by Terri Thayer
I went back to the roster files. Each year had four seminars named by the month they were held. Chances were Ursula came to the May session each year, so I decided to start there. I began with the 2008 file and went backward. Ursula’s name didn’t appear until 2003. Paul had said she’d been coming for ten years. I went back to 1999. She was listed there and for the next four years. She fell off the roster in 2003.
But she kept coming. Where did she stay?
I knew the way Asilomar worked. The organizer received the keys to all the rooms and doled them out to the participants. She was responsible to let Asilomar know who was in each room so they could charge accordingly. At the end of the weekend, the person in charge collected keys and returned them to Asilomar. Mercedes had said she was responsible to Asilomar. This was what she meant.
If Ursula was staying here, her name would have to show up somewhere. Ursula talked about “her” room. I’d gotten the impression she’d stayed in the same one each time. One would be unaccounted for.
Mercedes kept detailed records, matching each participant with their dorm room and their roommates. I looked through the assignments. These women were creatures of habit, returning to the same space year after year.
I went back to 2003. There she was. No roommate. Paul had paid extra for Ursula to have a single. Of course, so no one would see her bruises.
Mercedes put her in the same place. For the four years between 1999 and 2003, she’d stayed in Room 1626. I looked on the roster for 2004. That room was listed as Mercedes’. But Mercedes stayed in 505 every year. The room she’d died in.
Bingo! Ursula had to be in there. I didn’t know what building Room 1626 was in, but I should be able to find out at the front desk. I wrote the number down and stuffed the note in my pocket.
“Here’s my letter,” Kym said, shoving a scrap piece of yellow-lined paper under my nose. I minimized the accommodations file and took the letter. It was short and to the point.
“Okay, great. Just give me a minute to type it up.”
I composed the e-mail and sent it out quickly. I closed the laptop, waiting for her thank you. She was frowning.
“You didn’t show me what you did.”
“You wrote it. I just copied it and e-mailed it.”
Her lower lip trembled. My head began to throb. I rubbed my hairline where Ursula had hit me, feeling my fingers soothe the spot.
“What?” I said.
“It’s so … impersonal,” she said. Her lips were pursed. She twisted the ends of her scarf making it tighten around her face unattractively.
The girl was never satisfied. I hadn’t worked with her for six months, and five minutes into this, I’d had enough. Even with this simple task, she was impossible to please.
“I’m taking a class here, Kym and I’ve got to go back to it.” I’d spent most of my lunch hour here. If I rushed over to the Administration building, I could get a sandwich from the store cooler, find out what room Ursula was staying in, and still get to my class on time to show off my key print.
The blueprint fabric. Damn I hadn’t found that. I stood up, looking around the room.
“Kym, did you see a piece of blueprint fabric in here? I was getting ready to expose it …”
Kym said, “You never should have come to this conference. You’re the one causing all the problems here. I told her not to cash your check.”
“Excuse me?” I stopped in mid-scan. I saw the plastic bag on the table under the window.
Kym crossed her arms, then uncrossed and scratched. “The minute I saw your name on the form, I told Mercedes you’d be nothing but trouble. If it had been up to me, I would have lost your registration.”
My mouth fell open. Kym was looking at me with complete disdain.
No wonder Mercedes hated me from the get go. My darling sister-in-law had been filling her head about me. Nothing nice, by the sounds of it. I never stood a chance with Mercedes. Kym had gotten there first.
“Face it, Dewey, you’re no quilter. And you never will be.”
Whatever pity I’d been feeling for her vanished. I was left with a familiar feeling—disgust that I’d let myself get taken in again by Kym.
I grabbed my fabric and let myself out without saying another word.
I was back to my classroom before I realized I’d meant to stop at the registration desk to find out about Ursula. The Legendary Quilts students were gathered outside. I couldn’t leave without drawing a lot of attention to myself.
Cinnamon had a table set up outside the door with a half-dozen buckets of water on it. I joined the group.
Lucy said, “We’re exposing our images to the sunlight.”
“That’s how the magic happens,” Cinnamon said. “Come on, everyone, let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Just dip your piece in the water. Swish it around gently.”
The first group of six stepped up and rinsed their pieces. They spread them on the bushes nearby. We gathered around, looking at the pieces of blueprint fabric. Ghostly images were appearing. A fish skeleton, a spray of oleander, seaweed.
“What’s that?” one of the students cried, pointing to a squiggly line next to a sand dollar.
Cinnamon looked over her shoulder. “You got an image of a thread. You’ve got to make sure no random things hit the cloth. Everything will be imprinted.”
Cinnamon directed me. “Rinse it in the water.”
I dunked mine. The water turned lime and the fabric changed, going through the spectrum of color between green and blue. It was the color of the ocean near the shore.
I laid the fabric out on a bench. The outline of the key appeared slowly, then the details emerged. The image got more distinct. I grinned up at Lucy.
“Cool,” I said.
“The sharpness will be determined by the amount of sunshine your piece got,” Cinnamon said, circling behind us and watching.
