by Mary Marks
“What?” I plopped my hands on my hips.
“You say you found your mother’s picture in Giselle Cole’s house? With this love note on the back?”
“Yes.”
“What was it doing there?”
“I know. That’s been bothering me, too.” Why didn’t Quinn give this to my mother? And why would Giselle keep and display a portrait of her father’s mistress? “Giselle maintains several houses. They’re all filled with beautiful things. This portrait is such a small item, maybe she didn’t notice it.”
“Maybe. But I think you should ask.” He cleared his throat. “There’s one more person you should ask about the portrait. Isaac.”
“Uncle Isaac? What could he possibly . . .” I stopped myself mid-sentence. Exactly one week ago, my uncle revealed stuff about my mother I never knew. Could he still have more to tell?
I blew out my breath. “Tomorrow. They’re both coming for Shabbat. I’ll ask then.”
CHAPTER 20
By Friday afternoon, the house was filled with the savory smells of brisket cooking in a marinade of sweet wine; roasted whole chicken rubbed with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary; and the oniony smell of potato kugel. I smoothed the white cloth and set out six plates of my bubbie’s white china with the blue rim. The Sabbath table sparkled with silver: flatware, twin candle holders, and a sparkling cup of wine near Uncle Isaac’s plate. I covered the challah with a special linen cloth Bubbie hand-embroidered decades ago, featuring clusters of grapes and flowers. Her hand-stitched Hebrew letters spelled out the words Likavod Shabbat v’Yom Tov—“In honor of the Sabbath and holidays.”
At five, I changed into my long black skirt and a white sweater knitted with fine silk yarn. I fastened my curls on top on my head with the jeweled combs from New York and spritzed a flowery perfume on my neck. I was just slipping my feet into my new strappy black heels when the doorbell rang. Yossi was still in the shower, so I hurried to the living room.
The first thing I saw when I opened the door was my daughter’s copper-colored curls.
She stood, grinning in a green dress that made her green eyes sparkle and a face aglow like the Mona Lisa. “Hi, Mom!” She gathered me in a tight hug. I wrapped my arms around her and held her a beat too long. She finally pulled away and stepped inside.
“Why did you ring the doorbell? Did you lose your key?”
“Well, since Yossi moved in, I didn’t know if you’d want us just showing up in your living room unannounced.”
“This is still your home, Quincy. You are always welcome here.”
The dark-haired Noah Kaplan stood slightly behind her, wearing slacks and a shirt without a tie.
I met his brown-eyed gaze for the first time since they’d arrived and offered my hand. “Hello, Noah.”
He shoved a bouquet of pink roses into my outstretched hand and sprang forward to hug me, pinning my arms at my sides. “Shabbat shalom, Mom!”
Crap! My stomach sank as my worst fears were realized. If Kaplan called me Mom, that could mean only one thing.
I patted his back twice with my free hand and pulled away. “Shabbat shalom, Noah. How are you?”
He drew Quincy toward him and gazed, besotted, at her face. “Over the moon. I’ve never been so happy. We’re . . .”
Quincy put a finger to his lips. “Shh, honey. Not yet. Let’s wait until everyone is here.”
Well, that cinches it. I glanced at my daughter’s naked ring finger and frowned. What a little cheapskate. Where is the engagement ring?
Crusher came out of the bedroom in his Sabbath clothes: black trousers and a white shirt. He welcomed the young couple with a hug and a friendly handshake and ushered them into the living room.
Giselle arrived next with a merry-looking Uncle Isaac. She helped him over the threshold and he smiled. “Thank you, faigela.”
Wait! Why are you calling her by my pet name?
He noticed my frown, cupped my face gently in his hands, and kissed my wrinkled forehead several times—just the way he used to do when I was a child. “Good Shabbos, faigela.”
Everyone stood to greet the old man.
“Oh, Zadie, I’m ecstatic to see you.” Quincy had to bend down to embrace him. Even though he was technically her great-uncle, she’d always had a special relationship with him and called him Grandpa in Yiddish. “Say hi to Noah.”
