A Patchwork of Clues Read online

  “As I said, change is good.” Mary’s voice was steely now.

  Po picked up on the change. “Mary, I’m so sorry if I have offended you. I have no right to interfere in your business. I didn’t mean to suggest…”

  “Of course you haven’t offended me, Po,” Mary interrupted, standing up. “But taking care of our house, our properties and charities, our store—well, that’s my life now. And I will do the best I can to make Owen proud.” Mary turned and walked down the hall and out the front door, with Po trailing behind her.

  Po stood at the door and watched Mary walk down the porch steps and along the brick sidewalk to the street. Her sleek, elegant car was parked at the curb. Po watched her slide behind the wheel, then drive slowly off to Windsor House and a day of selling extravagantly priced artifacts to people who didn’t need them.

  Po frowned. She brushed her hair back behind one ear, her hands on her hips, and shook her head. “Lord,” she wondered aloud, “what in heaven’s name was that all about?”

  Chapter 7

  Tumbling Blocks

  Early the next Saturday, Selma unlocked the door to her fabric shop and ushered everyone into the workroom. A collective sigh of relief hung heavy on the early morning air.

  “A humongous dose of normal—that’s what we need,” Phoebe said. She walked over to the far end of the eight-foot table, the spot where she always sat, and dropped her bag to the floor. A pacifier and two diapers fell out. She quickly stuffed them back inside.

  “I don’t know if we’ve actually reached normal yet,” Selma said. “But by gum, we’ll be there soon.”

  “Of course we will,” Po said, and settled down at the end of the table. “So let’s talk anniversary quilt. This is the day we start in earnest.”

  “I think Susan and I have it figured out,” Leah said. “Tell me what you think.” She walked over to the table and spread out a diagram—a large sheet filled with tiny squares.

  “This is our version of an old pattern called the Crystal Star. Perfect for Selma, don’t you think?” She looked over at Selma. Unwilling to be embarrassed, Selma walked back into the front of the store, claiming someone needed to keep the store running.

  They all agreed that a star would be good. Even Kate, who expressed great fear that she’d have to master points, thought it was a good idea. “A star for our star,” she said.

  “The Crystal Star pattern,” Susan went on, “was printed in the Kansas City Star in the 1930s. It was part of the series they did for all those years, reprinting quilt patterns that people sent in from Nebraska and Kansas and Oklahoma—from the whole center of the universe. Well, the country at least.”

  “My mother collected every one of those patterns,” Eleanor said. “They were a history book in the making.”

  Po nodded. Her mother had collected them, too, then passed them down to Po. She looked over at the diagram. “How will we divide this up?” she asked.

  “The quilt will be five blocks square, with several blocks reserved for a special center star, so we’ll each have to make at least two. Then the fastest among us can do the remaining ones. We’ll set the center star on point and give it its own frame. It will be special, a focal point. If you look at this diagram you can see that it becomes a star within a star, and will take up five blocks. Maybe Susan and I can work on the center while the rest of you do the border stars.”

  “Will all our stars be the same?” Phoebe asked. Phoebe loved experimenting, no matter what the outcome.

  “You can make it as special as you want by changing the center of your star. For example, the middle could be a checkerboard pattern, a diamond, or plain. Live dangerously, Pheebs.” Leah grinned at her. She loved the unpredictable young mom.

  “I have some fabric we can start with,” Susan said. She pointed to three pieces spread out on the table. “Leah and I picked out these three for the common colors, based on the color scheme we all agreed on last month. We’ll each use them in our stars in some way. Then everyone can pick coordinating fabrics and work those into their own design.” She picked up a purple cotton print. “This will be the common background for all the stars. What do you think?”

  “I’ve no doubt this will be amazing,” Kate said. “But I may be afraid to touch it. I have no idea what you’re talking about—center point, stars within stars. Maybe I could just be comic relief. Or bring donuts.”

  They laughed and Susan said, “I will assign myself to be your mistake fixer. No one will ever know.”

  Kate didn’t look completely convinced, but decided to take it a stitch at a time.

  “And filled with my mistakes or not, it’s a great idea. Selma sure deserves it.”

  The others echoed the thought, excited to get started and eager to honor Selma and Parker’s Dry Goods’ fiftieth anniversary.

  Susan passed out copies of the pattern and piled the table with bolts of fabric in deep shades of blue and purple, pale yellow prints, blue-black stripes, and lavender and gold.

  Maggie fingered a deep purple fabric with stripes of black and yellow swirling through it. “It will be a terrific quilt,” she pronounced.

  And with that, the anniversary project began.

  “What’s the latest news, Selma?” Kate asked when Selma came back into the room.

  Selma didn’t answer at first. Instead, she reached for a mat and rotary cutter and rolled her sewing table up to the edge of the worktable. She turned it on. The gentle hum of the machine filled the room. “Well,” she said finally, “the police have stopped hanging out in my store, which is a good thing. It’s not exactly a welcoming, come-hither sight for my customers, what with P.J. in his crisp blue uniform standing guard at the front door.”

  “Who’s P.J.?” Kate asked.

  “Flanigan,” Maggie said. “You know him. We all went to high school together,”

  Kate frowned. “Flanigan,” she said. “Pete? The guy who won all the debate competitions? I thought he went into law.”

  “He did,” Phoebe spoke up. “He was in law school with Jimmy. Everyone knew P.J. in law school. He left me great tips in that bar they all hung out in. He’s one tall piece of man candy.” Her laughter spun up to the skylight.

  “Really?” Kate said. That wasn’t her memory. Pete Flanigan ran in a different crowd, she remembered. He was quiet, but the kind of kid everyone liked. He was a swimmer, she remembered vaguely. And there was something else, too, but the memory escaped her.

