I finally managed to excuse myself without being too rude to Dani. Inside Miriam's little rust-colored house, the air was stale and stuffy from being unoccupied for so long. I set the package on the floor just inside the front door. Then I opened a few windows and shrugged out of my too-warm jacket and—I couldn't help myself—did a little snooping in the parts of the house I hadn't seen the last time I was here. Perhaps I could find some business records, possibly even a detailed inventory of the quilts.
The table in the eat-in kitchen had apparently served as Miriam's desk. It looked like there had been a computer tower there, probably confiscated by the police, so now only the monitor, printer, and a tangle of cables and cords remained. Above the table was a huge bulletin board with a calendar and assorted appointment cards and receipts affixed to it with sewing pins. But no inventory and no drawer or filing cabinet that might have contained anything related to the sale of Miriam's quilts.
I was going to check the bedroom next, but as I reached for the doorknob, I felt a chill, like the proverbial ghost walking over my grave. Despite what I'd told Craig Pitts about not being afraid of ghosts, something seemed to be warning me away from that room. Before my syncope diagnosis, I hadn't paid much attention to the signals my body sent me, but since then, I'd learned that ignoring those signals would more often than not end with me unconscious.
I had to check the bedroom eventually since it was likely at least one quilt was on the bed in there, but it didn't have to be done right this minute.
I returned to the front of the house to settle down to work. Before I touched any of the quilts, I retrieved a pair of white cotton gloves from my bag to protect the textiles from the naturally-occurring oils on my hands. Then I collected all of the quilts in the room and tossed them into a single pile next to the quilting frame. Like the quilts in the sewing room, these all had neat little tags on them, noting the name of the design, plus something that looked like an inventory number and a price. If I were lucky, that information matched records on the missing computer.
Three weeks had passed since the death, so the computer might have been returned to the estate's attorney by now. I'd have to ask him if I could look at Miriam's electronic files, but I couldn't wait until I had them before starting the inventory. There wasn't much time before the next museum board meeting, and Gil was counting on having the information on Miriam's quilts by then. If I worked through the weekend, I could get this project done before I had to drop it and work on other projects that would be due soon.
I started a spreadsheet on my laptop, creating columns to jot down the basics: the information on the tag, a note about the color scheme, and what size bed it would be appropriate for. After I finished keying in the data about each quilt, I piled it on the leather recliner against the wall.
By the third quilt, it had become obvious that there was something odd about the pricing: it was far too low to turn a profit. If there'd been just one like that, it could have meant that the specific quilt hadn't attracted any buyers at a more profitable price and had been marked down for clearance. But three of them in a row? And with the tags pristine, showing no indication that there had been a higher price once? That didn't seem likely.
I went into the back of the house and pulled five quilts at random from the hidden storage space. It didn't take long to confirm that every single one had a tag with a price too low for its maker to earn a living wage.
I hadn't known much about the cost of quilt supplies before I moved to Danger Cove. Since then, I'd observed quilters' excitement over certain fabric designers and manufacturers along with their sometimes sheepish admissions that they'd spent far more than they'd intended on some of the more expensive brands. I'd recognized some of those pricey designer fabrics in Miriam's workroom, and even if she'd used them sparingly by mixing them in with less expensive materials, the prices on the labels were only about a hundred dollars—sometimes even less—above what I estimated the quilts had cost to make. Add in some transaction costs, and Miriam couldn't have done much better than break even on the sale of her quilts.
It wasn't uncommon for hobbyists to sell off some or all of their quilts at cost, because they enjoyed the process of making them more than they appreciated owning the finished product. If they recouped enough money from the sale to buy the materials for their next project, they were happy. But Miriam had purportedly been a businesswoman without any other visible means of support.
Something was definitely wrong here. I'd have to let both the museum and the estate's attorney know, but first I needed more evidence to back up my suspicions.
I returned to the living room, and I'd finished looking at the next five or six quilts—all similarly undervalued—when the front doorknob rattled, and then someone knocked.
I'd have ignored it if not for the possibility it was Matt. Gil might have told him I'd be here, and I wouldn't mind some company. The place wasn't as creepy as young Craig Pitts had suggested, but the lighting everywhere except directly above the quilting frame was dreary, and the overall floor plan was more cramped and claustrophobic than I was used to.
