“Can I talk to you a minute?” said a soft male voice from over her left shoulder. “Outside,” the man added.
Harriet turned and was surprised to see Bobby Cosgrove crouched behind her. He stood up and went outside.
“I’ll be right back,” she said to Lauren and followed him. “What do you want?” she asked when the door had closed.
Bobby glanced around nervously before speaking.
“I need you to take a message to Jenny.”
“If you’re asking her for more money, I’m not helping you.”
“You think you know everything, but you don’t know anything. This was never about money. Not like you think, anyway.”
“I saw you in the parking lot.”
“You saw Jenny trying to push money on me. I tried to tell her I wasn’t there to ask for money but she wouldn’t listen. I was there to warn her. She’s in danger.”
“You haven’t seen her in years. Why all the concern now?”
“I’ve stayed away from her for her own good. I been laying low, but they found her anyway.”
“So, you’re not homeless because of your habit?” Harriet said and turned as if to go back inside.
“I’m clean. I haven’t used for over a year,” Bobby said, straining to see into the shadows as he spoke.
“You reeked of marijuana at the coffeehouse the other day.”
“That don’t mean I was using. I had to talk to some guys who were smoking, but not me. Not anymore.”
“If Jenny’s in trouble, why can’t you talk to her or, better yet, talk to the police?”
“You saw what happened when I tried to talk to her. She won’t listen. I can’t say I blame her. I wouldn’t believe me. I’ve let her down more times than I can count.”
“So, how do I know you’re being straight with me now? Maybe you’re still lying, trying a more sophisticated con on her.”
Bobby stopped his nervous searching of the shadows and put his hands out in front of him.
“Sophisticated con. Me? Really?”
“I guess not. How about this? I’ll go talk to Jenny. She’s working late. I told her I’d give her a break. Let me go do that, and when she comes back, I’ll see if she’s willing to give you another chance to talk. You can stay across the aisle. I’ll signal you if it’s okay to approach her.”
“What if she says no?”
“Have a little faith. I can be pretty persuasive. If she doesn’t agree, we’ll go to plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“I’ll call the Loose Threads.”
“What the heck are the Loose Threads?”
“It’s our quilting group. They’re her best friends. If she’s in danger, they’ll make sure she’ll talk to you. Let me go tell my friend what’s going on. Meet me at the back of the exhibit hall in the aisle to the right in about five minutes.”
Bobby agreed and disappeared into the night.
“What was that all about?” Lauren asked when Harriet had returned.
“That was Jenny’s brother. It was weird. He said I’d misinterpreted what I saw in the parking lot. He claims he was trying to warn Jenny that she was in danger, but she wouldn’t listen to him. He wants me to make her to talk to him.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“He was pretty convincing.”
“He’s a drug user,” Lauren countered.
“He claims he’s clean. He says he met with some guys who were smoking, but that he wasn’t.”
“This ought to be good. Jenny’s gonna go ballistic. I’ll be waiting here with bated breath to hear what happens.”
Harriet got up and went through the second set of doors and into the exhibit hall. A few people wandered the aisles, looking at the quilts and other exhibits. She noticed one woman wearing a well-cut navy blue wool suit with a large leather hobo bag slung over her shoulder pacing back and forth an aisle away from Jenny’s stage. She must have just gotten off work, Harriet mused. You didn’t see many expensive business suits at quilt shows, or even in Foggy Point in general.
“Hey, Jenny,” she called when she reached her friend’s display. “Ready for a break?” She tried to force a cheerful tone into her voice. If Jenny noticed, she didn’t say anything.
“Boy, am I,” she said. “I thought it was hard standing and answering questions all day, but it’s excruciating standing here with almost no one in the hall. I’m going to run out to the restroom and then dash by the food court, if that’s okay. It shouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes.”
“No problem, I’ll be right here.”
Harriet looked around. She didn’t see suit lady or anyone else. She studied Jenny’s quilt and was glad her friend had chosen the blue and mauve tones that were also used in the sixties rather than the more popular gold, orange and green.
It seemed like an eternity before Bobby came to the stage.
“Did you talk to her?” he asked.
“No, she’s still on her break. She should be back any minute. She’ll probably come back down the main aisle. Wait over there.” She pointed to her left. “If you stand one booth in and watch through that display, you can see me wave at you without being noticed.”
Fifteen minutes had passed when Harriet finally saw Jenny coming down the main aisle toward her. What occurred next happened so fast, she wasn’t sure afterward what the actual sequence was.
She saw the woman in the suit looking at something in a booth, her back to Jenny’s stage, saw her glance to the side as Jenny approached. One row over, Bobby apparently saw Jenny and decided to jump the gun, stepping out into the main aisle.
“I’m going to put my purse away,” Jenny had said, and ducked behind the black curtain on the stage. At the same time, a stout gray-haired women accompanied by a younger version of herself approached the stage and asked Harriet to show them the back of Jenny’s quilt.
