Forget Me Knot (A Quilting Mystery)

by Mary Marks

  I remembered all the times I tried and failed to get my mother’s attention and her love. “So you’re saying she’d always been remote? I thought she just didn’t like me.”

  “No, No! God forbid! You had nothing to do with it. Your poor mama was born that way.”

  I wasn’t sure that made me feel any better.

  “Anyway, when she was young, about seventeen, she met a man. From what we were able to piece together later, he took her to his hotel room several times.”

  “If she was so sheltered, how could that happen? Didn’t you ever notice she was gone?”

  “Ours was a small town. We never thought anyone would harm her, so we didn’t feel we had to watch her every minute. She was, after all, not retarded. Just naive.”

  I tried to imagine what life must have been like in the mid 1950s in a small midwestern town. Shady streets? Clean air? Lilac-scented breezes in the spring? Friendly neighbors looking out for one another?

  “It wasn’t unusual for your mama to go on long walks by herself, or sit for hours reading in the library. We just thought she was doing something like that. Anyway, the worst happened and she got pregnant. She was too innocent to understand what was happening to her. It was your bubbie who suspected something was wrong and took her to a doctor.

  “Anyway, when your mama broke the news to him, the louse told her he was going out of town to visit his sick mother. He promised her they’d be together as soon as he returned.”

  My head spun. What kind of man would take advantage of someone like her? Although I knew the answer, I asked anyway. “Did he come back?”

  “What do you think? She never saw him again. When your bubbie and I found out she was pregnant, we tried to track him down. Your mama called him Quinn, and the hotel registration confirmed his name was J. Quinn. He listed his permanent address as a post office box in Omaha. The box number turned out to be phony.”

  “Phony in what way? That there was no such number?”

  “No. All the post office told us was that the box wasn’t registered to any Quinn and they refused to tell us who it was really registered to.”

  I wracked my brain thinking of other ways he could be found. “Do you know what he did for a living? Did my mother?”

  “The hotel owner didn’t really know. The man was a transient. Your mama said he painted pictures. That’s all the information we had to go on, your bubbie and me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to find him.”

  You could have done better than that! “Did you think of hiring a detective agency to track him down?”

  Uncle Isaac looked at me with great tenderness and sadness. “No, faigela. Your bubbie and I decided to bring your mother to California to make a fresh start. Two months after we arrived, you were born.” He smiled and gestured toward me. “A real native Californian. We made up the story about the train wreck to protect your mama’s reputation and to spare you the stigma of being . . .”

  I spat bitterly, “A mamser? An illegitimate bastard of a child?”

  “Don’t say that! We never thought of you that way. You were our whole life.”

  By now, tears coursed down my cheeks. I covered my face with my hands and cried softly, emptying the tears bottled up inside me for so many years.

  Uncle Isaac patted my shoulder. “No, no, faigela. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”

  When I could speak, I wiped my eyes with the back of my wrists. Uncle Isaac handed me a paper napkin for my nose. “Did my mother ever describe him, ever talk about him?”

  “We told her not to. We were afraid she’d let the truth slip out. She didn’t have the sechel to judge what was safe to say and what wasn’t, so we just told her not to talk about it anymore.”

  Well, in at least one respect, I was my mother’s daughter. I’d done a lot of loose talking recently that almost got me killed.

  The missing pieces of the story began to come together like the patches in a quilt. I now knew more about my parents and about how I came to be, but there was so much more to know. I cried some more for my poor mother, for the pain of Quinn’s betrayal, and for the lie she was forced to live her whole life. I wept for my uncle and Bubbie, who devoted their lives to care for my mother and me. And I wept for myself. Born because of one lie and raised on another. Not likely to ever find out the full truth of who my father was or what happened to him.

  My uncle patted my shoulder again. “This is why we never told you, faigela. We wanted to spare you. We just wanted you to have a normal life, to be happy. There was nothing we wouldn’t do for you or for your mama.”

