as Hannah and Victoria quietly chatted, but not about Abigail, I noted. Maybe Hannah was thinking Victoria needed to be protected, because of her illness.

  Returning, I solemnly held out Ada’s quilt, now draped across my forearms. It was an intricately decorated album quilt covered with biblical scenes—and full of painful memories.

  The hand quilting group had given it to me last month, hoping my research skills could be used to crack the mystery of Ada’s death. It had indeed contained family secrets that were part of the answer they sought.

  “I assume this quilt goes to you, Victoria, since she was your daughter-in-law.”

  “No! It goes to Eddie.” Andrea shouted. She was watching us from the doorway, and she swooped into the room like a red headed hawk and tore the quilt from my arms. It almost weighed as much as her, and she swayed as she tried to adjust it in her arms.

  Joining us, Anne shook her head and her short curly hair wriggled around her head like peevish yellow and white budgerigars.

  “No, I can’t agree, Andrea. Eddie has no home at this point. I’m sure his grandma will give it to him when he’s ready.”

  “What are you talking about? His home…” But she didn’t finish. Instead her beady eyes grew as the implications of what Anne was saying sunk in. Eddie had lived all of his life with his parents’ Luke and Ada until a couple of weeks ago, when his encounter with me had set him free to roam.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Calm down, Andrea. The County has made the decision to have the old Stowall house torn down, along with several other vacant homes in that run down neighborhood. They feel it would be a wonderful place to establish a county park, complete with a small zoo,” Anne said.

  Wahoo! I wanted to cheer. Not just for a new zoo, but because the neighborhood Eddie had lived in looked to me like it was suffering from a sixteenth century curse.

  “What the…” Andrea glanced at Victoria, and swallowed the F word waiting at the back of her throat. “When did this happen? Don’t they have to have public meetings on this kind of thing?”

  Anne remained calm in the face of Andrea’s storm. And my storm-trooper butterflies were still coaxing the shark.

  “No. They’re taking the land under eminent domain laws which have recently been expanded by the Supreme Court. And frankly we’re in agreement. There really was no hope of selling the house, given its current condition and its history. And the entire neighborhood is either upside down in debt or occupied by very old people who are slowly dying off, who-who,” Anne said.

  I excused myself in order to try Matt’s cell phone again. Again it went directly to voicemail. Where the hell was he?

  The argument in the other room continued. I half-listened, my arms folded protectively across my body. I began reviewing the steps to take in the case of a missing child. Abigail was a child, not a teen. A child.

  “Where will Eddie live?” Gloria asked, her suddenly small voice sounding much like her daughter’s. Fear was sapping her strength.

  Inaction was sapping both our strengths.

  “The house contains only bad memories for him, Gloria. This is for the best, really.” Anne said with finality.

  But Hannah persisted. “What about the Stowall family cemetery?”

  “It will be moved to the County Cemetery on High Street. For the time being if Eddie returns to this area he’ll live with his grandma or he can stay with me. I have a very nice three bedroom home about halfway between Julian and Iguana.”

  Julian is the town north of Cleveland County where the three Stowall sisters own and operate the Apple FIXation restaurant and store.

  Iguana, twenty-five miles south of Julian and inside Cleveland County, is where Victoria Stowall lives, and Ada’s home is--soon to be was—a couple of miles away from Victoria’s.

  And where we were standing and making this idiot small talk was in Pinto Springs, the largest city in Cleveland County and still further south and east of Iguana, by maybe twenty miles.

  So large a city it had a wonderful police department, one with an excellent detective’s division, one we should be calling right now.

  “Why the…” (A quick eye check to Victoria.) ”…don’t you think he’ll return?” Andrea was growing more agitated by the moment and for some reason I worried that she’d lose it entirely.

  “He probably will, Andrea. If you’d like to keep his quilt for him until then,
that will be fine,” Victoria said in her ancient voice, now not just deeply hoarse, but also quavering. “I have more quilts than I know what to do with.”

  “Or I could keep it for him, Andrea,” Anne said.

  “No way! Your house is full of cats. They’ll tear it apart.”

  Victoria stopped things from escalating by lifting the quilt for Andrea to take.

  Andrea retreated into the living room temporarily mollified, holding the quilt tightly in her arms.

