CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

Ohlsen hadn't returned to the boardroom, so I told the female officer at the door that I needed to talk to Fred, and she let me past without the hassle Faria would have given me.

Outside, the hallway was deserted, only the five empty chairs remaining at the near end of the hallway to indicate where the conscientious objectors had been seated. Fred must have been instructed to take them downstairs for transport to the police station. Apparently someone had forgotten to tell the officer inside the boardroom.

I was debating whether I should continue down the back stairs on my own, when Meg slipped through the doors behind me.

She smiled wryly. "You know where I need to go."

"Officer Fields has left," I said. "You'll have to let the officer inside know you're out here alone."

"I can't wait that long." Meg was doing the restless little dance of someone who really couldn't wait.

Talking to Ohlsen, on the other hand, could wait a couple of minutes.

"I'll go with you." If anyone questioned our being outside the boardroom, we could vouch for each other. It wasn't like either one of us was going to make a run for freedom, and even if we did, there were officers at each of the exits, prepared to stop us.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you," Meg said, her grateful smile making her look even more the very image of Mrs. Claus, even without her pinafore apron and red hat.

"No problem," I said.

We reached the point in the hallway where it was open to the two sets of stairs, one to the museum lobby and one to the parking lot. Meg glanced in both directions, as if at a stop sign, looking for oncoming traffic. The tension on her face deepened the lines around her eyes and on her forehead. Perhaps she was afraid of heights. The stairs were steeper than in more modern buildings and seemed to go on forever.

To distract her, I said, "Doesn't your bladder condition interfere with your more formal teaching events? I would think the students would get restless if the instructor keeps having to leave in the middle of an explanation."

"That's why it's so important to have a highly trained assistant," Meg said, continuing past the stairwells. "Jayne helps out whenever she's able to attend an event, and most of the time she's better at my techniques than I am. I was her very first instructor, and she soaked up everything I had to teach. I sometimes wonder if she might have gone in a different direction with her quilts if she'd latched on to a different instructor. She decided that whatever I did was the only right way to do things, and everything else was inferior."

My stomach lurched, the way it did when I was in the beginning stage of a stressful situation, before the nausea and light-headedness that presaged passing out. Usually, I knew exactly why my symptoms appeared, but there didn't seem to be any reason right now. Ohlsen had shown himself willing to listen to my insights today, I'd at least solved the mystery of the thimble to my satisfaction, and I even had a good idea of who was going to turn out to be the prime suspect. It would be particularly interesting to see how Jayne explained why she hadn't claimed the thimble when she'd first seen it in the hands of the forensics tech.

But something was wrong, my body kept insisting. Nausea rose, and I leaned against the wall halfway between the stairwell and the door to the ladies' room.

What on earth was going on with my nervous system?

One of the most frustrating aspects of a syncope event was that my thinking tended to go fuzzy as soon as the stress began, which then clouded my judgment and made it more difficult for me to think of a way to avoid the stress. A little cold water splashed on my face might help me to concentrate. I needed to be able to think straight when I got downstairs and told Ohlsen my latest insight about the thimble and its likely owner.

Meg stopped to peer at me anxiously. "Are you all right?"

"Nothing serious, but I think I'll use the ladies' room after you."

"I'm used to people following in my footsteps," Meg said with a self-deprecatory smile. "Usually, it's in quilting techniques though, not bladder control."

I needed to stop thinking about the nausea and concentrate on something pleasant and soothing. Like a whole room full of quilters copying Meg's quilting techniques while creating amazing works of art for me to appreciate. I pictured Jayne and Trudy and Dee and Emma and even Stefan, all lined up, mimicking their instructor. First, the cutting, then the stitching and ironing and machine quilting. And finally a few hand stitches to secure the hanging loop, using their thumbs to push the needle through the thick layers of fabric.

As the image came into focus, I sucked in a startled gulp of air. Had Jayne been copying Meg when she used the thimble on her thumb? If so, that put Meg right up at the top of the suspect list with Jayne. Meg had no alibi for the time of Alan's murder. She'd claimed she was in the ladies' room when Sunny screamed, but I had no way of telling if that was true. Meg had definitely had the means to do the murder; I'd seen her put a pair of Sunny's scissors in the pinafore apron. I'd thought she'd discarded the apron and hat as inappropriate for the aftermath of the murder, but there could have been another reason for getting rid of it: it had Alan's blood on it.

