Make Quilts Not War

by Arlene Sachitano

  “But it’s okay,” Harriet added, pointedly looking at Aiden and hoping he was reading between the lines. “His back is really bothering him.”

  “Make it quick,” Colm said, his accent firmly back in place. “My busses are pulling out within the hour.”

  Aiden picked up the little dog and examined the burn scar on his back. There was a small remaining scab, but he knew it was of no consequence. With a silent apology, he deftly scraped it open, causing Scooter to yelp and the wound to bleed.

  Harriet was relieved Aiden had picked up on her ruse. While the two men were focused on her yelping dog, she retracted her burned arm into the sling, blindly stabbing the face of her concealed phone with her fingers and hoping she’d hit the speed dial number she was aiming for. She pressed the volume button down when she heard a woman’s voice.

  “I’m going to need to get my bag from the car,” Aiden said.

  “I don’t think so,” Colm snapped, revealing the gun. “Nice try, though. I’m not sure how she got you here, but now that you are, I’m afraid you won’t be leaving.”

  “I have no idea what’s going on here, but Harriet didn’t ‘get me here.’ I came to check on Scooter, which is something I do every day on my way to the clinic,” Aiden lied.

  “Well, that’s unfortunate.” Colm’s accent was once again gone. “I’m afraid your devotion to the dog is going to get you killed.”

  “What?” Aiden gasped. “What on earth are you talking about? If you’re going to shoot me, can I at least know why?”

  “The short version is that your friend here is too nosy for her own good.”

  “Come on, you have to give me more than that. If I’m just collateral damage, at least tell me what cause I’m dying for.”

  “I’m curious, too,” Harriet said.

  Both men turned and glared at her.

  “This is all about her friend Jenny,” Colm said.

  “Jenny Logan?” Aiden asked. “What could she possibly have done to you?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Colm said. “She seems to have set herself up as a suburban housewife now, but she has a past you-all don’t seem to know about. And see, that’s the thing—we share a past that I need to make sure stays in the past.

  “I’ve been able to hire most of the people who did jail time. They’re dependent on me, so it’s in their best interest to keep their mouths shut. But Jonquil and Paisley escaped scott-free.”

  “I don’t mean to be dense,” Aiden said, “but I still am not following what you’re telling me. Who are Paisley and Jonquil, and what do they have to do with Jenny and Harriet, and why do you want everybody, including me, dead?”

  “It’s like this. I got involved with a group of people when we were all in our teens. We had a crazy idea to make a political statement, and we got involved with some people with a different agenda. They robbed a bank, killed a policeman, and we all were incarcerated for various amounts of time. Everyone, that is, except two girls, who disappeared off the face of the earth.

  “After that, two things happened. I got forged papers and left for Ireland, where I played my guitar in pubs full of drunks. A funny thing happened, though. Without the drugs, I got better, and then I got real good. As soon as I started making real money, I hired private investigators to find Jonquil and Paisley. I also had a little reconstructive surgery done—my face needed to match my new age.”

  “I take it Jonquil or Paisley is who we know as Jenny?” Aiden asked.

  “I found Paisley about ten years ago,” Colm continued. “Just in time, it turned out. She was about to publish a memoir, and unfortunately, she included a chapter on me and how a drug-using ex-con became an Irish rock singer. I’m not saying it would have destroyed my career to be outed. It’s not like I was lip-syncing like Milli Vanilli or anything, but you know, I can’t take that chance. I could be run out of the business on a rail—you never can tell about these things.”

  “How did you find Jenny?” Harriet asked.

  “Well, that’s what’s funny, you know? All the high-priced detectives I’ve paid for over the years, and a newspaper article about this festival did it for me. I wasn’t expecting it. I was looking to see what they said about the band, and there was a picture of my old shirt. Well, not my shirt, but a piece of it. Jonquil was always sewing patches on jeans and stuff, and she’d use whatever material she could find. She made her and Paisley skirts from some old jeans one time.

