by Gin Jones
"No idea," I said. "I don't think it was anyone looking for the parade quilts, though, so you shouldn't have to worry that the killer would follow them here."
"I never even thought of that." Sunny sighed. "Stefan's going to have a panic attack if he hears that I'm storing the quilts."
Sunny was engaged to Stefan Anderson, the owner of a folk art gallery on Main Street, who'd helped me investigate some fraudulently labeled quilts shortly after I'd moved to Danger Cove. While Sunny was calm, deliberate, and optimistic about everything she did, Stefan was anxious, spontaneous, and pessimistic. His doubts had almost sabotaged his marriage proposal, but Sunny had been too much in love with him and too practical to let a flubbed declaration of love get in the way of their long-term happiness.
A yellow-smocked middle-aged woman popped her head in to ask where the latest shipment of wool batting had been stored.
Sunny explained where to find it before turning back to me. "Sorry. I'm determined to make this year's Black Friday sale better than last year's. It was the shop's first year, and I wasn't as prepared for it as I should have been. I thought quilters would be out at the bigger stores with doorbuster deals, but they showed up here in droves. Some of them all the way from Seattle!"
"I wouldn't have expected that much traffic for a niche market either," I said. "But I'm still learning about the business aspects of quilting."
"Lots of quilters say they want to open a shop, but it's not all fun and games."
As if to prove her words, there was another interruption by the middle-aged woman reappearing to say she still couldn't find the box of batting. Sunny sighed and told the woman to go check with someone named Lisa to see if she'd moved it.
After the woman disappeared again, Sunny shook her head. "See? Living the dream. Did you know that Brooke Donnelly once made plans to open her own quilt shop? Her husband told me she and a teacher friend had scoped out locations when they lived in Kansas. They created a business plan, got financing, and everything. But it never actually opened."
"What happened?"
"Apparently Lawrence got transferred to another base, all the way on the East Coast, Florida maybe, if I remember right, and everything fell apart," Sunny said. "He didn't really understand what happened. He thought it might have been because Brooke couldn't supervise the shop directly, but Brooke had known before starting to make her plans that there wasn't much time left before he'd be reassigned. She'd told him there was a way for her to be an active partner for the shop without living in the same state, but then after they moved, Brooke seemed to lose interest in the business aspects of quilting."
A different yellow-smocked woman, a redhead this time, timidly peered around the edge of the doorway. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Lisa, the one who was supposed to know where the batting was, but judging from her anxious face, she hadn't been able to find it either.
"Never mind," Sunny said. "Skip the wool batting for now and work on whatever's next on the list."
Lisa nodded and disappeared.
"Sorry about that," Sunny said. "Where was I? Oh, Brooke and why she never opened her quilt shop. I really couldn't say. I didn't know her all that well. She didn't come here very often. I saw her at a few guild events, but she never said much. At least not to me. She was more talkative with her friend, Tricia."
"I've met Tricia."
"You should ask her whatever you need to know about Brooke," Sunny said. "I think I know her husband better than I knew Brooke."
"Does that mean your car spends a lot of time in the repair shop?"
"My car is fine. I saw Lawrence here."
"I never would have guessed he was a quilter."
"He's not. He's an enabler," Sunny said with a grin. "He was always coming into the shop and asking what was hot and trendy that Brooke might like. I asked him once if he was getting something for her birthday, so I could put the date in our customer database, and he said it was just because it was Wednesday and he was grateful that she'd put up with him for so many years. It was so sweet."
Sweet, maybe. But not necessarily. My legal training had honed my tendency toward expecting the worst, so I couldn't help thinking that there were other less positive explanations for why a spouse might be buying surprise gifts. Like the need to seek forgiveness.
Lisa appeared in the doorway again, this time joined by the middle-aged woman who'd originally asked about the wool batting. In unison, they said, "We're really sorry to bother you…"
Sunny sighed. "I've got to go. If Lisa can't deal with a situation, I'm the only one who can."
"No problem," I said. "I'd better go see what happened to Matt anyway. If I don't get home soon to start dinner preparations for tomorrow, we're all going to be reduced to eating the centerpiece from Some Enchanted Florist. And while George Fontaine's arrangements are always tasteful, they're probably not very tasty."
* * *
With Sunny immersed in her latest crisis, I went to look for Matt. He and his teenaged guide had turned left from the doorway. In that direction was what looked like a maze of hallways, most of them with doors marked Employees Only. I didn't want to poke around where I didn't belong, so I turned to the right, toward the front of the store, where I could wait for Matt without getting in anyone's way.
As I reached the cutting counter, I caught sight of Tricia Sullivan struggling with the front door while carrying three large canvas tote bags overflowing with a variety of individually wrapped candies, nuts, and dried fruits, presumably for throwing to the crowds during the Thanksgiving parade.
The clerks were all distracted with their work and didn't notice Tricia's struggles, so I hurried over to open the door and hold it for her against the pressure of the wind. "Can I carry something for you?"
