by Lea Wait
“That’s my car,” I said, pointing. “Gram and Tom were going to move it for me. I was trying to find them.” My fingers had almost stopped bleeding. They seemed unimportant. “I’m fine, Pete,” I said. “Just a few glass cuts. A window in Sarah’s store shattered.”
Pete put his hand on my shoulder. “I wasn’t here when the fire started, but Gus Gleason at The Book Nook was rearranging his front window and saw it all.” Pete hesitated. “Gus saw Reverend Tom opening the door of your Honda right before the explosion. He said it was like fireworks—colors and all.”
Tears now covered my cheeks. “He and Gram have only been married about six months.”
Sarah had caught up with us. She put her arm around me, but I felt like stone.
“I don’t know how badly hurt the reverend was. The fire department ambulance took him to the hospital,” said Pete.
“Where’s Gram?”
“Maybe with him? Either in the ambulance or following it in her own car.”
I hadn’t seen her car in the street. That must be what had happened. “I need to get to the hospital,” I said. “Now.”
Pete nodded. “I’d take you, but I have to stick around and make sure nothing else happens here.” He looked at Sarah.
“I’ll drive her,” she said. “Angie, come back to the store with me and get your coat on. You’re freezing out here.”
“I need to get to the hospital,” I said again. All I could think was that Tom was dead, or seriously hurt. Gram loved him so much. She deserved to be happy. And it was my fault. I shouldn’t have asked them to move my car. “And your storefront window is broken. You need to cover it, or the snow will ruin everything.”
Sarah hesitated.
“I’ll get someone to cover your window, Sarah,” said Pete. “Don’t worry. You take care of Angie.”
“Thank you, Pete,” she said gratefully, and started to move away when Pete touched her arm. “Are you okay with this. Sarah? We don’t know who—or what—caused the explosion or fire. Or if whoever set it up is still around. He or she could be watching Angie. If so, he’d expect her to head for the hospital to check on Reverend Tom.”
“The hospital isn’t far,” Sarah assured Pete. “I’ll take Angie to the emergency room door and then come back and help fix the window.”
“I’ll alert the security guys at the hospital that you’ll be coming,” said Pete, pulling out his phone. “Get going. I need to get back to the street.” He headed back to the crowds on the sidewalk, leaving us in an alleyway that ended in a small tenants’ parking lot in back of the stores.
“Let’s go the back way,” Sarah said, heading me in that direction. “No one in the street will see us.”
“You were outside before I was. Did you see anyone who might have done this?” I asked her. “Anyone you didn’t know?”
“I wasn’t looking at the people on the street,” said Sarah. “I was trying to see what had exploded. At first no one seemed to know what had happened. But then it became clear.”
“Gus Gleason saw Tom open the car door. He might have noticed someone tampering with my car before that.”
“I’m sure Pete will talk with Gus,” Sarah assured me.
My teeth were chattering, and my feet were numb. My mind hadn’t paid attention to the cold, but my body had.
Sarah kept me walking toward the back door of her store.
“You go upstairs, take off your shoes, and put on your boots. I’ll pull anything that might be hurt by the snow out of the window and then close the store and meet you in a couple of minutes.” She opened the back door to her shop.
Two people were inside.
I ignored them and headed up the inside stairs to get my bag and boots and coat. Sarah could deal with unexpected customers.
Who would drop into an antiques store when all the excitement in Haven Harbor was happening a block away?
My mind pictured Reverend Tom, bleeding. Or burned. Patrick had been burned last spring. How was Gram coping?
Why hadn’t Sarah gotten rid of those customers by now? I needed to get to the hospital.
Chapter 21
“Jesus Permit Thy Gracious Name to stand
As the first efforts of an infant’s hand
And while her fingers o’er this canvas Move
Engage her tender heart to seek thy love
With thy dear children let her share a Part
And write thy name thyself upon her heart.”
—Twenty-inch square sampler, including alphabets of upper and lowercase letters, sewn on linen in silk thread. A house, two trees, an urn of flowers, and a fence are below the words. Sampler stitched (as a child) by American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and now in the Dickinson Room at Harvard University. Although Emily chose an elaborate pattern for her sampler, her stitching is not as even and measured as that on many other girls’ samplers, and she did not sign or date it.
When I’d left home yesterday morning I hadn’t intended to be away for the night, so I didn’t have much with me. A padded envelope, a pair of boots and a coat, my canvas bag, and my Glock. I quickly texted Patrick not to come for me until he heard from me again. I didn’t take the time to explain why.
Sarah was still talking to those customers.
Three minutes later I couldn’t stand waiting any longer. I grabbed Sarah’s coat (she needed one, too) and headed downstairs. Those customers had better be spending thousands of dollars for her not to have come upstairs.
I was halfway down to the store when I heard the words “samplers” and “auction.” I stopped abruptly. What was going on in Sarah’s shop?
“These are the ones. Interesting. Do you have any other samplers?” A woman’s voice.
