A Murder of Taste: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery Read online

  “Spoken with pure objectivity,” P.J. said.

  “Intuition,” Kate snapped back. “And if you think Picasso could ever hurt anyone, P.J. Flanigan, you’re dead wrong. He’s a prince. And you can tell your buddies at the department that.”

  “Whoa,” P.J. said, getting up from the table. “Don’t get your dander up, Katie. They’re just doing their job.”

  Kate softened. “I suppose.” She checked her watch and picked up her backpack, flinging it over one shoulder. “Well, I have a date with a professor to talk about cameras, so I’m out of here. You two have a good day.”

  Kate blew a kiss across the room, then disappeared out the back door.

  “Interesting young woman,” P.J. said, watching her leave. Po laughed. “Yes, P.J. I guess you could say that.”

  “But she may be wrong about Picasso, Po. The guys at the station found Laurel St. Pierre mighty convincing.”

  “That’s too bad. I think they were fooled, P.J. I don’t mean to speak ill of her, but I think Laurel has a bit of the actress in her.”

  P.J. shook his head and walked over to the sink to rinse out his cup. “You’re as stubborn as Kate is, Po. Just be careful, is all I ask.”

  “Be careful? P.J., now I think it’s you who has the dramatic streak. Be careful of a sweet French chef with a heart as big as his amazing mousse au chocolat? Shame on you!”

  But after P.J. left, Po sat alone at the kitchen table, her bills in a neat stack next to her pen, and her mind wandering back over conversations she had with Picasso in recent days. A spring wind had picked up and beat the branches of her willow tree against the side of the house. He’d seemed worried about something, but when Po asked if everything was all right, he’d pushed a smile back across his round face and assured her he was fine. Life was fine, he had said. And if not perfect, he confided to Po, he could live with it.

  Live with what, Po wondered now.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kate’s camera hung loosely from her neck, moving rhythmically as she jogged slowly along the river path in the newly built Riverside Park. The park ran along both sides of the Emerald River, a meandering stretch of water that curved its way through the center of the small hilly town. Wide bridges anchored it at either end, with one in the middle.

  The park had been talked about for as long as Kate could remember—her own father, Jim Simpson, had spearheaded a group of town leaders, forging the way for the acres of green that now hugged the sides of the river.

  Dad would have loved this, she thought. A wide paved path, dotted with gaslights, and clusters of comfortable benches curved along the entire length of the park. Small walking paths spread out from the main lane on the east side of the river like a spider web, meandering back into clumps of trees and picnic tables and play areas with sand-boxes and swings. The bridges provided the perfect place to stand and watch small kayaks and paddle boats go up and down the river. On the west side of the river, the same continuous path, connected by a bridge, ran all the way to the small Crestwood downtown, but the park itself was less developed, more rugged. In a month, the summer concerts would start in the gazebo up near the bridge, and the park would be teeming with people, the bridges crowded, the smell of hotdogs, beer, and lemonade filling the air.

  But today the park was quiet, with just a smattering of walkers, a few mothers pushing strollers, and some children just out of school chasing a kite up on the hill. Kate came to a stop beside a wooden bench, cemented into the cobbled path. She bent at the waist and stretched her hands down toward the ground, then sat down and breathed deeply.

  “Hey, Miz Simpson, what’s up?”

  Kate looked up into the grinning face of Amber King, a student in the senior English class in which Kate substituted often. “Hi, Amber. What are you doing here?”

  Amber flopped down on the bench beside her and pointed to her backpack. “I hang out here and people watch. Fodder for my writing.” She looked at Kate’s camera. “Looks like you do the same.”

  Kate lifted the camera up, focused on Amber, and snapped it a few times. “I guess you could say that,” she said. “I like watching people through this lens—you see them in a whole new way. Sometimes I almost feel like a voyeur. Take a look.” Amber took the camera, held it in front of her, and looked through the small square viewer. She focused on the river and a family of goslings slowly heading downstream. Then she shifted on the bench and snapped away at the scene behind her, a young mother and her baby lying on their backs on the side of the hill, and further up, capturing a couple as entwined with one another as the clump of trees behind them.

