Murder on a Starry Night: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery Read online

  Other Queen Bees mysteries by Sally Goldenbaum:

  Murders on Elderberry Road (2003)

  A Murder of Taste (2004)

  Murder on a Starry Night

  A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery

  By Sally Goldenbaum

  Editor: Doug Weaver

  Cover illustration and map: Neil Nakahodo

  Character illustrations: Lon Eric Craven

  Design: Vicky Frenkel

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 The Kansas City Star Co.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

  Published by Kansas City Star Books.

  First edition.

  ISBN 10: 1-933466-07-3

  ISBN 13: 978-1-933466-07-1

  Printed in the United States of America by Walsworth Publishing Co., Marceline, Missouri

  To order copies, call StarInfo at (816) 234-4636 and say “BOO]

  Order on-line at www.TheKansasCityStore.com.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  ______________________

  PORTIA (PO) PALTROW, founder and nurturer of the Queen Bees quilting group. Anchors the women’s quilting group in life and in art.

  PHOEBE MELLON, wife to Jimmy, an up-and-coming lawyer, young mother to eleven-month-old twins, and a constant surprise to her quilting cohorts.

  KATE SIMPSON, Po’s goddaughter and a high school teacher. The newest member of the Queen Bees.

  ELEANOR CANTERBURY, who lives on the edge of the college her great-grandfather founded. Is heir to the Canterbury family fortune.

  LEAH SARANDON, professor of women’s studies at Canterbury College. An artistic quilter.

  SUSAN MILLER, Selma’s artistic assistant manager in the quilt shop. Recently returned to college to pursue a degree in fiber arts.

  SELMA PARKER, owner of Parker’s Dry Goods Store. Provides a weekly gathering place for the Queen Bees quilting group and generous doses of down-home wisdom.

  MAGGIE HELMERS, Crestwood’s favorite veterinarian. Is an avid quilter and collector of fat lady art.

  MAP

  ______

  PRELUDE

  Oliver Harrington II walked down the back staircase from his second-floor bedroom, one hand gripping the banister tightly.

  The noises had come from the kitchen, Ollie thought. He wasn’t afraid, really. Things made him anxious sometimes, but not really afraid. In fact, Ollie couldn’t remember ever being afraid in all his fifty-two years. He didn’t get angry much, either. Hardly ever. But he was angry this time, more angry than he had ever been in his whole life. Because it wasn’t fair. None of it. That’s probably why he was hearing things—hearing the uncomfortable anger rattling around in his head.

  Narrow windows along the side of the staircase looked out over the lawns and gardens of the Harrington Estate. But Oliver’s eyes didn’t see the lawns and gardens; immediately, almost as if beyond his control, they looked upward toward the heavens.

  It was a deep, starry night, and Ollie could see the great Andromeda Galaxy with his naked eye. He paused on the staircase, his breath catching in his throat. Exquisite. Miraculous. Nearly 3 million light years away, and he could see it from this window of his home in Crestwood, Kansas. It was surely a miracle.

  Finally, Ollie forced himself to breathe, but the dazzling beauty of the universe above him was almost more than he could handle. For as long as Ollie could remember, this was where he was the most comfortable — looking up into the universe and learning every single thing he could about how it worked. And the amazement he felt never dimmed, just like the North Star.

  “Glorious,” he said and the single word traveled out of his mouth and pierced the still, predawn air, echoing down the hardwood stairs before him.

  When Oliver was a boy, the back staircase had been the way servants got to the kitchen quickly and silently from their third floor rooms. He couldn’t remember when that had changed. Probably when he and his twin sister Adele were college age and Adele went off to her east coast school, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Oliver had lived in the Harrington mansion nearly his whole life. He’d left briefly for junior college in the east, a school his mother chose carefully, one that would afford him attention and a chance to explore the things he loved — astronomy, writing. It hadn’t worked, though. They made him take other subjects that didn’t capture his mind and spirit, and Oliver failed. So after a year, Oliver came back home. And years later, he finally got the degree that would have so pleased his mother, a bachelors in science from Canterbury College. Or university as they wanted to call it now, though it seemed a little uppity to Ollie. And then the professors had let him stay on, taking any classes he wanted to take.

