Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  The thing that struck me the most was the fact that Rupert hadn’t shot himself at all. He’d hanged himself. Which meant that either the blood in his room was due to an incident that had not resulted in Rupert’s death, or it belonged to somebody else. Possibly his brother, Whalen.

  Finding the report of Whalen’s suicide would take more time. I knew it had to have happened sometime between June and December of 1922, but not knowing exactly when meant that I had to skim each paper or chance passing it up. I could almost bet that Whalen’s suicide would make the front page, since he was the last child of the family and the third to have ended his life tragically within one year’s time. I mean, what editor wouldn’t have put that on the front page?

  Sure enough, August of 1922, I found it on the front page. The headline read, “Third Tragedy to Strike Kendall Family.” August! That meant Sandy Kendall’s children had all taken their own lives within nine months. Nine months! In the time it took to bring a new life into the world, an entire family had checked out. It was overwhelming, nearly more than I could stand.

  I read the article on Whalen with great interest, since I really didn’t know anything about him. There was a photograph of him with a smaller photograph of each of his siblings. The author spent a great deal of time pondering the same damn questions I had been pondering. What the hell had happened? Whalen, it appeared, had served in the military as well, but had never seen front-line carnage like Rupert. According to his father, Whalen didn’t have to go to war, since he was married and his wife was pregnant, but he insisted it was the right thing to do and went off anyway. Interestingly, although he didn’t leave until after Rupert had left, he returned within six months. Whalen and his wife lived next door to Sandy and Glory during his brother’s absence in France. After Whalen’s wife gave birth to a daughter, his wife unexpectedly took the child and up and left in the middle of the night. No note, no word as to where she had gone or why. Whalen sold his house and moved back in with his father and sister. This would have been about 1919, just before Rupert returned. Neighbors painted Whalen as a dutiful son who had given up everything for his father and brother. Evidently, he’d had plans to leave for New Orleans to start over and begin a business venture, but when Rupert returned, Whalen realized there was no way he could leave his father and Glory to deal with Rupert on their own.

  According to the article, Whalen had shot himself in his brother’s room.

  I sat back and rubbed my eyes. Then I sighed and hit the print button. I left the library a few minutes later with my photocopies documenting three young lives gone horribly wrong.

  I called Stephanie once again. “Steph, is Geena there yet?”

  “Yes, she got here about half an hour ago,” she said.

  “Would you guys like me to bring you back some lunch?”

  “Oh, sure, where are you going?”

  “I thought about hitting Steak-n-Shake,” I said.

  “I want a steakburger and a strawberry shake. And…” There was a pause as she waited for Geena to decide what she wanted to eat. “Geena wants a steakburger and a large caffeine.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Oh, and she wants an order of fries.”

  “Good.”

  “And a bowl of chili.”

  I laughed. “You think she’s hungry?”

  “Just a bit,” she said with humor in her voice.

  I stopped and got our lunch and then drove back to New Kassel with my car smelling like grease and onions. I know that sounds gross, but it actually smelled really good.

  When I entered the Gaheimer House, Geena was coming down the stairs, pulling her white gloves off. Stephanie called out, “Back here!” I motioned for Geena to meet me in the kitchen, where we all sat around and ate our lunch. I had a turkey club with fries.

  “So what’s the deal with the quilts?” Stephanie asked, taking a drink of her shake.

  I explained to her about the Kendall house and Glory Kendall and my plan to purchase all of the quilts, even if I didn’t get the house.

  “How exciting,” she said. “Something new in town. That’ll shake everybody up.”

  “What did you learn today?” Geena asked.

  I filled her in on most of my discoveries, then stopped and wondered about a few things out loud. “It still makes no sense to me, though. Rupert killed himself first, in November of ’21, and yet around Christmas Glory begins quilting again, and she makes this big deal of stating how her legacy is her quilts. I mean, you get the feeling that she was on the comeback, not spiraling the other way. Then she ends her life in June with an unfinished quilt in the frame. Does that make sense?”

  Geena shook her head and thought about it. “Not really,” she said.

  “Also, Rupert hanged himself.”

  “But the blood?”

  “There’s blood?” Stephanie asked.

  “It’s his brother’s. For some reason Whalen chose to shoot himself in Rupert’s room,” I said. “The more I dig, the more questions I come up with.”

  “Isn’t that the way it always works?” Stephanie said, smiling.

  “True,” I said. “I’m going to check the St. Louis County library this week. Something of this magnitude would have drawn the attention of the St. Louis papers.”

  “I would think so,” Geena agreed.

  “Maybe those papers could shed a little more light on the why of this whole situation.”

  “What did you learn about the quilts?” Geena asked.

  “Oh, my gosh. I almost forgot! Glory quilted probably fifty quilts in her life. We recovered how many?”

  “Nine finished, and the one in the frame for sure,” Geena said.

