SEWED UP
TIGHT
A Quilters Club Mystery
MARJORY SORRELL ROCKWELL
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Buttons and patches and the cold wind blowing...
the days pass quickly when I am sewing!
- Old Saying
CHAPTER ONE
I ain’t a-skeered of no ghost!
Madelyn Agnes Madison did not believe in ghosts. Neither did any of the other members of the Quilters Club. But growing up in Caruthers Corners, they always crossed the street when passing the old Beasley Mansion on Melon Ball Lane. Everybody said it was haunted.
Now in their 50s, married, with grown children, they felt a little silly about this lingering superstition. Like not stepping on a crack to avoid breaking your mother’s back.
However, this adult skepticism was severely challenged last year when Skookie Daniels was frightened to death by a ghost.
Well, that’s what everybody assumed when his body was found stretched out there on the lawn in front of the Beasley Mansion.
The coroner pronounced it a heart attack. But Skookie’s mother maintained that the life had been scared right out of him by an otherworldly apparition.
If that was true, everybody knew the name of the murderer – Major Samuel Elmsford Beasley. Problem is, he’d been dead for over 130 years. The Major had been part of the stranded wagon train that fought off the indigenous inhabitants of this unruly Indian Territory (as Indiana was known back in 1829) to establish the frontier outpost of Caruthers Corners. The big stone mansion was one of the first buildings erected in the fledgling town. Some folks claimed the Major’s ghost still roamed the mansion, angry that his role in founding the town had been usurped by Jacob Abernathy Caruthers, Ferdinand Aloysius Jinks, and Col. Beauregard Hollingsworth Madison.
Maddy’s husband was none other than Beauregard Hollingsworth Madison IV, the great-great grandson of one of the founders. So in theory the ghost should have a grudge against Beau’s family, not Skookie Daniels. The Daniels were descendants of watermelon pickers who migrated here from Georgia a generation or two ago. Relative newcomers.
The Quilters Club – Maddy, along with her pals Cookie Bentley, Lizzie Ridenour, and Bootsie Purdue – met once a week at the Hoosier State Senior Recreation Center. It was a convenient place with a large rec room. This particular Tuesday their talk was more about Skookie’s demise than quilting squares.
Skookie (né Robert Carl Daniels) had been the principal of Caruthers Corners High School for the past ten years. Even the students had called him by his nickname. No need for formality in a small town like this. The school would be closed the entire week in mourning. Flag at half-mast and all that. He’d been a popular educator hereabouts. Even the students liked him.
Maddy passed out the plastic tubs that held the quilting materials, one for each of them, plus one for her granddaughter Agnes, who was an honorary member of the Quilters Club.
“Did a ghost really get Skookie Daniels?” asked the precocious twelve-year-old girl. Her blonde hair had been bobbed to shoulder-length for the new school year, making her look a bit like young Chloë Grace Moretz in the movie Hugo.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” her Grammy spoke up. Maddy was the unofficial leader of the group. This year the fluffy hairdo surrounding her cherub face was a chestnut brown, quite stylish in a ‘50s retro way. Sometimes it seemed the town was trapped in another era.
“The death of Skookie Daniels has been ruled due to natural causes,” Bootsie Purdue reported, as if that ended the discussion. Her hubby was the town’s police chief, so she usually had the inside scoop on local crime. “Doc Medford confirmed that Skookie had a bad ticker.”
“Yes, but why did it happen in front of the Beasley Mansion?” insisted Lizzie, the most superstitious of the group. The redhead followed her horoscope in the Burpyville Gazette every morning. And she carried a lucky rabbit’s foot key ring in her purse (although it hadn’t proved very lucky for the rabbit).
“Skookie’s grandfather picked watermelons for the Beasleys,” pointed out Cookie. As secretary of the Caruthers Corners Historical Society, she knew every family connection in the county. “You remember Sam Jr. used to own a big produce farm north of town.”
“That’s a pretty farfetched reason for Skookie to be at the mansion,” said Bootsie, double chin wagging. She was a tad plump. “He certainly wasn’t there to pick watermelons.”
Lizzie looked up for her stitching. Being the best of the group, she could place precisely twelve stitches to an inch. “Do you think he could’ve been drawn there by psychic forces?”
“Haw,” scoffed Bootsie.
Cookie rolled her eyes.
“I think I can piece that part of it together,” said Maddy, a smile crossing her oval face. Her husband Beau being the former mayor, she had her own inside track. “Skookie was checking out the mansion as a potential site for this year’s Halloween Festival. You know the high school puts on a big fundraising shindig every year.”
“What!” shrieked Lizzie. “A party in that old house – what was he thinking?”
Maddy smiled. “Don’t tell me you believe it’s haunted?”
“No, it’s just … spooky.”
Little Aggie looked up quizzically. “Doesn’t spooky mean the same thing as haunted?”
