Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  When we opened the wardrobe, Geena exclaimed, “Eureka!” There was a pile of quilts.

  “Oh, boy,” I said. “You know, some of these may not have been made by Glory, but rather by her mother or any number of quilting friends or family members. How are we ever going to know which are hers?”

  “Well, we can take quilts that we know for sure she made, like the ones your friend has, and compare style and stitching and fabrics that she used. She may even have initialed the ones that were hers. With some, we may never know the maker, but we might come closer than you think. For one thing, some fabrics are going to be far older than Glory.”

  “Yes, but couldn’t she have had a stash of old fabric and used that? I have a box full of feedsack cloth from the thirties that belonged to my grandmother. If I made a quilt out of that now, who would know it wasn’t an old quilt?”

  “For one thing, your batting and backing would be newer and inconsistent with the wear of the other fabric,” she said, “and obviously, there are going to be things about antique quilts that you’ll never be able to know for sure.”

  Boy, I hated to hear those words. Those words drove me crazy.

  “But one thing at a time,” she said. “First of all, we need to catalog them. Write down the obvious things like what pattern they are, the size of the quilt … We can’t do this here. It’s too dark and dusty. You think Mr. Merchant will let us take them elsewhere?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, would you?”

  “Well, Torie, you’re not exactly just the average buyer. Are you purchasing these for your personal collection?”

  “No,” I said.

  “For a museum, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So where are you going to go? He knows where to find you, for crying out loud,” she said.

  “True,” I said. “He might let us remove the quilts. Let’s see how many we’re dealing with for sure before I even think about asking him.”

  There were seven in the wardrobe in the first bedroom. The second bedroom yielded none, since it was actually more like a den. There were built-in bookshelves and an old desk; there was even a gun rack with the guns still inside. Oh, those would be worth money to a gun collector. Hanging on one wall was a rack of swords. Two were missing.

  The third bedroom was so disturbing that Geena could not enter. This was the room with the blood on the wall, the room that Sheriff Mort had said had bloodstains from one of the suicides. It wasn’t just the blood that was so disturbing, though. It was the mass of words and pictures scribbled all over the walls. Drawings and sketches of wounded and bleeding men had been drawn all the way up to the ceiling in some places. Men with arms and legs missing. Men lying sprawled in a trench; that one ran the length of one whole wall. The fear on their faces, the feral look in their eyes … The drawings were everywhere.

  On the bedposts were old ropes or restraints of some sort.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I whispered.

  “God, Torie, let’s hurry,” Geena said from the hallway. “This house is so damn dark.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m looking.” There were no quilts in this room, but I did find a few photographs of a young woman. Beautiful, ethereal, gazing into the camera with all the innocence of a child, but the sexuality of a woman. The photographs had probably been taken about 1915. I turned one of them over. The back read: Be brave, my one true knight. Your loving sister, Glory Anne.

  I took the photographs with me. I know it was wrong, and if Evan really wanted me to give them back, or if he wanted me to pay for them, I would, but I would need photographs to go with the quilt display. Besides … I don’t know, call it my Super Torie Sense, but there was one hell of a story here. I’d been doing this a very long time, and I could feel the story in this house trying to squeeze its way to the surface for somebody, anybody, to hear.

  If I wasn’t determined at that point to get to the bottom of what had gone on in this house, the next thing that happened sealed it. The door to the bedroom had nearly shut behind me when I came in, so as I turned to leave, I got a real good look at the inside of the door. There were claw marks all over it. Somebody had locked somebody in this room, and from the looks of it had tied him or her to the bed. I could deduce—by not taking too much of a leap—that when the individual wasn’t restrained, he or she had picked up a pencil and drew the nightmares in his or her head … and then at some point had bled all over the wall.

  “Torie, come on!” Geena called from down the hall.

  There was another bedroom, which yielded four quilts. Finally, Geena beat me to the last bedroom at the end of the hall. The one with the shades and curtains open. Glory Anne Kendall’s room. Geena stood by the window, soaking up the sunlight. “This house is a tomb,” she said. “And you want to buy it?”

