The Christmas Boutique

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “I think I found something,” she said.

  When Agnes showed Claudia the knots, the frayed threads, and the pinprick holes, she studied them intently and nodded. “Something was certainly embroidered here at one point,” she said. “But what? And why would she pick the stitches out afterward, or at least as many as she could without damaging the quilt itself?”

  “I imagine she didn’t,” said Agnes. “My first thought was that one person put the stitches in, and another removed them.”

  “I suppose that’s equally likely. Either way, we circle back to the same questions: What was taken out and why? The quilter used scarlet thread on a beige background, so she wanted the embroidery to be seen. Someone else erased it later.”

  “The late Mrs. Frieberg?”

  “That seems most likely.” Claudia closed one eye and held the pinpricked section close to the other, but after a moment, she sighed and shook her head. “I can’t make out anything. My guess is that the knots were meant to be periods after initials or dots over two letter i’s, but that’s very little to go on. Perhaps if I had a magnifying glass—”

  “Or we could shed some light on our subject,” said Agnes, inspired. “Could you help me hold this in front of the lamp, the one on top of that table?”

  Together they gathered up the quilt, rolling the other edges toward the center and lifting the formerly embroidered section so that it was suspended between themselves and the lamp. Light shone through the tiny holes where the embroidery threads had been removed, illuminating what once might have been three lines of writing, now illegible.

  “I can almost make it out,” said Claudia, squinting. “We need more light.”

  They set the quilt on the sofa, removed the lampshade, and tried again. In the brighter light, more holes were visible, as well as three lines of writing, the ink faded to the faintest of shadows. Claudia widened her eyes, squeezed them shut, looked again, but then drew back, shaking her head. “I can’t read it. It’s impossible.”

  “Why don’t I try?” said Agnes, tactfully refraining from noting that she was ten years younger and might have better vision. Claudia shrugged and stepped aside, and as Agnes peered closely at the pattern of small holes, she noticed a distinct space between two light patterns on the first row. “Two words,” she murmured, and as she spoke, she understood. “The quilter’s first and last names.”

  “Can you make out any letters?”

  “I think the first name begins with an E or a C. The last name . . .” Agnes blinked to rest her eyes and tried again. “The first letter looks like an H, but it could be an M. The surname looks about twice as long as the first name.”

  “That’s not much but it’s a start. What about the second line?”

  “The first letter looks like a W or a V. Capitals are larger,” she added, almost to herself. “Of course they’d be easier to read. But this looks like a capital R, right in the middle of the word, immediately following . . . a straight line. Perhaps a crossbar for a capital H, or a lowercase t? Then there’s a space, then another capital letter, perhaps an O, right before the first of the two scarlet knots.” Insight struck. “Not an O. It’s P.A., for Pennsylvania. The long word that preceded it was surely the quilter’s hometown.”

  “You said the first letter looks like a W?”

  “Or a V. Or perhaps a U.”

  “That straight line could be a hyphen. Wilkes-Barre. What other town in Pennsylvania has a hyphenated name that begins with a W?”

  “That seems about the right length,” said Agnes.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” Claudia’s voice rang with new energy. “This last line must be the date. Can you make out any numbers?”

  “Only the very last. It’s either a five, an eight, or the letter S.”

  “An S wouldn’t make any sense, not at the end of the line.” Claudia nudged Agnes aside in her eagerness to examine it more closely. “The line begins with a long word—‘November’ or ‘December’ would be my guess. As for the year, judging by the fabric and that last digit, if the number indicates the date she completed the quilt, it is almost certainly 1935 or 1938.”

  “Not 1945 or 1948?”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” Claudia acknowledged. “Our quilter might have purchased the fabric in the 1930s but didn’t use it until much later. I myself occasionally use fabric that my mother, aunts, and grandmothers added to our family fabric stash decades ago.”

