by Gin Jones
He took the phone from me and enlarged the image so he could focus in on one corner of the block. "Nope. It was similar, but this isn't it. This one gives the impression of a brand-new ring, all bright and shiny. The one I saw had been made to look sort of tarnished. The fabrics were duller, and she'd even embroidered a crack into one of the pieces, as if the metal had been damaged."
I took back the phone and scrolled through the rest of the pictures while Stefan moved to stand beside me where he could look over my shoulder and see the images. I hadn't noticed before, but the row covering Brooke's twenties had the same basic Wedding Ring block at both the beginning and the end. I pointed to the second one. "Is this it?"
He gave it a close look before nodding. "Yep."
"Did you notice anything else unusual like that?" I asked. "I think they're supposed to represent important events or experiences in Brooke's life. So the first Wedding Ring block would refer to her wedding, and the later one might refer to some problems in her marriage. I don't recognize all of the blocks in the next row, but one is Drunkard's Path, and another is Kansas Troubles. It makes me think her life wasn't as happy as in the previous decade before the tarnished Wedding Ring, when one of the blocks was Bright Hopes."
"Let me see," Stefan said, gesturing for me to hand over the phone.
"There are six rows of six blocks each, with each row accounting for approximately a decade of her life," I said as I gave him the phone. "I'm assuming they were laid out in chronological order to coincide with when the depicted events happened in her life, since the first one was an Ohio Star and she was born in Ohio, and the last one is a coffin that obviously represents her death."
Stefan silently scrolled through the images for a while. "I think you're right that this is Brooke's life story. It's definitely telling someone's story. I think she mentioned once that her husband was based in Kansas for a few years. She didn't seem to have fond memories of that place. But look at how the blocks after the Kansas Troubles and the cracked Wedding Ring seem tranquil somehow. Not just the colors, but also the lack of movement in the lines of the designs. On their own, those blocks would be dull and boring, but they balance out the busier blocks nicely. If I'm reading it right, I'd say she went through a difficult patch in her marriage when she lived in Kansas and then things settled down again for the next twenty years before moving to Danger Cove. Perhaps not as rosy as the day she was a bride, but comfortable. Solid."
"Thanks." I took back my phone, glad I'd asked Stefan's opinion. I wasn't sure I'd have picked up on the emotions the way he had. No wonder he was so good at figuring out which pieces of folk art would resonate with which collectors. But it left me wondering what secrets Brooke had in her past and what had sent her marriage into a rocky phase. Was it possible that Brooke herself had been responsible for the crack in her marriage and that it had never truly mended? Could Lawrence have been nursing a grudge against her all these years, and something happened last year to bring his resentment to the fore, making her afraid that he might hurt her? If so, it fit with my theory that she'd known her killer and that she'd believed she was in danger for a long enough period that she'd had plenty of time to make a quilt with clues to his identity. It even explained why, if she was afraid, she hadn't simply gone to the police for protection. Too often, women were reluctant to report behavior by their spouses that they would report if anyone else did it.
What I knew about the sampler quilt so far definitely pointed to Lawrence as the killer. But there were still too many questions to be answered, too many blocks to be decoded, before I would feel confident enough to tell Ohlsen that the quilt proved—or even supported the theory—that Brooke had been killed by her husband.
Besides, today was Thanksgiving, and I was needed at the parade. There was no time to talk to Ohlsen today. "I'd better go check in with Dee and Emma before they send out a search party for me."
"Would you keep an eye on Sunny for me?" Stefan said anxiously. "I'm worried about her. She's been working too hard, getting ready for Black Friday. She's such a perfectionist. She's so stressed that she decided she couldn't afford to spend the time to make a big dinner today, even though she loves turkey. I got us some deli turkey for sandwiches, but it's not the same."
