“Not good. We’re stuck. I’ll tell you, absolutely stuck.” He shook his head to emphasize his point.
“There was a note on pink paper. Did you find anything on that?”
He shook his head again. “It had only smudged fingerprints on it. It’s a dead end so far.”
I knew I would be pushing my luck if I kept asking questions, but I had one more. “Is Jesse, Chief Dewalt around?”
“No. He went out to get some lunch at Marabelle’s over by the highway. Want me to give him a message?”
“No. In fact, don’t bother telling him I was here.”
Marabelle’s was a sandwich shop I’d been to several times in the years I’d been coming to visit my grandmother. When I arrived, I saw Jesse’s car parked on the street in front and I pulled in right behind it.
I had rushed over so that I wouldn’t miss Jesse, but now I had to make it look casual, so I strolled into the shop and tried not to look around. The place was small, with a few tables near the window, but I kept my eyes on the counter.
“Chicken salad on wheat,” I said to the woman behind the counter. I spoke a little loudly with the hope that Jesse might look up. It worked.
“Nell,” I heard Jesse call out.
I turned and tried to look surprised. “What are you doing here?”
Jesse pointed to his half-finished sandwich. “Same thing as you, I guess.”
I picked up my sandwich and joined Jesse without his asking. “How are things?”
“Good. And you?”
“Good.”
“The fiancé?”
“Good, I suppose.”
“Things not going well?”
I sighed. “So much has happened.”
Jesse leaned back in his seat and nodded. “It’s got to be hard, not being sure.”
I looked into his eyes and for a moment saw a sweetness in them. “I still love him; I just don’t know if I want what he wants anymore, ” I admitted.
“People think that the moment a relationship is over you need to have one good cry and move on,” Jesse said. “It’s not that simple. Sometimes those old feelings linger, even when you start to have new feelings.”
I looked up at him, but he suddenly looked down at his plate. “I don’t know that it’s over,” I said. “I just don’t know if I’m ready.”
“You think he might have killed a guy. How do you get past that?” I looked at Jesse a long time without any idea how to answer him. Finally he said, “So are you going to ask me?”
“About what?”
He shook his head. “Okay, I’ll go back to small talk,” he said. “This weather is sure turning cold.”
“Okay. How is the investigation going? If you don’t mind sharing details of an open investigation with me.”
“I do mind sharing details, but I will tell you that I’m a bit stuck. I’ve checked with girlfriends, gambling buddies, anyone I can think of. It’s gone nowhere.”
“So where does that leave you?” Jesse took a sip of his Coke. I waited for an answer, then realized none was coming. “It leads you back to the quilt shop,” I said.
“So what have you come up with?” he asked. I was surprised by the question, and it must have shown. “You’re telling me you haven’t been looking for, what did you call them, clues?”
“I haven’t, actually. You told me to stay out of it.”
“And that worked?”
“Yes,” I said a little indignant. Then I leaned in. “But that doesn’t mean it has to do with the quilt shop. You’re leaving out the possibility that it could have been a robbery or something. Some stranger came into the shop and killed Marc.”
“Yes, I am. I’m leaving out the possibility that a robber came into an empty quilt shop and Marc let him in. And then, with nothing to gain, the guy stabbed him with a pair of scissors he found at the shop.”
“Marc had fifteen thousand dollars. Maybe the robber killed him for that.”
“How would a robber know that? And that’s assuming that Marc still had the cash on Friday. For all we know he went back to the OTB and lost it the next day.” Jesse stopped talking and finished his sandwich, but I’d lost my appetite.
“If your suspects are now my grandmother and her friends, you’re crazy. It can’t be anyone connected to the quilt shop,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“It can’t be Ryan either.”
We sat at the table quietly staring out the window.
“How’s the quilt coming?” Jesse finally broke the silence.
Glad of the change in subject, I said proudly, “I cut out a bunch of flowers.”
Jesse smiled. “Well, that calls for a celebration. They have a really good chocolate cake here.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice.”
Jesse jumped up, a wide grin across his face, and brought over chocolate cake and coffee. For the next half hour we sat and talked about quilting, his daughter, Allison, and the way the last of the autumn leaves were already falling.
Ryan, Marc, and the identity of a murderer were far away and forgotten subjects, and it seemed that Jesse was as glad of that as I was.
CHAPTER 44
By the time I got home all the members of the quilt club had already arrived. Nancy was pouring M&M’s into a bowl while Carrie set out coffee for everyone. Bernie sat with my grandmother looking over a new quilting book that had arrived that morning. Maggie and Susanne leaned over a vibrant quilt top Natalie had made.
“I still have to quilt it,” she was saying, “and I just can’t figure out the best design.”
“Since it’s strips, I would do circles,” Susanne suggested. “You want to do something simple, so as not to interfere with the design of the top, but you also want to play against the strong rectangles the strips make.”
I walked closer to see the quilt they were studying. When Natalie saw me, she held up the top she called a Bargello, and I was stunned. The quilt was made of two-inch strips of about forty fabrics that were then cross-cut into strips that varied in width from a half inch to three inches. Then these strips were sewn together to make a kind of wave effect. The quilt pattern was, according to Maggie, named after a needlepoint stitch and replicated the look. It looked like about the most complicated pattern I’d seen so far, but everyone loudly assured me it wasn’t.