Uncle Isaac beamed at the young couple and nodded his approval. After all, he was the one pushing the two of them together. “Nu? Kaplan. Good Shabbos.”
“You must be my niece, Quincy!” Giselle exclaimed. “I’d know you anywhere by your red hair and green eyes. We get that from Daddy.” She grinned. “I see I worried for nothing. You’re not at all heavy like your mother.”
Quincy’s face went white and glanced at me with a deer-in-the-headlights expression.
I rolled my eyes. “This is your Aunt Giselle, sweetie. She can be rude and tactless, but she means well.”
My sister laughed. “Sissy’s right. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to me.” She turned to Kaplan and gave the handsome young detective the once-over. “You’re Noah?”
He nodded.
“You seem cute enough. My sister tells me you arrested her once.”
Not only had he arrested me and thrown me in jail overnight, he smirked when he did it. Every time our paths crossed after that, he’d copped a snide and threatening attitude. Such deliberate nastiness was hard to forgive.
The skin on Kaplan’s olive cheeks turned pink and he pressed his lips together. He cleared his throat. “A misunderstanding.”
“And a stupid one on your part,” she said.
I could’ve kissed her.
Crusher clapped his hands once to break the tension. “Let’s welcome the Sabbath.”
I squeezed my sister’s hand on the way to the dining room. She squeezed back twice in response. We took our places at the table and I asked Quincy to bless the candles.
I watched with pride at the graceful motions of her hands and her perfect Hebrew diction. A tinge of melancholy secretly tugged at my heart with the realization she and Kaplan would eventually preside over their own Sabbath table.
After Crusher and Uncle Isaac recited the prayers, I brought out hot platters of food. While we ate, I kept waiting for Quincy to speak. But she was too busy scarfing down her favorite dishes. She even took second helpings of everything, which was unusual for her.
When the time came to clear the table for dessert, I’d run out of patience. “Don’t keep us in the dark another minute, sweetie. What is your big announcement?”
The couple grasped hands and she took a deep breath. “You’re going to be a grandma.”
First, I could no longer feel my lips. Then my head filled with a thousand bees, and a black circle closed in on my vision. The sensation of strong arms grabbing me was the last thing I remembered as I slid sideways into darkness.
I woke up stretched out on the sofa, where Crusher must’ve carried me.
I blinked open to a sea of concerned faces staring down from above. “What happened?”
Giselle helped me sit up and handed me a glass of water. “You’ve had a shock, Sissy. But a good one, right?”
Tears slid down Quincy’s cheeks. “Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry. I guess I should’ve prepared you first. I know this is kind of sudden, but you are happy, aren’t you?”
“Who wouldn’t be happy at the prospect of a grandchild?” But with Kaplan as the father? I gulped down some water. “I just wasn’t expecting this particular news. I thought you were simply going to announce your engagement. When are you due?”
Quincy placed a protective hand on her belly. “The end of February. I’m only seven weeks along.”
My very traditional uncle Isaac looked less than pleased. For him, the child should follow the marriage, not the other way around. He grabbed Kaplan’s shoulder and squeezed firmly. “So nu? When is the wedding?”
Crusher grabbed Kaplan’s other shoulder. “Soon, right?
”
Kaplan swallowed and nodded. “We need to find a rabbi.”
“Done!” both Crusher and Uncle Isaac said at the same time.
Giselle gave Kaplan a withering look. “I see you haven’t even given her an engagement ring. What’s the matter with you?”
Kaplan’s eyes widened and he looked quickly at Quincy. “I . . . I was going to shop for one on Monday.”
Giselle crossed her arms. “Don’t be a cheapskate. Two carats at the very least.”
Kaplan seemed relieved when she turned her attention to Quincy. “Let me do the wedding at my house in Beverly Hills. I’ve got people who do beautiful events for me. They can pull together something spectacular in as little as two days if we have to.”
So fast? “It’s really up to the kids, G.”
Crusher helped me to my feet. “Let’s talk about it over dessert.”