"No, it isn't." I thought about the two remaining empty seats at the new table in my living room and the massive amount of food that Matt was even now unloading from his industrial-sized refrigerator and delivering to my small kitchen. The leftovers would never fit in my fridge, even if everyone ate their weight in carbohydrates. "You're welcome to come over to my place around two o'clock if you want. We have a real turkey—a heritage breed, in fact—although it's pretty small, so no one will get more than about two bites each."
Lindsay came running up in time to hear my last words. "Stefan can have my two bites of turkey," she said. "I'm mostly interested in the side dishes. Grandma made a huge pot of wild rice pilaf last night to bring with us, and that's my favorite. Although Keely's sweet potato casserole looked like it would be good too."
"Deal," Stefan said. "We'll bring the sliced turkey, just in case you do run out of the other kind, and Sunny can have my share and Lindsay's share of the heritage turkey."
"Now that that's settled," Lindsay said, "Keely needs to head on over to the float. Dee and Emma want an update on who killed Brooke. I told them you were busy, but you know how they get."
* * *
Stefan seemed happier now that he'd arranged for Sunny to have a proper Thanksgiving dinner. He continued on to the beach to wait out of everyone's way until he was needed to join the parade, and Lindsay got a text from Emma asking her to go home for something that had been forgotten and was needed to decorate the float. Lindsay dashed off, leaving me to make my way across the street and over to the float where Dee and Emma were expecting me.
I only made it to the crosswalk and was still on the beach side of Cliffside Drive when Tricia Sullivan called my name. I turned to see her walking in my direction with the handyman who'd secured the broken window at her house. Tricia had an overfilled pack on her back and carried an equally heavy-looking canvas tote, while the man limped along beside her with a bucket full of brushes, pint-sized paint cans, and some old rags spattered with more colors than could be found in his Hawaiian shirt. Actually, today's shirt was relatively sedate, mostly orange and yellow in keeping with Thanksgiving, plus some green and brown palm trees. Behind him in the parking lot, I could see his pickup with the seascape mural.
Tricia turned to her friend. "Man, I really need to talk to Keely for a minute. If you want to go on over to the float, I'll catch up with you in a few minutes. It looks like they could use your painting skills more than anything I could do to help."
He gave her a cheery smile and headed across the street.
Tricia watched him leave. "If you ever need any painting done, from simple to fancy, he's really amazing. And he isn't very good at marketing, so he doesn't have many clients. I keep telling him he should have a website, but he isn't into technology. The kids make fun of him for being a Luddite."
"He doesn't seem bothered by it," I said, watching his smile grow wider when Dee and Emma joined him beside the float.
"Nothing bothers him, as far as I can tell, but that's not what I wanted to talk to you about." Tricia leaned forward to ask in a confidential tone, "I heard that Brooke's sampler quilt got stolen from your place last night. But I'm hoping the rumor mill got it wrong."
"I'm afraid it's true."
"Oh, no." Tricia shook her head. "Brooke showed it to me a few days ago when she finished it. It was an amazing quilt. A bit depressing but truly a masterpiece. And now they're both gone. The maker and the quilt."
"I hope the sampler's not gone forever. I did report it to the police, and I'm sure Dee and Emma are mobilizing the guild to search for it."
"I just wish it hadn't come to this. I feel responsible somehow. Like if the miniature quilts hadn't been stolen from my house, then Brooke wouldn't have h
ad to get them back and she wouldn't have been killed. I know her death isn't really my fault, but if Brooke hadn't met you that night at my house, she wouldn't have given you the sampler quilt, and it wouldn't have been stolen. At least her work would have been safe, even if she wasn't."
"You can't blame yourself," I said. "Unless you think I'm responsible for the sampler quilt being stolen from my office."
"No, no, of course not," Tricia said. "I know it's silly, but I can't shake the feeling that I could have done something useful, maybe go with her when she met the thief who'd taken the miniature quilts, if I hadn't been a bit annoyed with her this week."
"If that's who killed her," I said, "he could have killed you too."
Tricia sighed. "I know. But I can't help feeling guilty."
