CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

"Jayne's at it again," Meg said with a deep sigh, interrupting my thoughts. "Excuse me while I go deal with her. I swear I could manage better without an assistant."

Right after she left, before I could start on my gophering duties, Faria came through the doorway with Carl and his service dog. I was relieved to see that Rusty seemed calm, the bringsel hanging loose, confirming that his master wasn't in any medical distress. I was glad to see that Carl was better, although I would have preferred it if his return hadn't brought Faria back too.

The officer gave Carl a friendly punch in the upper arm by way of a farewell and then started toward the far end of the room. Carl seemed to relax when he caught sight of Trudy happily trotting from station to station. He swiped a stack of red-and-white fabric squares from the cutting table and then headed over to the vacant sewing machine next to Matt. Rusty curled up under the table at Carl's feet.

Meanwhile, Faria had stopped at the ironing board where Stefan and Sunny were working. They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying, and I couldn't think of an excuse to go over and join them without being obvious enough that Faria would be justified in reporting me to Detective Ohlsen. Still, from their actions, I could tell Faria was here to collect Sunny to be interviewed. She finished the piece she was ironing and set the iron down, prepared to go with Faria, but Stefan took her hand in both of his and said something to Faria.

It wasn't hard to guess that Stefan was insisting that they couldn't be separated. He nodded in my direction, probably reading more into my promise to help Sunny than I'd intended, and Faria turned to look at me before shrugging and apparently agreeing the couple didn't need to be separated yet. For once, he seemed to understand that he should leave the matter up to someone with more experience in handling anxious witnesses. As long as all Faria was doing was delivering Sunny and Stefan to Detective Ohlsen for their interview, there was nothing I could or should do to protect them.

It was actually an encouraging sign that Ohlsen was finally starting to take witness statements. We might not be stuck here much longer, and the sooner we could leave, the less traumatized the quilters would be by today's events, and the less likely they'd be to associate the museum with an unpleasant experience.

I still needed to see if anyone knew who owned the leather thimble. I'd been too distracted to ask Jayne or Meg, and in any event, they were unlikely to recognize it. Meg hadn't lived in Danger Cove for years, so she wouldn't have had many opportunities to get to know the idiosyncrasies of the local guild members. Jayne knew the local quilters, but she only noticed the things that were being done wrong. The owner of the thimble probably had solid skills, given the extensive wear that would only come from putting in the long hours of work that generally led to competence.

Carl might recognize it though, and Matt seemed to have forgotten that we were on a mission to find the thimble's owner. Matt was bent over his sewing machine, stitching at a speed that would make me dizzy if I tried to work that fast. His blocks might not have the assembly-line type of precision that Jayne and Meg insisted on, but I thought his intense concentration on the little pieces of folk art surpassed that of anyone else in the room.

I slipped into the vacant seat next to Carl. "Are you sure you should be here?"

He finished the perfect little seam he was stitching and then said, "I'm fine. I just needed to rehydrate, and then Rusty convinced the EMTs that I really didn't need to go to the hospital. It was nothing, really."

"It wasn't nothing." It felt a little surreal to be saying the exact words that my paralegal used to say to me, back when I was in denial about my syncope diagnosis. "You were unconscious. That's serious."

Carl picked up another pair of fabric squares and lined the edges up precisely. "Not this time. It's just part of living with diabetes. I've learned which things are serious and which aren't. I'm lucky to have Rusty, who can provide a second opinion. I trust him to know when I need help."

"Still, it wouldn't have hurt to get an actual medical opinion."

"In other circumstances, I might have." He glanced over his shoulder, and I had a feeling that if I followed his gaze, I would have been looking at Trudy. "It wouldn't be fair for me to be treated differently than everyone else here. I never liked it when I got special treatment because of my job, and I don't like it now when it's for other reasons."

I could understand that. I'd never liked it when people fussed over me after I passed out.

