Kansas Troubles

by Earlene Fowler

  After the Elvis exhibit came the antique quilts. This section had a theme—A Century of Quilts. It displayed quilts from 1840 through 1940 with small cards giving a corresponding piece of quilt trivia. When the 1840 Chips and Whetstones quilt was made, quilters paid half a cent for a spool of thread; when the 1870 Ocean Waves quilt was being stitched, a whole quilt cost $3.00 to have quilted; and in 1920, when the pastel David and Goliath quilt was finished, Sears was selling American Standard Fancy Calico for ten cents a yard.

  The last exhibit was fun and touching, and the quilters rose to the occasion as they usually do with both humor and warmth. Guild members were asked to show a baby quilt they’d made and tell the story behind its conception—a play on words, playfully intended.

  The display of quilts ran the gamut from a green and blue split rail with tiny cowboys depicted in the background (“Grandpa is a semiprofessional rodeo announcer”) to a red and white nine-patch with miniature baseball bats and gloves embroidered on every other square (“She never missed a Kansas City Chiefs game except the day I delivered her”) to an elaborate appliquéd carousel quilt made with fabric as glittery as jewels (“Her father and I met on a carousel. He was the operator and he let me ride five times for free”). Both of Becky’s daughters’ quilts were Amish. Whitney’s was a Tumbling Blocks design in cool blues, purples, and greens; Paige’s a colorful Amish Baskets in yellow, orange, and browns.

  Customers were already starting to line up when I got back to Janet’s booth. We worked steadily for the next few hours, only speaking when I needed to ask her how to write something up or the price of some unmarked item. By a quarter to nine, the crowd had thinned considerably.

  “Two more days of this,” Janet moaned. She opened the cash box, and her face brightened. “On the other hand, we’ve sold more today than I probably have all week.”

  “Becky told me she advertised within a hundred-mile radius,” I said, sipping on the Coke I had hidden behind some quilted tissue-box holders. “Looks like it did some good, and this is only the preshowing.” I glanced toward the entrance just in time to see Gabe walk in. Relief washed over me. Though I’d never admit it to him, I was still apprehensive and a bit nervous about being run off the road by that truck. It had preyed on my mind the whole day.

  Becky, working the front ticket table, saw Gabe seconds after he walked through the door and pulled him over to the Amish-style opportunity quilt to start her raffle-ticket pitch. He pulled out his wallet as she talked and handed her some bills, at the same time searching the crowded room. I waved when his eyes swept past Janet’s booth, and his tense face relaxed. He smiled, his teeth vividly white against his dark skin. I watched him follow Becky to the raffle table, enjoying the view of him from the back as much as his smile.

  “I remember when Lawrence used to look at me that way,” Janet said.

  I turned to her. “What?”

  “The way Gabe looks when he sees you.” Her voice held an edge of bitterness.

  “Believe me,” I said wryly, “he has his irritating moments. He can be very domineering at times. And stubborn as an old mule.”

  “And I bet he’s not the only one.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Our conversation had taken an uncomfortable turn, and it happened so fast, I wasn’t sure what caused it or exactly how to react.

  “Lawrence called me today,” she said, her eyes glued to the stacks of bills. Her neck flushed a pale shade of pink. “He said Gabe dropped by the club and was asking an awful lot of questions about Tyler. Do you know why he’d be doing that? Is he working with Dewey?” Her tone had a light but definite confrontational tone to it.

  I played with the pop-top on my can of Coke. “I don’t know, Janet. Maybe you should ask Gabe.”

  Tightening her lips, she pulled out a fistful of bills and started separating them into piles on the table. “You know, people who don’t know all the details about things shouldn’t be making hasty judgments. You know what they say about walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins.”

  I tossed my empty can into the waste basket. “Do you need my help tomorrow?” I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

  Her tone turned contrite. “No, Megan should be here. Thanks so much for helping me, Benni. I really owe you for today.”