  “Well, if I buy it, I’m not going to leave it like this,” I said. “For one thing, these big ugly curtains have got to go.”

  “I don’t even want to spend another second in this house,” she said.

  Glory’s room was bright and pink and full of finished quilts, partially finished quilts, fabric, pieces cut out but not yet sewn together, and all of her sewing equipment, including a machine. There was even a quilt still in the frame that she had clearly been in the middle of quilting.

  “I can transport everything back to the Gaheimer House,” I said. “I’m almost afraid to take the quilt out of the frame, though.”

  “No,” Geena said. “We’ll leave it in the frame and take it out last.”

  Quilting frames come in all shapes and sizes. I remember my Grandma Keith’s quilt frame hung from the ceiling in her living room. It was on a pulley system. She’d pull it up to the ceiling during the day, and at night after all the other work was finished, she’d pull the string and let it down and quilt.

  The three layers of a quilt—the decorative top layer, the batting, and the backing—all have to be pulled taut and then basted together with thread or pins so they won’t move. Otherwise, when you go to quilt it, the layers will pucker. In order to pull them tight, you have to set them and hold them in one position, thus the frame. With a wooden frame, the quilt would be loosely basted to the pieces of wood, and then the wood could be rolled—with the quilt—as you quilted until you just had a small strip left to work on. There were lots of methods to achieve this. Nowadays, there are quilt frames made out of PVC pipe, and I even use a big embroidery hoop to quilt on my lap.

  Glory had a standard wooden frame that stood on the floor. Luckily for us, it was rolled pretty tight and only had a little bit left to quilt, so it would be easy for us to transport it to the Gaheimer House. There we could put it in one of the big drawing rooms and then take it apart. Or who knows, maybe we’d just leave it as it was, so people could see what it was like to quilt back then.

  “I think the easiest way to transport this is for you and me to just carry it over to the Gaheimer House. It’s quite a few blocks, I know, but it’s not heavy.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Look, I made the deal with Evan for all needlework, so anything pertaining to that, we can take and pay him for.”

  “I found a box of her patterns in the trunk,” she said. “It’s not very often you actually find the patterns to go with the quilts. You’ve got quite a treasure here, Torie.”

  “Well, I want him to get every penny that they’re worth,” I said. “I’m not interested in making money on this, Geena. I want Glory’s quilts to be seen—and I want the Kendall family story to be told.”

  She hugged herself close and got to work gathering quilts and notions. Suddenly she stopped, hovering over the opened chest in the corner.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I think it’s a quilt diary,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “It is! Oh, my gosh,” she said. “Look, she has hundreds of swatches of fabric in here. Dates when and where she bought the fabric, what she would use it for … Oh, Torie, this is amazing.”r />
  It hit me then. This wonderful quilter, who spent so much time recording all of her hard work in a diary, just one day up and ended her own life. Why would she have done that? Why would any of the Kendall children have done it? Okay, well, whoever had been in the psycho room down the hall clearly had problems, but the other two? I suddenly wanted to throw up.

  “Torie, look at the quilt on the bed.”

  It was a plain quilt. Sort of brownish, made from big blocks. Nothing fancy. Nothing fancy at all. No appliqué, no frillies, no flowers, no clever interlocked pieces. Just big brownish squares. “Why would a woman who could create absolute art with a needle choose to put that on her bed?” Geena asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I need air,” she said. With that, Geena grabbed a stack of quilts and ran out of the room and down the stairs.

  I gathered up the remaining quilts and all of the other things that I wanted to take and met her out on the front porch, but not before I pulled the shade on Glory’s window as Evan had asked.

  I found Geena standing by the morning glory, clutching the quilt diary to her chest. “We have to find out what happened to her,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You can do that, can’t you? I mean, this is what you do best, right?”

  “Well, I try,” I said.

  “Then you have to try,” she said.