"Thanks." Tricia handed me one of the bags and redistributed the other two for an even load. "It'll just take us a minute to take them back to the storeroom. After everything that's happened, I thought it would be safer to put all the parade supplies here. I doubt the thief would come back to my house now, but I'm not taking any chances."
I hadn't wanted to bother her while she was grieving her friend, but perhaps I could find out a little more about the dead woman while also expressing my condolences.
"This must be difficult for you, working on something that constantly reminds you of Brooke," I said as I followed her into the maze where Matt had disappeared earlier. "I understand you were close to her. I'm so sorry for your loss."
Tricia shrugged. "I was probably her best friend, but that's not saying much. As far as I know, I was her only friend."
"I'd heard that she was shy and kept to herself."
"Not shy exactly," Tricia said. "She was a very private person, and I respected that, but she made it hard to get to really know her. Sometimes, I thought she was finally going to drop her barriers and really connect with me. And other times, I thought she might actually hate me. She had this way of making people feel judged all the time. It was like she was always holding everyone up to some impossible ideal and no one measured up except her husband."
"That attitude couldn't have been easy to be around."
"Exactly." She turned right at a corner. "Thus, the lack of friends. I was surprised when she joined the quilt guild. She'd been quilting forever, took it up in her twenties to keep busy when her husband was away or when she had to change jobs because he was transferred and it took a while for her to get a new job. She took up embellishing because those supplies were lighter and easier to transport when they moved than large stashes of fabric. But it used to be a solitary endeavor for her, not a social one."
"I wonder what changed."
"I think it had to do with her husband," Tricia said. "She only joined about a year ago, after a few years of me trying to get her to come to a meeting."
"Did she make any other friends in the guild?"
Tricia shook her head. "Not one. I tried. I really did, but she just sat next to me and kept her head down the whole time, never e
ven sharing what she was working on during show-and-tell sessions, so no one got a good look at how amazing her work was. And afterwards she'd tell me all the things that people were doing wrong. I almost wished I hadn't invited her."
"If she didn't like or respect anyone there, why did she keep going to the meetings?"
"I wondered that too, even asked her, and she said something about it being the right thing to do. She meant it too, but I didn't understand, and I couldn't get her to explain beyond that. I always thought her husband must have told her she should get out more after school, and she always had to do what he said, so she joined the guild. It was also possible that she didn't want her husband to see much of the quilt she was working on. It obviously wasn't a present for him, and I've heard lots of women say they'd spent too much on their supplies and didn't want their significant others to know about it."
"Sunny said he was generous toward Brooke, buying her surprise gifts from the quilt shop."
"I don't know anything about that," Tricia said. "She didn't talk about her husband much, other than to say that he was the most perfect man she'd ever met, and she didn't deserve him, but she was doing everything she could to make sure he never realized how imperfect she was. As far as I could tell, Lawrence was the only person in the world she didn't judge and find wanting."
"That sounds like a lonely life." After I'd made an impulsive decision to move to Danger Cove, I'd had some second thoughts, mostly related to leaving all my friends behind and not knowing anyone in the small town. Those worries had quickly been put to rest as I was befriended by almost everyone I met, from Alex Jordan, who'd renovated my house, to Matt, Gil Torres, and Dee and Emma and the rest of the quilt guild.
"I couldn't imagine living without a circle of close friends," Tricia said. "I thought our new artist in residence might live up to Brooke's standards, so I encouraged Manny to join us at lunch. She quickly judged him and found him wanting."
"What was his flaw?"
Tricia shrugged. "I'm not sure there was one. All she said was that you couldn't trust anyone who was so cheerful all the time. The same sort of meaningless thing she said about pretty much everyone she worked with. She mostly just ignored him, the way she did with everyone at the school except for me and her students. She developed a more intense dislike for him later, when he was invited to give a speech at the quilt guild. She didn't want him there because he wasn't a quilter, and then he really upset her when he'd said something about how artists needed to just get out there and try things rather than worrying about rules and techniques. She immediately got up and ran out of the room. At first I thought she might be ill, so I followed her. She said she was fine, but she had better things to do than listen to a lecture from someone who didn't believe in education. After that, she didn't just ignore him. She actively snubbed him after that. She'd turn around and go the opposite direction if she saw him in the halls at school."
"That does seem a bit harsh."
"Not for Brooke. She was like that with anyone she actively disliked," Tricia said. "And she wasn't entirely wrong about Manny. I like him as a person, not so much as a teacher. Brooke couldn't make that distinction. He's supposed to do some teaching as part of the artist-in-residence gig, but he's not really into lesson plans and grading and all the things that are part of the job. He's much more interested in doing art than teaching it. Brooke thought that was a serious flaw, and she had no patience for human imperfections."
"But you stuck with her."
Tricia turned right down a hallway with more Employee Only signs on the doors. "She wasn't a bad person. And she was a phenomenal teacher. I really admired how good she was in the classroom, considering how bad she was in social situations. She taught math, and I taught history at the same high school, with matching schedules, so we naturally ended up having lunch together most days. Plus, there was our shared passion for quilting. I may not be the gifted designer she is…was…but my technical quilting skills are pretty good. Enough to keep her from judging me a failure anyway."
