CHAPTER TWO

 

I'd almost finished the intentionally slow packing of my supplies when I noticed Faith hadn't resumed her work since we'd been interrupted by Herb's arrival. She seemed frozen in her new seat, staring unseeing at her hands.

I slung my messenger bag's strap over my shoulder and carried my supplies over to check on her. "I'm sorry. Was Miriam a friend of yours?"

Faith started and then laughed nervously. "Not exactly. I do try not to judge, lest I be judged. I knew she was an unhappy person, and not in the best of health, so I should have been more understanding. It's just that…no, I don't want to speak ill of the dead, so I'll just say we never did get along."

Then why was Faith so upset about Miriam's death?

I didn't have time to do a thorough cross-examination, but I was curious, and I didn't think it would take much to encourage Faith to confide what she hadn't liked about Miriam. Taking depositions of witnesses had taught me that sometimes people just needed to be given a chance to unburden themselves. A sympathetic look, a vague bit of commiseration, and it would all come pouring out.

I dragged out the process of packing the last supplies into my case, checking that everything was neatly folded or wrapped and then moving pieces from one spot to another as if concerned that they weren't in exactly the right location.

Faith suddenly dove into the canvas beach bag beside her chair, rummaging for something. "I wouldn't say anything normally, but you're an appraiser. You understand these things. And you need to know what to watch out for when Miriam's quilts hit the market."

She handed me her phone with the home screen featuring the picture of a stunning Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt. It was made from a wide variety of prints in cool blues, purples, and silvers, and the placement of the darks and lights created a secondary design, like a brainteaser puzzle that had one obvious image plus another one that was only visible when it was viewed from the right angle.

"That's lovely," I said as I handed back the phone. If I were appraising it, I'd add some extra value because of the unusual layout.

"Thank you. I love the Robbing Peter block. There's so much you can do with it, just by changing the layout and color choices. I made this version for last year's guild show." Faith scrolled through some other pictures on her phone until she found the one she wanted and showed it to me. "Compare that to the quilt Miriam brought to show-and-tell about a month ago. She said she'd just finished it that week. Almost a full year after mine was in the show."

The picture was of another Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt, smaller than Faith's, I thought, but still bed-sized. It was also a scrappy quilt, with each piece a different color and print, and laid out in much the same way as Faith's to create a secondary design. The biggest difference was in the color palette, a collection of warm oranges, browns, and yellows instead of Faith's cooler blues. Adjusting for the color differences, it still wasn't an exact match, but it was definitely similar. Enough that, if I were appraising them, I'd have wondered if the second one had been made by the same quilter or at least by someone who'd been influenced by the first one.

I wasn't sure what Faith's point was, so I just nodded my head appreciatively and waited for her to continue.

"I know that imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery," she said, "but when I saw Miriam's quilt for sale online, it didn't feel at all flattering. I wanted to have a tantrum to rival my youngest child's. I gave myself a time-out to think about how to respond, but now she's dead, and I'll never get the satisfaction of hearing her admit, in front of the entire guild, what she did."

Faith took back her picture and phone. "I suppose I need to forgive her and move on now. It may be a while, though, before I can pray for her soul. I'm not as good a person as I'd like to be."

"None of us are," I said. "We just try to do our best."

Faith sighed. "I wish it weren't always so hard to do the right thing. Fortunately, I've always believed in turning the other cheek, rather than taking revenge. Seeing my design stolen by someone who was supposed to be a friend definitely made me feel like I'd been stabbed in the back. I'll even admit to briefly wanting to do the same thing to Miriam. Literally, and not metaphorically."

I assured Faith that, in my experience, everyone felt that sort of anger occasionally, and the important thing was that she hadn't acted on her urges. She didn't look convinced, but I was running out of time if I were going to arrive on time to check out Miriam's quilt collection.

 

*   *   *

 

I'd given up driving as soon as I was diagnosed with syncope. The risk of passing out behind the wheel wasn't one I was willing to take. Not having a car wasn't usually a problem in Danger Cove, since I lived near the center of town and could walk to most of the places I needed to go. For slightly longer distances, I could always hop on the trolley that connected Main Street and the waterfront, and for anything else I could call a cab.

