Murders on Elderberry Road: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery Page 6

  Susan, her arms carrying a bolt of fabric, walked through the arch that opened the meeting room to the front section of the store. The silence stopped her in her tracks. “What?” she asked, looking from one surprised face to the next. “What’s wrong?”

  “Po doesn’t think a burglar killed Owen Hill,” Phoebe said.

  Susan dropped the bolt of cotton and stared at Po. “What are you saying, Po? Of course it’s a burglary.”

  “I don’t think any burglar worthy of the name would attempt to rob Selma’s store. You’ve all said the same thing in some shape or form, and that’s all that I’m saying. I don’t think it makes sense. Not with a busy bookstore down the street, and an antique shop with lamps that cost more than my home. So there, that’s it. That’s what I think.”

  “But,” Susan rested both hands on the back of the ladder chair and steadied herself. “Do you think someone wanted Professor Hill dead?”

  Po wished she hadn’t started the conversation. Susan was a sensitive woman and had her own bundle of worries — caring for an ill mother, going back to college at the age of 38, and working as hard as she did to make ends meet. She had also been on edge lately. Po shouldn’t have burdened her with another fear beyond her control. “I don’t mean to stir things up. Perhaps I spoke out of turn.”

  “You, Po?” Kate said, her voice lifting at the end of the question, and they all laughed at the affectionate jibe. The tension lifted.

  Po shushed Kate with a wave of her hand, but she laughed along with the rest of the Queen Bees. It was true that she sometimes found it difficult to hold her tongue when strong emotion gripped her. And she felt strongly about this issue, mostly because she didn’t want her dear friend Selma in any danger. And if someone killed Owen in Selma’s store for reasons other than theft, then danger might still lurk there in the jumble of fabric bolts and sewing notions. Po wanted the danger faced, and then erased.

  “Well, frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me either, Po.” Selma picked up a metal can filled with straight pins and handed it to Phoebe who was pinning a strip of bright green polka dot fabric to a lush lavender print. Her star matched her personality to a T, Po had commented earlier — bright, daring, and sparkling.

  Selma went on. “I for one could have killed Owen a time or two — of late, he’d been pushing for that fancy brick sidewalk, in spite of my very vocal protests — but I didn’t. That’s not to say, though, that he might have pushed others far enough that they did.”

  “There’s a lot of gossip brewing around town,” Phoebe said. “Even at the park where I take Jude and Emma. Greta Janssen — she has a two-year-old and goes to Reverend Gottrey’s church — she said that she thought the Reverend was having a hard time looking sad about the whole thing. Owen Hill was about to pull the plug on the endless donations he and Mary made to the church.” She pulled a small ironing board up to the other end of the table and plugged in the iron.

  Maggie joined in. “Hans Broker, he lives just a street over.” Maggie pointed with her head toward the back window and the large comfortable homes that lay beyond the thick border of bushes. “He had his lab, Sparky, in for shots last week, and he said there’d been activity in this alley on and off for awhile now. Night noises when there shouldn’t have been. I guess Sparky barked like crazy a few nights, according to Hans, and then finally got used to it.”

  “So he heard something on the night Owen died?” Kate asked.

  “Well, that’s where his story lost a little ground. He wasn’t sure about that, and yet it was so warm that night that he must have had his windows open. Everyone did.”

  Po stood and held a piece of royal purple cotton up to the natural light. It would be perfect for one of her stars. She set it down next to her coffee cup, pleased. “I don’t mean to put a damper on Hans’ story,” she said, focusing back on the conversation. “Hans is a sweet man, but he wears two hearing aids. And at that time of night both of them were probably on his bedside table, right beside his empty glass of Jack Daniels. Now Sparky is credible, but there are a thousand squirrels that live back there, not to mention the beautiful black cat that I ran into that awful morning.” Po sat down and fingered the fabric in front of her.

  “Those night-time noises could have been made by Wesley Peet,” Selma said.

  “The security guard?” Kate asked. She sat down at Selma’s machine and pushed the pedal, stitching together the small rectangles and squares that would be her flying geese — the rays of her star. “He’s one creepy dude. He skulks around in the shadows and rarely speaks. Honestly, he scares me, Selma.”