  I didn’t care who had it as long as it wasn’t me. And now I was wondering how many cats Anne had.

  I checked my watch. Matt should have reached home by now. I would try our house phone next.

  I finally thought to ask Gloria if her daughter had called or otherwise contacted her or Nana at anytime during the afternoon--which is when Nana emerged from her little downstairs bedroom by the stairs.

  “Oh, gud, she’s awake finally,” Gloria muttered as she spotted her mother and moved towards her. The two began gabbing in Cyrillic

  A few moments later Nana returned to her room and we all stood staring at Gloria expectantly.

  Gloria noticed at last and said, “My mother says Abigail called around two to say she was with friends, but she didn’t say who they were or where she was.” Gloria’s shoulders drooped. Now she just looked dispirited.

  I was still thinking it was wrong that Abby wasn’t here for her bee, but a little more of the pressure went out of my emotions.

  Then the doorbell rang and Gloria raced to answer it. But it wasn’t news of Abigail, it was Geraldine Patrone finally arriving. She would be the last quilter to arrive this evening.

  Gerry was even taller than Elixchel, thanks to an outrageous pair of backless heels, outrageous because each big toe was adorned with a pink pompom. They looked like 1930’s Hollywood bedroom slippers.

  Come to think of it, she looked like a thirties Hollywood starlet. Maybe this was her Halloween costume, and she just loved it so much she was wearing it again tonight.

  Gerry was the mother of four boys and a smart business woman, but to look at her you’d think she was a complete airhead.

  Wearing her signature animal skin prints--this time an orange-and-white, tiger-striped big-shirt over black-and-white leopard-print tights--her floppy mop of blond curls added to the illusion that she looked down upon us from dizzying heights.

  She and Elixchel approached six feet from opposite sides.

  Over her left arm she carried a new hot-pink and silver pocketbook with the capital letter C all over it that probably cost a thousand dollars. It was big enough to carry her SUV. As she threw a light, gold-lamé jacket on the living room couch, the label flashed Oscar de something. The fold in the metallic fabric hid the rest.

  Gerry was glamorous. I would be too if I’d married a billionaire. After dumping her things on the couch she joined us on the porch.

  “Hey! It’s the stitching sisters, back together again! How are you all doing?”

  Geraldine Patrone may be the somewhere-around-forty wife of a billionaire, but she was also the mother of four boys. I mothered three boys and they drove me into the ground with their constant activity. Gerry was thriving…and may even be tapping into their energy source.

  Of course that would be cookies and ice cream. She’d definitely put on weight since last month. Maybe she was pregnant, I viciously thought.

  Don’t ask, I told my brain as my mouth prepared to make a fool of me again. Besides I’m not that shallow, I reminded myself.

  “Okay, what’s wrong? Is it my outfit? You don’t like flamingo pink and orange sherbet? You can’t handle the switch from faux cheetah to faux leopard? You abhor the extra eight pounds I’ve put on and we haven’t even passed Thanksgiving yet?”

  I forgot to mention, Gerry’s watch--yet again? Tsh, tsh--was her familiar pink Gucci with blinding diamonds.

  Also, her fingers ended in ten different elaborately painted designs all inspired by Halloween, and she was still wearing Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond on her wedding finger.

  I would have to be careful not to watch her sew tonight, it might make me mad. With this thought I knew Gerry had lightened the mood—appropriate or not. At least my brain was tracking better and the butterflies had quit teasing the shark.

  Suddenly I realized there was no rack in the room. Then I looked up.

  Chapter 61

  There are basically two types of hand quilting racks for group sewing. One is a free-standing structure that is designed to allow gradual expansion as the topstitching is completed. Some of these are fairly light-weight and can be transported as necessary, but they are almost always left out as display racks when not actually in use.

  We’d sewn on the free-standing version at Victoria’s bee the first Saturday in October--a heavy wooden structure that her late husband Jake had made for her years before.

  (Jake, whose body I’d found seven weeks ago, burnt almost beyond recognition, a victim of the sort of familial foul play for which the Stowall family seemed to be infamous, had finally had his death ruled a homicide, partly due to my insistence. Of course it was irrelevant since the killer was dead, but it’s the little victories in life that matter.)

