"It was a saloonkeeper's dress," she said. "A barmaid's dress. Scarlet with black fringe and jet beads, cut low in front." Here she patted her chest, indicating where the fringe and beads would have been. "A dress no decent woman would wear! And Ann washed in it and cooked in it and slept in it until Lucy died. And the day Lucy died, Ann burned it." She rose painfully from the table.
"Do I have this right?" I said, my mouth full of crackers. "Your sister Ann wore this inappropriate dress while she kept house? And the day Lucy dies, Ann burns the dress?
Ann. Ann. Something about Ann.
"Grandma," I said, experiencing an unusual lapse in my ordinarily impeccable manners, and swallowing hard to get rid of the crackers, "was Ann out there with Lucy and her husband for a long time?"
"Went with them to Kansas, actually. Not a wise choice—there'd always been strife between my sisters. It was a year later that Lucy died."
I bet there was strife: there's actually a quilt pattern named Kansas Trouble. If there hadn't been discord before the westward trek, there surely would be after. Two women, one man, children, chickens, maybe pigs or goats, cooped up in their no-room hovel. Greased paper windows. No indoor plumbing. No privacy. And Lucy had fallen ill, fatally ill as it turned out. I had one further thought. . . .
In those days it was a popular custom to collect locks of the dead person's hair and weave them into a "mourning wreath" to display in the front parlor, or into braids for "mourning jewelry." I have a gold-filled mourning brooch I never wear; it contains some of my great grandmother's beautiful white hair. The brooch itself is little oval box with a clasp on the back, and you can see a minute braid through a tiny glass window in the front. Mourning jewelry was one of those bizarre things the Victorians did.
I asked: did anyone make jewelry from Lucy's hair after she died?
"Why, yes," Grandma said, and went upstairs. After a bit she returned with a tattered necklace box. She took off the top, lifted a sheet of tissue paper, and held it out for us to see. Inside were a heavy gold mourning ring and an intricately woven thing of chestnut brown hair.
"I don't know why I keep these," Grandma said.
"What is this?" I said, pointing to the woven hair. It was about six inches long and an inch wide and as thin as a sheet of paper. Several clumps of hair had broken off the object, whatever it was, and were hiding in the folds of the tissue paper.
"It's a bookmark," said Grandma, looking unhappy. "Ann made a bookmark of Lucy's hair. We sometimes did that in those days." Ramona and I must have looked shocked. "Please take these, Ramona, and do something respectful with them. I don't want them any more."
The idea of making bookmarks of dead relatives' hair was a bit unsettling, but it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for a theory I'd been hatching.
"That's great," I told Ramona as we walked down Grandma's front steps. "Now we have some evidence."
"Evidence?" Ramona gaped at me. For a lawyer, she was surprisingly unfamiliar with the word.
"Hmmm," I said, as we climbed into my rickety gray Studebaker. "I've remembered the name of your quilt. My idea may be farfetched," I said, sure I was actually on the brink of deductive genius, "but listen to this." I explained it to her as we roared the short distance to State College.
"Your great aunts go out west. One man and two women, and one of them is mentally unstable, if the business with the tarty red dress is any indication. Now listen to this. Ann poisons Lucy! Several poisons have symptoms resembling the diseases that were so common then. Diarrhea, vomiting and throat constriction, for example, are all symptoms of arsenic poisoning."
Ramona looked stunned.
"Anyway," I said, veering a bit close to a fire hydrant, "Lucy correctly guesses the cause of her illness—that she's being poisoned—but what can she do? Maybe she believes her husband's in love with Ann. No matter what she knows, how can she escape? Who can she tell?"
"Ah," said Ramona. "That's why you asked about the lock of hair. Can't some poisons can be detected in the hair?"
"Right, in the hair and nails for starters, especially when they're administered over a long enough period of time. So Lucy is dying, and has been dying for a while when your grandma arrives. And though there's no way to keep secrets in that house, Lucy nevertheless manages to finger her killer."
Ramona's jaw dropped. Score one for me: I'd caught her completely off guard. "Really? Who? How?"
