Streak of Lightning

by Clare O'Donohue

Eleanor had laid out quite a spread at Someday Quilts. Ham sandwiches, freshly made potato salad, and a chocolate cake for dessert. My grandmother knew how to cater an unofficial police investigation better than anyone. She even turned it into a sort of picnic, covering one of the tables in the classroom with a scrap quilt of four-patches in every color and pattern imaginable. In an art form that is moving toward the modern, with so many quilts having clean lines, solid fabrics, and an almost architectural feel, the scrappy four-patch was the kind of quilt that looked, well, like a quilt: something Grandma made, which in this case was literally true. It was one that Eleanor had whipped up from leftovers off the bolts, and with her keen eye and years of experience, she had turned a beginner’s pattern into a quiet masterpiece.

  As I looked at the table, the food, and the company, the whole thing would have seemed pretty festive if not for the depressing news that Eleanor had.

  “I called Lori after breakfast and offered my condolences. She asked me to come by, which made the whole thing easy. I made this cake for her and headed over. But when I got there at noon, just like she’d suggested, she wasn’t there. Her car wasn’t there. She didn’t pick up her phone when I called. I have no idea where she went.”

  The good thing about it being New Year’s Day was that Someday Quilts was closed, Jitters was closed, and in fact nearly every business in town was closed, so we could sit and strategize uninterrupted by customers. The bad thing was that it wasn’t always easy to find people if they weren’t at work. Carrie and I hadn’t had any success tracking Violet down at her home either. But, just in case, I offered to stop at Violet’s Floral Shop to see if she was there and, even though it was a long shot, look in at Everything Pizza to see if Lori had gone to the restaurant in some grief-induced effort to keep busy.

  “Or guilt-induced,” Carrie said. “She was the one who brought Joe the so-called medicine right before he died.”

  “Does Terri Adkin know about that?” I asked Jesse.

  He nodded. “The leftover pills were sent to the lab to be checked.”

  I didn’t know her very well, but I liked Lori. I didn’t want to think of her as a killer, or help send her to prison. But her actions this morning were certainly odd. And, I wasn’t exactly proud to admit, if Joe was murdered, I would feel better about helping prove it was Lori than letting Greg go to jail.

  I filled everyone in on what I’d learned from Larry and Rich, and Jesse told us about his morning with Greg.

  “When he said he’d killed Joe,” I asked as Jesse wandered the classroom looking at the quilts, “what did he mean? Did he say he’d hurt him?”

  “No. You know Greg. He means well, but . . .” Jesse took a deep breath. This was hard on him, I could see. Jesse, tall and lean, with his dark brown hair and glasses, was the professor/cop. Always trying to teach and explain rather than use force. He worried that he’d given Greg too much responsibility too soon, and I wondered if he felt that, by leaving town yesterday, he’d put Greg in this situation. Telling Jesse it wasn’t his fault wouldn’t help. It would just look like I was trying to assuage my own guilt about wanting my perfect weekend. The only thing that would help was getting to the truth.

  “What did he say, exactly?” I asked again.

  “He said that he delayed in getting Joe his medicine. Joe said he was ill. So Greg called his house, but Lori wasn’t home. Rather than go back to Joe and get Lori’s cell number, Greg waited half an hour and called again. That time Lori picked up. Greg thinks the delay might have killed Joe, caused a heart attack or something.”

  “Lori wasn’t home, and Greg didn’t want to tell Joe. He didn’t want to get Lori in trouble with Joe, which is how any of us would have felt,” Eleanor said. “Did he explain that to the state police?”

  “Not yet. But remember, Terri said something about there being reasons to believe the death wasn’t from natural causes. If you’re right, that means the bruise. So the pills, whether they were poisoned or actual medicine, don’t really matter.”

  “What were the pills for anyway?” Carrie asked.

  “No idea. Greg said he didn’t look at the bottle. He just took them from Lori, got Joe a glass of water, and brought them back to the cell.”