Perhaps most damning of all, Meg had tried on the thimble exactly as directed, fighting the muscle memory that, assuming I was right about where Jayne had learned to use a thimble, would have automatically called for wearing it on the thumb. If I was wrong, and Jayne hadn't learned that technique from her favorite teacher, Meg still would have known that Jayne used a thimble on her thumb, and I thought Meg was enough of a natural-born teacher that she wouldn't have been able to help herself from sharing that information with the forensic tech.

The only thing missing was motive. Why on earth would Meg have killed anyone, least of all a young, down-on-his-luck guy trying to do a nice thing for his grandmother? Without some explanation for why she might have wanted Alan dead, it would be difficult to convince Detective Ohlsen to search Meg's vehicle for the missing quilt and the pinafore apron. Especially since now I was working more from intuition—and the evidence of my hypersensitive nervous system—than from logic.

I wasn't even sure I could explain my theory well enough for Ohlsen to take me seriously, not with my head swimming.

"I really need to go," Meg said. "Will you be all right here by yourself?"

It hadn't been that long since Meg's last trip to the bathroom. Less time than any of her previous trips, I thought.

There was something other than her bladder behind her urgency. I needed to stall until I could figure out what was going on.

"Just give me a minute for my head to clear."

Meg glanced in the direction of the ladies' room, but she didn't leave me. Either she was truly concerned about me or she knew it would be suspicious if she acted too callously.

If she didn't actually need to use the toilet, why was she so desperate to get to the restroom? What if she had stashed evidence of her guilt there? Like her pinafore, which surely would have had at least some of Alan's blood on it if she'd stabbed him. Meg could have tossed the scissors in the trash, stowed the quilt in her car, and headed back inside the museum before she realized she was wearing incriminating evidence. Even if someone had seen her dashing toward the ladies' room to get rid of it, no one would have thought anything of her actions.

If I was right about Meg being the killer, then the apron had to be in the ladies' room, and I had to keep her from destroying it. Gil would definitely give the police permission to search there, so no warrant was necessary. Then forensic testing would confirm that the blood had belonged to Alan Miller.

"You know," I said, "perhaps we should go back to the boardroom so I can sit down before I end up needing paramedics."

Meg transformed suddenly, no longer looking even remotely like Mrs. Claus, unless Santa had married a vicious serial killer. Her eyes were narrowed, and she reached out to grab me by my arm. I tried to pull away from her, but I was too light headed and dizzy to free myself.

It was probably a good thing that Faria had confiscated all the scissors as soon as he'd arrived. Except he hadn't thought to confiscate the rotary cutters, and Meg had just pulled one out of the back of her waistband, where it had been stowed like a gangster's illegal gun.

I froze long enough to confirm that the safety guard had been retracted and the blade was fully exposed.

I took a step backward, but Meg followed, shoving the rotary cutter toward my face and forcing me to continue backing up. Unfortunately, if I kept going, I'd be in a precarious position between the two stairwells. One good shove and I'd go tumbling down the steep stairs.

At least now I knew who had killed Alan Miller. Of course, that wasn't particularly comforting now that she was threatening me with a sharp blade. She'd probably intended to cut up the bloody apron and flush it down the toilet, and that was why she'd smuggled the rotary cutter out of the boardroom. Now, it was coming in useful for making sure I couldn't alert the police before she destroyed the evidence.

She had a weapon, but I had the advantage of height and relative youth. I planted my feet and refused to move any closer to the stairwell. My arms were longer than hers, so I had a reasonable chance of keeping her from hitting anything vital with the rotary cutter. Anything was better than a fall down those steep stairs.

"As long as we're not going anywhere," I said, "why don't you tell me why you did it?"

"Did what?"

"It's over," I said, bluffing. "Before Fred left, he set up an appointment for me to talk to Ohlsen, so the detective is expecting me in the parking lot. I should have been down there by now, and he's not a patient person. He's going to come looking for me in a minute. When he gets here, I'm going to tell him that you killed Alan Miller, and if he tries the thimble on your thumb, it's going to fit you better than the proverbial leather glove. Plus, I'm going to tell him that your apron is hidden somewhere in the ladies' room up here and that they'll find Alan Miller's blood on it."

"You're wrong." Meg waved the rotary cutter at me again.