"I don't suppose she told you anything about who stole the miniature quilts," I said. "Maybe at lunch yesterday?"
"She didn't show up for lunch. She wouldn't have told me anything anyway. She was already angry with me. I'd asked her about the theft in the morning, before classes started, and she lost her temper. I'd never seen her so angry. She said that if she'd wanted anyone to know who the culprit was, she'd have given us the name on Monday night." Tricia turned left at another corner. "Do you think the thief killed her?"
"Not really," I said. "When Brooke said she knew who'd stolen the quilts, I thought she seemed more sad than scared. Although, I didn't know her well enough to be sure she wasn't hiding her fear. What did you think?"
"No, you're right. She wasn't scared. I thought she seemed resigned to a difficult situation," Tricia said. "But if it wasn't the quilt thief who killed Brooke, then who could have done it?"
"I was going to ask you the same thing. Had she argued with anyone recently?"
"She pretty much never talked to anyone except her husband and her students. And I never saw her raise her voice with anyone, inside her classroom or out, not in all the years she's been in Danger Cove. With her students she was infinitely patient, but with everyone else, as soon as a situation started to get tense, she just left. She'd managed to avoid one of her student's parents for over a year just so she wouldn't have to tell him he was being a jerk about his son's grades."
Tricia turned right and stopped in front of a locked door. She set down her bags to dig in her jeans pocket for a key chain with a Sunny Patches medallion on it. As she unlocked the door, she explained, "I work here occasionally, whenever they need an extra person." She took my bag to lean it against the pyramid of boxes topped with the bag of miniature quilts for the parade. Matt had obviously been here and left, and somehow we'd missed him in the maze of hallways.
"What about Brooke's husband?" I asked. "What was their relationship like?"
"It was perfect according to Brooke. She never complained about him or told any stories about him the way most people grouse about their spouses occasionally. The only time she even used his name was if she mentioned what time he'd be picking her up at the school—she didn't drive, you know—or whether he'd be attending a school function, which he hardly ever did." Tricia stepped back, holding her hand out as if prepared to catch the bags propped against the other parade float supplies if they fell over. After a moment, she seemed satisfied that everything was stable. She ushered me out of the room and pulled the door shut behind us as she added, "No one was as perfect as Brooke claimed Lawrence was. In retrospect, it's kind of suspicious, don't you think? Maybe she was afraid of him and didn't want to say anything negative about their marriage that might get back to him through the grapevine. I hate to think it, but it's possible that Lawrence could have killed Brooke."
"He's an obvious suspect, just because the spouse always is, but I don't have any particular reason to think he might be guilty." I headed in the direction I hoped was the front of the shop, and Tricia didn't correct me. "I was hoping you'd know more about their relationship."
"Sorry," Tricia said. "Brooke didn't say anything about their marriage, and I barely said two words to Lawrence in the whole time he's lived here. He goes small-game hunting with my husband occasionally, but neither one of them is into small talk, especially about things like marital harmony or the lack thereof. All I can remember my husband ever saying about their trips was that they had a good time. Well, there was one time when he was really pleased with himself because he'd finally bagged more rabbits than Lawrence. I can't say for sure that Brooke was right about her husband being a paragon of all things, but according to my husband, Lawrence is an amazing marksman. Probably from his decades of military experience."
"What did he do in the military?"
"He was a mechanic in the Air Force. Working on ground vehicles, though, not planes. And even though Lawrence's job didn't usually involve s
hooting anything, my husband said he still had solid weapons training."
We passed the room where Sunny had been cutting fabric earlier. She wasn't there, but at least now I knew where I was. When we emerged into the front room a few moments later, Matt was up on a ladder, helping his teenaged guide by stacking the previously missing wool batting on the uppermost shelves.
"I've got to go," Tricia said. "My husband's family is coming for the parade and dinner tomorrow, and I've still got to make desserts."
"I've got a lot of cooking left to do for tomorrow too," I said, thinking of the sweet potato casserole that was my first priority when I got home, "but I cheated and bought dessert at the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery."
"I get treats there for other special occasions, but my husband would probably divorce me if I didn't make my own Thanksgiving pies." Tricia gave me a sad smile. "Even Brooke thought my crusts were perfect."
CHAPTER SIX
Lindsay was waiting for me in her car when Matt dropped me off in front of my house. He didn't get out of the truck, instead saying he needed to get home to finish the ornament he was making for the museum's holiday auction. I suspected that his real reason for leaving was that he wanted to be alone while he dealt with the emotional fallout from having found Brooke's body.
I let Lindsay inside and headed for the kitchen to scrub the sweet potatoes.
"What can I do to help?" Lindsay tossed her coat onto the sofa. "You know I like to stay busy."
"Is that why you're so down in the dumps this week?" I moved so she could take my place at the sink. "You're bored with nothing to do while you're visiting your grandmother?"
"That's part of it," Lindsay said, taking a brush to the potatoes. "Emma already had everything under control for the parade before I got here, and since they're having dinner here tomorrow, I'm not needed for any cooking or cleaning."