  It was midday already, and all we’d succeeded in doing was proving that the killer had to be either Greg or Lori. And the problem was, Lori was an unlikely suspect for a murder that involved strangling. Unless, fingers crossed, it wasn’t a murder at all and Joe had fallen neck-first earlier in the day and gotten the bruise in the fall. Even being optimistic, I didn’t think that seemed likely.

  While Carrie and Eleanor went back to work, I cleaned up, and Jesse stood looking at the design wall, a fleece-covered section of the wall we used to preview projects and play with blocks before they were completely assembled. Fabrics stick to flannel without pins, making moving them easy and fast. And putting them on the wall lets you stand back and really see the design. On the wall at the moment were the blocks for a blue and white streak of lightning quilt I’d been working on.

  He pointed to my blocks. “This is nice. This isn’t a WOMBAT.” He smiled, proud of himself, I think, for remembering a quilting term.

  “No, it’s a WIP.”

  “A wonderful, interesting . . . ,” he guessed.

  “A work in progress.” I pointed over to a group of blocks on another table. “That’s a BOM. A block of the month. It’s usually a complicated pattern, but you get one block at a time so it doesn’t feel overwhelming. By the end of the year, you’ve got a whole top together.”

  “And what’s the other term, the spaceship . . . isn’t that the same as a WIP?”

  “UFO, unfinished object. A WIP is a project you’re actively working on; a UFO is when you work on a project, set it aside for a while, but you intend to get back to it at some point. A WOMBAT is when you’ve given up completely.”

  “Quilters speak their own language.”

  “So do cops,” I pointed out.

  “And you’ve spent a lot of time this last year learning how to speak cop, so it’s time I learned quilting. What’s this pattern called?” He pointed back to the wall.

  “Streak of lightning. It’s nice, isn’t it, the way the blue and white lines zigzag down the quilt?”

  “It looks complicated.”

  I looked at the quilt more closely. A streak of lightning is a design that can be made in a number of ways. Some people use rectangles that are offset, some use half-square triangles, and this one was a variation on the classic log cabin. The main point, however you do it, is to create the sense of movement, of color that juts back and forth in a line, just how we think of a lightning bolt.

  “It’s really easy, actually,” I told him. “It’s like a lot of quilt patterns. It looks complicated, but when you isolate just one block, you see how simple it is.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He kissed me. “I have to get back to the station. I have to fill in for Greg until we get this cleared up.”

  “Which we will.” I sounded optimistic, though I wasn’t sure I felt it.

  After Jesse left, I looked at the streak of lightning blocks on the design wall. It was a beautiful, simple pattern that really made a statement. And it had such a perfectly descriptive name.

  It made me think of Joe and what everyone said about him. He yelled and made threats, but as far as anyone knew, he never actually struck anyone. Like thunder, he was all sound and fury. It was lightning that was really the danger.

  It couldn’t be Greg. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it. So it had to be Lori; somehow she must have strangled him. As I looked at the blocks on the wall, I asked myself, was timid, tired-looking Lori the lightning to Joe’s thunder?

  Chapter 11

  There was movement in Violet’s shop. Though boards had been placed over the front window where Joe’s chair had broken the glass, I could see l
ight peeking out from the edges and I could hear the faint sound of classical music playing.

  When I knocked on the door, it gave with a slight push, so I wandered in. “Violet?” I called out. No one answered. The shop was tiny, crowded with flowers, and an absolute mess. One of the shelves was on the floor, and the large ceramic pots that used to be on it were now broken into pieces. Below where the display shelf had been, a floor plant that looked as if it had taken the brunt of Joe’s fury was turned on its side. I moved back farther into the shop. “Violet?”

  Nothing.

  I headed all the way in, moving from the front of the shop, past the counter, to the back. There was no one, not even in the office. But it was obvious that Violet had been there. Why else would her door be unlocked?