Harriet pulled a white cotton glove from her pocket, put it on and picked up the edge of the quilt. As she folded it back, stepping behind it so the women could see the careful stitches, she saw blue-suit woman whirl and, at the same time, pull a large plastic bottle from her bag. She ripped off the top then flung the contents toward Harriet. Bobby turned and tackled the woman pulling the bottle from her hand and throwing it away down the aisle.
Harriet screamed as burning liquid splashed over her arm; her lower body was protected by the edge of Jenny’s quilt. The fabric around her hand turned brown and began to disintegrate.
“Harriet, what happened?” Jenny cried as she appeared through the curtains.
The pain was so intense Harriet couldn’t answer. She dropped the quilt edge and waved her arm back and forth, trying to escape the searing burn.
“Do you have any water?” the older woman who had been looking at Jenny’s quilt asked.
Jenny disappeared through the curtains briefly and returned with two plastic bottles of water.
“I’m a nurse,” the woman said and uncapped the first bottle, pouring the water over Harriet’s arm. “We need more,” she ordered. “and a first-aid kit.”
“Pour some on the quilt,” Harriet said in a strained voice.
Jenny went behind the curtains again. The vendor across the aisle brought two more bottles and set them down beside the nurse, who was pouring the second bottle over Harriet’s arm. Jenny returned with more, uncapping one and pouring water over the brown spot on her quilt then pulling it down from its hanger. She folded it up and stuffed it behind the curtain then returned to Harriet’s side.
“I’m Dorothy,” the nurse said. “This is my daughter Jessica.” She looked at her daughter. “Honey, call nine-one-one.”
“Is that necessary?” Harriet gasped through clenched teeth.
“I’m afraid so,” Dorothy said as she continued flushing Harriet’s arm with bottled water. “We don’t know what was in that liquid. It clearly included an acid, but who knows what else was with it. You need to be checked out. And someone will want to analyze the remains in
the bottle to be sure there aren’t any surprises.”
To avoid seeing her arm, Harriet scanned the area around her. The woman in the blue suit was being held by two men she didn’t recognize. Bobby was nowhere to be seen.
“Who is she?” she asked.
“Who knows?” Jenny replied frantically, her cell phone held to her ear. “I’m trying to call your aunt, but she’s not answering.
“She probably doesn’t have her phone with her.”
Jenny turned as if to go.
“Don’t go get her. Leave the ladies to their dance. Lauren is at the protest in the foyer to the dance hall. Tell her to bring her car out front. She can drive me to the hospital after the paramedics look at my arm.”
“They’re going to want to transport you,” Jenny protested.
“And I’m not paying for an ambulance ride when I don’t need to.”
Jenny looked at Dorothy for help. The nurse shrugged.
“Her arm is burned, but if there was something really nasty in the mix she’d be reacting by now, and it’s true—they can’t force her.”
The same team of paramedics that had responded to the shooting came up, ending the discussion. The quilter-nurse identified herself and gave a concise description of the event as one EMT began taking Harriet’s vitals and the other opened a bottle of Milk of Magnesia, dumping it into a long-armed latex glove before slipping the glove over Harriet’s burned hand and arm. When the injury was covered, he taped the glove in place.
“What’s the white stuff for?” Harriet asked.
“Milk of Magnesia will neutralize hydrofluoric acid, if that’s what she used,” the paramedic said with a nod at blue-suit-woman. “She’s incoherent, but my partner heard her say something about rotting bones, so we figured we’d better be safe than sorry.
“Hydrofluoric acid is used in the electronics industry, so it’s pretty readily available here in the Northwest. It’s nasty stuff. You don’t feel the burn immediately, but it penetrates to the bone and destroys everything along the way. Clearly, it was mixed with something else that burned immediately—maybe sulfuric or hydrochloric acid, or even both.”
Harriet felt the blood leave her face as she listened to the description. The second paramedic inserted a needle into her unaffected hand and began a saline drip.
“I think you’d better reconsider taking that ambulance ride,” he said when he’d finished.
“Why am I not surprised to see you?” Office Nguyen said as he approached.
Harriet started to protest, but Dorothy shushed her.
“I saw the whole thing,” she said. “She was standing there on the stage, showing the quilt to me and my daughter, and that woman came up and threw a bottle of acid on her. Without provocation, I might add.”
Officer Nguyen raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“That woman in the blue suit is who you need to be talking to,” Dorothy continued, pointing at the her. She was sitting quietly, talking to herself in a continuous litany that made sense to no one but her.
Nguyen walked over to where two men still held the acid thrower. He said something into the radio on his shoulder then went behind the woman and handcuffed her.
“What have you gotten yourself into now?” Lauren demanded as she pushed through the growing crowd, kneeling beside Harriet when she arrived. “Are you okay? What happened?” She was more rattled than Harriet had ever seen her.
“That woman over there threw acid on my arm,” she said. “Luckily, I had just turned the edge up on the quilt and stepped behind it as she threw, so she only got my arm.”
“Where’s your aunt?”
“She’s at the prom still, and I told Jenny not to bother her or the rest of the Threads. Will you come with me to the hospital?”
“Your aunt is going to flip—you do know that, right?”
