“Okay,” she said, and he was out the back door, untethering his ten-speed and hoisting it over the back-porch railing. “Did you fix your bike light?” she called after him. Suddenly deaf, he swung one long leg over the crossbar and disappeared around the corner of the house.
Joan dawdled until she could put it off no longer. She rinsed her bowl and spoon, collected her viola and the box of music folders, shouldered her bag, turned on the porch light, and locked the door.
Halfway down the front walk, she heard the telephone.
Follow-the-Leader
In the end, she was late.
Ordinarily, Alex Campbell conducted without apparent concern for her players’ time. Ordinarily, Joan arrived well ahead of time to consult with her, distribute new music or the folders of players who hadn’t taken theirs home to practice, and make general announcements while the last few people straggled in.
Tonight nothing was ordinary.
After parking in the fire lane to avoid a ten-minute trek to the auditorium past the cars and school buses that crowded the Oliver Consolidated High School parking lot (some school function must be going on, she thought) Joan sprinted down the long hall. The corners of the music box poked her left calf as she ran, and the weight of the viola pulling on her bow arm made her wish, not for the first time, that she’d never let herself be talked out of playing the flute.
“There she is!” The shout went up as soon as she opened the auditorium door.
“Where have you been?” Alex demanded with the force she usually reserved for a player who missed a cue in dress rehearsal. “You know we don’t have this kind of time to waste. We play in a week.”
Joan’s cheeks burned. She hurried to the back of the stage and dumped her things on the table from which refreshments would be served during the break. Unstrapping the box, she distributed folders to players who circled it like moths around a light.
This is ridiculous, she thought. They should have been able to start without me. A week away from the concert I shouldn’t be taking home anything but extra parts. Isn’t anyone practicing?
By the time she could slide into fourth chair of the viola section, Alex was already announcing the two dances from Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo—“Saturday Night Waltz” and “Hoedown.”
There were, Joan thought, worse pieces to begin on if you hadn’t had a chance to tune. During the bars that mimicked a fiddler tuning up, she listened for the open A and checked her own four strings. Then came the waltz itself, sweet and slow. Back to the open strings, and the “Hoedown” cut loose—a joy, with notes that fell comfortably under her fingers and bowing that rollicked over the strings as if there could be no other way. First down low in comfortable viola range—then much faster and higher, but still delightfully playable. The violas even had the tune!
For years now, Joan had preferred her awkwardly large instrument above all others, even when her back ached from supporting it. She loved its warm sound enough not to mind the cracks people made about violists as incompetent violinists demoted to playing easy parts: “What do musicians call a half step?” “Two viola players trying to play the same note.” And she knew all too well why playing second fiddle meant standing in someone’s shadow—the first violins got all the good tunes. But compared to the violas, even the seconds basked in sunshine. What would it be like to play the melody like this all the time?
John Hocking, her stand partner, was digging in with enthusiasm. His jaw tucked into his chin rest, he gave her a lopsided grin when she leaned forward to turn the last page.
The rehearsals had gone well over the past several weeks, and this relaxed fun was the payoff.
Even Alex found little to criticize.
“If you can do that in the concert, we’ll have them all dancing,” she said. “Let’s run through the fanfare. You strings be patient a minute—I’ll need you for the Ives before the break.”
Joan had learned enough about Alex’s “minutes” not to face them without something to stave off boredom. She’d spend this one checking the orchestra personnel list for errors before taking the program to the printer. She wished she’d paid closer attention to that whole process last fall, when Yoichi Nakamura was manager. She hadn’t known then that she would inherit his job, or how impossible some of the simplest things could be. Like getting the orchestra members to correct their names before it was too late.
“Are you all right?” John Hocking asked softly when she laid her viola on her seat and turned back to the table where she’d left the list. “It’s not like you to be late.”
“I’m fine,” she said, and for the moment, she was. Then the worry swept over her again—worry that had made her, late or not, incapable of ignoring what had surely been Rebecca’s call. But her front-door key had jammed in the lock, she’d fumbled the receiver, and finally only the dial tone had rung in her ear.
