David of David’s Designs was sitting at a table already, but he was speaking into his cell phone. He was dressed casually, in khakis and a white-striped golf shirt. There was a woman seated next to him who rose and greeted her.
“It will be just a moment,” she said in a professional voice, but tinged with apology. “Please have a seat.”
Sheila sat down. This was awkward. She didn’t want to listen to his conversation—or for it to appear that way. So she very obviously looked out the window at the ocean, which appeared to be choppier than it had been this morning.
“He got what he deserved,” David said into the phone. “He broke up a happy marriage. What did he think? That there would be no revenge?”
She could not believe what she was hearing. Was he talking about Harold?
A waiter came up and asked Sheila what she wanted to drink.
“Water with lemon, please,” she said, thinking she’d kill for a sweet iced tea. But apparently it wasn’t on the menu; she’d tried to order it several times. What did you have to do to get a sweet iced tea outside the South?
“Theresa is right about that. But listen,” David said, looking at Sheila, “I need to go.” He placed his phone on the table. “Ms. Rogers,” he beamed. “So good to meet you.” He held out his hand and they shook. His handshake was firm and his manner charming. But one minute he was talking about revenge and the next oozed charm.
“This is my associate, Heather Reynolds,” he said.
“She’s in charge of my scrapbooking line. We work very closely together. I give her as much creative free range as possible. But everything gets run by me before it’s released.”
“If you were to describe our designs in one word, what would that word be?” Heather asked.
Sheila thought a moment. “Classic.”
A huge smile cracked across David’s face. “Indeed. Now, let’s talk about your designs. I’d call them shabby chic, wouldn’t you?”
Sheila sat a bit taller. “Absolutely,” she said. “But I have designed some classic paper and so on. I also have ideas for a nostalgic line inspired by a carnival.”
His eyes widened. “Sounds interesting. You know, you really are very talented. I’m not one to beat around the bush. I don’t have time for it. We’d love to have you join us.”
“Really? Me?”
“Why do you seem so surprised?” Heather asked.
Sheila shrugged. “I had this meeting with Theresa Graves and she wasn’t impressed with my work at all.”
David and Heather looked at one another. Heather rolled her eyes.
“Theresa wouldn’t know good design if it jumped up and bit her. I don’t like talking about colleagues, but that woman’s company is a design mess,” he said. “You don’t want any part of that.”
Interesting, Sheila mused. She thought the designs were okay—some lines better than others. But she was astounded by the competition between the scrapbooking companies. With such a family-oriented hobby business, Sheila had assumed that all of the big shots were friends.
The server brought Sheila a glass of water. She squeezed the lemon perched on the edge of the glass and dropped the peel into her water.
“So, tell me,” Heather said, after taking a sip of some kind of dark soda. “How would you see yourself fitting in to our company?”
Sheila’s heart raced. David’s Designs was interested in her. She hadn’t anticipated this at all because Theresa had said her designs were amateur. She hadn’t rehearsed this moment, which is what she would have done if she thought she stood a snowball’s chance in hell. Twinges of excitement pulsed through her.
“What I’m looking for is freelance design work,” she told them. “I still have children in school in Cumberland Creek. I have a complete home office and studio and see no reason why I couldn’t manage to work from there.”
“Would you be able to come to New York, say, once a month?” David asked her.
“Certainly,” she said.
“I’d like you to consider coming to work for us. I like to put this all up front. When you work for me, you sign a contract. You can’t work for anyone else. And I own your designs. It’s a standard work-for-hire agreement.”
Surely not! This doesn’t sound right at all. She felt her eyebrows knitting.
“I’d suggest you think it all over,” Heather said.
“You’ll be getting other offers, I’m sure. Please let us know something within a few weeks. We’d love to have you on board. What I admire about your work is your sense of color. I’ve not seen such inspiring work in a long time.”
“Thank you,” Sheila said. “How kind of you.”
“I like the way you’re comfortable with both digital design and traditional design,” David said. His eyes sparked with passion. Design really mattered to him; Sheila saw that. “I loved that scrapbook of yours, the one you entered in the competition. Where is it?”
“That’s a good question,” Sheila said, and then explained the situation with the scrapbook.
“How utterly maddening,” David said. “I’ll put in a word for you with security just to reiterate that you are to get that scrapbook back.”
“I hope they find it soon,” Heather said. “In the meantime, you have pictures, don’t you?”
Sheila nodded.
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “We wanted to buy the rights from you to create a prototype and actually sell scrapbooks with your design.”
Sheila’s mouth dropped open.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s exactly what I wanted.” Except for the rights issue—and I’ll deal with it later.
“Fabulous. We’ll draw up some contracts and treat this project a little differently than the freelance work,” David said. “I’ll text legal right now.”
What a perfect meeting it had been. Sheila slipped away into her room for a breather before she had to teach her class. She took a photo of herself on her iPhone and looked at it. This is what an artist looks like.
She mailed it to herself and uploaded it onto her computer, then pulled it into her scrapbooking program and journaled about her day. She chose a pallet of blue and green with waves, clouds, and starbursts.
