CHAPTER SIX

 

"You need to leave now." I gripped the door, partly so I could close it before Herb could block me, and partly to make sure that if the confrontation made me lightheaded, I'd have something to lean on. "You can take it up with the estate's attorney when you see him."

I thought Herb was going to argue, but we were both distracted by the sound of jaunty whistling coming toward us. I didn't recognize the tune, but it was definitely a happy one. Even as irritated as I was with Herb, the whistling made me want to smile, and my stomach settled down.

I looked past Herb to see a mail carrier I'd never met before coming up the driveway. He was average height, probably in his early forties. His deeply tanned face didn't have any obvious wrinkles, and he was in excellent physical condition, as evidenced by the muscular calves revealed by the shorts of his uniform, but he had a receding hairline that left most of the top of his head bare. His super-sized mailbag made my quilted messenger bag—which held more than I could comfortably carry for any great distance—look like a child's accessory.

"Hello, new neighbors." The mail carrier's voice held a hint of an Hispanic background, more a matter of inflection or rhythm than an actual accent. "I'm Tony Flores, and I'm here to remind you that our first priority in the U.S. Postal Service is, was, and always will be you."

Herb glared at the mail carrier. "We were having a conversation here before you interrupted."

Tony didn't slow either his approach or his smile. "Sorry, man. Just trying to be helpful. You never know when someone might need a stamp or an envelope."

Even Herb couldn't resist the cheerful enthusiasm beaming in our direction. "Yeah, well, I suppose I should be leaving anyway."

The mail carrier held out his hand for a shake, but Herb was busy pulling out a cigarette. He brushed past without acknowledging the greeting.

Undaunted, Tony turned to me. "If there's anything you need"—he paused to wink at me—"anything in the way of stamps and mailing supplies, that is, all you have to do is ask. I'm here five days a week, Monday through Friday. Have been for close to ten years now. The substitute for this route is good too, but she's still new."

I felt a moment's disappointment that I didn't have Tony for my mail carrier. I loved my renovated bank building, but I couldn't recall ever saying more than "hello" to my own mail carrier. In fact, I couldn't even say whether it was the same person all the time or a new one every day. "I'm not actually moving in here. I'm just doing some work for the estate."

"My heart is broken." He placed his hand over the left side of his chest and sighed dramatically. "I can't bear losing you to another mail carrier."

"You could always request a transfer."

"No, no," the mail carrier said with exaggerated sorrow. "That would break the hearts of all my beloveds on this street. I couldn't do that to them."

"You're a good man, Mr. Flores, putting their wellbeing ahead of yours."

He took an exaggerated stagger backwards. "You wound me again with all this mister stuff. Call me Tony."

"Of course. And I'm Keely Fairchild."

"I've heard of you," he said, turning serious. "A quilt appraiser, right? Miriam always wanted to get your opinion of the antique she has on her wall. She showed it to me once and asked me what I thought of it. All I could tell was that it was orange, and it looked old, but what do I know about quilts, huh?"

"I've seen it, and it is lovely. I'll be doing a more thorough appraisal for the estate, but I'm confident it will turn out to be an antique."

"She'd have liked that," Tony said. "It's just sad she never got to give you its history. I can't remember much of what she said about it. I think it was made by some relative of hers, and somehow it got damaged, but she rescued it. She had trouble finding the right fabrics to replace some damaged pieces. Eventually she found what she needed at an estate sale near Seattle. I remember thinking it must have been traumatic for her to go that far to find the fabric. She hardly ever left the house—I could see her through the picture window, working at the quilting machine, almost every day when I delivered her mail—although she did get out to do her errands locally. Mostly, she was just terrified to go beyond the borders of Danger Cove. And yet, she went practically all the way to Seattle for what she needed to fix that quilt. Which, to tell the truth, I thought was kinda ugly, but, hey, to each her own."

"Cheddar quilts are something of an acquired taste for many people," I said, "but I'm sure we'll find someone to cherish it."

"Cheddar, huh?" Tony grinned. "Now you're making me hungry. I don't suppose you're free to have lunch with me? I just need to finish this street before I take a break."

