Bound and Deceased

by Rothery, Tess

  “Shara, let’s not argue about this right now. I came here to help Taylor see the need to take her fabric down.”

  Taylor was enjoying the show.

  Carly was new to town. She had only owned her shop for the last five years, but she was one of those women who become the leader wherever she goes.

  “Remove your Amish fiction books, and I’ll believe you mean it.”

  “I don’t carry the same titles you do,” Carly said. “You carry some fairly racy Amish romance.”

  “How about you take your books down,” Taylor said to Carly, then turned to Shara, “and you rename your shop, so it isn’t a direct copy of mine.” Taylor settled into a chair with her mug. She was the only one who had taken advantage of the offered caffeine. “And then I’ll go shop to shop with my catalogue of original fabrics and make sure we all remove anything that could be easily confused with mine. That makes sense, right? Small repeated floral patterns were especially common to flour sacks.”

  Carly exhaled slowly. “You’re trying to make a point that our issue with you carrying this fabric is absurd.”

  “Very good.” Taylor sipped her coffee.

  “But this is the way it has been done. We each have lines of fabric that the other stores won’t carry.”

  “Bring me the list of fabrics you carry,” Taylor said to Shara, “and I will show you all the ones I still don’t have, how is that?”

  Shara pressed her lips together and narrowed her eyes.

  “Ladies…” Carly stood between them, hands up and out.

  “I’ll discuss food donations with Rueben’s,” Taylor said. “They can be counted on for some kind of hot comfort food. And I’ll ask at Comfort Noir if they’d like to donate some wine. Who are you going to talk to?”

  “I’ll go to Country Market on the highway and see if they can provide some vegetarian options.”

  “How many people are we expecting?” Taylor asked Carly.

  Carly’s brows were drawn in confusion.

  Taylor had flipped the switch to the memorial so suddenly, Carly had missed it. Taylor had, in a way, stolen her moment of glory.

  It felt good, if petty. Like putting up the quilt.

  “Strive for two hundred.”

  “Easy. If you ladies will excuse me, I’m still training my new employee.” The polite ejection almost worked, but Taylor was greeted at the back door by Sissy. “I need to talk to you alone.” She looked at Carly and Shara as though they were complete strangers.

  “We were just leaving.” Carly hooked her arm through Shara’s. “We’re going to my shop to talk about books.”

  Taylor felt the same thing that made Shara cringe. She had a feeling their discussion about books would end up with Shara being told that her Amish titles had to go…. She didn’t want Shara to win, by any means, but she certainly didn’t want her to lose to Carly.

  What they needed was someone impartial to intervene in their troubles. Someone like June from Comfort Cozies. It had been the second shop to open in town, and Grandma Delma and June’s mother had founded the guild together.

  Shara, on the other hand, gave Taylor a triumphant look as she left with Carly. A look Taylor couldn’t understand. In what way was going to Bible Creek Quilt and Gift to get a lecture a win for anyone?

  “Want some coffee?” Again, Taylor directed her surprise guest to their little coffee set-up.

  “When do you open today?” Sissy stood with her back to the Keurig.

  “In an hour and a half.”

  “Good, then let’s go.”

  “Hold up Sissy, I do have things to do before we unlock the doors.”

  “Can’t Roxy do them for you? She’s better at it anyway.”

  “Ouch! What was that about?”

  “Everyone knows Roxy was running this place while your mom was trying to get internet famous.”

  “If you want me to help you, you can’t come in here insulting me and mine and demanding I run at your whim.” Taylor sat down and crossed her legs. “What on earth has happened since yesterday morning to make you so panicked?”

  “Your new employee is heading over to the house right now to clean out the online shop stuff. Perhaps to eliminate anything that links her to the murder.”

  Taylor’s interest was piqued. “And we can go too?”

  “Yes. Fawn will be there. She called to say Hannah had texted Art and gotten permission. I don’t like it one bit. Who knows what she’ll be taking away?”

  “What will our excuse for showing up be?”