  A bang beneath him halted Oliver’s body on the bottom step. Was there someone in the house? He could feel something nearby.

  Probably some neighborhood kid playing a trick on me, Oliver thought. Maybe he should start locking his doors—his friend Halley had been surprised when she discovered he didn’t lock up. But she didn’t grow up in a small town—she didn’t understand. Halley worried about too many things, he thought —wills and deeds and things that didn’t matter much to Oliver. Other people worried about those things, too, but Ollie just smiled and agreed, and that seemed to make everyone feel better.

  His clear brown eyes fought the fog of darkness in front of him. Finally his bare feet felt the flat smooth surface of the floor and he moved to the wall, flicking on the light switch.

  Yellow light fell on the wide planked flooring and bounced off the stainless steel counter and refrigerator. The kitchen was big enough to feed an army, Halley had told him the other day, but Oliver kept every surface clean and sparkling. He loved the stainless tops because you could see the perfect shiny surface, clear of even a thumbprint or a smudge. Oliver loved its orderliness, the pots hanging in order of size, the cups in the glass-fronted cabinets lined up in perfect symmetry. Oliver loved this house. It was way too big for him, he knew that, and all sorts of people were telling him that these days. Move to a small condo, Ollie, Tom Adler kept telling him. I’ll find you the best in the city and take this monster off your hands. But 210 Kingfish Drive wasn’t a monster at all. It was home. Always would be.

  Ollie looked around the room and out across the wooded back yard, back toward the pond that Joe, his gardener, tended to. No branches moved in the Indian summer night. No sound. Only the silence of the stars. Silly. No one was here. Just in his dreams, that’s all.

  Oliver pressed the boiling water button on his sink and filled a china cup with the liquid, then scooped up a cup of loose herbed tea from the canister on the counter. He and Halley and Joe had laughed about that the other day—how Ollie made midnight trips to the kitchen for a cup of tea. They didn’t believe him that herbed tea solved all ills. But it was true. He’d sleep like a baby tonight. A cup of ginger tea and the fog in his head would clear. He was being silly. Hearing things.

  His eyes slowly adjusted to the light and he looked around the spacious room, took in the wide island in the center of the room, the door leading out to a small enclosed porch where years ago the milkman left bottles of fresh milk and the Harrington twins lined up their boots after building snowmen in the backyard. The door to the porch was slightly ajar. Oliver frowned. Had he left it open when he let his cat back in the house before going to bed? He reached out and closed it with the flat of his hand, then jumped at the noise. Through a window in the door, he spotted a small cat
on the porch, staring up at him with accusing eyes. “Neptune,” he said. Ollie smiled and let the sleek black cat in. Mystery solved. That’s what he’d heard, his sweet Neptune.

  Oliver sipped his tea, staring out into the starry night, knowing he needed sleep and strength for what the new day would bring. He hated confrontations, but he couldn’t let this go. It was wrong. Against the law, he thought. He drained the last liquid from the cup and rested back against the counter, his thin bathrobe leaving his body unprotected from the cold marble edge. He’d go back upstairs, read that little collection of Loren Eisley’s essays that Halley had given him. Fall asleep with visions of galaxies filling his head. And he’d deal with tomorrow, tomorrow.

  Oliver left his mother’s pink Limoges teacup in the sink and headed for the stairs. The tea had done its magic and a dreamy fog settled over him. He pulled himself up the first step, then another. Sleep. It was on its way.

  Oliver reached the first landing where the steps curved back upon themselves and a small window lighted his path. He paused for a minute, taking in a breath of air, then frowned as the brightness of the stars beyond the window dimmed. An eclipse? No, of course not. But things were moving in slow motion. The tree branches, leaves falling. Humming.

  So odd, Ollie thought, and released his hold of the walnut railing. A dance. He was dancing, moving slowly through the air.

  Neptune stood at the foot of the stairs, her green eyes watching as Oliver’s long slender body turned slightly, then bent at the waist, doubled over, and slowly somersaulted down to the wide-planked kitchen floor.

