Wild Goose Chase

by Terri Thayer

  “Stay put,” Sanchez said, directing me to a desk in the far corner. “I’m going to seat Ms. Stein in the Witness Interview room. I’ll be right back.”

  Eve went off without acknowledging me. I looked around. This office was where Buster came to work each day. I knew immediately which desk was his when I saw the Metallica coffee mug. I averted my eyes, unwilling to look any deeper. The top of Buster’s desk, like the rest of his life, was no business of mine.

  Sanchez came back, patting the back of the chair convivially, inviting me to sit. He smiled. Out of the estrogen-laden atmosphere of the quilt show, he seemed able to shed his macho image. The cock-of-the-walk act fell away.

  He settled into his chair behind the desk, centering my cell phone in front of him on the bare wood. His shoulders were pulled back, his head held high. I knew a lot of Filipinos who had served in the U.S. military. Sanchez certainly had the bearing.

  His sideburns were cut in a straight line across his cheek, longer than what was in style. Not a single hair strayed past the designated line. I wondered what the cost was of always being so vigilant.

  Sanchez turned to the desk drawer on his right, pushed a button, and told me he was taping our conversation. He said the date, time, my name, and his. The interrogation started quickly.

  “Tell me why the deceased, Ms. Lanchantin, called you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She did call you; it’s in your call logs.”

  “I’m not denying that,” I said. “I just never talked to her. She left me a brief message. I assumed it was about the fashion show.”

  “Did you return her call?”

  He knew I did. That had to be in the logs, too. “I did, but she didn’t answer.”

  “Where were you at 3 p.m.?”

  He knew exactly where I was. I answered reluctantly. “Having lunch, outside the building.”

  “Do you know why Ms. Lanchantin was at the auditorium this afternoon?”

  “She was in charge of the fashion show. Rehearsal was at five.” While we were all jammed into the dressing room, fretting over which dress to wear, Justine was laying alone on that stage. I only hoped that she was past our help by that time.

  Sanchez pressed on. “Who knew she was going to be there?”

  “It seemed like common knowledge.”

  “What do you remember seeing when you walked on stage?”

  I talked fast, trying to get it over with. “I didn’t see anything at first. I was nearly to the middle of the stage before I saw her body.” I was unable to go on, my voice caught in my throat, feeling like a stone was lodged in my gullet.

  “Continue,” he said.

  His tone forced me to swallow hard, but I couldn’t finish my answer. He switched his tactics.

  “What time did you leave the convention center this afternoon?”

  “I guess around two. I wasn’t really looking at the clock.”

  “And before that? Where were you?”

  I was starting to panic. I was with Buster after two, but if Justine was dead before that, could I account for my time? I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing.

  “Do you think she was killed earlier?” I asked.

  “Her time of death is still a question.”

  His cold tone got to me. Justine had been reduced to a time of death. A victim, a puzzle to be solved. “Do you ever get used to it?” I asked him, a question that started out sarcastic but ended up pleading.

  He studied my face for the meaning behind the question. “You’ve had a violent death in your family, correct?” he said.

  Hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I didn’t want Sanchez to speak about my mother. As awful as Claire and Justine’s deaths were, their murders were tiny tears, little rips compared to the gaping wound left behind by my mother’s accident.

  “Audra Pellicano, hit and run last year,” he continued.

  Her name on his lips froze me, and I gestured for him to stop, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at a picture on his desk.

  “Have you been able to explain to your friends how that changes you?” he asked. “How you feel like a foreigner—no, more like a solo navigator trying to circumvent the globe without a sextant. You must keep moving, but you’re in the dark.”

  I could see it was a black-and-white photo of a man and a boy. Sanchez’s face told me this wasn’t going to be a happy tale. I didn’t want to hear it.

  “I have nothing more to tell you,” I said. “Let me go home, please.”

  He ignored my outburst. “You’re no longer Roy; you’re Roy-whose-dad-was-killed-in-a robbery-at-his-appliance-store. There’s a stigma permanently attached to you.”

