It felt peaceful being alone in the museum and inspecting the almost finished sampler exhibit. The adobe walls and free-standing cork-covered display boards the woodworkers had designed and built were crammed corner to corner with samplers. There was enough reading material here to rival the new library over by Central Park. After fiddling with the thermostat back in the studios, I returned to the museum and strolled through the exhibit, straightening a frame here and there and rereading some of my favorite verses.
“A house is made of brick and stone, A home is made of love alone—To my daughter, Sarah, on-the day of her wedding—M.E. Worley 1926”; ”Let me live in the house by the side of the road and be a friend to man—Jan Anagoni, Taos, N.M. 1962”; “To cultivate a garden is to walk with God—Hendricka Bas 1943”; ”A Merry Heart doeth good like a Medicine—Suzanne Matthews 1931”; “A sorrow shared is but half a trouble, A joy that’s shared is a joy made double—Retha Smith to Birdie Baker, Kingman, Kansas 1954”; ”Remembering is the sweetest flower, Of all this world’s perfuming, Memory guards it sun or shower, Friendship keeps it blooming—Kathleen Webb 1919.”
I’d even contributed one of my own samplers. I’d saved a corner spot in the back of the room and when it was hung, I would feel the exhibit was finished. I pulled it from under the counter in the gift shop and studied the familiar colors and patterns—the blue border of hollyhocks, the deep brown, contented-looking cattle, the peach-colored house with a man and woman in overalls standing in front. The words were as well known to me as the feel of Dove’s hands.
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made, Our times are in His hand—ALR to JWH, San Celina, California, February 1, 1978.”
My wedding present to Jack. It had taken me three months to stitch. Long, warm evenings in front of the fire with Dove, planning my future, a future that looked as certain and optimistic as Browning’s words. I’d packed it away at the bottom of my cedar chest when I moved from the ranch, unable to bring myself to even look at it. But when this exhibit came about, something compelled me to dig it out. I sat in front of the chest at the foot of my bed, wondering if seeing it would upset me. But only happy memories surfaced when I unwrapped it from its tissue paper cocoon. I’d discovered in the last year, somewhat to my surprise, that the things I thought would tear my heart out, sometimes gave me the most comfort. Displaying this symbol of Jack and me in the exhibit seemed right somehow. I unrolled some paper towels and started cleaning the film from the glass, when a knock sounded on the locked front door. The round oak-framed clock above the door said seven. I opened it with some hesitation. There wasn’t an artist in the co-op who would be up this early, no matter how far behind in their work.
Todd stood there, his rangy arms dangling at his side, looking naked without his usual camera.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I thought I’d come early to start work. When I saw your truck, I thought ...” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his baggy black jeans and ducked his head, hair flopping in his face. “I can come back at ten like you said.” He looked back up at me helplessly.
“No, come on in,” I said. “I was just putting a few finishing touches on the exhibit. I’m glad you decided to come early. It was going to be almost impossible for me to get that quilt rack set up by myself.”
His face relaxed slightly from its uneasy expression. It took all I had not to hug him like he was one of my young cousins and tell him everything was going to be okay.
Even with two of us, it was difficult getting the frame set straight on the sawhorses. Thanks to four of the co-op’s quilters, the quilt itself had already been stretched and squared-off evenly on the rack, and the three layers of backing, batting and top had been basted together. After setting a dozen or so metal folding chairs around the quilt, I put Todd to work washing long-neglected windows and vacuuming the museum.