As long as Tricia was feeling responsible for the situation and didn't seem to be in a hurry to join the people working on the float, it might be a good time for me to find out if she had any useful information for interpreting the sampler quilt. I glanced toward the float to see that the handyman was touching up some spots on the side of the base where some paint had peeled. Dee and Emma flanked him and were pointing out additional places that needed work. As long as they were supervising the handyman, they wouldn't notice I hadn't answered their summons right away. I wasn't in any rush to go confess that I really didn't have any useful information about Brooke's murder.
I turned back to Tricia to say, "What happened to Brooke and her quilt wasn't your fault, but you knew her better than anyone else. Do you know anything that might help the police find the culprit? Maybe someone who was angry with her? Or some idea of who might have taken the miniature quilts? That seemed like such a pointless thing to do since they weren't worth much, and you said the thief didn't take anything else."
"None of this makes any sense to me," Tricia said, setting down her overflowing tote bag and then adjusting the straps on her heavy backpack. "Not the theft of the miniature quilts or the later theft of the sampler, and definitely not Brooke's murder. It's like I'm stuck in a bad dream, and random things keep happening all around me, and I'm trying to make them stop, but I can't because there's no logic to them."
"I know she wasn't particularly friendly with her colleagues at the high school other than you, but was there anyone she worked with who really disliked her or had any kind of feud with her?"
Tricia shook her head. "I don't think so, but I'm not really sure. She mostly kept to herself. Some people thought she was stuck up, and they might have been hurt by what they saw as her turning her nose up at them. But I don't know any more. I thought I understood her as well as anyone could, given how little she would talk about anything other than quilting and teaching, but now I'm wondering if I ever really understood anything about her. For all I know, she had enemies everywhere, and they didn't say anything to me because they knew we were friends, and she didn't say anything because she never talked about personal things."
"What about her quilts?" I asked. "Did she discuss them with you?"
"That was about the only thing we ever talked about."
I glanced across the street, and Dee and Emma had moved to the far side of the float where only the tops of their heads were visible. If they looked up, they'd see me, but they were bent over, apparently pointing out more spots that needed touch-ups by the handyman. I had at least a few more minutes before they noticed I hadn't come running to answer their summons.
"Did Brooke ever mention her inspirations for the sampler quilt? I think it's a quilted autobiography. I can match up some of the blocks to key events in her life, like her birth and her marriage, and a few other blocks probably refer to the various bases where her husband was stationed while he was in the Air Force, but that's about all I've figured out. Assuming I'm even right that it was inspired by her life's story."
"That sounds like something she'd do," Tricia said. "I didn't see the quilt when it was finished, so I didn't see the whole story. She didn't say anything about why she'd chosen the individual blocks, just the technical challenges she had in making them come out the way she wanted them to. She was the same way at school. She only talked to me about things related to teaching, not emotional topics. It was sad, really. She could say so much with her quilts, things she couldn't talk about. She was always more comfortable with numbers and geometry than she was with words. And quilts start with numbers and geometry, but then they become so much more than that."
"If I'm right about the meaning of some of the blocks, it looks like she might have gone through a difficult patch in the past, back when she was in her twenties." I got out my phone and found the pictures of the third row of the quilt. "See here? First, there's a Wedding Ring, probably referring to her marriage, and everything was happy. Then there's a Monkey Wrench block that looks like she was showing how proud she was of her husband's career. But the very next block is Drunkard's Path, which can't possibly represent anything good."
"I've heard it referred to as Wanderer's Path sometimes," Tricia said. "And there are several blocks that feature a plane. Maybe it just referred to all the travel involved in being married to someone in the Air Force. I know she lived in a lot of places before she moved to Danger Cove. And isn't that an Air Force seal embroidered into one of the corners?"
I enlarged the image of the first plane block I came across, and Tricia was right. The four corners of the block were each embroidered with something that looked like a seal or a patch, one for the Air Force generally and the others possibly for the type of work he was doing or awards he'd received, although I didn't know enough about the military to decode them.
