by Jodi Thomas
The school snapshot that had disappeared from her secret library box. The closeness she’d shared with Connor that had bonded them as friends, real friends. The feeling of not being alone in the old house even after she’d walked through every room except Mrs. K’s private quarters.
Even the strange message left on her cell phone from Mrs. Kelly, saying she wouldn’t be back for a few days, bothered Jillian. If she didn’t think it impossible, she’d consider the option that the round little woman was holed up in her room having an affair.
Jillian smiled, realizing she’d always thought the only man in Mrs. K’s life was old Willie Flancher. They old guy must have had something going for him if he found five women to marry him back in the 1800s.
Maybe the innkeeper was simply worried about leaving her tattered Tara in the care of a stranger. Maybe she’d asked someone to walk through the downstairs last night to simply check to see if the place was locked up. A neighbor would do that.
Maybe Mrs. K simply got out of the house for once and found herself in no hurry to come back.
The big old place was usually so quiet when no guests were there. No wonder Mrs. Kelly talked to the shy ghost. Another weekend like this one and Jillian decided she’d not only be seeing him, but talking to him, as well.
As she moved toward the quilt shop, all the stores appeared to be still sleeping. The flower shop called Pot Along. The coffee shop lined with bookshelves. The antiques store with a hundred dolls with porcelain eyes staring at her. She knew she was early, but she’d expected some life before eight in the morning.
Seven forty-five. She was really early. Mamma Bee’s Pastries had lights on inside, but the Open sign hadn’t been flipped.
Jillian unlocked A Stitch in Time’s door. She glanced across the street and noticed the lights were also on in the Laurel Springs Daily. Connor must have not been able to sleep either. He was always there to meet Gram when she climbed off the Autumn Acres bus, but Jillian never thought that he’d already been at work for hours before.
Whatever his work was... He was a man who wore many hats, it seemed. Gram said he managed the family properties better than the past three Larady men. Sunnie claimed he wrote books that never sold. Joe Dunaway told her being mayor in this mess of a town was a full-time job.
Jillian swore she could feel Connor close. The need to talk to him again had kept her awake last night, but she’d be wise to take no action. Keep it polite and formal. She didn’t want to leave sadness behind when she drove away. Connor deserved a friend who didn’t count their time together in minutes.
Smiling, she thought of Joe Dunaway and his Jeanie. They’d been friends for decades and still had plenty to talk about. She’d never have that, but she’d seen it and guessed that was a rare thing to witness.
“Mornin’, Jillian,” a squeaky voice sounded from a few feet away.
Almost dropping her keys, Jillian turned, half expecting to see Minnie Mouse behind her. “Oh, Stella, I’m sorry I didn’t see you there.”
The nervous little quilter hiccuped a giggle. “I may be a little early, but it’s quilting day and I never miss the bee. I got my bag full of ‘fixing to-dos’ to help me pass the time till the others get here.”
“‘Fixing to-dos’?”
“Yep. Every quilter has them. Projects we don’t get finished before another one comes along.” She tick-tocked her head from side to side, sending her gray curls bouncing. “The older I get, the earlier I am to everything. At the rate I’m going, I’ll outrun dying and jump into heaven while I’m still alive.”
Jillian pushed the door open. “No problem. We’ll have time for tea before the others come in.” An hour of time, since Gram’s bus wouldn’t be along until almost nine and the quilters tended to wander in after that.
She held the door as Stella stepped inside, muttering something about how it was hard to tell what time it was on foggy days.
“How long have you been quilting?” Jillian asked, just to make conversation.
“For as long as I can remember. When I was little, I’d take my naps under the quilting frame as I listened to the ladies talk.”
Jillian made herbal green apple tea and brought it out to one of the tables by the huge front windows. This special spot was called the Someday Corner because it was framed on two sides by supplies. Organized squares of material were bunched together. Fat quarters, wild confetti, drab pieces, and splashed segments. All waiting their turn to be pieced into a quilt someday.
In truth, it was simply pure marketing. Gram served tea in the one spot in the shop stuffed with sales items. She made money on the bolts and pattern books, but here the profits were higher. Fancy scissors that just cut batting or tiny ones made small and sharp for embroidery. Rulers and marking pens that could be erased by water or heat.
Stella patted Jillian’s camera on the table and asked questions about how the cataloging project was going.
Jillian explained, telling only the facts, as she carefully stitched the two-inch blue ID onto the back of the quilt she was working on.
No. 19
Cherry Bostock’s pinwheel quilt, 1992
A blend of material from her thirteen bridesmaid dresses
Entitled: You’ll wear it again.
* * *
“I’m managing to finish up two or three quilts most days. I write up their stories at night and file the photos.” More to distract Stella than out of interest, Jillian asked which one of the quilts in the shop Stella thought had the most interesting story.
The old woman laughed. “Eugenia’s quilt, of course. She’s been working on it since she opened the shop.”
“Eugenia’s quilt? I haven’t seen it. Which one is hers?” She scanned the walls, where two stories of quilts hung in the shadows.