  “I don’t need an excuse. I’m keeping a stranger from robbing my aunt’s family.”

  “I need one. I’m Hannah’s new employer. It would be a little odd for me to be afraid she’s going to steal from them.”

  “Come up with whatever story you want, but come with me. I’ll be in the office with the records. Fawn plans on following Hannah around. You can station yourself in the work room where all the quilting supplies are.”

  “Why not?” Taylor caught Roxy’s eye. “You good if I go play detective for a while?”

  Roxy shook her head in disbelief, but grinned.

  There had been a lot of drama already this morning, and like always Roxy rolled with it like a pro.

  Chapter Ten

  Art and Reynette Wood’s Queen Anne Victorian was just as impressive the second day as it had been the first, and just as cluttered with boxes. Of course, it would be as no one had been in it since Sissy and Taylor were there last, but it was still a sort of shock to see the elegant wood paneling and built-ins and plaster work obscured by the stacks of cardboard cartons.

  “Hello?” Hannah’s voice, with a hint of curiosity, came from the kitchen. It was soon followed by her footsteps as Hannah met at the front door.

  “Coming!” A voice from upstairs shouted down followed by the running feet of Fawn. “Aunt Sissy, I’m so glad you could come.” She practically leapt to Sissy and gave her a big hug. “And you brought Taylor. That’s great.”

  “I only have an hour or so before I have to open the shop,” Taylor murmured. “Hi Hannah. Glad to see you.”

  Hannah frowned at Taylor. “I didn’t realize you knew the family.”

  “It’s a small town.” Taylor shrugged. “Sissy’s a family friend and asked me to help out in the sewing room. Sissy’s not much of a quilter.”

  Sissy cleared her throat.

  “I mean, she’s a great quilter, but not like, for assessing the situation up there.”

  Sissy shook her head, still displeased with Taylor’s representation of her. “I just can’t be in two places at once, that’s all. Art was really wanting some help with the bookkeeping for the business and so me and Taylor came to sort things out.”

  “I’m here to help with whatever.” Taylor smiled, looking from face to face.

  Fawn extended a hand her way. “Come upstairs with me, if you will. I need help in the work room.”

  “I’ll head to the office if anyone needs me.”

  Hannah shrugged. “I’m just getting some water. I’ll be in the stock room where the clothes for online sales are stored. I’ve got some questions for Art, so I’ll be calling him.”

  “Cool, great,” Fawn’s voice was thin, but she led Taylor upstairs. “Listen, I don’t want this Hannah lady digging around in Mom’s stuff. I know that like, Art gets it all, but you and I know that’s not really fair. They were married barely a month before she died.”

  “Have you spoken to the police lately?” Taylor looked around the work room. It was another room filled with unopened cartons. A folding worktable was open but empty and a large flat screen TV was leaning on the wall.

  “I call them every day, but they think I’m crazy. We’re making the funeral home store the body because we can’t afford a private autopsy, and the cops say they don’t need one.”

  “You do know the cause of death, right? Aspirin overdose.”

  “Salicylate poisoning,” Fawn corrected. “Mom didn’t overdose on
a medicine she never takes.”

  “Forget the autopsy. You need to find the source of the salicylates. I’m pretty sure it’s nothing in here.”

  “I don’t know where to look.”

  “She had to eat it or drink it didn’t she? Have you dug through the kitchen yet?”

  Fawn looked confused. “Not really. Just kind of.”

  “What does kind of mean?”

  “I looked around, but I didn’t really see anything. It’s not like I know what I’m looking for.” Fawn looked down at her hands, her soft, moony eyes half closed.

  “If you suspect Hannah, why are you up here while she’s down in the kitchen getting water alone? Also, what makes you suspect her?”

  Fawn’s face went sort of green. “Because the day after Hannah moved here, Mom died. Doesn’t get any more suspicious than that, does it?”

  “Have you done any reading up on aspirin, I mean Salicylate poisoning? Can it be done in a day like that?”

