by Mary Marks
Why choose the shortest needle? Small needles make small stitches, and the mark of a skillful quilter is in her small, even stitches.
Now you’re ready to choose the right thread. Avoid thread made with polyester. Polyester is a hard synthetic fiber that will eventually saw through the soft cotton fibers of your quilt. Choose an all-cotton thread instead.
Threads are also numbered; the smaller the number, the heavier the thread. Regular cotton sewing thread has a weight of fifty, and is more easily broken. For durable quilting stitches, I use a quilting weight thread, which is around thirty.
In the olden days, women used to run their thread through beeswax to prevent it from tangling while they stitched. The drawback of using beeswax is that it can deposit a yellow residue on your quilt. Nowadays some quilting thread comes already coated with a glacé finish, which accomplishes the same thing without leaving a residue.
In today’s world, hand stitching has been largely replaced by quilting machines. But in times past, women used to compete with each other to be the best quilter, aiming at twenty stitches to the inch. I find that seven to ten stitches to the inch, evenly spaced, produce a stunning quilt.
With the right tools and lots of practice, you can produce a hand-quilted work of art that will be treasured for years to come.
Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of
Mary Marks’s next Quilting Mystery,
GONE BUT KNOT FORGOTTEN,
coming soon from Kensington Publishing!
CHAPTER 1
So far, the morning mail had only yielded credit card invitations, an interesting flyer for yoga classes and—now that I was a member of AARP—another postcard advertising the Neptune Society. I picked up a white number ten envelope, glanced at the unfamiliar return address, and almost tossed it in the junk pile, but something stopped me.
The envelope looked personal. First, it was addressed to Martha Rivka Rose, my full legal name. I never used my middle name, even on my checks, credit cards, or driver’s license. Second, I realized the postmark was not one of those presorted things, a sure giveaway of a mass mailing. The law offices of Abernathy, Porter & Salinger of Los Angeles, California, had paid full price for the stamp.
I reached for the white plastic letter opener, a prize I received from the UCLA Department of Internal Medicine after having my first colonoscopy. The envelope tore neatly along the top fold, and I pulled out a one-page letter:
Dear Ms. Rose:
We regret to inform you of the death of Mrs. Harriet Gordon Oliver. You have been named the executor of her estate. Please contact me personally at your earliest convenience to initiate the process of probating her will.
Very truly yours,
Deacon “Deke” Abernathy, Esq.
Harriet was dead? I hadn’t heard from her in over twenty years. We had been best friends in high school, but we had lost touch when she moved to Rhode Island for an Ivy League education at Brown and I lived at home and attended UCLA. One of the last times I saw Harriet was at our fifteenth high school reunion in the late 1980s. She had moved back to Los Angeles with her husband, Nathan Oliver, a fellow Brown graduate, and I had married Aaron Rose, a local boy finishing his psychiatric residency at LA County Hospital.
Since Harriet and I lived in Brentwood, a tony part of the west side, we met a few times for lunch after that. Harriet and her East Coast husband collected wine and art; Aaron and I focused on raising our three-year-old daughter and paying the mortgage on our much smaller home. Eventually even the lunches stopped. By the time I divorced Aaron and relocated to a not-so-tony part of Encino in the San Fernando Valley, Harriet and I had long since lost touch.
Now she was gone at age fifty-five. What had taken her so soon? Why hadn’t she made her husband executor? What about children? The more I thought about the letter, the more questions I had.
The telephone number Deacon Abernathy gave me must have been his cell phone because he answered it himself. “Deke here.”
“Mr. Abernathy? My name is Martha Rose and I just received your letter about Harriet Oliver.”
“Oh, right. Thanks for calling, Ms. Rose. We have some details to go over, including Mrs. Oliver’s funeral instructions. How soon can you come to my office?”
“Wait a minute. Please slow down. When did Harriet die? How did she die?”
“I’m sorry. Got ahead of myself. Has it been a while since you spoke to Mrs. Oliver?”
“Decades, actually.”
“That explains the problem we had in locating you. The last address she had for you was in Brentwood. Under the circumstances, I guess I’m not surprised.”
“What do you mean, ‘circumstances’? What’s going on?”
“There’s no delicate way to say this, Ms. Rose. Your friend Mrs. Oliver’s body was discovered in her home about three weeks ago. The coroner estimated she had been dead for at least ten months.”
I was glad I was already sitting down. My ears started ringing and a black circle closed out my peripheral vision. I saw horrible pictures of desiccated corpses and skulls with gaping jaws. “Ten months? Didn’t she have family? What about her husband?”
“It’s too complicated to explain over the phone. The thing is, Mrs. Oliver hasn’t been buried yet. We had to wait until we located the executor to make certain, ah, decisions. So you see, Ms. Rose, the sooner you get here, the sooner we can, ah, lay her to rest.”
Poor Harriet. How was it that nobody missed her? She had been such a vibrant and pretty teenager with long black hair that she ironed straight every morning before school. During our sleepovers, we would whisper about our plans for college, our hopes for the future, and which girls at school were having sex. When she left for Brown, we hugged and cried and promised to write letters every day. But time and distance eventually slowed our friendship. With the exception of our brief reunion in Brentwood, we moved into completely separate lives.
I shuddered at the thought of her body lying unattended for ten months. It really bothered me that nobody had missed her. Didn’t the neighbors notice any bad odors? I agreed to meet the attorney at the Westwood office of Abernathy, Porter & Salinger later that afternoon.