We'd reached the State College Chem Lab and found a lucky parking place half a block away. "I'll tell you in a second," I said, fervently hoping my buddy Jay Allen was in. We hurried to the lab in question, and up two flights of stairs.
Besides being a chemistry professor, Jay does forensic work and has testified in some newsworthy national criminal trials. Indeed, he was in, supervising a couple of bored-looking freshmen who appeared to be watching beakers of liquid come to a boil.
Jay is tall and very handsome, with stunning red hair and a red beard. Much as I wanted to, I couldn't waste time flirting with him now. I was a woman with a mission. "Could you check this hair for arsenic poisoning?" I asked him, pointing to the hair crumbs tucked in the tissue paper. "It's important."
Jay had the audacity to glare at me suspiciously. "Now?" he said. "What is this? We're not tampering with evidence of a crime here, are we?"
"How could you even THINK such a thing?" I said, giving him my most withering look. "Can you can test for arsenic using this hair or not?"
He sighed, nodded yes, and led us to his tiny work space in the back of the lab. It was crammed with complicated arrangements of bent glass tubing and Erlenmeyer flasks. "Atomic absorption spectroscopy's what's needed," he said. "I'll be destroying this bit," he said, pulling one of the little hair clumps out of the box with a pair of tweezers. "Is that okay?"
Ramona nodded yes.
The test took longer than I expected. He had to dissolve the hair in acid, burn it in a flame, and look at the light given off through a spectroscope. I quickly grew bored with this and wandered back out into the lab. Ramona followed. There we passed the rest of the time helping the two college students clean up the mess they made when their beakers shattered all over the countertop.
Eventually Jay emerged from his cubbyhole. "Six hundred parts per million," he said.
"Meaning?" I said.
"Chronic arsenic poisoning."
Ramona was genuinely impressed. "How on earth did you figure that out?" she said as we left Jay's lab, the box containing the mourning ring and hair bookmark safely tucked into her purse. "I never had a clue."
I was pleased with myself, so pleased I didn't waste time with a splashy Ed Sullivan buildup. "The clue was the name of the quilt," I said. "The name of the pattern of Lucy's last quilt is Crazy Ann."
2/ Patch As Patch Can
Hi. My name's Barb Hoxsie. As you can tell from the previous (true) story, I'm a quilter. At least that's what I do in my spare time. I teach quilting to beginners, and write a quilting column (for which they pay me a pittance) for Aunt Maggie's Needlework Magazine. You may have seen it, tucked on the magazine rack next to Better Homes and Gardens. I'm also a registered nurse and general busybody.
Some people I've talked to over the years have actually suggested quilting is boring—even a little lowbrow, if you can believe it. Several of my acquaintances (I couldn't possibly consider them friends) have said to me, "Barb, this is the modern age! It's the 50s! Get hep!" But quilting has been anything but boring for me. Heck, I nearly got killed over a quilt. (More about that in a bit.)
Presumably you've gotten this far in this book because quilting interests you, too. Or else someone has left a copy of this book in the doctor's office, and it's the only thing available to read during your interminable wait. (Desperate times drive people to desperate measures.)
Anyway, let me tell you a little bit more about myself, and then I'll get on with the quilting business.
My name is Barb Hoxsie—did I say that before? ("Hoxsie," by the way, rhymes with "boxy.") I live in Spotsburg, M
ichigan, which is a little spot in the palm of the mitten, as we Michiganders are wont to say. Spotsburg is not far from Hell, Michigan, though Spotsburg is nicer than Hell. (That's an example of typical Spotsburg humor.)
Anyway, I'm forty-one, happily divorced from the jerk-of-the-universe, not bad looking, have two very fine grown sons, and a couple of— Help me here. Boyfriends sounds a bit juvenile, don't you think? Lovers sounds romantic, but may not give you an accurate picture, if the picture it gives you is assignations in romantic French inns over steaming cups of Nestle's Instant. Anyway, I have some intimate men friends. (The devastatingly handsome Jay Allen, mentioned in the last chapter, is not one of them [sigh] because he's married, and I have a thing against breaking up marriages. HOWEVER, should his wife Betsy ever leave him or die, you can be sure I'll be the first through his front door with my casserole and sympathy.)