  As I came back out, I noticed something on the counter. A takeout menu from the Chinese restaurant in Morristown, the one that had upset Lori the day before. I wanted it to be a smoking gun, but even I had a menu from that restaurant. It was the only Chinese takeout close to town. But on this menu, there was what seemed like a phone number written at the top. I grabbed a pen from my purse and searched for a piece of paper, but no luck. So I rolled up the sleeve of my sweater and wrote it on my arm, then walked back outside, leaving the door unlocked but closed, just as I had found it.

  Then I went next door to Everything Pizza. The CLOSED sign was on the door, and there seemed to be no movement inside. I tried to look in the window, but the restaurant was dark. If Lori was in there, she was in back.

  I walked around the block to the alley. As I did, I saw Violet and Lori chatting quietly in the parking area between the back doors to each of their businesses.

  “Lori,” I said, when it was clear that they saw me, “I’m so sorry about your husband.”

  “Thanks, Nell. It’s very kind of you. I’m still in shock. I warned Joe over and over that the anger would give him a heart attack one day.”

  “Is that what it was?” I asked.

  “What else could it have been?” Violet jumped in. “He was alone in a jail cell.”

  “Yes, he was,” I agreed, but turned my attention to Lori. “You brought some medication to the police station last night.”

  “For Joe’s blood pressure.”

  “Was he in bad health? I mean aside from high blood pressure.”

  “Like a heart condition or something? No, and if there was, Joe wouldn’t have done anything different. Whenever I’d nag him about his health, he’d say he was too stubborn to die.”

  “You had a lot to deal with,” Violet said, patting Lori’s shoulder. Violet was about Lori’s age and quite petite. She was strong, though. I’d seen her carry huge potted plants from her truck.

  Violet and I glanced toward each other, both thinking, I’m sure, how much easier Lori’s life would be now.

  “My grandmother wanted to stop by . . .”

  Lori blushed. “I’m so sorry. I . . .” She stumbled on her words. “I just felt like I needed to check on the restaurant.”

  “You’re closed of course,” I said.

  She nodded. “Violet and I were just discussing what I’m going to do now. I can run a business, but Joe was the chef.”

  “He made a wonderful pizza,” I agreed. “Do you want to keep the place? It seems like a lot of work for one person.”

  She nodded. “Joe had ideas to make it more profitable, and I’d like to keep his dream alive.”

  “I suppose you’re used to how hard it is. You must have had to work late last night to close up the restaurant on your own,” I said. “You probably did that a lot.”

  “No,” she said. “Hardly ever. And last night we were closed before . . . well, before all the excitement. I was already home making dinner when Joe attacked Violet’s shop.”

  “You were home? And you stayed home all night?”

  “No. You already know that I went to the police station with Joe’s pills.”

  “But Greg called your house twice. The first time you didn’t pick up, so he called again a half hour later.”

  “The first time he called, I must have had the water running or the TV on or something. Why?”

  “You know me,” I said. “I’m always trying to solve puzzles.”

  She smiled. “Luckily, this isn’t a puzzle. I brought Joe the pills, but it was too late. He’d gotten himself worked up once too often. I was barely back at the house when Greg called me to tell me what had happened.”

  “The state police think Greg . . . ,” I started, but I didn’t know how much I wanted to reveal, so I stopped.

  Lori looked genuinely distressed. “I’ve known Greg since we moved to town, and he’s a kind, sweet man. He wouldn’t have hurt Joe.”

  “I know, but Joe was drunk last night, so maybe—”

  Lori cut me off. “Joe didn’t drink.”

  “Lori, I saw him when he was arrested. He was drunk.”

  “I don’t know what you saw, Nell, but he wasn’t. He might have been a bit rough around the edges, but drinking wasn’t one of his faults.”

  I stared at her a minute. Lori looked sad and tired, more or less how she always looked. Certainly not like a woman who was glad her husband was dead, or the cause of it. “You weren’t at the police station last night after Joe’s body was discovered,” I said. “At least I didn’t see you there. Did you make a statement to the police?”

