by Lissa Kasey
“While she’s still missing?”
“What do you expect us to do? Start racing through the woods and get lost ourselves? Get in the police’s way? Trample any evidence they may have used to find her?” Freya asked.
“You always take his side. Micah has always been your favorite. You mentored him when he was barely old enough to be anything, and the rest of us fight for crumbs.”
I gaped at her. Were we fighting over Freya? I glanced around the group trying to determine if I was the only one confused, but couldn’t tell if anyone was agreeing with her or just as lost as I was. Was that why they all never seemed to like me much? Tim told me I’d been reading too much into ulterior motives, and that only got worse after my return. Maybe it wasn’t all in my head.
“I give my time to as many as possible. And Micah showed a lot of potential at a very young age with no other support from friends or family. I’m sorry if that offends you, but I have thousands of followers, many of whom cosplay. All of you here are closer than any of them, and still you’re ungrateful?” Freya shook her head. “I spend a lot of time looking over work for all of you. Time I could be crafting more videos and pieces of my own.”
“Except interest in you has been waning for years,” Melissa snarled at her. “It’s why Byrony has been asking for you to give her acknowledgment among your followers, that her skill is at your level, that she’s worth the fame. Instead you focus on a little boy with a broken past who doesn’t even cosplay anymore. I didn’t even want to come. Byrony said she wanted to try one last time to gain your support, instead you cast her aside again. This is all your fault.”
“If anyone is to blame, Melissa,” Freya said looking more angry than I could ever recall her being, “it’s you for leaving them alone in the dark because you were too afraid of some woods. Byrony knew I would never promote her brand. Not after she spent the last five years cannibalizing everyone else’s ideas. She wants fame without the work. I couldn’t give that to her even if I wanted to.”
“She copied us a few times,” Nicole said softly with Julie nodding beside her.
“She copied me more than a dozen times,” MaryAnn added.
“She copied everyone,” Jonah said.
“It’s part of what it means to be in the group,” Melissa defended. “Collaborating…”
“Collaborating means actually sitting down and working out ideas with other people and everyone working on something together. She blatantly stole designs, from the colors to the trim and buttons without a single word of requested consent or acknowledgment,” I brought up. “In fact, she told me more than once, that because she was a girl, she could make enough changes to an outfit I created to make it legally hers. Then threatened to sue me if I claimed otherwise.”
But this was not why I’d come here. Time away from the long days of my small business had sounded like a good idea at the time. Company while I worked through ideas since Alex had been gone, and even feedback was supposed to be fun, a distraction at least. Being dropped into accusations wasn’t my idea of fun.
I got up from the chair. “I’m sorry, Freya. Maybe I shouldn’t have come. I’ll take my stuff to the cabin and work out there while I call around to find a new place to stay for the week. I really don’t want to be in the middle of all of this.”
Freya put her hand on my arm. “Stay. You are in the middle of nothing. We are here to cosplay and craft. Let’s focus on that.”
Melissa screamed and slammed her hands on the table. “You’re all so worthless.” She got up and stomped up the stairs leaving everyone gaping behind her. Alex came in just as she left.
“Everything okay?” He asked, his gaze focused more on me than anyone else in the room. His arms were full of the garment bag and the shopping things from yesterday. If they hadn’t been, I might have gone to him and buried my face in his shoulder. Instead I made my way to the craft room, needing to get out what was in my head because suddenly the internal noise had become deafening.
Chapter 13
Freya sat me down at the computer first. “Let me show you that software,” she said, opening the giant Mac screen she had set up in the craft area. She logged in and opened a program. “It’s not cheap in terms of software, but saves a lot of time.”
She showed me how to input the size of the person, regular measurements, which I already had, and then from there I could choose from some basic designs and build on top of them. I played with it for a few minutes, creating a silhouette of Alex in his Frozen gear, but making the shirt a little more translucent and adding flakes to the side of the legs. I could probably play for hours with the software, and made a note to look it up later to buy for myself as it would be a huge time saver, but I needed something to clear my head. Something else to focus on, while still leaving me with enough capacity to think.
“Thanks, Freya,” I said. “I’ll play with this later. I think I’m going to show Alex how to do some quilting.”
Alex spread out the haul of fabric we’d purchased yesterday, laying everything in a rainbow colorway. I made my way over to him and rested my forehead on his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said, putting his arms around me. His warm breath caressed my hair and I wished for a moment to go back to bed in his arms. Only my head was too busy to let me rest. “What do you need? Total distraction or thinking mode?”
A little of both really. “How about you pick something, and I show you some basic design? We can work on that for a while.” I glanced at the set of mid-arm machines Freya had. “Then maybe you can try quilting again.”
“Okay,” Alex allowed, his tension rising with the mention of using his ghost-learned ability. We both had hang-ups. Maybe it was why we worked so well together. “Show me how you turn squares into something.”
“Pick a set of squares,” I instructed.
“Any of them? Doesn’t matter the size?”
“Sugar, size always matters,” Jonah piped up.