“Last time I saw it she had it stashed in a drawer beneath the cutting table. It’s not finished. Maybe never will be. It’s her crazy quilt. We all make one if we quilt long enough. Some start with it, some end with it. Most are made from the scraps of our lives.”
Jillian fought the urge to jump up and run to find the quilt, but somehow it seemed like an invasion of privacy. Gram hadn’t mentioned it in the weeks she’d been in the shop. Maybe she’d forgotten about it. “I’ll ask her to show it to me sometime.”
Stella nodded. “I made a funny quilt once. It was a dozen blocks of all the cats I’ve owned. Or lived with, since no one really owns a cat. I put hats on them just for fun and to add color to the quilt.” She giggled. “They would have hated wearing hats. My Sassy, a big red Somali, would sit on any hat I left lying around. I put a pillbox hat on him in his block.”
“I’d like to see that quilt,” Jillian lied.
“I’ll bring it sometime and you can take a picture of it.”
They talked their way through three cups of tea and all the leftover cookies. Jillian spent most of her time making a mental list of what she needed to do. If she planned to finish in three months, she had to keep a schedule, even if no one else in the quilt shop seemed to follow one. Sunnie would be a big help on Saturdays, but the other five days she’d be helping Gram more often than working on her cataloging project for the county museum.
Jillian listened to Stella talk about her cats as she stared out the window, hoping Gram would come soon. The street was alive now. People moving past the window. Cars parking.
Connor Larady suddenly rushed out of his office and headed directly toward her. Head down, steps long. He marched like a man on a mission and truly had no idea how powerful he looked at that moment. For a man who worked behind a desk, he somehow still managed to look like he stayed in shape.
Before she could stand, he banged his way through the front door. “Have you seen Gram?”
“No.” Jillian glanced at the clock. “But she should be here by now.”
He took her words like a blow. His brown eye
s darkened to coffee and his hands were knuckle-white fists. The mild-mannered mayor looked more like a warrior.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, as if saying it too loud might alarm him.
“We don’t know where she is.” Connor paced back and forth in the small space in front of the windows. “A main desk attendant from the Acres called. She thought maybe I’d dropped by and picked her up.”
Raking his fingers through unruly hair, Connor seemed to age before her eyes as he struggled to piece together an answer.
His words finally came out like a news report. “When she didn’t get on the bus, the driver went inside to check on her. The receptionist said she’d seen Gram dressed and walking toward the little cafeteria earlier that morning. One of the staff said she’d walked with her to the front door where she always waited for the bus.” Connor took a breath, as if fighting down anger. “Somewhere between the front lobby and the bus parked ten feet outside, they lost her. At first they thought she might have gone back to her room, but she wasn’t there.”
“Maybe she went to someone else’s room. You said she has a lot of friends there.”
Stella nodded her agreement, as if Jillian could solve the problem so easily.
Even Connor relaxed a bit. “They searched once, but you’re right. She could have decided to say hello to a friend, or gone back for another cup of coffee, or maybe she simply went to the restroom. There are a dozen places she might have thought she’d stop instead of just waiting by the door. The chapel, the one-chair beauty shop to make an appointment, the little post office to check her box.”
Stella’s head kept nodding. “One of the girls said your gram likes to go out the side door of the Acres and watch the construction going on along the new wing.”
“I’ll call them back and tell them to keep checking.” The muscle in his jaw was still tight. “Only the nurse who makes sure she takes her meds said Gram had commented once last week that she could walk to work. Gram said she’d done it for fifty years. But not from the Acres. She was mixed up. Gram always walked from her little place in town to the shop.”
He met Jillian’s gaze. His voice came low. “What if she decided to walk?”
Jillian had only been to Autumn Acres once, when Connor took Gram home because the bus was running late. It was far to the west of town. Too far for an elderly woman to walk. The apartments were small, with a tiny living area and a bedroom. Staff was around, but it wasn’t a nursing home. Tenants were independent. If Gram had decided to walk, she could have easily left without anyone noticing.
“She wouldn’t walk,” Stella whispered. “Not today. It might rain.”
Connor showed no sign of hearing the little quilter. “I’m driving that direction. If she’s walking, she’ll need help. I have to find her.”
Jillian grabbed her jacket. “I’m going with you.”
“No. If she is walking she’s headed to the shop. If she catches a ride she’ll end up here. Someone needs to stay.”
Stella stood up as if she’d heard the call to arms. “I’ll man the shop and start calling folks on my cell. I’ll keep the shop phone open so you can call in with news. The more people looking for her, the faster we’ll find her.”
Connor didn’t argue with the plan. He opened the door as Jillian buttoned her coat. When she passed him, her shoulder brushed his and she stumbled slightly.
His hand shot out and rested against her back for just a moment.
Neither looked up.
They climbed into his truck and began slowly tracing the route between Autumn Acres and Main Street. There was one obvious route, along the highway. But Gram wouldn’t take that way. She’d told Jillian she always avoided the state highway even when she could drive. Too many trucks, she’d complained. Too much noise.
The other routes weren’t so direct. There were half a dozen roads that would all end up on Main.