"Besides," Carl said. "I'm worried about Trudy. She was terrified while she was waiting to be interviewed by Richie Faria. I thought she might have some sort of episode herself, in fact. That's probably why I didn't notice that I wasn't feeling well until it was too late."

"Everything seems to terrify Trudy," I said. "But she's young, and she recovers quickly."

Carl nodded. "Still, someone needs to keep an eye on her. She's fine now, but she might fall apart when Bud interviews her. She got some strange notion into her head that she might be blamed for Alan's death."

"Trudy?" This time I did turn and follow his gaze to look at the timid young woman laughing at something Emma had said to her. "Why would anyone think she might be violent? She's got victim written all over her, not attacker."

"It didn't make sense to me either, but it was obvious she believed it." Carl turned back to his sewing machine and concentrated on placing the two squares on the sewing plate. He fidgeted with them until they were in exactly the right spot, which didn't seem all that different to me from where they'd started, and dropped the presser foot. "I would have asked, but then Faria called her over to his desk, and I started to feel a bit dizzy, and then, well, you were there. You probably know better than I do what happened next."

Carl had spent enough time on the police force that he had to know anyone could become violent in the right circumstances. I'd learned that lesson in the course of my legal career, and then in more personal terms during my investigation of Randall Tremain's murder. Even so, I had trouble imagining Trudy stabbing someone.

I gave Carl a reassuring grin. "You couldn't have created a better distraction for Trudy if you'd been trying to do it. When you collapsed, she forgot about being afraid of Faria so she could be brave for you."

Carl looked up from the sewing machine bed, worry lines etched across his forehead. "Did you notice how afraid she was of Alan? I saw it earlier, when he first arrived. I'd have been watching him anyway, given his history, but when I saw how scared Trudy was, I thought it might help if she knew I had her back."

 "I'm sure she appreciated your presence," I said. "And that only makes it more ridiculous to think she might have killed Alan. She didn't need to do anything to him if he bothered her, not with you right here and prepared to help."

"Yeah, that's what I thought." He stepped on the pedal, keeping the needle at a much safer speed than Dee and Emma had. "I just wish I knew for sure. Maybe I should have told her not to leave this room until I got back from walking Rusty, so she wouldn't risk being alone with Alan, and then she'd have had an obvious alibi."

"Now you're being silly." I'd experienced the same sort of irrational guilt in the wake of Randall Tremain's death, as if there had to have been something I could have done differently that would have prevented the crime, even when I knew there wasn't. "It's not your fault that Alan is dead or even that Trudy doesn't have an alibi for the time of the murder. You should probably be more concerned about the fact that you don't have an alibi either."

"I'm no vigilante," Carl said. "I'm just a useless ex-cop."

"And an accomplished quilter," I said, hoping to turn the conversation to where I could ask about thimbles without raising any suspicion. "There aren't many people whose stitching can meet Meg McLaughlin's high standards."

"I like precision work. It takes my mind off other things."

"I'd love to see one of your finished quilts someday. Do you have any special style you're known for?"

"I like modern quilts, the ones with simple lines sort of reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture. But I like to interpret them using lots of little pieces within each of the large sections."

The "modern quilt" movement was something of a recent phenomenon in the quilting world, with simple but precise piecing that often relied on particularly fancy quilting to bring the minimalist piecing into a more complicated overall design. It gave me the perfect opportunity to ask him about thimbles.

"I can see that you do excellent piecing, but do you send the tops out to be finished, or do you also do the quilting?"

"I do it myself," he said. "I find hand quilting relaxing."

"I've never tried it," I said honestly. "It looks somewhat painful actually, pushing a tiny, sharp needle through all those layers, multiplied by several stitches on the needle each time. It has to be hard on the fingers, especially for someone like me who's never gotten used to a thimble."

"I can't use a thimble either. I tried at first, but I finally figured out the only way I can quilt is with a stab stitch." He must have seen the confusion on my face, because he explained. "It's just one stitch at a time. Push the needle through from the top of the quilt to the back, pull it all the way through underneath, and then poke it back up to the top. It can be slow, but it doesn't require as much pressure on the fingers, so there's less need for a thimble." Carl raised one hand from the table, turning his palm upward to stare at it. "It's not like I'd even notice if I inadvertently got pricked while quilting, considering how often I have to do it on purpose for testing."

