Book Read Free

Buried in Quilts

Page 14

by Sara Hoskinson Frommer


  “Paper,” Fred said thoughtfully. “As in paper money.”

  “Better yet. Leon was in such a hurry for cash. Wouldn’t he love to find it where he could just walk off with it! No probate, nothing to slow him down.” Even old Mrs. Brown from the center had emptied a joint account and lockbox before the bank found out her husband was dead—because, she’d told Joan afterwards, she couldn’t bear to wait months for what was rightfully hers.

  “We’re looking into the cuts in those quilts. We’ve taken all the ones that were cut into over to the station. If there’s anything in them, we’ll find it.”

  “You won’t wreck them, will you, Fred? I hear some of them are old and special. They say Edna never showed them.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be careful. We won’t have to do much—Kitty really opened them for us.”

  He’s still sure it’s Kitty, Joan thought, feeling a rush of sympathy for the woman.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said firmly. “For one thing, how could she? Kitty’s too little to cut those quilts down standing on the floor, and the ladders are gone.”

  “We don’t know when the ladders were moved.”

  “True, but Leon wouldn’t even have needed a ladder. Why are you stretching, Fred, when the obvious answer is staring you in the face?”

  He finally stopped pacing and balanced the mug on a stack of Andrew’s textbooks.

  “I’ve been holding out on you, Joan. We found a couple of hairs.”

  “Can you establish identity from a couple of hairs?” Joan thought it unlikely.

  “Not unless there’s enough root tissue and skin cells attached for a DNA match, and we don’t have that. But we can narrow it down from what we do have. Alice’s hair is long and straight, Mary Sue bleached hers, and Leon’s going gray. At first glance, Kitty’s the only one of the family they could have come from. We’ll match them with her hairbrush—the search warrant should have arrived by now.”

  “What about Harold? He doesn’t have much hair, but what he has looks a lot like Kitty’s. Leon said Alice could pretend all she cared about was family, because she knew Harold would see to it that she got hers. Not that I believe anything Leon says, but he sounded bitter enough that he may not have been putting that on. And Margaret Duffy said at the center the other day that Harold and Alice had made a bad cross-country move and couldn’t afford to change their minds and come home.”

  Fred nodded and scribbled something in his notebook. “Thanks. We’ll check it out.”

  “And how about prints? Weren’t there fingerprints on the plastic?”

  “Smudges, most of them. Useless. Too many people had handled it. There were some lipstick smudges on it, too, and one clear print of Mary Sue’s lips—too bad that’s no help.”

  Joan shuddered to think of circumstances in which a victim’s lip prints might help. It was a use she had never thought of for Mary Sue’s heavy makeup. She refused to be sidetracked.

  “I don’t know how those hairs got there, Fred Lundquist, or whether they came from Kitty. But they don’t prove a thing and you know it. Even if you establish that they were hers, all you’ll know is that she was there. We already know she was there. So were all the rest of them—I saw them myself. For that matter, maybe someone else took them out of her hairbrush and planted them at the scene.”

  “I’d hate to come up against you in court.” He sat down beside her. “You’re right, of course. That kind of circumstantial evidence would never hold up. I can’t make a case—yet. But I’ll keep digging.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “The truth?” He was smiling down into her eyes now.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She wasn’t sure just what she was afraid of. I can trust this man, she told herself. He’s not Leon. But how can he be so pigheaded? Doesn’t he know he can hurt an innocent person?

  Then the back door slammed, and she jumped like a guilty teenager.

  “Mom? Rebecca?” It was Andrew.

  “In the living room,” Joan called back. She grinned up at Fred. “Come see who’s here.”

  Fred met Andrew halfway across the room.

  “I was just leaving. You tell your sister she makes a mean curry.”

  “She said she was going to leave me some. You ate it, huh?” Andrew slid Fred’s mug off his books onto the end table and started rummaging in the pile. “It’s probably just as well. I’m a ham-and-eggs man myself.”

  The tension broken, Joan padded to the door with Fred. She’d see him at the Sagamore Inn on Saturday, when the orchestra would make one last stab at a dress rehearsal.