  Kate watched Amber as she pivoted on the bench. She was zooming in now on the loving couple up on the hill, snapping a sequence of shots. Kate wondered if she had been that sure of herself at 17. The kids she taught fascinated her, and though substitute teaching had never been on her list of things she wanted to do in life, she was discovering that she liked it. The chance opening when she returned to Crestwood last year had filled a need for both her and the high school. Returning to the same wide halls that housed four years of her life was a nostalgic trip. Some of the teachers who had taught Kate were still there, including Betsy Carroll, a favorite guidance counselor who had spent much of her time keeping Kate on the straight and narrow. She enjoyed the time she now spent with Betsy, speaking adult to adult. And then there were kids like Amber, who made her think she might sign on again next fall if there was a need.

  “Very cool camera, Miz Simpson. Digital is the way to go. And the way for me to go is up that yonder hill to ponder the poetry of Yeats.” Amber stood and handed the camera back to Kate. “I will leave you alone to your voyeuring.”

  Kate chuckled and watched Amber saunter up the path, find a grassy spot and settle down. Kate followed her through the camera’s eye, then panned across the hilltop to the couple standing close in the shade of the trees. It was a camera-perfect sight—dark green trees, a neatly mulched path, and two entwined figures cloaked in the shadows and lost in a passionate embrace. She lowered her camera to her lap and squinted at the two figures. There was something frighteningly familiar in the stance of the woman, her hands now on her hips. Kate stared hard, and watched as the couple moved another step apart. They seemed to be talking, gesturing. And while Kate continued to stare, the woman lifted her arm and slapped the man forcefully across the face. In the next instant, they moved beyond the trees and out of Kate’s view.

  Kate stood and lifted her camera from her neck. “Well, I’ll be,” she muttered. Maybe voyeuring isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She slipped the camera into a small leather case, strained unsuccessfully to catch another glimpse of the couple, then turned and headed toward her home.

  ***

  “I swear it was Laurel St. Pierre,” Kate said. “And she was very, very cozy with some tall, dark stranger. Then all of a sudden, the embrace dissolved and she whacked him one.” Kate, Po, and Eleanor Canterbury sat on Po’s back deck, sipping martinis in the diminishing daylight. Kate had kept the disturbing scene in the river park to herself for 24 hours, but wrapped in a sweater and ensconced in the comfortable Adirondack chair on Po’s wide, comfortable deck, Kate blurted out what she had seen.

  The early-evening martini ritual—or sparkling water for those who preferred it—was something Po’s friends could count on—a place and time to unwind, to sit quietly in the company of a friend, or sometimes, like today, to sort through disturbing news.

  “I believe you, Kate,” Po said. “But perhaps it was an innocent, chance meeting. Perhaps she was out for a walk and ran into an acquaintance. An old friend. Or …”

  “Po, she was kissing him on the lips!” Kate paused and replayed the brief incident in her mind. It had been strange. First the couple was pressed together as if a giant vice had squeezed their bodies tight, and then suddenly arms flailed angrily.

  “He was tall,” Kate said. “Definitely not Picasso. But it was so hard to see. They were standing in shadows.”

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p; “We know so little about Laurel,” Eleanor said. She pushed a loose strand of gray hair behind one ear. Eleanor lived a stone’s throw from Po, just at the edge of the college named after her deceased husband’s family, and she often walked by Po’s on nice evenings, her cane tapping out a familiar rhythm in the tree-shaded neighborhood. Sometimes Po worried about her walking alone, but Eleanor insisted the hand-carved cane she’d picked up at a market in Spain was weapon enough should anyone give her trouble. “As if they would,” she’d laugh in her gravely way.

  “Laurel is a troubled young woman,” Eleanor said now.

  “There’s a pain behind those pretty eyes. I see it sometimes when she’s working in the restaurant. And I saw her at Wally’s drugstore one day when I was picking up my vitamins. She was asking Wally about a stronger medication for pain. When I approached her, she told me she had headaches sometimes, but just between the three of us, I think the pain comes from another place.”