"What about the next blocks after the Drunkard's Path? One of them is Kansas Troubles. And Stefan Anderson pointed out that the last block, another Wedding Ring, was cracked and seemed tarnished."
Tricia peered at the images of those blocks. "Her husband was based in Kansas at one point, so maybe the state block was just supposed to reflect where she lived, not the troubles part of it."
"There are other Kansas blocks though," I said. "Kansas Star, for one, if she'd had happier thoughts about that time in her life."
"You're probably right," Tricia said sadly. "I wish she'd been willing to share her past with me instead of putting it all in her quilt."
"It would have been better if she'd talked to someone instead of sending an encrypted message." Brooke hadn't even left any clear message that the quilt was in fact her autobiography. "Maybe my whole approach to her quilt is wrong, and she wasn't trying to send a message to me or anyone else."
"No, I think you're onto something." Tricia made a scrolling motion in the air with her index figure. "Go back to the plane block with those embroidered patches. It had to refer to her husband's career. She was afraid of flying, so it wasn't anything she would have wanted to celebrate. You might be able to research the patches and guess at where he was stationed. I don't remember any specifics about his postings. Brooke used to swear in a foreign language sometimes, and when I asked where she learned the words, she said she lived in Germany for a while." Tricia indicated for me to scroll a bit further through the pictures to the last row. "The Lighthouse and Monkey Wrench blocks probably refer to when Brooke moved to Danger Cove and her husband took over the local garage."
"That's what I thought, except I don't know what the TFQ initials stand for in the two Monkey Wrench blocks."
"You'd think the Q stood for quilt," Tricia said. "But then what would that have to do with wrenches?"
I shook my head. "I have no idea."
"I'm afraid those blocks raise more questions than answers for me," Tricia said. "I really don't understand the Card Trick one in the Kansas row. Brooke thought card games like bridge were a waste of time, and she was opposed to gambling, even little things like throwing five bucks into an office pool every few months for some big sports event. I can't picture her husband as a gamer either. Not from the way Brooke considered him such a paragon of virtue."
"Maybe there's another name for
that block." I didn't think so though. My recollection was that it was of fairly recent origin, designed in the last quarter of the twentieth century during a renaissance of quilting.
"Oh, wait. There might be another explanation. What if Brooke's disdain for cards and gambling when I knew her was influenced by an earlier problem she or Lawrence had when they lived in Kansas, and it caused their marriage to be rocky?" Tricia picked up her tote bag. "That might explain a lot. If she or Lawrence got into some trouble over gambling, it could have made her particularly sensitive on the subject, and that was why she got on her high horse whenever we had an office pool. She held everyone to such high standards, like we were math equations that needed to be perfect or else we didn't deserve to exist. She might have been overcompensating for her own past mistakes, projecting onto other people the anger she felt with herself or with Lawrence about a past gambling problem. I was always surprised that she was willing to have me as a friend since she'd found out about my worst mistake in life and never let me forget it. I was always a little on edge with her, waiting for the day when she told the whole world about it."
I wanted to ask what the secret was, but didn't know Tricia well enough. Instead, I kept the focus on Brooke, since Tricia seemed happy to share everything she knew about her friend, if not necessarily about herself. "Would Brooke really have done something that mean?"
"For the longest time, I thought I was just being paranoid, but I still tried to be careful around her, making sure I didn't do anything that might upset her so she wouldn't have any reason to hurt me by telling my secret. But then I upset her on Tuesday, and she did just what I'd always been afraid of. She told my supervisor about my misbegotten youth and couched it in terms of my being a risk to her students by setting such a bad example, and she just couldn't keep it to herself any longer. I had some serious explaining to do." Tricia looked across the street and waved to someone. "Sorry. I've got to go. But let me know if there's anything else I can do to help you figure out the meaning of Brooke's quilt. I'm just glad you got some pictures of it before it was stolen."
