Ocean Waves

by Terri Thayer

  I wanted to be free of his oppressive presence. “Mr. Wiggins, you need to go to the police. Tell them you think it’s your wife. They will keep you apprised.”

  He nodded, and started plodding back toward the scene. His shoulders slumped. I watched him for several moments, but he wasn’t making much headway.

  I turned into the Asilomar grounds. Paul called to me.

  “Keep your eyes and ears open back at Asilomar. This has something to do with Sewing-by-the-Sea. I know it.”

  I shook off his parting shot. He was almost right. I was the reason Ursula had leapt into the ocean. She was trying to escape from her predator, her husband. The man I’d brought onto the grounds.

  Ursula had killed herself because her husband had nearly found her. She had to realize that there was no escaping him.

  How had she found out about Paul’s visit to Asilomar?

  There was only one way that Ursula could have found out that Paul was here. Mercedes. I had to find her and get to the bottom of things.

  Breakfast was over. I looked into the empty dining hall but there was no sign of Mercedes. I couldn’t believe it was only 9:30 a.m. So much was going on, just down the road a mile or so, out of sight.

  I strode past the dining hall and up the hill past Merrill Hall, its majestic façade like a stone ship rising from the earth.

  All of the residence halls at Asilomar were designed with a common room on the first floor. Many of these rooms were dominated by a fireplace, and most had a piano. These rooms were left unlocked around the clock so that visitors could enjoy all aspects of Asilomar.

  Mercedes was using the living room of the Pirates’ Den as an office. The building had two public bathrooms off the living room, and five sleeping rooms. The land sloped behind the building, so the back half also had a lower level, which housed another private room.

  I could see Mercedes sitting at a pine table set under the window on top of a vein-patterned green carpet. Two chairs with burnished leather seats and padded arms were pulled away from the wall. Papers were spread out on the table. I was glad the orange curtains were closed against the view of pine trees, feeding deer, and the ocean in the distance. Too pretty for this discussion.

  As I entered, the bathroom door swung closed. I heard the water running as I walked into the room.

  “Mercedes, a woman fell into the ocean,” I said.

  Mercedes looked up from her paperwork, unfocused, her finger holding her place on the spreadsheet she had in front of her. She obviously did not comprehend what I’d said.

  “That’s too bad,” she said and went back to her work.

  “Mercedes,” I said. “I think you know her.”

  She tilted her head. “Was it one of my students?”

  “It’s worse than that,” I said. “Paul Wiggins thinks it might be his wife, Ursula. Did you tell her he was here?”

  Mercedes’ gaze unfocused, her pencil eraser tapping her bright white teeth again and again. She was leaving little pink bits behind. Her orthodontist would not approve.

  “Ursula? No way. I told you two yesterday that she’s not attending the conference this year. She didn’t sign up.”

  “Well, she was here. She threw herself off a rock a half mile from where we are standing,” I said.

  Mercedes pointed her pencil at me. She tapped the pages in front of her. “I don’t know anything about that. She’s not a part of the conference.”

  “The police will want to talk to you.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got my hands full. I’m dealing with a kosher student’s meals and an asthmatic complaining about the tree pollen. A diabetic who’s misplaced her insulin.” She shook her files at me. “I’ll talk to them if they come, but I’ve got a lot of immediate concerns. A former student is not one of them.”

  A fat raccoon trundled by the open door and I shivered.

  An extremely short, and mostly round, woman burst through the opening. Her generous chest was heaving and her cheeks were mottled.

  Mercedes stood up. “Concordia, please take a breath. You’ll hyperventilate and pass out.” Again, she muttered under her breath.

  Concordia made a beeline to Mercedes, stepping on my toe without acknowledging my presence. I stumbled out of the way. The pain was intense.

  “You’re doing this on purpose. My classroom is freezing. Last year it was too hot. You must come to my room and correct the situation. Now.”

  I recognized Concordia Filleto as an international quilting teacher, known for her unreasonableness. The internet group of shop owners I belonged to talked about her long lists of requests—no, demands—including a golf date for her husband, a cooler full of iced Diet Lemon Coke, a supply of no-longer manufactured flower-headed straight pins, a design wall of certain proportions, and an aide to help her show off her quilts.

  Mercedes looked at me. It was obvious she was going to have her hands full for awhile. “I suggest you get your butt back to your class, Dewey. You’ve paid for it, now go. Let the police do their work.”

  “But Ursula?” I said. Concordia’s head whipped my way when I said her name. She glanced back at Mercedes.

  “Paul Wiggins is a psychopath, Dewey. You’d do well to stay out of his way. Every word he speaks is a lie. Remember that,” Mercedes said. Concordia seemed to agree.

  I went out of the building.

  The police and Coast Guard were doing their thing. Getting in their way was not an option. I would wait until after lunch to go to class. I didn’t want to disrupt the teaching and I was sure I wouldn’t be able to concentrate very well. I needed to talk to someone from my real life.

  I’d call the store, using our video-conferencing set up. I’d like to talk to Buster, but didn’t want to give Mercedes an excuse to be mad at me. I’d try him later.

