“Not very likely. The State Police says the information in his personnel file is phony. That he never attended Ball State. And his Social Security number belongs to a man who got run over by a tank during Desert Storm.”
The retired banker couldn’t hold back his temper. “Don’t you have any good news to report?” he shouted into the phone.
After a pause, Virgil Hoffstedder said, “I think he left without picking up his last paycheck.”
Chapter Twelve
Maddy and the Quilters Club agreed that they would have to risk returning Maud Purdue’s quilt the same way they got it: Aggie climbing in through the attic window.
“I can do it,” Aggie assured her grandmother. “I got an A in gym last year.”
“I’m sure you can. But I doubt your mother would approve.”
“Maybe you’ll forget to tell her. After all, you’re getting old and forgetful.” The girl winked to seal the secret.
“Thanks. I’m glad my age is helpful to this plan,” said Maddy. But her granddaughter didn’t catch the sarcasm.
“Lucky I’m two months younger than you,” Lizzie joined the joke. “At least senility hasn’t set in with me yet.”
“Don’t count on that,” said Bootsie. “Remember how you lost your car keys last week?”
“That Lexus is a new car and I’m not used to that funny key. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned kind?”
“Time marches on,” commented Cookie, ever the historian.
Maddy began folding the smelly old quilt in preparation for their late-night incursion. She had brought a Glad trash bag to carry it in.
“Why does the quilt make that sound?” asked Aggie, the curiosity of a tween girl.
“What sound?” replied Lizzie.
“Oh, you mean the crinkling sound?” said Maddy. “That’s whatever it’s stuffed with. Sounds like paper.”
“That’s an odd stuffing,” said Bootsie.
“Perhaps it’s old newspapers,” offered Cookie. “That would be interesting, to find old newspapers from 1899.”
“We’ll never know,” sighed Maddy as she continued to fold the quilt. “This unremarkable example of quiltmaking is going home tonight. Right, Aggie?”
“You bet. And I promise to be careful climbing that oak tree.”
“Good girl.”
Cookie fidgeted a tad. “Maybe we could clip a few threads and fish a scrap of newspaper out before taking it back.”
“Cookie!” admonished her friend Bootsie. It was bad enough they had completed a burglary, but the idea of damaging the antique quilt was simply unacceptable.
“Oh, I know. But I am the town historian. So you can’t blame me for being curious.”
“Me too,” admitted Lizzie.
“Why can’t we take a peek?” Aggie weighed in.
Maddy held up her hands to silence them. “Okay, okay. Let’s see if there’s a loose thread.”
Bootsie rolled her eyes, but joined the up-close examination of the quilt. “Here’s a square that’s kinda loose,” she pointed.
“Hand me those tweezers,” Maddy prompted her granddaughter. “Let’s see if I can work it loose without breaking the thread.”
“Pretty shoddy sewing,” harrumphed Lizzie. “Looks like it was done in haste. No attention to the stitching.”
“I agree,” said Bootsie. “Surprising that Harry Periwinkle would want this ugly old thing. Poor needlecraft. Boring design. Stuffed with old newspapers. Can’t be worth more than twenty dollars at yard sale.”
“Not newspapers,” said Maddy. Something in her voice got their attention. The women turned to stare at the quilt.
Maddy’s tweezers had extracted a long green piece of paper … US currency featuring the image of some stuffy looking man in formal military attire.
“T-that’s a thousand dollar bill,” stammered Lizzie. “Look it says so in big numbers on the backside.”
“There no such thing as a thousand dollar bill,” Bootsie stated flatly. “This must be counterfeit.”
“No,” corrected Cookie, calling on her encyclopedic memory. “Small-size Federal Reserve notes in the amount of one thousand dollars were first issued in 1890. They bore the portrait of General George Meade.”
“He wasn’t a president,” said Aggie, having studied them in school last year.
“Neither was Ben Franklin or Alexander Hamilton,” Maddy patted her granddaughter’s hand. “And they’re on hundreds and twenties.”
Maddy fished out another $1000 bill.
