Deadly Thanksgiving Sampler: a Danger Cove Quilting Mystery (Danger Cove Mysteries Book 21)

by Gin Jones

  I perched on one of the kitchen peninsula's stools. "I'm fine. I was just startled by the intruder, and it triggered a brief episode."

  "You're not fine," Lindsay said, peering into my eyes. "I know you. You're still not yourself."

  "I will be in a moment." I took a sip of the tea. "This is all I need."

  Lindsay snorted her skepticism. "Have you told Matt about your diagnosis?"

  "Not yet, but I'm planning to do it as soon as things calm down after dinner tomorrow. Assuming he doesn't find out for himself when I pass out in front of him from anxiety over hosting a holiday meal."

  "Perhaps you should cancel tomorrow's dinner plans," Lindsay said. "I know you didn't intend for it to be such a big deal before Dee and Emma guilted you into inviting them and then me."

  "I can handle tomorrow's dinner," I said. "If you really want to help though, I could use a hand with boarding up the broken window."

  "Just stay here," Lindsay said. "I'll take care of it."

  A minute later, she'd gotten a scrap of plywood out of my storage room and was carrying it through the great room, wearing the tool belt that Alex had given me as a housewarming present. I sat and sipped quietly for the next ten minutes until she emerged from my office to sit beside me and drink her own tea. By then I was truly feeling fine again.

  "I heard you say that a quilt was stolen," Lindsay said. "My grandmother is going to want to know all the details."

  "Just don't let her round up a posse to hunt for the thief until after the police have done their job," I said. "It could be dangerous. The stolen quilt is the one that Brooke made, and it might have been taken because it contains clues to her murder and someone wanted to make sure I couldn't interpret them."

  Judging by Lindsay's lack of a reaction, she didn't see anything surprising about my conclusion. Unfortunately, it didn't narrow down the suspects, since Dee and Emma knew I was keeping the sampler quilt in my office until I could make arrangements to give it back to Lawrence or donate it to the museum. They would have told everyone in the guild about it, and the quilters would have told everyone they knew, until everyone in Danger Cove had heard about it.

  The more I thought about the situation, the more convinced I became that this latest theft was connected to Brooke's death. I'd been too groggy to think to mention it to the officer who'd responded to the alarm, but he wouldn't have believed me anyway. Not even Detective Ohlsen would give my theory any credence without more evidence.

  At the moment, all I had was my ingrained distrust of coincidence. It just strained credulity to believe that the theft of Brooke's autobiographical quilt right after she'd died was pure happenstance, two events that were totally unrelated to each other. The sampler, while worth more than a couple of hundred bucks to collectors, wasn't worth enough on the black market to explain why it would be targeted by a typical thief, and as best I could tell, the burglar hadn't even tried to check the rest of the house for more valuables. I'd been unconscious for at least a minute or two, so I couldn't say for sure that he hadn't entered the main room, but there was at least circumstantial evidence to that effect. The door from the office into the great room had been closed when I heard the window break, and it had still been closed when I passed it on the way to respond to Lindsay's pounding out front, suggesting that the thief had taken the quilt and left again without searching outside the office. I couldn't imagine why a thief would take the time to neatly close doors on his way out, especially if the reason he left was because he heard the approaching sirens. It made even less sense that the thief would do anything to cover his tracks if it was the same one who'd made a mess of the break-ins at Tricia's and Brooke's homes.

  Lindsay went over to the sink to refill the kettle. "I'm making myself another cup, this time with caffeine for me. I'll need it to keep up with my grandmother once she hears about the theft. I'm not sure even Emma will be able to do much to calm things down." She set the kettle on the stove before looking at me expectantly. "Unless I can tell her that you'll be investigating the theft?"

  "Definitely." I'd already been planning to ask a few questions while I mingled with people during the parade, but now I was even more determined to figure out the message in the quilt. I couldn't shake the feeling that if I'd just looked at the sampler sooner, I might have prevented Brooke's death. And if I was right about the solution to the murder being in the quilt, Detective Ohlsen might not be able to identify the culprit without those clues. The longer it took to arrest Brooke's killer, the harder it would be for Matt to come to grips with what he'd seen.