“Nope,” I corrected. “I bought everything with ideas in mind. So whatever size squares you want. We can even mix and match.”
“How about these? They make me think of strawberry lemonade or something.” Alex chose a set of 5” squares, the colors a mix of of stripes, swirls and florals in coral, green, orange, white, pink, and black. I’d picked up the set because it reminded me of spring gardens, fresh berries, and bright colors. Alex seemed drawn to bright colors, though he rarely wore them. But I’d picked a few packs with him in mind.
“Sure,” I agreed. “Let’s do a disappearing nine patch.”
“A disappearing what?”
I took the squares from him, stitched a set of nine together, three rows of three and then ironed it. When I laid them out on the cutting board he got really worried.
“What? All that work and now you cut it?” Alex gave me a squinty side eye.
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
“I guess.” He sounded less than certain at that moment.
“You wanted magic, right?”
“Yes.” This time more confident.
I picked up the large ruler, centered it vertically, and used the rotary blade to cut the block in half. Then, since I was using a rotating cutting mat, turned the entire thing with a little twist of the mat, to cut down the horizontal side as well, creating four blocks.
“Here is where your magic really happens,” I told Alex as I separated out the blocks. “Turn this top right one, and the bottom left one.” I turned the two, putting the larger uncut blocks pointing toward the middle, and suddenly it looked like a whole new pattern. “Now we sew them back together. It looks like we took a mad amount of time to make small pieces and sew them into these designs, when all we did is cut a block and turn it.”
Alex gaped at the design. “Wait, do that again.”
I flipped the blocks back to the way they had been, aligning the edges so it still looked like the nine squares. Then I flipped the top right one, which made the large print square point toward the middle, and
a small square appear in the corner beside a couple of lines of green. The whole process made the piece look like you’d worked forever on it by sewing small pieces together. Except it was a simple block, sew, then cut, process.
Alex flipped the bottom left. Examining it.
“You can flip the other two as well,” I turned them so the larger uncut blocks all faced the center, leaving small squares at each corner and the entire thing appearing as though it were bordered in green. “This is a cornerstone,” I said pointing to the small square in the corners. “You can create a half dozen designs by simply changing how you lay out these squares after you cut them. That’s where the magic is.”
Alex studied the pieces, flipped them around a few more times before landing back on the first one I’d shown him. “Now I sew them together?”
“Yes, like we did the first squares, right sides together.” I took them and sewed the new set of four squares together, then pressed it again.
“We made that.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s tiny.”
“That’s why we make more and then put them all together. Quilts are made from many smaller blocks like this one.”
His lips curved into a big oh.
“Do you want to try?” I asked him.
Alex shook his head. “I’m so worried I’ll break something, or mess something up.”
“I can fix pretty much anything you might do,” I promised him.
“Except my anxiety about it,” Alex admitted, indicating he knew it was an unreasonable fear.
“You would feel better if I sew and you watch?”
“I love watching you sew. It’s relaxing.”
“Okay,” I agreed. Alex made his way back to our little area and began laying out the blocks.
“What if I change the order of the blocks?” He wanted to know as he laid out a bunch of squares on the large workspace.
“Keep the green in the same spots, since it creates a cohesive sashing, but change up the rest any way you want.” He could actually change it all and make it ‘scrappy,’ though I had a feeling he was getting to the edge of his capacity of new learning for the day.
“More lingo,” he grumbled. Alex went to work, laying out the squares, then bringing them to me to sew together. “You’re like a super speed sewer.”
“I also have years of practice,” I reminded him. I cut and sewed, he ironed, and we rolled through four packs of squares like a well-oiled machine. Twice something bumped my leg and thought Alex was crouching in close, only when I looked up, he was perched on a chair about three feet away. I frowned and looked down. Maybe I’d dropped something. Nothing looked out of place in the dark underside of the sewing table. I probably needed more sleep.
The third time it happened I could have sworn it felt like what Jet often did when I was at home. In fact, I was so focused and chain piecing the blocks as Alex handed them to me, I almost thought that it was Jet, and that we were home. Only the sound of chatter from across the room made me look up and realize we were at the B&B. Jet wasn’t there, but Alex had told me he’d seen a ghost cat.
I turned my gaze to him.
“What?” he asked, holding out squares, which I took, but didn’t put on the machine.
“Is the cat near me?” I whispered to him. “The ghost cat?”
He looked at my feet, then back up to my face. Expression confirming a drop of a rock into my gut. “Yes. But she’s normal right now. Just a cat. Do you feel the skin tingles?”
“No. I thought it was Jet for a minute…” And that made me catch my breath. No ants on my skin feeling, but I had felt something bump my leg. Had it happened before and I’d never caught it, or was this new from my encounter with whatever things had been out in the forest last night? I gripped the edge of the table, forcing myself to suck in air as I counted deep even breaths.
Alex rubbed my back in slow circles. “It’s just the cat. I promise. She’s acting like a normal cat right now. Mostly sitting at your feet.”
“A ghost cat,” I muttered.
“Yes. Would you rather it be a person?”
