Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel

by Sullivan, Barbara

  Andrea said, “And mass hysteria, as in female mass hysteria. Shame on you, Gloria.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not insulting you. But you need to know Nana and my Abby hef been dueling poetry, competing in writing poems to each other in their separate languages. I tink they vere each trying to teach the other their specific tongues. Any vay, Abigail became obsessed with details revealed last month about Luke and Mark.”

  The warring brothers. The oldest two sons of Victoria and Jake, both of whom had loved Ada.

  I wouldn’t realize the importance of this information until much later, after we had finally deciphered the poem. Or maybe just before.

  The sewing had stopped. We were sure to a woman that this message contained the location of Abigail--and none of us had even blinked at our complete and immediate acceptance of Ruth’s paranormal capabilities.

  I wasn’t surprised. They had hinted of Ruth’s magic abilities at last month’s bee. Last month Andrea had called these messages Ruthmonitions. I had personally received messages from her as I lay nearly comatose after my terrible car accident—the one that left me with a yanked neck.

  And Abigail obviously wasn’t where Matt had expected her to be—at Buddy’s house. What was he doing? By now he would have called to tell us she was dead.

  But before we solved the poem, we formed our Sisterhood of Ruth the Prophetess.

  “I told you Ruth has magic in her brain.” The angry pixie.

  For a moment I’d thought the multicolored tips of her red hair had flashed florescent, but her words were said in a mumble, as if she still didn’t quite believe. Then Elixchel piped up.

  “We’ve always known. We just haven’t known the extent of her abilities. I mean, think of it, she spoke to Nana in Ukrainian.”

  “Or Nana heard her thought-messages in Ukrainian,” Gerry said.

  So they all thought Ruth sent messages.

  There was more. It was like they were all suddenly finding the courage to bring their belief in the unbelievable out of the closet.

  “I didn’t know, whew-hoo.”

  Anne of course, with a sudden accent in her tic. Anne who had not sewn with her mother’s group before. I looked back at her mother Victoria, expecting some reaction, but she was bowed to her work, busily sewing.

  Ruth was her sister. Surely Victoria knew what Ruth was.

  A brief worry flitted through my tired brain…Victoria’s getting way ahead of us. I almost picked up my needle again to catch up. But more important things lay before us. We needed to solve the puzzle sent from Ruth. And we needed to….

  The final psychic message--I think it came from my own brain--was, turn on the TV. So I did. It was all downhill from there.

  Chapter 79

  I looked at my watch, two forty-five. It seemed like an hour since I pressed the on button of the ancient analog television. It was still warming up. I wondered if the digital converter box on top of the set was even working.

  Finally, a picture emerged and I flew through local channels looking for news. But the west coast was still asleep.

  Then Anne’s cell phone rang. She answered and we watched her pale complexion blanch to that of a ghost. She abruptly sat down on a corner chair.

  “Mary.” She closed her phone. “They’re missing, but they found…blood all over the Zinzer house.”

  I finally landed on CNN news and found a live report.

  “…this is gruesome, folks, we aren’t going to show pictures of this, and we only have a few details on this exclusive report yet, but there’s been another brutal attack in otherwise peaceful Pinto Springs, California. Our sources indicate police and others are scouring the Hispanic neighborhood in south Pinto Springs. Apparently they’re looking for the brother of a young woman who recently committed suicide….”

  I flipped channels to MSNBC, then FOX. They were all covering it. I returned to CNN and heard, “I think it’s a shame that the authorities in Cleveland County are pointing fingers at the Hispanic community there. Do you think these are racially motivated killings, William?”

  “There’s no evidence to suggest that, Conway, but given the strain between….”

  I changed the channel back to the local news. The cable channels were all about ratings and inflammatory opinions helped raise them. But there still wasn’t anything on the local channels. It was way too early.

  “Try NBC, Rachel.” It was Gerry. I handed her the controls and stepped away. My stomach was churning.

  Where the hell was Matt?

