by Jolyn Sharp
“Well, OK, that was my contribution,” said Peggy. “But it sounded just as reasonable as all the others.” She maintained a solemn expression for a few moments, but when Stella rolled her eyes, Peggy burst out laughing.
11
Annie had a full day ahead of her on Thursday already when she got a call from Gus St. Pierre in the morn- ing. He complimented her again on the successful exhibit at the Cultural Center.
“It’s a shame about the break-in.” His tone of voice was sympathetic and not in the least prying. “Those things are disturbing, and violating, but vandalism—I’m sure it was nothing more than that—is a fact of life, unfortunately.”
“Well, perhaps we are better off since we—the Historical Society, I mean—installed more security measures,” Annie said, still trying to remain as neutral as possible.
“Yes, and that is good. And controversy can be good too. I hear the Cultural Center is seeing record attendance. But listen, I don’t want to hold you up. I called because I can’t help feeling that I’d like a little documentation of the embroidery piece for the Folk Arts Center; I have a few colleagues I would very much like to consult about it. I know you’re committed to the Historical Society for the exhibit, but would you be willing to let me make a set of documentary photographs and some notes about the item? It would only take a day or so, and could even be done in situ at the museum, if necessary.”
Annie briefly considered offering to send him the photo Hank took with his phone, but immediately she rejected that idea—it would not be of sufficiently high quality, she was sure. She said, “Gus, I’m happy to give you permission. Gosh, you hardly even need to ask. That is, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the Historical Society’s use. I’ll call Liz to tell her it’s OK; then I’ll let you work out the logistics with her. But, Gus—” Annie hesitated, feeling suddenly a little tongue-tied on the phone with someone so versed in American arts and crafts.
“What is it, Annie?”
“I just wondered if you would share with me anything you are able to learn about the piece. I mean, it’s so finely stitched, every detail just so. It’s really remarkable.”
“Naturally! I wouldn’t think of leaving you out of the loop.”
****
Annie was a little relieved to find only Liz Booth at the Cultural Center when she arrived; she was scheduled to meet with Hank to learn about his research to date on the embroidery piece. As it happened, Hank’s friend, the expert in historical textiles he had spoken of the night of the opening, was also coming up that morning, and Annie had been invited to sit in on her consultation. But Annie was glad to have a moment alone with Liz to explain to her about Gus’s request to photograph the piece.
“Certainly, Annie,” Liz assured her. “I have a lot of respect for Gus St. Pierre, and I know he’s as careful in his research as Hank. True, Gus and Hank are rivals, and that is something that goes way back. But as historians, I believe, they at least have a grudging respect for each other, despite a few ruffled feathers here and there.” The two women stood over the case as if they were protecting the embroidery piece. It was an old, wooden case with a glass top, over which a dark cloth was draped. Liz pulled it back to show Annie the padlock on the box.
“At night—and this isn’t information we are sharing widely—we have been removing the map from the display case and locking it in a fireproof safe we keep in the back office,” Liz explained.
“I appreciate all this caution you are taking with the embroidery, but I wish it weren’t necessary.” Annie couldn’t help, while the cloth was removed, gazing into the depths of the piece. “Well, I expect Gus will be calling you soon.”
Liz smiled. “Actually, Annie, he already has.” Liz looked down at the embroidered fabric. “There is something about this map that’s significant. Both Hank and Gus sense it, but they aren’t being very open about what they are thinking. They’re too afraid that they’ll be proven wrong and made fools of, I guess.” She crossed her arms and smirked. “Men.”
Just then they heard a knocking at the door, and they turned to see a strange woman holding a thick carpetbag. Liz replaced the cloth before unlocking the door and swinging it open to invite the woman in.
“I’m Emma James,” the woman said without smiling, though she extended her hand. “I’m a conservator of vintage fabrics, here to meet Hank Page and look over his textile.” She was petite and abrupt in the way she moved. Her black hair was styled in a sharply angled blunt cut that set off nicely her large, round black glasses.
“Oh yes! I’m Liz Booth, the president of the Historical Society. Do come in. Hank will be here in a few minutes.” She drew the woman into the interior of the room and introduced her to Annie. “Annie, as I’m sure Hank explained, found the embroidery in her grandmother’s attic.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Emma James said, shaking Annie’s hand. “Hank didn’t say much about how he came to be in possession of the piece, only that he thought it was interesting.” Emma James’s eye caught on the first display of aprons and recipes on the wall, and she wandered over to read the description. Then she scanned the entire room and took in the nature of the entire exhibit. “Wonderful,” she said flatly. “I like what you’ve done here.”
Emma James declined Liz’s offer of a cup of tea while she waited for Hank. Instead, without turning around, she moved on to examine the next display. As she slowly circled the room, she asked Liz questions about local geography and industry, and some details about Stony Point’s founding fathers and connection to maritime trade and inland logging camps. From her very specific questions, Annie felt that she’d learned more in ten minutes about the town’s history and development than she had learned from her grandfather or from living in Stony Point.
“Excellent display, Ms. Booth,” she said when she had finished her tour of the room with Liz and Annie at her heels.
“Please, do call me Liz.”