  “Anyway, there was the back of my favorite shirt, right in the middle of that quilt. It disappeared the day of the robbery. I had bigger things to worry about on that day, but when I saw the quilt, I figured out where it came from. That shirt was hand-dyed, so it was an original. There wasn’t a chance it was anything else but my shirt.”

  “So, you just decided to kill Jenny without even talking to her?” Harriet persisted.

  “Come on, give me a little credit. I had my PI check her out. There didn’t seem to be anything I could leverage in her background, and it was obvious that, if she was confronted, she’d crack. Her brother was a bit of a problem, too.”

  “What do you mean?” Harriet interrupted him again, hoping whomever she’d reached had called 911 and could hear what was being said.

  She wiggled her arm again as if it were hurting her, sliding her phone forward toward her hand. She used her good hand to reposition the sling, brushing her finger over the screen. The face illuminated, and she could see she was still connected.

  “Ole Bobby was finally cleaning up. My guys interviewed Bobby’s fellow rehab inmates. He was coming up on steps eight and nine in his process—identify people you have wronged and make amends. We couldn’t have him making any amends that involved me or the band.”

  “If you had plastic surgery, how was he going to know it was you?” Aiden interrupted.

  Colm pulled his sleeve up, exposing the peace sign tattoo.

  “We all had these,” he said. “And Bobby was snooping around backstage and saw mine. I offered him cash to go away, but he said he couldn’t leave until he’d connected with his sister and made amends. He had a lot of guilt about involving her with the rest of us. And he was ready to do whatever she wanted him to do to make it right.”

  “Too bad he didn’t know that what she wanted most was to bury her past deep. She had no desire to dredge it all back up,” Harriet said.

  “That is too bad, but there was no way for my PI to figure that out. All we can do now is clean up. You two are, unfortunately, going to be the victims of a murder-suicide.”

  “No one will believe that,” Harriet said. “He’s just my veterinarian. Why would he kill me?”

  “Good point,” Colm said. “You’ll kill him accidentally and be so remorseful you’ll kill yourself.”

  “No one will believe you,” Aiden said and stood up.

  “Don’t do anything foolish, hero,” Colm said. He slid the top of the gun back, chambering a round.

  The door from the studio slammed open.

  “Drop the gun and put your hands in the air,” Detective Morse said. “It’s over.”

  Colm not only didn’t drop his gun, he grabbed Harriet by the arm and whirled her around so her back was pressed to his chest, his gun jammed into her neck.

  “It’s over, Mr. Byrne,” Morse repeated. “This place is surrounded. Put your gun down and your hands in the air.” She slowly edged along the length of the kitchen bar, causing Colm to retreat, turning his back to the windows that flanked the kitchen table on two sides.

  No one spoke for a moment.

  “Remember what Robin is always trying to get us to do?” Morse commented.

  Harriet stared at her. When Robin wasn’t driving her children all over Foggy Point, or using her skills as a lawyer to rescue her quilting friends from trouble, she taught yoga, something she was always trying to get the Threads to participate in, with varying degrees of success.

  “Now!” Morse barked.

  Everything happened at once. Harriet bent fo
rward as if to touch her toes, her kitchen window shattered, and Colm Byrne fell forward onto her.

  Aiden apparently had taken a step toward her because she heard Morse say “Stop.” She couldn’t see what was going on from the floor. She heard a metallic scrape, which must have been the gun being kicked away from Colm’s hand. He was so still, lying on top of her back, that she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be grabbing it—or anything else, for that matter.

  Her arm was screaming in pain—it was pinned under her with Colm Byrne’s weight pressing down on her.

  “Clear,” she heard Morse yell, followed by the sound of feet shuffling into the kitchen.

  Finally, Colm’s body was lifted off her, and Aiden gently took her by her good arm and pulled her to her feet.

  Chapter 32

  The kitchen filled with crime scene-related personnel, and Harriet, Aiden and Detective Morse went into the dining room to regroup. Harriet’s bottom lip was quivering from the pain in her arm.