“The hardest thing for this quilt is choosing the right fabrics,” Bernie told me.
“And putting them together in the right order,” Susanne added.
“Still,” I hesitated. “It looks like you have to be precise.”
“That just comes from experience.”
I walked over and took the quilt top in my hand. A red square caught my eye. In the first strip it was near the middle but its position moved up and down on each succeeding strip across the quilt. It was quite a beautiful effect until I got to the last three strips. There two red squares were next to each other.
“Is this on purpose?” I asked, as I pointed to the red squares.
Natalie grabbed the quilt. “Damn,” she said. “I can’t believe I missed that.”
The other women circled around. “You can fix that easily,” Maggie reassured her. “You just have to unsew the last bit.”
“Unsew?” I asked.
“That’s our way of saying rip up the part you got wrong and sew it back together,” my grandmother told me. Natalie grunted at the thought.
“I thought if something didn’t work, you threw it out,” I said. “UFOs, you called them, right?”
“That’s only if you don’t like it,” Carrie spoke up. “If you make something and realize that the design isn’t working or the fabrics are wrong, something that can’t be fixed.”
“If you like it, if you just made a mistake, then you do whatever it takes to fix it,” Natalie sighed. “No matter how depressing that is.” She looked down at her quilt, fingering the mistake in her sewing that put the two red squares next to each other.
“But
how do you know when to give up and when to repair?” I asked. “It seems like a lot of work when you could just move on to something else.”
“It is a lot of work,” Natalie said. Maggie put an arm around her.
“That’s the tricky part,” Bernie acknowledged. “When you put a lot of work into something and then realize that you’ve made a mistake, or something isn’t working, you can get so frustrated that you want to throw it away. What I do is give myself some time.”
“That’s right,” Nancy agreed. “I put it away for a little while, maybe a few days or a week, then I look at it with fresh eyes.”
My grandmother shifted on her chair. “The thing is, Nell, if you decide that something isn’t worth the effort, then you have to let it go. But if you decide that it is, then you have to do whatever is necessary to make it work.”
I nodded. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me.
An hour later, as the discussion turned to the quilt we were making for Tom, I left the room for the kitchen. My grandmother had asked me to put together gift bags of fat quarters of fabric as a thank-you for all the pies, cakes, casseroles, and brownies the quilt club had been bringing us.
“Well, hello there,” Susanne said cheerily as she walked into the kitchen with an empty coffee mug.
“We’re out of coffee,” I said. “It will take a minute for me to make some more.”
“How about tea?” I put the kettle on and Susanne leaned against the kitchen counter, watching me fill the bags. “How are things going at the shop?”
“Tom’s doing a great job. He may be finished before you’re done with the quilt.”
“Not a chance.” She held up several finished blocks. They were shades of purples, blues and reds. They looked pretty, but I couldn’t figure out what they would look like once they were sewn together. “Natalie told me about what you said. About the baby. It’s a big relief.”
“I’m glad.”
“And it means that Jesse can leave Natalie alone about this Marc thing.”
“Yes, hopefully.” I didn’t want to say anything about a possible new motive, so instead I was a little out of line. “But Marc was still harassing Natalie. She still had a motive.” I swallowed hard. “So did you.”
Susanne smiled widely and warmly. “I certainly did. I would have happily killed that SOB if I’d had the courage.”
I nodded. “Look, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Jesse would try to railroad Natalie into a murder charge just because she bailed on a friendship with his wife.”
“Is that what he’s telling you?”
“He isn’t telling me anything.”
“Well, then, you should ask him,” she said.
“I find that he’s better at listening than talking.”
She laughed. “He is a man with many secrets,” she said.
CHAPTER 45
I had talked with Ryan every night, but the conversations were short and, for the most part, perfunctory. Work was fine, he said. He was getting a cold. I was busy with the shop. Things were going well and my grandmother was healing nicely. Had we really gotten this dull?
I’d started dreading the calls, but after Jesse’s and my grandmother’s veiled advice, I needed to hear Ryan’s voice, so as soon as the quilters left, I went upstairs. He sounded tired from a long day at work but otherwise the same. It was getting confusing—liking Ryan’s familiarity, but also Jesse’s new stories and way of looking at the world. Love in the fairy tales wasn’t like this. You met, fell in love, and lived happily ever after. You didn’t kiss the local bad boy or share chocolate cake with the soft-spoken widower. I wished I could just say all of this to Ryan, but I knew any attempt would be met with the same anger and pain that Ryan had encountered when he tried to talk to me the night he broke the engagement. Instead I chatted about the quilt and he talked about the office. We were on the phone for about ten minutes of dull, everyday talk when Ryan brought up the subject we’d been avoiding.
“We need to talk about the wedding,” he said.
“What about it?”
“If we’re going to keep the same date, then you have to send out the invitations.”
“I can’t remember where I packed them,” I told him.