“No, not right now,” Sarah answered. “But I do try to keep several in stock. If these don’t interest you, would you like to register on my customer list? I could call you if I find any others.”
“No; that’s all right. These were the samplers sold at the auction in Augusta a few days ago, right?”
“Three of them, yes,” said Sarah. Her voice got a little louder. Maybe she wanted me to hear what was happening. “How did you happen to know that?”
“Oh, I know the auctioneer. He mentioned them to me. But I wasn’t able to get to the auction that day.”
“She had a previous appointment,” put in a male voice.
That didn’t make sense. Even I knew you could leave a bid at an auction if you couldn’t get there in person.
“But how did you know I’d bought them?” Sarah asked.
Silence. Then “We saw on Channel 7 the other night that someone from Haven Harbor had bought them. We were driving by and saw your sign. We thought it must be you, since there didn’t seem to be any other antique shops in town.”
“I didn’t buy the embroidery mentioned on the news. I didn’t buy every embroidery at the auction. The Saco Museum bought the best one . . . a beautiful sampler. They’ll probably add it to their collection, and you can see it there.” Sarah sounded a little dismissive. I hoped she was getting rid of the couple. It didn’t sound as though they were going to buy anything.
“But what about the embroidery on the news? A coat of arms, the newscaster said.” That was the male voice.
“It sounded unusual,” added the woman.
“I didn’t buy it. It was in poor condition,” said Sarah. “And, I’m sorry, but I need to finish covering my antiques near the broken window, and then I have an appointment. I do love needlework of all kinds. And did you see my antique needleworking tools on the table in the corner?”
“We’re just interested in the embroideries themselves,” said the man.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave your names in case I get any other pieces in?” Sarah asked.
“No; no, thank you,” said the man. “But if you should hear anything about that coat of arms”—I heard him ripping a piece of paper—“here’s my e-mail address. We’d love to see it.”
“Thank you,” said Sarah.
I heard the front door of the shop close.
“Sarah!” I said, from the stairs. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know exactly, but I didn’t like it,” she said. “Something was weird about those two.”
My last steps took me behind her counter.
Sarah was trying to move the rest of her antiques out of the window without cutting herself. She shook an iron fire engine to remove the glass splinters. After the second toy she gave up and shook her head. “I hope whoever Pete finds to fix that window gets here quickly. The children’s books I had in the window are already ruined. I’m not going to try to bring them inside now. Snow will ruin so many of these things.”
“Can I help you move anything else?” I asked. I wanted us to leave, but Sarah’s store was important, too.
“No! You stay away from the front of the store. Someone in the street could see you through the window. Hand me my coat, and we’ll get you to the hospital,” Sarah said. “I’ll drop you off and then come back and see what I can do here.”
I followed her out the back door to where her van was parked. It only took a few minutes for the two of us to brush off the snow that had fallen since yesterday. The street had been plowed, but her van was heavy enough to bump over the piles of snow left at the entrance to the small back parking lot.
“Who do you think those people were?” I asked once we were out in the street heading for the hospital. “The couple in your store.”
“I don’t know. The e-mail address he gave me was a generic Gmail account; no name, just the word sampler and a number.”
“I didn’t see them, but they sounded strange,” I said. “Right now I’m nervous when someone seems to know about old needlework. Especially if they know about the coat of arms.” I was talking to Sarah, but my mind was on Tom, and Gram. Were they both at the hospital? How was Tom?
“I agree. It was strange they happened to show up—driving by, he said—right after the fire in your car. And a day after Clem was killed.”
“Thanks for not giving out my name, or saying you knew anything about the coat of arms,” I said. “What did they look like?”
“The woman was late middle-aged. Short and post-menopausally plump. Brown hair beginning to gray, but sculpted well. No makeup; wore slacks and a heavy ski sweater.”
“More Talbots than L.L. Bean then?”
“Exactly. Wouldn’t stand out in a crowd around here, but I had the impression she could buy any sampler she wanted. The man with her was younger—maybe early thirties? I figured he was her assistant. Or even her son. Tall, slim—almost skinny. Pale face and hair. Big ears.”
“Not ringing any bells with me.”
“Sorry. Neither of them had any distinguishing characteristics. Not much to remember. But if Pete comes to help with the broken window I’m going to tell him about them. They were looking for you, not me. They were interested in the coat of arms. And they didn’t say anything that made me think they were really interested in samplers or embroideries. Neither of them looked closely at anything I had, or asked any questions about them. Serious collectors of needlework do.” Sarah turned her van into the circular driveway that led to Haven Harbor Hospital’s emergency room entrance. “If you need a ride back, or to Patrick’s house, call me. And let me know how Reverend Tom and Charlotte are.”
“I will,” I said, nodding as I opened the van door.
“I wish I could stay, but I could lose hundreds—thousands—of dollars’ worth of merchandise unless that window gets covered and everything dried off. Not to mention that right now someone could walk into the store through the window and take anything there.”
“No problem,” I said, waving my hand to dismiss her concern. “I’ll let you know how they are. And thank you for last night. And for keeping cool and not telling that couple anything about the coat of arms. They might be harmless, but today I don’t trust anyone interested in antique embroidery.”