She typed in the word “artist” large across the top of her picture and read over her journal.
At forty-four, I am finally an artist. I am a mother, friend, wife, businesswoman. I can be all of those things and be happy. I stepped into my own skin today as one of the biggest designers in the country spoke to me—as if I mattered. I always thought of myself as a little bird of some kind, struggling to fly. Hell, sometimes struggling to walk. But I have pretty, colorful feathers. Today I felt like an eagle. Strong and soaring.
She stepped back, considered her face on the screen with all of the color and words around it. Not bad. Not bad for an old broad from Cumberland Creek.
Chapter 24
Annie had it narrowed down to twelve men. Twelve single male passengers were aboard the Jezebel. One of them had died last night. One of them was Randy. And, of course, there was Eric. So that left nine. She sent the names to Vera, Paige, and Sheila, in hopes that one of them at least would receive her message. In the meantime, she pulled up one of her databases that listed criminal records. She keyed in “John Monroe.” Several were listed, as it was a very popular name. She scanned the list. There was one in Sarasota, which was where the Monroes had lived. She clicked on the link. The computer took a moment to catch up to itself.
His arrest record stretched back ten years, most of which was domestic violence charges. There were two DUIs. And the last one? Embezzlement. He had embezzled $325,000 from his wife’s scrapbooking company. Ouch.
And he was currently in prison. So, unless he hired someone to kill his soon-to-be ex-wife and her boyfriend, he was in the clear. He certainly wasn’t on board the ship and Annie doubted he could have hired anybody, given that embezzlement was his crime. He was probably broke and the authorities would b
e watching all of his accounts.
Could someone else have had it in for Allie Monroe? Maybe her boyfriend, Harold? Did someone else not want to see them together? It seemed an odd thing for someone else to be so engaged with her and her life, so much so that they killed her and her lover. Annie would look into Harold’s background next.
“How about lunch?” Mike asked as he entered the room.
“Sure, what do you have?” Annie replied, turning away from the computer.
“I made some egg salad. The boys are already scarfing it down,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her as she stood.
She kissed him. It was a rare thing for him to make food. She knew that he was capable—hell, more than capable. He just relied on her to do it. And during the week, she really didn’t mind since he was working and she was at home. Still, she had work to do as well, and didn’t feel like cooking. She didn’t really want to leave her computer—or her train of thought—now, but she felt that she should because he had gone to the trouble of cooking.
The boys were already at the table and Ben’s face was already smeared with the egg mixture. Mike had toasted some good rye bread and cut the sandwiches into triangles.
“Nice,” Annie said, sitting down.
“So tonight’s the first night of Hanukkah, boys. We’ll have a good dinner, then light the menorah. And Mom and I have a little something for you,” Mike said, before biting into his sandwich.
“The menorah was my grandmother’s,” Annie said. “My mom never had one. My grandmother had Hanukkah for us at her place every year. When she died, she willed the menorah to me. I think Uncle Josh was a bit upset about that. We both had such fond memories of it.”
Ben and Sam ate happily. She didn’t know if they realized how much the menorah meant to her. They probably wouldn’t realize until it was passed on to one of them. She could almost hear her grandmother singing the prayers. She closed her eyes and swore that she could smell her lilac perfume, mixed with spices.
“Annie?” Mike said. She opened her eyes, surprised to find they had the pricking of tears in them. “Are you okay? Where were you?”
She smiled and waved him off. “Ay, yes. I’m fine. Just remembering my grandmother.”
“Tell us about her,” Ben said.
And so she did.
She told them about the menorah, how it was one of the few items that made it to the shore of the United States when her grandmother came from Russia as a young girl. The ship had hit a storm and the crew and passengers lost many of their items.
“Our menorah is from Russia?” Ben’s eyes lit up.
Annie nodded. “And your great-grandma gave it to your grandmother. Who gave it to me. I wish you could have known her. She was strong and beautiful and kind. Everything a grandmother should be. She wore dresses every day of her life. Loved a good brisket and oh, did she love her chocolate.”
The boys and Mike sat and listened to her memories of her grandmother Doris.
Later, after Annie placed the brisket in the oven, having followed Doris’s recipe to a tee, she was overcome with a longing, a melancholy for her grandmother’s arms, for her voice chattering as they cooked together.
She reached into a cupboard drawer and pulled out a blank journal and a box of photos. She searched for the photo she was thinking of—the one where she was sitting on her grandmother’s lap and they were looking at something off in the distance. What was it? Annie wished she could remember.
The boys had left some acrylic paints on the table. She painted a page with a strip of red, then yellow. She tore out another page and wrote in longhand. When was the last time she had done that? She wrote down some memories of her grandmother, her kitchen, her warm bed, and how the thought of her grandmother on a big ship had always troubled her.
By the time she wrote it all down, the paint was dry. She placed the photo off-center on the page, then cut the paper with her writing into four pieces so it resembled a puzzle. She placed each piece in a corner and thought about that ship that brought her family across the sea. What kind of life had they left behind? Her grandmother had never wanted to talk about it.