  “Well, a few of the others without initials might be hers, as well. She documented who received her quilts as gifts, that’s the cool part. And,” I said, pulling a sheet of paper out of my back pocket, “I have descriptions of quilts that her mother and grandmother made, and one by her great-grandmother. So we should be able to see if any of the quilts we recovered are those.”

  “Let’s go see,” she said. “I can’t wait another second. I want to see if I’m right.”

  After we washed our hands, all three of us hurried up the steps to the second floor, where Geena had spread whichever quilt she was studying on the full-sized poster bed.

  “This one I’m looking at now I would say was made in the late 1840s. It’s a coxcomb design made in red and green on a white background,” she said.

  “Why is there only a border on three sides?” Stephanie asked.

  “Well, you have to understand, back then, most quilts were never going to be hung on a wall. They were made for the bed. The missing border is the top of the quilt that would either be hidden under pillows or pulled over the pillows and tucked down by the headboard. You’d never see it. You’ll also find some quilts that have what looks like two missing square pieces at the bottom. Those were to accommodate the posters at the end of the bed.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Makes sense.”

  I checked my notes. Glory had written about a green and red coxcomb made by her great-grandmother on her way from Rhode Island to what is now Michigan, sometime in the 1840s. “You’re exactly right,” I said.

  “How’d you do that?” Stephanie asked Geena.

  “A lot of it’s about knowing what patterns were popular.”

  “I could make a coxcomb quilt right now,” I said. “I’d probably pull my hair out in the process, since it’s appliquéd, but I could do it now. How can you tell it wasn’t made forty or however many years after that design went out of fashion?”

  “That’s when you have to rely on knowing what fabrics were available, what oxygen and light do to certain materials over time, dyes, that sort of thing. You know how there were no true yellow roses before a specific year?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Well, I can’t remember the year, but it took breeding and a freak of nature to get a true yellow rose to happen,”
she said. “Same thing with colors of dyes and fabrics. Today we can create any color fabric we want, but not so a century ago. At one time there was a definite limited color palette. There was no fuchsia or chartreuse for an eighteenth-century quilter. So one way to document the age of a quilt is to know what colors were available, how the colors were made, and what effect time and elements have on each color.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling really stupid.

  “The brown in that quilt over there was most likely a brilliant green at one time.”

  “So this one belonged to her great-grandmother,” I said.

  “Yes, what was her great-grandmother’s name?” Geena asked.

  “I don’t know, but that I can find out,” I said. I might not be able to date fabric, or know when a yellow rose was first developed, but by golly, I could hunt down somebody’s great-grandmother.

  “What about crazy quilts?” Stephanie asked.

  “You won’t find one of those prior to 1876, and very few were made after 1900 or 1910. Until, of course, they came into fashion again. I just made one last year.”

  Stephanie smiled. “Can we keep her?” she asked me.

  I laughed and was about ready to say something when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it.”

  I went down the stairs and opened the door. It was Maddie Fulton.

  “Maddie, what a nice surprise.”

  She handed me a big bouquet of roses, which I, of course, buried my nose in. It’s the first thing you do when you see a rose. Stick your nose in it. Of course, that’s the first thing I do with almost everything. At least according to my husband.

  “Come in,” I said, and stepped aside for her. “What brings you here?”

  “I wanted to say thank you for all the hard work you’ve put into the rose show. All of the advertisements, setting up booths, the whole bit,” she said.

  “Oh, Maddie, that’s my job,” I said.

  “Well, I still want to thank you,” she said. “I also wanted to let you know that I’m getting the quilts together that Glory gave my grandmother. The more I think about it, the more I really want you to display them.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. “At the very least, I want to get photographs of them.” Maddie looked like she had something else on her mind, but she didn’t say anything. “Would you like to see the ones we recovered from the Kendall house?”

  “I’d love to, just some other time,” she said. “I’m on my way to a garden club meeting.”

  “Oh, hey, was your grandmother’s name Elspeth Bauer?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking surprised. “How did you know that? And why do you want to know?”

  “Glory mentioned your grandmother in her quilt journal. Nothing major, she just mentioned giving Elspeth some of her quilts,” I said.

  “I think I have a few photographs of my grandmother and Glory together,” she said. “I’ll look those up for you, too.”

  “Did your grandmother ever mention Glory? I mean, other than the fact she’d given her the quilts?”

  “You want to know what happened in that house, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “I can tell you some of what my grandmother knew, but I don’t think she shared everything with me. I don’t have time to go into it all right now. Why don’t you come by later tonight or tomorrow, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Just suffice it to say that my grandmother never trusted the brother,” she said.

  “Rupert?”

  “No, Whalen,” she said. “I don’t have time right now. But there is one other thing I wanted you to know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think somebody was in my house last night,” she said. “The back door was cracked when I got up.”

  “Could the wind have knocked it open?”

  “No, it’s a sliding glass door,” she said.

  “Have you told the sheriff?”

  “No,” she said, as if that had never occurred to her. “I’m telling you.”

  I chuckled a bit. “Was anything taken?”

  “Not that I can tell, but I know somebody was there. I could tell by the garden.”