  I studied her face, involuntarily reaching up to touch the side of mine, not wanting to think what I was thinking. Were her earlier words a subtle threat? Did her eyes shift guiltily when I touched my face? Or was I starting to see things where nothing existed?

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “It was fun, really. I’d better go now before Becky talks Gabe into spending his police retirement on raffle tickets.”

  Janet gave a half smile and started stacking quarters. “Becky’s a born saleswoman, no doubt about that.”

  I walked up behind Gabe, who was contemplating the table of flyers that advertised the various quilt shows and quilting products and services available in the Central Kansas area. I circled his waist with my arms and laid my head against his solid back. “Hey, good lookin’. Whatcha got cookin’?”

  He laughed and pulled me around to the front of him, hugging me warmly. “Nothing I can show you in public, but it’s definitely of gourmet quality.”

  “Brother,” I said. “Give a guy an inch, and he thinks he owns the whole forest.”

  “Your metaphors are a bit convoluted, but I’ll let it pass. You hungry?”

  “Not really. I just had pizza. Are you?”

  “Starved.”

  “Is your mom cooking dinner?”

  “No, I told her you and I were going into Wichita to eat.”

  “So no one can eavesdrop?”

  “Exactly.”

  “What did you find out?” I asked the minute we were in the car.

  “Pull back on the reins there, Calamity Jane. Give me a chance to put the car in Drive.” On the way to Wichita, he told me there’d been so much activity at the rodeo that he couldn’t pinpoint anyone’s movements for very long. “We’re back to where we started with everyone being suspect.”

  “I found out something,” I said. “I think.”

  A smoldering look started in his eyes. “I thought we agreed you were going to keep a low profile.”

  “I am.” I reached over and stroked the back of his hair. “Calm your ruffled tail feathers, Friday. Janet volunteered this information. She said she talked to Lawrence, and he was suspicious about the questions you were asking about him and Tyler. I’m sure they had or were having an affair.”

  “Did she say they were?”

  “No, but I could hear it in her voice.”

  “Well,” he said, pulling into the parking lot of the Eastgate Mall. “This time I think your feelings are right on the mark. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I think Lawrence and Tyler did have something going on.” We stopped in front of a busy, yuppie-style cafe called Willie C’s. The decor was fifties nostalgia and the food a nineties version of home-style cooking. Gabe ordered a chicken fajita salad, and I ordered cherry cobbler à la mode. Above us, a Hamm’s Beer bear in red cowboy boots revolved on a pedestal while Elvis sang about being all shook up. The Friday night crowd was loud enough that no one could possibly overhear us.

  “So,” I said. “The question is, when did they have their affair, was it still going on, and why would he kill her.”

  “Or why would Janet kill her.” In an instant, amidst all the noise and music, Gabe’s eyes drooped, and a sadness seemed to weight his features. I reached across the table and took his hand. Again, in my eagerness to solve the puzzle of Tyler’s murder, I’d forgotten these people were his friends and that the consequences of this would probably haunt him the rest of his life.

  “Let’s forget it while we eat,” I said. “That was all I got from Janet, and you can tell me the rest later.”

  He nodded and picked up his fork. As we ate, I told him about the the various quilts in the show, which guild entry won my vote, the Elvis Challen
ge, the stories behind the baby quilts. His face started to relax, and by the time we were done, I’d almost managed to erase the sadness in his eyes.

  He reached across the table and took my hand, interlocking our fingers. “It’s good to hear your voice. I missed you today.”

  “Me, too.” I squeezed his hand and smiled. “I wish we were back home in San Celina. Alone.”

  He lifted his dark eyebrows, a smile in his eyes. “There’s a La Quinta Inn on the other side of the parking lot. I could get us a room.”

  “Sixty-some dollars for just a couple of hours?”

  “Right now I’d pay five hundred bucks for an hour with you.”

  I feigned hurt. “Just five hundred? I’m insulted. I figure I’m worth at least a thousand.”

  “Women. You can never satisfy them.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’ve done all right by me.”