“These are red seal bank notes.” Cookie pointed to the circular red blob on the front of the bills. “They were known as Grand Watermelons because the zeros are shaped like large watermelons, oblong and dark green with black streaks.”
“Watermelons,” laughed the mayor’s wife. The town was famous for its annual Watermelon Festival. “How appropriate.”
“Are there more in there?” asked Lizzie.
“Let’s find out,” said Bootsie, ripping at the stitches she’d earlier tried to protect. “Holy cow! This quilt is filled with thousand dollar bills.”
“N-no wonder Harry Periwinkle wanted it,” stammered Maddy. “There must be a million dollars in here.”
“But half interest in E Z Seat has got to be worth more than that,” said Bootsie.
“This pile of money is worth much more than its face value,” countered Cookie. “A $1000 Grand Watermelon is the most expensive US banknote ever sold at auction. One of them went for a world’s record price of $2,255,000.”
“One of them?” gasped the banker’s wife. “There must be hundreds of them here.”
Cookie nodded, dumbfounded by their discovery. “Before we opened this old quilt, only two red seal Grand Watermelons were known to still exist. The one that sold at auction and another that’s in the museum at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.”
“Amazing,” muttered Liz. “We’ve just figured out what this Lost Boy charade was all about – a hidden fortune.”
“Yes,” said Maddy Madison. “But now the question is, where did Amos Purdue’s grandmother get this much money?”
Chapter T hirteen
The Haney Bros. Circus had returned to the Bentley farm on its way to a gig in Illinois. Ben was a sucker for helping out wayfarers in need of a place to camp out – whether stranded RV’s, itinerant workers, gypsy troupes, or pocket-sized circuses.
Ben even helped the Haneys pitch their two tents. Big Bill and Little William slept in one, Bombay and Sprinkles the Clown shared the other.
Sneezy the Baboon had his own folding cot in the second tent. The horses were tethered out back. The elephant was chained to a stake. The lion and tiger had their own cages. And Sleepy the Bear slept in the back of the truck.
“We had a great run at the Burpyville Mall,” crowed Big Bill, still dressed in his ringmaster’s getup, a frayed red jacket and black top hat. His boots looked spit-shined.
“Indeed we did,” confirmed Little William. While Bill was 6’ 2” tall, William barely reached 5’ even with thick-soled shoes. “It was worth waiting for a slot. Thank goodness that kiddy carnival got canceled because its Ferris wheel failed a safety check.”
“You should have seen Big Bill put Grumpy and Bashful through their paces,” the clown said to Ben. “He had those cats eating out of his hand – literally.”
“Musta been quite a show,” smiled Ben. “Little Aggie Tidemore talked about it for hours when she got back from Burpyville. It was nice of you to give Aggie and her uncle passes.”
“Took a liking to the little girl,” said Sprinkles. “I hope she’ll come by to say goodbye before we pull up stakes and head to Peoria. We’re playing a waterpark there.”
“Dunno. She’s caught up in some big excitement in town. My wife and some other women found about a zillion dollars stuffed inside a quilt sewed together by Amos Purdue’s grandma. Somebody’s gonna be rich, once they figure where all that cash came from.”
“That’s my mon
ey,” blurted Sprinkles the Clown.
≈≈≈
Turns out, there were only five $1000 bills in the old patchwork quilt. But there was a plethora of other denominations: 1880 hundred dollar notes featuring Abraham Lincoln; 1882 twenty dollar gold certificates featuring James A. Garfield; 1891 five dollar silver certificates with Ulysses S. Grant; 1880 two dollar bank notes with Thomas Jefferson; and 1899 one-dollar silver certificate notes also with Abe Lincoln’s portrait.
Some $73,512 in face value, but Daniel Sokolowski of Dan’s Den of Antiquity estimated that all told it might be worth more than $100 million on the auction block.
Question was, to whom did it belong?
Police Chief Jim Purdue was boiling mad. His own wife involved in a third-rate burglary! Beau Madison was embarrassed by Maddy’s actions. Ben Bentley was proud of his spunky wife. Edgar Ridenour was too distracted with that hospital business to notice. And little Agnes was grounded by her parents for about one hundred years.