  “He’s frightening,” Susan agreed. She had slipped into a chair and was helping Eleanor line up her fabric against a paper template. Eleanor had decided to paper piece, insisting that the points of her star would be absolutely perfect. “Wesley is usually around when I’m closing up.” She held the template and fabric up to the light to make sure the alignment was perfect. Her unfinished thought hung there in the air awkwardly.

  Selma took a pin out of her mouth. “Wesley’s an odd duck, that’s true. The ESOC hired him last year after that unfortunate incident with Susan.”

  All eyes turned toward Susan, who paled at the attention.

  Selma went on. “Some guy began to harass Susan as she was closing up the store late one night. Thank God for Max Elliott. He was working in his office across the street and heard the ruckus.” Selma looked at her assistant again. “As quiet as Susan seems, there’s a tigress beneath that Grace Kelly facade. She made plenty of noise. Anyway, Max rushed out and chased the fellow off. Then he went to Owen, and the next thing we knew, we had our very own Elderberry Road security guard.”

  “Max is a good man,” Susan said in a soft voice.

  “I agree that Wesley’s a peculiar sort, but he seems harmless enough. His bulk alone would frighten anyone off, so he doesn’t need to do much. He’s noisy, though, so he could very well be the cause of Sparky’s barking,” Selma said.

  “I think he sometimes has a nip or two,” Susan said.

  “Or five or six. In fact, he recently fell right smack onto a garbage can. Smashed the side in flatter than a pancake. We were having our ‘sweat-sock’ meeting that night and he scared the life out of us. Owen was fit to be tied. He threatened to fire him. In fact, I think he would have, if …” Her words fell off. “If he hadn’t been killed” hung in the still air.

  “Maybe someone should fire him,” Kate said.

  “He’s better than nothing,” Selma answered. “And I think Owen overreacted. There’ve been times when I’ve been glad to see Wesley standing in the alley while I got safely inside my car. And as clumsy as he can be, he’s a warm body. A big noisy one, but a body.”

  “Speaking of noisy, those ESOC meetings could have been what Hans heard,” Susan said. “They get kind of noisy, and you were meeting that night.”

  “We do get noisy sometimes,” Selma agreed. “I guess we can be a cantankerous group.”

  “What do you talk about?” Kate asked. She looked at the two small triangles she had stitched together and frowned at the misaligned point. Slowly, she began to pull the stitching out. As the least experienced quilter, Kate had chosen the easiest star center for her block. But points, Kate had learned, were difficult, no matter what.

  “We talk about everything,” Selma said. “Hiring security guards, repairing roofs, fixing rain gutters. Insurance.”

  “Owen was one of your directors?” Eleanor asked. She had come back into the room, leaning lightly on her hand-carved cane, after exploring Selma’s new delivery of hand-died batiks. She sat down at an empty spot near Kate.

  “Yes, he was,” Selma said. “We elect three directors so we don’t all have to meet on every tiny detail. This year it was Owen, Daisy, and Ambrose. We’re meeting soon to select someone to take Owen’s place.”

  “Would you be a candidate, Selma?” Po asked.

  “Not on your sweet life, Po. You’ve been around long enough to know all th
ese folks on the block. Decisions don’t come by us easily and the less involved I have to be, the better. I have my hands full keeping up this shop. Besides, I detest those meetings. The group meets far more than I can stomach, and if you’re a director, you meet even more often.”

  “But surely you have a say in what decisions are made regarding the shops, don’t you?” The thought of Ambrose Sweet and some of the others making decisions that affected Selma’s store bothered Po.

  “Selma should have the biggest say.” Susan spoke up before Selma could answer. “We have the most frontage, and when they decide about snow removal and sidewalk repair and window awnings, well, it affects us financially more than some of the others.”

  Po noticed Susan’s use of “we” and she smiled to herself. That was good. Selma needed someone else who cared as much about the store as she did. Someone to carry that burden of care and attention.

  “Why should you have to pay more, Po?” Kate asked.