  Neptune meowed, then walked over to Oliver’s face and gently licked his moist sharp chin with her gravely tongue.

  CHAPTER 1

  News of Ollie Harrington’s death caused a ripple of deep sadness through the Canterbury University community and the neighborhood where his family had lived for generations. But a larger ripple—nearly a tidal wave, Po Paltrow thought— occurred when Ollie’s twin sister, Adele, elegant and self-assured, swept down upon the small town of Crestwood a few days later to bury her brother.

  Shades of Isadora Duncan, Po thought, the first day she spotted Adele speeding down Elderberry Road in her long elegant Cadillac convertible, a yellow scarf tied around her neck and flying in the autumn breeze. She is certainly a whirlwind. But the thought that Adele’s arrival would cause the chaos that followed, was beyond Po’s imagination.

  Adele’s years away had made her an unfamiliar figure to most residents, but in the space of a week she had quickly and efficiently buried her brother, taken over the Harrington mansion, disturbed quiet neighbors with strident demands to trim trees and keep children away from her property, and alienated nearly everyone else in town.

  Even in the back room of Selma Parker’s quilt shop on Elderberry Road, the Queen Bees quilting group, gathering for their Saturday morning session, felt the mounting tension.

  “Like who would have imagined a quiet nice man like Oliver Harrington would have a sister like that!” said Phoebe Mellon, the youngest member of the group, as she looked around the cluttered table for a pair of scissors.

  Eleanor Canterbury handed them to Phoebe. “It’s a shame. Adele came to bury her brother. But she’s doing damage to the Harrington name with her demands and rude manners.” A rare note of displeasure crept into the lively voice of the Queen Bees’ only octogenarian. Eleanor picked up a square of flowered red fabric and examined it carefully to see if she had left any stray threads hanging. Eleanor did all her piecing by hand—mostly because it was portable that way, she said, and she could take it with her to Paris or New Guinea or wherever she might be headed. Today she was finishing a table runner for a charity auction, and decided she had done a very nice job, indeed, on the crazy quilt design.

  “But you can’t say it isn’t exciting, El,” Phoebe replied. “Even moms in my twins’ playgroup are gabbing about her. Word has it she eats three-year olds.” Phoebe dipped her blonde-white head and bit off a piece of thread.

  Po Paltrow—Portia in more formal circles—laughed at Phoebe’s irreverent comment, the kind they’d come to expect from her. She looked down to the end of the table at Selma Parker. “Selma, what do you think is up with Adele? I remember her from the neighborhood when we were growing up. And she was in your class, right?”

  “A few years behind me,” Selma said. She wet one finger, then touched the iron to be sure it was hot. The Saturday quilt group had met in the back of Parker’s fabric store for as long as anyone could remember—beginning back when Selma’s mother ran the shop. Members changed, of course, as life ran its course—daughters and granddaughters and sometimes friends of original members taking their place. And Selma loved it all—especially the present group of Queen Bees—an unlikely mixture of women with an age span of nearly sixty years, anchored on either end by Phoebe and Eleanor. Though the group had begun as quilting companions, their lives had become as intricately entwined as the strips of fabric they deftly fashioned into works of art.

  Satisfied that the iron was hot and sewing machine was ready to go, Selma looked back at Po and nodded. “Adele didn’t stick around Crestwood long, as you remember, Po. She came back for a short while after graduating from Smith College. But she couldn’t settle down. I remembered her mother urging her to go back East. Encouraging her to leave. She told her that Crestwood wasn’t big enough for her. There seemed to be some tension in the family, but it was never talked about, of course. Walter Harrington was a pompous, arrogant, man—”

  “Aha,” Maggie Helmers interrupted, “it’s in the genes, maybe.”

  “I remember Adele not liking it here,” Po said, “And once she left, she rarely came back. I don’t think she liked Crestwood very much.”