I took a cautious sideways step, trying to force her to trade places with me so she would be closer to the stairs than I was. I had to move slowly, so as not to provoke a further attack from Meg and also to prevent my light-headedness from worsening. Meg might not even need to push me down the stairs if I got too close and my nervous system did the job for her, causing me to pass out at just the wrong time and place. I needed to remain calm. And vertical.

Easier said than done, in the circumstances.

"I'm not wrong about you," I said. "The only thing I don't understand is why you did it. Everyone seems to admire you and appreciate how generous you are toward your home town."

Meg shook her head and laughed bitterly. "It's true, you know, what they say about not being able to go home. Too many ghosts, too much unfinished business."

"Alan was just a kid when you left Danger Cove," I said. "You couldn't possibly have had any problems with him."

"Not with Alan directly. With his family," Meg said. "You're an outsider, so you don't know. The locals know. Ask anyone. The McLaughlins and the Millers were practically family to each other for generations. My mother and his grandmother would have considered each other BFFs if they'd had texting and Twitter back when they were growing up together."

"That would make Alan something like a cousin," I said. "I know families can have their arguments, but that doesn't explain why you'd want to kill him."

"There's more to it," Meg said. "My mother and his grandmother were best friends, but they were also complete opposites. We McLaughlins have always had a reputation for working hard and succeeding. The Millers have pretty much the opposite reputation. Not that they're lazy exactly, but no matter how hard they work, they still fail at whatever they set out to do. Only my mother didn't care. She accepted them as they were."

"Again, I don't understand," I said. "Perhaps there are mitigating circumstances, and I can let the detective know, but only if I understand, and I don't. You've just confused me even more. You killed a friend of your family."

Meg's laughter grew even more bitter. "That's the thing. They weren't really our friends. All this time I thought they were, and it was a lie. My mother, bless her soul, is gone now and doesn't have to learn the truth. The friends she cherished all her life had actually betrayed her."

"Not Alan," I said.

"Oh yes, he did," Meg said. "He lied to me. He said his grandmother made the Tree of Life quilt."

I did some quick mental math. "Assuming his grandmother is around fifty years older than he is, she could have made it when she was in her early twenties. The materials and design are right for that era, and it's got an embroidered date to confirm it."

"You got the date right," Meg said. "But it wasn't made by Alan's grandmother. It was made by my mother. You probably noticed that it wasn't a scrap quilt. It was made of five green prints and just one red print. All bought new. My mother scrimped and saved to buy that fabric before the first Christmas of her marriage. She was determined that her children would have a special quilt just to be used in December. It was supposed to be a tradition to be passed down through the family."

The longer I could keep Meg talking, the better the chance that the officer inside the boardroom would wonder what was taking us so long and come out to check on us. "Your mother sounds like a wonderful, caring person. I still don't understand how her tradition became a motive for murder."

"That quilt should have been mine," Meg said fiercely. "I would have taken care of it. Those Millers never took care of anything. I saw what they'd done to the quilt. It was a mess of stains and tears and broken stitches. My mother would have been heartbroken if she'd known how it would end up. She always stored it away from January to the end of November, and then she only brought it out in December, when we took turns sleeping under it. I still remember the first time I was old enough to be entrusted with it."

"Still," I said, "you can't blame Alan for what his family did."

"You don't understand. It should have been mine. He stole it."

"Alan did?" I said. "He didn't seem to have any particular attachment to it other than that it belonged to his grandmother."

"Another lie," Meg said. "I suppose I should have said that his grandmother stole it. All these years, and we never knew. See, it disappeared during my mother's wake. She died a few weeks after Christmas one year, and she'd been too sick to remember to put the quilt away. It was on my bed still. Maybe I should have folded it up and put it away on my own, but I was only twelve at the time, and I knew my mother was dying. The quilt helped me to cope, since I knew I'd inherit it someday, and I'd always have it to remind me of her."

I was beginning to understand. All this time, Meg had felt guilty for not putting the quilt away properly, and then she'd seen it today and realized who had stolen it. All of her guilt had turned to rage against the family that had caused her so many years of distress. "So you followed Alan out to the parking lot to demand that he return your property, and things got out of hand. I can see how that could have happened."

