The Devil's Puzzle

by Clare O'Donohue

  “I’m checking on that but nothing so far. We’ve got three doctors in town that have been practicing for more than thirty years and what records they have don’t show anyone with those injuries.”

  “No one?”

  “No one who’s unaccounted for, I should say. But we’re still looking into it. I’ve got two officers checking on stored files from retired doctors, and if we have no luck there, we’ll spread out countywide, then statewide if we have to.”

  “What about dental records?”

  “Nothing that matches in Archers Rest. Though the coroner did say the man’s teeth were well cared for,” he said. “That’s the confusing part. His teeth were in great shape, but his leg wasn’t set properly, as if he hadn’t gotten good medical care. If he had the money to look after his teeth, why didn’t he have the money to get his leg set?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that, only another question. “What about DNA? Can you identify him that way?”

  “I’d need DNA to compare it to,” Jesse said. “I’d need a relative.”

  “What about the blood spots you found?”

  “No match in the national criminal database.”

  “I’m sure people in town would volunteer to give samples of their DNA. All you need is to swab their cheek, right?”

  “Yeah, but to do the whole town would take a lot of money and a lot of time. I’d rather start with asking around. Maybe someone remembers a man who passed through Archers Rest, or has a relative that’s been unaccounted for all these years. We . . .” He smiled. “Sorry, I just have to start asking everyone if they know anything.”

  Just when I was about to ask if the coroner had been able to provide a cause of death, Ed announced that he’d fixed the projector. Despite reminding myself that I wasn’t going to get involved in this investigation, I was puzzled about how a well-dressed man that no one in town had reported missing had ended up in Eleanor’s garden. It was all I could think about until Janet Leigh stepped into the shower, and then I grabbed Jesse’s arm and got lost in the movie.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Hi, Nell.”

  The next morning I sat at the front counter of the shop, paging through the latest issue of my favorite art quilt magazine and trying to stay awake when Glad Warren snapped me to attention.

  “Just popping my head in to see how things are going.”

  ‘They’re going well, Mrs. Warren.”

  “Glad. Call me Glad. Anyone who would give so much of herself to help this town is a friend, and my friends call me Glad.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m working on some plans for the quilt show and hoping to get some other regulars at the shop involved.”

  Glad took a step into the store. It may have been her first time. She had a fussy, won’t-break-a-nail quality about her. Correcting other people’s manners and checking for dust seemed more likely to be Glad Warren’s hobbies than anything as useful as quilting.

  She sniffed at the general warmth of the place and then turned on a concerned—aka annoyed—expression when she looked at me. “This is a big responsibility, Nell. A well-designed quilt show can be a huge draw for us, or it could be a disaster if it’s just thrown together. I hope you’re taking it seriously.”

  “I’ve got a terrific plan for the show,” I assured her. “I just want to go over it with the other members of the quilt group and then I’ll clear it with you.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Is Eleanor helping you, dear?”

  “She’ll contribute a quilt or two, I’m sure, but she’s leaving the show to me.”

  “Well, I suppose she knows what she’s doing. Your grandmother sometimes can exhibit an inexplicable faith in people.”

  “I don’t think she’s ever been wrong.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “It’s good that you have such confidence in your grandmother’s judgment. Just let me know what you need before you get in over your head.”

  “Will do.”

  I watched her glance around the store before leaving. While I did sense that Glad approved of handmade things and the continuing of tradition, I also felt that she would never bother with the actual effort involved in making anything from scratch, and was wary of anyone who would. For Glad, the only duty of a prominent citizen was to form a committee and find some poor idiot to do all the work.

  “Who’s that?” Kathryn Brigham, a regular customer of Someday Quilts, had been pulling bolts of bright neon pink fabrics.

  “One of our town big shots. I somehow got myself put in charge of a quilt show this summer.”

  “It sounds like you have some great ideas for it,” she said.

  “It does sound that way,” I admitted.

  Truth was, between the skeleton and helping Oliver, I hadn’t really thought much about it. Now, with the Fourth of July weekend less than two months away and Glad looking over my shoulder, I had to start thinking. And fast.

  Kathryn had gone back to the bolts, choosing, rejecting, then re-choosing fabric after fabric until she’d accumulated a pile. She ran her hand along Alex Anderson’s newest collection, a colorful medley of polka dots and stripes. I could see she was debating, the way quilters do, whether she should indulge in them.

  “Are these new?” she asked.

  “Just came yesterday.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.”

  “When has that ever stopped a quilter?”

  She laughed. “I’ll take a yard each. I’m trying to get my daughter interested in quilting, and I think she would love these. I think it’s wonderful the way quilting has been passed down from one generation to the next.”

  “It is. You could trace the entire history of the country just by looking at antique quilts,” I said. “I’ve always thought of it as a really subversive way that women have expressed themselves. Over the centuries we’ve used quilts to make political statements or religious statements, show off our wealth with expensive fabrics, show off our talents with amazing stitch work . . .” I stopped myself from rambling. It was a subject I could talk about all day. “I’m always so humbled when I think about all the amazing quilters there have been.”

