by Terri Thayer
At the bottom, I stopped. I could hear my own breath sounding like I’d just run the Rock n’ Roll marathon. I forced myself to quiet, holding my breath and let it out slowly through my nose.
I heard a gasp. My heart did a flip.
A light flickered and then came on.
Ursula sat up in a twin bed that took up most of the wall opposite me. The room was small, maybe six feet square. The walls had been wallpapered a long time ago in a classic William Morris pattern that had been popular a hundred years ago.
“Jesus! Dewey!”
Ursula was shaking. She pulled the covers up to her neck, fingers twitching. The bed was covered in a wildly colorful crazy quilt, very much like the cape she’d been wearing on the cliffs on Tuesday morning.
I’d found Ursula’s lair.
The room was sparsely furnished. Just a small writing desk that held a sewing machine, a three-drawer wooden dresser. No closet, no bathroom. The window high above the bed was the one I’d seen from outside earlier.
“This is where you live while you’re at Asilomar?” I asked in disbelief. As sanctuaries go, it was one step above the Underground Railroad shelters I’d seen in historical homes back east.
She looked around the room. “It’s lovely. You don’t know what it means to have a place of my own.”
Even if it was a dingy room, walled off and forgotten.
“How?” I asked. My legs felt rubbery, and I leaned against the ladder I just descended.
“Mercedes gives me the money that Paul pays her for the conference.”
Paul Wiggins was such a creep. What did you have to do to a woman to make her feel like her best shot at a life was one week a year in a room no better than a cell? Jail comes in all forms. This felt to her like freedom.
“She doesn’t charge me much for this.”
Good ole Mercedes. Making sure she got her cut. I couldn’t believe she made Ursula pay anything for these accommodations.
But I had another woman trapped in a jail of sorts that I needed to rescue.
“Ursula, I’ve come for the sewing bird.”
“What?” she said, her fingers had stopped convulsing and color was returning to her face. “You can’t have it. It’s my ticket out of here,” she said
“Where is it?” I said. I straightened, trying to recover a more powerful position. Ursula sat up higher, tossing the quilt off her shoulders, and putting her feet into hard-soled slippers that were under her bed. She stood, too. She was wearing gray sweatpants and a matching shirt. No pretty pajamas for her. She must always be prepared to flee.
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you.”
“Paul is looking for you. He wonders where you are,” I said. I didn’t want to threaten her with her husband, but I needed some leverage. “Do you want me to tell him where you are?”
Her face pinched. The wrinkles around her mouth told me this was a familiar expression. Pinched and scared. I felt sick at how much my words had frightened her. It was an empty threat. I needed the sewing bird, but I couldn’t sacrifice her to get it.
“It’s hidden,” she whispered. “You’ve got to give me time to get away. I’ll really kill myself this time.”
I doubted that. Whatever strength she’d pulled on through the years was enough to keep her sane and healthy even while married to a psychopath. Why would she give up her life now? Now that it was about to change so much.
I paced the length of her room. What was I going to do to protect her? And get Kym?
An old treadle sewing machine was set up in the corner. I’d heard about these machines, requiring no electrical power, running on pedal power. I turned on another gas lamp that sat next to it and looked at what she was working on. More crazy blocks. Strips of fabrics and muslin squares lay on the sewing machine bed. Several finished blocks were laid out. The fabrics were sewn willy-nilly with a randomness that was appealing. She’d been using silks, and their sheen was dazzling.
The crazy block was her block of choice.
Ursula should have been safe in her own home, but she was not. We’re searched at the airports, we’re wiretapped. The politicians worry us about our borders, from the terrorists without—but for Ursula, the terror was behind her front door. Her home was not a sanctuary. Just the opposite. The only peace she got was once a year at this quilt retreat. Seven days out of three hundred sixty-five.
I picked up a block and examined it. The fabrics were slippery smooth. Her cape had been made of many of these hodge-podge blocks. It seemed like there was no order to them, no rhyme or reason. The pieces were large and small, three-sided, five-sided. It didn’t matter. Somehow they worked together and formed a cohesive whole.
These were the pieces of Ursula’s life held together with thread. Chaotic, but beautiful.
She spoke quietly. “He’d stopped beating me three years ago.”
I looked up in surprise. “He stopped hitting you? So why leave him now?” I asked.
She sat heavily on the bed, looking into the distance. I followed her gaze but could see nothing. She was lost in her own world. A place I couldn’t follow her.
“It was worse than being hit.”
She didn’t say any more. Finally I said, “I don’t get it.”
Her voice was small. She picked up the pillow on her bed, and hugged it, pulling it close to her heart.
“I don’t know if I can make you understand,” she buried her face in the down.
“Try,” I said.
She gnawed on the side of her thumb. “It wasn’t all bad, you know. After he’d beat me, he was so sorry. He’d leave me alone for a few months. During that time, he was sweet and caring, the best husband anyone could want.”
Her face softened, the lines around her mouth disappearing. Her forehead smoothed, and her hands clasped her elbows. She looked pretty as she thought about the good times in her life.