Being that this involved prominent families, it was agreed to sweep the “theft” under the rug. The police chief released a story about how the women found the quilt in a trashcan, not that anyone believed it.
Maud Purdue said she wouldn’t press charges if her rightful property was returned. She told her cousin Jim that it was none of his business how Grandma Purdue got the money – making the point that the quilt had been handed down to her husband’s side of the family, not his.
She tried to hire Mark the Shark to represent her claim, but he pointed out that it would be a conflict of interest, him representing the miscreant who pretended to be her son in order to extort the quilt from her.
Maddy raised the question as to how Harry Periwinkle knew about the money being in the quilt, but it was the consensus that he’d learned about it from Bobby Ray Purdue sometime before his friend stepped into the quicksand.
Cookie had a theory about where the money came from, but she figured now was not the time to speak up. The town was filling with newspaper reporters and TV crews looking to cover this “hidden treasure” story. Everybody was abuzz. It wasn’t until after midnight when Cookie finally got home that her husband mentioned the strange remark by the circus clown.
“Everybody wishes it was their money,” she yawned. “Me too.”
“Aw, we don’t need the money,” said Ben. “Farm’s doing pretty good.”
“Even so, having an extra hundred million dollars wouldn’t hurt,” Cookie smiled as she turned off the light.
Chapter Fourteen
Amanda Madison was worried about her husband. While the burns were healing nicely, his acceptance of his altered appearance wasn’t going so well. He moped about his parents’ house like one of those zombies in Dawn of the Dead. That used to be one of his favorite movies, but he hadn’t even bothered to watch it when it came on TV the other night.
The adoption plans for the little girl he’d saved from the fire was going well, thanks to powerful friends in Atlanta. But she worried he might be too distracted with his own problems to take on the role of fatherhood.
“Maddy, do you think we need to talk Freddie into getting some therapy? The insurance would pay for it. But he doesn’t seem interested.”
“He’ll work it out,” her mother-in-law responded. “Freddie always had a good head on his shoulders. That fire may have burned off his skin, but it didn’t reach the man inside.”
“I hate seeing him like this. So despondent.”
“He’ll come around. His new face just takes some getting used to. By all of us.”
≈≈≈
“I’m sooooo sorry,” Aggie was telling her mother. “But the Quilters Club was trying to solve a crime. We’re detectives, you know.”
Tilly Tidemore was still stewing. How dare her mother involve a child in illegal activities? The morning sickness had left her crabby lately. But this time her reaction was justified, she told herself.
“No trips to the Dairy Queen for a month,” she pronounced the sentence. “And no more Quilters Club – ever!”
“That’s not fair,” said Aggie. “I’m going to appeal.”
“You’re going to do what?”
“Hire me a lawyer and appeal.”
“Where are you going to find a lawyer, young lady?” her mother laughed at the idea.”
“Daddy’s a lawyer.”
“He charges $300 an hour,” Tilly countered.
“He does pro Bruno work,” said her daughter.
“You mean pro bono.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m going to appeal.”
≈≈≈
Mark the Shark was having a meeting with his other client, Sad Sammy Hankins. That property dispute.
“My farm is north of town, next to the old Baumgartner place,” the roly-poly man was saying. His skin was pale and puffy, like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. “There’s a fence separating the Baumgartner pasture from my watermelon field.” He laid two snapshots down on the table, there in a booth at Cozy Diner. “This first one was made twenty or thirty years ago, and here’s one made only a month ago. See the difference?”
Mark leaned closer to study the images. He could see that the position of the fence had shifted between the first snapshot and the second. A big elm tree was in front of the fence in one, behind it in the other. “Someone moved the fence,” the lawyer stated the obvious.
“Exactly.”
“Who do you think might be responsible?” asked Mark.
“Who else but Errol Baumgartner. He took over the farm when his grandpappy died.”
“When was that?”