John had a daughter—he’d understand. But what could she say, even to him? My daughter’s in trouble? She didn’t know any such thing.
A hush behind her meant that Alex had lifted her baton. Staring into the raised bells of the brass section, Joan knew it was time to move while she still had all her hearing. She’d often wished for one of those clear plastic baffles some orchestras attached to the back of a chair to protect the ears of the player sitting in it from unbearable volume close behind. Now she just scooted past John and behind the brass. From back there, she quite liked Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” with which the concert would begin. There were some compensations to being manager, she thought. Alex would have fussed if another player had taken an unauthorized break, but everybody expected her to move around during rehearsal.
Her problem was getting in enough playing time. She was forever hopping up to deal with some interruption or other. She hadn’t yet played through Ives’s “Unanswered Question,” and it worried her.
It was the scoring—for strings, flutes, and solo trumpet—that had done her in. In a rare instance of sensible scheduling, Alex had been saving the piece for the end of each week’s rehearsal, to let the rest of the orchestra go home. Between checking out music and hearing players’ complaints, Joan hadn’t yet managed to rehearse it. And unlike much of the raucous music of Charles Ives, this brief piece was so soft that she didn’t even know how her part sounded. She was glad Alex had decided to tack it on to the first half of the rehearsal tonight. The others could take an extra-long break instead of leaving early.
When the last notes of the fanfare sounded, she put away her lists and programs, went back to the table, picked up her viola, and tightened her bow.
“I’ll be out of your way now,” she said to the new volunteer from the symphony guild who had begun setting out cups and cookies for the break. “Where’s your help?” Usually those ladies came in pairs, like Mormon missionaries.
“Mary Sue Ellett was scheduled, but you know her mother died, so of course she won’t be here,” the woman said. “I don’t mind doing it alone. It’s no trouble.”
Well, no. Joan had long suspected the orchestra members of being capable of ladling their own punch. But someone had baked those cookies at home.
“Thank you,” she said, her managerial hat on firmly. “We really appreciate all the guild does for the orchestra.” Resisting temptation, she started back to her seat to play the Ives at last.
She should have known.
“Joan! I have to talk to you!” Mary Sue Ellett was squeezing her way between the stands. The players hunched protectively over their instruments as she descended on them, and the glare Alex directed at her back would have shriveled a tuba.
“Would you believe that?” the guild volunteer asked nobody in particular. “Her own mother!”
Good thing you didn’t see her at the funeral parlor, Joan thought. She intercepted Mary Sue as she emerged from between the violas and woodwinds.
“Let’s go out in the hall,” Joan said. “They’re about to start the Ives.”
“Ives—good L
ord, yes. We wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves think.”
In the echoing, chairless hall, the tiled floor stretched uninvitingly, streaked with spring mud from hundreds of young feet. They stood—Joan comfortably flat, Mary Sue teetering over her in the spike heels she’d worn to the calling hours at Snarr’s.
What could be so important that she’d come here tonight? Joan wondered.
“You have to help me.”
Mary Sue always was one for coming right to the point without saying anything.
“How?”
In the past few months Joan had learned not to say yes too soon. After the scene she’d witnessed at Snarr’s, she wasn’t inclined to say much of anything.
“I want to talk to the orchestra. It’s about the quilt show you’re playing for.”
Joan hadn’t thought of it quite that way. The Oliver College Fine Arts Department, the Oliver Quilters’ Guild, and the Alcorn County Historical Society had indeed asked the orchestra to play this all-American concert during the week of the quilt show, as a kind of added attraction. With Mary Sue representing the guild on the symphony board, the question had been settled quickly. The concert, like the show, would take place in the historic Sagamore Inn.
“What about it?” Joan asked now.
“I’m short ten sitters. The orchestra will just have to fill in—I’m running out of time.”
