Of course, I had to know exactly what was happening. I walked up the walk and knocked. Ted appeared behind the screen door.
"Hi, Ted," I said, looking (as I always do) like a person who will be invaluable in a crisis. "Problems?"
Ted crossed his arms and pulled himself up in what I recognized as his Official Manner. (He's still very young, and His Official Manner looks silly.)
"Yes, ma'am," he said solemnly. "There's been a fatality."
Needless to say, I was provoked with Ted for going all high-and-mighty on me and calling me "ma'am." But I was even more shocked by his news, so I hid my irritation.
"Ted," I said, feeling a small prickle of anxiety, "Anna Grummond's my quilting student. She was at class tonight. I dropped her here at about 10:40. Is she all right?"
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "She's all right."
And then, after thinking the matter through very carefully, and glaring at me as if I were a total stranger and had asked him for America's atom bomb secrets, including blueprints and perhaps some samples of uranium, he added, stiffly, "Her husband has died."
"That's terrible," I said, not (I'm not ashamed to say) sure it was terrible at all, if Anna's black eye was any indication of her husband's character. "Is there anything I can do? Why don't I take her home with me?"
Ted shook his head. "No, ma'am—"
"Ted," I yelled, "QUIT CALLING ME MA'AM! WHAT IN HEAVEN'S NAME IS GOING ON?"
Ted looked only slightly deflated by my tone and said, "Foul play is suspected. I'm taking her in. I'm sorry that's all I can tell you."
And then, incredibly, he stepped back into the house and SHUT THE DOOR! I would really have been furious with him except that he'd been under a great strain recently, what with another addition to their family—an addition partly of his own making, I hasten to point out.
I walked back down the walk and told Mike what happened.
"Really?" Mike said. "Is she the type of woman who'd kill her husband?"
Mike, as you've seen, is a wonderful man. He's funny and clever and kind. (And handsome, too.) But I definitely had to take issue with him for the preposterous way he worded that question.
"And exactly what type," I asked him sternly, "is the ‘type of woman' who'd kill her husband?"
"What I was trying to ask," he said cautiously, watching me closely in case I was planning to bite, "is if she was angry with him. How he treated her. Things like that. Does she have any family around here?"
It was getting colder and I shivered. "Hmmph!" I said. I filled him in on the particulars surrounding her black eye.
Mike had given me an idea. The next morning, (having completely forgotten Ramona and her exciting news, I'm sorry to say), I was up bright and early. I arrived at the city jail before 8:00.
The city jail is located in our magnificent red brick City Hall, facing Spotsburg founder Harold Thripp's magnificent statue on our town square. The jail isn't really a jail at all, but one small room outfitted with bars at the window and door, situated behind the police department counter and the receptionist's desk. There's no visiting room in our police department plus jail, so Maisie (the receptionist) let me go right into the cell.
"I'm sorry about all this stuff in here," Maisie said, following me in and carrying a cardboard carton labeled "Fountain Pen Ink: 2 Doz. Bottles" out. "We don't use this cell much, so we store office supplies here."
I could see. Anna, poor, sad-looking Anna, had evidently spent the night with "STAMP PADS, 1 DOZ" and "Mimeograph Paper, 24 Reams.")
What a sorry sight she was. I was used to seeing her looking nice in her prim, quiet sort of way, but there she was, perched on the edge of a cot like a frightened bird, her pale hands clasping and unclasping themselves in her lap, her eyes downcast, the bruise from her eye now discoloring her nose and cheek, her nearly-white hair hanging like hanks of damp yellow rope around her face. I was grateful for one thing: they hadn't made her put on prison clothes. She was wearing a demure blouse and skirt.
"Maisie, did you get Dr. Rasmussen to look at this eye?" I said.
"Sam here called," she said, "but Dr. R.'s doing calls at Jackson Hospital this morning," she said. "So ol' Doc Lunt's coming in. After—" she said in a stage whisper so loud you could have heard it over Wally Ziegler's antique steam-powered combine at full throttle "—doing the autopsy. On you-know-who."
Maisie doesn't always know when to keep her mouth shut. I did my best to wiggle my eyebrows and shake my head at her, indicating this was neither the time nor the place to discuss Anna's late husband's autopsy.
