The heavy door didn’t yield when Fred tried the latch. Joan felt better. She couldn’t have walked in by herself, after all. He eased a key into the Yale lock, turned, and pulled. The door swung open and the noise poured out.
“They’d never have heard me,” Joan said.
“Might not have let you in if they had. They’re kind of jumpy this year.”
“Mary Sue Ellett knows me.” And it’s her fault I’m even here.
“Yes.” His eyes crinkled again. “I found that out.”
Joan didn’t ask. Maybe he would have said more, but just then a blue van with “Snarr’s Funeral Home” on the side pulled up the curving drive. The sandy-haired man who hopped out wore blue jeans and a checked shirt. Tall and wiry, he looked more like a woodsman than a mortician.
“You the lady from the orchestra?” he asked. And, when she nodded, “Bud says you need chairs.”
“See you,” Fred said, and went on in. Then he stuck his head back out. “I’ll prop the door for you, Joan. It’s self-locking. Just pull it shut.”
“Okay. Thanks, Fred.” She turned to Bud Snarr’s helper. “You unload them and bring them in while I find out where to set them up, okay?”
“Sure thing.” He pulled the back doors open and vaulted into the rear of the van.
Joan left him to it and went into the front hall. The din made her think kindly of trumpets. Mostly it was hammering, punctuated by occasional bursts of a power saw, with people constantly yelling to make themselves heard.
No sign of Fred. Dodging two young women sprinting past her, both loaded down with quilts, she stared at their attire: blue jeans, T-shirts—and white gloves.
“Who’s there?” The shout came from a skirted table piled high with bulging pillowcases and plastic bags through which she could see patchwork. Startled, she jumped.
“Joan Spencer,” she called back. “From the orchestra.” Where was Mary Sue? She felt silly talking to pillowcases.
Now white-gloved hands pushed them apart and revealed a little dumpling of a woman behind a table stacked with folded quilts. The woman picked up a clipboard and a pencil, flipped pages with the eraser, and ran a finger down one without actually touching it.
“Spencer? I’m not finding you.” She scrutinized Joan, who was leaning over the table to hear. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to tuck that necklace away, dear, and your watch. We can’t have you snagging a quilt. What committee did you say you’re on?”
Joan checked her watch—quarter to six—and left it on her wrist.
“No committee. I’ve come to set up for the symphony rehearsal.”
“In the middle of all this?”
“I hope not,” Joan said fervently. “We’re not rehearsing until tomorrow night. Will it still be this noisy in here?”
“Heavens, no! The judges are already here. We started hanging yesterday.”
Judges? Hanging? It sounded grim.
Flipping pages again, the woman ran on.
“It’s a subjective business, don’t you know. We can’t outguess the judges completely. You always want the winners up front, but if we waited for them, we’d never open on time. So we do the best we can. We put the ones we think are likely to win in front, and hope that something huge we’ve hung in back doesn’t mess up all our arrangements by winning best in show. We need to get them all up by this time tomorrow—they’ll be judging and giving lectures and demonstrations before the show opens Sunday.”
The hanging judges had disappeared as quickly as Joan’s imagination had conjured them up.
“There it is!” the woman said with satisfaction. “Oliver Civic Symphony—what did you say your name was?”
Joan told her again. She looked up from her clipboard.
“The manager! Why didn’t you say so? You want the ballroom. That’s where you’ll be playing.” A pristine forefinger pointed the way.
“Is Mary Sue Ellett here?”
“She’s in and out—I haven’t seen her lately.”
Joan could understand why.
Blue Jeans ran up to the table, peeling off white gloves and ignoring Joan.
“Polly, isn’t the Ellett list done yet? I’ve got to take it over before six.”
Flipping pages again, Polly detached two from her clipboard and handed them over.
“You’re a doll—the printer’s tearing his hair.” The jeans disappeared through the front door.
