Fred stayed where he was to make his call, and I went over to see how the conscientious objectors were doing. Someone had gotten them chairs, apparently deciding wisely there was no chance that mere discomfort would make Dee change her mind about her fingerprints, and it wouldn't look good to keep an eighty-three-year-old woman seated on the hard floor for hours on end.
Dee and Emma had the two middle chairs, with Sunny and Stefan on one side of them, and Trudy, looking miserable, on the other. She must have felt guilty about having given in to the pressure to be fingerprinted, because she'd scooted her chair about a foot away from the others and turned sideways on the chair with her back to them, like a toddler who believed that if she couldn't see them, they couldn't see her.
"Well?" Dee asked. "Have they found a match yet?"
"It doesn't work that way," I said. "Fingerprint matching isn't quite the science that TV and the movies make it seem. It's a slow process. I don't know exactly how long it takes for this police department, but it will definitely be days rather than minutes. And that's assuming they got clear prints from the murder weapon."
Trudy turned in her chair to face us. "They found the murder weapon?"
"They believe so."
"I bet it was a pair of scissors." Trudy slumped deeper into her chair. "Maybe I'd better call a lawyer. My prints are probably on all of the scissors in the room. Sunny brought enough for everyone to have her own pair, but you know how it is. You can never find your tools when you need them. People were always asking me to get them scissors. Even Jayne thought that was one job I could do reasonably well, although she did take one pair away from me and stick it in her back pocket. I think she was just looking for an excuse to tell someone not to run with scissors. I wasn't, really. I just have long legs, so I move pretty fast even when I'm walking."
"It sounds like there'd be multiple sets of prints on any of the scissors you handled, and they were probably smudged by whoever used them after you did. Even if they can find your prints along with others, they'd have to have a reason to suspect you instead of the owners of the other prints. Something like a motive for wanting Alan dead."
"That's the problem," Trudy said. "I do have a motive. Sort of. I mean, I wouldn't actually kill anyone, but I knew Alan Miller. We went to high school together. He had a crush on me, and he wouldn't leave me alone when I said I wasn't interested in him. Really freaked me out by following me around town. He still does…I mean, he still did it all the time. At least, it felt that way. I'm not sure if he was following me exactly, but it's a small town, and he'd see me somewhere and come over and tell me how pretty I was, and how I'd look even better in tight clothes, and how come my boyfriend wasn't with me? That sort of thing. Every single time he saw me."
"Did you ever get a restraining order against him?"
Trudy shook her downcast head. "I was afraid it would just make him do something worse."
"It would be hard for the police to think you went from doing absolutely nothing about his bothering you to suddenly killing him," I said. "It would be different if you had a long history of police involvement or you'd ever threatened him with violence if he wouldn't leave you alone."
"Well…" Trudy sighed. "There was this one time, when I was out window-shopping here on Main Street a few months ago, and Alan started following me and saying stupid things. I saw a cop coming out of the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery, and I ran over to see if he could help me." She nodded in the direction of Fred Fields, who was still just out of hearing range, talking on his phone. "It was the same cop who's watching over us today. I told him what was happening, but when I turned around to point out Alan, he was gone. I don't know if the cop will even remember."
Another cop might not, but Fred would definitely remember. The only thing I wasn't sure about was whether he'd mentioned it to Ohlsen yet. Fred might not think Trudy was a viable suspect, but Ohlsen would if he knew about the history between Alan and Trudy. And now I was starting to wonder about Trudy too. She was such a timid young woman, but I couldn't help thinking about the old saying that still waters ran deep.
* * *
The conscientious objectors were fine and didn't need me to hold their hands, so I headed back inside the boardroom to see if there was something useful I could do.
The quilters were getting restless as the work was wrapping up. Only two of the workstations were still operating: the one for quilting through the three layers of the miniature quilts, and the one with the machine that attached the binding and hanging loop. There were only about a dozen ornaments left to be layered at the first station, and the woman doing the binding was finishing them as fast as they were arriving at her table.
Jayne stood over the basket of the finished ornaments now, acting as a self-appointed quality-control inspector. She snatched the latest addition out of the basket and announced, "This is unacceptable. The hanging loop has some exposed raw edges. It needs to be ripped out and redone."
The woman who had made the offending loop acted as if she hadn't heard Jayne's shrill voice and picked up the next little quilt that needed binding.
Meg, on the other hand, must have heard the complaint, since she hurried over to intervene. She took the supposedly defective ornament from Jayne. "Oh, that's not so bad. I bet you could fix it with a few hand stitches and a little tuck in the binding."
"It wouldn't look good on close inspection," Jayne said.
"That's all right," Meg said. "These little quilts aren't going to be in a juried show or anything. No one will ever notice once it's hung on the tree."
"A quilt judge would notice."
"Not after you've worked your magic on it, especially if it's placed high on the tree, where no one can get a close look at it." Meg steered Jayne over to the abandoned cutting table. In addition to the rulers and rotary cutters, there was a pincushion, three sizes of cheap metal thimbles, and two spools of thread—one red and one white.
"I guess a temporary repair will do for now," Jayne said. "After the holidays, I'll take the worst ones home and do them right."
"Make sure to let the museum's director know that you're not stealing them," Meg said, "just fixing them."
Curious to see how the little imperfection would be hidden, I followed to watch as Jayne threaded a needle, created a tuck in the binding fabric, and then folded it over the tiny bit of raw-edged fabric that stuck out. Her stitches were so tiny they appeared to be part of the binding fabric. When she reached the bottom of the loop, where it met the top corner of the quilted ornament, the needle got stuck in the thick layers. Jayne grabbed the largest of the thimbles and stuck it on the tip of her thumb. It was too small, barely covering the tip of her thumb, but it was enough to allow her to push the needle past the sticking point.
And then it dawned on me. I knew why the leather thimble hadn't fit anyone during the tests. It wasn't designed for a finger; it had been worn by someone who used her thumb to quilt. It wasn't a common method, but I'd seen it a few times during my studies. That would explain why it was too big even for the largest-boned people in the room, Carl and Gil, and it had only fit the tip of Matt's fingers, flaring out too far at the knuckle.
Ohlsen needed to try the thimble on everyone in the room again, but wearing it on thumbs instead of fingers. This time, I suspected it would be noticeably too small for Carl, Gil, and Matt. I couldn't tell just by looking at Jayne's thumb whether it would match the leather thimble, but she'd just jumped to the top of the suspect list. She was easily angered, she had no alibi, and she'd given a false name when questioned by the police. Dee and Emma had said Jayne could get violent, at least to the extent of property damage, over quilting issues, and she'd admitted to being irritated with Alan Miller for his mistreatment of the Tree of Life quilt. Jayne's perfectionism might have an even darker side than what anyone had observed so far. I'd heard often enough during my stress support group meetings that perfectionism could be a killer, but until now I'd never thought the saying might be true in a literal sense.
I needed to let Ohlsen know that we'd been looking at the thimble all wrong, and that it might yet be the key to identifying Alan's killer.