Let me say a few words here about Dr. Lunt. I know it's considered the height of unprofessionalism to criticize the members of one's own—or adjacent—professions, but in the interest of improving medical care in Spotsburg, the outlying areas, and perhaps the rest of the GREAT STATE OF MICHIGAN, I'd like to tell you frankly what I thought of Doc Lunt. NOT MUCH!
Doc Lunt was as friendly and kind-hearted an old gentleman as you'd ever hope to find, but he was almost eighty. Being eighty was not, in and of itself, a crime. The real problem was that he was about two centuries behind in his medical techniques. For example, he was the last doctor in this county to use penicillin, which for years he dismissed as being nothing more than "scientific hooey." I hate seeing that in a doctor.
Furthermore, Doc Lunt's eyes were bad. That was dangerous. Somebody could get hurt. And if the person had the good fortune to be dead while experiencing Doc Lunt's ministrations, their autopsy was likely to be botched. So I was very relieved when Dr. Rasmussen moved into town, and I heartily wished that Doc Lunt could be convinced that a much-deserved retirement was, well, much deserved.
(You may be asking yourself how I know so much about Doc Lunt's eyes, as well as his doctoring techniques. I substituted in his office for a week once—while Libby Sawyer was on vacation—and after watching him with a few patients I realized he couldn't possibly be reading their charts. Oh, he made a show of running his eyes over his notes, but between asking each patient his history, and asking ME his history, I quickly deduced that Doc Lunt couldn't see a thing. Sad. Irresponsible, too.)
These thoughts flashed through my mind in a trice. It was time I turned my attention to the prisoner.
"Anna?" I said.
Very slowly, as if she were a stiffly jointed doll, she lifted her head. "Hmmm?" she said. She looked me straight in the eye, but if she recognized me, I couldn't tell.
It was most alarming. "It's Barb Hoxsie," I said, thinking I'd better treat her like one of my senile dementia patients.
"Oh, hello, Barb," she said, sounding like she was speaking to me from the next state. Or maybe the next galaxy.
"I see there's been trouble," I said, wondering where I could sit in the small cell, and finally deciding on a wooden crate marked, "Little Whizzo Mimeograph Machine."
"I guess so," she said. "Bruce is dead. I found him."
"Your husband," I said.
"Mmmm," she said, in the way that means "yes."
I felt awfully sorry for the poor thing. "Do you have any family around here that can help you?" I asked.
"Mmmm," she said, in the way that means "no."
Whew! This was tough. If Brenda Pierce at the dry cleaners had been there, she'd have known how to describe the scene, saying something picturesque like, "This is harder 'n stirrin' molasses with a wooden spoon on a winter's day."
Time to take the lead. "What kind of help can I get you? Call a lawyer? Call your friends?"
"No friends," she said. "No lawyer."
I decided she meant she didn't have a lawyer or friends, not that I shouldn't call them. "Okay," I said. "Anything else?"
A light came into her eyes, like a tiny flame suddenly flaring up, then dying down again. "I'm not sorry he's dead," she said. "But I didn't kill him."
"Of course, you didn't!" I said loudly. "You just stay here—" (a ridiculous thing to tell a person in jail, I realized afterwards) "—and I'll get everything taken care of."
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I went straight home, called Ramona, and told her the situation. She would be happy to take the case, she said. The case for the defense, that is.
"By the way," she said, "I've got some exciting news. . . ."
"That's great," I said, thinking I'd better go back to the jail and check out Anna's eye. And maybe check with Ted Dancer about the autopsy. No, it was probably too early to have the autopsy results. Heck, with Doc Lunt doing the autopsy, we might ALL be dead before we got the results. Maybe Dr. Rasmussen could look in—
"Listen, Ramona," I said, cutting her off, "I want to hear the whole story. But I've got to dash. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?" I hung up.
I've got to say right here and now that I'm not proud of the way I behaved. I was rude to Ramona, I was short with Mike, I neglected my friends, AND I was distracted during quilting class the following Monday and completely forgot to tell my students during their lesson on Introductory Appliqué that they needed to pin or baste their appliqués to the background before stitching them down. Several mistakes, alas, occurred as a result.