The street where Miriam had lived was within easy walking distance of where the guild met, in the opposite direction from Some Enchanted Florist. Her house was near the turn-around at the far end of a quiet cul-de-sac lined with well-maintained little homes that had all the necessities for a residence, but no architectural frills. They had little, white picket fences separating their lots, and many of them were small ranches, including Miriam's and the houses on either side of hers. All of the structures on the street had probably been virtually identical originally, built by a single developer—one who was not as disliked as Jack Condor, I hoped—in the middle of the twentieth century, but some of them had been added onto in the meantime. The one to the left of Miriam's was a dark green that almost disappeared behind the profusion of flowers in the front yard, which had been turned into one massive English garden. The beige house to the right was less eye-catching, with a more conventional landscaping. Still, it was in pristine condition, presumably at least partly to maintain the curb appeal while there was a For Sale sign in the front yard.

Miriam's house looked less pristine than her immediate neighbors' homes. At first, I thought her siding was a badly weathered shade of red, but as I went through the front gate and up the walkway, I could tell that it had been painted within the last few years, far too recently for the color to be anything but a close approximation of the intended hue. It was as if the usual proportions of dominant color and accents had been reversed, with the siding an intense pumpkin orange more usually seen in the smaller elements of a house, and the trim the same sedate beige as the siding on the house to the right.

Of course, the owner of the rust-colored house had been a quiltmaker, and one of the things I'd always admired about quilts, beginning long before I was certified as an appraiser, was the sometimes adventurous use of color.

Herb Stafford was waiting for me on the front porch. He stubbed out his cigarette on the concrete steps and tossed the butt into the shrubbery. He'd left the door open while he was outside, so he stepped aside with a gesture for me to precede him into the living room.

Inside, dominating the entire space and facing the picture window at the front of the house, was a professional setup for machine stitching the layers of a quilt together. The only other furniture in the room was a leather recliner against the side wall. Not counting the quilts in the room, the overall effect was Spartan, without any rugs on the wood floors or even curtains on the window, which seemed odd for someone who appreciated textiles as much as Miriam purportedly did.

A king-sized quilt top, layered with batting and backing, had been stretched onto the rails of the quilting setup. The arm of an oversized sewing machine arched over the quilt, ready to pick up where Miriam had last left off. While I couldn't see the mechanics of it from the door, I knew that the sewing machine was affixed to a rolling base, which allowed for the arm to be moved across the plane of the quilt by the operator, using handles affixed above where the needle pierced the quilt.

The quilt design was known as the Variable Star. The pieced blocks consisted of indigo stars on a white background, and they alternated with unpieced squares in an orange that was similar to the exterior of the house. Experts referred to the color as antimony or chrome orange; everyone else called it "cheddar." It wasn't as popular today as it had been in the late 1800s, but it still had a devoted group of collectors and creators.

Miriam had obviously been a huge fan of cheddar quilts. In addition to the one on the frame and the one that Faith had claimed was a copy of her design, there was a small antique cheddar quilt, framed and hung on an interior wall to the right of the door. The antique was yet another Robbing Peter to Pay Paul design, but in a much simpler layout than Faith's. The individual fabrics were more interesting than the design, with historic cheddar prints alternating with traditional "shirtings," tiny prints on a pale background.

It was just a guess, but I thought the antique might have been a salvaged section from a much larger quilt that had been damaged beyond repair. The remaining section was only about two feet wide by three feet high, with edge blocks that were seemingly random widths, rather than full or half blocks. On closer inspection, the binding, while made of old shirtings, was suspiciously pristine, with fewer stains than the rest of the quilt and without the wear and tear that the edges of an antique textile usually experienced.

The quilt fragment had been professionally framed, with appropriate spacers to prevent the accumulation of moisture. Ideally, a quilt of that age should have had even greater protection from sunlight, although at least it wasn't subjected to direct light. The large picture windows faced north, limiting how much sunlight fell on either the contemporary quilt in the machine's frame or the antique on the wall.