I've got some great women friends, too, though not in the sense of lust. (You've met Arden, Karen and Ramona already. They're kind and smart and just the types to be stranded in a lifeboat with.) I pride myself on being a good friend, a good visiting nurse, and pretty darn smart about quilts. Not bad at political prognostication, if I do say so myself. As I predicted at the time we were introduced to Ramona's interesting quilt (on which occasion I covered myself in glory solving her great aunt's murder—decades later), Adlai Stevenson was soundly defeated by Dwight Eisenhower. Since then, somebody has actually come up with a patchwork design called Eisenhower Star, but you won't see that pattern in any of my quilts!
Anyway, here's one of the finest columns I ever wrote for Aunt Maggie's Needlework Magazine.
The Ten Commandments of Quilting
[This appeared in the February 1958 issue of Aunt Maggie's]
The launching of Sputnik—the beep heard round the world—last October seems to have been a shock to everyone's system. Now we're rethinking our schools, our science programs, even our guiding philosophical principles. But some things should never change. And among those are the Ten Commandments of Quilting.
I don't want to mislead you. These weren‘t handed to me on tablets of stone. No, these are things I've figured out over the years, and they're a mixed bag of work strategies and rules I've learned for survival. (As I often say, if you learn from your mistakes, I've learned the most.)
1. Always buy a little extra fabric for your project.
Why? Because buying exactly the right amount leaves you no flexibility. And if, as so often happens, you decide to rearrange your fabrics or reverse your colors or make a major motif out of the fabric that was previously just a minor chord—as sure as I'm sitting here at my typewriter, you'll go back to the store and find they're ALL OUT OF EVERY SCRAP OF THE FABRIC YOU NEED TO FINISH YOUR PROJECT!!
I can't tell you the number of quilting students who have come to me sobbing their eyes out, because there is no more of their fabric to be had anywhere in the universe! In fact, more than once not only have the stores been out of that fabric, but there's been a major shift in what manufacturers call "the color story" (a year's prevailing colors and their coordinates), and my poor students haven't been able to find a fabric that even remotely matches. (You know how that goes. Last year everything was tangerine; this year it's maroon.)
Such an experience has left several of my students permanently scarred. (Plus they never finished their bedspreads!)
2. When starting a major project, always make four test blocks first.
The reason for this is evident in Commandment Number 3.
3. If you don't like how your first four quilt blocks look, quit.
Most quilters have at least one project they started and never finished. And why didn't they finish it? Very simple: because they didn't like it. And they kept on cutting and piecing (or perhaps, even more heartbreakingly, cut it all out, and then started piecing), and then discovered it was awful.
People rarely like a project better if they work on it longer. Usually they like it less, and become grumpy to boot. Chalk it up to an experiment that didn't work, and add the fabric in your fabric collection. Or donate it to your high school's home economics or theater program or your favorite charity.
4. Always pre-shrink.
And look in the washer tub while you're pre-shrinking. If the water is loaded with color, I'd recommend you pre-shrink twice to get completely rid of that extra dye.
5. Make no apologies.
You don't have to justify what you like. Some day orange and purple and olive drab will be cool. And you can feel smug because you saw it coming!
6. Don't bite your thread. Really!
People (like my mother) told me not to do this, and I accused them of perpetuating old wives' tales, and I laughed. Now that I've ground down the teeth that bit the thread, and need special dental work, only my dentist is laughing. (I hate it when my mother is right.)
7. Leave the coffee and cookies in the kitchen.*
My heart skipped a beat when we all sat down at the quilting frame, and one of my acquaintances put her CUP OF COFFEE ON THE QUILT! A sneeze would have dislodged the cup, with resultant catastrophes including, possibly, murder.
If you hold a quilting bee, set out refreshments in the kitchen, and make sure no one carries them into the work area.
