A Thread of Truth

by Marie Bostwick

  The crowd broke into thunderous applause as Mary Dell, who reached the top of the stairs on the opposite side of the stage just as Porter finished the introductions, waved, stepped up to the microphone, and said, “Well, thank you, Porter! It’s so wonderful to be here! Hello, New Bern!”

  A fresh wave of applause swelled the air as the citizens of New Bern acknowledged her greeting.

  Howard took the microphone from his mother, jumping into the little act they’d worked out between them without missing a beat. “Excuse me, Mama, but that doesn’t sound right. What do you say we teach the folks how to say hello Texas style?”

  “Howard, that’s a wonderful idea. Why don’t you do the honors?”

  Howard’s face broke into a wide grin. He waved his arm over his head like he was signaling a ship and shouted, “Howdy, y’all!” Then he cupped his hand to his ear and leaned toward the audience, mutely inviting them to follow his lead.

  They did, enthusiastically mimicking Howard’s greeting, complete with waving arms.

  Mary Dell took the microphone next, smiling. “Well! That was just wonderful! I tell you, you’ve made me feel right at home. And I do want to thank y’all for inviting us here today and for everyone who has gone to so much trouble to make New Bern’s Quilt Pink Day such a big success. Porter Moss, Dale Barrows, and everyone on the planning committees, thank you so much. And I want to give an especially warm and heartfelt hug of a thank-you to my dear friend Evelyn Dixon, owner of Cobbled Court Quilts and the one responsible for bringing Quilt Pink Day to New Bern in the first place. Let’s give her a big round of applause!”

  I’m not a shy person, but after the broadcast, I’d had enough notoriety to last me a lifetime. Still, Mary Dell meant well, so I got up from my seat on the picnic bench, waved, and quickly sat down.

  After the applause died down, Mary Dell continued. “I’m going to let y’all get back to eating your barbeque in just a minute, but first, Howard and I want to thank you again for treating us right and making us feel so at home. And, to show our appreciation, we want to teach you a little song we like to sing back home called ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas.’ Ready, y’all?”

  Nobody else could have pulled it off, not with a crowd of buttoned-up, no-nonsense, dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders, most of them directly descended from the purest of Puritan stock, but Mary Dell Templeton was the woman who put the celebration in the word “celebrity.” After a little coaching, she had that audience eating out of the palm of her hand, singing at the top of their lungs and, between choruses, clapping out the song’s familiar four-beat rhythm with the gusto of cowhands on rodeo day.

  Sitting on my bench, clapping along with everyone else while a fat yellow Labrador stood nearby and wolfed down the leavings of my lunch, I smiled with my whole heart, the kind of smile that brings tears to your eyes, as I watched my dear friend Mary Dell.

  Let me tell you: She was a sight to see.

  After the public revelries wound down, Franklin, Garrett, Bethany, Bobby, and Howard drove to Waterbury for a movie while Mary Dell came back to the shop with me and the rest of the quilt circle for our own private party.

  Though he had a strict rule against serving bar food at the Grill on the Green, Charlie put aside principle and made a special batch of buffalo chicken wings for me to serve at the circle meeting. He’d also arranged for his beverage supplier to bring in two cases of Dr Pepper, enough to get Mary Dell and Howard through their weeklong vacation in New Bern.

  When I came up the stairs, carrying a platter of wings, Mary Dell dropped the scissors she was holding and practically hooted for joy. “Are those what I think they are?”

  She grabbed a chicken wing, dipped it in the accompanying bowl of blue cheese dressing, and took a bite. “Oh my gracious me! I tell you what, I have died and gone to heaven. Girls! Get over here and try some of these. You too, Abigail. You’re going to love this.”

  Five minutes later, our individual quilting projects abandoned, all of us were sitting at the worktable sucking the meat off chicken wings, our fingers stained red with the hottest of hot sauce—all except Abigail, that is, who insisted on eating hers with a knife and fork.

  Between the broadcast and the barbeque, I had managed to sneak upstairs to Garrett’s apartment for a refreshing twenty-minute catnap; otherwise, I’d have been dead on my feet. Mary Dell had had no such opportunity, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was still bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and anxious to catch up on all the secondhand news she’d heard from me. She wanted to hear the real scoop, straight from the horses’ mouths.