“No, dear,” Lizzie defended herself. “Spooky is a feeling, a mood. Haunted means an infestation of … well, ghosts.”
“But how can a place be infested if there’s no such thing as ghosts?”
Maddy patted her granddaughter’s arm. “There are different ideas about ghosts,” she said, always the voice of reason. “There’s the Holy Ghost, like you hear about in church. And some people think that souls are kind of like ghosts, floating off to Heaven. But ghosts wearing bed sheets and going ‘Boo!’ are just pretend.”
“Come to think of it, the Beasley Mansion would be a perfect place for the Halloween Festival,” the girl allowed. “It’s – what did Aunt Lizzie call it? – spooky.”
“Y-you really think so?” sputtered Lizzie.
Aggie smiled. “Why not?” she said. “The house looks ha
unted – even if ghosts are just pretend.”
“Yes, it does look like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon,” allowed Maddy. She read the New Yorker.
“We grew up being scared to walk past that big old empty house,” nodded Cookie. She was a pretty, thin-faced blonde who wore her years well. She’d once been a beauty queen.
“It was scary,” admitted Bootsie, her bottom hand steadying the quilt, her top hand moving the needle down into the cotton fabric and up again. “Perhaps we’ve never got over it.”
“I know I didn’t,” said Lizzie. The high-maintenance redhead was afraid of mice and spiders -- and ghosts, if there was such a thing.
Maddy Madison spread out her quilting squares on the large table. She was working on a design based on watermelons, that delicious Cucurbitaceous agricultural product that had become Caruthers Corners’ greatest claim to fame. The town’s annual Watermelon Days Festival was gaining popularity throughout the Midwest. “We were all skittish about walking past that old building. But that still doesn’t explain what scared Skookie Daniels to death,” she came back to the original question.
Bootsie sighed. “Didn’t I just say he had a bad ticker?”
“Yes,” said Maddy, “but something had to set off that bad ticker.”
“Just going up to the front door of Beasley Mansion would give me a heart attack,” Lizzie rolled her eyes. “And I have a good ticker.”
Cookie frowned. “I wonder what made Skookie’s mom say he was scared to death. Bootsie’s right – there’s no medical evidence to support that assertion.”
“Perhaps it’s a mother’s intuition,” suggested Maddy. She continued to stitch, keeping one hand underneath the quilt for stability, ensuring that the needle went all way through to the back of the quilt. “Mothers sense things.”
“Madelyn Madison, I can’t believe you said that,” gasped Cookie. “That’s something like Lizzie would say. She’s a closet New Ager, but you’re the practical thinker. Intuition – really?”
“Then let’s call it gut,” responded Maddy. “We all listen to our gut.”
“I know I do,” said Bootsie. “And right now it’s rumbling from hunger. I brought some watermelon cookies. Anybody want one?”
“Me, me,” Aggie raised her hand.
“Me too,” said Cookie with a flick of her blonde hair. A one-time sad sack, she’d come back into her own after marrying Ben Bentley. Her first husband had died in a tractor accident, but that big lug Ben had given her a whole new reason for happiness.
“Maybe half a cookie,” allowed Liz, always a finicky eater. No wonder she was so slender.
“None for me,” declared Maddy, loading several stitches onto her needle and pulling the thread all the way through with an even tension. “I’m too busy noodling this mystery.”
“Mystery?” mumbled Bootsie. “Only to you. A guy drops dead from a heart attack and you make it into a sinister plot involving ghosts.”
“Not ghosts,” she countered.
“If not a ghost, who then?”
“Hmm, that’s the question isn’t it? Somebody scared Skookie Daniels to death – but who?”
Little Aggie looked up from her pile of fabric scraps, a kaleidoscope of reds and greens and blues. “Maybe this is a job for the Quilters Club,” she said.
CHAPTER TWO
The Upper Window
Agnes Tidemore had a cockeyed view of the Caruthers Corners Quilters Club. In her youthful eyes, she saw it as a quasi-detective agency. That was based on a handful of instances over the past few years where the four friends (with a little help from Aggie) had solved some local crimes.
Bootsie’s husband didn’t exactly approve, seeing it as encroachment on his role as police chief. But he found it difficult to complain when they’d nabbed the bad guy.
Maddy didn’t have that problem at her house. Beau Madison was proud of his wife’s steel-trap mind and ability to ferret out wrongdoers, like some kind of Agatha Christie sleuth. Now that he’d retired from his two-year term as mayor of Caruthers Corners, he was spending more time fishing with Lizzie Ridenour’s spouse, a retired bank president, and helping Cookie’s husband manage the non-profit zoo and wild animal refuse adjacent to the Bentley farm on the outskirts of town.
“If you gals want to look around the Beasley Mansion, you can get a key from Mark the Shark,” Beau told her.
“Mark? Why would he have a key?”