  “Your friends drift away, don’t they?” he continued, each word searing my heart. “They can’t grasp what losing someone to a sudden violent death means. And God help you, you don’t want them to know; you wouldn’t want them to suffer the way you did. But the fact that they don’t know means you have no one to talk to.”

  I thought about my father, and the times we hadn’t talked about Mom.

  Sanchez was relentless. “People are afraid to speak of the dead, and that leaves you in an untenable spot. Unable to think of anything but the deceased, but unable to tell anyone.”

  The truth of his words grabbed me like a rip tide, tossing me at will. He was right. I had not expected to be so isolated. At first people hung around, lingering too long when all you wanted was for them to go home so you could curl up in a corner and cry. The neighbors, the college buddies, the old family friends cooked for you, took back your library books, picked up prescriptions. Then their lives made demands on them. The dog needed to go to the vet or the car needed its 30,000-mile checkup and, slowly, errand by errand, they went back to their lives, and you went back to yours. Except yours was no longer there.

  That was what Myra would discover, and now Eve. Already her life had irrevocably changed. Instead of grieving for her partner, she was being questioned by the police.

  He was looking at me now. He kept his distance, leaning back in the chair, watching to see what he had churned up in me.

  I wanted out of here, away from Sanchez’s probing eyes. What did I have to give him? What could I tell him so he would let me go?

  “I saw Justine the morning of Claire’s death,” I blurted out.

  Sanchez’s forehead creased. “Go on.”

  “When I first went up to Claire’s room, I noticed Justine walking away from me. She went down the service stairs.”

  “I don’t remember that as part of your initial statement.”

  I shrugged. “At the time, it didn’t seem like anything.”

  Sanchez’s lip twitched. “If Justine was involved in Claire’s death, it was very important.”

  “Well, sure, now it looks important. I’m just saying, at the time …”

  “Never mind. Is there anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Sanchez bit off his words.

  I let the sarcasm fly. “It’s kind of hard to be sure when you don’t know what matters.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “I’m not trying to be difficult,” I interrupted, suddenly realizing that if I allowed it, I would be here for hours as Sanchez plumbed my memories for everything surrounding the deaths. He would never be satisfied. I threw my shoulders back and straightened my spine.

  “I’m done. That’s all I have to say. Let me go home or charge me.”

  The streets of San Jose were packed, cars moving at a crawl even though it was after midnight by the time Sanchez’s officer returned me to the convention center to pick up my car. He gave my cell phone back as I got in to drive off. I hadn’t seen Eve again, and Sanchez hadn’t told me where she was. I had no idea how she was
coping. Was Sanchez telling her his sad story, trying to get a confession out of her?

  Right by the arena, I was forced to stop short to avoid hitting a group of concertgoers. I crept forward slowly. When Dad taught me to drive, his contention had been that teenagers were like deer. If you spotted one on the side of the road, you could be sure there were others just waiting to jump in front of your car. I didn’t get up to full speed again until I was beyond the next traffic light.

  What passed for conversation with my Dad always involved my car. Most Sunday afternoons, he took my Acura out for a drive to see how the engine “sounded.” When I protested that he never took my brothers’ cars out for a road test, he just grumbled. He’d usually be gone for an hour, sometimes longer if the car was due for maintenance. I knew he was checking the tire pressure, topping off the oil. The gas tank was always full when he came back. To thwart him, I used to gas up on Saturday, but I’d quit fighting him about these afternoon rambles after my mother’s death.

  Sanchez’s story about his father had stirred up a longing to see mine. I’d allowed him take his fishing trips, separate himself from me and the boys without much of a fight. I’d let him stop talking about my mother. That was going to end. As soon as he was back, I was going to tell him my favorite memories about Mom. When I was finished, I would make sure he told me his stories. All of them.