“The orchestra—” Joan stopped dead. “Mary Sue, these people love music, and they’ll play for a quilt show or almost anything else that’s legal. But they don’t do babies.” Or windows.
“No, no, no. Not baby-sitters. Hall sitters—to watch over the quilts. I talked to your friend Lieutenant Lundquist. He’s in charge of security, and he was sure you’d help.” Mary Sue showed white teeth between startlingly red lips. She’d touched up her makeup since leaving Snarr’s. “He’ll be disappointed in you, Joan.”
Oh, the joys of living in a small town. In Mary Sue’s mouth, “your friend” sounded serious. Actually, Joan hadn’t seen Fred Lundquist for months, but quilts weren’t the only things created out of whole cloth in Oliver. She knew Fred well enough, though, to be morally certain that he wouldn’t have volunteered her to do anything without asking first.
On the other hand, why should she be caught in the middle? The players could speak for themselves. Maybe some would even want to help.
“You ask them, Mary Sue. Quilting’s not my thing.” Neither is extortion.
“I’m sorry, Joan. Of course.” The battle won, Mary Sue could afford to be gracious. “Will you at least introduce me?”
“Oh, sure. Come on.”
They went back in to hear the last plaintive trumpet theme trail off. The strings faded away to nothing and then less than nothing, bows scarcely moving, only a few hairs touching. Alex stood with her eyes almost closed, the baton pointing to her chin and a finger to her lips. Then she dropped her hands and smiled, her round face lighting up.
“Nice job, all of you. For the concert, we’ll have the strings in the wings, the flutes up here, and the trumpet—Joan, would you see if we can put him in the balcony? That would be ideal.”
Joan waved agreement and went forward.
“Before you break, Alex, we have a couple of announcements.”
“Let’s keep it short. We started late,” Alex said, but she stepped down with what looked like relief, fanning herself with one pudgy hand and heading around the cellos toward the iced punch.
Joan stood by the podium.
“Be sure to check how your name is spelled on the personnel list by the door. What’s on that list is what goes on the program. The concert will be a week from Sunday in the ballroom of the old Sagamore Inn. We’ll rehearse there next Wednesday.”
“What about music stands?” someone called from the back.
“Bring stands. Concert dress is the usual long black. That’s it from me. Now Mary Sue Ellett, from the guild, has a favor to ask. Then we’ll break, but you heard Alex. Five minutes.”
Joan waved Mary Sue forward and wandered back to the punch and cookies. The guild volunteer, her mouth open and her eyes on Mary Sue, handed Joan a cup. Never retiring, Mary Sue mounted the podium.
“You sounded beautiful just now,” she began.
How would she know? Joan thought. She didn’t hear more than fifteen seconds of it. And I’m not going to listen to that much of her. Lifting a cookie from the plate, she ducked out.
Merry-Go-Round
Lieutenant Fred Lundquist, OPD, was already covered up when Captain Altschuler dropped the quilt show on him. All year, a rash of overnight computer thefts had been plaguing college offices. Rather than lugging off heavy printers or bulky monitors, the thief or thieves were breaking into the machines to steal only the expensive chips and cards that made them run. Months of hard work had disappeared with the hard disk drives on which it was stored. Thousands of dollars’ worth of such stolen goods could be concealed in an instant, leaving the police few options. Asking every person moving on campus at night to strip to the buff was not one of them.
Just once, they’d come close. Late one evening, a professor returning to finish writing an exam had chased a man he saw leaving his office. Yelling, he attracted the attention of a police officer patrolling the campus. The man escaped over a seven-foot chain-link fence, leaving bits of a brown cotton shirt and old blue jeans on its prongs. The professor couldn’t tell them much except that he was tall.
“And in some kind of shape! He went over that fence as easily as I’d walk upstairs.”
A student? Maybe. Maybe not. The professor, not given to backing up his hard drive on floppy disks, had left the station house mourning the loss of at least a month’s work—and his database of old exam questions.