“They’re hanging a special display of Edna Ellett’s quilts in a room upstairs,” Polly told Joan. “We had to change the program at the last minute. You might try up there.”
Mary Sue hadn’t lost a week because of her mother’s death, after all. She’d gained a special display.
“Thanks.” Following the noise, Joan walked into a spacious room. On one side, two men hammering two-by-fours onto wooden whirligig bases were putting together something like tall hat racks, with holes up where the hooks should have been. Between bangs, they were carrying on a lively conversation. The polished wooden floor and walls echoed and magnified each blow.
Had Alex listened to these bathtub acoustics before agreeing to play here? She’d like the big sound, but every miserable mistake would carry.
Too late now. At least the room was beautiful, with graceful stairways curving from each side up to a circular walkway, its banisters dark against the white wall. Standing in the center, Joan stretched her neck back to look at the ceiling two stories above. It made her dizzy.
Through open doors she saw three women bent over a quilt spread out on a table in the next room. Beyond them, a few quilts were already hanging between standards like the ones whose construction had nearly deafened her.
“Let’s check the back,” she heard clearly, and realized that the hammering had stopped. Three pairs of white gloves turned the quilt over, and the debate began.
“This’ll never make it. You can see the knots. Here’s one, and there—and there’s another.”
“But the design is spectacular!”
“Won’t save it, not with Duckworth judging. She’s a real stickler. I vote we put it halfway back. Maybe next to that blue Barn Raising.” The others nodded. They slid a pole into a cloth sleeve sewn to the back of the quilt. Two of them carried the pole to the tall stepladders standing ready beside a pair of those odd-looking standards, while the third kept the quilt from dragging on the floor. Joan watched them insert the pole into one of the holes and then turned back to the ballroom.
More women carrying quilts up the stairs gave her an idea of the traffic pattern.
All right, she thought. If the orchestra sits between the two stairways, people can choose between standing to listen and just walking by on their way from one exhibit to another. It’s dark under the balcony. Will the folks sitting there be able to read the music? Maybe, but I’ll sure hear about it.
Making a mental note to find stand lights, she headed back to the door and picked up a chair under each arm. Snarr’s helper came in with four more.
“Here’s the last of the load. Where do you want ’em?”
“We’re going to be in here,” she told him, and took off for the ballroom. He followed, looking around at the few quilts that were already hanging.
“This is something else,” he said. “Wonder what kind of beating they’d take if someone got careless with matches around this old place a couple of days from now.”
Joan shuddered.
“Don’t even think it!” But she looked at the old plank floors with a new eye.
“I wouldn’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “They’re probably insured to the gills.” He unfolded his chairs next to hers and went back for more.
Twenty minutes later, they had finished setting up. She counted seats. Eight in the innermost row—her mind’s eye saw the two first violins, two seconds, two cellos, and two violas. Flutes and oboes in the second row, with the strings fanning out on either side of them. Clarinets and bassoons in the third, horns and brass in the back.
“
We’re in good shape,” she told the man. “I’m not going to worry about setting up for the basses and percussion. No matter where we put them, Alex is sure to move them. We have enough chairs—that’s the main thing. Thanks so much. And tell Bud I’m grateful.”
“Bud said he owed it to Mary Sue Ellett—I guess she’s in charge of this whole affair.”
“That’s right. Do you know her, too?”
“Wish I didn’t. She still hasn’t paid me for some electrical work I did six months ago. But I didn’t take it out on her mother.”
Joan processed that.
“You worked for Edna, too?”
“Embalmed her and laid her out.” Oh. “I do a lot of the work in Snarr’s back room. Bud’s getting old, and Gil would rather wear a suit and run funerals.”
“Well, thank them anyway.”
“Sure thing,” he said, and left. She heard the big door slam.
By now the foot traffic had stopped and the group from the next room had adjourned. Beyond it, the entrance hall was dark. Along the ballroom wall the carpenters’ tools lay in a grove of new support posts and fresh-cut poles that smelled like Christmas.