  She lowered the volume and except for the muffled, barely controlled, crying of Gloria--standing outside staring off into the wet darkness--the house was in shocked silence.

  Eventually CNN broke its promise and went live.

  They were near the crime scene set up around the little house. The gathering reporters were hoping for the arrival of the parents. In the meantime they were trying to get some of the outer rim cops to spill the beans.

  But they would wait for a very long time. Mr. and Mrs. Zinzer wouldn’t return to their home on the mountain plateau for weeks, and only then to move.

  Finally, we heard a uniform say, “The kid’s been tortured. They think he’s been taken somewhere else.”

  Buddy, not Abigail.

  I stepped further away, back into the quilting room. Victoria was still sewing. One by one we retreated from the painful news coverage. All except Gerry, who listened for the rest of us. A few minutes later a shivering Gloria returned to her place at the rack. The cold had calmed her emotions, but it took several minutes for her hands to stop shaking so she could sew again.

  I marveled that she wasn’t in a wailing pile of fear and grief on her bed, by now. She was redefining the word stoic.

  What did it mean that there was no mention of Abigail? Had the reporters just not caught onto the fact that there had been a young girl at the house as well? Or was she somewhere else entirely?

  We were powerless; all we could do was wait. I was seething at Matt for keeping me in the dark, even though on some level more professional I understood why.

  Weird thoughts filled my brain as the minutes dragged on and my body froze up from the painful ritual of sewing for hours. At some point I realized my mind was just trailing along, totally unfocused.

  Andrea broke the spell I was under, saying, “It’s your turn Elixchel. Tell us your teen story.”

  “No.”

  I thought it was a simple answer. Understandable. Forgivable in light of the circumstances. But Andrea was neither understanding nor forgiving. She persisted. Elixchel resisted. I wished Victoria would bellow at her again--seemed to be the only thing that tamed the little pixie-shrew.

  “You have to…Abigail would have wanted this!” Andrea finally cried.

  She caught the meaning in her sentence and glanced around embarrassed.

  “I mean she wants us to do this! She’s not dead. She’s not going to be dead. She’s a strong girl and she can fend for herself when necessary. She’ll find a way to escape, or…or she’ll be found, alive, and not even damaged like Ruth.”

  I’ve cleaned this up. Andrea was actually chanting derivatives of the F-word and its various synonyms throughout her mini-soliloquy. I thought you could do without them.

  “Why don’t you quit while you’re behind, Andrea,” Gerry said darkly. The mad lorikeet ran out of steam.

  But I wasn’t surprised by the change in tenor from Gerry. I’d seen Gerry take charge before. Underneath the Gucci and fake animal skins and mile-high mound of blond curls was a strong-headed, intelligent woman to match her billionaire husband.

  “Okay. My turn to bare my soul before this haughty crowd,” I said.

  I almost looked around behind me to see who’d spoken. But someone had to bring us back under control, so I went with it. I told my teen story.

  It was as boring as I could make it, full of first kiss stuff, stolen around corners with a young boy, how we entered high school together the next year and suddenly wen
t our separate ways.

  And I told them about my first Pearl S. Buck book, the one where the Japanese raped all the Chinese women. It scared me off of kissing for a full year. Probably just as well.

  And I told them about my childhood dog dying when I was eleven. And the replacement dog my dad bought, just for me. He’d said this dog will be yours to raise and train, Rachel.

  I smiled at the memories. Duke had been my first shepherd, and from that day forward all I ever wanted for a pet was a shepherd--which made me think of Wisdom. How was he doing, all alone at home? My lovely Wisdom.

  At last we returned to ferreting the meaning hidden in Ruth/Nana’s cryptic message-poem.

  It wasn’t until much later that I learned that Ruth had kept a small black, leather books full of her prophecies—most of which were in verse. All of them described what actually happened in the extended Stowall clan.

  Chapter 80

  Gerry said, “What does the third line mean? ‘To down of van free son?’” We discussed and argued and sewed for several minutes but couldn’t come to any conclusions.