The minibus from Oak Terrace arrived at nine sharp, and within half an hour everyone was situated around the quilt rack, mouths and fingers moving a mile a minute. I’d prudently spent part of the night before filling all the pincushions I could find with threaded #10 Between needles—a favorite size with the ladies. I picked up a needle and sat next to Thelma. I listened with amusement to the women’s high, silvery voices as they compared the successes and foibles of their children and grandchildren. The sound of their voices relaxed me, bringing back childhood memories of long summer visits down South to Dove’s only sister, my great-aunt Garnet. In Sugar Tree, Arkansas, quilting bees were a twice-a-week habit with the Women’s Missionary Union of her church. A good deal of my sex education was acquired by faking sleep on Aunt Garnet’s scratchy Victorian sofa and listening to the quilting ladies refer obliquely to the trouble the new wives of the Darcy brothers had due to the rather oversized proportions of their “maleness” or how “that” was never satisfied, no matter how often it happened. Always, just as it started to get detailed and my seven-year-old imagination went wild trying to picture exactly how it all fit with what my obnoxious thirteen-year-old Uncle Arnie told me one of Daddy’s Black Angus bulls would do to my sweet-faced little heifer, Dossie, Aunt Garnet reprimanded them in her tight, hard-shell Baptist voice. “Little pitchers have big ears, ladies.” She knew I never could sleep in the daytime. Dove would give a big laugh, slap her sister playfully on the shoulder and tell her it was better than me learning it behind the barn.
“So, Benni,” Thelma said after a while. Her eyes never left the small diamond she was rocking her needle through. “Have you seen that nice boy, Clay, lately?” On the other side of her, Martha chuckled.
“Just how bad is this flu you said Oralee has?” I asked, sidestepping her question. I had been disappointed when Oralee didn’t show up, and wondered just how I could go about approaching her at Oak Terrace.
“Flu, my eye,” rabbit-faced Vynelle Williams said. “She’s just too lazy to quilt.”
“Now, Vynelle,” Thelma scolded good-naturedly. “She really wasn’t feeling good. Heavens, who can blame her? What happened to Rose Ann and Brady scared all of us more than a tad.”
The other ladies in the group murmured agreement. It was exactly the opening I was looking for.
“How’s everyone taking the murders there?” I asked.
“Most everyone’s doing okay,” Thelma said. “Edwin’s been running around like a chicken with his head cut off, but then he’s always like that.”
“Have the police talked to any of you individually?”
“Yes, indeedy,” Vynelle said. She snipped a thread, stuck her empty needle in the pincushion sitting on the quilt and picked out another threaded needle. “The next day. We all had appointments to see them in the dining hall.”
“What kind of questions did they ask?”
Vynelle looked back down at the quilt and snorted. “The obvious. Who liked Brady, who didn’t. Same with Rose Ann. They seemed a bit incompetent to me. Matlock would have had this solved and the murderer in prison by now.” She gave me an apologetic look. “No offense to your beau or nothing.”
I smiled. “Well, Gabe is certainly no Matlock. What did you tell the detectives?”
“The truth, of course. That the only person that hated Brady that much was Oralee, but then that hasn’t been a secret for fifty years.”
“You mean their feud is that old? Why did they hate each other so much?” I stopped my stitching and looked around at the ladies.
They eyed each other and remained silent.
I turned to Thelma. “C’mon, what are you all holding back? What about Oralee and Mr. O’Hara?”
Thelma patted my hand. “My dear, some things are best left in the past. Believe me, it was so long ago it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Rose Ann and Brady now. They’re in a better place. We should just let them be.”
“Well, Rose Ann might be, but I wouldn’t be taking bets on Brady,” Vynelle said.
“Vynelle Williams!” Thelma admonished
. “Now you hush.” She turned to me. “We’ve been at this for an hour. Don’t you think it’s time for a little coffee break?” She stood up and stretched her thin body. The rest of the women followed her lead and I pointed them toward the coffee, tea and doughnuts Todd and I had set up in the co-op’s small kitchen.
“Thelma, could you wait a minute?” I asked as the women moved slowly down the hallway. When everyone was out of the room, I looked her straight in the eye. “Would you just tell me what the deal is between Oralee and Mr. O’Hara? Did you tell the police about it?”
Thelma inspected me with her shrewd brown eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
“The truth?”