  So when I’d first wondered where the rack with Abigail’s quilt was, I’d thought Gerry might be bringing it with her—perhaps swinging by Victoria’s house to retrieve it and stuff it into her huge SUV. (More on Gerry’s huge SUV later. Suffice it to say I’m both green with envy and disturbed at her unabashed and wasteful display of wealth with this vehicle.) However, after getting over Gerry’s new outfit I returned to the question of where the rack was and finally thought to look up.

  The second type of group quilting rack—a suspended structure--is stored on the ceiling.

  Of course, if I’d thought it through in the first place I’d have remembered that Abigail and Gloria had been quilting together for years, so clearly they had to have a large quilt rack somewhere in the house.

  I was curious what this experience would be like. I had misgivings as to the stability of a hanging quilt rack, especially if its support derived entirely from the wires attached to the ceiling—and you had eight women quilting on it at once.

  Unless….

  Again I looked around, and lo and behold found four support structures tucked away behind a small pile of un-hung canvases. They looked a little like saw horses and I assumed it was on these that the rack would rest once it was lowered.

  It seemed as if Abigail’s quilt was already loaded on the rack, but of course I couldn’t see well in the dim lighting on the tall room. Besides, all that was visible was the bottom layer of the quilt.

  The doorbell rang yet again and this time Gloria almost ran to the front door. My heart ached for her.

  “Abigail..?” Gerry said. Then I heard Matt’s deep voice, and relief washed over me. He stepped inside.

  “Wow. Is that your husband? How do you rate?” Elixchel said. She was drooling.

  It was true. Matt was drop-dead gorgeous. The gray at his temples was added spice. The six foot two muscular frame was more spice. And the Irish attitude made him just so flamingly spicy I should have my head examined for letting him leave the house alone. And I haven’t even mentioned the crystal blue eyes.

  “Rachel isn’t chopped liver either, Lix.” I heard Andrea say.

  “Lix?” Elixchel said testily. “It would be Lish, if it were a proper diminutive…”

  Uh-oh.

  “Okay, what’s going on? Where’s Abigail?” Gerry complained as I walked toward Matt.

  Behind me Anne said, “She’s not here. She went out at noon. Gloria is frantic.”

  Chapter 62

  Matt led me outside by the elbow and we sat in his car to discuss my two messages. He’d never gotten back to Escondido. After the second voice message from me, he’d stopped the car, listened to them, turned around, and made a couple of calls.

  “Okay, what does Gloria know?”

  “She’s missi
ng, is what she knows, has been since noon. The young cop they sent over to answer her cry for help tried to convince her it was normal for thirteen-year-old girls to be out until ten pm.”

  “Fuck.”

  Okay, I told you he was a retired Marine. They tend to swear a lot, especially during combat. Relieves tension.

  “Matt, her accent, it gets in the way, especially when she’s upset. The young cop probably couldn’t even understand what she was saying, half the time. And then there’s her personality.”

  He nodded.

  “At least she’s reported. We’ll pick it up from there. Here’s what we’re going to do. Pay attention. One: Will is on the way. We’re going to connect with Harks. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet Harks as planned, but Will knows him well and he’s the link.”

  As I’ve said, Harks is the PI in Los Angeles Will Townsend had begun his apprenticeship with. He was an expert in gangs.

  “Two: we’ll connect with Tom Beardsley to get the county folks involved immediately and Detective Learner…”

  “Pestilence. I….”

  “I know he’s hard to like but he’s good. And he’s necessary. He’ll bring the PS cops along. And I’ve been cultivating them through Captain John Clancy in Escondido PD. He’s Mosby’s brother-in-law. We’re down.”

  “Down. Fine. I didn’t mean you shouldn’t contact Learner. I agree completely with that move. And if the cops agree, maybe Tom B. could be the point of contact for Gloria. Gerry can help interpret between them, and she’d be another calming influence on Gloria. Frankly Matt, Gloria is terrified. I’ve never seen her like this, not even when those boys were dying all over her ICU. God only knows what her experience with criminals and cops in communist Ukraine was. And then there’s Gloria and Abigail’s recent history over schooling. But you should keep reminding them about her run-ins with the Pintos. Or maybe not, I’m not sure.”