  Lindsay topped off my mug with what was left of the decaf brew in the teapot and then carried it over to the stove to fill with a different tea bag. "Do you think it was the same person who stole the miniature quilts? He broke a window to get inside too."

  "It's possible." Originally I'd had mixed feelings about whether the miniature-quilt thief and the killer were the same person, but the latest theft and the matching modus operandi had me second-guessing myself. If the sampler quilt had been stolen because it held clues to Brooke's death, and that theft followed the same pattern as the one involving the miniature quilts, then logic suggested that all three crimes—two burglaries and one murder—were related. "All I know for sure is that the answers must be in Brooke's sampler quilt. She was afraid of something or someone, probably the person who killed her, and she made the sampler as a cry for help. Except it's in code, and I need to break it to read the message. If I can figure out what each block refers to, at least for the last year or two, it should tell us who killed her or at least why, and that should lead to the killer."

  "So we need to get it back so you can finish translating it."

  "We do need to get it back so it can be displayed in the Danger Cove Historical Museum," I said. "But I don't need the quilt itself to figure out the clues. I took pretty extensive pictures earlier today. I can work from them."

  "Grandma will be relieved that at least there are pictures," Lindsay said. "Although she'll probably come up with a plan to search every square inch of Danger Cove until she finds the quilt."

  "Assuming the thief didn't destroy it."

  "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that." Lindsay poured the boiling water into the teapot. "I might be able to keep my grandmother and Emma from starting their quilt hunt until after the parade, but not if they think it's in imminent peril."

  I groaned at the thought. Detective Ohlsen would lose his usual calm demeanor if he found Dee and Emma doing midnight, house-to-house searches for evidence related to a homicide, even if they were doing it for the sake of the quilt. "If they make any wild plans for tonight, you can tell them I've got some ideas for narrowing down the suspects, which will improve the odds of finding Brooke's quilt. I'll spend the rest of this evening with Brackman's Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, researching the names of the blocks in the sampler quilt. They might give me some more clues into what she was afraid of."

  "That reminds me," Lindsay said, carrying the refilled teapot over to the peninsula. "I found out a little bit about Brooke's husband and his repair shop. I'll send you some links when I get back to my laptop, but the bottom line is that Lawrence is ex–Air Force, honorable discharge, and still hangs out with other veterans at a local gun range occasionally."

  "Any idea what type of gun he used?"

  "Sorry, no," Lindsay said. "Oh, but speaking of guns, I did find out that Ryan Murchison has several of them. Apparently he's a collector, as well as a seller."

  "I wonder if Brooke knew," I said. "She didn't seem particularly afraid of him. Not if she had to be forced to get a restraining order."

  "Or else she was more afraid of someone else, someone closer to her," Lindsay said. "Is that why you want to know more about her husband?"

  "I'm just trying to keep an open mind," I said. "What else did you find out about Lawrence?"

  "He was a mechanic in the military. He retired about ten years ago, moved here, and bought the repair shop. Just abou
t everyone thinks he vastly improved the place, much better work than the prior owner did, with reasonable prices, so it's become the most recommended garage in Danger Cove. I got that last bit from Emma, not from any research. She told me she even took her car to Donnelly's Garage before she found out the owner was married to a quilter."

  "That's pretty high praise from Emma," I said. "Not everyone agrees with her though. I met one guy at the shop who was really angry with Lawrence because of a problem with his car."

  "Could be the person who's leaving negative reviews of the shop all over the internet for a little more than a year," Lindsay said. "At least, I think they're all coming from a single sock puppet rather than a slew of dissatisfied customers. He uses a bunch of different names, usually something that starts with an A, plus a color for the last name, but the wording of the complaints is virtually identical wherever he posts."

  "The name of the guy at the shop starts with an A, but his last name is Hollister," I said.

  "Could be him," Lindsay said with a shrug. "Most internet trolls aren't as clever as they think they are."