But I was possessed, as I'm sure you can see. I was certain Anna wasn't her husband's murderer (you know me—I'm an excellent judge of character), and there was no one but me to help her out of her mess! No one!
So I took to hanging around the jail, irritating the living daylights out of Maisie, the receptionist. I talked with Anna about what she wanted to be someday. (She said she'd never finished high school, and didn't know what she wanted to be, although she liked kids.) I pestered Ted Dancer the whole week we were waiting for the autopsy results—which Dr. Lunt did finish, actually, in our lifetimes. And I'm sure I made Ramona's life a misery, except that I caught a glimpse of her at the far end of Sawyer's Drug Store (she was looking at greeting cards) and she had this unusual glow about her. . . . But, of course, I was too busy to inquire, and she's nice and didn't push it. (That's Ramona all over.) PLUS Mike beat me in two ferocious bouts of Scrabble—once with "jinxed" on the triple word score!
Finally, Tuesday, one week and one day after the murder, I got my hands on the autopsy. I will spare you the graphic details they love to include in autopsies, all those appetizing observations about the weight and condition of the deceased's liver and the size and appearance of his brain. Anna's husband, Bruce Grummond, a "white male approximately six feet four inches tall, weighing 279 pounds," had been suffocated around 7:00 that fateful Monday night. According to ol' Dr. Lunt's report, "nylon fibers and threads discovered in the mouth, nasal passageways, trachea, and lungs indicate the agent of death" (as Doc Lunt so delicately put it) "was the quilt under which Grummond's dead body was found." Another important fact revealed in the autopsy: Anna's husband had been drunk.
"So," Ted Dancer said to me, leaning over the police department counter, "it's simple. She killed him. He beat her up and she killed him. When I was at the Police Academy, one of my professors used to say, ‘Gentlemen, when you hear hoof beats, look for horses, not zebras.'"
"WHAT?" I said, thoroughly provoked with Ted, and no doubt looking at him as if he was some sort of crazy person. "ZEBRAS? Who said anything about ZEBRAS? We're concerned with MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY here!"
"Barb," Ted said, pulling himself up a little taller, probably happy to be lecturing me for once, "it's an old saying that means the obvious solution is the most likely. Grummond died around 7:00, but, according Doc Lunt's report, it could have been a little bit earlier or later. Anna wasn't in your class at 7:00—you yourself told me that she didn't arrive until about 7:45. She had plenty of time to kill her husband AND walk to the high school."
"Mmmm," I mumbled, feeling like I'd been a stool pigeon. But Ted had asked me directly about her comings and goings, and while I may be prepared to tidy up the truth a bit, I'm not prepared to out-and-out lie. I have some standards!
"So she killed him," Ted said. "And even though she's tiny—just a little slip of a girl—and he was a mean old bruiser, if he passed out on their living room floor, which was where we found him, then it would have been no trouble at all to stuff the quilt in his mouth and hold it over his nose, and kill him."
It was an awful picture. I hated it. I also had to admit it was entirely possible.
Ted Dancer's really pretty nice. He must have seen I was feeling glum about this case. "You know," he said, dropping his voice a bit, "this isn't the first black eye he gave her. When Ramona calls me to the witness stand, I'll tell the jury about the other times, too. And I'm betting Anna will get off with a reduced charge and a lighter sentence."
"Gee, thanks," I said begrudgingly, but I walked around the end of the counter and gave him a quick hug. I could see he was trying to make things better.
And then I had one of my strokes of genius, one of those remarkable bolts out of the blue to which Spotsburg has yet to become accustomed. Why hadn't I seen it before?
"Ted," I said, "let me see that quilt!"
"What?"
"I want to see the quilt!" I said. "I've got an idea!"
He smoothed his shirt front, cleared his throat, and I feared he was about to go all official on me again.
He was. "It would be Highly Irregular," he said. "It's the Murder Weapon." He thought about it a little more, and grew a more incensed. "It's in the Evidence Room!" And then, exasperated, "Darn it, Barb! I can't let you go poking around in our Evidence Room, pawing through our Evidence!"
The picture he'd painted was certainly offensive, but I decided to overlook it in the Interests of Justice.