In the blessed quiet, Joan thought for a moment that she was alone in the building. Then she heard something crash to the floor upstairs. Must be Fred and the kids. Or Mary Sue? Probably no point in asking for stand lights. But she climbed the stairs anyway.
Light and warmth streamed out of one room. She walked around the curve to the doorway and was stopped by a mammoth Double Wedding Ring quilt hanging just inside. Its flamboyant colors made the Double Wedding Ring her Grandma Zimmerman had pieced out of sugar sacks look anemic, even in her memory.
Intense whispers filtered through the quilt.
“She’d never leave it to you.”
“I know what she left me.”
“Don’t you count on it! She said you could talk the hind leg off a mule. But not even you could talk her into that. I’ll stop you. You have no right.”
Joan was torn between fascination and wanting to tiptoe away before she was caught listening. Someone else must be in the room—why else would these two be whispering? They couldn’t know she was there. But she knew the words she was hearing weren’t meant for her.
Feeling melodramatic, she went back to the stairs to make noise.
“Fred?” she called, as she came around the curve again. “Mary Sue? Are you all right?”
This time Mary Sue stuck her head out the door.
“Hello, Joan. Don’t worry about the racket. We just knocked over one of Mother’s quilts—we’re hanging them. Come see them. She’d like that.”
That’s not the way I heard it, Joan thought. But maybe she would, at that. Family and friends are different from a public exhibit.
They were all there. Mary Sue, Alice, Kitty. Leon and a little man in glasses, with a curly brown fringe around his bald head, whom Mary Sue introduced as Harold, Alice’s husband, were hauling ladders around the room and sweating freely. No one looked embarrassed.
Good. They don’t know I heard.
A dozen quilts were already spaced between the wall and the antiques that gave the old inn its charm.
“Did Edna make them all?” All those little stitches?
“She made two or three a year until her sight got so bad,” said Mary Sue. “Most of these are hers, but some have been handed down in the family.”
Alice pointed to a crazy quilt of dark silks and velvets, spread out on a maple trundle bed. “I love to stroke this one. I used to beg to sleep under it. Sometimes she’d let me.”
“That should be yours, Alice,” Mary Sue said. “Unless, of course, Mother willed it to someone outside the family.” She turned to Joan. “We don’t know about her will yet. It’s a nuisance.”
Leon muttered something. Harold laughed. Kitty, stitching a folded strip of cloth across the back of a quilt, didn’t say anything.
Joan made sympathetic noises. But she wondered about the words she had overheard. There had never been any secret about the content of the wills her own family’s lawyers had taken so long to work through.
She wondered, too, whether Mary Sue was being as generous as she sounded. Was a worn crazy quilt as valuable as, say, the well-preserved one in soft green and rose, with the tiny, dense quilting stitches? She pointed to it.
“Tell me about this one.”
“Oh, that’s one of those that came down from Rachel Berry,” said Alice. “Mother always made over Rachel—her great-great-grandmother. She was thrilled to inherit her things.”
“Rachel impressed everyone,” Leon said. “She made a point of it.” He swapped grins with Joan, his boyish appeal in full force.
“That branch of the Berrys went broke a long time ago,” he said. “We just got leavings. But Alice is right. To hear Mom, anything from Rachel was solid gold. Trouble is, I need a little of the real kind.”
Joan’s stomach growled. She fought back a yawn.
Past time to get out of here. I don’t need to listen to Leon tonight.
“Mary Sue, I’ve got the orchestra set up downstairs for tomorrow night. The lighting is uneven down there—we’re going to need some stand lights and extension cords.”
“Some what lights?”
“Stand lights. You know. They clip on the music stands.”
“Never heard of them.”
Oh, well. It was worth a try. “I’ll try to borrow some. If we have to rent them for this shindig, I’ll send you the bill. You want to come check where I’ve put us?”
“I’m sure you know what you’re doing.” Mary Sue was already waving to Leon and Harold to move their ladders over to the fallen quilt.