  "What's he been complaining about online?"

  "He didn't give any particulars. He just kept saying Lawrence had turned a muscle car into a piece of trash."

  "That sounds like the guy I heard at the shop. He used those exact words when he was talking to Detective Ohlsen," I said. "Hollister also said he'd get what he was owed, one way or another. I wonder if he'd have been even more specific about how far he'd go to make Lawrence pay if the detective wasn't right there ready to make an arrest if things got out of hand. Did the online person say anything like that?"

  "He only mentioned criminal behavior once in the reviews I saw, suggesting that someone should burn the shop down so no one else would be victimized," Lindsay said. "He got banned from that site as a result. He must have learned his lesson, because after that, he kept it to simply giving bad reviews, warning people away, and threatening lawsuits but not violence or arson."

  "He may have decided that if he couldn't vent his rage online, he'd do it in person," I said. "In that case, he might have started with something indirect and sneaky, the real-life counterpart to using sock puppets online. Stealing the miniature quilts and planting the tire gauge at the scene to implicate Lawrence would fit the bill."

  "The gauge doesn't seem like a terribly good thing to incriminate someone," Lindsay said. "Anyone in town could have one of them. Even Emma has one in her glove compartment."

  "But only a mechanic is likely to keep one in his pocket, where it might fall out while climbing through a window," I said. "Even if we assume that Hollister planted it there, it doesn't really explain why he might commit murder. Presumably, the point of his leaving the gauge there would be to embarrass Lawrence. Maybe the thief intended to plant the quilts at Donnelly's Garage and make sure that they were found there so Lawrence would be arrested for the crime."

  "That sounds like something a sock puppet would do if he couldn't get his thrills online," Lindsay agreed.

  "I'm not sure it makes sense though," I said. "The timing of Hollister's complaints online matches up more or less with the period when Brooke started her sampler quilt. Her husband said she was moody that whole time, and I think she was aware that someone wanted her dead. But it seems unlikely that Hollister would have been focused on her for all that time. It's more likely that if he killed Brooke, he only attacked her as a last resort, when he wasn't able to get to her husband either through his online reviews or more directly, like his visit to the garage earlier today. So Hollister couldn't have inspired the anxiety that led to Brooke making the sampler quilt."

  "You'll figure it out." Lindsay glugged down the last of her tea as she headed over to set her mug in the sink. "We're counting on you, so I'd better go home and let you study the pictures. Meanwhile, I'll keep Dee and Emma calm and make sure they know that you're taking care of everything. For the investigation as well as tomorrow's dinner."

  CHAPTER TEN

  The turkey was in the oven, and my teenaged turkey-sitter was settled in at the kitchen peninsula with her laptop before I left the house the next morning. The downtown trolley was more crowded than usual as volunteers converged on the parade's starting line. Most people, including myself, got off at the pier since it was closest to the staging site for the parade, across from the lighthouse and Two Mile Beach.

  The town had already closed off that section of Cliffside Drive so the floats and groups of marchers could line up two abreast. Alex Jordan, the woman who'd renovated my home, had her tool belt on and was going from group to group, offering help to anyone who needed last-minute repairs to their floats. Officer Fred Fields was doing his usual community policing routine, wandering through the staging area, encouraging cooperation among the groups, and calming down the occasional arguments that flared whenever people forgot that the parade competition was supposed to be friendly, not cutthroat.

  The trolley had dropped me off at the pier on the side of Cliffside Drive closest to the parking lot and beach. The guild's float was a short distance away on the opposite side, facing what would be the wrong direction for regular traffic. Sunny Kunik was at the front of the truck that was hitched to the float, busy affixing one end of a banner that credited the quilt shop as a major sponsor of the Danger Cove Quilt Guild's entry in the parade. The float itself was built on a seven-by-twelve-foot trailer pulled by a pickup that looked brand new and would have made Matt's truck look like a toy if they'd been side by side. The flatbed of the trailer had been transformed into a scale model of a quilt show on wheels, with the miniature quilts hanging from display stands that were three-foot-tall replicas of the ones that the guild used during its annual quilt show. They were set up in a U shape, with two rows of little quilts facing each other and running parallel to the length of the trailer, plus three additional quilts, each one sporting a tiny ribbon, hung on stands set up to be perpendicular to the others. The middle one of the three quilts was on a slightly raised stand to indicate that it had taken the top prize, with the runners-up flanking it.