  Agnes’s eyes were beginning to water from gazing into the lamplight through the tiny holes, and her shoulders ached from the strain of holding up the quilt. With a sigh, she let her arms fall to her sides, careful not to let the quilt touch the unswept floor. Claudia helped her spread it upon the sofa again, and they both stood back to admire it once more in silent wonder. “I never would have thought to search for an artist’s signature,” Agnes said, breaking their reverie. “I’m indebted to you for suggesting it. Thank you.”

  “It’s not much to go on, but I suppose it’s better than nothing. Your mystery quilter is someone with the initials EH or EM or CH or CM, and considering her evident skill, she was a mature woman, not an ingenue.”

  Agnes nodded, but even as a vague sketch of the mysterious quiltmaker began to take shape in her imagination, she realized just how difficult, impossible, even, it would be to find her. “I admit I have no idea what to do next.”

  “I’d send photos of the quilt to every fabric shop and quilt guild in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,” said Claudia. “Your quilter bought her fabric and notions somewhere, and she surely showed the finished quilt to a friend or two. Someone will recognize it, even if they only glimpsed it from across a room twenty years ago.”

  Agnes fervently hoped she was right.

  She rolled up the quilt—Claudia made her promise never to fold it, which would strain the delicate fibers—and returned it to the muslin wrapper. The energy and excitement that had flowed into Claudia as they examined the quilt seemed to drain from her as she escorted Agnes to the front door. “Please come and visit anytime,” she said as Agnes put on her coat. “Promise to let me know what your search uncovers.”

  “Of course I will.” On a whim, Agnes added, “We spent our entire visit talking about the quilt. Why don’t we meet for lunch on Friday so we can catch up on the other news?”

  “What other news?”

  “Well . . .” Agnes resisted the impulse to rest her hand on her abdomen. “I haven’t told you anything about my job at the Rare Books Archive, and I’m dying to know about your apple orchard adventures. You must be quite an entrepreneur to have launched your own business. I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be. Mostly I just renewed contracts with merchants my father had worked with for years.” And yet for all her scoffing, Claudia looked pleased. “All right. Friday lunch.”

  “Let’s meet at my place. Our entire house would probably fit inside your foyer, but we have a nice dining room and Joseph says I’m a fine cook.”

  “He says that, does he?” said Claudia, skeptical, but she agreed to come.

  Agnes drove home with a light heart, pleased that she had renewed ties with her sister-in-law, intrigued by the clues they had uncovered about the mysterious quilter. Although it was true that the search would be difficult and Claudia seemed unhappy in her isolation, Agnes had every reason to hope for progress on both fronts with a bit of time, patience, and effort.

  The next day on her lunch break, Agnes took her negatives to the photography shop and ordered reprints of the photos of the Christmas Cactus quilt. After work, she went from the Rare Books Archive to the reference section of the library, retrieved a phone book for Wilkes-Barre, and wrote down the addresses of every quilt shop and dry goods store listed. She could not find a category for quilt guilds, unfortunately, not even under “Clubs and Service Organizations,” but she hoped the quilt shop owners would spread the word to their customers.

  That evening after supper and whenever she could find spare moments througho
ut the next day, Agnes wrote several copies of a letter briefly explaining her search and asking for help tracking down the elusive quiltmaker, who may have lived in Wilkes-Barre around 1935 and may have had the initials EH, EM, CH, or CM. She included full-length and detail photos with each letter, but at Joseph’s urging, she omitted a few significant details from the description to ward off unscrupulous characters who might falsely claim to be the rightful owner. She hoped such precautions would prove unnecessary.

  She sent off a dozen letters with photos, then turned her attention to her lunch with Claudia. Since Elm Creek Manor was unreachable by phone, she sent Claudia a friendly note reminding her of their plans. On Thursday she shopped for groceries and made a pretty centerpiece of autumn foliage, pine cones, and ribbon to adorn the kitchen table. She took Friday morning off work so she could clean the house and prepare a lunch of chicken breasts with wild rice stuffing, Brussels sprouts salad with toasted almonds, and acorn squash. Then she set the table and waited in her favorite chair by the front picture window, eager to tell Claudia about the letters—and about the little bundle of joy she was expecting in early summer.

