Buried in Quilts

by Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  The introductions began. Joan immediately lost the names and wondered why they couldn’t put signs in front of the people. She retained the bare bones: a tall bean pole of a woman had worked on the Indiana Quilt Project, a short, dumpy one on the Kentucky Quilt Project, and a woman wearing a badge and a ruffled shirtwaist that Joan suspected of being attached to a long skirt behind the table was a member of the Alcorn County Historical Society. The Oliver College Fine Arts Department was represented by a young man with a beard.

  They began by speaking, first separately and then together, on the importance of preserving quilts, both for their own sake as objects of beauty and as fragile cultural artifacts.

  “It’s a crying shame how many are ruined,” the Indiana woman said. “There are simple things you can do to preserve the quilts you have. Never store quilts in plastic, for instance, or in mothballs. And keep them clean.”

  Listening to her tips for cleaning a quilt (“pick a warm sunny day, fill the tub with cool water first, use pure soap—never detergents or Woolite on cotton quilts—rinse gently four times, squeeze the water out without letting its weight pull on the quilt, roll it in mattress pads, lay a sheet outdoors on flat ground, and lay the quilt on it to dry”), Joan knew she could never tell such a person that she threw Grandma Zimmerman’s quilts in the washing machine and dryer with the sheets and towels.

  She wanted to cry out, “What about sleeping under them? What about using them for the purpose for which they were made? What’s wrong with that?” From her childhood she remembered waking on a cold Michigan morning with the comforting weight of many quilts on her body, and the airy feel of a summer quilt on a warm summer night. When they finally wore out, her matter-of-fact mother had used old quilts in ways that would horrify these people. She had even laid one with holes in it on the floor as a drop cloth. It had, Joan remembered, absorbed the paint spatters beautifully instead of passing them back to shoes, as plastic ones did.

  She tuned in better when they argued for documenting the history of the quilter whenever possible.

  “People who collect old quilts do well to determine their provenance, and it’s rare that we can learn the identity of the quiltmaker, much less details about her life,” said the woman from the historical society. “Few family histories have survived to suggest that even such massive upheavals as the Civil War touched their lives. Many quilts have been passed down in families, usually from mother to daughter, but we’re a generation too late to hear the stories.”

  Women’s stories, Joan thought. Women’s history. Rebecca was nodding again. I must remember to tell Rebecca about old Rachel Berry. Now there’s a Civil War story worth hanging on to, and didn’t they say some of Edna’s quilts came from her?

  Then the panel moved on to some of the exceptions. The Kentucky woman waxed eloquent about the spectacular quilts of Virginia Ivey, and what a coup it had been for Louisville to acquire one—she called it “one of the ten or fifteen greatest quilts in the world”—in the low thirties.

  “Am I hearing right?” Joan whispered to Rebecca. “This quilt she says is so great sold for only thirty dollars?”

  “Not dollars—thousands,” Rebecca whispered back. “And that was years ago. They’d never get it for so little now.”

  Good Lord. More names flew by. Other heads nodded knowingly at mention of Susan McCord’s vines, Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilt, the Perkins family, Marie Jane Harlan, Marie Webster’s quilt patterns, and Elizabeth Mitchell, “known for her famous Graveyard Quilt.”

  “Her famous what?” Joan whispered, but this time she didn’t have to rely on Rebecca. The Kentucky woman told her all about it.

  “In her grief after burying two sons in Ohio between 1831 and 1834, Mrs. Mitchell seems to have become obsessed with death. Or maybe just realistic, given the vicissitudes of country living in those days. In any case, in 1839 she created her one-of-a-kind Graveyard Quilt. Mostly in shades of brown, it would have been an attractive, if somewhat somber, Star of Lemoyne, but in the center she put a graveyard and surrounded it by a neat little picket fence. In the graveyard she quilted thirteen coffin-shaped spaces. Four of them are filled—two with appliqué coffins labeled with the names of her lost sons, and two from a row of twenty-one family coffins waiting inside another fence around the outside of the quilt. Having moved from Ohio to Kentucky, Elizabeth couldn’t keep going back to visit her dead boys. Perhaps she was afraid the family would continue on the move and so she prepared a family graveyard that she could always keep near her.”