  “Well, it’s the way it works. Each of the owners pays a certain amount into the CAM fund — that’s legal gibberish for community area maintenance. The amount we pay is based on square footage, and with all my storage space and having both front and side windows, well, we have a lot of square footage and a lot of frontage …”

  A noise from the front room broke off her sentence. From the table Susan and Selma could see into the shop and could hear the jingle of the door when new customers came in. Susan stood at the sound of the bell and motioned to Selma that she’d help the customer.

  “So when you put in these skylights …” Phoebe pointed up to the long narrow windows in the ceiling, “… who paid for that? Did it come out of the CAM funds?” Phoebe asked.

  “Not those. I put those skylights in a long time ago, when Po came to me and said that we needed to start a quilting circle. And it needed to be held in this very room, and if I didn’t add some natural light, we’d all be blind as bats in short order.”

  Po laughed and Selma continued. “That was long before the Elderberry shop owners got together and decided to buy this block of shops and run it the right way.

  “So no, the CAM funds didn’t pay for those windows. I did. But things are afoot now that might be beyond my control. Ambrose and Jess, for example, want to put in a brick sidewalk. Mary Hill wants it, too, and was pressuring Owen to see that it happened. He was going along with it — could have killed him for that. That kind of thing will affect me greatly. In fact, it may be the last straw …” Selma’s voice dropped off as if she had driven off the side of a cliff. She paused for a minute, took a deep breath to collect herself, then looked intently at the small pieces of fabric on the table in front of her. “Fiddlesticks! See what I’ve done? I’ve pinned the wrong pieces together. My star will look more like a Drunkard’s Path.”

  Po sensed Selma’s distress. She stood and walked over to the handsome oak sideboard that stood beneath the back window. Selma had found it at a flea market and refinished it. It was usually filled with stacks of fabric, jars of scissors, transparent rulers and rotary cutters, and the cupboard below was jammed full of additional supplies. But on Saturday mornings a space in the center was cleared for pots of hot coffee and platters of cinnamon rolls, coffeecake, or whatever delicacies Kate had pulled from her oven a short while earlier. Since she’d joined the group, Po swore their collective weight had risen one hundred percent. She lifted the foil off the platter and breathed in the sweet smells of butter and fresh fruit. “Okay, ladies, it’s time for Kate’s blueberry scones,” she announced.

  “Let me help you, Po.” Susan came through the archway and moved around the table to Po’s side. “Another ten-pound Saturday, compliments of Kate,” she said, picking a crumb from the edge of the platter. She took the coffeepot from Po and began to fill the line of mugs.

  Po watched Susan pour the coffee. Each Saturday Susan opened up a little more, relaxed and laughed with all of them. Her blue eyes spoke of a life that wasn’t always easy, and Po was glad to see she had some outlet, at least, besides her classes and caring for her mother.

  “Watch your squares, everyone. Blueberries stain in the worst way,” Kate said.

  “Kate, these are amazing,” Maggie said, licking a smear of purple from the tip of her finger. “You’re going to put Marla out of business.”

  “That’ll be the day.” Kate laughed. “This is therapy, pure and simple. It’s what I do to forget that three promising young kids in my English class are clearly more interested in pot than Shakespeare, and refuse to listen to my eloquent words of wisdom. Or when I suspect a confused and frustrated fourteen-year-old is about to run away from home, or when I have forty papers to correct and an exam in my own classes the next day, it’s when, well, you get the picture. When stressed, I bake.” Kate’s substitute teaching was a great help in paying for her computer graphics classes at Canterbury College. And she loved the kids. But sometimes it was more than one day and one body could handle nicely.

  “Speaking of blueberry scones,” Leah said, “feast your eyes on this fabric that Selma found at market.” She held up a length of printed fabric. Tiny yellow and green lines meandered across a deep purple background. And at uneven intervals, a bright pinpoint of white lit up the fabric like a starry night.

  “Cool,” Phoebe said, reaching over to touch the fabric. “It would be amazing in the anniversary quilt.”

  “The yellow print in my star would look perfect with it,” Eleanor said.