  Fawn shrugged and picked at the sleeve of her sweater.

  “Listen. Go downstairs and follow Hannah’s every move. I’ll look around in here and see if I can turn up something. Maybe she has snacks she keeps in her sewing room and they got tampered with.” Taylor’s mama-instinct kicked in. She knew the utter panic from your mom dying and not knowing why. She was glad, suddenly, that she’d had Belle to focus her energies on nine months ago.

  Fawn needed someone to give her specific instructions and then tell her she had done a good job. Taylor could do that much at least, and maybe make her morning’s efforts worthwhile.

  Fawn nodded and then ran back downstairs.

  For her part in today’s charade Taylor had to keep busy for an hour. With the memorial just around the corner it occurred to her that she might as well look for some works in progress to display.

  The boxes weren’t taped shut, just overlapped, so it was easy to snoop. She opened the box on top of the nearest stack. It was full of T-shirts in the red color family. The box under it were T’s in the blue color family. She guessed at what was in the one beneath it and found she was correct: Yellows. The yellows also had greens, the blues had purples and the reds had oranges. Very organized. Another stack of boxes was also color organized, but the clothing items were more varied. They seemed to have been selected by the weight of the weave—that rayon Sunday-dress blend. She checked boxes across the room and found one with precut squares. It was quite a mish mash of colors, so Taylor suspected it was for specific quilt. The one beneath it, however, had two finished quilt tops, and one complete quilt. She pulled them out and spread them on the floor to see if she could discover their magic.

  The completed quilt was pleasing, but it wasn’t the wow that the quilts on Instagram had been.

  There is something about a quilt in real life that dazzles the eye. The precision is part of that, from the tiny pieces creating a fabric mosaic to the intricate stitching, whether hand or machine, that holds it together. Part of the magic of the quilt exists when the eye is mesmerized, and you find yourself lost in the work that went into the creation.

  These sloppy scrappies just didn’t have that kind of power. Reynette didn’t iron the seams flat before putting the rows of blocks together so the rows were bunched and lumpy in ways they shouldn’t have been. The corner matching showed she wasn’t careful about her pinning, either, some corners being more than half an inch off the mark. Having seen her other work, her careful traditional work, Taylor suspected this sloppiness was on purpose.

  But Reynette’s color work was pleasing. These were a vast improvement over the one picture Taylor had first seen on the website.

  The top Taylor was looking at had been made up of three-inch squares of blues, creams, grays, and whites pieced together like a sky filled with clouds. Reynette had mixed denims, cotton T-shirt material, and polyester blends shot through with metallic threads. A blue cotton crepe with deep wrinkles and tiny white flowers gave the impression of rainfall toward the bottom seam. But as nice as this was, the work looked better online. Captured in the right light in a field of wheat and that kind thing. Maybe even photoshop.

  Taylor rocked back on her heels.

  And yet, Hannah had said Instagram was useless for them. Their real success came from flea markets and antique sales. That meant people bought them more when seen in person.

  Either way, unless one of the artists at the school found this kind of false primitivism as offensive as Shara found Taylor selling Lancaster Linens, Taylor couldn’t see it having anything to do with Reynette’s death. That said, the memorial would be a good chance to talk to her future co-workers at the college. Whatever the local quilt store owners thought about her, Taylor’s old friends at the college still liked her.

  * * *

  Weekends ought to be busy at Flour Sax, but the weather was terrible, and it was getting closer to Thanksgiving. At three, Taylor left Roxy in charge of the shop and their new hire so she could run down to Rueben’s to solicit a food donation for Reynette’s memorial. There she spotted Ellie, the owner’s daughter, who had been running the diner for years, leaning on the counter talking to one of her cooks. “Hey there.” Taylor joined her.

  “What can we get you?” Ellie asked with a tired smile. The dining room was empty.

  Taylor didn’t know if they’d had a lunch rush or not, but considering the driving rain, she expected it hadn’t been a mad rush. “Just a coffee, if you don’t mind.”