Matt suddenly stopped sewing and leaned toward Carl to say in a low voice, "Heads up, guys. I think Jayne just noticed that you two aren't working."

I felt Rusty shift beneath the table, and Carl shuddered. "Jayne's worse than my old sergeant."

I pushed myself to my feet. I could either gopher or sew, and there was no way I was operating anything motorized. The paramedics surely had better things to do than to visit the museum for a third time today.

 

*   *   *

 

Trudy was busy in the back of the room, delivering quilt pieces from station to station, so I stayed in the front, starting at the cutting table. I hadn't had a chance earlier to see what they were doing there in any detail, and I was curious about the process.

The women had an efficient assembly line going. One person cut the red fabrics into narrow strips from selvage to selvage, then cut the strips at the appropriate intervals to create one-and-a-half-inch and two-inch squares. Another woman did the same thing with the white fabric. A third woman took the various squares and sorted them into plastic baggies that contained enough pieces in the right sizes to make a block that would eventually become an ornament.

After a couple of minutes, when a whole stack of baggies had been compiled, I took them over to the sewing machine tables and offered them to anyone who didn't already have a stack of fabric pieces to sew. Along the way, I collected any blocks that were finished except for the final ironing. When I'd distributed all the baggies, I brought the sewn blocks to where a woman I didn't know had taken over Stefan's ironing board. She gave me a stack of finished blocks to take over to yet another station at the end of the conference table, where the blocks were layered with batting and a red print for the back. The three layers were then pinned together for the quilting. I took those layered blocks to the opposite end of the conference table, where a sewing machine had been set up after lunch had been cleared away. There, the blocks were quilted. I traded the layered blocks for a stack that had been quilted and took them over to the final station in the front corner of the room. The machine there had a special foot for attaching the binding around the edge of the quilted block. An extra length of binding formed a loop for hanging it.

I gathered some more baggies filled with cut pieces and distributed them around the room. When I saw Meg was having a private word with Jayne over near the white board and wouldn't be paying attention to me, I headed for Matt's table and offered him the last of my baggies.

He shook his head. "Not my style. I cut my own pieces so I can work free form."

I turned to the next row of sewing machines behind Matt and held up the baggie. One of the women raised her hand, and I tossed it to her.

"Do you have a minute?" I asked Matt.

"I've always got time for you."

Not for the past twelve weeks he hadn't. It was too petty a complaint for me to say out loud though, given the events of today.

"It's making me nervous, how long the cops are keeping us here." I kept my voice low, although I didn't think anyone but Matt could hear me over the roar of the sewing machines. The women at the table behind us didn't seem to be paying us any attention. The people closest to us were Fred and Gil, talking in the doorway, but I couldn't make out exactly what Fred was saying or what song Gil was humming, so they weren't likely to be able to eavesdrop. "I wish I knew what Ohlsen was thinking."

"It is nerve wracking, isn't it?" He raised his hands to his cheeks, doing an exaggerated impression of Edvard Much's painting The Scream. "It's like we're in a manor-house mystery, locked up with all the suspects, unable to leave, while we get picked off, one by one. First Alan and then Carl."

From the other side of Matt, Carl raised one hand. "I'm still here. I didn't get picked off. I just wasn't paying enough attention to my medical condition. No one to blame except myself."

"Are you sure?" Matt turned to ask him. "You've been dealing with your diabetes for a while now, and you had some intense training with Rusty. So how come you didn't notice something was wrong before it was too late?"

Rusty poked his head out from under the table. Carl reached down to pat him. "It's okay, boy. He didn't mean it. It wasn't your fault." He told Matt, "I saw Rusty's signals, but I thought I could wait a few more minutes. He was doing his job. I was the one who messed up."