  Violet stood in front of Lori. “After Greg called, she came to my house. She didn’t need to sit in that station looking at Joe’s dead body, and she couldn’t stay in her empty house. She needed a friend.”

  “And you two are friends?”

  “Yes. Good friends.” Violet was a small, middle-aged woman, but standing in that alley between me and the woman I suspected of killing Joe, she looked pretty tough.

  “I’m glad that she has a friend,” I said. “Being married to Joe, she certainly needed one.”

  Violet smiled. “Joe wasn’t all bad. I was his friend, too.”

  That caught me off guard. “He threw a chair through your window.”

  “He was a bit excitable, but we always worked things out.”

  It was my turn to smile. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that Violet was playing with me. “So when you punched him in the mouth, was that you being excitable?”

  “It was a misunderstanding.”

  “About what?”

  “Does it matter, Nell? I wasn’t in the police station last night, so obviously I didn’t kill Joe. And anyway, as Lori pointed out, no one killed Joe. He died of a heart attack.”

  As Violet spoke, Lori started to cry. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.” It was a sudden outburst of emotion, and I hadn’t expected it. But it did seem genuine. No one knew what went on between two people in a relationship. To everyone else it seemed like Joe was a nightmare, but maybe Lori saw a different, better Joe.

  Violet put her arm around Lori and led her into the flower shop, closing the door behind them. I stood there thinking that in these women I had two great suspects. Lori, the long-suffering wife, and then Violet, suddenly pretending to have been Joe’s friend when the two had done nothing but argue.

  But if Joe had been strangled in his jail cell, then neither of my two best suspects could possibly have done it.

  Chapter 12

  Four people and a tired dog sat in a quilt shop carefully going over the statements of all our suspects. And getting nowhere.

  I was warm and sleepy, and everything hurt. I rolled up the sleeves of my sweater and rubbed the arm that was quickly falling asleep.

  “Did you get a tattoo?” my grandmother asked.

  I looked down at the ink on my arm from earlier. “No, a clue. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  In a rush of excitement, Carrie did a reverse phone directory lookup on the number I’d seen written on
the Chinese takeout menu. “MG Management,” she said. “What’s that?”

  None of us knew, and calling the number didn’t help either. The recording said the offices were closed for the holidays. It seemed everyone was taking the day off but us.

  “So tomorrow there’s the autopsy, and we find out if Joe was strangled,” Carrie said. “And if he was, then it had to be Greg.”

  “But it wasn’t Greg,” Eleanor corrected her.

  “So who then? Violet or Lori?”

  Jesse leaned back in his chair, as tired as the rest of us. “I had to keep Joe from lunging at Rich yesterday. He was pretty strong. Assuming one of those women got into the station and unlocked Joe’s cell, I don’t think either of them could have strangled him. Joe would have been able to stop it. And Greg would have heard it.”

  “And Larry was at the garage all yesterday,” I pointed out.

  “Are we suspecting Larry?” Eleanor asked.

  “No, but he was the only other person who went back to the jail cell before the paramedics got there.”

  “But Greg said Joe was dead before Larry arrived,” Carrie pointed out. “So we’re back to Greg.”

  “He does make a great suspect.” Jesse got up and stretched. It was a good idea, but I was too tired to move. “It’s that darn bruise. I can’t see Greg strangling him. And when he arrested him, he said he didn’t get rough, just sort of chased him around. I was rougher on Joe than that.” He stopped, stared into space for a second, and then turned to me, his eyes wide. “Nell, show me again where Larry said the bruise was.”

  I touched the base of my throat, and as I did, Jesse’s expression changed.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said. “It wasn’t Greg.”

  I jumped up. “Who was it?”

  “It was me.”

  Carrie turned to him. “You murdered Joe?”

  Jesse laughed. “No. I stopped him from attacking Rich. I held him back. He was strong. I think I caused the bruise when I was pushing my hand against his chest, trying to hold him back.”