“Young lady, seeing as I was your Sunday School teacher for three years, I think I’ll ignore that question.”
I looked down at my boots, kicked at the floor, then glanced back up. “Gabe has zeroed in on Clay O’Hara because he’s the most obvious suspect, but I think he’s wrong. I think there’s more to it than that.”
She looked at me a long time before she spoke. “He is a fine-looking boy.” Her lips curled into a small smile. “And very personable.”
“Who?”
“Both of them. But I was referring to the O’Hara boy.”
“That’s not the reason,” I protested, trying not to smile back.
“He reminds you a bit of Jack, doesn’t he? Or at least that time of your life.”
“I just don’t think Gabe is being fair,” I said weakly. I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I thought I’d done a good job keeping those thoughts hidden, even from myself. Apparently, my mixed feelings were about as secret as the recipe for Tollhouse cookies.
“Besides all that, you’re Dove’s granddaughter and you can’t stand it when there’s a secret you aren’t privy to.”
I grinned. “That’s probably closer to the truth than anything.”
She shook her head doubtfully. “I’m not sure what I know about Brady and Oralee has much bearing.”
“Why don’t you let me decide?”
“I suppose it can’t do any harm.” She sat down in one of the folding chairs. I sat next to her. “This is actually quite common knowledge. To anyone in our group, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
She laced her fingers primly in her lap. “Oralee and Brady were quite an item in our younger days.”
“An item? You mean they were ...” I didn’t quite know how to put it, good friends, dating, lovers? That last one was too incredible to imagine.
“I mean they were going to be married.”
“What?” I leaned toward her, my voice coming out in something resembling a squawk. “They were engaged? Mr. O’Hara and Oralee? When? What happened? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Now, Benni, don’t act so shocked. Hard as it is to believe, all us old folks were as young as you and your beaus at one time. Some of us were known to really cut a rug.”
“But Oralee and Mr. O’Hara?” I couldn’t in my wildest stretch of imagination picture that.
“Brady O’Hara was considered quite the catch back in those days, you know. And Oralee was a pretty attractive woman herself.”
“But they’re as different as fried chicken and sushi. How in the world could two people so different be attracted to each other?”
She tilted her head and smiled. “Well, dear heart, that’s something you’d probably understand better than me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Forget my love life. So, what happened to their romance?”
“No one really knows. It was around the time the war started. Everything was crazy those first few months.” She touched her pearly gray hair tentatively. “All I know is one day they were engaged, the next they weren’t speaking to each other on the street. San Celina was a lot smaller back then. The town itself, that is. With Camp Johnson full of Army boys, there were thousands of military people living in the county, but the hometown folks knew everything that was happening with each other. But, you know, no one ever found out who really broke the engagement. We all talked about it for weeks. We wondered if maybe it had to do with his younger brother being killed at Pearl Harbor, but no one ever found out. Brady O’Hara was not one to share his feelings with anyone.”
“His brother was killed at Pearl Harbor?”
“We lost a lot of boys that horrible day. Those few hours changed all our lives forever.”
I chewed on my bottom lip and considered what she’d told me. Intriguing gossip though it was, I couldn’t see how it would have anything to do with his death, or Miss Violet’s, fifty years later.
“Did he and Miss Violet ever have anything going on?” A crime of passion maybe? Right, I chided myself. Fifty years later Oralee smothers Miss Violet and chokes Mr. O’Hara because of spurned love.
Thelma shook her head No. “Not that I ever heard. I told you I didn’t see how any of this would help you. Besides, I think there may be other reasons why Brady would be more valuable dead than alive.”
My ears perked up. “Like what?”
Her voice went down into a whisper even though there was no one else in the room. “You know Oak Terrace will get a large endowment now that Brady’s dead.”
“I remember Edwin mentioning something about it. Are you suggesting that Edwin knocked him off to get money for the retirement home? I know jobs are tight these days, but if Oak Terrace went under, I’m sure Edwin could find a job somewhere.”