Connor drove slowly as he dialed the retirement home, clicked it on speaker, then dropped the cell on the dash. “Any luck?”
“No, Mr. Larady.”
“Did you search...”
“We’ve searched everywhere twice. Our staff is trained for this. Not one room, not one closet is skipped. She is not in the building, or the garden, or even the construction site next door.”
“How do you know? The site is a big place.”
“It’s far enough along to be locked at night. The painters haven’t gotten here yet.”
“Okay.” Connor seemed to be gulping down the lecture he’d planned to give the staff. “I’m driving the roads between your place and Main.”
“It’s only three miles.” The woman on the phone seemed to think her words would calm him. “The bus driver is tracing his route. Maybe, if she’s walking, she’d go the same way he drives.”
“Call me if you find her. I’ll do the same.” He clicked off the phone.
Jillian didn’t make a sound. The last thing she wanted to do was speculate on what might happen in three miles of road on a cloudy day.
They drove over the bridge and into the warehouse area of town. This old part would be directly in her path unless she took the highway road or followed the winding creek. Neither of those routes would be likely, though—too rough. The warehouse crossing was her safest way.
Jillian tried to think of something to say that would help. Gram might be forgetting little things—names, dates—but putting an extra round of sugar in her coffee didn’t make her senile. Just last week, she’d explained the layout of a six-point Lone Star pattern and helped cut bias binding for a scalloped-edge quilt.
She kept glancing over at Connor. Gram had told her he was only thirty-seven, but he seemed older now. She’d said when he’d left college and returned home to run the business after his parents died, Gram wondered if he regretted it. He’d had no wild twenties to find himself.
“The boy doesn’t know how to live,” Gram admitted. “Too many brains, not enough wildness in his heart, I fear.”
Jillian considered that Gram might be right. He seemed to carry a heavy load on his shoulders.
As they passed through the grain elevators and warehouses littered with the bones of equipment left behind, Jillian said, “Gram told me you own this land.”
“I inherited it. Not sure if it was a blessing or a curse. It’d cost a million to clear all this out and then I doubt I could sell the land. With all these aging buildings, no one would buy it. So I keep paying the taxes until I figure out what to do.”
He seemed to relax a little. At least he looked like he was breathing. Earlier she wasn’t so sure. Talking came easy while they were both watching the road and not facing each other.
“You grow up in a town like this?”
She saw his effort to remain calm, so she played along. “No. I grew up in the oil fields, from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska. My dad liked to travel. He went wherever the jobs took him.”
“What about you?”
“I’m the same way. No strings to anywhere. I wouldn’t know where to call home.”
His short laugh held little humor. “I envy you a little. When I was in college, I thought I’d graduate and see the world. Wash dishes for gas money. Write all night in a cheap hotel or sleep under the stars on warm nights.”
“You ever do any of that?”
“No. Melissa, my wife, got pregnant a few months after we met. She came to college one semester with me, but it was too hard on her. Sunnie came along a few months before my folks died, so we moved back and I finished my degree online. She never got hers started. When we moved back, she stepped into running with her high school crowd and none of them were interested in college. Melissa was younger than me. I figured she had some growing up years to finish.”
Jillian studied all the corners and shadows of the district as she continued to talk low. “Gram said Melissa died in a plane crash
a few years ago. I’m sorry.”
“We married because she was pregnant. We both loved Sunnie, but I knew my wife never loved me.” His voice was bland. Simply giving a report.
“Did you love her?” Jillian couldn’t believe she was getting so personal, but for a change she wanted to know someone better. Now might not be the time for these questions, but talking would keep them calm.
“I tried. A man should love his wife. After the plane accident, I found the paperwork she’d done for a divorce. I guess I failed in the loving her department. I think she was planning to leave me and marry the guy with her in the plane. I found out they’d traveled together several times. Her ‘weekends with the girls’ were mostly weekends with him.”
Jillian thought of telling him that it took two people to make a marriage work, but now wasn’t the time and she didn’t know enough about relationships to advise anyone. The longest one she’d ever had was three weeks.
Connor turned down a dusty street, and Jillian saw a truck parked in front of one of the barns.
She pointed but before she could ask, he answered her questions. “That’s Joe Dunaway’s truck. He’s probably still working on that crazy idea of making Toe Tents.”
Jillian couldn’t stop a smile. The old man was nuts, but ever since he’d mentioned them, she’d wished she had a Toe Tent when she crawled into bed.
Connor pulled up beside the truck. “I’ll tell him Gram’s missing. He’ll want to help.”
Out of curiosity, Jillian climbed out of the pickup and followed Connor. The bay area had been scrubbed clean and long tables were laid out in a square. The abandoned building Joe had made his factory seemed to be holding up well.
“Morning, Connor,” Joe shouted. “Come to check on your investment?”
“I’m not invested, Joe. The barn is yours to use. When you hit it big, it’s all your idea and your profit.”
Joe took off his welding gloves. “That won’t be long. I’ve about got the assembly line set up.”
“You mean assembly square.” Connor reached the man and lowered his voice. “We got a problem I need your help with, Joe. Gram is missing. We think she left the Acres and started walking to work.”