For the next half hour, we sat at the table eating strudel and discussing the wedding.
Then Quincy yawned. “I’m really tired these days. I think I need to call it a night.”
Now I understood her increased appetite, sleepiness, and contented glow.
Kaplan jumped up, concern and tenderness written on his face. “Come on, baby, I’ll take you home.”
I reluctantly acknowledged, as I watched him help her out of the chair, that Kaplan might’ve been a jerk to me, but he certainly seemed to love my little girl.
After they left, Crusher leaned over and whispered, “The picture.”
“Right!” I brought the pencil drawing of my mother in from the sewing room and handed it to Giselle. “I’ve been wondering, G. Since we now know Quinn drew one of these for each of his women, how did my mother’s picture end up hanging on your wall?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “I found it years ago in a stack of drawings my father left in his studio. I had all of them framed and hung them in my various houses. How could I know this one would turn out to be significant?”
“Weren’t you curious about the inscription on the back? I mean, this obviously wasn’t a drawing of your mother, yet he called her the love of his life.”
“To tell you the truth, I thought it was something he did before he met my mother. I didn’t give it a second thought. Remember, until Deep Roots, I never knew he’d been unfaithful, let alone fathered any other children. Who knows why he didn’t give it to your mother. Maybe he intended to but disappeared before he could.”
I handed the drawing to Uncle Isaac. “Have you ever seen this?”
He adjusted his glasses and peered closely at the drawing. “This is your mama, all right.” He turned it over and read the inscription on the back. “Vey iz mir. I’m pretty sure that if your mama had this drawing, she would’ve kept it a secret, just like she kept their affair a secret for all those years.”
When I cleared the last plate from the table, the men recited the birkat hamazon.
Giselle said, “I forgot to ask you last week. What are they singing?”
“It’s called the Grace after Meals. You Christians bless the food before you eat, but we Jews bless God when the meal is over.”
“Potaytoes, putahtoes. By the way, I found a lab that’ll test for Wolf Shiffer’s DNA. I took the cup in today. I also gave them a sample of my DNA for them to compare. We should have the results in a few days.”
“I’ve been thinking, G. I’ve got the weekend free. Do you want to bring all the pieces of your grandmother’s quilt over tomorrow? We can decide how to finish it.”
“Sure. But remember, I sleep in late on Saturday and Sunday.”
Giselle left soon after with Uncle Isaac, and Crusher immediately poured us each a glass of wine. “You okay, babe?”
“I’m still in shock. This whole thing happened so fast with Quincy and Noah. I was hoping the affair wouldn’t last, but now . . .”
“Do you know what I think?”
“What?”
He raised my hands to his lips and kissed it. “I fell in love with you the moment we met. Why can’t the same thing happen to them? It’s obvious they love each other. No matter what went down between you and Kaplan in the past, you need to get on board this train, Martha. Or it’ll leave without you.”
CHAPTER 21
Giselle arrived in her Jag at eleven Saturday morning, wearing dark glasses and a dark business suit. She carried two sacks: a large one with her quilt and a smaller one bearing a logo from Western Donuts. “You mentioned last night that you both liked these.” She shoved the white paper bag in Crusher’s direction.
Inside were a half-dozen glazed apple fritters, each the size of a lunch plate. “Great!” He headed for the kitchen.
A moment later we heard the whirr of the coffee grinder—another reason I loved this man. Living with Yossi was like living with a huge, domesticated bear.
Giselle and I spread the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt top on the cutting table in my sewing room, where we’d sorted the documents from Quinn’s missing-persons file one week before. This was the first chance I’d had to really examine the quilt top closely. Each flower mosaic started with a yellow hexagon in the middle. A ring of six hexagons were stitched together at the edges to form a circular shape around the center yellow hexagon. A second ring of twelve hexagons was stitched to the outside of the first, to form a larger circle or flower.