"Ted," I said very slowly and calmly. "I don't want to take the quilt anywhere. I don't even want to touch it. But I'd like to take a tiny look at it."
He was making those little "tst!" noises people make when they're irritated beyond belief. "Barb, I can't think of one good reason why I should let you do that. If we mess up the evidence, this case could be destroyed!"
And then—I could hardly believe it, and have to think that the exhaustion of intensive parenthood had dulled his wits—he added, "THAT'S not what you're up to, is it? Trying to WRECK THE STATE'S CASE?"
The boy deserved to be slapped down for such an offensive suggestion, and I slapped him down—hard.
"Ted Dancer," I said, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for implying such a thing. How long have you known me? Who took the gravel out of your nose the day you foolishly tried to fly your new bicycle over the railroad tracks at the speed of light and nearly obliterated yourself in the bargain? I want to see the quilt," I yelled, "because it's entirely probable YOU'VE GOT THE WRONG MURDER WEAPON!!!"
That took him aback, I can tell you.
Taking advantage of the surprise I produced, I forged ahead. "Do you suppose silly old Dr. Lunt took fiber samples from the quilt to match up with the fibers he found in the body?" (I've learned a lot from Jay Allen!) "Because I've NEVER seen a quilt that contains NYLON, and if this quilt contains NYLON, I SURE WANT TO SEE IT!"
We both stood there exhausted by this interchange. He rubbed his chin. "Hmmph," he said. "Where's Maisie?"
"If she's got any sense," I said, looking at the clock, "out to lunch."
"How about this?" Ted said, mulling it over and looking a lot like the cute kid he was in high school—NOT SO LONG AGO. "When Maisie comes back, we'll take her with us into the Evidence Room, and she can be our witness, and you can look at the quilt, and render your PROFESSIONAL opinion—" I gave him a hard look to see if he was being facetious, but he appeared to be quite serious "—and we'll take it from there."
"Okay," I said, more than satisfied. To while away the time while we waited for Maisie to return, I spent the next fifteen minutes with Anna in her cell. They'd let me bring her some books, and I saw with surprise she was turning the pages of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I'd also brought her an Agatha Christie, a quilt book or two, and a sweater, since the jail's radiator was busted.
"This is real good," she said, holding up the Dickens so I could see what she was reading. I was pleased to note that the black
eye was definitely resolving. "I can't put it down. I guess it's lucky I'm in jail," she said with a rueful smile. "No interruptions."
So we chatted at bit, and I made a mental note that her spirits seemed better, and that I should bring her David Copperfield. Then Maisie blew in the office door, calling out to no one in particular, "Guess what I just heard down at Sew and Go?" Ted and I converged on her at once, and I said, "Never mind that now. We need to look at the quilt in the Grummond Case."
Maisie's eyebrows shot up. She grunted, stuck out her lower lip, dropped her purse on her desk, and led us down the corridor to the room marked "Evidence Room," which doubles, it turns out, as City Hall's broom closet. There, folded and wrapped in a plastic bag, and neatly tagged with writing and some numbers, was the so-called Murder Weapon, resting on a shelf, next to an unopened box of Dixie paper cups and a can of BAB-O Cleanser.
I decided it was in Anna's best interests to be nice to Ted. "May I pick this up?" I asked sweetly.
Ted looked at me suspiciously, but nodded yes. "I guess so. But for pete's sake don't open the package. Just look at it." And then he added—quite unnecessarily, I thought—"Can you do that, Barb? Just look at it?"
I was sorely tempted to recall—out loud—the day I removed the splinters from his rear end, after he'd made his escape from Wally Ziegler's barn (not his barn siding, though!). But I bit my tongue.
I really didn't need to look at the other side of the quilt. It was faded, but was entirely hand-worked, and must originally have been executed in hot pink, turquoise, bright yellow, orange and black.
"Ted," I said, "you need to send this over to Dr. Jay Allen at the State College Chemistry Lab right away. He's a national—an INTERNATIONAL—" (I was feeling expansive) "—expert, actually, on just this kind of thing. Fibers, blood, poisons. This isn't the murder weapon!"
"Yeah, I know Jay," Ted said.
The Name of the Quilt: Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder Page 13