  “I’ll bet nobody ever slept under that one,” Joan whispered, grinning at Rebecca.

  As if she had heard, the speaker said, “Oddly enough, this is a well-worn quilt.” Rebecca grinned back.

  The art professor stressed how important it was for quiltmakers to know tradition.

  “It’s as important as for any other artist. Only with an understanding of the past can you go forward, and quiltmakers must try to move forward if quilting is to be an art form. In our time, people who collect quilts as art already look less at traditional technique and more at the composition and painterly qualities of quilts. But this form is not limited to two dimensions. I can’t even imagine what it’ll be like in ten or twenty years.”

  Rebecca beamed.

  The woman from the historical society traced the resurgence of quilting in the sixties and seventies to a “reaction to plastic culture and the terrible speed at which we live.” The Bicentennial, she said, was little more than a convenient peg on which to hang something that would probably have happened without it. “There’s a real need in modern life for a natural rhythm, a turning back to the earth. That’s why historical societies are flourishing. We’re searching for our roots, and we want to do more than just read about them. We want to experience them firsthand.”

  The questions and answers began with a lively debate about the best way to date an antique quilt.

  “Forget about cottonseeds,” said the Indiana woman. “Everybody seems to think that finding cottonseeds in quilt batting means you have a really old one, from before 1792, when the cotton gin was invented. But it doesn’t. It’s easier to date textiles. If you’re lucky enough to have old family photographs, you can often date them by the textiles in the clothing the people are wearing. Still, all a fabric tells you is that a quilt was not made before that fabric was available. Old fabrics are often used in much newer quilts—don’t be misled.”

  Joan quickly bogged down in the technical detail that followed.

  “I’ll see you later,” she told Rebecca, and slipped out to look for a program.

  “They’re due anytime now,” said today’s doorkeeper. “Can you wait?”

  “Oh, sure,” Joan said, and wandered back into the ballroom to reassure herself that everything was still in good order for Sunday. Standing at the conductor’s desk, she heard voices that seemed to be coming from directly overhead. The echoes in the building gave what were surely ordinary voices an eerie quality.

  This must be how it sounds to Alex when Eddie plays his solo from up there, she thought. But who would be up there today? She climbed the stairs and followed the sound past the hall sitter’s chair, now empty. There, in the Ellett room, she found Ruby, the old regular who had jumped to Edna’s defense the day they worked on the orchestra quilt, talking with a woman she didn’t know. Both wore white gloves and badges.

  “She showed it to me once, a long time ago,” Ruby was saying. “And I’m telling you, it would’ve walked off with ever’ one of them prizes. Course, they ain’t nothin’ could hold a candle to Edny’s quilting.”

  “But I thought it was a real old one,” the other woman said.

  “It was,” Ruby said, unfazed by her own non sequitur. “Real old. Edny always was a one for old quilts.”

  Their white gloves protecting the fabrics, the two women were making their way around the room, turning up the corners to examine the stitching on the back of each quilt.

  “Hello, Ruby,” Joan
said.

  “Why, hello, honey,” Ruby said. “Ain’t these somethin’?”

  “Except this one,” the other woman said. “I wonder how come they ever hung this poor thing next to all those pretties.” Joan recognized the simple patchwork squares that had covered Mary Sue’s body. They didn’t measure up, even to her uneducated eye.

  I’m not going to tell them, she thought. I’m just not.

  Ruby had found the label.

  “It says Edny give this one to that woman who lived with her,” she said.

  “Not much of a gift, if you ask me,” said the other woman.

  Poor Kitty, Joan thought. The one artistic member of the family, she would have appreciated something better. It didn’t even have the virtue of being old—fresh from the question-and-answer session, Joan saw that some of the squares were fabrics even she could recognize as synthetic.