Edith Eagan, Giselle’s grandmother, had grouped printed fabrics in the same color family together to form each flower. She used darker hues in the smaller circle, like deep reds or purples, and lighter hues on the outer circle, like pinks and lavenders. The flowers featured bright combinations, such as indigo with sky blues, kelly green with mint green, orange with gold, and teal with turquoise, among others.
I stretched a fabric tape measure across the width of the ten-inch flowers and the plain muslin hexagons that separated them. “This is approximately eighty inches wide. I think your grandmother intended to make a double-bed quilt.” I measured the length. “To complete the top, we need to lengthen it by about four more rows, which means we need about thirty-two more flowers.”
She opened the large bag again and dumped the rest of the contents on the table. We counted an additional twenty-five flowers, a whole pile of fabric hexagons in colorful prints waiting to be assembled into ten-inch flowers, and hundreds of plain muslin hexagons to sew in between the flowers.
“I think we have enough. If not, we can always reach into my stash.” I waved my arm toward the floor-to-ceiling shelves lining one wall, groaning with stacks of fabric folded and divided into color families.
Giselle opened a plastic Baggie that had also fallen onto the table. “Looks like these are some extra paper shapes if we need them.”
Crusher carried a tray into the room, with two mugs of steaming Italian roast and two apple fritters served on paper napkins. “I’m leaving now. Isaac and I are going to visit the rabbi to discuss Quincy’s wedding.”
I reached for one of the mugs of coffee. “Thanks. Listen, Yossi, I thought about what you said last night, about not being left behind. You were right. I’m totally on board.”
He smiled and kissed my cheek. I smelled apple fritter on his breath.
After he left, Giselle handed me one of the six-sided bits of paper. “Take a look at this.”
The two-inch hexagon had been cut out of blue stationery with three lines of handwriting on it. I could just make out the words Dear Quinn, You promised y . . . , eave your wife. Do . . . , our son to . . . My hand flew to my mouth and I looked at Giselle. “Oh my God. This looks like . . .”
“A note from Quinn Junior’s mother.” She finished my sentence. “And we know who that probably is. Maybe Grandmother found it among the papers Daddy left behind.”
“Figgy said she definitely knew about the boy, G. But why would she cut up the note and hide it in your quilt?”
Giselle was silent for several seconds. “Grandmother was completely under Granddad’s thumb. Like we all were. I think this might’ve been a
n act of rebellion. I can just picture her discovering the letter and hiding it from him.”
“What good would that do?”
Giselle shrugged. “Maybe keeping secrets gave her a sense of power and independence from such a domineering man.”
“If she didn’t want your grandfather to know about Quinn Junior, why didn’t she just destroy the letter?”
“Maybe she thought Daddy was coming back someday. Who knows what she intended? But putting it in the quilt was a way to keep it and hide it.”
I regarded my sister with a new respect. What she said made perfect sense. “If you’re right, then the rest of the pieces must be around here someplace.”
We turned all the fabric pieces to the back, found five more blue paper hexagons, and carefully removed the basting stitches holding them to the fabric. Then we cleared a space on the table, taped the pieces back together, and pinned it up on the murder board. The note read:
5/20
Dear Quinn,
You promised you’d leave your wife. Do you want our son to grow up without you?
Money is not enough. I’ll take him far away. You can’t treat us like this.
“That conniving witch! Not only did Eliza Shiffer make my mother’s life hell, she threatened Daddy right where it hurt. According to Jayda, he loved being with Wolf.”
“Take a step back, G. Men like Quinn are incapable of feeling hurt. Thwarted? Yes. Angry? Yes. But feeling hurt requires empathy. As for being threatened, who was playing whom? Quinn managed to deceive and manipulate everyone in his life. Save your pity for his victims.”
Encouraged by our discovery of the letter, we searched the quilt for other papers that might hold clues. We found fragments of newspaper articles, bank statements, and an accounting ledger. But without reassembling the pages, they made no sense. More promising were pieces cut from what looked like a desk calendar, with snippets of handwriting.
“We’re going to have to separate all these hundreds of papers from the fabric, G. Then we need to fit them together. It’ll take a lot of work.”
