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CHAPTER ONE

 

It could have been worse, I thought. Much worse.

I knew only too well how badly things could go wrong. I was an expert at anticipating worst-case scenarios. It had been an important part of my job as an attorney, and even after I'd had to change careers to reduce the stress in my life, I'd held onto the habit of always being prepared for any possible disaster.

Even with all my skill though, I hadn't anticipated just how much could go wrong while working as an appraiser of quilts. I'd always admired the artistry, so when I'd needed a new career, I'd thrown myself into the serious study of quilt history. Before long, I'd passed a rigorous exam that allowed me to put "certified quilt appraiser" underneath the "Keely Fairchild" on my business cards.

So what could possibly go wrong with my new career? In two words: Dee Madison.

Dee was president of the Danger Cove Quilt Guild. In her eighties, she definitely looked her age, with white hair, a fashion sense that was stuck in the 1980s, and a generally fragile appearance.

Dee might have been tiny, but when she declared something had to happen, there was no getting around her. Especially when her best friend and self-appointed enforcer, Emma Quinn, was nearby, which she always was. Emma was about ten years younger and several inches taller than Dee, although not quite my height. She had a sturdy build and a knack for organizing volunteers, even when said volunteers hadn't intended to step forward to help.

Apparently my certification as an appraiser wasn't enough. According to Dee—and therefore also according to Emma—I had to have hands-on experience with making quilts.

I liked Dee and Emma and respected their opinions, so about a month ago I'd given in to their pressure. Today was my first day as an active member of the guild, attending their regular Tuesday midday meeting.

Still, it could have been worse. I'd managed to convince them I could not and would not use the dangerous instrument commonly known as a sewing machine. Especially if it was one of the super-powered ones that Dee and Emma favored. In the course of my legal work, I'd seen the statistics on the dangers of motorized equipment, both large and small, and given my syncope diagnosis, I wasn't willing to take the chance that I'd pass out while my fingers were near a needle moving at the rate of five thousand stitches per minute. If I had to learn to quilt, it was going to be by hand, no electricity or motor required. After all, some of the most amazing quilts I'd ever seen, like the one made by Maria Dolores, the first keeper of the Danger Cove Lighthouse, had been sewn by hand, probably by the light of a kerosene lantern.

With the help of Dee and Emma, I'd settled on a single block that could be made into a nice little pillow rather than a huge bed covering. They'd guided me to a traditional Hawaiian design, a stylized breadfruit that had curved edges instead of the trickier-to-appliqué sharp points found in the more difficult patterns. I'd already cut the four connected leaves by folding a mottled turquoise fabric, tracing the pattern's design onto the top layer, and then cutting it as if I were making a paper snowflake. I'd even finished the next step all by myself: basting the turquoise fabric to the white background material.

According to the instructions, now I had to turn under the edges of the top fabric and stitch them to the background. In order to do that, I needed to consult with more experienced needle artists.

The Danger Cove Quilt Guild met in what had once been a gracious parlor in a Victorian-style house built in the early 1900s, a few buildings past Some Enchanted Florist and directly across from Pacific Heights Park. Over the years, it had been "rehabilitated" by removing all the interesting architectural elements. The fireplace had been covered over and the mantel removed, and the original plaster decoration on the ceiling had been replaced with a popcorn treatment.

I'd heard that Alex Jordan, the owner of Finials and Facades Renovation and Restoration Services had been thinking of buying the building. After seeing the ruined interior, she'd gone straight to one of her worksites and hammered things with far more force and relentlessness than required. It had taken well over an hour before she'd exhausted herself enough to let go of her outrage.

I hoped she hadn't seen what the current owner, a developer named Jack Condor, had been doing to the place in the past two years. Since the interior had already been stripped of its original elements, the historical commission had been helpless to prevent him from gutting the rooms in order to turn most of them into bland, modern medical office suites. At least the commission had been able to insist that the exterior be maintained in all its Painted Lady glory in keeping with the quaint, tourist-attracting nature of downtown Danger Cove.

Today, there were about a dozen women, one man, and a Labradoodle service dog in the first-floor room where the guild met. As the only part of the building that hadn't been gutted and renovated already, it had apparently been used as a staging area during the rest of the construction work. Scattered around were a few boxes of electrical outlets, a roll of industrial carpet, and several nail packs in a variety of sizes. Even the furniture appeared to be left over from earlier use, possibly abandoned by prior tenants. There wasn't much of it, just a collection of mismatched folding chairs, a metal desk, and two beat-up, laminate-topped banquet tables.