  “It’s a good thing we have shops like this one, to keep the tradition alive,” she said, looking around. “Maybe I should pick up a couple of reproduction prints while I’m here.”

  “We’ve got a great selection,” I told her. “They’re getting so popular we can hardly keep them in the store.”

  Kathryn grabbed a few bolts of Civil War reproductions, then went back for some 1970s psychedelics. Like so many of our regular customers, she’d come from quite a distance to check out the newest fabrics we had in stock and didn’t want to miss something special. Someday Quilts was the only quilt shop for about thirty miles. Quilt shops, just like any other specialty business, suffer from dips in the economy, competition from the Internet, and the changing interests of their customers.

  Somehow, though, my grandmother’s shop was doing better than ever. She’d doubled the square footage over a year ago and because of it had been able to hold more classes and bring in more specialty fabrics. And now the shop was offering quilting services. Or, rather, Natalie and I were, as we’d become quite good at the longarm machine we’d convinced Eleanor to buy.

  It was turning out to be the shop’s best year. As Jesse had said, she was an independent woman used to running her business—and her life—without interference. It was something to be proud of, and as her granddaughter, something to aspire to. But I didn’t think the shop was the reason—at least not the entire reason—why Eleanor was shying away from a marriage to Oliver.

  I could see Eleanor at her desk in the tiny office at the back of the shop. Barney, as usual, was curled up at her feet and there were piles of newly arrived books sitting on the edge of her desk.

  After I finished waiting on Kathryn, I walked back to Eleanor, looking for an excuse to talk.

  “Do you want coffee?” I asked.

  Eleanor looked up a
t me, startled, as if I’d woken her from a dream. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, more to herself than to me.

  CHAPTER 9

  “About what?”

  She blinked at me a moment, then seemed to wake up. “About all this work I have.” She took a breath. “Did you want something?”

  “I asked if you wanted coffee.”

  “Desperately,” she said. “And I’m guessing you could do with a cup yourself. You didn’t get home until early this morning.”

  “Four,” I admitted.

  I yawned. I hadn’t slept well the night before, as I rarely did on nights I was with Jesse. After the movie, we’d gone back to his place so he could be home in time to put Allie to bed. Jesse and I would take turns telling her stories and then, when we were sure she was asleep, we’d retire to his bedroom. Problem was, neither Jesse nor I were sure how Allie would feel if she found me there in the morning, and we weren’t ready to find out. So it had become my routine to spend the first part of the night at his house, then drive back to mine and catch the last few hours of sleep in my own bed.

  “Maybe you can make an early night of it,” Eleanor suggested as she saw me yawn a second time. “I’m sure the girls won’t mind if you miss the meeting.”

  It was Friday, which meant our weekly quilt meeting. And while I loved hanging out with the members of the group, I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and close my eyes. But I knew that on this particular Friday, I couldn’t.

  “The quilt show,” I reminded Eleanor. “If I’m going to get it together I’ll need everyone to start helping tonight. Even with help I have no idea how I’m going to manage.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t volunteer for things if you don’t have the time.” I could see the corners of her lips turn up as she tried not to laugh.

  I threw a skein of decorative yarn at her, which she caught and dropped on the desk.

  “Wasn’t someone going to get coffee?” she reminded me.

  I sat on the chair opposite her. “That would be great, Grandma. I’ll take mine black.”

  She met my smile with one of her own. “I guess I deserved that.”

  “That’s almost an apology. What’s your angle?”

  “No angle. I just realized that I should enjoy you while I can. Once you’re a bride-to-be, you’ll be too busy for your old grandma.”

  “It does take a lot of time, planning a wedding.”

  “It can. You and Jesse will try to keep it simple, I imagine, but these things have a way of becoming big and complicated.”

  “Was your wedding big and complicated?”

  “No. It was your grandfather, a minister, my sister and parents, and his brother. We got married in the church at ten in the morning and then we all went to lunch.”

  “Where did you go on your honeymoon?”

  “Niagara Falls.”

  “Was it nice?”

  “It was a honeymoon. It would be a crying shame if it wasn’t nice. And yours will be nice, too.”

  “So you and Joe were in love?”

  “Yes. We were very young. I was eighteen. He was twenty. We didn’t know a thing about what marriage really was, but we were in love.”

  “What was he like?”

  She leaned back in her chair. “He was a football player in high school, so he had a strong build. He was very athletic. He played baseball and tennis, and really any sport he was interested in. And he was good at all of it. He liked to watch them, too. He used to take me to New York to see Yankees games and tell me how his dad had seen Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play. He knew all the statistics. We used to have so much fun.”

  “That’s where you got your love of baseball,” I said. The only time I’d ever heard my grandmother swear was when the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in extra innings. “What else did he like?”

  “Lots of things. He was smart. Not an intellectual, but he had a curious mind. He was good at reading people. He could tell if someone was ready to buy insurance or wasn’t.”

  “That’s right, he sold insurance. I’d forgotten that.”