  After he’d left, it was all she could do not to warn Kitty.

  Spring Beauty

  Nope. Ask Mom—or walk.”

  “Andrew, come on! It’s a long way out there.”

  “Sorry, Bec. I need it. See you.” The back door slammed.

  Standing at her bedroom window, Joan looked down. Hunched over his low-slung handlebars, Andrew was already pedaling toward school. She breathed in April freshness. Moist leaves and soil warming in the sunshine.

  You can almost smell the worms, she thought—and the mushrooms. At home I’d know where to hunt.

  Home. It took her by surprise every time. Would she never feel that Oliver was home?

  Now she heard Rebecca climbing the stairs. She girded herself to say no.

  I don’t want to be without the car, any more than Andrew wanted to lend his bike. But it won’t be so easy for me—I know what she’ll say.

  She said it.

  “You always walk to work, Mom. Mind if I borrow your car for the morning?”

  “Where do you want to take it?” Even old private Rebecca would have to admit that that was her business.

  “Just out to Carolyn Ryrie’s cabin. She’s dyeing today. She says she’ll show me the whole process.”

  “Oh? Where’s the cabin?” Joan was stalling, and knew it.

  “Off old 46, in woods near the state forest. She drew me a map.”

  The curtains flapped, giving Joan another overwhelming whiff of spring. Why not? she thought. I could play hooky in the woods. While they’re dyeing, I’ll commune with nature. I’ll love it. And I deserve it.

  “Rebecca, I’ll be happy to take you out,” she said. “Hang on while I make a phone call.” Turning her back on any objections Rebecca might raise to having her mother along, she started dialing.

  “I’ll be back this afternoon,” she told the center. “I’m not sure when.”

  Already dressed for work, she changed to a long-sleeved flannel shirt, jeans, socks, and her oldest sneakers. She stuck a wad of toilet paper in one pants pocket, just in case, and went down to the kitchen for a couple of wax-paper bags, which she tucked into her other pocket. She’d soon forget them if she didn’t need them. But far more frustrating than finding no mushrooms would be finding more than she could carry.

  It was a short drive, but beautiful.

  Near the edge of town, the blacktop gave way first to gravel and then to dirt. Huge weathered woodpiles and bales of uneaten hay suggested that the locals had been prepared for much worse than the mild winter Joan had appreciated after long years in Michigan.

  They rode in silence past splotchy grass, with wild onions already green and tall. Here and there the sun glinted off the windshields of abandoned cars and trucks, their bodies dull with rust. Dried cattails waved stiffly in a ditch on one side of the road; on the other, raspberry canes stretched new red tips toward the earth.

  Along the curve of a little creek, sycamores with last year’s balls hanging from their bare branches stood out white against a newly plowed field. A haze of green interrupted by delicate red-brown patches and occasional dark green pines marked the beginning of the woods ahead.

  At a fork where dead-looking branches crossed the road above them, Rebecca came to life.

  “This is it.” She held out the map Carolyn had drawn the day they worked on the orchestra quilt. “Yo
u turn up that way. Then left at the little bridge. That’s the Oliver reservoir.”

  The road narrowed to a one-lane track surrounded by increasingly dense woods. They came to a clearing.

  “There’s her car,” said Rebecca.

  “It is a cabin!” Joan had pictured a small house, not these roughhewn logs. She pulled up and they both got out. Any minute now she expected Abe Lincoln to stride through the doorway. “Do you think it’s genuine?”

  Coming around the cabin, Carolyn answered her. “Only the front room. The rest has been added piecemeal. Come on in—I’ll show you.”

  Joan hesitated. Driving Rebecca out was one thing, but horning in on her visit would be another.

  “Oh, come on, Mom. You know you’re itching to see it.” True.

  “I’d love to, but I won’t stay. I came to walk in the woods.”

  “This won’t take long.” Carolyn ducked into the low doorway. Walking through straight up, Joan felt the frame brush the top of her hair. Abe never would have made it.