  A buzz of voices downstairs signaled the end of the session, and Joan went back down to look for Rebecca. Finding her among a group of quilt lovers expressing shock at the news of the missing sleeping bag, she left her there and asked one more time at the door.

  “The programs just arrived,” said the doorkeeper. “But they’re so late, they skipped the final proof. I hope they’re all right.”

  “Me, too,” Joan said fervently. She wished people who never bothered to send their information on time didn’t get so bent out of shape if their names turned up spelled wrong. Carrying a program back to the ballroom, she pulled her orchestra personnel list out of her jeans pocket and sat down in the empty viola section. She had just started comparing it to the one in the program when a familiar voice boomed across the room.

  “Little Joan!”

  What on earth? It was indeed Leon Ellett, followed closely by his sister Alice and her husband. Beyond them Kitty Graf was bringing up the rear. But why?

  Joan kept her seat. She didn’t think Leon would grab her, but remembering the scene at Snarr’s, she wouldn’t have put it past him.

  “I didn’t expect to see you all here today,” she said, marking her place with a finger on the page. “Have you come for the lectures?” Pretty unlikely, when she thought about it.

  “No,” Alice said. “We’re hoping someone here can tell us about Mother’s quilts.”

  “We finally found her will,” Leon said. “Turns out they belong to all of us. So Harold, here, suggested that we try to get them appraised by one of the experts at the show.”

  “You’re planning to sell them?” Joan asked.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” Alice said. “One way or the other, we need to come out even.”

  Leon beamed. Harold merely nodded. Kitty frowned.

  “Are you sure they’re all here?” Joan asked. “One of Edna’s old friends was talking as if a special old one was missing.”

  “Nonsense,” Alice said, as if Mary Sue had challenged her. “We brought them all over ourselves.”

  Seek-No-Further

  Suddenly, it all made sense. Joan stuffed her list inside her program, and her program in her pocket.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said to the Elletts as casually as she could manage. Conscious of every step she took, she walked to the stairs and down them, called to her daughter, and walked out of the ballroom and out the door. Once outside, she let go and ran across the street without checking to see whether Rebecca was following.

  Fred beat Rebecca to the front desk by a hair.

  “They told me you sounded urgent,” he said, and waited.

  “We had it all wrong.” Joan was breathing hard. “No one was looking for a will in Edna’s quilts.”

  “No?” He didn’t look surprised.

  “But money—I think you did find money in one—and you still have it.”

  “Money?” Rebecca was staring at her. “In a quilt?”

  Fred shook his head. “We didn’t find anything.”

  “Yes, you did. You told me. You said there was an old quilt inside one of them.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I’ve just heard an old friend of Edna’s say that one of her oldest and best quilts is missing. Fred, do you have any idea what great old quilts can be worth?”

  “You really think so?” Rebecca said, and turned to Fred. “Can we see it?”

  He spread his hands. “It’s just an old quilt. But I’ll bring it down.” He led them down the long hall, past the coffee and candy machines, through a locked door, and to a nearby room, windowless and empty except for a table and four straight wooden chairs. “I’ll be right back. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  Rebecca laughed. Fred looked embarrassed.

  “Sorry.” He waved at the room. “You get used to it. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” Joan said. She was champing at the bit.

  “Me either,” Rebecca said.

  They sat down on the hard chairs. Fred waved and disappeared. Then Rebecca pounced.

  “What in the world did you hear?”

  “You remember Ruby, the old lady who worked on the orchestra quilt? Ruby said Edna had one that was so great, it would have won all the prizes. She hadn’t seen it for years.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “Maybe it was sold.”

  “No. Edna loved quilts, and she loved antiques. And I’m sure she wasn’t that hard up. She would never have sold it.”

  “Maybe not. But someone else might have.”

  “Ohhh.” It could have happened, Joan knew, during the months when Edna was too ill to take care of herself, much less her things. “Oh, Rebecca, I hope not.”