"I'm afraid not," I said, genuinely regretful. "I'm already running behind schedule."

"Maybe another time." Tony's face grew solemn again. "You will make sure that Miriam's quilts are treated with respect, won't you? She lived for them. Probably died for them too."

"You think she was killed because of her quilts?"

"I don't know," he said. "I was the one who first realized something was wrong, you know. She wasn't at her quilting machine when I came by for three days in a row. Sometimes our schedules didn't align perfectly, so the first day, I thought she'd stepped into another room and I'd just missed her. The second day, I thought it was a little odd, but she might have had an appointment or something. But when it happened again on the third day, I knew something was wrong. Called 9-1-1 and wouldn't leave until the police went inside and found her body. I got a reprimand for taking too long on my route that day, but I didn't care. I had to know what had happened. No one else cared, and everyone deserves to have someone who will notice if they're dead or alive."

"I was right before," I said. "You are a good man. Miriam was lucky to have you as a friend."

"I see too many lonely people in this job," Tony said. "Used to be, folks would at least send letters and cards to family and friends who lived alone. Nowadays, no one does that anymore. It's sad."

"Being alone might not have bothered Miriam. I heard she wasn't much of a people person."

"That's just because hardly anyone ever made the effort to get to know her." He glanced over his shoulder in the direction Herb had scurried off. "Like her cousin. He came around maybe once a year. He never sent her any letters either. Of course, she never sent him any either. Her mail was mostly packages for her quilt business. At least one a week, which is how I got to know her. She'd come to the door if she saw me with something more than envelopes. It was like my visits were the highlight of her week. Or at least the packages were, but I did try to spend a few minutes with her, and she seemed to appreciate the attention."

The murder was none of my business, but I couldn't help asking, "Did Miriam have any friends at all besides you? I know that Herb's her only blood relative, but what about other people who might have cared about her? Members of the quilt guild maybe?"

"There was this one guy who'd been hanging around lately. I introduced myself once. He said his name was Wayne Good. She acted like he was her boyfriend, but he's probably ten years younger than she was. I know I shouldn't judge, and it wasn't just his age that made them seem like an odd couple. It was more that Miriam wasn't much of a socializer, and he seemed like the kind who really liked to party. I know she liked him, though, and she'd even stop quilting when he came to visit. Maybe he was an acquired taste, like that orange quilt on her wall, but I have to say, I wouldn't turn my back on him if he was anywhere near my mail pouch."

A battered pick-up truck came up the street and pulled into Miriam's driveway.

Tony watched over his shoulder as the truck came to a stop and the engine was turned off. "I see you've got company, and I've got appointed rounds to complete. Just remember, we deliver for you."

 

*   *   *

 

Matt Viera climbed out of the pickup and sauntered over to Miriam's front porch. "Has anyone ever told you that your lawyer face is both scary and pretty?"

"No one who lived to tell the tale," I said.

"I guess I'm special, then." He held up a hand to stop me from disagreeing with his self-assessment. "Before you have me arrested for trespassing, I'm allowed to be here. I talked to Gil, and she said it's okay for me to observe your work. You should have a text from her by now."

"I must have missed the ping." I realized belatedly that I shouldn't have left my phone inside the house, tucked into the pocket of the jacket I'd taken off when it had proven too warm to wear in the stuffy house. It wasn't so much that I might have needed backup for dealing with Herb, but I'd promised Dee's granddaughter that I'd never go too far away from my phone in case I felt a syncope episode coming on and needed to call for help.

Matt might not share all his secrets with me any more than I shared my own with him, but I knew him well enough to be convinced he wouldn't lie to me. If he said Gil had given her permission, then I was confident she had. "Come on in."

He raised his eyebrows. "You trust me that much?"

"Sure." I hadn't always trusted him—and I would still do the responsible, professional thing by checking my text messages to confirm what he'd said—but I'd come to believe that he wouldn't do anything underhanded just for a story. "It's not like I'm giving you the combination to my vault."