  “And he was popular. He knew everyone. We’d walk into a store and he’d know the owner, the owner’s wife, the owner’s dog.” She laughed. “It was strange when I first moved to Archers Rest because nobody knew him. That’s when I realized he was really gone.”

  Joe, my grandfather, had been dead since my mother was six and my uncle Henry was five. There were photos of him in my grandmother’s bedroom, but she rarely spoke about him, and growing up, I never heard my mother mention his name. He was a ghost in our family. A man who had big plans, big ambitions, but ended up with his car wrapped around a tree after a night out with friends. He left my grandmother a widow at twenty-six, with two small children and a pile of debt.

  “Did he make you happy?”

  “We were kids, with kids. We didn’t think about being happy.” She paused. “But I guess we were.”

  “Was he the love of your life?”

  “When did you become a romantic?”

  “I’ve always been one.”

  “I would have thought you had more sense.”

  “I have enough sense to believe in love,” I said.

  “I’m sure Jesse will be happy to hear that.”

  I sighed. “I just don’t know if I’m ready for all of that. I feel like I’m just beginning to grow into myself. But I do love Jesse,” I said, “and I know you love Oliver. I’ll bet he’s the love of your life.”

  “Not everyone has that kind of happiness, Nell. Or deserves it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m going to get that coffee before you fall asleep.” She got up and walked to the door of her office. “Jesse is a good man. He’ll be good to you, and you’ll have a nice life together—you, Jesse, Allie, and whatever children you bring into the world. If you want to be happy, you will be. It’s more of a choice than you think.”

  I nodded. So why wasn’t she choosing to be happy, I wondered as I waited for her to return. Was the specter of my grandfather, or the long-ago pain of losing him, keeping her from marrying Oliver? Or was it as simple as feeling too old and too settled to become a wife again? Or was it something else? Whatever the answer, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t hear it from Eleanor.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Okay, no time for gossip,” I said once all the members of our quilt club had arrived. “We have serious quilting business to discuss.”

  Carrie and Natalie were both at the counter eating oatmeal raisin cookies, but stopped when I spoke. Natalie sat next to her mother, Susanne, the award-winning art quilter in our group, and Carrie sat next to Maggie, my grandmother’s best friend and the only person I knew who could win an argument with Eleanor.

  “I thought we were going to talk about the skeleton,” Bernie said. Bernie was our local pharmacist, an ex-hippie, sometime psychic, and my go-to person whenever I needed cheering up.

  “We’re not talking about the skeleton,” I said. “We’re talking about the quilt show that I somehow got roped into organizing.”

  I looked over at Eleanor, who shrugged.

  These Friday night get-togethers had been going on long before I moved to Archers Rest, but I was welcomed as a member before I even knew how to quilt. Theoretically we gathered to share quilt ideas, show off new projects, and spend some uninterrupted time engaged in our favorite hobby. But soon after I joined the group I came to realize that the quilts everyone brought to a meeting served mainly as an alibi for outsiders. We did talk about quilting once in a while. But what made our meetings a not-to-be-missed occasion was the opportunity for seven women to share the events of their week, and whatever gossip happened to be floating around town.

  “I heard he was a gambler,” Susanne said, ignoring my plea to talk about the quilt show.

  “They found a poker chip in his pocket,” I told her, “but I don’t know if that makes him a gambler.”

  “There’s a casino not far from here,” Carrie said.


  Bernie shook her head. “Oh, that was built less than ten years ago, and he’s been in the ground for at least forty.”

  “Why do you think that?” Maggie asked.

  “Well, he had to be buried there when Eleanor moved into the house or else she would have noticed someone digging in her garden.”

  Carrie turned to my grandmother. “When did you move in, Eleanor?”

  “Nineteen sixty-five,” Eleanor said. “And the garden was in good shape for several years.”

  “You don’t remember anyone digging in it?” Carrie asked.

  “No one but the gardeners, Larry Williams, and his father.”

  “The mayor?”

  “He was a teenager then. His father was a gardener. These days I suppose you would say he had a landscaping business, but back then he was just handy with a garden hoe. Larry would tag along with his father and help as he could. When he got to be a teenager he took over tending to the place. He kept that rose garden in beautiful condition.” Eleanor smiled at the memory of it. “It’s a shame I didn’t keep it up, but after Grace died and I bought the place, there were so many other priorities . . .”

  “You did the best you could,” Maggie jumped in.

  “She did,” I agreed. “And she did a wonderful job. But that isn’t why we are here. I’m in serious trouble unless we figure out what we’re doing about the show and start dividing up the work. So we have no time for investigating mysterious deaths.”

  Bernie laughed.

  “I’m serious.”

  Carrie nodded. “She is. She says she’s staying out of this one.” “Jesse can handle it,” I said.

  “What else is there for him to do?” Bernie jumped in. “Aside from keeping Nell happy, which I’m led to believe is a full-time job . . .”

  “It is.” Eleanor laughed.

  “But what about the break-in at the high school?” Susanne said. “There were a couple of windows smashed early this morning. Nothing was taken, but I think Jesse was there most of the day.”