  “I know,” I choked. So that was that. As far as anyone knew, my father could still be alive. A good detective agency might even be able to find him, but did I really want to go there? Maybe Uncle Isaac was right. Maybe it was wiser to just not talk about it and move on.

  I got up and hugged my uncle in a long embrace. His bony old shoulders protruded through the blue sweater he wore. “Thank you for the truth. I hope you know you’ll always be my real father, Uncle Isaac, and I hope you know how much I love you and appreciate what you did for me and my mother.”

  Those old shoulders shook as he hung on to me and wept.

  TUESDAY

  CHAPTER 37

  The following day was Quilty Tuesday again, just two weeks after we discovered Claire’s body. I sat with Lucy in Birdie’s sewing room helping her cut out wedge-shaped pieces for her Grandmother’s Fan quilt. Birdie was using lots of greens and yellows. Each block featured a fan with scalloped edges appliquéd to a background of unbleached muslin. She used a pencil to trace around the template for each ray of the fan while Lucy and I cut out the pieces with our Gingher scissors.

  “So what happened after Dixie threw away the baby quilt in the Dumpster behind her building?” asked Lucy.

  “Dixie realized she’d never get Claire to change her mind about exposing Godwin. So she went to Claire’s house under the guise of working on the auction. She brought some fresh grapefruit juice spiked with drugs. When Claire realized she was being poisoned, she tried to run for help, but Dixie easily overpowered her and forced the rest of the drugs down her throat.”

  Birdie looked up. “Where did the blood on Claire’s hands come from?”

  “Claire got manicures every week to keep up her acrylic fingernails. They weren’t long, but they were as strong as knives. When she fought back, she scratched Dixie’s arms pretty deeply.”

  Birdie twisted her braid. “So, how did Dixie know about Claire’s other quilts?”

  “Like everyone else, she read about the upcoming quilt show in the Daily News. On opening day, Dixie scoped out the show and found Claire’s newest quilt. She wanted to know if Claire wrote anything else damaging to BCA, so she attempted to read the Braille on the quilt but was stopped several times by the White Gloves. The next day she dressed up like a man and stole the quilt. She took ours as well, hoping to make it look like a random theft.”

  Lucy cut into a ditsy green print. “What happened to your quilts?”

  I looked at Birdie, trying to think of the best way to break the news.

  “Go on, I need to know.”

  “Dixie admitted she burned them in her fireplace. The police went through her trash, but the remains were already in the landfill.”

  Birdie pursed her lips and frowned hard. “They’re sure?”

  “Yes, Birdie. Forensics found some singed scraps of fabric in Dixie’s fireplace. I was able to identify one of them as the double pink from my quilt.”

  “So then what happened?” asked Lucy.

  I picked up a green and blue print featuring little flying swallows with forked tails. “Well, you remember the following Tuesday was when I visited BCA and stumbled upon the baby quilt the homeless woman, Hilda, had rescued from the Dumpster? The same evening, I got a call from Dixie offering to drive over and pick up the quilt. When I declined, she decided to come over anyway and take it from me. If I’d been there, she probably would have killed me rather than leave
a witness behind.”

  Birdie looked up from her tracing. “How did she know where you live?”

  “I gave her a donation earlier that day, and she got the information off my check. I also let slip Claire’s other quilts were at my house, so I really made myself a sitting duck.”

  Lucy paused and raised her head. “Fortunately for you, you got arrested and spent the night in jail. Otherwise she would have killed you right then.”

  “Yeah. Fortunately.” I had a hard time keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. “Anyway, on Thursday Dixie came to the wake to see if she could read any of the other quilts, but the guards wouldn’t let her touch them.”

  “So when you offered to give a quilt to the auction, she saw a chance to go to your house and kill you?”

  “Not exactly. I don’t think Dixie came over with the intent to do me any harm. After all, I didn’t have the quilts anymore. I left my translations of the quilts on the counter. Dixie saw them, made a comment, and I realized she was somehow involved. As the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place I couldn’t help myself. Stupidly, instead of keeping my mouth shut, I confronted her. Once she realized I knew what she’d done, she tried to kill me. Even so, I’m glad I only wounded her.” I reached for a new piece of fabric.