  “That may be true, Eleanor,” Kate said. “And you’re a compassionate soul. But it’s Picasso I care about.”

  “We all do, Kate,” Po said. “But what goes on between a couple is their business.”

  “Oh, phooey, Po. You sound just like my mother. I think you two spent far too much time together. If Picasso is having trouble, I don’t care who it’s with, I want to help him. And I don’t trust Laurel St. Pierre for a single second.” Kate took a drink of her Pellegrino. The clink of ice cubes was loud in the quiet evening air. “There’s something about her, I don’t know. Like she’s looking at me, waiting for me to say something to her. It’s strange. And, frankly, I don’t want her messing with Picasso’s heart.”

  Po got up and flipped a switch that lit a low row of gaslights bordering the edge of her deck. They flickered on, bright against the darkening night. She paused behind Kate’s chair and rested one hand on her shoulder. “But Kate, dear, what it comes down to is this: there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

  ***

  After Kate and Eleanor left, Po went inside, slipped a Nora Jones CD into the player and tried to finish an article she was writing for the Sunday magazine on crazy quilts. But thoughts of Picasso kept drifting in and out of her mind, scattering the descriptions of the quilt form’s utilitarian beginnings, and then its evolvement into a hobby for well-to-do women, who spent their days piecing together expensive silk and satin pieces of fabric and embroidering intricate, lovely designs. That was a world away, she thought. Today women rarely had the time or the luxury to devote to such pastimes. They were running children to soccer games or band practice—or helping husbands manage restaurants. Po had seen a change in Picasso in the past few weeks. His ready smile had a droop to it, his chuckle was a little more forced. And even his interest in the quilt they were fashioning for the back wall of his restaurant seemed a little distant, less exuberant. Did this liaison, or whatever it was that Kate encountered, have something to do with it?

  But she needed to take her own advice, she decided. She had too many things on her own plate to get involved, uninvited, into someone’s personal problems. Po stared at the screen on her computer. What was her business was finishing this article.

  But writing came in fits and starts, and when Po finally decided to go to bed a few hours later, she fixed herself some sleepy time tea first. Somehow she anticipated sleep would be as difficult as the writing had been. She couldn’t put her finger on the cause. Concern for Picasso? A writing deadline? Or was it just one of those anxious times in life when things aren’t as smooth and tranquil as they sometimes are? Her mother had always told her those were the fruitful, creative times, like a plant beneath the soil’s surface, just about to burst forth in brilliant colors. Restlessness could be a good thing, her mother had insisted.

  But Po’s optimistic and wise mother never mentioned the other side of restlessness. The dark side that might be the harbinger of distressing events.

  Ella Paltrow would never have imagined—not in a million years—that the nagging unrest that kept her daughter tossing beneath her fine cotton sheets that moonless night might have portended a murder.

  CHAPTER 5

  The next morning came far too early, but a brisk shower brought life back into Po’s body. That and the thought that it was Saturday morning and she’d be spending it, as usual, with the remarkable Queen Bees. She slipped into light slacks and a cotton blouse, brushed her hair and pulled it back into a knot at the base of her neck, then headed downstairs and out the back door.

  Po took advantage of the gorgeous spring day and walked the few blocks from her home to the Elderberry shops. She hoped the crisp air would help her shake the uneasiness that interrupted her sleep. She loved her Saturday mornings and was determined not to let unknown anxiety interfere with her day. It had kept her from rising at five for her morning run, and that was the extent that she would allow it to ruin her day. Po moved aside while two college coeds whizzed by. Exams were not far off and tension was tossed to the wind as they ran down the flowering streets of Crestwood.

  The Queen Bees met at Selma’s Quilt Shop at eight a.m. every Saturday for their weekly quilting gathering. Not everyone made it each Saturday, but they’d decided a long time ago that meeting monthly didn’t do the trick—so sometimes there would be three of them on the weekend morning, sometimes six or eight. Po herself sometimes missed if her daughter Sophie was in town with Po’s beloved grandchildren, or one of the boys managed a weekend away from their busy lives in California to visit. Or if she had a book deadline or lecture to prepare. But she found the gathering important to her well-being and was always there if her schedule permitted. She’d been a member of the Queen Bees from its beginning thirty years before, when she was a young bride having babies, teaching writing, and helping her husband Sam up the ladder of academia. Eventually, Sam climbed that ladder to the top—the youngest president in the history of Canterbury College. And the whole town had mourned when a sudden heart attack had taken Sam Paltrow from their lives far too early.