The thought of the sea brought her back to her friends and the murder. She set her book aside and went to her computer and keyed in Harold’s name to the database. Hmmm. He had no arrest record.
But as she reviewed his personal information, she found out that he was married. So both he and Allie had been married, and trying to divorce their respective spouses so that they could be together. Annie’s brain sifted through another assortment of possibilities for her friends on the high seas, none of which settled the gnawing in her guts.
Chapter 25
“We’re getting ready for Sheila’s class,” Vera said into the phone.
“How is she doing? Any better?” Beatrice asked. She was sitting at her kitchen table after a lunch of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. She was a bit tired after a morning of baking and standing on her feet.
“I can’t get through to Annie, Mama. I don’t know why, but if you’re talking with her, can you tell her that I’ve gotten her list of unattached men on the cruise?”
“Sure. That sounds interesting,” Bea said, and chortled.
“She came up with a list of men who aren’t here with their wives.”
“Oh yes, we talked about that.”
“You can tell her that we are going to check these guys out.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“We’ll find them and talk with them and ask what they are doing here and so on. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find our killer.”
“And then what?” Beatrice asked.
“We’ll tell security. Or the FBI. They are supposed to be meeting the ship at the next port of call.”
“Well, you know to be careful. I don’t want to get another visit from law enforcement at my house.”
Vera quieted. “I love you, too, Mama. And God knows I miss you and Elizabeth.”
“She misses you, too,” Beatrice said. No point going down that sad road. “Have your learned the latest froufrou scrapbooking techniques?”
“It’s intense,” Vera said. Beatrice heard Eric mumbling something in the background. “I love scrapbooking, but I’m glad we took a bit of a break from it this morning. These people take their scrapbooking very seriously.”
Beatrice harrumphed. How seriously could one take scrapbooking?
“Sheila fits right in. Kind of. We haven’t seen her since this morning. She was supposed to meet us at the pool, but she went back to her room to get some rest,” Vera said.
“Rest? That doesn’t sound like her.”
“I know it,” Vera said, and then the phone went dead.
Typical.
The tropical storm was still in the area; Beatrice had been tracking it. The Jezebel was heading in the opposite direction, but the storm was still affecting communication. And Beatrice was still worried. Yet Vera didn’t appear to be worried at all about the storm. She was more concerned about finding Allie’s killer, which did not serve to alleviate Beatrice’s anxiety either.
Her timer went off. Finally, her last poppy seed cake was done. She opened the oven door and sucked in the scent, felt the heat pouring out of the oven. That was all for today, she told herself. She had a meeting to go to this afternoon. It was the first year Beatrice was chairing the committee and some of the others suffered from power withdrawal—they made every little decision into a cataclysmic one and it drove her bonkers.
“Do we really need to discuss how big the signs should be for twenty whole minutes?” Beatrice had said at the last meeting.
Even with all that nonsense, she looked forward to the bazaar every year. She loved the crafts, the baked goods, and even some of the entertainment. Local kids would be singing Christmas carols and Donna Trevor was going to sit in the corner and play her dulcimer on and off all day.
Beatrice found herself thinking of the last craft fair she’d gone to. It had been in Ch
arlottesville and she had Cookie with her. Beatrice grimaced. Whatever happened to Cookie? She was one of the few people who had liked to go to craft fairs with her. She loved the quilts, but never bought one. And as far as Bea knew, she didn’t own one either.
She placed the poppy seed cake on the cooling rack and saw tiny snowflakes forming into big fat flakes against the window. The ground was covered with a couple inches of snow. Jon was at the grocery store; she hoped he came home soon. Those sidewalks could be mighty slippery until folks got around to shoveling.
She made her way back to her computer. It had become a bit of an obsession for her to check the weather in the Caribbean. She knew those storms cropped up quickly and the back end of them could be a problem, too.
She clicked on the Jezebel’s Web site and then to the journey section. The boat was moving again—like Vera had said. It was moving toward Grand Caymen, where Sheila was going to lead a scrapbooking-photography class, the one she had been planning to lead in Mexico.
Beatrice felt she was being a bit silly and obsessed by this scrapping cruise. Get it together, woman.
She clicked on her file that had the schedule for the week, leading up to the bazaar as well as the bazaar schedule. She printed four copies—one for each of the committee members. Even Elsie Mayhue, who was driving Bea to distraction.
In fact, there was an e-mail from her. Bea clicked on it:
I contacted all the local papers and we are set to go.
Okay. Did she want a medal for doing her job?
Beatrice caught herself rolling her eyes, then heard Vera’s voice chiding her. “Not everybody is as smart as you. You need to be patient with the rest of us.”
Hmph. I’m eighty-three years old and I don’t have time to be that patient.
Chapter 26
The crop room was open twenty-four hours a day, and some croppers took advantage of it. Sheila overheard one woman say to her husband that she’d been up since 3:00 A.M. cropping and had finished a whole scrapbook. The crop room was lovely, with floor to ceiling windows, so the scrappers’ view was inspiring and the lighting was great during the day.
A Crafty Christmas Page 9