I'd no sooner entered the room than Dee and Emma came rushing over from where they'd been working in the strong natural light over by the bay window. We'd been friends for almost a year now, ever since they'd asked me for help with proving that a local quilt dealer was selling reproduction quilts as antiques, but I doubted they'd have been in such a hurry to leave their quilting projects if the only thing on their minds was to be gracious hostesses.

"You've got to talk to Jack Condor for us," Dee said as I braced myself. "He just told us that next week is the last time the guild can meet here. He finally got permission from the building department to turn this room into another office, and he's evicting us. You've got to stop it."

"It didn't work out so well the last time you asked me to talk to someone for you," I said. "The man ended up dead."

Dee opened her mouth, and I just knew she was going to say that the death was a perfectly acceptable result, in the case of both the shady quilt dealer and the guild's landlord, but Emma, even more accustomed than I was to her friend's sometimes thoughtless comments, spoke first.

"Randall Tremain's death wasn't our fault," Emma said. "Or yours, Keely. The man had been asking to be killed for years."

"That's true of Jack Condor too," Dee said irritably.

I hadn't met the man yet, but I'd heard all about him from Alex Jordan when I'd hired her to turn an abandoned bank building into my residence. Developers tended to have a bad reputation anyway, but this one lowered the bar even further. According to Alex, cheating and lying were Condor's stock in trade, and he had no respect for property or people. He wasn't from Danger Cove originally and didn't have any sentimental attachment to it, so he felt absolutely no compunctions about destroying the very things that made the town so special. The only local resident who might care if Condor died was Officer Fred Fields. Even then, it wasn't personal. It was just because Fred considered all crime—from murder all the way down to littering—to be an affront to his profession.

Even if I discounted some of what Alex had said about Condor as the exaggerations of a competitor, it was obvious that he wasn't a model citizen. He didn't even have the decency to give the guild a reasonable period of time to relocate, despite the guild's having met here every week since at least ten years before he'd bought the building. I might have been able to fight the eviction or at least delay it if I were still practicing law, but it wasn't an option now that I'd accepted my diagnosis of syncope, a not-very-well-understood condition characterized by an excessive response to stress, which included nausea, light-headedness, and sometimes even unconsciousness.

 I was a quilt appraiser now, I reminded myself. And a novice quiltmaker. I didn't do anything the least bit stressful.

"Perhaps Jack Condor deserves whatever comes to him," Emma said, "but Keely is right about being careful in what we say and do. Now that the guild is being evicted, if anything happens to him, we'll be the prime suspects."

"I suppose that could be a problem." The wrinkles in Dee's face deepened while she thought. After a moment, she relaxed, and her eyes lit up. "Wait. I know. When Keely goes to talk to Condor, we won't go with her. We'll go somewhere public, with lots and lots of witnesses, so if anything happens to him, no one can blame us."

Right. They'd blame me. Just what I need in my search for a stress-free life.

"I'm not the right person to talk to your landlord." That was the truth, and not just because of my health issues. I didn't have much experience with landlord-tenant disputes. I'd always specialized in personal injury litigation. That was part of why I'd had to retire. There were some types of law where the risk of passing out with little notice wouldn't have been a major problem, but litigation wasn't one of them. Judges and juries tended to be a bit distracted by a lawyer who passed out in the middle of a closing argument.

"Lindsay says you can do anything you set your mind to," Dee said.

Bringing Lindsay Madison—Dee's granddaughter and my friend and ex-legal assistant—into the matter meant that I was going to lose the argument. I still felt a little guilty about having abandoned Lindsay when I quit the law office. She'd been on the verge of being fired by the managing partner at the time, and I hadn't been able to figure out how to get Lindsay to live up to her potential before I left. Since then, she'd improved on her own, but I still wished I'd been able to do more to help her.

If Dee called her granddaughter, Lindsay would drop everything at her job in Seattle and come back to Danger Cove to do whatever she could to help the guild. Including guilting me into doing a little bit of negotiating for the guild.

Some battles couldn't be won. I'd known as much in my trial practice, when the medical or forensic evidence hadn't been enough to support a claim. And I knew it now. I might have been a shark in pursuit of compensation for my clients, unswayed by both logical and emotional appeals, but I'd always had trouble saying no to people who needed my help.

"You don't need to bring your granddaughter into it," I said. "I'll make an appointment to talk to Jack Condor as soon as I leave here today."

 If we'd been anywhere other than at a guild meeting, Dee would probably have insisted that I drop what I was doing and leave immediately to go see Condor. Quilting, however, came before anything else, including eating, sleeping, and business negotiations. As far as Dee was concerned, for some people quilting even came before breathing.