  And then Fred was back, looking down at them over four large evidence bags.

  “Let’s lay these on the table,” he said, opening the first bag. “I’m not sure which one it is.” He slid out a new-looking quilt decorated with tulips. The binding had been cut open and the border peeled back several inches to reveal only plain cotton batting inside.

  “You did this?” Rebecca asked, her face stony.

  “We helped it along. Someone else had already cut the edge enough to look in.”

  “That doesn’t make it right!” Joan knew Rebecca was fighting back angry tears.

  “Neither is murder,” Fred said quietly. “We do what we have to.” Refolding the tulip quilt, he slid it back and opened a second bag.

  The second quilt, which even Joan recognized as a Log Cabin pattern, had almost no quilting. Lifting the edge, she could see much older patchwork inside. But instead of the valuable antique she had persuaded herself to expect, she saw a tattered, stained quilt held together by sloppy stitches. She was too disappointed to say a word.

  “Too bad,” Rebecca said. “It wasn’t a bad idea, though, Mom. Just wrong.”

  “Maybe someone did sell it. Fred, I’m sorry we bothered you.”

  “It’s no bother.” He put the Log Cabin quilt back into its bag.

  “But since we’re here, would you mind if we took a look at the other two?” Rebecca asked.

  “Oh, sure.” And he displayed the others, both crisp quilts pieced with many contrasting prints.

  “They’re all new, did you notice?” she said to Joan. “So you weren’t all wrong.”

  “Come again?” Fred said.

  “You thought the killer was trying to find something hidden in one of these quilts?”

  “And maybe succeeded.”

  “These four quilts are all made with modern fabrics. That looks as if the killer thought it had been hidden fairly recently—and knew how to tell new quilts from older ones.”

  “Kitty would know, wouldn’t she?” he asked Joan.

  “Probably,” she said reluctantly. “I don’t know about Leon. And some of the old ladies at the center think Alice doesn’t know beans about quilts.”

  “Maybe I’ll go over to the Ellett house and have a little chat.”

  “We just saw them at the inn,” Rebecca volunteered.

  “Oh?”

  “Seems they’ve all inherited Edna’s quilts,�
� Joan said. “They’re hoping to find someone to appraise them.”

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. “I’ll just return these to the evidence room.”

  “We’ll wait,” Rebecca said.

  And so they crossed the street together, Rebecca’s black curls bouncing as she led the way. Why don’t I just go home? Joan wondered. I don’t want to live through any more of this. I don’t want to know who in this family would kill Mary Sue.

  She climbed slowly to the room with Edna’s quilts—she would try to think of it that way. Dawdling, she made small talk with the afternoon hall sitter. Finally, she went in. Leon, Alice, and Harold were standing near the window with Rebecca.

  Over by the fireplace, Fred was speaking to Kitty in a soft, matter-of-fact voice. “Here’s what I think,” he said. “I think you were afraid you’d be out in the cold when Edna Ellett died. You didn’t know whether she had put you in her will—that’s what you were trying to find out by visiting lawyers the week before the murder.” He paused. Kitty, her eyes wide, didn’t say anything. The others, too, kept silent. Joan listened in dismay.

  “You knew she hid notes—you even found one in a quilt. Then one day it occurred to you that she might have hidden her will in a quilt. When all her quilts were hanging here, you came back after all the others had left, and you started hunting for it in the ones she had made since you came to live with her. But you didn’t know that Mary Sue had come back, too. She walked in on you and caught you in the act—cutting into her mother’s quilts. So you killed her.”

  Kitty erupted.

  “I didn’t! I never would! Never!” Her voice cracked and broke.

  “I don’t have proof,” he said. “Yet. But I’ll get it. Meanwhile, you have the right to remain silent.” And he recited the whole Miranda warning, still in that calm voice.

  “Oh, sure,” she said, her voice strong and sarcastic now. “I just reached up and whacked her. Or do you think Mary Sue waited for me to climb up on a chair?”