“Maybe after he got out of prison.”
“What?” My small shriek brought a satisfied smile to her face. I shook a finger at her. “Okay, Thelma Rook, you old gossip. You’ve known something all along. Now come clean, or I’ll be forced to bring out the truth serum.”
She gave a merry little laugh. “Oh, Benni, the look on your face was worth it. I’m being a bit facetious, really. What I’m about to tell you is pure gossip, so I hope the good Lord will forgive me.”
“C’mon, don’t torture me,” I said.
“You know, most people, even the ones who work at Oak Terrace, think that once we senior citizens check into a retirement home we’ve completely lost all our faculties. They act like we can’t see, think or hear.” Her lips grew tight in irritation. I knew what she meant. “Invisible” was the word. It had happened often since I’d started teaching the quilting class at Oak Terrace. Many of the retirement-home workers, and even some family members, would discuss the residents as if they weren’t present.
“So,” she continued, “we hear a lot of things they don’t think we hear.”
“Like what?”
“I was sitting on that sofa in the front lobby. You know, that hideous green vinyl one? These two nurses were talking with the receptionist about how they were thinking of looking for new jobs because a girl in Accounting said the books at Oak Terrace were looking a little shaky these days.”
“Shaky?”
“Money being shifted around and such. They started whispering, not thinking I could hear, but believe me, that’s one part of me that’s still working just fine. They said”—she paused for emphasis—“that someone in charge of a certain retirement home has a bit of a gambling problem.”
“Edwin? A gambler?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“And he’s getting the money from the retirement home,” I reasoned.
“Apparently so.” She looked at me smugly. “So you see, a nice bit of money like that endowment could come in real handy right now for our Mr. Ed.”
“No kidding,” I said, sitting back in my chair. “But murder?”
“Well, he and Brady did get along pretty well. Heaven knows, Edwin made up to him enough, but I think once Clay arrived and started helping his uncle with his finances, that endowment business was on shaky ground. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that was why Clay’s daddy sent him down here. He must have got wind of Brady’s intentions.”
Before I could react, the ladies started wandering back into the room and took their places around th
e quilt. As I stitched, I thought about what Thelma had just told me. Granted, if Edwin was embezzling money from Oak Terrace and Mr. O’Hara was leaving the home money in his will, Edwin might have found a way to work it so that the money he’d embezzled was covered. I wasn’t sure how all that complex accounting worked; the books I’d kept at the Harper Ranch the fifteen years I’d lived there were fairly uncomplicated. My college accounting classes and the books that came with the word processing program we’d purchased had more than sufficed. But these days miraculous things could be done with computers. A person with the necessary know-how could make numbers do the ten-step in triple time. And I’d happened to find out, during the course of working with Edwin on the Senior Citizen Prom, that his major in college had been accounting with a minor in computer science. If anyone could pull off a little piece of technical hocus-pocus, Edwin probably could.
Then again, a little voice inside me said, Clay might have decided he wanted his uncle out of the way before he could change his will and leave anything to the retirement home. Maybe Mr. O’Hara had decided to leave it all to Oak Terrace or to someone else.
I worried the new information like a dog digging for marrow in a fresh bone. What exactly was in that will? A lot seemed to hinge on that.
We ended the quilting session about noon with plans for the ladies to return next week. Thelma boarded the minibus last. As I helped her up the steps, she whispered, “I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and call you if I hear anything.”
“No,” I said, remembering the cool, lifeless feel of Miss Violet’s hand. “Thanks for your help, but I should never have gotten you involved. It could be dangerous. I think you should forget about it.”
With surprising strength, she pulled her arm out of my grasp and looked me square in the eye. “Now, Benni Harper, do you really think I’m going to sit around and let you have all the fun?” She turned to the bus driver. “Home, James,” she said in a regal tone. “And make it snappy. I’ve things to do.”
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