Their son-in-law Mark Tidemore – Tilly’s husband and Aggie’s dad – was now mayor, having succeeded Beau in an unopposed election last fall. A former lawyer, he’d earned the Mark the Shark nickname in the courtroom, but discouraged its usage now that he was a public official. Something about maintaining a dignified image, not that anybody paid any attention to that within the family.
“The Beasley Mansion is town property. Charlotte Beasley, last in the family line, left it to Caruthers Corners when she died last year. Mark says he’s thinking about turning it into municipal-sponsored low-income apartments. An architect we hired says we can get twelve units if we subdivide some of the bigger rooms.”
“That’s right, the Beasley Mansion has a large ballroom, doesn’t it?”
“So I’m told,” he smiled sheepishly. “I’ve never been inside the building. Some unfounded holdover from when we used to think it was haunted. Funny how childish ideas linger on even after we grow up.”
“That’s what Lizzie said just this afternoon. Hate to admit it, but I’m almost afraid to go inside myself.”
“Aw, you know we’re just being silly. You’ll have all your friends with you. And besides you don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Have there ever been any … occurrences at the Beasley Mansion?
“You mean like ghost sightings?”
“Well, strange lights. Noises. Something that makes people think its haunted.”
“Not really,” Beau shook his head. “But keep in mind it had the reputation of being haunted even before we were born.”
“Yes, I suppose it did.”
“Samuel Beasley built that old mausoleum, one of the first buildings in this town. Cookie could tell you the exact year.”
“1832.”
He smiled. “So you’ve been doing your homework.”
“I gather Samuel Beasley wasn’t very fond of your great-great grandfather.”
“True. But he hated Jacob Caruthers even more. That’s because the town got named after him. Old Sam was hoping for Beasleyville.”
“I understand his son Samuel Junior was the last person to live in the house.”
“Yep. Old Sam died in a bizarre accident, impaled by a falling chandelier. His son Sam Jr. continued living there till his own death in 1902. Got locked in the basement and starved to death. His son John closed up the mansion and moved to the other side of town. And John’s daughter Charlotte left the old home place to the town.”
“You’re saying it has sat empty for over a hundred years?”
He nodded. “I imagine it’s pretty dilapidated inside. But the architect we hired said the basic structure is sound. It’s built of huge stone blocks quarried from pits about fifty miles south of here.”
“Maybe the town should hire an exorcist before it builds apartments there,” joked Maddy. They had watched a television rerun of The Exorcist the other night. Nobody would be serving pea soup anytime soon.
“More likely it will be Rev. Pillsbury leading a prayer at the ribbon cutting for the new apartments, if the town can cobble together the funds for the renovation.”
There was the sound of a car in the driveway. Beau stood to look out the kitchen window, like a sentinel guarding the fort. “Hey now, it’s Freddie,” he said, recognizing the blue SUV.
Frederic Hollingsworth Madison was the youngest of their three children, with Bill being the oldest and Tilda in the middle. After getting horribly burnt in a four-alarm fire, Freddie had retired from the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department and moved back to Caruthers Corners with his wif
e Amanda and their adopted daughter. His disability check allowed him to spend most of his time entertaining local kids as Sparkplug the Clown out at the new zoo.
“Dad, Mom,” he greeted them as he came into the kitchen. They were sitting at the dinette table, a pitcher of icy watermelon juice sweating in the center. He reached into a cabinet for an empty tea glass and poured himself some of the pinkish juice as he sat down.
“What brings you by here this time of day?” asked Beau. He was a tall, thin man who reminded you of that actor who played the farmer in Babe. “Thought you had a performance scheduled about now out at the Zoo.”
“Mr. Haney closed down for the afternoon to wash the elephant. Happy was starting to look like a walking pile of dirt. He needed a good scrubbing.”
“How’s Amanda and little Donna Ann?” asked his mother. Her hair glistened with chestnut highlights – thank you, Lady Clairol!
“Just fine, Mom. Amanda’s busy making our daughter a Halloween costume. She’s going trick-or-treating as a pumpkin.”
“Hope nobody toilet papers the house this year,” groused his dad. “Hard to get it out of the trees out front.”
“That was always the Duncan boys,” remembered Freddie. “They must all be grown and married by now.”
“Yeah,” nodded Beau. “But they have kids who seem determined to carry on the tradition.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but I came over to ask your advice.”
“About what?”
“Skookie Daniels, his murder.”
“Murder you say?” That was Maddy, her ears perking up.
“Well, that’s what Maisie Daniels is saying.”
“There’s no proof of any wrongdoing,” said Beau. “Although your mother seems to agree with Maisie’s assessment.”
Maddy felt compelled to speak out on her own. “I’m merely wondering what gave him such a fright that his heart stopped. It may not have been a deliberate homicide, but something caused it. Could have been a stray cat. A barking dog. The sudden appearance of a ghost –“
Sewed Up Tight (A Quilters Club Mystery No. 5) (Quilters Club Mysteries) Page 1