  I took my laptop into the administration building and set myself up at a wooden table. I’d be talking out loud right in the middle of the room that bustled with people coming and going, but it couldn’t be helped. I felt self-conscious but was desperate to touch base.

  Luckily, Vangie was at her computer and answered my signal. She batted away a curl that had wandered onto her cheek.

  She smiled and pulled a funny face when she saw me. “Hey, girlfriend.”

  The sight of her grin lifted my spirits. She and I had been through a lot in the past year, and the adversity had made us closer. She was the first one, after Buster, to whom I told all my troubles.

  But we’d had a tiff just before I’d left for Asilomar. She hadn’t approved of my choice of class here at the seminar: Legendary Quilts. The class had appealed to me because I knew I could manage it. A lot of the offerings here were geared to the experienced quilter. I wasn’t good enough to tackle anything too complex. My quilt-making skills were severely limited. Vangie knew that, but she thought I was dogging it here. Wasting my time. I had to make sure that didn’t happen.

  She’d finally conceded that my coming might bring us new customers. There were three hundred quilters here, after all. She’d made sure I had plenty of business cards.

  “How is Legendary Quilts going?” she’d asked. Even through the screen, I could see her eyes flashing.

  “Great. Cinnamon is an amazing teacher.”

  “Cinnamon?” Vangie said. “Her parents named her after a spice?”

  “I guess she’s lucky she’s not Turmeric,” I said.

  “Marjoram,” Vangie countered. “’Hello, my name is Marjoram. Marjoram I am.’”

  I laughed as Vangie babbled, Dr. Suess style. She always knew how to brighten my day.

  “So what’s it like there?” she asked.

  Hmmm … no cell phone, my car keys in lockup, the negative comments at breakfast about QP, a woman flying off the rocks into the ocean. I didn’t really want to talk about
what was going on here.

  “How are things there?” I asked.

  She looked away.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Vangie cracked the knuckle on her thumb and took a sip from her water bottle. I waited, my stomach knotting. This couldn’t be good.

  “The new hire brought her five-year-old to work yesterday. And her knitting.”

  My heart sunk. “Did you fire her?”

  “I thought I’d leave that for you. As sucky as she is, I need the body until you get back.”

  Vangie and I had been unlucky when it came to replacing Kym at the store. People quit after several weeks or were just plain lazy when they realized it was not fun and games. We had to fire one who did nothing but talk all day. The customers couldn’t get a word in.

  I tried to put on a happy face. “Who knows? Maybe that’s the real reason I’m here. I’ll meet someone here who’s perfect to fill Kym’s shoes.”

  “Size six, Dooney & Burke?” Vangie laughed. “With glitter toes and a handmade bow?”

  Our conversation was interrupted by a bell ringing loudly. The girl behind the registration desk was pulling on a rope which was strung through the rafters and attached to a large church or school bell, which was now moving back and forth, deafening me—the signal for lunch.

  I gave up on the call and joined the line of quilters filing into the dining hall, happy to be anonymous in the crowd. I heard talk about a woman going into the ocean, but it seemed to go nowhere. No one knew who she was. I didn’t fill in what I knew. I grabbed my meal and sat at a table where I knew no one, letting the chit chat about sewing machines, grandchildren, and yoga float over my head.

  ___

  In class, after lunch, the women settled into their seats, cooing and rustling like morning doves.

  Lucy whispered, “I missed you this morning.”

  I nodded, without explaining where I had been. Lucy didn’t look satisfied, but she didn’t ask any more questions. I was ready to throw myself into this class, eager to forget the morning’s drama. “Where’s Harriet?” I asked, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t there.

  “She didn’t come today either,” Lucy said. “Not feeling good.”

  Today, Cinnamon wore jeans and a T-shirt, covered with an oversized man’s denim shirt that was dotted with paint.

  “We’re going to concentrate on the foundation of our piece today,” Cinnamon said. She pointed to her three by four feet wall hangings. The goal of the class was to make a similar piece.

  “Do you see that the backgrounds are always traditional blocks?”

  I strained to see what she was saying. She traced the line of a block on a quilt that featured a fishing pond and small boy. There was so much going on, I hadn’t noticed that the backgrounds were made up of pieced blocks. I’d only noticed the subtle changes in colors and textures, not really understanding how those worked in with the large appliqué pieces that made up the story she was telling.

  She pointed to another, with a crooked-roofed house. She told us the cherry tree represented her happy childhood as a tomboy, climbing trees and eating fists full of fruit until she got a bellyache. The backgrounds were mostly blues, with a few greens thrown in.

  “The best thing you can do is give your quilt layers so that the eye never tires of looking at it. The piecing becomes a treasure, something for the observer to notice only after studying the quilt for a few minutes.”

  I tried to unfocus my eyes, to see what lay beneath the pictorial elements.

  As she pointed to the blocks hidden behind the tree branches, she said, “The block I used here is called ‘Hole in the Barn Door,’ because the barn on our property has a chunk taken out of it. I’ve distorted it, changing the angles.”

  She quickly drew the block on the whiteboard with the traditional 90-degree angles. It looked so different. I hadn’t known it was the same block.