  Lucy shook her head. “I just can’t accept that someone who’d devoted her life to helping handicapped children could murder Claire and her unborn baby.”

  Birdie nodded in agreement. “I know what you mean. Dixie seemed like such a nice person. She must have been crazy to do what she did.”

  “Yes, I was totally taken in by her, too. Dixie poured her life into BCA. Her work was her whole world. I found out from Arlo she had a rough time as a visually impaired child. She’d lost a significant amount of her vision by the time she was seven. When she grew up, she devoted her life to helping blind children.

  “Then on Sunday night I saw another side of Dixie, the same side Claire must’ve seen before being overpowered. Dixie thought her life’s work was about to be ruined. She became enraged and willing to kill to protect the thing that mattered to her most.”

  Lucy nodded and pointed at me. “Remember, if it weren’t for Ray’s gun, you’d be dead, too.”

  I shuddered at the mention of the gun. “Thank God Joey taught me how to use it. By the way, the police will return the pistol when the case is concluded.”

  Lucy nodded. “What about the break-in at Claire’s house? Why didn’t Dixie look for the quilts and the list of quilts right after she killed Claire? Why wait and come back later?”

  “Dixie didn’t break in to Claire’s house. Will Terry arranged that.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “After I left Siobhan’s house the first time, she told her husband I was going to find the stories in Claire’s quilts. Naturally he didn’t want anyone to know those stories, so he arranged for someone to stage a break-in at Claire’s and steal the quilts. Unfortunately for him, I’d already removed them. All his hired goon managed to get was the list of quilts Claire kept in her files.

  “When he found out his thug had been too late, Will called me and tried to talk me out of looking at the quilts. When that didn’t work, he insisted on giving me only three days, hoping I wouldn’t have enough time to decipher the stories—if there were any.”

  “What did he want with the list of her quilts?”

  “In case there were stories in the quilts, he hoped to buy them all back under the guise of ‘sentimental value.’ It was all about damage control.”

  I started cutting a piece of yellow and green yarn-dyed plaid. “As for Godwin, the media is hot on the scent of a good story. Apparently that wasn’t the first time Godwin seduced a patient, especially the pretty or the wealthy ones. Turns out Godwin’s wife was a former patient of his, too. She had no idea he was being unfaithful with Claire.”

  “What a dog!”

  Birdie handed over a new stack of marked fabric pieces to be cut. “I’ll say. What did she do when he was arrested?”

  “Well, when the police asked Mrs. Godwin to corroborate her husband’s alibi, Kaplan made sure she knew all about Claire and her pregnancy. I think he hoped to shake the alibi, as they say.”

  “Poor thing. I imagine she was quite shocked.”

  “And angry. She threw her husband out.”

  “And here I thought she was just a ‘pretty face.’” Lucy wiggled her fingers in the air. “That young woman gets major points for having the good sense to dump him.”

  “Well, the media will have afield day with Godwin. He’s sure to be disgraced once all the facts of his involvement with Claire are revealed. He may even lose his medical license. Unfortunately, BCA is done for.”

  “At least there will be a little justice for poor Claire.” That was Birdie again, the gentle optimist. “Some of the scoundrels in her life are getting their just desserts!”

  Lucy asked, “So, what about Will Terry? How’s Claire going to get justice where he’s concerned? The statute of limitations must have run out on the incest years ago.”

  “Yes and no,” I said. “The statute has expired on the childhood incest, but the recent incest is still considered a crime. Unfortunately, Claire’s not alive to file a complaint. The good news is Siobhan kicked Will out of the Benedict Canyon house the night of the funeral—preventing him from destroying Claire’s quilts.”

  Lucy finished cutting the piece she was working on and put her scissors in her lap. “Good for Siobhan. Unfortunately nothing will have a real impact on the man. He has more money than God and can live wherever he wants.”