  “I intend to,” I said.

  I ran around back and asked Evan if it was okay if we took the quilts somewhere else for Geena to appraise them, since it would be hard for her to work in the dark and dusty environment. He agreed without much argument. We drove the first load over to the Gaheimer House and then came back to the Kendall house to get the quilt that was still in the frame.

  As Geena and I carried the quilt out into the sunlight, I got a good look at the design. I gasped and dropped my end of the quilt frame. “What?” Geena asked.

  The quilt Glory had been working on when she killed herself was an appliqué floral design. A purplish blue morning glory.

  “N-nothing. I stepped in a hole,” I said. I picked up the frame and made sure that I hadn’t broken it. It was still in perfect condition. “Can’t believe I just dropped an antique.”

  “Well, at least it wasn’t china,” Geena said. “You’d be screwed for sure if it had been china.”

  “Right,” I said. We headed to the van. I had decided to take the seats out of the back of the van, so we could try getting the frame in, and was surprised to find that it almost fit. I tied a little red flag to the part that was sticking out. We were only going a few blocks anyway.

  As I pulled out of the driveway, I couldn’t help but take a long look at the morning glory vine growing up the side of the porch. Coincidence. Had to be.

  Six

  Geena and I spent the rest of the day cataloging the quilts. We searched each quilt for initials or dates. Nine of the twenty-one finished quilts had GAK quilted somewhere on them, usually in the lower right-hand corner, so we knew for certain those nine were Glory’s. We could assume the quilt in the frame was Glory’s, and the partially completed quilts as well. In Glory’s cedar chest were no fewer than eleven finished quilt tops. The quilt tops were just that, only the top layer. They were waiting to be quilted and hemmed. I had to smile at this, because it always took me much longer to quilt a quilt than to piece one together. In fact, I had four finished tops waiting in a plastic storage bin for me to quilt. I’m not sure why, but this made me feel a bit closer to this girl who had lived a hundred years ago. I guess it was because some things are universal, and even nearly a hundred years ago, this girl suffered from the same thing I did. So much to do, so little time.

  Aside from determining which quilts were Glory’s, we also separated them into types: pieced, whole cloth, appliqué, etc. We might never determine who made the other twelve quilts—the ones without Glory’s initials—but we at least needed to determine their approximate age.

  We worked until almost sunset. Finally, Geena stretched and winced at a pain in her lower back. “I need to call it a day,” she said. “Can I come back tomorrow?”

  “Of course you can come back tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be here bright and early. My sister is working tomorrow, too, so somebody will be here when you arrive.”

  She paused at the front door and turned to me. “I don’t know what happened to that girl—or what happened in that house—but at least her quilts will finally be seen.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Torie, have you seen the craftsmanship in those quilts?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She was amazing.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Geena left me alone to ponder the day. I walked back to my office and called Rudy. I asked him to pick up Matthew from my mother’s because I was going to be a little late. I wanted to do some research on the Kendall family suicides. I knew Sylvia probably had a file on the family. Hell, Sylvia probably had known Glory Kendall. In fact, they would have been born right about the same time, within five years or so of each other.

  Right now, though, I wanted to do my own research. One thing I’d learned about Sylvia was that she often tainted her research with her own prejudices. Ironic, considering the woman was all business and no pleasure, most of the time. She rarely let her personal life interfere—in anything. Be that as it may, I had seen her more than once make a mental leap based on her opinion of whatever family she was researching, so I thought it would be better if I dug a little on my own and then later read whatever Sylvia had on the Kendalls. As of right now, I really didn’t know any more about the family than most other people in New Kassel did. Besides, I wanted the documents to tell me the story, not somebody else.

  The first thing I did was head over to Santa Lucia, the Catholic church. By the time I reached the church, it was nearly six in the evening. The sun was getting lower in the sky, but I still had a while before it set. The church is made of stone and has Gothic-arched stained-glass windows along two sides. It really is a very pretty church, and the only Catholic church within twenty miles.