"It wasn't just the quilt," Meg said. "I recognized it at once, of course, and I was going to wait until after today's event was over, and then I'd go file a police report. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Not so much at the initial theft of the quilt, but at the ongoing betrayal. Decades of it. I can still remember Alan's grandmother comforting me over the loss of the quilt. She even helped me look for it when we thought it had just been misplaced. Everyone thought she was being such a good person, taking time out of her busy schedule to honor the friend she'd just lost. And all along, the bitch had actually stolen it. It wasn't some random thief who took it. She knew how much the quilt meant to my mother and the whole family. She knew, and she took it anyway."

I couldn't help saying, "I'm sorry." It really had been a terrible betrayal.

Meg didn't seem to hear me. "The least they could have done was to take care of the quilt, but oh, no, they treated it with as little respect as they showed our friendship. They took it and abused it."

I suspected there was another explanation. The damage to the quilt wasn't as extensive as it could have been if it had been mistreated. The wear and tear was consistent with reasonably careful but constant, everyday use over several decades. Alan Miller hadn't seemed like a bad kid, despite his rap sheet and his harassment of Trudy. Rather than coming from a family of cold-hearted liars, it was just as likely that Alan's grandmother had been grieving when Meg's mother died, and she'd "borrowed" the quilt on the spur of the moment during the wake, for much the same reason that Meg had left it on her bed beyond the holiday season: for the memories it held. And then the situation had gotten out of hand, and there had been no easy way for Alan's grandmother to return it.

Meg was too far gone with reliving her anger to stop now. "I tried to reason with him, explain that the quilt didn't belong to his grandmother, but he wouldn't believe me. Said his Gran would never steal anything, that she'd almost disowned him once for his shoplifting. He might have convinced the cops to let him keep the quilt if they'd heard his lies, but I knew better. He was just like everyone else in his family. He was evil through and through. People thought the Millers were the unluckiest family in town, but now I know they were just getting what they deserved."

As Meg relived the morning's events, she forgot to keep the rotary cutter poised to threaten me. Now was my chance.

I took a deep breath and prayed that a sudden move wouldn't be the last straw for my nervous system, and shoved Meg down the hallway, away from the stairwells, tackling her as hard as I could. We both fell onto the floor.

Meg was so startled that I was able to knock the rotary cutter out of her hand and send it careening down the wood floor before she realized what was happening. She went limp, and for a moment I thought she might have hit her head when we fell, but her chest was rising and falling. The struggle seemed to have gone out of her. I didn't trust her enough to roll off her though. I wasn't sure what she might do to me, or possibly to herself. As long as I kept her here, someone would eventually come looking for us. Besides, my head was swimming, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to stand up right now. Fortunately, she didn't know that.

"Where's the quilt now?" I said gently, hoping to get an answer while she was so wrapped up in her anger that she didn't realize how incriminating it would be.

Meg didn't say anything for long moments, much like Detective Ohlsen's prolonged silences while he mulled over a bit of evidence. Finally, she said, "If I tell you, will you do me a favor?"

"If I can."

"I know you're going to turn me in to the police, but would you explain to them why I did it? That I didn't mean to hurt anyone, but that the quilt meant so much to me that I just snapped. They'll listen to you, and you understand how people can get so attached to a family quilt."

I did understand. It wasn't the quilt itself that had set her off, but what it stood for, both the good memories of Meg's mother and then the bad memories of loss and heartbreak. That was true of all heirlooms, but in this case, it was an even stronger trigger, since it epitomized all the years of betrayal, the feeling that people who were supposed to be her friends had actually been keeping a secret from her, possibly laughing behind her back over her trust in them. "I can't promise they'll understand, but I'll do my best to explain."

"Thank you. It's in the trunk of my car." Meg took a deep breath. "One more thing. Would you make sure the quilt is taken care of when it's released from evidence?"

"That will be up to whoever ends up owning it. It sounds like you have a claim to it, but I'm guessing that Alan's grandmother is going to claim she's the legal owner." I didn't add that Meg was unlikely to be in any position to sue for possession of the quilt. She was going to have enough legal problems dealing with the murder charges.

"Just promise me that if you can do anything to make sure it's preserved, you will," Meg said. "My mother only made a couple of other quilts, and they were meant for daily use, so they fell apart years ago. This is the only one that survived."

"I'll do whatever I can." I thought it was safe now for me to get to my feet without passing out and without Meg doing something crazy. I stood and held out a hand to pull her up.

"Before we go talk to the detective, I really do need to use the ladies' room." Meg took my hand. "After you collect the apron from the ceiling tile where I stashed it, of course."