"A guy can dream."

Matt followed me into the living room where I collected my phone to confirm that Gil had authorized his visit. Her text did give me permission to discuss my work for the museum, just as Matt had claimed. Gil had also attached a press release that had been sent to the Cove Chronicles already, acknowledging that the museum had been named as the beneficiary of a quilt collection and I had been hired to inventory and appraise it.

While I was reading, Matt had been giving the entire room a quick once-over. That done, he headed over to the antique cheddar quilt on the wall. "That one's old, right?"

I put away my phone and went over to join him. "Yes, probably from the early 1800s. That was the peak of cheddar quilts' popularity."

He turned around to squint at the quilt on the machine dominating the space. "And that one?"

"A contemporary cheddar quilt."

"I'm guessing the antique is valuable, but what about the newer one?" Matt started patting down the plethora of pockets in his cargo pants, presumably searching for a pen and paper. He did have a smartphone, but he was a bit of a Luddite when it came to taking notes.

"That's a bit tricky." I debated whether to share with him my suspicions that there was something off about Miriam's business. I could really use someone to bounce my concerns off in case I was letting my professional paranoia get the better of me. Preferably someone familiar with the art world and who understood that pricing wasn't necessarily proportional to the amount of time spent creating a handmade item. Matt would definitely understand that. And I did trust him not to publish what I told him if he promised not to. "This has to be between you and me for now. Completely off the record."

"Sure." He stuck the pen and paper into separate pockets apparently chosen at random and then crossed his arms over his chest. "It must be something explosive if it's got you stumped."

"I don't know about that, but it's definitely puzzling." I led Matt over to the stack of quilts on the recliner and flipped the top one's tag so he could read it. "All of her quilts have these little tags with the block's name, an inventory number, and a dollar amount."

He peered at it. "Seems pretty straightforward to me. Not all artists are good at the business side of things, but a surprising number of them manage to keep records like that for their merchandise."

"It's not the existence of the tags that's bothering me, but what's on them." I pointed to the price: three hundred twenty-five dollars. "That can't be right. The supplies alone for a quilt that size, without including anything for the artist's time, would be at least three hundred dollars."

"That's the art world for you," Matt said with a shrug.

"The art world, yes, but from what I'm told, Miriam was doing this as a business, not just for the love of quilting. There wouldn't be any profit at that price."

"Maybe she didn't care about the money." He glanced around the sewing room. "It's not like she lived a luxurious lifestyle."

"She didn't scrimp either. Come look." I gestured for him to follow me into the kitchen, where I pointed at the wall above the table.

Matt leaned over the table to study the contents of the bulletin board. All around the quilt-themed calendar in the center were assorted bits of paper pinned in neat rows. Above the calendar, all by itself, was a yearlong pass to the Danger Cove Historical Museum. The right side had a collection of business cards lined up alphabetically. One was missing, but the remaining cards were for things like plumbers, electricians, car mechanics, or else places that delivered groceries or takeout food. The left side of the calendar was dedicated to receipts, including several from the Smugglers' Tavern and events associated with the Lighthouse Farmers' Market. Along the bottom of the calendar were three rows of appointment cards. Most of them were for a variety of doctors, but the entire bottom row was dedicated exclusively to The Clip and Sip. There were some old cards from the previous year, when she'd had appointments every two months or so, but for the eight weeks before her death, she'd started to go every single week.

I waited for Matt to lean back from his intense study of the various papers before I said, "I think Miriam's definition of 'luxury' had more to do with experiences, like going to the farmers' market and the museum, and less to do with things. Except for her quilt stash, of course."

"Okay, so she had a comfortable lifestyle," Matt said. "Maybe she had a source of income other than the quilts. She could have been living on disability. My source at the Chronicles said she was in poor health. Some kind of lung condition."

"I suppose that could explain it," I said. "It's just that her cousin said she didn't have any other source of income, and he definitely believed Miriam was making good money with her business. He was shocked when I told him how relatively little the entire collection was worth. Of course, he could simply have been wrong about his cousin's finances. The mail carrier told me Herb didn't visit here very often."