  I’d noticed a rosary among some of the things in Glory’s cedar chest, so, unless it had been someone else’s, she was most likely Catholic. I had checked the cemetery records at the historical society before I left. The members of the historical society and volunteers had spent long hours cataloging every tombstone in every cemetery in Granite County and putting the records in book format for the historical society library. Sure enough, Glory Anne Kendall was buried in the Santa Lucia cemetery. Right next to her parents. However, her two brothers were not. The date on her death was recorded as June 14, 1922. Her father had lived to 1956. Her mother, of course, had preceded all the children in death, having died in 1913.

  So where were her brothers buried?

  I walked quickly through the cemetery until I found Sandy Kendall’s tombstone. It was huge, about five feet tall and made of very stately white marble. His wife’s stone, to his left, was a smaller version of it. Both paled seriously in comparison to Glory’s. When I realized that this was the grave of Glory Kendall, I felt like an idiot. How many times had I seen this monument and even commented about how gorgeous it was, never realizing it belonged to the young woman who had killed herself on Haggeman Road?

  Lounging on top of a marble tomb that must have been four feet high was a full-sized sculpture of Glory Kendall, lying on her side, raised up on one elbow, her hand cradling her face; the other hand lay gently on her hip. It was both beautiful and creepy all at the same time. The tomb was engraved with the words: Glory Anne Kendall. Beloved daughter, angel of God, sleep forever in the arms of the Lord. Entered this world the 2nd of April 1897. Ripped from our hearts the 14th of June 1922.

  She’d been a whopping twenty-five years old. I suppose, back then, her father was most likely worried that she’d be a spinster. Nowadays, girls were just finishing up college about that age. I headed back toward the church, glancing over
my shoulder at Glory Kendall’s likeness.

  I knocked on the rectory door, and Father Bingham answered. I’ve noticed that at the bigger churches in the city or even in St. Louis County, not too many priests answer their own doors. Usually a secretary or a housekeeper does that. Father Bingham almost always answers his own door unless he’s saying mass or hearing confession. What hair he has left is dark, like his beard, and behind his glasses his eyes are very kind. He isn’t overweight by any means, but you definitely get the feeling that he doesn’t miss any meals.

  “Torie,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “I was wondering if I could look at the records,” I said.

  “What are you interested in?” he said, as he motioned me into his home. There was a photograph of the new pope in the hallway, but I saw that Father Bingham had just moved Pope John Paul II’s photograph to the other wall. He noticed me looking. “Can’t imagine this hallway without John Paul.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So what are you looking for?” he asked.

  “I want to do some research on the Kendall family,” I said. “In fact, I was wondering where the sons were buried. They’re not in the cemetery with Glory and her parents.”

  Father Bingham shook his head. “You know, back then … they probably wouldn’t have allowed them to be buried here. Since they committed suicide.”

  “Well, yes, but so did Glory Kendall.”

  “I’m not sure why, but Sandy Kendall got special dispensation to get Glory buried next to him,” he said. “Father O’Brien never disclosed the reasons to me before he retired. Only that Sandy had gotten special dispensation.”

  “Oh,” I said. My mind was racing. What special dispensation? What would be the grounds for a dispensation to get a suicide victim buried in sacred ground?

  “You know, so many things have changed now,” he said. “Thanks to Vatican II.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “There was a man who showed up to church every day, best Catholic I’d ever seen, but when he died his wife had him put in a Protestant cemetery. When I asked her why, she said it was because he’d never divorced his first wife. He’d simply picked up and moved to Missouri, where she’d met him. He told her the truth, and she agreed to go along with the charade, but when it came time to bury him, she couldn’t lie anymore. She felt compelled. So he’s buried out at the Methodist cemetery. Honestly, though, since the Second Vatican Council, he could probably have been buried here and nobody would have said anything to her. Some of the older people can’t get used to the new way of doing things. I had one old lady just last month ask if we were ever going to have a Latin mass again.” He chuckled at the thought of it.