  Until Elixchel said, “What if Nana meant to say town of van free son? Maybe we just need to think of a town that sounds like van-free-son.”

  But we couldn’t think of a town that sounded like that, and frankly the whole thing didn’t sound right. The meter was right, but it just didn’t make sense.

  “Okay, how about if you compare the lines, ‘away they’ve flown’ in the first stanza and ‘away they’ve gone’ in the second stanza, don’t they go together?” Hannah said.

  “Okay, and if you compare ‘the road leads down’ in the first stanza with ‘to wait for dawn’ in the second stanza, they match.” Anne.

  “Right. Same with the last two lines of each of the two stanzas, they match meter and they rhyme too.” Gerry.

  “But the middle lines in each stanza, the two odd metered lines, ‘To down of van free son,’ and ‘to rend their sweet reason,’ they use the same meter and they rhyme and all, but, well, I just don’t get it.” Andrea.

  “Why don’t we read it like, all in one paragraph? The way it was written down. Maybe it was never meant to be a poem.” Gloria.

  So we did. It still made no sense.

  “We’re chasing our tails, ladies. Let’s give it a break and see what comes to us.” Me, thinking maybe Ruth would clarify if we opened our minds--and our mouths, and ate some more delicious pie, in the kitchen. My fingers hurt. My neck and back hurt. My butt hurt.

  But we didn’t go into the kitchen like I was wishing we would. Instead we sewed and I chased my thoughts round and round in my head like a puppy after her tail, until I heard Elixchel’s voice filtered by my jumbled thoughts.

  “…got my degree in accounting at the local community college. Bookkeeping actually, I’m still working on the accounting degree.”

  She was telling her teen story after all. The least I could do was listen.

  Andrea said, “So that’s where you met Javier?”

  Elixchel stopped, as if frozen in time. Her head hung low, her long black hair trailing by her face, her fingers poised to start another stitch. Stalled. We waited.

  Finally she said, “Yes.”

  It was like a sigh, really, from somewhere deep inside her, or maybe back in time, but from a long ways away. We watched her set her needle in the quilt and wipe at her cheeks with her hands. The Panther Queen raised her head and looked at us through reddened eyes shinning with some awful truth.

  “Yes, that’s where I met Javier Escobar.”

  She spoke his name as a native, enunciating each perfect vowel, the v as a vibrating b, trilling the final r’s. His name pushed her pronunciation toward Spanish so completely that her next few sentences were spoken as if not in her native tongue, but as if she’d just ventured over our southern border to visit a while. I briefly wondered if she had some hidden Indian language inside her soul as well.

  “I had to take a science class that spring. I selected geology. He did too. That’s where we met.

  “He was…magical. He was beautiful and magical. He was even taller than me and carved looking, as if from…a tiger’s eye gemstone.”

  She paused and looked off to the side, seeing things we could only imagine. She wore a Mona Lisa smile under her glistening eyes.

  “We studied gemstones in the class. Did you know that tiger’s eye is a chatoyant gemstone? The word chatoyant comes from the French phrase l’oeil de chat, which literally means cat’s eye. Chatoyancy arises from within the fibrous structure of the material, from fibrous inclusions or cavities within a quartz stone.”

  Her fingers briefly toyed with the anchored needle as if they wished they could begin the rhythm of the stitches once more.

  “Tiger’s eye is also described as pseudomorphous and that word is used to describe a mineral compound that appears in an untypical form.”

  Her Lisa smile wavered briefly. She looked down at the quilt again.

  “As in metamorphosed, changed, usually under great pressure and heat.”

  Elixchel’s voice had turned to melted silk, her words sticky fibers moving languidly in the air. We were mesmerized. Something terrible was this way coming.

  She looked straight at us again, at least I thought she did but her eyes were still not seeing us. They’d settled on something that sat between Gerry and me. A ghost perhaps. I fought the urge to confront the intruder.