  “Sam,” Po said softly as she circled a child’s scooter left out on the sidewalk, “You’d like this group. Maggie Helmers—she was in school with Sophie, you remember? And she’s now Crestwood’s busiest veterinarian. There’s a young mom—Phoebe—who is married to Jimmy Mellon. His parents were big benefactors at the college. A bit stuffy, though well intentioned, I suppose. And of course, dear Eleanor Canterbury is still there and never misses a session—unless she’s off on an African safari or visiting Egyptian pyramids. I swear, Sam, at 82 she has more wind in her sails than that boat you used to race on Lake Quivira.” Po stopped and leaned over a bed of daffodils bordering a thick green lawn. Lovely, she thought, then continued on her way. “And Leah Sarandon, of course. She still teaches at Canterbury, still giving the male faculty a hard time, and still remembers the day you promoted her to department head against the wishes of that stodgy board you had to deal with. Susan Miller is another Bee—you didn’t know Susan—she was involved in all that mess last year when Owen Hill was murdered, the poor girl. But she has bounced back beautifully and still helps Selma in the shop, even though she inherited a hunk of money from Owen. She’s an amazing, talented quilter.” “Hey, Po, who you talking to?” Kate rode up behind Po, braking her bike to a stop. “I called to you but you didn’t seem to hear—you were deep in conversation.”

  Po laughed and brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and looked at Kate. “Just talking with an old friend, that’s all.” Kate got off her bike and began walking next to Po. She looped one arm loosely around her shoulders. “I talk to mom, too. They’re still with us, for sure.”

  Po smiled, waved at a woman across the street, and changed the subject. “You’re early for quilting, honey. That’s not like you at all.”

  Kate’s throaty laugh, a bit too loud, filled the space between them. “Miracles happen. You’re a bit early yourself. Are you hoping Marla has the cinnamon rolls finished?”


  “Maybe a cup of coffee. I didn’t sleep well.” She rotated her shoulders as if to shrug off the last remnants of discomfort that still lay just beyond conscious thought. “I thought maybe Selma might need some help readying the store. Since she started displaying quilts on Friday nights, she’s had a mess of people going through the store. Great for business but lots of work.”

  “That’s a good idea to use that west wall of her store for displays. But what we really need is a quilting museum. When I lived on the east coast, we used to visit one in Lowell, a great little town not too far north of Boston. It’s an amazing museum, with terrific, passionate quilters, just like us. We could do that here.”

  “Selma and Susan have similar ideas, I think. They have their eyes on that old brick building across the street.” Po and Kate rounded the corner onto Elderberry Road, and Po pointed to a large, three-story building that used to house a hardware store before Home Depot moved into the mall on the edge of town. Today a For Sale sign was posted in one of the windows.

  Kate squinted to read the sign. “McKay Commercial Real Estate,” she read. “Billy’s everywhere.”

  “He’s a go-getter, just like his father.”

  “Well, he charmed the socks off every teacher in Crestwood High,” Kate said. “If he’s half as good with his clients, he’ll be very successful.”

  “Eleanor told me yesterday that he may give the city a good deal on an old warehouse down near the river. They want to turn it into a half-way house.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. He was always the one to lead the food drives in high school. And though I don’t mean to take away from his generosity, Po, none of that will hurt his political career.”

  “No, you’re right about that.” Po nodded to a neighbor walking by. “But if it helps the city in the process, more power to him.”

  Kate nodded. She was actually proud of Billy, and had to admit she enjoyed the frequent encounters they’d had recently. Janna Hathaway was a very lucky woman, and Kate suspected from the tight grip she kept on Bill, that she was well aware of that fact.