Lucy showed me her piece. Squiggly lines appeared. “It’s a piece of bark.”
I glanced at my piece again. To my chagrin, another image was emerging on the edge of the fabric.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I ruined it.”
“How?” Cinnamon asked. She bent down and looked at the fabric.
I shook my head. “I confess, I lost track of my fabric after I put the key on it. It was lying in the living room all night. Who knows what was laid on top of it.”
“Not ruined, just different than you’d intended,” Cinnamon said. “No mistakes, just a design opportunity.”
It didn’t feel like an opportunity. It felt like a screw-up.
I watched the image appear. It looked familiar. First, the distinct ninety-degree angle that the clamp took. The wings came next.
Then the body.
This was a sewing bird. The missing sewing bird.
I searched my backpack for the Polaroid Mercedes had taken of the Rose Box. That was where I’d seen that particular shape. The sewing bird that would make the Rose Box worth a small fortune. It matched.
I followed everyone back into the classroom, quietly mulling over what this meant.
The sewing bird had been in the Pirates’ Den, sometime between the time I’d left and presumably Mercedes’ murder. The person who had both the Rose Box and the sewing bird could sell it. For a lot of money.
The killer had the box. Who had the sewing bird? If the killer had both, she was scot free. And rich.
I worked on my quilt for the rest of the afternoon, my mind on what I’d learned.
Ursula was alive. She’d been in the Pirates’ Den. She had been here, right under our noses, the entire time. I didn’t think she’d killed Mercedes. She’d been too startled when she learned about her death. As soon as I found her and talked to her myself, I’d tell Tony where she was.
Clas
s was over at four, and we all left. Cinnamon gave us our question to ponder overnight: What place does quilting have in your life?
___
The first day Cinnamon had asked us what we were running away from. After my experience with Kym earlier, I knew I’d been running from her. And with good reason. The two of us would never see eye to eye on what was important in life. She’d risked her health for a beauty treatment, she refused to learn how to use the computer, and she felt my brother was her personal errand boy.
I wanted my relationships with Buster to be on equal footing. We met as equals and I wanted it to stay that way. Kevin and Kym were like a couple from my parents’ era. He brought home the bacon and she fried it. She kept herself pretty and youthful looking, and he pretended to rule the roost. Her playing at this job for Mercedes just showed how immature she was. She was unable to handle the smallest glitch. I couldn’t imagine her taking over for Mercedes.
I’d taken action when I’d fired her last year, but I’d never really lived up to the consequences of my action. The shop had suffered. We lost customers and, if I was brutally honest, some of my mother’s reputation. We’d been seen as a family business, but now there was a rift in the family, and that made some people uncomfortable. I needed to repair it without losing my integrity as the shop owner.
Taking this class had been a form of running away, too. Vangie had nailed it when she’d said it was an indulgence, but that wasn’t completely right. I needed this class for myself. Needed to know that I could grow as a quilter. My eyes had opened thanks to this class, not just to nature and the images we view as iconic. Cinnamon asked us to go beneath, go deeper into what we saw.
With Ursula, at first, I’d seen a woman who was pathetic. Someone who took her own life rather than live. The ultimate running away. But she turned out to be running toward something. A new life. Ursula, under the worse conditions for a woman, had been determined to carve out a life worth living. She’d managed to escape her husband’s net and start over.
I wasn’t sure yet how she’d done it. It was obvious that she’d needed money. She looked to Mercedes for help, and Mercedes, knowing her situation, had given her a way out.
I headed for the Administration building. As I walked past the sleeping rooms, I looked for the number I’d written down. There were a lot of rooms at Asilomar, spread over several acres. I had a feeling Ursula was in one of the ones far out of the way.
I went to the desk. “I’m looking for my friend. She’s in room 1626. Can you direct me there?”
“Certainly.”
The man in the polyester blue vest pulled out a manila-colored map. He turned the map to face me and circled a building I hadn’t seen before. It sat on the northernmost point of Asilomar, facing the dunes.
He said, “If you walk out here, past the chapel and the lodge, and go up the hill, you’ll see Viewpoint. She’s in that building.”
“Thank you.”
I started to walk away and remembered the assignment I’d given Vangie. I turned back. “Did you get a fax for me? Dewey Pellicano?”
The young man smiled. He went into a small private office and came back with two sheets of paper.
Faxes from the QP office. Vangie had outdone herself. Not only had she gotten a list of appraisers from the Lowell Quilt Museum, she’d called the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and got their recommendations as well.
I sat outside on the Adirondack chair and looked them over.
The lists were different. There were plenty of experts on the east coast and more here on the west coast. I didn’t see any overlap. I looked at the Lowell fax. There were several familiar names. Nan Orchard. Quentin Rousseau.
I shuffled pages and perused the pages from the local museum. One name jumped out at me. Mercedes Madsen.
Mercedes was a certified appraiser, so she would have known exactly what the Rose Box was worth and what was needed to make it valuable. An appraiser would know who was in the market for antique sewing tools.