  He laughed. “Just all right?”

  Before I could answer, the waitress brought our check. On the way out to the car, we resumed talking about the quilt show.

  “Did Becky have any of her quilts there?” Gabe asked.

  “Yes, and you’d better drop by tomorrow and see them so she doesn’t get her feelings hurt. She’s got a cute Elvis quilt based on his ‘Clam Bake’ song in Blue Hawaii—the clams’ mouths actually move—and one in the general show—a Solomon’s Puzzle quilt with a black background that shows a really interesting combination of positive and negative space, and there are also two baby quilts she made for Paige and Whitney.”

  “I can’t believe how much those girls have grown,” he said as he started driving out of the parking lot. “It seems like only yesterday that Becky was pregnant with Whitney. I remember visiting when she was eight months along. She sat in my mom’s recliner sewing on that quilt. She was as big as a barn and cranky as a—”

  “That’s it!” I grabbed Gabe’s arm, causing him to swerve and just miss sideswiping a Toyota full of teenagers.

  “Benni, watch it!”

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It was right there in front of my face! Geeze, sometimes I can be such a dope.”

  He pulled the car to a stop in a vacant part of the dark parking lot. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  “The wall hanging that Tyler made,” I said, so excited I could barely contain myself. “It’s not a wall hanging at all. Gabe, I think it’s a baby quilt.”

  THIRTEEN

  “BABY QUILT?” GABE sounded skeptical. “Why would you think that?”

  “It makes sense. I’ll bet my last healthy heifer that she went down to Arkansas to have a baby and made the quilt while she was waiting for it to be born. Think about it. Six months. She’d just start showing at three or four months, so the timing fits. I bet she stayed with T.K.’s family or somebody he knew. Maybe we can pry it out of him. Isn’t there some way we can find out from the autopsy if she’d recently had a baby?”

  He shook his head. “Slow down there, Calamity. I think you’re reaching now. There’s no way I can ask a question like that without having the sheriff’s department climb all over me.”

  I sat back in the seat, frustrated. “This would have been a lot easier in San Celina. We’d have all the medical reports at our fingertips.”

  “We?” He gave a sardonic grunt and restarted the car. “First off, we wouldn’t have anything. I would. Frankly I wish we were in San Celina because then I’d have some control. Right now, I feel like—”

  “A civilian who can’t get any information? Welcome to the club, Chief. Now you know what it feels like.”

  “You were attacked once. I don’t intend for it to happen again.”

  “Look, we have to find out if that really is a baby blanket. If one of those men got her pregnant, maybe that’s a motive. Maybe all that money in her bank account came from a blackmailing scheme. Maybe—”

  “Maybe you’d better just slow down there. You’re making more out of this so-called baby quilt than is really there. It’s a common problem among inexperienced detectives. They tend to manufacture evidence out of the smallest, most insignificant details.”

  “It’s not insignificant,” I snapped, turning to gaze out my window. “I wish you’d just take me seriously for once.”

  We didn’t speak again until we pulled up in his mother’s driveway.

  He turned off the ignition and turned to me. “Sweetheart, let’s not argue about this. I’m sorry if you think I’m not taking you seriously. I just want you to be safe.”

  “Or maybe you’re afraid I might solve this first and show you up.”

  “You’re getting juvenile now. Your impetuousness has landed you in some tight spots that so far you have managed to squeeze out of without too much harm. This time you might not be as lucky.”

  “I’m trying to think this through before doing anything, but you won’t let me. That’s not impetuous.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

  He played with the turn signal, clicking it back and forth, his eyes straight ahead. Finally he gave a small growl and hit the steering wheel. “Woman, tu me vuelves loco!”

  “Friday, you make me crazy, too. But at least I’m open-minded enough to listen to other people’s ideas.”

  He pointed a finger at me. “I still think it’s farfetched, but I’ll listen. Just what do you plan on doing with this cockeyed theory of yours?”

  “You know what they say, a cop is only as good as his sources.”