Sarah smiled, grimly. “And you’d be absolutely right.”
I headed for the emergency room door.
What would I find inside? My fingers were crossed inside my mittens.
Chapter 22
“As one contemplates the millions of stitches worked by these young girls, one wonders what their thoughts were as they sewed them. Children are conventional and conservative beings, and so perhaps the universality of the employment kept most from boredom. But there must always have been a residuum of the discouraged and of the rebels ‘who hated every stitch,’ and so made their samplers badly or left them unfinished if they could possibly shirk their task.”
—From American Samplers by Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe. The Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1921.
Haven Harbor Hospital wasn’t a large medical center. If you needed specialists you went to Portland, or even to Boston, as Patrick had last spring.
Boston had a burn unit. Would Tom need intensive care?
In Phoenix I’d once taken a neighbor to an emergency room and, despite the blood dripping (slowly, but steadily) from her forehead after a fall, we were told she was number fourteen to see a doctor. Here the chairs in the emergency room waiting area were rarely filled.
Serious bleeding, strokes, broken bones, and heart attacks received immediate care—even though that care might mean pulling an extra doctor or nurse in from a nearby office. A sign inside the entrance read, “Maternity patients seen at any point in pregnancy.” Good to know. But not relevant today.
Usually patients and their families walked through the outside doors and straight to the emergency admissions desk.
This afternoon a large woman in a uniform was standing inside the doors.
“Miss Curtis?” she asked, blocking my way.
“That’s right,” I said, prepared to push past her.
“Welcome to Haven Harbor Hospital. I’m with hospital security. Sergeant Lambert asked that we watch this entrance. He said someone might be following you. Did you notice anyone on your way here?”
“I didn’t look, actually,” I said. I’d been so focused on what injuries I might find here at the hospital, and on what the pseudo-customers at Sarah’s store were interested in, that I hadn’t looked around. I glanced over my shoulder, out the plate-glass doors. “I don’t think so.”
Pete had said he was going to call security here. I’d forgotten, but he hadn’t.
“If you have any problems while you’re here at the hospital, tell whomever you’re with to call Shaundra in security,” she said protectively. “I’ll know what to do.”
I looked at her, and thought of the gun in my bag. Shaundra was big. And muscular. I was glad she was on my side.
“Thank you, Shaundra.”
“I was an MP in the Army. I’ll know what to do,” she continued. “No one should be hassling you when you’re at a hospital.”
“I agree. Thank you.” I moved past her and on to the registration desk. “Is Reverend Tom McCully a patient here? Or his wife, Charlotte?”
The young man behind the window didn’t hesitate. “Reverend Tom is with Doctor Mercer now. Are you a relative?”
“I’m his granddaughter,” I said, not hesitating to fudge. “Step-granddaughter” didn’t sound as connected.
“I’ll buzz you in,” the young man said, pressing a button. “Reverend Tom’s in room eight.”
I’d been in this emergency room before—too many times. I knew room eight wasn’t for the most critically ill patients; they were in rooms ten and higher.
I waved to Shaundra, went through the double doors, and walked down the corridor of small patient rooms.
A toddler in room three was crying in her mother’s lap.
An elderly man was lying quietly on the bed in room five, an IV in his arm.
Rooms six and seven were empty.
It was a quiet day in the emergency room.
I paused at the door to room eight.
“Angie! I’m so glad to see you!” Gram jumped up from the chair next to Tom’s bed. “Are you all right?”
“Me? I’m fine.” If you didn’t count being on someone’s hit list. “What about Tom?”
“I’m all right,” he said. “Just a few scratches.” His words were mumbled.
“Pain meds,” Gram said softly. Then she added, in her normal voice, “And a shattered leg and a couple of broken ribs, they think. The doctors have ordered another set of X-rays and a CT scan. Do you know what happened? Does anyone? I dropped him off by your car and started to drive home, and there was an awful explosion. It all happened so fast.”
“I don’t know any details about what happened. Broken bones . . .” I winced. “But at least he’s not burned.” I’d been remembering the burns Patrick had endured last spring, and how they were still changing his life. And always would.
“Whatever caused that explosion blew him right onto the curb, thank goodness. That’s why he isn’t burned,” explained Gram, shaking her head.
“Threw me out of the way,” Tom managed to say.
“He hit the curb, which is how his ribs were broken,” Gram explained. “And landed on his leg. After the fire started he was hit by pieces of shattering glass.”
“He’ll be all right?” I asked. Those injuries weren’t minor. And how badly was his leg broken? It was covered by a sheet.
“I hope so. It could have been a lot worse,” said Gram. “I’ll feel better after we get the results of the scan. You’re not a young man anymore,” she scolded Tom.
Gram was sixty-five. Not a young woman anymore. Although I’d never tell her that.
“Thirteen years younger than you are, my love,” he answered. “I’m grateful we’d decided it would be me who’d drive Angie’s car home, and not you.” Those words were clear.