I opened the door to find Herb Stafford standing there, taking the last few puffs from a cigarette. He seemed to be wearing the same clothes as yesterday, or else an identical unbuttoned flannel shirt over a stained white T-shirt and faded jeans.
"What are you doing here?" he asked. "I didn't hire you, and I'm not paying you."
"The estate's attorney has authorized me to do an inventory of the quilts."
"I heard that someone claimed to have found a will, and I'm not supposed to be in charge of my own inheritance." He shrugged. His voice was surprisingly calm. Perhaps my revelation yesterday that the quilts weren't as valuable as he initially believed had softened the blow of learning he'd been at least partially disinherited.
"So you've talked to Aaron Pohoke and seen the will?"
"Not yet," he said. "I got a message at the Ocean View B&B and set up an appointment to go talk to him later today. I need to be sure he didn't take advantage of my cousin when he wrote her will. Miriam wasn't in the best of health, you know, and she'd never had any social skills. Not like me. She couldn't read people, so she frequently thought people were looking out for her best interest when they weren't. Sometimes the other way around, too. She sometimes thought I was trying to scam her when I was really trying to protect her, and then I had to listen to her holier-than-thou lectures on personal responsibility."
It was hard for me to associate good people skills with Herb Stafford, but I couldn't discount his concerns entirely. I'd heard too many stories about unscrupulous estate-planning attorneys who'd abused their clients' trust. I had to hope Miriam's lawyer wasn't one of the bad apples. Not just for Miriam's sake, but also for Gil Torres's sake. It wouldn't reflect well on the museum if there were even so much as a rumor that the bequest had been the result of undue influence.
"I don't know Mr. Pohoke personally or professionally," I said, "but I understand he's been a fixture in the Danger Cove legal community since time immemorial. No one—especially not a lawyer—stays in business that long if they're shady."
"I hope you're right." Herb knelt to stub out his cigarette next to the existing black smears on the cement porch. "It's just that it's weird that Miriam didn't at least provide for me to get the family pictures. I had a fire in my apartment a few years ago and lost all of mine."
Now that he mentioned it, the wording of the will was a bit odd. Even though I wasn't an estate planning expert, I'd written my fair share of wills. Many of my personal injury clients hadn't had much in the way of assets when they first came to me, but once they'd received their compensation, they'd realized they needed an estate plan, and I was the only attorney they knew. Out of the hundreds of wills I'd worked on, I couldn't remember a single instance where anyone had provided for the contents of their house to go to someone outside the family.
Giving the contents of the house to close family members made far more sense than giving it to someone who had no personal attachment to it. Pictures and knickknacks were generally of purely sentimental value, things that only family members might care about. Some of the other items, like clothes, furniture, and the contents of the kitchen had some slight value on the secondary market, but in my experience, the heirs usually trashed most of that stuff, sometimes having to pay to get it taken away, rather than profiting from it.
And yet Miriam's will had clearly stated that everything inside the house was to go to the museum, not to her cousin.
Fortunately, it wasn't my problem, and I couldn't afford to waste time worrying about it right now. "You'll have to take that up with Mr. Pohoke."
Herb peered past me, into the living room. "It's just that I'd really hate for anything to happen to the family pictures before the estate gets resolved. Would you mind if I at least made sure they're secured? Once I know they're safe, I'll ask the museum not to throw them out. I'd even be willing to buy them from the museum."
"I don't have the authority to let you in." My stomach churned, threatening to escalate from slight discomfort to full-on nausea. "The best I can do is to let the museum know that you'd be interested in any pictures."
"I could help with your work while I'm here," he said. "It's not like I've got anything else to do around here, and I can't leave town until I work things out with the estate's lawyer."
I didn't have the time or patience to argue with Herb. I'd been hoping that before the end of today I'd have a solid grasp of the scope of the work here and I'd have seen at least one quilt that the museum might want to keep and add to its collection of locally made quilts. So far, all I had was an upset stomach and an uneasy feeling that something was fishy about Miriam's quilt business.
Perhaps I should have brought the young wrestler-turned-lawyer-wannabe from Aaron Pohoke's office after all. I didn't really think Herb would get violent right here on the front porch, in plain view of the entire neighborhood, but a witness inside the house with me would make it even less likely that matters would get out of hand.