  “And apparently that hasn’t changed,” Kate Simpson said. She pushed her chair back from the table and took a sip of her coffee, careful not to spill it on the mounds of fat quarters piled on the table. “The neighborhood kids are already calling her the wicked witch of the north. But I feel kind of sorry for her. This can’t be easy for her, coming back to bury her twin brother. Maybe this is how she handles grief. She’s probably not so bad.” Kate had come back to Crestwood to bury her own mother several years before—and the memory was still fresh, though cushioned now as sweet memories filled in around her loss.

  “Bad? Kate, she’s downright nasty,” Maggie said. “She brought her dog into my clinic yesterday. The waiting room was packed because Daisy Sample’s beagle was hit by a car. He’s fine now. But anyway, Adele elbowed her way to the counter and demanded that Emerson be seen immediately. She was so rude. And then—” Maggie’s hands gestured while she talked, and she waved several pieces of freezer paper onto the floor. “And then when Mandy—my new technician—tried to calm her down and explain why she’d have to wait, Adele told her she had bad breath and should see a dentist.”

  Po shook her head. She picked up a finished block of her quilt hanging and held it up to the light to check the hand stitching she’d done on the abstract design. She was trying something new—piecing together bright oranges and yellows and minty green strips in wavy swooshes. She’d hang it in the upper hallway, she thought, where it would brighten up the interior space. “I agree with Kate,” she said. “Adele has had a rough couple weeks. Burying her brother and figuring out what to do with that enormous house and property can’t be easy.”

  “People offered to help, Po,” Leah Sarandon said. Leah, one of the most popular professors at Canterbury University, taught women’s studies on the ivy-covered campus just a few blocks from the Harrington home in the oldest section of Crestwood. “Professor Fellers talked the college board into having a memorial service for Oliver. Jed Fellers was Ollie’s mentor and spent a lot of time with him. Ollie was such a sweet guy—a little different—but he loved the library and learning and the college. And the students kind of adopted him because he was around all the time. Anyway, Adele said no. And there wasn’t a funeral, either. As for selling the house,
that won’t be a problem at all. The college has tried to wrest it from Ollie for years. They may finally get it now.”

  “It’s a magnificent estate,” Po said. “I remember going to parties there when Adele and Oliver’s parents were alive. And I stopped by now and then when I saw Ollie around, just to say hello, to take him some cobbler or bread. He’d always been a bit of a loner.”

  “The house is haunted,” Phoebe said. “That’s what Shelly Rampey in the kids’ playgroup says. But that can be, like, good, depending on the ghosts, I guess. Shelly said that her yoga teacher is wanting to buy the place for a retreat house for busy mothers—a place they can go to refresh their spirits. I said, ‘sign me up, sister.’“

  “Phoebe, if your spirit were any more refreshed, we’d have to tie you down,” Po said.

  Phoebe laughed.

  “But I agree with Leah,” Po went on. “That property is priceless. Neighbors are concerned that it be sold to the right person.”

  “What’s that mean?” Kate asked. She reached over to the table behind her for a pastry from Marla’s bakery, just a few stores down on Elderberry Road.

  “Well, the neighbors don’t want anything that will bring traffic, that sort of thing. And there are so many beautiful old magnolias and oaks and pines on that property—the thought of a developer tearing it down and putting up huge new side-by-side houses is very sad. I think it’s one of the oldest houses in Crestwood. It needs to be taken care of properly.”

  “Do you think Adele Harrington will care about any of that?” Eleanor asked.

  “The house has been in the family for over 100 years,” Po said. “Adele will surely consider that and do the right thing.” But Po frowned as she spoke. The controversy surrounding the beautiful old home at 210 Kingfish Drive was heating up discussions in all pockets of life in sleepy Crestwood. And just this morning, as she ran past the Harrington home on her daily jog, she’d noticed that activity had picked up around the house—cars, and even a truck or two, driving in and out of the long, angular drive leading up to the stately home. Probably interested buyers coming to check it out, she had thought, though the hour was early and she wondered if the noise had awakened the neighbors. She’d noticed a truck with Tom Adler’s Prairie Development name on it. He was hungry for more land to build homes on, Po knew. 210 Kingfish Drive would be wonderful for his needs.