  Po set her empty coffee cup on the side table and watched the shared pleasure light up faces and flow around the table like a sweet summer breeze — and all over a piece of cotton fabric. She watched Selma’s eyes deepen to ocean green and the blush return to Susan’s high cheekbones. She saw Eleanor’s stately shoulders relax as she set a strip of her bright green square on top of the purple, and she watched Maggie and Phoebe’s wide smiles as they fingered the fabric with near reverence.

  Kate stood next to Po, her arms folded across her chest. She inclined her head toward Po, touching her head lightly with her own. “My dear Po,” she said quietly.

  Po looked over at her. “What?”

  “I see that look on your face, watching these ladies you’ve pulled together for whatever reason. Mom used to call you ‘the gatherer’ because you gather people together. You’re as soft as marshmallow fluff. And that’s just one of the things I love about you.” She looped one arm around Po’s shoulder. “And I agree with what that look on your face says. It is kind of amazing how a piece of fabric can cover up all the ugliness of this past week.”

  Po reached out and squeezed Kate’s hand. She nodded. But it was more than the fabric, she knew. It was what a quilting bee did for each of these special women, binding their lives together as surely and securely as if they had the same blood running through their veins.

  A jingling bell sliced through the moment.

  Before either Selma or Susan could make it to the front to greet the customer, P.J. Flanigan appeared in the doorway. His head nearly touched the top of the arch and a smile as big as Texas softened the strong bones of his face.

  “We caught him, ladies,” he said proudly. “You can rest easy now. Owen Hill’s killer is in jail.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Next Door Neighbor

  An hour later, Kate and Po sat at a table in the bay window of Marla’s small bakery and café, munching on a late lunch of avocado and brie sandwiches and drinking strong green tea that Marla claimed would add twenty years to one’s life. They’d managed to get a little more quilting in after P.J.’s pronouncement and quick exit, but concentration didn’t come easily, and the session ended early.

  “Selma looked like she shed ten years in those few minutes,” Po said. “She was more worried about all this than she let on.”

  Kate nodded and the two continued to munch on their sandwiches, thoughts of the last week playing in their heads.

  Finally Kate broke the silence.

  “So, are you convinced?” />
  Po laughed. Kate was a true kindred spirit and there were times, like right this moment, that she knew Kate could read her thoughts.

  “Well, maybe I was wrong,” Po said. She smiled over the edge of her teacup. “Maybe it was a burglar, and maybe they caught him.”

  Kate wiped a dollop of mustard from the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “You know, Po, the whole thing seems odd to me, too. This must be one dimwitted fellow.” She chewed her sandwich thoughtfully.

  Marla shuffled her way over to their table. The bakery owner’s bulk made it difficult to squeeze between the tables, and Po was reminded again that she must convince Marla to get on some kind of a weight loss program or she would surely die before she turned fifty. And then where would they all be? Absolutely no one on earth could match Marla’s cheese soufflé nor her homemade, seven-grain bread.

  “So,” Marla said, leaning over the small table. Her pudgy fingers formed a tent on the tabletop. “I hear they caught the rat who did this to Owen.” Her blue-black hair was parted in the middle and pulled back severely, fastened at her neck with a thick rubber band.

  “That’s what P.J. tells us, Marla. I guess we’ll all sleep better tonight,” Po said.

  “Where’d they catch him?” Marla stood straight and wiped her hands on the smudged apron that wrapped around her middle.

  “Out at the Wal-Mart on the other side of town. Apparently he tried to use Owen’s credit card. And when the police got there, they discovered he was wearing Owen’s Rolex watch.”

  “Geez! Not a very bright kid, I’d say.”

  “Well, that’s what we thought, too,” Po said. “But P.J. says he’s not a dummy. And not a kid. The fellow claims he found the wallet and watch in a sack out at the truck plaza near the highway.”

  “Likely story.”

  “That’s what the police think, too,” Kate said. She looked down at the crumbs on her empty plate. “Marla, these avocado sandwiches are great.”

  Marla beamed. Keeping up with the college crowd and vegetarian eating trends had plunged her into a whole new domain. “Thanks, Katie. If I can satisfy you kids coming back from fancy places like Boston, then I must be doing something right.” She turned back to Po. “So has Selma settled down? She was in such a twit about all this.”