  “He was the tiger’s Eye, and I was mere sand. I was very young and he thought he was very powerful. Not just a gemstone, but a jewel with no limitations. A diamond with no flaws. I learned that hot summer that his skin tasted like his root beer color.”

  Her eyes floated down toward the beautiful quilt. She whispered the rest, as if the words were dangerous.

  “And in the fall I learned he was married.” A solitary tear slid from her eye. And finally the dam was broke.

  Absolute silence greeted her announcement. There was no judgment. As one, we understood her emotional war. Finally, as if she were still wrestling with the decision, she spoke again.

  “I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

  Suddenly she looked like Charlie Brown, her eyes wide and lost and full of the unfairness of life. I couldn’t remember ever seeing such emotional pain in a woman’s eyes before. The proud panther was no where to be seen.

  She bowed her head and tried to return to her sewing. Andrea wasn’t letting up, but Elixchel had left her story and all of us knew it, even the feisty pixie. Nevertheless, the pixie gave us a hint at what wasn’t being said.

  “Okay, we’ll accept this for now. But next month you’re going to tell everyone what’s going on with your beautiful tiger’s eye now—how he mistreated you.”

  Mistreated you. When? How, as in rape? As in beatings? I searched Elixchel’s down-turned face, listened harder to her silence, but there would be no answer to these and other questions tonight.

  I marveled at the odd relationship between these two “adopted” children of Victoria. They seemed ever ready to war. But why now, why after this powerful confession would Andrea make painful demands. Premonitions crept into my head—this time my own.

  Javier was back. He’d come back to claim her again as old lovers sometimes did, hadn’t he? This would explain the freshness of her pain.

  But it was Alphabet Bomber Andrea who spoke to our collective growing concerns.

  “Javier should be in Donovan Prison. He’s not just a stalker anymore. He’s dangerous, and he should be put away like the murderer Luke--who should have spent his entire life in prison. We need to help you stop him, Elixchel.”

  Good God.

  She said all of this in battlefield dialect, as in F bombs and B bombs and a few S bombs. I marveled that Victoria didn’t chase her out of the room as she had last month, only this time brandishing a sword of righteousness as she chased.

  Perhaps the cutting words about Victoria’s son Luke had effectively stripped Victoria of her moral imper
ative. My immediate reaction was one of embarrassment for Victoria. As bad as he’d been, Luke had been her son.

  But then it hit me.

  “Donovan Prison! To down of van free son.”

  They stared at me; then I watched them agree with me that this must be the meaning of that confusing line in Nana’s poem. Nana had heard “Donovan Prison” but her Ukrainian mind could only come up with down under free son!

  Donovan Prison in south San Diego County was only a few miles away from Mexico.

  I tried to reach Matt again, but again he wasn’t answering.

  Chapter 81

  Around three Hannah got up and took my place at the rack. If part of a quilt was to be left unfinished it had to be an end piece. And I couldn’t sit still long enough to sew more than ten stitches at a time. They knew I had to have time to think through the problem with or without Matt.

  “Abigail can finish this one section when she gets back.” Hannah gently said. “It will help her feel ownership of her quilt.”

  They had all murmured their agreement, and I silently prayed Hannah’s optimism would play out. I personally had a belly full of fear that Abigail might never see her quilt again.

  The issue with quilting was that you had to sew from the center out to the edges.

  Every quilt has variations in the tightness of the stitching used in forming and connecting the many blocks that eventually comprise the top-sheet—even when only one person is doing the work. Wrinkles can appear and must be carefully smoothed out or eased in the overall quilt as the final layer of sewing is done. Thus the constant stretching and pinning done throughout the long night.

  Of course you could also sew in daylight, I mused angrily.

  I was at the windows again, staring out at the darkness again, wondering where Matt was again. Thinking another piece of pie wouldn’t be so bad after all. I was just short of the DT’s with the amount of caffeine and sugar flowing in my bloodstream now. Why not go for broke?