She closed her eyes, as though she didn’t want to see what was coming. “Then the cycle would start again. It would always begin in the same way, with him growing short and impatient about little things. I fed the fish too much. I opened the window when there was pollen outside. I closed the window. Didn’t I know he needed a cross breeze? I could tell when he was building up a head of steam. A laundry list of my failings as a wife. And I knew what was coming next. A beating.”
She was so matter of fact. And then he’d beat me.
I tried to imagine Buster laying his hands on me in any way but a loving manner. His hands that loved me, tickled me, teased me, brought me happiness over and over again. I pictured myself arm-in-arm with him, walking down the street, knowing that that fist would be raised against me, but I couldn’t do it.
Ursula said, “I knew that was the way it worked. I put up with it. I was willing to take the good with the bad.”
She pushed the pillow away. She saw I wasn’t getting it. “You can handle anything as long as it’s consistent. But about three years ago, after I’d been coming here alone for years without attending class, he just stopped.”
I held my breath. That could have been the beginning of a new life for her.
“We never talked about it. For months I waited for the familiar pattern to emerge. The holidays were always a tense time in our household, but Thanksgiving and Christmas passed without incidents.”
That was good, I thought.
She rubbed her stomach as though she had a tummy ache that wouldn’t stop throbbing. I wondered about her broken body. How many aches and pains she must have, remnants from the brutality. How jeopardized her health was. How much life did she have left?
“At first, it was great. I went out to work for the first time in years. I started working in a shop, making pattern samples. I volunteered at the quilt museum.”
I felt my own stomach tense as though I k
new a blow was coming. Mercedes had wanted to keep us secure at Asilomar. It was too late now. No one was safe. Kym was locked up by Quentin. Safety was an illusion.
“As time passed and he still didn’t hit me, the anticipation got worse. I could never let my guard down. I was sure he was going to beat me again. I couldn’t concentrate on quilting. I was like a dam, ready to burst.”
“I began to wish he would give me a beating. I was always girded against that moment, but it never came.”
“For the first time in my life, I was having a life outside my house, outside my one week in Asilomar a year.”
Her world had been so small.
“And I began to worry about losing it. When it was just me and Paul, I had nothing to compare my life to. I’d left home at eighteen and married Paul and spent the next thirty years living my life at his whim.”
“So maybe he’s a changed man.” If I believed people could change, Paul had to have that chance too. I’d thought he was a murderer, but Quentin had put the lie to that.
“The longer it went on, I wanted to believe that. I’d heard that older men change. They lose testosterone and they mellow. The rages of his youth might be over.”
She looked up at me, her eyes sad. “But I couldn’t enjoy anything, just waiting. It was horrible. My life, as I knew it, was over.”
Her voice changed, became more animated. “Last year, here, I asked Mercedes to help me get out. She said she knew people. She’d help me find a safe place, far away from Paul, far away from his fists. The threats, the not knowing. All I had to do was get some money together.”
Her voice fell again as she relived the torture that was her life. “I had no way of doing that. Paul still monitored my cell, my e-mails, my credit cards. I had no money of my own except for the little money I made at the quilt shop. That wasn’t going to be enough to start over.”
I fingered one of the blocks, feeling the rides and bumps caused by the seams coming together. I didn’t dare say a word. Ursula was lost in her story.
“Then Mercedes told me about a sewing tool laying forgotten in the drawers in the back room of the quilt museum. No one would ever miss it. The museum receives so much stuff from well-meaning people, they don’t have time to catalogue everything. It was in a bin with other sewing implements, yet to be inventoried.”
Finally, the sewing bird.
“She would pay me ten thousand dollars for it.”
“She was buying it for Quentin?” I asked.
She nodded. “He’d been looking for the Rose Box and the missing piece for years. Mercedes knew Nan had the box. Quentin was willing to pay fifty thousand dollars.”
But that hadn’t been enough for Mercedes.
“It was surprisingly easy to steal. I put it in my purse during one of my docent tours. Mercedes was right, no one cared about it.”
She was silent for a moment.
“How did she die?” she asked quietly. She wanted me to let her off the hook.
I said, “My guess is that she told Quentin she wanted more money. She probably threatened him with her gun, like she did Paul, but instead Quentin used it against her.”
I shuddered at the idea that I’d been holding a loaded gun and hadn’t realized it.
Ursula looked as though she might throw up.
I said, “Quentin was looking for the bird. The room was trashed. He’d torn the place apart. Didn’t you hear him? Didn’t you hear the shot?”
She shook her head. “I can’t hear much. There’s a wall with the plumbing for the bathrooms between my room and hers. My only exit was the way you just came down. Mercedes would knock on the floor of the closet to let me know the coast was clear. I’d come up, and use the bathroom at night when no one was around. Once every couple of days, I’d shower in her room.”
“No one knew you were here? Not even Kym?” I asked.
“Lord, no. It was just between Mercedes and I. She’d discovered this room one year and decided I could use it.”