Joan hadn’t really expected her to bother checking, not after passing the buck twice. She started down the stairs—and looked over the railing to admire her handiwork.
A tornado had cut its way through her careful seating pattern. Jumbled every which way, the chairs had been pushed out to the sides. A broad swath of open floor gleamed from the concertmaster’s spot back to a small door behind the second trumpet’s.
“What’s going on here?” Joan ran the rest of the way down as if she weren’t ready to drop. There was no mistaking the flaming hair framed in the open door.
“That’s what I want to know,” said Catherine. On Sunday, Joan hadn’t been sure. Tonight, though, Catherine’s hostility was plain. “You did that?” they asked simultaneously, and glared at each other.
This might be funny in a hundred years.
“Yes, I did.” Joan struggled to keep her voice from going shrill. “Who gave you the right to tear it up?”
“Who gave you the right to block the kitchen door? I have to set up here for the judges’ reception tomorrow!”
Oh. Joan made a stab at peace.
“Sorry.” And she almost was. “The left hand must not be talking to the right around here. I set up the orchestra where they told me to, and I just now cleared it with Mary Sue Ellett.” She glanced upstairs.
“You sure you have the right Ellett?” Catherine asked sweetly. “I saw you out with Leon the other night. Leon, when you had a chance at Fred. You’re a bigger fool than Linda Lundquist.”
Joan gaped, and shut her mouth.
Catherine smiled.
“Better keep your eye on Leon. But then, you won’t have any trouble doing that, will you? I hear meddling in other people’s affairs is your forte.”
She pronounced it “for-tay,” as in loud.
Joan dug out the seating diagram. Willing her fingers not to shake, she laid it on the closest chair.
“I expect to find it like this tomorrow night at seven,” she said.
And left.
After the Fall
The next evening, Bud’s chairs were back in some semblance of order, and the acoustics were greatly improved.
In the midst of the hammering, Joan had despaired that the ballroom’s polished wooden floors and walls would be much too “live,” jumbling the notes t
hat ricocheted off them. Now the quilts hanging along the walls and from the balcony overhead were making all the difference. The Copland “Hoedown” had a rollicking clarity, and not even the fanfare was too loud.
Enjoying it, Joan looked through the open doors into a room now hung with row upon colorful row, like laundry lines gone wild.
Rebecca had prepared her for quantity, but the variety astonished her. Here, muted tones blended subtly. There, colors rioted. And over there, shadings tricked her eyes into seeing three dimensions where there were only two. Traditional geometric and floral patterns rubbed shoulders with abstractions that might have been painted by Mondrian or Kandinsky.
On the wall nearest her, rosy brown lovers hung intimately entwined in overstuffed embrace. Looking closely, Joan saw that this oddity was really a double sleeping bag. The lovers’ soft-sculpture heads would pillow those of the sleepers, who might blush to see a photograph of the resulting effect—if anybody blushed anymore. She nudged John Hocking with her left elbow.
“Look at that one.” The fanfare ended in the middle of her sentence. She dropped her voice.
“Wild, isn’t it?” he murmured, reaching out to stroke a bare bottom. “Any relation?”
Joan stared. But his face wore only its usual cheerful expression. He leaned back to let her read the neatly printed label basted to one corner.
AFTER THE FALL
REBECCA SPENCER $2000
And she’d been trying to picture Rebecca piecing little squares! She should have known better. Was the price possible?
Maybe she can’t bear to part with it, Joan thought. But if she’s really pulling in that kind of money, I can quit worrying about her. She said something about designing a line …
“You all right?” It was John.
“Oh … sorry.” She came back. “I’m fine. I didn’t exactly expect this.” She grinned at him. “Rebecca’s my daughter.”
“I thought maybe.” Now he was laughing.
“I wonder if this is the only thing she entered.” She was suddenly wild to know.
“Go ahead. I’ll cover for you in the Ives.”
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