Spring break, when many faculty members and most students alike skipped town, would leave the computers on campus even more vulnerable than usual, and Fred knew it would increase the ordinary sort of burglaries in houses and dorms. And the annual influx of visitors to the quilt show would attract con artists and purse snatchers and give them crowds in which to disappear. It happened every year.
Through his open office door, Fred could see the woman berating Kyle Pruitt. He thought he might have heard her even if the oak door had been closed.
“Laundry!” she exploded. “Just because it was hanging outside doesn’t make it laundry! If you don’t appreciate the value of art, take me to someone who does!”
Fred couldn’t see Kyle or hear his reply, but he could imagine the color spreading across the freckled face. Assertive women flustered Sergeant Pruitt. Angry ones did him in. Fred wondered how long he would hold out.
She towered over Pruitt in a camouflage jacket and farmyard boots, with a flowing skirt that almost touched the boots. Her dark hair, streaked with what had to be premature gray, was on the wild side, but even in her anger her vowels were shaped and her consonants precise.
Not from around here, Fred thought. Another East Coast dropout. Living in the cooperative, maybe, or trying to eke out a living with a garden and a cow. She probably ought to be ranting in the sheriff’s office, not the OPD. Wonder how long she’ll last. She’s made it through the winter, anyhow.
He couldn’t hear Pruitt’s soft reply.
“No, I won’t sit down, and don’t give me that ‘boys will be boys’ crap,” the woman raged. “You haven’t done a thing for two weeks—I won’t let you put me off any longer. This isn’t vandalism, it’s theft! That quilt was unique. I dyed and printed the cloth myself. It stood a good chance of winning the top prize next week. Now I’ve missed the deadline. Your ‘boys’ have done me out of at least five thousand.”
Maybe, Fred thought. But I hear the competition’s pretty stiff.
“You get your act together and find out who took my quilt,” she said. “Or what you’re calling a prank will cost Oliver one hell of a lot more than it cost me. I don’t have to go to court, either. If I get the word out, the quilters will boycott your precious show. Nobody’
s going to send good work to a rinky-dink town where the cops treat a valuable quilt like a pair of coed’s panties.”
Boycott? Never mind jurisdiction. It was time to get involved. Fred picked up his phone and dialed Pruitt’s extension.
“Come on in, Kyle,” he said. “And bring her with you. Let’s see what we can do.”
“Something more your size, Fred,” Captain Warren Altschuler had called the request from the Alcorn County Quilt Show committee earlier in the week.
Fred had quirked a blond eyebrow and smiled down at the stocky chief of detectives standing in his office door.
“Thimbles?”
“This is serious. I wouldn’t lie to you.” Warren Altschuler’s pug-ugly face was as earnest as his gravelly voice.
It was true. Since his success in solving last fall’s orchestra murders, Fred had been treated with noticeably greater respect. There was no point in thinking about a promotion or raise until the Oliver town council passed the budget in June, but for a few months he’d been getting decent assignments. He no longer daydreamed of retiring.
“Sorry,” he said, and meant it. “Take a load off. What’s their problem?”
For years the quilt show had managed without an official police liaison. Just off the courthouse square, the grand old Sagamore Inn was spitting distance from the police department—an officer or the ambulance could be there at a moment’s notice.
Altschuler chose a straight wooden chair instead of the big old leather one he usually preferred. Fred cleared a corner of his desk for Altschuler’s feet and settled his big Swedish frame in the swivel chair behind it, but Altschuler kept his feet on the floor.
“Theft. Big stuff.”
“Since when?” Fred couldn’t remember a serious incident at the show in his years in Oliver. There might be a call or two about someone overcome by the heat in the historic building, authentic to its lack of air-conditioning—and indoor plumbing, for that matter. He was grateful that the purists had weakened on the matter of electricity.
“So far we’ve been lucky,” Altschuler said. “But the quilters’ guilds are boycotting shows where quilts walked off last year. One up in Indy closed before it opened.”
Buried in Quilts Page 2