  The bells at Good Shepherd Church a few blocks away rang out the noon hour as Agnes was checking on the acorn squash, and again at quarter past when the oven timer buzzed to announce that the chicken was done. Agnes turned the oven low to keep the chicken and squash warm and returned the salad to the refrigerator, wondering why Claudia had been delayed, wishing she could call Elm Creek Manor and see if she was on her way. At quarter of one, she suspected Claudia wasn’t coming, and by one o’clock, she was sure of it.

  Disappointed, she ate some chicken and half of an acorn squash alone at the kitchen table, put away the leftovers, and whiled away the afternoon knitting baby booties and debating whether she should drive out to the manor to make sure Claudia was all right. She decided against it. If Claudia had responded to her note and Agnes knew for certain she had meant to come, her absence would be cause for worry. As it was, it only meant that she had changed her mind.

  Agnes had heard nothing from Claudia by the time the first responses to her letters arrived a week later. A quilt-shop owner wrote to say that she had posted the photos on her bulletin board, and one of her customers recalled seeing a quilt like it at a state fair many years ago. Unfortunately, she could not remember which year or even which state, but she was sure it was either Pennsylvania, New York, or West Virginia, because those were the only state fairs she had ever attended. The following day, two more letters arrived. The first writer claimed that she had made the quilt and would appreciate it if Agnes sent it to her by return post.

  “I just bet she’d appreciate it,” said Joseph dryly, reading over Agnes’s shoulder.

  “She signed the letter Janice Whitfield,” said Agnes, indignant. “Her initials don’t match at all. Honestly. The nerve of some people.”

  The second letter was more intriguing. The writer recalled from childhood that her family’s next-door neighbor displayed two quilted throw pillows in her living room every holiday season, and the appliqués seemed to be a perfect match for the Christmas Cactus pattern in Agnes’s photos. She vaguely recalled overhearing the neighbor tell her mother that she had made the pillows using blocks that were not quite perfect enough to be included in a holiday quilt she had made and had entered in a quilt contest. The quilt had gone missing somehow, but if the writer had ever heard the story, she had been too young to remember it. “My neighbor retired and moved away,” she concluded, “but I’ll get in touch with her and have her call you if you’ve found her long-lost quilt. If it isn’t hers, she could give you the source of the pattern, and that might lead you to your missing quilter.”

  “This one sounds very promising,” exclaimed Agnes, and after she read it aloud, Joseph agreed. She only wished the writer had provided her former neighbor’s name so she could compare the initials.

  The next day Agnes was tempted to call in sick so she could wait by the phone and meet the postman when he arrived with the day’s mail, but honesty prevailed, so off she went to the library. No news from Wilkes-Barre waited in her mailbox when she returned home that afternoon, but the next day, she found a large, white cardboard envelope on the front porch half tucked under the welcome mat. It was too large for the opening to their mailbox, and their postman was too conscientious to bend things to fit.

  Her excitement rose when she read the return address—Osterhout Public Library, Wilkes-Barre. Hurrying inside, she opened the envelope quickly but with care and spread out the contents on the kitchen table. There were two photostats of newspaper articles—one larger, folded in half, and the second a long, narrow news column—as well as a letter. The headline of the column drew her gaze, and she gasped to read Local Woman’s Prize Quilt Disappears from State Fair. It was dated July 1, 1936.

  Eagerly she turned to the letter, which was from Marigold Johnson, a reference librarian and a quilter. Although Marigold explained that she had never seen the quilt in person, she recognized it immediately from the newspaper photo, a copy of which she had enclosed, and from the heartbreaking tale that still came up from time to time in the Wilkes-Barre quilting community.