  As I continued along Cliffside Drive to join the guild members, I saw the unsecured end of Sunny's banner flap free of her helper's hand. I couldn't hear Sunny's words, but she snapped something at him. She was a patient person, an important trait for both her part-time job as a physical therapist and her role as the owner of a retail shop, but she didn't suffer fools lightly. Even when the fool in question, the one who'd failed to keep a grip on the banner, was her fiancé, Stefan Anderson.

  Stefan was a slight, short man in his thirties, who aspired to looking like a serious academic in khaki pants, button-down shirts, a bow tie, and round wire-rim glasses. Instead, he looked a bit clownish since his pants were too long and dragged on the ground and his shirt cuffs tended to slip down to cover his hands all the way to the fingertips.

  Sunny raised one arm to point across the street toward the deserted beach, presumably indicating where she thought Stefan could be of greatest help to her. He nodded and headed for the crosswalk that would take him to my side of the street.

  Stefan wasn't a quilter himself, but he owned a gallery on Main Street, where he sold a wide variety of folk art, including both old and contemporary quilts as well as sculpture, paintings, and pottery. I'd met him shortly after I'd moved to Danger Cove, when I'd had a run-in with his archrival in the quilt-selling business, and he'd been eager to tell me all about how rotten his competitor was.

  He caught sight of me before he could leave for his exile on the beach and waved briefly, his shirt cuff sliding down to reveal his left hand and what he called his engagement ring. He was truly committed to Sunny, but I suspected he would have found some other excuse to wear the antique gold ring if he hadn't been able to claim it as a symbol of their love. I didn't know much about jewelry, but it was an impressively large piece of folk art, featuring what he'd told me was a Russian family's coat of arms set with three small rubies for highlights.

  Stefan
didn't sell a lot of quilts, but the ones he did acquire were always extraordinary, and I'd encouraged the Danger Cove Historical Museum to purchase some of them from him. What he lacked in terms of an official appraiser's certification like I had, he more than made up for with his eye for quality. I'd love to know what he thought of Brooke's sampler, and as long as Sunny didn't need him to help with the float's setup, it was a perfect chance for me to show him the pictures on my phone.

  I hurried over to where he was trudging from the crosswalk in the direction of the Memorial Walkway with his head down and so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn't seem to notice when I caught up with him.

  I tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention. "You're just the person I wanted to see today."

  "At least someone appreciates me," he said, sending a forlorn glance over his shoulder toward his girlfriend.

  "Sunny appreciates you," I said. "She especially appreciates that you give her some distance when she needs it. Matt does that for me too, but not every guy understands how important it is to step back when asked."

  "Really?" Stefan perked up. "Do you appreciate me too?"

  "Definitely. I appreciate your knowledge of both quilts and local quilters, and I was hoping you'd share some of it with me today," I said. "Did you know Brooke Donnelly?"

  He nodded. "We met at a guild event. Can't recall which one. She was particularly gifted at embellishment."

  "Did you see her sampler quilt? The black, gray, and red one?"

  "I saw a few blocks as she was working on them, but not the finished quilt." He looked toward the beach for a moment before adding, "I remember one in particular because it was a Wedding Ring block, and I'd been thinking about commissioning a quilt in that design for my wedding. Just not in those dreary colors."

  I got out my phone to access the pictures I'd taken of Brooke's quilt and scrolled through them until I found the one I thought Stefan might be referring to. It wasn't the curved Double Wedding Ring design that most people know of, but a more geometric design made of triangles and squares that when viewed through squinted eyes to round off the sharp edges, sort of looked like a ring. It was located in the row that I thought probably reflected Brooke's life in her twenties. "Was it this one?"