There must have been twenty other quilts in the room. The patterns varied, but almost all of the quilts included at least some cheddar orange fabrics. Miriam wasn't the most organized person, though. Her quilts weren't folded and stacked or—better yet—laid out on a flat surface as I would have recommended to minimize wear and tear. Instead, they were strewn around the room, three of them hanging off the rails of the machine-quilting setup, others balled up and tossed aside, and the rest scrunched up on the recliner.

Herb must have noticed my bemusement, because he said, "Sorry about the mess. You can see why I couldn't stay here while I'm working on Miriam's estate. I had to get a room at the Ocean View B&B. The police only released the scene a few days ago, and I've been so busy looking for Miriam's will since then that I haven't had a chance to straighten up. She was an immaculate housekeeper and would have been appalled to know anyone saw the place like this."

I hadn't agreed to get involved with anything as stressful as a crime scene. "Why were the police involved?"

"Didn't you know?" he said. "Poor Miriam was murdered. Whoever killed her tossed the place."

 

*   *   *

 

I should have known better than to think this was going to be easy. I'd been looking forward to a quick rummage through her collection, just enough to determine whether they were worth in-depth appraisals. I was assuming Miriam had the typical dozen or so quilts, none of them antique or even vintage, with a cumulative value in the range of five to ten thousand dollars. If I was right, then individual appraisals would cost almost as much as each quilt was worth, so all that Herb was likely to do was hire me to give him and his attorney an informal ballpark figure for the entire collection. In that case, I could be done here in less than half an hour.

It was just as well. I had plenty of other work that needed to be completed this week, like finishing the report on a collection of vintage quilts the Danger Cove Historical Museum was considering acquiring. And I couldn't forget my latest high-priority project: convincing Jack Condor to reconsider his eviction of the quilt guild.

"I'm sorry," Herb said. "I thought you knew. It looks like her killer was looking for something. I think he knew she was wealthier than her house and personal appearance might suggest, and he was looking for money. Apparently he didn't know that the quilts he was tossing aside were the sole source of her wealth, or he'd have taken them with him."

So far I hadn't noticed anything that suggested Miriam's quilts were particularly valuable in anything but sentimental terms. They were all contemporary and featured fairly simple, traditional patterns. The workmanship was solid, but the designs weren't anything out of the ordinary, nothing as complicated as Faith's Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.

Unless I'd missed something that only a closer inspection would reveal, the odds were that each of the quilts would only sell for between three and five hundred dollars. Even that was a generous evaluation. The total would be a nice sum, given the number of the quilts in the room, but it would require months of work by a knowledgeable seller with contacts in the quilt-collecting community to get that much for them. Otherwise, they could bring in as little as a hundred dollars apiece.

Perhaps there was more to Miriam's collection, though, since Herb was so obviously convinced it was valuable. She might have kept her more valuable quilts in another room. "Are there any other quilts in the house besides these?"

"Oh, yes," Herb said. "This is just where Miriam did the machine quilting and stored the most recently finished quilts before she had time to list them for sale online. All the rest are in the second bedroom. She turned it into her sewing room. Her fabric and supplies are in there too. In fact, they're probably worth quite a bit as well. I know she complained about how much she had to pay for quilting thread in hard-to-find colors."

I followed him down the short hallway to get a quick look at the rest of the collection. The sewing room was dominated by cheddar orange. There were at least ten full bolts of fabric leaning against the wall across from the door, half of them orange prints and the other half orange solids. Lined up as they were, from darkest to lightest, they looked like an experiment in dyeing gradations.

Another wall had floor-to-ceiling built-in cubbies, the bulk of them filled with folded fabric and spools of thread, all sorted by color, much of it in the warmer end of the spectrum. The very top row was packed with books about quilts, some of them focused on patterns and others containing a mix of photographs and historical information.