 

*   *   *

 

With the eviction resolved as far as Dee was concerned, she looked around the room for an appropriate tutor for my foray into appliqué. She shared a bit of silent communication with Emma, who then took me over to the table set up under the bay windows while Dee went over to chat with the sole male quilter and his service dog.

Emma introduced me to Faith Miller, probably the youngest woman in the room at no more than her early thirties. She was seated next to the head of the table with her back to the brilliant sunshine streaming in from the bay window. She was short and rounded with wispy blonde hair that stuck out in ways that seemed random, rather than an actual style, making her appear frazzled.

"It's so nice to meet you." Faith's voice was what I'd expect of a kindergarten teacher, all sweet and enthusiastic and as wispy as her hair. She even dressed like my image of a kindergarten teacher, in a mid-calf-length denim skirt and a V-neck knit shirt with crayon stains on one sleeve. "I've heard a lot about you."

I hoped it was in the context of quilt appraisals and not dead bodies.

"I'm glad to meet you too." I pointed at the stack of Robbing Peter to Pay Paul blocks on the table in front of her. It was a simple block, traditionally made with just two colors, alternating the placement of dark and light from block to block, so that when they were laid out, they formed an optical illusion of interlocking circles. While some quilters made the block on a sewing machine, Faith was using the alternate method of hand-appliquéing the curved pieces onto a background square. I couldn't imagine having the patience to make enough of them to cover an entire bed. "It looks like you've got a lot to teach me. I have a much smaller project, but I don't know where to start my stitching."

"Faith is a good teacher," Emma assured me. "She homeschools her three kids, in fact."

Faith smiled ruefully. "These Tuesday meetings are practically my only 'me' time. I trade with another homeschooler to have the afternoon off. Guild events are the only time I get to have any grown-up conversation. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids. But ever since my husband started traveling for several weeks at a time for his job, I'm practically a single parent. It gets to be too much sometimes, and if I don't get the occasional break from the kids and all the chores my husband used to do, I'm afraid I'm going to snap and do something I'd regret."

"I used to feel that way about my legal practice and my clients sometimes," I said. "I loved my work, but sometimes I needed a break. That's why I first started going to quilt shows."

Emma returned to the other end of the table where she'd left her current project, and I hung my quilted messenger bag on the back of the seat next to Faith at the head of the table before dropping into the chair. I placed the see-through, plastic quilter's version of the briefcase I'd once carried on the table. The brand new case held my basted breadfruit block, a packet of needles, and a spool of thread.

Faith examined my basting work and declared it to be passable. She was more enthusiastic about my choice of thread and needles, which I couldn't actually take any credit for, since they'd come in the kit with the pattern and fabric.

Faith demonstrated the needle-turn technique and the appliqué stitch on her own, more intricate block, and then, too soon in my estimation, it was time for me to take my own first stitches at the point she suggested in the center of the design. Faith had made it look easy, using her needle to turn under the raw edge of the turquoise fabric and then taking invisible stitches every sixteenth of an inch.

My first stitch looked like an errant eyebrow in need of plucking.

"Don't worry," Faith said in her sweet, encouraging voice. "Just keep going, and it will get easier. Then you can pull out these first stitches and redo them if you want."

She was the expert, chosen by meta-experts, so I had to trust her.

The next stitch wasn't quite so obviously a mess, and the next one almost looked like the worst of Faith's.

Almost.

Faith glanced at my work. "If you need help after the meeting, you can always call me. I don't answer if I'm too busy, which seems like all the time now. But I do love talking about quilts. And the chance to have a grown-up conversation. You probably won't need any help, though. It's really just a matter of practice."

"Thanks." I gave her one of my business cards so she could send me her contact information.

Trusting that Faith was right that repetition would improve my needlework, I returned to my stitching. I'd completed perhaps a dozen of what looked to be thousands of stitches in just that one pillow-sized block when I heard the outer door slam shut.

A moment later, a scruffy, scrawny, middle-aged man appeared in the doorway of the parlor. He wore faded jeans that looked like they'd seen years of wear, rather than being artificially aged by the manufacturer. His plaid flannel shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a dingy white t-shirt with food stains all down the front.

The man hesitated in the doorway, clearly ill at ease. I'd seen that sort of look on other men entering a room full of women and finding this kind of male-to-female ratio intimidating. His gaze finally settled on the one male in the room, and his eyes lit with relief. He started for the table where the male quilter was working, but Emma got to the newcomer before he'd taken more than a few steps.