“OK,” the curator looked Liz in the eyes and said. “You can call me Emma James.” There was an awkward pause before she explained, “My cousin and I have the same first name, so I’ve always been called Emma James. It’s like my first name now.” Then she smiled for the first time. “Hank is late,” she continued, looking up at the clock on the wall. “Perhaps you can show me the embroidery, Liz. And Annie, I would like to hear your story about finding it.”
As Liz went about removing the embroidery piece from its case, Emma James opened her bag and pulled out a small, plain notepad and a pen. She opened the pad to a fresh piece of paper and carefully laid the pen down on a diagonal so that it pointed to the first line of the paper. She next pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves, a large magnifying apparatus, and a piece of plain muslin, which she spread on top of the case before setting the embroidery piece on it. The large, round magnifying glass was set into a black frame with a light that circled the glass; it was attached by a jointed arm to a base on which the object of study could be placed.
She had pulled on the gloves and was engrossed in examining the piece when Hank came barreling in.
“Emma James! So good to see you! I’m so sorry I’m late. I had a flat on my way in. Liz, do you know your cell phone isn’t turned on? I’ve been trying to call. Oh look, you’ve started. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Hank.” Emma James looked up briefly, giving her second smile of the morning. Her gloved hands remained on the magnifying glass. “Everything is OK with the car, I hope.”
“Yes, just a flat, after all, but annoying. Annie, finally, my dear, we have an opportunity to talk about this … this map!”
Emma James returned to her magnifying glass. She began to talk as she scanned the fabric.
“I commend you all on the care you have taken with the piece. You’ve done everything right. The colors are brilliant, which suggests to me that this piece has not seen much of the light of day.” She set aside her magnifier and flipped over the muslin, paying as much attention to the back as she did the front. “Aha,”
she said. Hank, Liz, and Annie waited for her to say more, but she was silent for a long two minutes as she scribbled a notation on her notepad. Annie and Liz glanced at one another, but Hank seemed unperturbed. Annie, uncomfortable with the silence, was about to mention again that the piece had been stuffed into the cookie jar when the expert resumed her discussion.
“See this,” Emma James pointed with her gloved finger to a faint orange mark near the corner. “Look closely at the hem, and you can see a ‘maker’s mark.’ This is an identifying mark that we sometimes see on the selvage of fabrics. It can tell us who made this piece of muslin, if not who made the map itself.
“If I had this in my workshop at the museum, I would gently undo the hem, here, to examine the mark more thoroughly. But just from my examination with the glass, I can see that it appears to be a part of the trademark symbol of a mill near Brunswick. And since we know, or can find out, when that mill was operating, this may help us determine when the fabric was made, and thus help us narrow down when the piece was made and whether the artist was local.”
After Hank, Liz, and Annie had a chance to look through the magnifier at the maker’s mark, Emma James flipped and recentered the embroidery piece. She resumed her scrutiny of the stitch work. “It’s hard to see with the naked eye,” she said after a moment, “but if you look through the glass you see an interesting pattern of frayed threads running horizontally here and vertically here, which suggests to me that someone at one time had folded this piece up like a sheet of paper.”
“To store it?” suggested Liz.
“Possibly, but if so, it must have had quite a lot stored on top of it, because the wear suggests that the fabric was significantly compacted while folded.” She turned to Annie. “Was it tightly folded when you found it?”
“No, quite loosely folded. Sort of half rolled, half folded.”
Emma James nodded, cocking her head and squinting through the glass. “Yes, I think this was done some time ago. Also, it appears to have been folded down to quite a small size, smaller than would seem necessary to fit it in a drawer. I think it may be more likely that it was folded to be carried, perhaps in a pocket or packed tightly in a suitcase. But that seems rather strange.”
“Why is that?” Annie asked.
“It’s a decorative object,” Hank said. “It was made to be displayed in some way, probably hung on a wall.”
“So why would anyone need to carry it about so much?” muttered Emma James. She stepped back to allow the others to look again through the magnifier.
“I hadn’t noticed that at all,” Annie said, shaking her head as she stepped back from her turn.
“No, you wouldn’t—not without equipment and probably not unless you knew to look for it. But patterns of wear are among the things I look for in assessing fabric.” Emma James pushed the muslin out from under the magnifying glass and moved the contraption over to the side of the case.
“Note the different stitches.”
Annie and Liz nodded. Hank bent and looked closer as if he was just now noticing the stitch work.
“There’s some variety, but I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the stitching patterns indicate more than one person worked on the piece. Around the turn of the century, needlework was a popular pastime for women with a certain amount of leisure. Needlework periodicals or pamphlets were also gaining popularity and were inspiring women to try new stitch work. So it’s not impossible to find various stitches in the work of a single woman.
“Another thing. Note the way the older matte embroidery thread is used with the mercerized cotton threads, which have a bit of sheen to them. The person who created this map used the juxtaposition of flat and shiny threads to heighten the effects of shading and depth. That suggests a degree of sophistication at the conceptual level. In my opinion, it further supports the notion that this would be the work of a single individual.”