8. Don't strive for perfect.
Perfectionism is a killer life-style. Don't keep ripping out your stitching, trying to make it better.
The following is good to know when the day comes that you're proudly showing off your completed pieced top and discover—horror of horrors—that you've put in a block wrong: the Amish have a lovely philosophy. As I understand it, they worry that if a quilt top—or any artistic endeavor—is too perfect, it may be an affront to God, whom they see as the only creator of perfection. And so the Amish put one intentional mistake in their work.
Doesn't this mean we can all breathe a little easier?
9. Respect what you're doing.
When I was a little girl, our city's main street was named General Logan Boulevard, after a Civil War general.
In more recent years, in a stroke of unparalleled creativity, the city fathers (there were no city mothers present—if there had been, such stupidity would, no doubt, have been avoided) changed the name of the main street (the aforementioned General Logan Boulevard) to Main Street. How daring! How exciting! How utterly new!
City councils change street names. College trustees change building names. And another forefather is irrevocably lost in the mists of time.
Not so with quilts. People keep quilts. Your quilt will be an immortal remembrance of you and the person or event you're commemorating. (It gives me goose bumps just to think about it.) So respect your quilting. It will brighten countless lives even after the next generation of baseball fields named after presidents is a just a heap of rubble.
PS: Sign your quilt with your embroidered signature. Date it, too.
10. Enjoy.
We don't have to piece or quilt any more. It's cheaper and easier to buy a nylon blanket for $5.95 through the Sears Roebuck catalog.
So quilt because you love it.
*This one's hard for me, since Karen makes excellent Tollhouse cookies.
3/ Eight Diamonds and a Star
I mentioned earlier that I nearly got killed over a quilt. (For those of you who are just starting quilting, let me say this: don't be alarmed. Getting killed over a quilt is a fairly rare occurrence. It's still safer to quilt than, say, cross the street.) Anyway, here's what happened.
I special-nursed Florence Montgomery for almost a month before she died. A sad case
—pancreatic cancer—and not a thing she or anyone else could do about it but try to ease her last days.
Now I don't snoop when I'm in people's homes. Of course, I can't help noticing things—especially if they're lying about begging to be read—but I don't snoop. So it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that not only did Florence Montgomery's son Gilbert never visit, but he never wrote or called, either. That made m
e mad because Florence was a lovely lady who helped everyone, especially kids. In her will she established the Florence Bascombe Montgomery Trust Fund, administered by the school board, to buy clothes for needy children. That was the kind of person she was. Her son contested the will. That was the kind of person he was.
Florence lived in one of those amazing old Victorian homes you still see in parts of the Midwest. Not everyone in Spotsburg cared for the house, but I loved it. To me it was a real jewel: set on three acres of parkland right inside the city limits: clapboard exterior painted emerald green and maroon, three stories (the third floor was a very grand ballroom, with an immense crystal chandelier), twelve-foot high ceilings, dark wood paneling and banisters, eight bedrooms (including one in the dear little turret in the northern front corner, just right for Rapunzel to let her hair down from), two immense front parlors, a kitchen the size of my whole house, a huge front porch loaded with gingerbread, four bathrooms with claw-footed tubs and gleaming brass fixtures. All in all, a white elephant in Gilbert's beady, porcine eyes (if eyes can be beady and porcine at the same time), and something—I'm talking about Florence's house again—that ought to have been torn down years ago to make way, if he had his way, for a dozen absolutely undistinguished ticky-tacky houses constructed of cinder block. And painted white.
Under the terms of Florence's will (which, of course, in a small town like Spotsburg everybody knew), the house went to Florence's daughter Maureen (who lives in Ohio and really had no use for it), and the contents went to Gilbert. Gilbert wasn't completely hard-nosed about this. He generously invited his sister to buy anything from him that caught her fancy.
So within a month of Florence's death, there was an auction of the contents of the house, and though most of us Spotsburgers felt uncomfortable poking through Florence's things, we felt even more strongly that her belongings should go to people who would treasure them.
The Name of the Quilt: Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder Page 2