  “In all my years in law enforcement, I’ve never heard anyone say that.”

  “Okay, maybe I heard it on TV. Anyway, I have a great source who can find out whether Tyler did have a baby in Arkansas, providing she gave birth in a place where they keep records.”

  “What source?” he asked suspiciously.

  “My cousin Emory in Sugartree.”

  He groaned and laid his head back against the headrest. “I’m afraid to ask. Just how are you related?”

  “His father, Boone Littleton, is my third or fourth cousin. I think. His daddy and Dove’s daddy were first cousins by marriage, but then Boone married my mom’s third cousin, Ervalean, so I think I’m related to Emory on both sides. Emory’s a year younger than me, and we used to play together when Dove and I visited Aunt Garnet in Sugartree.”

  “And just how is Cousin Emory going to help?”

  “He’s a newspaper reporter, sort of. And sort of a private detective.”

  Gabe’s eyebrows went up. “And how is someone sort of a newspaper reporter, sort of a private detective?”

  “Well, you know how the economy is in Arkansas these days. Emory made it all the way to his last year in law school, then had to drop out ’cause Boone’s smoked chicken business took a downturn, and he couldn’t pay Emory’s tuition. The thing is, Emory’s a real sweetheart, but he’s not the brightest guy in the world by any means, so that let out any scholarships. But Boone has lots of contacts, being in the chicken business for so long, so he pulled some strings and got Emory a job at the Bozwell Courier Tribune. Bozwell’s a town south of Sugartree, and Boone practically supports the newspaper with his chicken advertising. Anyway, it turned out that Emory was actually pretty good at reporting, being the type of guy you just can’t help telling your whole life story to, and so he even did a little investigative reporting, such as it is in the Bozwell-Sugartree area. His claim to fame is finding the governor’s mother’s kidnapped poodle, though it was quite by accident during an afternoon tête-à-tête with the daughter of a man running a puppy mill. He collected quite a substantial reward, and of course the exposure got him more clients and—Why are you laughing?”

  “Tell me, do any of these cousins have two thumbs?”

  I scowled at him.

  “Sorry.” He held up his hands. “Just run that last part by me again. I got lost somewhere between the kidnapped chickens and smoked poodles.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “The point I was trying to make is that Emory has a lot of contacts both from his l
aw school days in Little Rock and his newspaper job. Those postcards were postmarked Little Rock. Maybe he can use those contacts to find out if Tyler had a baby there. ”

  “I still think you’re going overboard on this baby quilt theory.”

  “All it will cost us is a phone call.”

  “I guess it can’t hurt. Just let me know what he finds out. Immediately. Promise.” He gave me a stern look.

  “On my honor, Chief Ortiz. Honestly, you really need to learn to trust your investigators a little more.” I climbed out and looked toward the house. “All the lights are on. It looks like your mom waited up for us.”

  “I guess some things never change.”

  “She knows something’s going on,” I said, following him up the steps. “Maybe we should go ahead and tell her.”

  He grabbed my upper arm and stopped me before I could open the front door. “No, Benni. It’s not that I don’t trust Mom, but she’s taught a lot of these people, and some of their parents are her closest friends. I don’t want to place that burden on her.”

  “Okay,” I said, sighing. “I just hate her thinking that we’re arguing about something petty. She already thinks you made a big mistake when you married me.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” he said evenly. “You’re just overly sensitive.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m going to call Emory right away.”

  He glanced at his watch. “It’s past eleven.”

  “Emory’s a real night owl. Always was, even as a kid. If I know him, he’s just getting warmed up.”

  Kathryn was awake, but already in her bedroom. While Gabe went in to tell her good night, I dialed Arkansas. Just as I suspected, Emory was wide-awake and primed to chitchat the night away. After we went through the litany of family gossip with me pointedly leaving out Dove’s latest adventure, he said in his smooth Arkansas drawl, “Okay, cuz, as much of a pleasure this has been talkin’ to your sweet self, you’re wantin’ something. Am I right?”