After ending my conversation with Deacon Abernathy, I gave my shoulder-length gray curls a once-over with a wide-toothed comb. Then I stuffed my Jacob’s Ladder quilt, my sewing kit, and an emergency package of M&M’S into my large red tote bag and headed for my best friend Lucy Mondello’s house. Today was Tuesday, and I never missed our weekly quilting group. I drove in a daze, trying to make sense of the shocking news about Harriet’s death. What a horrendous way to go—alone and evidently forgotten.
I drove across Ventura Boulevard and wound around a couple of side streets before pulling up in front of Lucy’s house. The Boulevard was a natural dividing line between classes in Encino, one of the many small communities in the San Fernando Valley. Small homes, condos, and apartment buildings were located on the valley floor north of the boulevard. That’s where I lived, in a tract of medium-priced midcentury homes. Houses south of the Boulevard—especially those built in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains—tended to be large, custom-built, and très expensive. Lucy lived somewhere in between: south of the Boulevard, but not in the hills; gracious home, but not a McMansion.
Lucy smiled and greeted me as I pushed open the front door. “Hey, girlfriend. You’re a little late. Everything okay?”
I marveled at how perfectly put together my tall friend Lucy was. She was famous for always dressing with a theme. Today she wore canary-yellow twill slacks, a yellow-and-white long-sleeved T-shirt, and dangly citrine earrings. Her bright orange hair looked freshly colored; her eyebrows were perfectly drawn; her lips were painted a soft coral. Even at sixty-something, Lucy could have been a model. I, on the other hand, wore my usual size-sixteen stretch denim jeans and T-shirt straining under my ample bosom.
“I just had to deal with a last-minute phone call. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you all ab
out it.” I settled down in one of the cozy blue overstuffed chairs in Lucy’s casual living room. Every few years, she changed the décor in her home as easily as she changed her daily outfits. This latest version evoked an elegant cabin located in some snowy resort: furniture upholstered in richly colored woolen fabrics, Navajo and cowhide rugs on wide-planked wooden floors, and a coffee table made of polished burled tree roots. Above the fireplace hung a reproduction of a mainly yellow Remington painting of longhorn cattle. The room literally screamed Wyoming, where both Lucy and her husband, Ray, were born and raised.
“Was it an upsetting call? You look a bit peaky, dear.” That was Birdie Watson, Lucy’s across-the-street neighbor and the third member of our little sewing circle.
I fitted my multicolored Jacob’s Ladder quilt in a fourteen-inch wooden hoop. The Jacob’s Ladder block featured lots of little squares and larger triangles of contrasting light and dark materials. The more fabrics, the more interesting the quilt, and this one had dozens of different cotton prints. I threaded a needle with red quilting thread and looked at my friends.
“I got a letter from an attorney in LA this morning asking me to call him.” I told them about Harriet’s death and my surprise at being named executor of her will after such a long estrangement. “The creepy thing is, she was dead for more than ten months before her body was discovered.”
“How awful!” Birdie, naturally predisposed to worry about people, frowned and twisted the end of her long white braid. Birdie was in her seventies and looked like Mother Earth. She always wore the same thing: white T-shirt (short sleeves in summer, long sleeves in winter), denim overalls, and Birkenstock sandals (with socks) to accommodate her arthritic knees.
Lucy handed me a cup of coffee with milk. “You must have been close, for her to make you executor. Yet, I don’t think I ever heard you mention her name before.”
“We were best friends growing up.” I told them how our teenage friendship didn’t survive our adult lifestyles. “After I moved to Encino, my West LA friends forgot about me, including Harriet.”
Lucy shook her head. “Well, obviously, she didn’t forget about you. Do you know what happened to the husband?”
“I really don’t know any details. I have to see the lawyer this afternoon in order to get poor Harriet buried. The lawyer said he’d explain everything then.”
Birdie tilted her head. “So you’ve decided to go through with becoming the executor? Without knowing what’s involved?”
How could I say this without sounding morbid? “Let’s just say I want to do one last favor for an old friend.”
And I’m curious.
Lucy narrowed her eyes. “Uh-oh. Please tell me you’re not going to get involved in another one of those again.”
Lucy’s voice was more than a tad disapproving as she alluded to my recent penchant for discovering dead bodies and getting sucked into murder investigations. And both times the killers came after me.
“This is way different, Lucy. First of all, the attorney never said we were talking about murder here. Second of all, being the executor of someone’s estate only involves signing papers and selling stuff. There’s nothing to worry about. What could be more straightforward?”
My redheaded friend shivered slightly. “You know, Martha, I’m getting a strong feeling about this.”
Lucy swore she had ESP and could tell when something bad was going to happen. In the past, I dismissed her feelings as some kind of displaced anxiety. But if I were completely honest, I’d have to admit that in the last several months her warnings turned out to be real. Still, the lawyer gave no indication that poor Harriet’s death was anything more than tragically premature.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lucy. Don’t you think I’ve learned my lesson? Don’t you think I’d run straight to the police at the first sign of something suspicious?”
Without hesitating, Lucy and Birdie responded in unison, “No!”
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2014 by Mary Marks
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-9207-0
ISBN-10: 0-7582-9207-4
First Kensington Mass Market Edition: November 2014
eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-9208-7
eISBN-10: 0-7582-9208-2
First Kensington Electronic Edition: November 2014
Table of Contents
KNOT IN MY BACKYARD
Also by Mary Marks
Title Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
Teaser chapter
Teaser chapter
Copyright Page