“And that day? The day she was killed? You didn’t hear anything?”
She shook her head. “After a while, I went up into the living room. I looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anything.”
That was when she’d laid the sewing bird down on my blueprint fabric. The open curtain had let in enough light to expose the image onto my piece.
I said, “Give me the sewing bird.”
“I don’t have it.”
My heart sunk like a stone in the ocean. I felt myself go cold. A picture of Kym, helpless, lifeless crossed my mind and I felt myself curl up in pain.
“I have to have the sewing bird. Quentin has my sister-in-law. He wants that tool.”
Ursula was shaking her head slowly from side to side. “I’m sorry. I feel for your sister-in-law, I do, but I gave the bird to Mercedes.”
I pictured Kym as she was right now, tied up in that dingy room. She would be so unhappy when she woke up and realized that she hadn’t washed her hair today. Her fingernails were probably cracked, and her lip gloss nowhere to be found. I couldn’t imagine how itchy she would be after a night without her medication.
I’d often wanted to shut Kym up, and gagging her had often crossed my mind when we’d worked together at QP. This was beyond anything even I’d imagined for Kym, and I’d come up with some pretty exotic tortures when she worked for me. I’d once envisioned her buried under a shipment of batting, and would have gladly sewed her mouth shut many times.
The last thing I wanted was for Kevin to see his wife like that. Or worse. If she didn’t get out … that wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t let that happen.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
She thinned her lips, her body shaking from the effort of not telling me where the bird was. Her eyes gave her away, straying to the dresser against the wall.
I walked the several steps to the dresser and pulled out a drawer, dumping the contents on the floor. Several bras and panties fell to the floor. Ursula gasped.
“Where is it?” I yelled. “Tell me.”
She clutched the pillow to her. She acted as though I was hitting her. I felt sick to my stomach.
I yelled, “Do you realize Quentin will kill you? He’s not going to give up. This bird is more to him than a collectible, it’s a family heirloom. A lost legacy that means more to him than life. Especially your life.”
I pulled open the second drawer, pulling out the T-shirts and jeans that occupied it. I ran my hand around the inside to make sure it was empty. I turned the drawer over. Ursula grunted as though in pain.
“You’ll spend the rest of your life running from two men, Paul and Quentin. Let me help you, Ursula. You can create a life worth living. You can be happy.”
She began to weep.
The third drawer fell forward too easily and I knew it held the prize. I upended it, her pieces of fabric, thread, and scissors falling to the floor. Taped on the back was the sewing bird, the weight making the drawer top heavy.
I ripped away the duct tape that held it to the underside. The sewing bird that held the key to Kym’s safety dropped into my hand. A great wave of relief washed over me.
I sat on the bed next to Ursula and rubbed her arm. She leaned away from me.
I pulled her to her feet. “Let me help you get out of here. My car is the red Honda in the lot next door. You can’t miss it. It has a QP sign on the side.”
I gave her my car keys.
“Take my car.”
I scribbled my address on a scrap of paper. “Go to my house in San Jose. That other key will open the back door. Go. We’ll figure out what to do with you later. Just get out of town. Away from Paul and Quentin.”
She made up her mind and scrambled up the ladder, faster than I thought a woman her age could move. I followed her, a
nd we both dashed outside. She went to the parking lot.
I had fifteen minutes on Quentin’s deadline. I dialed Buster’s cell and got the same message, the caller was not available. Tony must have taken him well into the woods, looking for the mountain lion’s lair. He was having a wonderful time, backpacking with my brother while I needed him here. I felt a surge of anger at both of them. Kym was Tony’s sister-in-law, too. Buster was best friends with Kevin. Why weren’t they around when I needed them?
I shook off the self-pity.
I had only a few minutes before it was time to meet Quentin and trade this silly sewing tool for my sister-in-law. If it meant he got away with killing Mercedes, there was nothing I could do about it.
The leaves on the trees were dripping with fog. The overhead telephone lines were humming. The fog disguised the outlines of the buildings, softening edges and blurring the angles of the trees. A huge raven landed in front of me, startling me. She pulled at the edges of a potato chip bag and raced away as I approached. Gulls’ cries sounded sadder than ever.
___
Quentin was waiting for me at the door to the maintenance room.
“I want to see Kym,” I told Quentin.
“No. You’re going to have to take my word that she’s okay,” he said.
I stood my ground. “Not good enough.”
“She said to tell you to hurry up because her hair is frizzing in the fog.”
That was proof she was alive. I nearly laughed. She was alive and not too frightened to worry about her looks.
“Where’s the sewing bird?” he demanded.
I ignored his question. I had to maintain some control over the conversation. “Do you have the Rose Box here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we make sure the tool fits in it?”
“I know it’s the right tool. Hand it over. I need to be on my way back to New Orleans.”
He looked at his watch. “My car is due here in five minutes.”
“Well I guess it wasn’t about the money, then.”
“It’s always been about family honor, Dewey. Something you don’t know much about.”