Emma James set the cloth down and began packing up her magnifying glass. She helped Liz reposition the muslin in the display case before removing her white gloves, but her thoughts were still on the differences in the threads. “The artist used the contrast between the two types of threads the way a painter would work with color and tone. That suggests not just an artistic eye, but also extensive experience in needlecrafts. And of course, the elegance of the execution also bears that out.” She paused. “I think the key to understanding where this piece came from is these letters YSP, whatever they might stand for.”
Emma James stared down at the embroidery for another moment, as if trying to confirm her conclusions. Then she turned away and closed up her carpetbag.
“We could do a thorough fiber and chemical analysis in my lab at the museum,” she said, straightening up. “There are, I’m sure, many more hidden details that would help us understand its history. Bits of grit or hair can tell you a lot.” Emma James picked up her bag and stepped a few paces toward the door as she spoke. Stopping and turning, she said, “I do feel that you have a remarkable piece. It’s fairly old and should have a lot to say, with further investigation. I would strongly urge you to bring it down to me or take it to some other museum or conservator’s workshop for more analysis.”
Annie suddenly realized that all eyes were on her. “Yes, I would like that, but—well, I feel that it really needs to be displayed here, for the people of Stony Point, at least for the time being.”
“But, Emma James,” Liz broke in, “you’ve said nothing about the red Xs or the numbers written on the back. What can you tell us about those?”
“Nothing at this point,” she said simply. Then she pulled out her business card for Liz and Annie, shook Hank’s hand, picked up her carpetbag, and left.
****
The sound of Emma James’s heels as she left the Cultural Center was still clicking in Annie’s head as Liz set down three mugs of hot water and a selection of black, green, and herbal teas. She watched Hank stir two heaping spoonfuls of sugar into his black tea and waited eagerly for him to begin with his response to the new information. She resisted the urge to prompt him.
“Well,” he said finally, clinking his spoon back and forth in his mug, trying to cool the tea a little, “Emma James’s speculations don’t contradict what people have been telling me. I no longer think that this was produced in piecework by various hands. And I don’t think there is more than one—set of hands, that is. I think this is an artisan’s creation.” Hank stared into his mug and then took a tentative sip of the tea, wincing as if it were bitter. “I have my suspicions too about that YSP, though I haven’t wanted to say anything about that yet.”
As Annie listened, she held her mug of hot tea to her lips and blew over the top to cool it. When Hank mentioned that last bit, she jostled her tea and managed to burn her lips.
“That’s a huge step forward, Hank. What?”
“A couple of women ran a seaside trading post just north of here in the twenties and thirties. Sisters. One was something of an artist, painter, but never really flourished—I s’pose family and work got in the way. Her name was Yvette St. Pierre.”
“St. Pierre? Any chance she is a relation to Gus St. Pierre?” Liz asked.
“The two sisters, Yvette and Marie, ran the trading post till it blew down in a hurricane in the late thirties, I believe. Interesting ladies. Eccentric, I should say.”
Annie took a more cautious sip this time. “No wonder Gus is so interested. If he has a family connection to the piece … I wonder if he will try to claim it.”
“I wondered that too,” Hank said. “There’s certainly no record of whose hands it’s passed through. Typical of the St. Pierres.”
“You sound like you know quite a bit about the family.” Annie hated to probe, but she was starting to lose patience with Hank’s evasiveness, and a little confidence in him too.
Hank leaned forward with his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. “I s’pose I know more about the family than most folks in these parts.”
Liz gas
ped and suddenly compared her watch to the clock on the wall. “I’d completely forgotten about the time. We’re supposed to open to the public in just a few minutes.” She stood and started collecting the tea things, but Annie elbowed her out of the way.
“I’ll wash up, Liz,” she said. She reached for Hank’s half-empty mug. He didn’t seem to notice the commotion around him. He was staring up at the ceiling, rubbing his chin, lost in thought.
12
Annie’s next appointment on Thursday was with Mary Beth. They’d arranged to meet up at her shop before heading out for lunch with Laura Coyne. As Annie was running a little late, she made an ill-considered decision to jaywalk across Main Street and promptly heard a screech of tires. Startled, Annie jumped, but what cars there were midmorning were moving very slowly and mostly looking for parking spaces. She hastily made her way to the other side of the street when the owner of the screeching tires came into view. It was none other than the goateed man in his battered van.
Annie slipped into A Stitch in Time and nearly bumped into Mary Beth, who apparently had her purse already on her arm and was worried about being late for their lunch date with Laura.
“It’s him,” Annie blurted out, by way of greeting. “Look!”
“You sure?”
The two women cracked the door of the shop, letting out cool air, and craned their necks around. The dark-haired man was just that moment stamping out a cigarette on the sidewalk.
Mary Beth straightened up and stepped outside. “We have a trash can, you know!” The man looked up at her, a little surprised at being addressed, but trying not to show it. Mary Beth pointed at a spot just beyond the van. “Right behind you.”
“Sorry, lady,” the stranger said, sauntering past the shop, not stopping to pick up his cigarette butt.
Undeterred, Mary Beth followed him. “Young man, would you mind if I asked you a question? What were you doing at the site of the house fire on Elm Street?”