  “P.J. is a nice man,” Po said. “His parents are friends of mine. After law school, he switched to police work, following in his father’s footsteps. I suspect he’ll go back to law someday.” She looked over at Kate. “And whether you remember it or not, Kate Margaret Simpson, you did know him.”

  Kate frowned. Sure, she knew him. Crestwood High was small. But she didn’t know him well. And then she remembered. It was middle school, not high school, when a ballroom dance class was obligatory. The kids were all paired up. And Kate was paired up with a guy who was an even worse dancer than she was. Pete Flanigan. She shook her head, hair flying in several directions. “Him,” was all she said, thinking of the bruised toes she went home with after each class.

  “He has two Aussies,” Maggie said. “You can tell a guy’s character by his dogs. Kanga and Mocha are the sweetest girls in town. And they adore P.J.”

  Po smiled, remembering Kate’s mom and how she was always on the lookout for someone who might have a good influence on her daughter—being nice to dogs was one of the criteria. “Your mother and I used to dream up scenarios that might throw you and P.J. Flanigan together. He was such a responsible young man and Meg thought he would have a good influence on you.”

  Kate laughed. “Geesh.”

  “We’d sit on your front porch sipping martinis and plotting a soap opera episode for you.”

  Phoebe lifted her eyebrows. “P.J. Flanigan? You
could do worse, Kate. Honestly, he’s a great guy. So, what were you like in high school? Were you part of the in crowd? I imagine P.J. was every mom’s dream.”

  Kate made a face and Po laughed, remembering the Kate of a dozen or more years ago. Kate wasn’t in the popular group. She’d been a wild filly, a thorn in her parents’ side much of the time—opinionated, stubborn, but underneath it all, as they often told themselves, she was smart with a big heart, even if that heart sometimes took her to protesting things she deemed unfair and skipping an occasional day of school rather than sitting in history class taking a test.

  “Pete, or P.J., or whoever he is now, was well liked, that I remember,” Kate said. “Me? Well, my best friend Honora liked me. But sorry to disappoint you, Pheebs. You won’t find me on the Prom Queen page in the Crestwood High yearbook. Though P.J. might have made an appearance. In fact, I think he did.”

  “Speaking of P.J.,” Eleanor said, “what does he think about this awful murder business, Selma?”

  Selma shook her head. “He said they’re still thinking it was a burglary. The ‘perp,’ as P.J. calls the scum bum who did this, assumed the store would be empty that late at night.”

  “So what did this guy steal—a bolt of fabric?” Phoebe asked. “That’ll provide a great Sun City retirement.”

  “Now that’s a good question, Phoebe,” Selma said. “Whoever this person was, he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box. He took my locked box from under the counter up front. And walked off with a sum total of half a dozen handwritten store charges, some change, and a stack of order sheets I had planned to finish that day. And Owen’s wallet and watch, I believe I heard P.J. say.”

  “Owen died for loose change,” Leah said. There was an edge to her usually soft voice. She lined up her cut strips of fabric on the table and smoothed them out with her fingers. “Owen was a good man, a decent man. This whole thing just doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t make any sense at all. And I think P.J. Flanigan, as intelligent as he is, is dead wrong,” Po said. She blurted the words out with more force than she had intended and was slightly embarrassed when all eyes in the room turned toward her.

  Susan, who was carrying a bolt of fabric to the front of the store stopped in her tracks. “What?” she asked, looking from one surprised face to the next. “Why do you say that?”

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

  Susan dropped the bolt of cotton and stared at Po. “It has to be a burglary, Po.”

  Po fiddled with a fabric square. “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. It doesn’t compute. Not with a busy bookstore down the street and an antique shop with lamps that cost more than my home. It might be the easier hypothesis, but I don’t think it’s the right one.”

  Susan rested both hands on the back of the ladder chair. Her usually quiet voice had gained some volume. “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 thirty-eight, 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. And certainly, working in a store in which a man had been found dead wasn’t easy to swallow. It made sense that Susan—and Selma, too—would opt for the burglar explanation. “I don’t mean to stir things up, Susan. Perhaps I spoke out of turn.”

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

  Po shushed Kate with a wave of her hand, but she laughed along with the rest of the quilters. 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, partly because she didn’t want her dear friend Selma in any danger. And if someone had 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. Not covered over by a hypothesis that didn’t make sense.

  “Well, frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me either.” 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 quilt 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. Recently he’d been pushing for that fancy brick sidewalk, in spite of my very vocal protests. And he fought me on snow removal companies a couple of times. And there were other association feuds, too, plenty of them, but none that couldn’t be solved more amicably and easily than murdering him.”

  “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 child 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.

  “Why would he do that?” Kate asked.

  Phoebe lifted one small shoulder.

  Maggie nodded, then removed several pins held between her lips. “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 border of alley 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 a while now. Night noises when there shouldn’t have been any. 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. Hans actually walked out in his backyard—he has this amazing rock garden back there that Sparky loves to dig in—but couldn’t see anything so went back to bed.”

  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’s story,” she said, focusing back on the conversation. “He 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.”

  “Those nighttime 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. The line zigzagged and she turned off the machine. “He’s one creepy dude. He skulks around in the shadows and rarely speaks. Honestly, he scares me, Selma.”

  “He’s a bit 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 and. …” Susan held the template and fabric up to the light to make sure the alignment was perfect. Her unfinished thought hung 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 is, 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. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, he fell right smack onto a garbage can. Smashed in the side flatter than a pancake,” Selma said. “We were having an association 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 association meetings could have been what the back neighbor heard, too” Susan said. “They get kind of noisy—and you were meeting the night of…well…that night.”

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