Matt dropped into one of the chairs facing the bulletin board. "Where did she sell her quilts? If she consigned them somewhere, they'd have records of the sales."

I pointed at the collection of receipts on the bulletin board. "It looks like she might have had an occasional booth at the Lighthouse Farmers' Market on holidays, but from what her cousin said, she did most of her business online, and I don't have those records."

"Maybe you're reading the tags wrong." Matt stood up and headed for the living room. "What if they're just for her use, and she'll remove them before she ships the quilt? The dollar amount could be the cost of supplies, rather than the retail price."

I followed him into the front of the house. "The answers are probably on her computer, but it looks like the police confiscated it."

He sorted through the tags on the quilts stacked on the recliner. "And you're not exactly eager to ask Detective Ohlsen if you can see what's on the hard drive, are you?"

"Ohlsen's okay." It was more the idea of having to deal with anyone else at the police station that made me reluctant to do it. Ohlsen listened to everyone respectfully, but that wasn't true of some of the other officers.

Matt gave up digging through the tags. "Why does any of it matter anyway? You can put the right price on them for the museum's use, so they'll get the full value."

"Two things," I said. "First, if I knew what Miriam sold her quilts for in the past, it would be extremely helpful for assigning a value to the ones she hadn't sold yet. The prices are going to depend in large part on what her reputation was within the cheddar quilt community."

He looked at me skeptically.

"There's a community for everything these days," I said, "now that aficionados can find each other online. If Miriam was something of a cheddar celebrity, she might have been able to charge more than what someone else could."

"Okay. Why else do you want to know what the tags mean?"

"If I'm right, and she was selling them for cost, it might mean that something shady was going on. I wouldn't want the museum to be associated with that."

"Shady how?"

"I don't know exactly. It's possible she was stealing her supplies. A while back, one of the clerks at Sunny Patches told me they'd been warned about a woman—not around here, but in the national news—who was selling quilts online for ridiculously low prices. Nobody could figure out how she could afford to do it until she was caught red-handed, unrolling a bolt of fabric and stuffing the material inside her clothes. It turned out she'd been stealing all her supplies from big fabric stores."

"You think Miriam might have been doing that?"

"Not really." I smoothed the top quilt in the stack on the recliner. "Sunny Patches is small enough that someone would have noticed if enough fabric for several quilts went missing, and I'd have heard about it. Besides, from what the mail carrier said, she got a lot of packages, so it sounds like she bought a lot of her supplies online. She might have been using a stolen credit card, I suppose."

"Not if she was shipping things to her own address," Matt said. "Too easy to get caught."

"Maybe I'm just imagining a problem. I tend to do that. It's part of my legal training. We're taught to anticipate the worst-case scenario, so we can take steps to minimize the risks or at least minimize the negative consequences if things do go wrong."

"Is that why you always expect the worst from me?"

I'd definitely done that when we first met, acting as if he were the lowest of muckrakers instead of a reputable journalist. I was still expecting the worst now, at least when it came to sharing any of my secrets, for fear that he would somehow abuse that trust.

"It's not personal," I said. "I expect the worst from everyone. But I do hope I'm wrong in this case, and Miriam was just an enthusiastic hobbyist who didn't care about the money as long as she brought in enough to keep quilting. She probably had some other source of income that her cousin didn't know about. The estate's attorney can probably tell me. If she was receiving disability, he might even have handled her case."

"What are you going to tell Gil?"

"Nothing until I'm sure that something's wrong. First I'll need to check to see if anyone who sells fabric locally has experienced the degree of shoplifting that would be necessary to account for all of Miriam's quilts."

"It could be tricky for you to do that while it's known that you're appraising Miriam's estate. People might well figure out that you suspect her of shoplifting." Matt pulled out his notebook and pencil again. "On the other hand, no one knows I've got anything to do with Miriam's estate. Why don't I ask around for you?"

"What's in it for you?"

"It might turn into a story on shoplifting in the arts," he said. "But what I'm really counting on is that it'll show you how much you need me."