  “Where are your pain meds?” Aiden asked.

  “Upstairs in my bathroom,” she told him in a tight voice.

  He looked at Morse.

  “Okay if I go get her pain meds?”

  Morse nodded.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” she said, “but I can wait until your meds kick in, if you want.”

  “I’m okay,” Harriet choked out, and then recounted Jenny’s story one more time while Morse scratched notes as quickly as she could write.

  “Here,” Aiden interrupted when he brought Harriet’s medication and a small glass of water. He had a bed pillow clenched under his arm, and he placed it gently under her damaged arm.

  “Did you suspect Byrne was our killer when you invited him here?” Morse asked.

  “Not even a little,” Harriet said in a shocked tone. “I was starting to wonder why he was so interested in me, though. He brought me CDs and T-shirts, and then he kept wanting to come for dinner. But he was a rock star, so who was I to question him?”

  Aiden looked at her.

  “You let your head be turned by the glitz and glamour of a rock star?”

  “Better that than a crazy sister,” Harriet shot back.

  “Children, please. You can fight all you want later. Let’s go back to this,” Morse glanced at her notes. “Paisley. You said he found her some years ago and just in time. Did he say what he did about it?”

  “No, he didn’t. The implication was clear, though.”

  “Any idea who Paisley was?”

  “You need to talk to Jenny, not me. She knows all the players. I’m sure she’ll know who Colm Byrne really is when she finds out he’s had plastic surgery.” She yawned.

  “She needs to lie down,” Aiden advised. “The pain meds make you sleepy.”

  “I need to go get my bandage changed first,” Harriet held her arm up, displaying her blood-soaked sling. “Colm bled on me.”

  Aiden jumped up.

  “Come on, we have to get you to the emergency room.” He looked at Morse. “You can come with us if you want, but she needs this cleaned right away. We need to see if his blood got into her raw wound.”

  Morse declined, and Aiden took Harriet to the hospital alone.

  Chapter 33

  “Tom’s coming by after our Loose Threads meeting,” Harriet told her aunt Beth the following day. They were sitting in Harriet’s kitchen watching a workman spread caulking around the edges of the newly replaced window. “He’s heading back to Angel Harbor.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Harriet sighed. “If Aiden weren’t in the picture, it would be an unqualified good thing, but even though I’m really unhappy with Aiden at the moment, I feel like we have unfinished business to deal with. But things with Tom are so easy.”

  “Oh, honey, you know the easy way isn’t always the best way.”

  “Not to change the subject, but you and Jorge seem to be spending a lot of time together these days.” Harriet’s eyes sparkled.

  “He’s a lot of fun, and I think he enjoys my company, too, but there’s no reason for us to push to make it anything else at this point.” Beth picked up the candle that sat on the table, sniffed it and set it back down again.

  “You wouldn’t let me get away with an answer like that,” Harriet said with a laugh.

  “Oh, you hush, now.”

  “Hello?” someone called from Harriet’s studio. Robin came through the connecting door, followed by DeAnn, Kissa on her hip.

  “My, you’re getting big,” Beth said and took the baby from DeAnn. “You want some juice?” she asked her.

  “No,” said Kissa.

  “She says that to everything,” DeAnn explained. “She never turns down juice.”

  Harriet stood up.

  “There’s coffee in the pot and hot water in the kettle. Fix your drinks and meet me in the studio,” she said, still too uncomfortable to be more gracious.

  Beth had set up the studio with chairs in a loose circle and the tables strategically placed to hold teacups and coffee mugs. Carla arrived, followed by Mavis then Connie and Lauren and, finally, Jenny.

  “I’m really sorry,” Jenny began.

  “You don’t have to apologize to any of us,” Connie said. “Everyone has a past and is entitled to keep it just that—in the past.”