  “Spin it any way you want,” she said. “If you use a block that has meaning to you, you will add to the layers of meaning in your quilt.”

  Lucy said, “I’ve always liked Storm at Sea. I wonder if I can incorporate that.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  Cinnamon continued, “I have books up here, with pictures and diagrams of traditional blocks. If you’re not into that, you could always crazy piece your blocks or use some of the slash-and-piece techniques that don’t require matching.”

  “That’s for me,” I muttered. Lucy laughed.

  “Don’t get too hung up on the perfection. I want you to piece these backgrounds quickly and without thinking too much. You should be thinking instead of the story you want to tell.”

  “If I knew what that was …” I muttered.

  “I heard that,” Cinnamon said. “Don’t fret. It’s too early to know what you’re going to do. In fact, if you have an idea, forget it.”

  “Oh, so being clueless is a good thing,” Lucy said.

  “I finally found the right class,” I said.

  Cinnamon was a good sport and laughed. “Glad to have you.”

  She whirled around, braid flying, and clapped her hands.

  “Let’s go. I’m setting the timer for one half-hour. Look at the books. Dig into your fabrics. I will come around and make suggestions. By then, I want you to make your own decisions.”

  I pulled out the fabrics I’d brought. Most of the quilters had carried in suitcases full of material, with bits and pieces left over from other projects. I felt a little self-conscious with my perfectly cut fat quarters of new fabric lines. My fabric had all been bought at the store in the last week or so. It was obvious to me, and everyone else, how new I was to this. I should have raided my mother’s stash. The image of Ursula’s crazy quilt robe on the wet, black rocks kept surfacing. I pushed it away. This was my quilt, not hers.

  I looked through the pattern books and was drawn to a block called Ocean Waves. It seemed appropriate. It had an awful lot of small triangles, though—too complicated for me. I put the idea out of my head, and moved on.

  I had taken the beginning and intermediate quilting classes at the shop with Ina. A death had interrupted my class, but we’d gotten back to the schedule within a couple of weeks. Ina had taught me how to rotary cut safely, how to sew a decent quarter-inch seam allowance, and to measure my borders through the middle of the quilt. I had the basics down. I’d mastered nine patches and gentle curved piecing, and could hand sew an appliqué if someone was holding a gun to my head. I enjoyed it, although not as much as I enjoyed working with Pearl, QP’s resident art quilter.

  Art quilting meant saying goodbye to the rules. It was okay to use fusing or buttons or beads to cover up mistakes you made. In fact, mistakes were considered design opportunities. I loved that phrase, design opportunities.

  But I didn’t have Pearl’s innate talent. Cinnamon’s method of brainstorming and combining old-fashioned piecing with fusible appliqué might work for me.

  Suddenly, Cinnamon was at my elbow, her fingers touching my fabric and rifling the edges. She pulled out several, tossing them aside. She changed the position of several others. The pile instantly looked more interesting.

  “I’d like to do this block,” I said, pointing to a simple nine-patch.

  Cinnamon frowned. “Really? That’s not very challenging.”

  “Well, I’m not a great piecer,” I said.

  “Do you love that block?” she asked.

  I had to admit I didn’t.

  She shook her head. “That won’t do. You have to be in love with the block, so that every time you think about sewing, you can’t wait to get back to your piece. I want your heart to beat faster every time you work on it.”

  She licked her thumb and forefinger and paged through the book. “Stop me when you see something you like.”

 
The Ocean Waves block came into view again, and before I could stop myself I laid my finger on it. She looked at me and smiled. “Oh, yes, I can see by your face that you like this one.”

  “I do,” I said, feeling her enthusiasm spill over to me. “But it’s a complex block. I’m sure I can’t do it,” I said.

  “The triangles are really tiny, and I’m not a good piecer,” I said, feeling my inadequacies weigh me down.

  Cinnamon was studying the page. “Let’s make it simpler.”

  I felt a glimmer of hope. Simple I could do. Maybe.

  “Picture this,” she said, her hands sketching on the handout she’d given us earlier. “One block, blown up to maybe thirty-six inches square.”

  She quickly drew short lines to represent the triangles. “See, you’d have a large empty space in the middle where you could plant your story quilt. The half-square triangles surrounding it would be big, maybe three, four, even five inches square. That’s easy to sew.”

  I tried to imagine what she was saying. She patted my hand. “You can do this,” she said.

  With new enthusiasm, I got out the laptop and pulled up the quilting program. I imported one Ocean Waves block and experimented with enlarging it. I could see what Cinnamon meant more clearly on the computer. When the block was made bigger, the middle unpieced block would become the background and the pieced blocks would act as a border. I could handle sewing blocks that were four inches square. I had a much better chance of my points matching if the fabric pieces I started with were not tiny.

  I felt a surge of creativity. Cinnamon had really sparked my imagination. Ursula’s death seemed far away.

  ___

  I’d been working steadily for more than an hour when Cinnamon called for our attention.

  “It’s magic time, girls,” Cinnamon trilled, her voice sing-songy. We all looked up expectantly.

  “Gather round,” the teacher said, setting down a basin of water. “I want you to witness the wonders of cyanotype.”

  “The what now?” someone asked.