No. Absolutely not.
“Will we have time to finish this today?” Alex asked, holding out more squares. He was completely unbothered by the fact that a ghost sat at my feet. If he wasn’t freaked out, I could calm down too, right? Focus on what we had at hand. We had already completed a half dozen blocks. “I’ve seen you finish putting together quilt tops in a day.”
I had. Simple designs. Which is what we’d chosen. I took the blocks and continued to sew, working hard not to move my feet more than necessary to actually push the pedal down. Alex took to cutting the blocks, then handing them back. He did the ironing. I focused on sewing, racing through the blocks as fast as I could, and breathing deep while I chanted, “It’s just a cat,” quietly to myself.
We laid out the completed squares, Alex shifting one here or there every once in a while, until the batch was done. A good size blanket formed from the rows. The layout created a secondary design of diagonal lines from the turned center blocks. Alex played with it until he was happy the diagonals did what he wanted. Smiling in triumph as he placed the last square he’d been moving around for several minutes. He handed me the first two squares, adding one as I got through each one. I paused when the first row was finished to hand it to him.
“Iron that. Then give me the second row. We do each row, then sew the rows together.”
He thought about that for a minute, but handed me the squares from the next row, then took the first to the iron. I glanced at the clock. Two and a half hours since we’d begun. It was a record even for me. Maybe ghosts motivated me too? The final row of sewing took almost no time. A quick nesting of seams, pinning, which Alex did with the two rows while I stitched the previous two. Finally it was finished, one big unit, which Alex ironed again.
He held it up. “We made this. And it didn’t take that long.”
“The magic of precut squares. The cutting takes up most of the time while quilting. There are machines that some of the bigger quilt shops have to cut squares or strips on demand, but not all of them have it.”
“I’m sold. Squares or whatever, are the bomb.” Alex grinned dancing around with our new creation. “What’s next.”
“You should eat lunch,” I told him.
He waved a hand at me. “Are you hungry? I ate like four eggs and half a pound of bacon for breakfast. And did you see the strawberries? I must have had a pint of those.”
I wasn’t hungry, but I carefully got up and stepped away from the machine, worried about wherever the ghost cat might be.
I waved at Freya to get her attention. She was engaged in a conversation with Chad about the Cricut cutting machine, and crafting EVA foam for an Infinity Glove. She looked up. “Do you have any spare 108?” I asked her.
“Yes. Far left cabinet, left side. It’s sorted by color,” she said pointing to the distant wall of cabinets.
I headed in that direction, found the cabinet and opened it to find almost a full section, floor to top of the cubby, labeled 108. They weren’t hanks of fabric like I had, but a section of full bolts, many solid colors, and a handful of prints. Alex appeared beside me with the quilt top, staring into the depths of Freya’s organization.
“She’s a hoarder too,” Alex said with a bit of awe.
“Better organized though,” I said. “We need to find a good back for our quilt. These fabrics are 108 inches wide, meaning they fit most quilt tops without having to piece together smaller bolts of fabric.”
“Oh.” Alex held up the top beside the wall of colors. “More quilting magic. How about this green with leaves?” He pulled out one in pale green, with metallic gold leaves.
“Sure. But we should stop for lunch.”
“Or we could keep going and have an early dinner. How much is left?” He eyed the backing and the top. Did he remember the quilt sandwich part?
“All that’s left is sandwiching the quilt, t
hen the actual quilting. Are you ready to try free motion quilting again?”
“What if I can’t do it?” he whispered. “The machine didn’t feel as familiar when I was sewing the seams.”
I set the fabric down and pulled him into my arms, tilting my head up to meet his lips. “Whatever happens is fine.” There was fear in his eyes, but I knew he wouldn’t let it hold him back. “If you can’t do it, then we just put it on the long arm and set a design. No pressure.”
“I want to be useful to you.”
I stepped into his space and put my hands on his face so he could see only me. “You are. Just having you hang out while I sew is one of the few things that quiets my brain. Your presence, even if you were only napping while I worked, helps me out. Whether you craft or sew or not doesn’t matter. I like having you close.”
“I like crafting with you.”
“And I love crafting with you too. Showing you stuff. Even with a ghost cat at my feet, I knew you were close and it was okay. I know this freaks you out a bit, but I think it will be alright. I would love for a ghost to stop in and give me some skill I could use,” I told him.
“Careful what you wish for, eh?” Alex muttered. “The cat is still here. Sitting in the chair you were using.”
I glanced at the chair as though I’d see something there. Nothing. Not even a divot where the cat might sit. I guess I wouldn’t be sitting back down.
“You missed my point. Having you here has been great. I’m so happy you came along.”
His cheeks pinked again. I worked to get us focused back on the project and soothe his internal panic about being gifted.
“Try to think of the finished quilt,” I told him. “What color do you want the thread?” Freya, like me, had a wall of colored threads meant for top quilting. Some were variegated, some even metallic. I preferred heavier cotton thread for quilting, and found a pale peach I thought would work well, blending in most spots, visible in others. “How about this one?”