"Hello," she said, taking his reluctant hand in hers for a sturdy shake. "I'm Emma Quinn. Are you here to join the quilt guild?"

"Um, not exactly," he said. "I was hoping to talk to someone who knows about quilt pricing. See, my cousin died, and she was a quilter, and now I've got to figure out what to do with her stuff. I found a flyer about the guild when I was looking for her will. I thought maybe someone here could help me figure out what the quilts are worth and how I can sell them."

To a woman—and man and Labradoodle—everyone turned to look at me.

Emma took the newcomer by the elbow and headed in my direction. "You must be related to Miriam Stafford."

Beside me, Faith gasped and then whispered, "I didn't know Miriam had died."

The man was nodding. "Herb Stafford."

"We're all so sorry for your loss," Emma said. "Miriam was a dedicated quiltmaker and far too young to have completed all the quilts she was capable of. Her death was such a loss for the guild."

Herb nodded, his feet dragging a bit as Emma pulled him deeper into the room full of women.

Emma either didn't notice his reluctance or didn't care about it. "I know just who you need to talk to. Keely Fairchild. She's a certified quilt appraiser. You're in luck, because she's here today, so you can schedule an appointment right away."

Herb stopped dragging his feet. "That's good. It's already been three weeks since Miriam passed, and I need to get the information together as soon as possible for my attorney to start the process. It's already been delayed a bit since I had to search for the will."

I put down my needlework, somewhat relieved by the interruption. It was going to take far more than the number of stitches I could do during this meeting before I got the hang of this new skill. Assuming I ever did. Not everyone had good eye-hand coordination, after all, and I'd never really tried anything that required that particular skill, so I might be a total klutz. Worse, I might be one of those people who were so bad at an activity that they couldn't even recognize how bad they were and flaunted their horrible handiwork. Instead of using my hands-on quiltmaking to buttress my credentials as an appraiser, my poor stitching would undermine my expertise.

I pulled out the seat across from Faith and gestured for Herb to sit beside me.

As he approached, Faith began to cough and wave a hand in front of her face as if trying to fan away noxious fumes. I didn't have a particularly keen sense of smell, but even I couldn't miss the smell of the cigarette smoke that seemed to be steeped into the fibers of his clothing.

Faith bundled up her work as if it were one of her children being exposed to noxious fumes, and scurried off, leaving me and Herb isolated at one end of the table.

"Thank you," he said. "Ms. Fairchild, was it?"

"Keely." I dug in my messenger bag for another business card and handed it to him. "Tell me a bit about your cousin's quilts."

"I don't know much." He adjusted the placement of the chair next to me and settled into it. "I just know she's got lots of them, and it's up to me to figure out what to do with them all. I'm the only one left in our family, I'm afraid."

"I'd be glad to take a preliminary look at the quilts to see whether they're worth doing in-depth appraisals."

"Oh, I'm sure they are," Herb said. "She's been selling them online, supporting herself nicely for almost ten years now."

"Let me check my schedule." I scrolled through the calendar on my smartphone. Business had really been picking up, both through the Danger Cove Historical Museum's new acquisition program and assorted referrals to private collectors. Still, it wasn't like when I was a trial lawyer and every minute of my day, stretching out for the next six months, was fully booked. I had to finish up a major project for the museum in the next few days, but after that my schedule was fairly light. "How about Monday? I could spend as much time with the quilts as you need then."

"Nothing sooner?" he said. "It's just that I'd really like to be able to give the attorney a rough idea of what the quilts are worth. She said she needed an estimate—even a guesstimate is fine, but I can't even do that much myself—in order to file the preliminary paperwork."

I wasn't in any real rush to finish my appliqué block, and Dee would understand if I left the guild meeting early to do something related to quilting, especially since it would also give me the chance to make an appointment with Jack Condor. "The only unscheduled time I have this week is in the next couple of hours. I couldn't do anything major in that timeframe, but I could at least get an idea of the scope of the project and let you know what I would charge if you decide to hire me."

Herb jumped to his feet. "That would be perfect. I'll text the address to the phone number on your card."

"I need a few minutes to wrap up what I'm doing here," I said. "Why don't I meet you there in half an hour?"

Herb gave me his phone number to add to my contacts list before he left. I had to force myself to move slowly and not haphazardly stuff my fabric and other supplies into the carrying case. It wouldn't be good for my reputation if I looked as pleased as I felt about having an excuse to skip out early on my first lesson in quiltmaking.