  “You are kidding me! So they’d been bilking the government all those years, charging for procedures they’d never performed…”

  Ivy nodded confirmation. “Sometimes on patients who had died months before.”

  “…and then that little toad of a doctor would fly to the Caymans every month and put the money in your account?” Mary Dell narrowed her eyes and made a hissing noise. “That man is lower than flea skis.”

  “That sounds about right,” said Ivy with a grin. “The plan was to keep working until they had six million in the bank—three for each crook—then Hodge was going to pretend to take me on a second honeymoon, and trick me into withdrawing the money for them. And if anything went wrong, they figured they could pin the whole thing on me since the account had my name on it. Kittenger told the Feds everything.

  “Hodge had it all worked out. The one thing he didn’t plan on was me growing enough of a spine to actually leave him. Kittenger said Hodge didn’t report us missing because he didn’t want to attract the attention of the police. He figured I’d come crawling back on my own, but when months passed and I still hadn’t turned up, they got nervous. Then one of our neighbors, who knew I’d disappeared with the kids but didn’t know why, saw the promotional video and told Hodge where I was…”

  Mary Dell’s face fell. “Honey, I’m real sorry about that. I never meant to cause you all that trouble.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ivy took a sip of her Dr Pepper and paused a moment, waiting to see if she liked it before taking another. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the best thing that could have happened. If not for that, I’d still be on the lam, dragging my kids from pillar to post, and living a life of lies.

  “Now, I’ve got a career, good friends,” she said, smiling as her eyes scanned the ring of faces, “and a home.”

  “And a bank account worth three million dollars!” Mary Dell exclaimed.

  Ivy tipped her head to one side. “Not quite. That money was stolen. The government has frozen the account. In fact, they’ve frozen all of Hodge’s accounts, everything. It turns out that there’s one thing he wasn’t lying about. Other than that money in the Caymans, Hodge was dead broke. He borrowed money like there was no tomorrow, which I guess makes sense if you’re planning on skipping the country and you’re a thief. But that means I’ll get nothing from the divorce. No settlement. No alimony. Zero.”

  Mary Dell made a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue. “Ivy, that’s terrible.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ivy said. “I don’t have any money, but I didn’t have any before, either. Nothing has changed. We’ll manage. Evelyn has taught me that I’m perfectly capable of supporting my family.”

  “You certainly are,” I agreed.

  “It’s all good,” she said. “The Petermans are home, in New Bern, to stay. And no one can take my kids away from me, especially Hodge Edelman, because from what I understand, he’s going to be in prison for quite some time—years and years. Maybe everything didn’t work out the way I planned it, but in the end, it worked out better than I ever could have planned. It’s like Margot says: ‘All things work together for good…’”

  “‘To them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose,’” Mary Dell said, finishing the verse, and her eyes misted. “Romans 8:28. That was my old granny’s favorite verse.”

  “Mine, too,” Margot said with a smile.
<
br />   “So, Margot, honey, how’d you crack this thing open?”

  “Well,” Margot said modestly, “it really was a team effort. When Hodge broke into Ivy’s apartment and then her car, it was Arnie who figured out there must be something in Ivy’s personal papers that Hodge didn’t want anyone else to have. I was just lucky enough to turn over a sheet of paper and see a string of numbers and letters that Hodge had written.”

  Liza pulled a chicken bone out from between her lips and made a “get real” face. “Come on, Margot. There was more to it than that. You’re the one who finally put two and two together.”