  The cook, who Taylor could swear she knew, but whose name wasn’t coming to mind, filled a thick ceramic diner mug with hot black coffee. It was late for caffeine, a thought that made her feel older than she wanted to feel, but the hot mug and rich aroma was a great comfort on such a damp day. “So, have you been following the Reynette Woods story?” Taylor took a satisfying sip.

  “Yeah. She practically died in our booth. It’s been on my mind.” Ellie rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  “The Quilt Shop Guild is hosting a memorial for her at Comfort College of Art and Craft.”

  “You’re putting on the funeral?”

  “No, the family will have a quiet event for a funeral. This is more a memorial of her art, a kind of retrospective.”

  “To each his own.”

  Ellie’s attitude wasn’t the kind that made Taylor think she’d get free food.

  “I was wondering if….”

  Ellie reached across the counter and grabbed a half a sheet of paper. “This is our catering menu.”

  Taylor didn’t look at it. “The event is tomorrow.”

  Ellie laughed. “You want me to give you free food tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Taylor figured honesty was the best policy. “Each shop is donating two quilts to auction for the Oregon Food Bank. Reynette ran a thrift shop that supported the cause.”

  “From everything I’ve heard about the Woods family, they can afford to buy food for the event.”

  “I’m sure they could. But the family isn’t putting the event on, the shops are.”

  “Are you all bankrupt?”

  Taylor stiffened. Ellie’s chilly attitude was worse than the rain outside.

  Aviva, the waitress who had been serving the day Reynette died spotted Taylor as she came out of a cleaning closet. Her eyebrows flew up and she shook her head softly. Then she motioned outside.

  “Got it. I’ll look for donations elsewhere. It’s no big deal.” Taylor slipped off her stool.

  “Good.”

  She left her full mug on the counter with a five, which was more than a cup of coffee at the diner cost. She left out the front door but went around back, the way Aviva had directed.

  Aviva was waiting under the awning over the back door. “The police have been at my heels. I know everyone is saying it was some kind of overdose, but Aunt Ellie is a mess. She’s pretty much had to talk to the cops every single day. And I know you must be thinking the rain is keeping people away, but rain used to bring people here on weekends. They’d get all cold and wet
from shopping or they’d get cabin fever and have to come out. But we had literally no one for breakfast and only two tables at lunch. She’s sick to death with worry and sick to death of Reynette.”

  “Got it. Wish I had known earlier though….” Taylor picked at her thumbnail. “You haven’t overheard any of the conversations your aunt has been having with the cops, have you?”

  “Just one. They came in here and sat at a booth together while I was mopping last night.”

  “Anything you can share with me?”

  Aviva narrowed her eyes. “How is your investigation going?”

  “I want to tell you everything, I swear, but I’m not ready.”

  Aviva seemed to be deciding if she was ‘ready’ to share with Taylor or not, but her youthful taste for drama won out. “Okay, listen, it wasn’t much. I think they’d worn her down a lot. Aunt Ellie had already given them her first aid box and said they’d already been to her house. They’d asked for the food and drink Reynette had when she was here, but we’d already cleaned it all up. Besides, she’d literally only had like, half a cup of coffee. It would have all had to have been aspirin and that would have tasted disgusting, right? They believed Aunt Ellie, but only because Cooper and Sissy vouched for how much Reynette had eaten.”

  “If they really believed she hadn’t eaten anything here, why do they keep coming back?”

  “That’s what Aunt Ellie asked, and then she refused to answer anything else without a lawyer. They got real defensive then, the whole hands up ‘Woah, woah, woah’ kind of defensive.”

  “What question made her finally snap?”

  “They were asking her about the other times Reynette had been in.”

  “And?”

  “She and Sissy had eaten here about five times in the last week before she died. I Googled it, and that seemed like enough meals to hide enough aspirin to kill her.” Aviva’s wide-eyed-wonder at the tragedy of it all was almost too much. She was Belle’s age, but Belle, despite her dyed black hair and over-lined eyes seemed decades older in many ways.