  A fieldstone fireplace and hearth dominated the dim room, and a ladder led to a dark loft. While Rebecca oohed and aahed, Joan wondered how many people had once lived in this small shelter. She tried to imagine winter months with small children.

  “How did they see to quilt?” Rebecca marveled.

  “Not very well, even in the daytime,” said Carolyn. “I wouldn’t try.” And she led them through the kitchen and past a bedroom and bath to her workroom, clearly a recent addition, with large windows on three sides and a skylight directly over a large table. Open cubbyholes on the long inside wall held folded pieces of fabric—blues here, reds there, yellows and browns farther along. Drawings on translucent paper lay on the table. At one end of the room stood an empty quilting frame, its poles wrapped in white cloth.

  Carolyn showed off lights recessed in the white ceiling. “I had them put in. Now day and night are the same to me.”

  “What a great studio!” Rebecca was poking her nose into corners. “I’m getting ideas already.” She looked at the drawings on the table. “Your designs are beautiful. Are they for a new one?”

  “No, this is the one they stole.” Carolyn slid the drawings into one of many wide, shallow drawers built into the table. “Let’s go back outside. I need to check the fire.”

  “You dye outside?” Joan asked.

  “Sure. Spills don’t matter out there, and I don’t have to worry about fumes.”

  Time for me to take off, Joan thought, and did. She left the two of them huddling like the witches in Macbeth and muttering about mordants.

  A narrow path led into the woods but soon disappeared. Looking back for landmarks, Joan took her bearings from the sun and the long shadows cast by the trees. It was old forest, with little underbrush—once the mature trees leafed out, few saplings would have a chance at sunlight. Her eyes followed the tall, straight trunks of oaks and tulip poplars up to their crowns until she felt dizzy. Then she sat down, leaned her head back against a beech, and listened to the silence. Only the soft rustle of the treetops far above her proved that she could hear at all.

  Gradually, although she couldn’t see them, she began to hear birds. Then, in the distance, she heard a hollow hammering. Sounds like a big one, she thought, and watched. The hammering came again, and the unmistakable silhouette of a pileated woodpecker appeared on a tree across a deep gorge—Woody in the feathers. She wondered how her tree would sound if the bird attacked while her head was still touching it, but it kept its distance. Then she stood up, stretched, and looked for a stick to poke the dead leaves.

  A couple of hours later she hadn’t found a single mushroom, but she’d hiked hillsides covered with bloodroot and cut-leaf toothwort in full bloom, budding trillium and fuzzy wild poppies, and May apples with their leaves furled. It was too soon to see jack-in-the-pulpits or fiddleheads—only the Christmas ferns were green—but the spring beauties were out, and the trout lilies were the biggest she’d ever seen.

  Her calves aching from climbing the steep hills, Joan felt at peace. She turned back toward the cabin, aiming for the sun, and was delighted to arrive, if not at the path she had taken behind it, then at least in the clearing in front of it.

  An old red pickup had joined the cars, and she could hear a man’s voice coming from behind the cabin.

  “You know I’m good for the money. When did I ever let you down?” he pleaded softly in the accents of rural southern Indiana. His voice sounded vaguely familiar.

  Joan walked around the cabin. Now she could see him. A tall man, he bent as if he were trying to hide his chest. The wiry arms sticking out of his shirtsleeves sprouted hair as sandy as the wisps sticking out through the back of his ventilated John Deere cap. When he turned and she saw his face, she recognized him as the man who had delivered Snarr’s folding chairs to the inn. His full attention was fixed on Carolyn.

  Carolyn snorted.

  “Let me down? You don’t call taking off without a word letting me down? I was worried sick—I kept imagining you lying in a ditch and no one coming to help. But then someone saw you in Martinsville. That was weeks ago. You didn’t so much as call until today.”

  “A man’s got to have his freedom.”

  “Not at my expense.” Carolyn turned her back on him and stirred a dye pot with a stick. Briefly, Joan’s eyes met Rebecca’s. They kept their faces still.

  “I told you, I’ll pay you as soon as I get back. When this deal goes through, we’ll be in clover.”