  “It is a shame, but making Will Terry’s crimes public would mean exposing Jerry Bell as a product of incest, and Siobhan won’t do that to Jerry. She cares for him a lot.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Jerry called me yesterday to thank me for everything. Told me he has visited Siobhan every day since the funeral. Siobhan learned from the family attorney that Claire left everything to Jerry in her will. They all were completely surprised.”

  Lucy raised her eyebrows. “Lucky boy!”

  “There’s more. Siobhan informed Jerry she’s revising her will. Jerry is now a very rich man and will become even richer. He told me he and Siobhan plan to set up a multimillion-dollar foundation in Claire’s memory to provide psychological and medical care for kids who are underserved.” My cheeks heated. “They want me to sit on the board.”

  Birdie smiled at me tenderly. “Martha, dear, you hardly knew Claire, yet you risked your life to get to the truth about her story and her murder. You turned out to be her best friend, poor thing. Wherever she is right now, thanks to you, Claire must be very happy to see her mother and son are finally together.”

  “Amen.” Lucy smiled at me and picked up another piece of fabric. “So after they took Dixie away to the hospital, what happened?”

  “Arlo told Detective Kaplan to take over and close things up. Then he helped me pack a few things and we left.”

  “The same Detective Kaplan who arrested you for stealing Claire’s computer?” asked Birdie.

  “Yeah, the same.”

  “He didn’t try to arrest you again for attempted murder?”

  I laughed. “He wouldn’t dare. Besides, when Dixie’s DNA is matched to the DNA found under Claire’s fingernails and in the blood on her hands, he said a conviction would be a slam dunk, even if Dixie later denied what she confessed to me.”

  “So when can you get back into your house this time?”

  “Actually, I can go back now, but Arlo advised me to hire a crime scene cleanup company to come in and get rid of the blood first because it’s a biohazard. The cleanup will happen tomorrow.” I looked down and gathered all the pieces I’d cut out and stacked them into a neat pile.

  Each time I called Beavers by his first name, my friends stole a glance at each other and smiled.

  Lucy put her scissors down again and looked at me. “So, aaah, do you have anything to tell us? You k
now, maybe about where you’ve been since Sunday night?”

  Sunday night I didn’t ask Arlo Beavers to take me back to Lucy’s house, even though he told me he and Arthur would drive me and Bumper anywhere I wanted to go. I didn’t bother to point out to him I was perfectly capable of driving myself, or that I didn’t need to be taken care of. After all, hadn’t I proved myself by sussing out the real killer and surviving an attempted murder?

  Instead, I looked into his dark brown eyes and told him to take me home. His home. Warm honey spread all over my insides at the memory of the last two nights. I leaned back in the chair and surrendered myself to the soft chenille upholstery. I couldn’t remember the last time my body felt so relaxed and free of pain.

  “So?” Lucy insisted. “Where have you been?”

  It had been difficult to say good-bye to Arlo this morning. I still felt his moustache tickling my neck as he held me close and could still smell the clean scent of patchouli soap on his wet skin fresh from the shower. But Tuesdays with my friends were sacred. I looked at them with great affection and smiled slowly. “Let’s just say Arthur and Bumper are cultivating a close friendship.”

  “How close?”

  I grinned. “As close as you can get.”

  Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of Mary Marks’s next Quilting Mystery Coming in November 2014 from Kensington Publishing!

  CHAPTER 1

  Yesterday I joined Weight Watchers for the eighth time. The lecturer Charlissa told me to get rid of all the bad food in my house and take a walk every day. So I did what she told me, confident this time I’d work the program successfully.

  After a breakfast of egg whites scrambled in one teaspoon olive oil, I bent over to put on my new white athletic shoes. The top of my size-sixteen Liz Claiborne stretch denim jeans dug into my waistline. No doubt about it. At the age of fifty-five I, Martha Rose, was outgrowing the largest clothes in my closet. I didn’t think I could feel any worse today, but I was dead wrong.