  Liza’s eyes brightened as she leaned over to fill Mary Dell in on the details. “For the next couple of nights, Margot couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about those numbers, thinking they had to mean something, so she got up in the middle of the night and started reviewing the notes she’d taken when she and Arnie were at the hospital with Ivy. And then, all of a sudden—bam! It hit her! The part about Hodge wanting to take Ivy to the Caribbean, and wanting to do it so bad he’d already bought the tickets!”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite—bam!” Margot said. “But it got me to wondering. First thing the next morning, I called Annie Fielding and asked her if those scribbles from Hodge couldn’t be some kind of account or password. Annie had already noticed some enormous problems with the books at Shady Brook. She thought Hodge was hiding money somewhere, but she couldn’t trace it. So she started pulling up online banking sites for every bank in the Caribbean, plugging the numbers into every password prompt she could find until, finally, she found the right one. There it all was! Every deposit, every transaction for the previous eight years! And Franklin took it from there. Arnie had to get back to court, so Franklin only had one hour to talk to Annie, look over the financial evidence, and figure out a strategy. Abigail, your husband is some lawyer!”

  “I’ve always known that,” Abigail said with a proud little smile. “He’s handled my business affairs for thirty years. Of course, now that we’re family, I get a reduced rate on billable hours.”

  Abigail, who had poured her Dr Pepper into a glass, took a tentative sip and pinched up her face in disgust. “Something must be wrong with mine; it’s like drinking cherry perfume.”

  “No, that sounds about right,” Mary Dell said and took another swig from her soda can. “It’s an acquired taste.”

  Abigail pushed her glass away and got up to pour herself a glass of water from the pitcher that was sitting on the end of the table.

  Margot picked up where she’d left off. “The really amazing part was how Franklin tricked Dr. Kittenger into spilling the beans. We didn’t have access to Kittenger’s travel records at all, but Franklin had been watching him in the courtroom and noticed how nervous he was. He figured that, some way or other, Kittenger had to be directly involved. Somebody had to make those deposits and, from what Ivy told us, we knew that Hodge never traveled out of town overnight. Franklin guessed Kittenger was the mule, but he didn’t know for sure. All he did was ask Kittenger if he liked traveling to the Caymans and that was it! He cracked like an egg.”

  Mary Dell whistled her admiration. “That is some story, Margot. And I particularly like the part where you and that cute little Arnie got to work side by side the whole time, smokin’ the midnight hour just like Perry Mason and Della Street.” Mary Dell rested her chin on her elbow and raised her eyebrows suggestively. “So tell me, Della. Did any sparks fly between you and Mr. Mason? Any foolin’ around with the legal briefs?”

  Margot turned bright red and the smile faded from her face.

  Oh no, I thought. Here we go again. The last time anybody hinted at any possibility of romance between Arnie and her, Margot had burst into tears. Ivy and I both started to say something, anything, to deflect Mary Dell’s imprudent inquiry, but Margot beat us to it.

  “Actually,” she said softly. “He’s asked me to go on a picnic with him tomorrow afternoon. A date. A real date.”

  “He asked you out?”

  “Margot, that’s wonderful!”

  “Arnie is such a great guy!”

  The smile slowly returned to Margot’s lips. “I know. But I told him I couldn’t go.”

  I stared at Margot, completely confused. “Why not?”

  “I’m on the schedule tomorrow. You and Mary Dell and Howard are going up to the lake to see the leaves and I said I’d cover for you, remember?”

  “Margot! Are you kidding? Don’t worry about that. We’ve got all week to see the leaves. You go on your date with Arnie.”

  Margot’s face lit up. “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Heck, yes!” Mary Dell affirmed. “We can watch the store. Evelyn can run the register, I’ll cut yardage, and Howard can help people figure out what color fabrics go together best. We’ve got you covered, honey. So you get on the horn and tell Arnie you’re going on that picnic. Scoot! Young love can’t wait.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about young love, but thanks, Mary Dell. Thanks, Evelyn.” Margot let out a little squeal of excitement and ran out the door and down the stairs, where she could talk to Arnie in private.

  Mary Dell smiled as she reached toward the serving platter and piled her plate high with dripping, spicy chicken wings. “Well, that worked out, didn’t it? I’m glad. She seems about as sweet as tea.”

  “She is,” Liza confirmed.

  “And speaking of young love, Liza, how are things going with you and that good-looking Garrett?”

  “Mary Dell!” I gasped. “You can’t ask her about that! Not when I’m sitting right here!”