I could only dream of having that many reference books for my collection, some of them rare enough to make it worth the effort for the estate to look for a buyer who would pay a decent price rather than donating them to Goodwill. The new owner of the local bookstore, Dangerous Reads, might be willing to buy the whole collection or else arrange some sort of consignment deal with the estate.

The third wall was covered with two giant, flannel-covered design boards that ran from the floor to a few inches from the ceiling. The one closer to the door displayed the first few blocks for yet another cheddar quilt and the other had what appeared to be leftover blocks from a previous project. The remaining wall was dominated by a custom worktable. At one end was a sewing machine dropped into an opening so the machine bed was level with the surface of the table. At the other end, another cutout was filled with a three-foot by four-foot ironing surface. Stuffed underneath, filling every bit of space except for where the rolling chair was neatly tucked under the sewing machine, were cylinders of rolled batting in a variety of colors and sizes.

"Check this out," Herb said, heading for the nearest flannel-covered design board. "There's a hidden compartment behind the design wall, and that's where Miriam kept the finished quilts that hadn't sold yet. The killer must not have known about it, because as far as I can tell, it hasn't been touched."

He slid the first design board along a hidden track until it was in front of the second board. In the space behind them was shelf after shelf of neatly folded quilts with little tags that reminded me of the ones antique-quilt dealer Randall Tremain had attached to his inventory at his shop, Monograms. Except for a few relegated to obscurity on a hard-to-reach top shelf in the far corner, most of the quilts featured the cheddar prints that Miriam favored.

"There must be more than a hundred quilts in there."

"I could tell you exactly how many if the police would let me have her computer back with all of its inventory information," Herb said. "Although, I might need some help from someone who understands her software. She was always much better with numbers than I am."

"Just inventorying these quilts would take several days," I said. "Doing complete appraisals on all of them would take weeks, and I don't have that much time open in my schedule. Are you sure you really need that much information for your attorney?"

"I don't need an in-depth appraisal right now," Herb said. "The lawyer said she just needed a ballpark figure for the entire collection in order to get things started in the probate court. Then we can talk about more in-depth inventorying and valuation."

"It would have to be a very rough ballpark," I said. "I can tell you the average of prices for contemporary quilts, and you can multiply that by the number of quilts. I might be able to do more in-depth work next week, at least enough to let you know which ones are more valuable than the others, if not to do full appraisals."

"That would help a lot." He slid the flannel-covered board back to its original location and turned to me expectantly. "So, what do you think? A thousand dollars apiece? Five? More?"

"Quilts tend to be under-valued in the marketplace." I braced myself for what could be a bad response to unwanted news. It should be easier to break the news to someone who hadn't invested hundreds of hours creating something that would return about ten cents an hour to its maker. Still, it was going to be a challenge, since Herb's expectations were so far out of line with reality. "I've seen estimates that handmade quilts at craft shows sell for anywhere between $200 and $500, depending on their size."

He frowned. "That can't be right. I know Miriam made a good living selling her quilts online. Paid off the mortgage on this house several years ago, even. She certainly didn't have any retirement income, not after working her entire career for old Miser Dreiser. She was always complaining about how he underpaid her and wouldn't even set up a company-sponsored retirement plan for her, let alone contribute a single penny to it. He didn't even give her any severance pay when he fired her."

I'd never been terribly good at soothing emotional clients, and I didn't have much time available today. I needed to visit the museum's archives to finish another project and also make sure to contact Jack Condor before the end of business hours. Dee might accept that I couldn't meet with the guild's landlord today, but if I wanted to keep her from getting her granddaughter involved, I had to at least be able to tell her I'd scheduled an appointment.

"I'd be glad to provide you with the names and contact information for other appraisers to get a second opinion," I said. "Or you could check the websites of the American Quilter's Society or the Professional Association of Appraisers—Quilted Textiles. They've both got search tools for finding a qualified appraiser."

"I'll do that." Herb stalked out of the room in an obvious hint that it was time for me to leave. The smell of cigarettes trailed after him, and his voice drifted back from the hallway. "It's obvious that you aren't qualified to do the work with Miriam's quilts."