“She’s going to be upset in any case, so she might as well enjoy the dance. Before you come to the hospital, go look at Jenny’s quilt where the acid burned it.” Jenny was now talking to Officer Nguyen. “It’s behind the curtain. Hurry, before she gets done.”
“Aren’t you just the bossy one?” Lauren said, but she got up and went behind the curtain. She hadn’t returned before the paramedics loaded Harriet onto a gurney and pushed her out to the waiting ambulance.
Chapter 18
“Harriet, what are you doing here?” Aiden asked as she was wheeled into a curtained slot in the emergency room.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she replied. “I didn’t think this hospital handled animals.”
“Michelle is here.”
“My mistake.”
“She’s got food poisoning,” he said in an empty voice. “She’s very sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Harriet said without feeling. “Are Carla and Wendy okay?”
“Fortunately, they went out to dinner with Terry tonight, and I had to work late.”
“I hope it wasn’t something Carla made.”
“You don’t even care about my sister, do you? She’s in there having her stomach pumped, and all you care about is that it’s not Carla’s fault.”
“Excuse me for caring about my friend.”
“Why are you here, anyway? What’s wrong with your arm?” As if he had only just noticed she was lying on a gurney with her arm wrapped in ice packs.
“You need to wait outside, sir,” a dark-haired nurse said as she came through the curtained entrance to the cubicle. She gently tried to guide Aiden out. He pulled his arm away from her grasp.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me what happened to Ms. Truman.” He returned to her bedside. “Are you okay?”
Harriet felt a flutter in her stomach in spite of her pain as his ice-blue eyes searched her face.
“Are you family?” The nurse raised one eyebrow, and she kept her gaze on him as she checked her patient’s pulse. Finally, she looked at her watch.
“What happened?” Aiden asked.
“I had an accident,” Harriet finally said. “Not that it’s any of your concern.”
He started to protest, but a different nurse stuck her head into Harriet’s space.
“There you are, Dr. Jalbert. Your sister is asking for you.”
He hesitated, resting his hand on Harriet’s leg.
“I’m fine, really,” she said. “You better go, your sister needs you.”
A muscle in Aiden’s jaw twitched. He hesitated, looked at Harriet, then turned and followed his sister’s nurse.
Harriet’s nurse reached into a cabinet and pulled out two white paper-covered packages. She set one down and opened the other, revealing a sterile syringe.
“This will be a little pinch,” she said.
“My arm is on fire. Do you really think I’m going to feel your needle?”
“I suppose not, but it’s what they teach us to say. It seems like a better thing to say than ‘I know you’re in pain, but let me add a little more,’ don’t you think?”
“I guess,” Harriet said and only then realized the nurse had efficiently drawn two syringes of blood while she was talking.
“These will go to the lab just to be sure there wasn’t anything nasty in whatever was splashed on your arm. They’ll check to see if you absorbed anything into your bloodstream.”
“We recovered enough liquid from the bottle to test,” Detective Morse said as she came through the curtain.
“Great, so I didn’t need the blood test?”
“I’m sure they need to test your blood in any case, but we sent the bottle and liquid to the forensic lab for analysis.”
“I suppose you’re going to yell at me for being involved in yet another crime,” Harriet said and leaned her head back on her pillow.
“Actually, no. From all accounts, you were an innocent victim in this little drama. And the perp seems pretty upset that she got you and not whoever she intended to attack. Given the rather specific location, and the events of the last few days, I’m going to as
sume Jenny was her intended target.”
“Did she say she was trying to hit Jenny?” Harriet asked.
“She’s talked nonstop since we took her into custody, but none of it makes sense. She hasn’t mentioned Jenny by name, but it’s clear she was the target. I talked to the nurse who helped you and her daughter, but now I’d like to hear what you saw.”
Harriet described the blue-suited woman and the sequence of events that led to her being burned.
“Did you see or hear anything else that might shed some light on this incident?”
Harriet thought about Bobby and the story he’d told her but then rejected the idea of telling Morse before she’d had a chance to talk to Jenny. She should be the one to tell Morse about her brother, if she thought it was relevant, not Harriet.
“There was an incident of bleach being thrown on a show quilt a few years ago in Houston,” Harriet said. “It turned out to be a case of a sore loser in a civil lawsuit. Maybe this is something like that.”
“Maybe, but that would imply a relationship between Jenny and the perp.”
“Unless the woman got the wrong quilt altogether. Everyone involved in this show is in costume. Lots of people are wearing Afro wigs and big sunglasses with granny dresses.”
“Hopefully, the woman will calm down and tell us what this is all about. She wasn’t carrying any ID, so we don’t know who she is or why she might have done this. So far, she’s yelling something about her father. Does that mean anything to you?”
“Not at all. I’ve never seen that woman before in my life.”
A tall man in green scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck came into the curtained room.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave, Detective,” he said.
“I hope you feel better soon,” Morse said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’ll check back with you tomorrow.”
“I’m Doctor Mitchell,” the new arrival told Harriet, “and I’m going to take a look at that burn. If that’s okay with you.”
“Sure,” Harriet said. She wasn’t sure what he’d expected her to say. Did people in this situation refuse treatment? she wondered.
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