  In 1936, Edna Hachmeyer, a local quilter of great renown, had submitted her most recent masterpiece to the Pennsylvania State Fair. It had won first prize in the appliqué division and had earned a gold ribbon for Best of Show. On the morning after the fair, when Edna went to the tent to retrieve her quilt and collect her ribbons, they were gone. At first the officiants assumed that a worker had moved the quilt for safekeeping, as the tent was going to be dismantled soon, but all of the other quilts were accounted for and a thorough search turned up not a single thread of her Christmas Cactus quilt. The police were summoned, and they soon concluded that Edna’s prizewinning quilt had been stolen.

  “I’m convinced you’ve recovered it,” Marigold wrote. “The photos are too similar for there to be any other explanation. After all this time, I’m sure Mrs. Hachmeyer has given her quilt up for lost. She moved to Harrisburg years ago to be closer to her family, but I have her youngest daughter’s address and I’ll write to her as soon as I finish this letter to you.”

  Agnes set the letter aside and unfolded the larger photostat. There, beneath a headline declaring Wilkes-Barre Best of Show Quilt Stolen from State Fair, was a photo of the Christmas Cactus quilt, unmistakable even in black and white. Below it appeared columns of text and a second photo of a woman standing in front of the quilt, smiling shyly as she shook the hand of a man in a three-piece suit and straw hat. Another man stood nearby just within the shot, looking on and beaming as he waited to hand her two ornate ribbons.

  “Edna Hachmeyer,” Agnes murmured as she sank into a chair, her gaze fixed on the woman in the photo. She was petite compared to the men, with bobbed, wavy light brown hair and glasses. She wore a pale, short-sleeved floral day dress with a tiered skirt and three bows on the bodice, one each at the neck, bosom, and waist. The photostat was not clear enough for Agnes to be sure, but she looked to be in her early to middle forties, which would put her in her early to mid-sixties now.

  Mrs. Edna Hachmeyer of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. With a name and a city, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the elusive quilter. Tomorrow on her lunch break, Agnes would look her up in the reference department’s Harrisburg phone book, and when she returned home, she would call.

  But after supper that evening, just as she finished washing the dishes and while Joseph was still drying them, the telephone rang. Agnes picked up, and when the caller asked for her by name, some instinct compelled her to reply, “This is Mrs. Emberly. Am I speaking to Mrs. Hachmeyer?”

  “Please call me Edna,” she said, her voice thin and warbling. “An old friend called me with exciting news, but I hardly dare believe it’s true. Have you found my long-lost Christmas Cactus quilt?”

  “I’m very sure that I have,” said Agnes warmly, gesturing excitedly to Joseph, who set down his dish towel and hurrie
d over. Agnes held up the handset between them and they both leaned an ear close.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to trust the word of a stranger on the telephone,” said Edna, “but if you look on the back of the quilt, in the lower right-hand corner, you’ll find my name, my hometown, and ‘December 1935’ embroidered in dark red thread.”

  Happy tears rose in Agnes’s eyes. She had not mentioned the embroidery in her letters, the better to identify the true quiltmaker. “Most of the embroidery is gone, but I believe you.”

  “Why—I hardly know what to say.” A chair scraped, and Edna breathed heavily as if she were easing herself into it. “Where has my quilt been all this time?”

  “In an old maple hope chest I discovered in an antiques shop,” Agnes replied. “I’d love to tell you the whole story, or at least what I know of it, in person, when I return your quilt to you. Are you free on Saturday?”

  Flustered, Edna said that she was, and after a quick discussion of convenient hours and an exchange of addresses and phone numbers, they settled on two o’clock.

  “You didn’t make her an offer for the quilt,” Joseph remarked after Agnes hung up the phone and seated herself at the kitchen table.

  “How could I have?” Her voice caught in her throat. “She was so happy to know that it was found at last, and she’s so eager to see it again. She wouldn’t want to sell it, not at any price. I could hear it in her voice. Couldn’t you?”

  Nodding, Joseph sat down in the adjacent chair and took her hand. “You have a kind and generous heart, and I adore you for it.”