  “The garden?”

  “Whoever it was broke off one of my elephant ears and trampled my Graham Thomas.”

  “Your what?”

  “It’s a rosebush,” she said. “Lovely fragrance. A yellow blush color.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, I need to go and get this meeting over with. It’s gonna take a lot out of me, you know. Eleanore will be there.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sorry.”

  She turned to go and I stopped her. “Hey, what year was the first yellow rose?”

  “Oh, uh … well, if you mean a true bright yellow rose, that would be right around 1900. A man named Joseph Permet-Ducher had been breeding roses trying to come up with a true yellow and had failed up to that point. Then one day he was walking through a field and there was a mutant. A yellow rose. He used that rose to produce yellow and orange roses, and we’ve had them ever since.”

  I smiled and waved to her as she left. Then I put my bouquet of freshly cut roses in a vase and put it in the sitting room. I didn’t want them all the way back in the kitchen where nobody could see them. I had no idea what sort of rose they were, what fancy names they had or anything of the sort. As I looked at the vase all I was thinking was Pink, white, oooh sorta pink and white together. Fat, fluffy. Pretty. That was good enough for me.

  Just as I was about go back upstairs, the front door to the Gaheimer House opened and Colin walked in. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Your mother wants me to head over to the garden club meeting,” he said. “In case there’s any excitement.”

  “You’re not the sheriff anymore,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I’m bigger than all of them, so if they start any crap I can … I don’t know, stand up and look menacing, I guess.”

  I laughed. Leave it to my mother.

  “How’s it going on that Kendall thing?” he asked.

  “It’s going. I’ve been finding out a lot of new stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he asked. “Like what?”

  “You don’t have time to hear it all. You’ve got a meeting to go to,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. He looked utterly dejected. At one time he would have been right in the thick of things, giving me warnings and telling me how much of a pain in the butt I was. Now he was attending garden club meetings.

  “You want to come with me?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “I try to avoid Eleanore if at all possible.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll let you know if there’s any excitement,” he said.

  “You do that, Colin,” I said.

  Nine

  Rudy, the kids, and I were all seated at Velasco’s Pizza later that evening. Not only is the pizza really good, but the owner, Chuck Velasco, is one of Rudy’s best friends and his bowling partner. So we try to eat here once a week to support one of our own. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I hate to cook. Nothing at all.

  Velasco’s is done in a 1950s décor, and Chuck himself takes orders, cooks pizzas, and fraternizes with the customers. He wears flannel plaid shirts and work boots nearly every day, except in the summer. He looks like he should be driving a backhoe rather than flipping pizzas, but he confided in me one day that he’d always wanted to be a chef. Chuck has a temper, too. We were eating dinner here one night several years back when he threw the glass cookie jar at his ex-wife.

  “Hey, guys!” Chuck called out from behind the counter.

  We all waved. Matthew was busy tearing up his paper napkin with his fork, while Mary was preening, running her hands through her hair every five seconds. I realized that Tony, the adorable Italian boy who was in her class, was sitting by the window with his family. The great thing about Rachel having a steady boyfriend was that she didn’t preen quite so m
uch anymore. Once she realized that Riley liked her regardless, she even stopped wearing eyeliner. Wonders never cease.

  “Mom, can I dye my hair black?” Mary asked.

  “Why would you want to do that?” Rudy asked.

  “I’m asking Mom,” she said.

  Rudy shot her a death look, and I said, “Hey, watch your mouth.”

  “Oh, like he’s gonna know what color would look good on me,” she said. “I’m asking you. Because even though you’re old, you at least have some taste.”

  She was thirteen. I had seven years to go until she was twenty. I was not so sure I would make it without killing her.

  “Really,” I said. “Like what?”

  “You have excellent taste in shoes,” she said.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t get a big head,” she said. “Please, I wanna dye my hair black.”

  Here’s the dilemma we face as parents of today’s teenagers. Did I want my thirteen-year-old to dye her hair black? No, of course not. She’s got gorgeous blondish hair with little coppery highlights. Like I want that ruined? No. Her hair is also naturally curly, but she straightens it every morning. As much as I wanted her to inherit curl from her father instead of the straight boring stuff that I have, she wants just the opposite. Straight-as-a-poker hair is in right now. Anyway, did I want to make a big deal out of something that would last a couple of months and grow out? No. The trick is to pick and choose your battles. Would it hurt anything if she dyed her hair black? No, although she’d probably ruin at least two towels in the process. On the other hand, will it hurt if she goes to a rave party? Yes. So, see, I have to choose which battles are the most important, because if I just shoot her down on everything, she’ll rebel. I had to make her think that I didn’t want her to dye her hair and was giving in only under great pressure so that she would think she’d won some huge major battle, so that later when she actually loses a big major battle it won’t be such a big deal to her. In actuality, as much as I don’t want her to have black hair, in the grand scheme of things, black hair is no big deal. Pierced noses are no big deal, either. Tattooed face? Big deal.