“Maybe ten years ago. Old Man Baumgartner lived to be ninety-three. Had the constitution of a horse.”
Mark studied the pictures again. The newer photo was digital. The date it was taken was written by hand on the back – July 20, 2012. The older photo had been printed from a film negative. It had been time-stamped on the back by the photo processor – August 12, 1982.
The fence could have been moved anytime between those two dates. But it really didn’t matter whether Errol Baumgartner or his grandfather moved the fence, it had clearly been moved.
“Do you have any surveys?”
“Right as rain, I do. Here’s the plait survey from the courthouse. And here’s the survey I paid for two weeks ago. Shows that the Baumgartner fence is setting twenty feet over on my property.”
“Okay, this should be a slam-dunk,” Mark concluded. “I’ll need to keep theses photos and the surveys.”
“No problem. Just kick Errol Baumgartner’s butt. He’s as weird as his grandpappy.”
“Weird?”
“The Baumgartners never were very neighborly. I doubt anybody’s been allowed to set foot on that farm in half a century. You’d think they’re hiding Elvis out there.”
Chapter Fifteen
That weekend the three families were having a backyard cookout at the Madisons’ beautiful Victorian mansion on Melon Pickers Row. Ben was manning the barbeque grill, basting the steaks with his special watermelon sauce. Edgar was playing bartender. Beau and Jim were acting as tasters.
Their wives were taking it easy at the shaded patio table, happy to not be fixing dinner, the men waiting on them for a change. Not that they deserved any pampering after that misadventure involving Maud Purdue’s quilt, Beau pointed out.
“But, dear,” argued his wife, “if we hadn’t bent the rules a little, no one – not even Maud – would have known about the money hidden in that ugly old quilt.”
“A little,” snorted Jim. “Breaking and entering is a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison.”
“You’d miss me,” teased Bootsie. Defiant as usual.
“Could I convince you to press charges against Lizzie,” called Edgar from behind the Tiki bar. “Give me more free time for fishing if she was locked up in jail.” He was enjoying his retirement, spending most weekends with a rod and reel in his hand.
“Oh poo,” his wife responded. “Who
would fix you dinner?”
“Ben,” he said, pointing toward the burly man at the stone grill. “He’s a damn good cook. We’d eat steak every night.”
“Not with his cholesterol levels,” Cookie chimed in. “Red meat is off his diet, tonight being an exception.”
“I have a theory about that guy at Burpyville Memorial,” volunteered Maddy to no one in particular.
Being on the hospital’s board, that got Edgar’s attention. “What theory’s that?” he asked while mixing a frothy gin fizz for his wife. Lizzie was fond of sweet alcoholic concoctions.
“I think he’s really Jud Watson.”
“You’re saying Bernard Warbuckle is actually one of the Lost Boys?”
“Why else would he switch the DNA samples?” Maddy posited. “He was in on the swindle with his pal Harry.”
“Doggone,” said Jim. “That makes sense.” You could almost see the lightbulb coming on over his slick head.
“But why would Jud Watson change his identity in the first place?” asked Beau, confused.
“So he could get a job at the hospital,” speculated Cookie. “Pretend he was qualified as a lab technician.”
“There might be another reason,” suggested Maddy. “What if Harry Periwinkle and Jud Watson killed Bobby Ray Purdue? That would explain why they disappeared, changed their names.”
“Why would they kill their childhood buddy?” asked Jim, switching back to cop mode.
“Maybe Bobby Ray told them about the money – and they killed him for it.”
“And waited thirty years to go after it?”
“Who knows? Maybe they panicked, ran away. Only got up the courage in recent years.”
“I’ll float that idea with the state boys,” said Jim after a moment’s thought. “Might be something there.”
≈≈≈
Daniel Sokolowski had been giving some thought to that money found in Amandine Gersbach Purdue’s quilt. He’d spoken with several numismatists since his first appraisal and was coming to the conclusion it was worth even more than he originally thought.
Coming Unraveled (A Quilters Club Mystery No. 3) (Quilters Club Mysteries) Page 5