  Mary Dell hinged back, offended. “Well, why not? Heaven knows you’re never going to ask, you’re much too polite for that, and inquiring minds want to know. So come on, Liza, what’s the scoop?”

  I started to protest—she shouldn’t have to answer personal questions about her boyfriend in the presence of his mother—but Liza waved me off.

  “It’s okay, Evelyn. I don’t mind. The scoop is that we’re in an exclusive relationship, but”—she shrugged noncommittally—“that’s it for now. I’ve got a year to go before graduation, then I’ve got to figure out how to make some kind of living with a degree in studio art. So for right now that’s about as far into my future as I can see.”

  “Well, you’ve sure got an eye for color,” Mary Dell said. “Not that I’d know personally, of course. Everybody knows I’ve got no more taste than a hothouse tomato, but Howard was bragging on you. He just loves all the displays you did for the shop and the way you arranged all the stock into seasons. Said it helps people imagine way more possible color combinations than they would if the fabric was just sorted like a color wheel. You’ve got a real special talent.”

  “Thanks. It’s not a big deal, really, but I do like working with fabric.”

  “Well, darling,” Abigail interjected, “maybe that’s how you can make a living with a degree in studio art. All these fabrics must be designed by someone. Perhaps you could do that after you graduate. If you’d like, I could make a few calls…”

  Liza held up a hand to stop her aunt. “Thanks, Abbie, but let’s not go calling in any favors yet. Besides, whatever it is I end up doing, I want to get there on my own, because of my own talents and hard work, not because I’m your niece. Okay?”

  Abigail’s mouth flattened into a line. “Fine. Have it your way. I just don’t see what’s so wrong about using connections if you’ve got them. A million girls would…”

  “Abbie,” Liza warned.

  “Fine.”

  Mary Dell wisely changed the subject. “Ivy, what are your plans now?”

  “Things have been so crazy the last few months, I haven’t had much chance to think about the future. I’ll stay on at Cobbled Court—at least, I will if Evelyn still wants me.”

  “I do,” I assured her. “You’re not going anywhere. Don’t even think about it.”

  Ivy smiled. “Other than that, my biggest concern is finding a new place to live. But you kno
w, I’m not really that worried about it,” she said in a voice that sounded almost surprised. “One thing I’ve learned recently is that, one way or another, things have a way of working out. It’s good to know what direction you’re heading in, but it’s better to be flexible about your route. Sometimes the back roads turn out to be the fastest way home.”

  “In other words,” Mary Dell said sagely, “when life hands you scraps, make a quilt.”

  “Right,” Ivy said.

  Abigail narrowed her eyes and tapped her fingernail on the table thoughtfully. “Speaking of homes, I heard some very interesting news today. Homes,” she mused. “You know something Ivy, I just might have an idea about that…”

  41

  Ivy Peterman

  It’s a good thing there aren’t many cops in New Bern. If there were, Franklin Spaulding would have to give up his regular practice in favor of spending his days clearing up his wife’s tickets.

  “Ivy! Quit being such a Nervous Nelly. Open your eyes. I wasn’t within a mile of hitting that man.”

  I followed orders. She was right. We’d missed the pedestrian, but only because he had quick reflexes. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him standing on the side of the road, shaking his fist at Abigail’s car.

  The tires squealed as she made a hard left onto Proctor. “There it is. On the right.” Abigail pointed to the right and swerved the car in the same direction, finally coming to a jerky stop in front of her enormous white mansion.

  “But…this is your house. I can’t afford to rent your house. I can’t even afford to heat it.”

  Abigail sighed, impatient that I was so slow to catch on. “No, not the main house, Ivy. I told you, I sold the main house. The Wyatts have wanted a house on Proctor for years, but they almost never come on the market. When I called and offered to sell them mine, they jumped at the chance. Everything worked out beautifully. I called Donna Walsh and told her to make an offer on the old elementary school before some wily contractor beat us to it. The proceeds from my house enabled her to make a fifty percent down payment on the school. So everybody’s happy—me, Donna, the Wyatts, the school district, not to mention the families who will live in the newer, bigger, better Stanton Center!” Abigail beamed, entirely pleased with herself.