“Well, look.”
“What’s the rush?”
“Are you kidding me?” an exasperated Ryan practically shouted into the phone. “What is with you? You want to get married, don’t you?”
I hesitated. “Yes,” I said. I didn’t know what I wanted. I just knew I didn’t want to fight about it.
I could hear Ryan’s voice soften. “I know things are hard for you right now, but I’m really proud of you for doing this,” he said, changing the subject, “helping your grandmother this way.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s hard for me too, you know.”
“I know.”
“I walked past the skating rink in Central Park yesterday. Do you remember?” I did remember. On our third date Ryan had taken me there and we spent an hour skating and falling before giving up and taking a hansom cab ride through the park.
“It was pretty hokey,” I laughed.
He laughed too. “You loved it.” I did love it. “I was trying to impress you with how romantic I could be.”
“You were?” I thought about how I felt with him that night, nervous and excited and almost in love. “I thought you were so smooth you didn’t need to impress me.”
“I want to keep impressing you, and I feel like I’ve fallen down on the job lately.”
“It’s okay,” I said softly. “We can’t spend our lives on a third date.”
“But you still love me?” he asked.
“I still love you,” I said. I did love him, and maybe that was reason enough not to just throw things away, not if they could be repaired.
“Well, then, look for the invitations.”
“I will. First thing tomorrow.”
By four the next afternoon I hadn’t looked, so after spending the day at the shop, I dragged myself to the bedroom and began opening the boxes from my apartment.
I found a CD I’d been looking for and my favorite pair of socks, but I almost missed the invitations until I opened the last box. The one containing summer clothes and other items I didn’t think I’d need for a while.
I pulled out the dark blue box of invitations and opened it. Inside were dozens of beautifully printed cards waiting to be addressed and stamped. I stared at them for a long while, unsure of what to do. But I had been right when I spoke to Ryan, you can’t live your life on a third date. Maybe the excitement of standing near Jesse or kissing Marc was just the thrill you have at the start of something, whether it’s a quilt or a relationship. But excitement has to give way to work, and if I wasn’t willing to give up on Ryan, and I wasn’t, then I had to be willing to try.
I took the invitations downstairs, intent on spreading them out on the dining room table to work. But downstairs was still quilt central. Nancy was showing a new line of Indian-inspired fabrics to Eleanor and they were debating which of the fabrics to order. One woman was pulling out bolt after bolt of fabric while two other women were choosing fat quarters from a large basket.
“Shop still open?” I asked. “I thought you closed at four.”
“We are.” Eleanor looked up. “What’s that in your hands?”
“The wedding invitations. I promised Ryan I’d get them in the mail by Monday.” I plopped down next to my grandmother at the dining room table.
Just as Eleanor opened her mouth to speak, a woman walked over. “Excuse me,” said the woman with half a dozen bolts under arm, “I’m having a little trouble here.”
The woman dropped the bolts on the dining room table and held up a quilting magazine. Nancy walked up behind the woman and offered her assistance, I assume to give Eleanor and me a chance to talk. But I wasn’t interested. I preferred to watch Nancy and the customer than talk about the sudden appearance of wedding invitations. It seemed that the woman
wanted to make the quilt in the magazine, but only if she could find the exact fabrics that were in the picture. Nancy patiently explained that this wasn’t likely, but something very similar was sure to be here. I watched her maneuver through the room, pulling fabric after fabric for a full twenty minutes until the woman was satisfied. All the while Nancy smiled.
But as soon as she left, Nancy shook her head. “I wish people had a little more faith in their imaginations,” she sighed. “It’s a beautiful quilt in that magazine, but instead of duplicating it, she could have chosen her own colors. People are so afraid of making their own choices that they end up with something that isn’t really theirs. I’m not putting it down, mind you,” Nancy said to me, “I’ve done it myself. But there is something to blazing your own trail.” She smiled a little and moved over to help the women picking fat quarters.
I looked down at my box of invitations. The pretty, simple lettering that looked like a thousand other wedding invitations. “Better get to it,” I said to no one in particular, as Eleanor was playing with the computer and Nancy was busy with customers. “I can’t believe these will be in the mail.”
“Neither can I.” Eleanor gave me a slightly confused smile and I left the room to look for a quiet place to work.
I sat in the kitchen and placed envelopes, invitations and RSVP cards in separate piles. I took each envelope and wrote the name and address of each friend or family member invited. It didn’t take long before I got to the end of the list, but I realized there were a few people missing. I wrote the names of each of the women from the quilt club on an envelope to be hand-delivered. Then I stared at a blank envelope. “What the hell?” I said to myself. I wrote Jesse Dewalt on it.
CHAPTER 46
On Monday I took my pile of invitations with me to the shop. Tom had the place freshly painted in a soft white that made it look very clean but a little sterile.
“Strict instructions from your grandmother,” he said when I commented on the color. “She doesn’t want anything to interfere with the colors of the fabrics and the quilts.”
“What if we just did one wall? Something in a really neutral tone. Maybe behind the cash register. With the window there, there’s hardly any wall anyway. She can’t object.”
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