  Away from downtown, traffic eased and I was home in a few minutes. I let myself in the back door. Inside, I threw my keys on the kitchen counter. The message light on the phone was blinking. I felt the familiar fluttering in my stomach that meant Buster had called. I pushed the button, but to my complete disappointment, Kym’s voice came out of the machine.

  She wanted to know about Justine’s death. She’d wrung everything he knew out of Kevin and now was starting in on me. I deleted her mid-message with a firm press of the button.

  Buster’s old messages remained on the machine. I was tempted to replay them, let his strong voice fill the empty space, but Buster’s silence tonight at the auditorium told me all I needed to know. I was either a suspect or a sick hanger-on who wanted to tie myself to the police investigation to avenge my mother’s death. Either way, he wanted nothing to do with me.

  I stood in the hall between the kitchen and bedroom, trying to get back the feeling of sanctuary my house had always given me. Tonight, the plaster walls felt cold. Buster’s voice had brought warmth to my space. I’d ruined that source of security, his voice no longer calming, now only a reminder of our shared two-day history. Buster was unwilling to take on Sanchez on my behalf. And why should he? We didn’t have a relationship; we had sex. It wouldn’t hold up to a date and real conversation.

  I needed to get rid of Buster’s messages and stand on my own. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pushed the erase button. “Message deleted,” the mechanical voice said. I hit the red button again and again until all of Buster’s soliloquies were gone. I felt dizzy—the sense of being alone in the world finally hitting me.

  In my bedroom, the still-rumpled bed sheets reminded me what a long day it had been, starting out on such a high note and ending with death and suspicion. I could not face sleeping in my bed tonight. I found my sweats on the hook in the bathroom and put them on.

  On the couch, I wrapped the fleece throw around me. The heavy softness enveloped me, as yielding as my mother’s cheek when she’d lain beside me whenever I had cramps or a cold.

  I closed my eyes, but Sanchez’s accusing face loomed. I wondered if his story about his father was true or just a cop trick to get me talking. I was beginning to understand that putting words together into a cohesive narrative was an essential skill for a detective. Buster was a good storyteller, too. I knew that from his messages.

  With great effort, I shifted my mental focus to the store. Myra’s offer to buy Quilter Paradiso was the one bright spot in my life. I tried to concentrate on that, but the sale of my shop seemed cursed. Every time I tried to sell the shop, someone died. Would Myra be next?

  I shook off thoughts of voodoo. The shop was not under some kind of curse, afflicting all who approached it. That was just silly. Look at Kym, she thrived at the shop. Unless she was the one doing the cursing …

  I laughed out loud. Sanchez was wrong. The real trouble with violent death is that you began to make up scenarios, reasons why it happened. Explanations where there are none. Pretty soon you were thinking your white-bread, squeaky-clean sister-in-law was murdering people. Ridiculous.

  ____

  At dawn, birdsong woke me up before I realized I’d been asleep. A niggling problem rose to the surface with false urgency. Where had I left the pink and brown flying-geese quilt that Chester and Noni had given me?

  I’d dreamt about the woman who made the quilt, and awoke feeling bereft. Someone in her family had treasured that quilt enough, so that even now, a century-and-a-half later, it was still in perfect condition. And I couldn’t even remember what I’d done with it. I sank back onto the couch pillow, retracing my steps yesterday morning. I was glad when I finally remembered that the quilt was safe at the booth, locked up in the convention center. I’d left it behind to go for a ride in Buster’s truck. I should have stayed with the quilt.

  It was too early to go to the show and get it. I would go find the quilt history book I’d seen as a kid. I showered and pulled on yesterday’s jeans, with a fresh QP T-shirt.

  In the backyard, I found the little notebook propped up on the picnic table. A note stuck to it read “Thought you might need this in your quest for a new owner. B.”

  Buster had discovered the notebook in his truck and returned it to me in the night. I must have slept more soundly than I thought. I hadn’t heard his truck or seen the headlights that surely would have shone through the living room. And Buster hadn’t knocked on the door to let me know he was here. Shaking off a creeping sadness, I tucked the notebook in my pocket and continued to the store.