It stood to reason that if Mercedes was using this opportunity to get her hands on the sewing box, she’d invited Nan here planning to steal the box from her. Had she found the missing tool? Or invited the person that owned the tool. Did Kym know?
My sister-in-law was the perfect foil. She didn’t know anything about antiques. She had some knowledge of quilts, but I doubted that she knew anything about sewing tools.
I folded the pages and stuck them in my backpack.
I went to room 1626 and knocked on the door. It was down at the end in the back of a building that had a great view of the sunset. This room overlooked the road, which was lined with scrub oaks and grasses.
I tried the door but nothing budged. I banged again.
Where would Ursula be? She couldn’t spend time outdoors. Paul was out there. She had no place to go.
I called to her, being careful not to use her name. “It’s Dewey. Can I talk to you?” I whispered.
Nothing but silence. I waited, trying to sense if the room was empty or not. I could hear nothing. No breathing.
I moved away from Ursula’s door, down the concrete sidewalk that ran in front of the rest of the rooms in the building. I knocked on doors as I went. About three doors down, someone answered my knock.
“Yes?” A pretty blonde answered. She was at least fifty years old, her hair streaked with gray but perfectly coiffed.
“I’m looking for the woman in Room 1626,” I said. “Do you know her?”
“Yes, that’s my friend June.”
“What does June look like?” I asked, my heart racing. Was I close to finding Ursula?
“She’s tiny, with black hair.”
My heart sunk. Definitely not Ursula.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I am. We’ve been coming here every year for the past five years. We always get the same rooms. We enjoy the raccoons. They come out at night, taking the peanuts we leave for them along the railing.”
I hurried away, creeped out by the idea of the raccoons so close to their sleeping rooms.
Maybe I’d copied the number down wrong.
I trudged back to my room. It was a long walk, thankfully mostly downhill. Where to look for Ursula now? I thought about how she’d appeared in the mirror in the Pirates’ Den living room. Where had she come from?
I was waylaid by the sight of Buster’s truck parked in the lot outside the Stuck-Ups Inn, right next to my car. My heart did a little leap.
I ran to the building, and into the living room. Buster was waiting for me in one of the deep armchairs. He smiled when he saw me, and stood up. The creases his smile dug into his face gave me a jolt of happiness. I kissed him hello, pushed him back into the chair, and sat on his lap.
“This is a surprise. What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m done. The case went to the jury.”
“Finally,” I said, settling deeper into his arms. He’d shaved, probably in the car with his electric razor. His chin was super smooth. He could get a five o’clock shadow by 1:30 most days. I appreciated his desire to look good for me, and rubbed my hand on his jaw.
“I’m off for the next four days. No work for me until Monday morning.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I meant it. I could feel my breathing slow. I stroked his hair. The worries of the day faded.
Buster would help me find Ursula and the missing sewing box. I could explain to him my theories and he’d help me figure things out—one of the perks of having a homicide detective for a boyfriend. I’d bounced things off him and together we’d hit on insights that I wouldn’t have gotten to on my own.
“I’m all yours,” he said.
I rehearsed what I was going to tell him. How I was going to lay out the facts. I made mental lists of the players.
But for now I was just going to enjoy the security of his lap.
“Except for tonight,” he said into my neck.
I sat up, wrenching my hand away from his silky locks. “What’s that?”
He grimaced as I accidentally pulled out a hair.
I searched his face. His eyes were restless. He was acting like a puppy who was about to pee on the rug. Knowing he was about to do something wrong, but unable to stop himself.
“Spit it out, Healy. You can’t lie to me.”
“The mountain lion made a kill this morning,” he said eagerly.
“I know, I saw it.”
“Cool, huh? The thing is, the best time to track a lion is after she’s made a kill like that.” He sat forward, practically dumping me from his lap. I held onto the edge of the chair, twisting to watch his animated face.
“What’s that got to do with you?” I said.
“She caches her food, half-burying it so she can come back and feed again. Tony and I are staking out the pool to see if she comes back.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“Tony called me this morning.”
“Again?” I didn’t mind when Tony had called him earlier in the week because he knew I’d needed Buster with me, but about this? I felt a little hurt.
Buster didn’t notice. “He asked me to bring your dad’s rifle, and he said I could come along on the hunt if I wanted to.”
Amazing. Buster sounded like a ten-year-old who’d been invited to play stickball with the big kids.
Buster had always been around my house growing up. He and my brother Kevin had been best friends. Tony, at six years older than those two, had been a demigod to the younger boys. Buster and Kevin had been allowed to clean off his skateboard, wax his surfboard, and wash his car.
We’d all idolized Tony. He was the strongest, fastest kid on the block. But he’d left home at seventeen to go to college. School and then work and the mountains kept him away much of the time. The more he stayed away, the greater his status in the neighborhood. Any time he came home, he was likely to attract a gang of younger kids that dogged him. Buster had always been leader of the pack.