"I'm just saying the crisis seemed to happen awfully fast," Matt said. "Like it even took Rusty by surprise. Could someone have triggered the event somehow? Spiked your water bottle or something?"

Carl shrugged. "I suppose anything's possible. If there was a simple way to treat or monitor blood sugar and hydration, we wouldn't need service dogs."

"So someone could be trying to pick us off, one by one," Matt said triumphantly.

"But why?" I said. "What do Alan and Carl have in common that someone would target both of them?"

Matt wrinkled his nose. "See, this is why I leave crime reporting to the pros."

"I know. I know. You're just a simple arts reporter."

"Hey, that's right," Matt said, unfazed by my implied skepticism. "And in the arts, the second killing is usually to take care of loose ends from the first killing. Carl was outside near the time of the murder. Maybe he saw something incriminating."

"I wish I had seen something," Carl said morosely. "I'd have told Bud the minute he got here, and he'd have the suspect in custody by now. Except I didn't see anything. There was no one in the parking lot when Rusty and I were out there. Not even Alan Miller."

"You've seen too many movies based on Agatha Christie novels," I told Matt. "One person dying today is more than enough. And I really don't think Alan's killer was any kind of mastermind who would plot a whole series of murders. I can't see how any of this could have been planned in advance. Alan said he only heard about the event this morning, right before he came here, and apparently no one expected Carl to be here today."

Matt looked like he was going to argue with me, but I held up a hand. "And don't even think about mentioning the possibility of more victims if Stefan can hear you. He's already convinced he almost lost Sunny earlier today. He'll go into a total panic if he starts wondering whether the killer might be targeting her now because she saw something she shouldn't have."

"Maybe she did," Matt said. "Did you ask her?"

"She didn't see anything." I couldn't hide my frustration at how little we knew about what had happened. "At least not that she remembers."

"Isn't that the way it usually works?" Matt said. "The killer thinks someone saw more than she actually did."

"I'm not an expert in the mental processes of killers," I said. "What I do know is that Sunny is a lot stronger than Stefan is giving her credit for, and he's not going to let her out of his sight. So I think she's pretty safe unless the killer is prepared to take out two people simultaneously."

"Sunny's not the only one at risk," Matt said. "You and I are probably safe, just because we were both up here when the murder happened and couldn't possibly have seen anything incriminating. Everyone else is fair game."

Matt might appear laid back and less than serious, but he was also smart. I knew that he resented being dismissed as nothing but a pretty face every bit as much as I resented the way my syncope events gave people the impression that I was weak. He might just be right about someone having seen something incriminating without realizing it.

Carl had already claimed he hadn't seen anything, and he was a trained observer, so I believed him. He wasn't the only person who'd been out of the boardroom during the relevant time frame though. "I suppose Meg could have seen something on one of her trips to the ladies' room. Or Gil on her way down to the museum lobby."

Matt blinked. "Wait. Gil doesn't have an alibi? I thought she was up here all morning."

I shook my head. "There was some problem in one of the exhibit rooms. She went down to take care of it before Alan left. She was gone until after the murder. I expect the security cameras down there will exonerate her of the crime though."

"What about the cameras in the parking lot?" Matt blinked. "Wait, don't tell me. The museum got hit by the hooligans competing to knock out all the cameras in town."

"It's possible," I said, since I couldn't betray what Gil had confided to me in private. "But if so, the killer wouldn't have known the cameras were out. The museum certainly wouldn't advertise the fact. Maybe the police are right, and the killing really was just a matter of Alan's past catching up with him. If it was one of us who killed him—one of the quilters, I mean—they would have thought there was surveillance footage of the crime, and they'd have run away instead of coming inside and pretending nothing had happened."

"People live in denial all the time," Matt said. "Maybe the killer thought he'd stayed out of range of the cameras. The body was in an isolated corner of the lot, after all."

"You're determined to make me feel like I'm in a horror movie with a killer lurking around every corner, aren't you?"

"Don't worry," he said with a grin. "I'll protect you."

I almost believed him.