  “There’s no way you could …” Carolyn’s voice trailed off. She turned to face him. “Actually, Ralph, there is something. And it won’t cost you a thing.”

  “Uh-huh.” He wasn’t having any.

  “I mean it. You still have that last shirt I made you?”

  His jaw tensed. “Why?”

  “You put that up as collateral, and I’ll lend you the money.”

  “Now why would you do a thing like that?”

  “I’m having trouble matching the browns.”

  “It’s pretty beat up. Got a big hole in it.”

  Carolyn didn’t flinch. “I don’t care. I don’t need the shirt, just the fabric. And only for a few days. You can have it back—if you want it.”

  “You really mean it.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I won’t say no. And hey, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, Ralph.” She flashed him a smile Joan thought could melt a man down into a puddle. “Any chance you’d go after it today, while we’re still working here?” She waved her stick at the fire.

  Uh-huh, Joan thought. Maybe he was going to get a loan, but if he thought he was going to pick up with Carolyn where he left off, he was in for a surprise. This was business.

  “Sure thing. I’ll be right back.” Acknowledging Joan and Rebecca for the first time with a two-fingered salute that almost made it to the bill of his cap, he started for his truck.

  Then Rebecca spoke quietly into Carolyn’s ear. She nodded.

  “One more thing, Ralph,” she said. He pulled up short. There was going to be a catch to it, after all.

  “When you come back, could you give Rebecca a lift into town?”

  Rebecca beamed at Joan.

  “We’re just getting a good start, Mom. There’s no reason you should hang around, if Ralph will take me home.” Translate that as hang around and cramp my style, Joan thought.

  “Glad to.” Visibly relieved, Ralph swung into the pickup and raised a cloud of dust down the road toward town.

  Joan had a sinking feeling about entrusting Rebecca to him. But I’m not, she told herself. Rebecca’s doing the entrusting. Why is that so clear when she’s far away and so foggy when we’re standing next to each other?

  “I’m sorry you had to hear all that,” Carolyn told her. “I would have sent him packing if it weren’t for that shirt.”

  “The one you were talking about the other day? That matches your stolen quilt?”

  “That’s it. Ralph
doesn’t need to know I’m going to display it in public—I hope it’s not too far gone. Sometimes he’s hard on clothes.”

  “Doing what?” Rebecca asked. Joan wondered how hard embalming people was on clothes.

  “Just about everything. He can fix anything from a car to a computer, and does. He did a lot of the work on my cabin and taught me how to stack wood and clean a chimney. You need skills to survive the simple life in the nineties, and Ralph’s a surviver. But I know better now than to count on him.”

  Joan wished her good luck, told Rebecca she’d see her when she saw her, and left for home.

  Less than half an hour later, without exactly having decided to stop, she was sitting in Fred’s office telling him about it. “It’s probably nothing,” she said. Rebecca would call that discounting herself.

  “‘Probably nothing’ is where some of our best leads come from. Think I’ll call Sergeant Pruitt in on this one.” He picked up the phone.

  Joan remembered the solid man with freckles who appeared at the office door.

  “C’mon in, Kyle,” Fred said. “You’ve met Mrs. Spencer.”

  “Yes, sir. Ma’am.”

  Joan repeated her brief story. Pruitt blushed when she came to Carolyn’s obvious anger. She didn’t try to guess why, but went on to describe the deal Carolyn had struck.

  “So he’s going back to take her a brown shirt—about now, if he meant what he said.”

  Pruitt sat up even straighter, if that was possible.

  “Brown? Cotton? Printed like her quilt?” He seemed to know all about Carolyn’s quilt.

  Joan nodded.

  “What does this Ralph look like?”

  “Kind of a tall, skinny version of you. Maybe thirty-five.”

  Fred chuckled at that, and Pruitt blushed again, but he didn’t quit.

  “I don’t suppose you saw him run?”

  “Run?” Puzzled, she shook her head. “He just walked over to his pickup and climbed in.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Red-and-black-checked shirt and blue jeans. Boots. A John Deere cap.” Pruitt was nodding.

 

‹ Prev