  I parked along the Alameda and entered through the front door. It was not quite eight, so not even Vangie was here. I breathed in the unique smell of the shop, a combination of wood polish and fabric sizing. I wanted to stay within the familiar walls. I wouldn’t go to the quilt show. Ina, Jenn, and Kym could handle the booth. Without the laptop, and now that I’d found my buyer, I didn’t have much to do at the show. I’d just stay here today.

  A lump formed in my throat as I realized I would be the last of my family to own this building. I shook myself. Dwelling on things I couldn’t change was deadly. Action was the only way out.

  I found the Quilts in History book in the big classroom. The summer I’d spent reading this book under the pear tree in the backyard came back to me as soon as I opened to the page with the reprint of a nineteenth-century ad for Coats and Clark thread. I had pored over the pictures of quilts, reveling in the stories of their makers. Hardship and honor. Making clothes for a large frontier family had seemed like fun to me then.

  I’d nearly worn out the pages, thinking they held a blueprint for how to be a woman. In those days, I’d thought I would be just like my mother when I grew up. I’d been wrong.

  The quilt I remembered was near the middle of the book. The caption read, “Wild Goose Chase quilt, circa 1855.” That settled the question of the name of the quilt. Ina had been right. The colors and fabrics were just like the quilt I’d received from Chester and Noni. I could see the wide variety of prints, stripes and paisleys that made up the blocks.

  According to the book, when Harriet Strauss of Stamford, Connecticut, became engaged, she made the requisite ten dowry quilts. But her beau had gotten gold fever before they could marry. He traveled west, and she stayed at home, piecing the eleventh quilt, the Wild Goose Chase quilt, making hundreds of small blocks, by hand. The smallest ones were the rectangle flying-geese blocks, measuring 3 inches by 1½ inches. I couldn’t imagine putting together such tiny bits of fabric.
/>   The fabrics were not just pieces of old clothes, but new fabric bought especially for this quilt, an extravagance for her farming family. Her fiancé didn’t return for five years. According to the book, her parents begged her to give up on him and marry the local parson. She refused, piecing the blocks, but not quilting the top until he returned. She finally quilted the top in Denver where the young family settled a year later.

  I re-read the description. The quilt was made up of flying-geese blocks. According to Noni, my mother had loved flying geese. Now that I knew what one looked like, I would look for quilts that contained them.

  I heard voices. To my surprise, Kym walked past the door to the classroom on her way to the kitchen.

  Kym’s voice sounded loud, even for her, in the morning quiet. “I told you I would take care of things. Now that Claire’s gone, everything will go back to normal, Vangie.”

  Vangie? I stopped reading, my finger holding my place. Why was Vangie here? The only time Kym had criticized my mother was when she’d hired Vangie back. At least once a week, Kym brought a reason to fire her to my attention. Vangie studiously avoided Kym. Why the sudden tête-à-tête?

  I wanted to hear what they had to say to each other. I quietly reshelved the book and tiptoed back to the doorway.

  “What about the other woman who died?” Vangie asked.

  “Justine? She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “I can’t help that. Our only concern is Quilter Paradiso and keeping things just as they are. Agreed?” Kym said.

  I positioned myself where I couldn’t be seen and peeked into the break room, just in time to see Vangie set down a bag of bagels from Noah’s and two cups of coffee. This was not a random meeting.

  “Kym, Dewey’s serious about selling the shop.” Vangie’s back was to me as she cut into a bagel. She was wearing a QP T-shirt and jeans and her usual motorcycle boots. Kym sat at the table facing me, the stiff collar of her period blouse framing her face. She took the lid off the coffee cup and blew gently into the steam. Her bright pink nails showed up anachronistically against the brown paper cup. Her hair lay on her shoulders, streaked with expensive highlights that her historical counterparts never dreamed of.