  “We’re sorry you had to have yours drug out for everyone to see and have an opinion about. None of us can say what we would do if we’d been in the same situation,” Mavis agreed.

  “We care about the Jenny we know now,” said Aunt Beth, Kissa firmly planted on her hip with a sippy cup of juice clutched in her chubby hands.

  “I appreciate your support, and I’m sure you all have questions. If I can answer anything, please ask me,” Jenny said. “It’s the least I can do after lying to you all these years.”

  “Since we never asked you,” Lauren said, “it can’t even be considered a sin of omission. It’s more of a ‘we didn’t ask so you didn’t tell.’”

  “I’d like to know who Colm Byrne is,” Harriet said. “I mean, we know who the invention is, but who is the man?”

  “His name was Dennis. Dennis Smith.”

  “Boy, it doesn’t get much more ordinary than that,” Lauren said.

  “Dennis was anything but ordinary,” Jenny said. “He was the one who thought up the whole break-in scheme. He always had grand plans. And he always said he was going to be a rock star.” She gave a little laugh. “At least he achieved that goal—for a little while.”

  “Are you in any trouble?” Carla asked.

  “No. At least, not so far. When I disappeared, I mainly did it because I assumed that, with James dead, no one would know I was there as his informant. I was only fifteen when this happened, so my knowledge of the world and of how the police worked was limited. It turns out he’d documented everything. All that time, I was never a suspect. They wanted me to be a witness. On the other hand, I was in danger from my friends, so go figure—hiding from my perceived enemy saved me from my perceived friends.”

  “I’m sure there’s a moral in there somewhere,” Lauren said.

  “I’m just glad it’s all out,” Jenny said.

  “Me, too,” Mavis said. “Now that we’re done with the sixties festival, we’ve got to get busy on our quilts for the women’s shelter.”

  “No rest for the weary,” Connie said.

  “Before we move on,” Beth said. “Anyone interested in how the festival did? We’re talking rough figures right now. It will take weeks to get all the secondary numbers in.”

  Everyone nodded or murmured agreement.

  “I went to a meeting with the main committee. Jorge was included, since he was a major part of the profits.”

  A knock sounded on the door, interrupting Beth’s report before it got started. Harriet looked out the bow window and saw it was Aiden. She got up, grabbing her fleece jacket from a coat tree by the door.

  “I’ll be back i
n a few minutes,” she said, swirling the coat over her bound arm then putting her good arm in the sleeve.

  “Can we talk?” Aiden said when she was outside.

  “Sure, let’s walk down the driveway so we’re not in view of the Threads.”

  “I wanted to see how your arm is doing,” he said. “It can’t feel great after all the cleaning they did last night.”

  “No, it doesn’t feel great, but I’ll live. My temperature is almost back to normal, so the infection is better, but that’s not what you really wanted to talk about, is it?”

  “I guess not. I mean, I do want to know how you’re doing, but I guess what I really want to know is has my sister ruined everything? Or do we have a chance?”

  Harriet took a deep breath.

  “Before we get started, I need to let you know that Tom is coming by any time now.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, of course not. I just don’t want you going nuts when he drives up.”

  “Is that how you see me? Someone who’s ‘going nuts’ all the time.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Harriet said.

  “But it’s clear that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She grabbed his arm with her good hand and turned him toward her.

  “We had a good thing going for a while—” Aiden started.

  “Let me speak, please. I think you’ll agree, we had a great start to our relationship, but it seems like the first time things got rough, we couldn’t deal with it. It’s possible we could make things work again, but not if we try to pretend everything’s okay and try to just pick up where we left off. We need help, but if you’re not willing to change anything, we’re going to be spinning our wheels.”

  “So that’s it? An ultimatum? Get help or else?”

  “I didn’t say that. You know I don’t come from a traditional family. My boarding school headmistresses didn’t teach me much about personal relationships with the opposite sex, and we both know how well my first husband and I communicated. My problem is—I can’t figure out how couples counseling will help if I don’t have the other half of a couple with me.”