As I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the museum, I could hear the sound of cheerful voices coming from the boardroom. I was anxious to see the raffle quilt they were making, but I had to take care of business before I could join them. Reluctantly, I turned in the other direction, toward Gil's office.
She was humming something with an emphatically morose feel to it. For once, I didn't feel bad about interrupting her mid-song.
She went silent the moment she saw me. "The way my week is going, I'm guessing there's been more trouble at Miriam's house."
"Not trouble, exactly." I dropped into a chair across from her to explain about the hidden safe and the cash.
When I was finished, she asked, "But isn't that good news? If the money was in the house, then it's part of the bequest to the museum. We can always use cash, and you said the quilts themselves aren't worth a lot of money."
"I'm probably worrying about nothing, but that's what I do." I adjusted the messenger bag on my lap. "If Miriam wasn't making enough money to live on from the sale of her quilts, then where did she get that kind of cash? She had no known assets from before she quit working for Frank Dreiser ten years ago, and since then she hasn't had a job that anyone knows about other than the quiltmaking. Given those circumstances, I can think of far more illegal sources for that money than legal ones. If I'm right, you won't want the museum to be associated with that."
"True." Gil hummed a few notes of her morose song. "In fact, the board member I spoke to yesterday didn't even like the idea of accepting a bequest from a murder victim, just in case someone might think we'd killed her for the inheritance. Which is just silly. We didn't even know Miriam had named us in the will until three weeks after she died."
"Are the rest of the board members as irrational as this one?"
"They all have their quirks," Gil said diplomatically. "I don't think any of the others have really thought about the possibility of bad PR from the bequest. They're just thrilled to have what might be a significant donation."
"Perhaps the amount of the bequest will blind most of them to the PR issues. Despite all the delays, I'm still hoping to have the inventory of Miriam's quilts finished before your next board meeting. Each quilt isn't worth much, but there are a lot of them, so they'll add up for a nice total."
"Assuming they're not tainted the same way as the money in the safe."
I wished I had as nice a voice as Gil's. Then we could have harmonized on the morose song she'd been humming earlier.
As long as I was dwelling on the bad news, I had to ask, "Did you get a chance to talk to that board member about letting the quilters use the boardroom as their regular meeting space?"
Gil shook her head. "I decided discretion was the better part of valor and didn't bring it up. If it weren't so frustrating, it would almost be funny. Most people think of quilters as sweet little old ladies, which is lazy stereotyping, of course, but this particular board member somehow got it into his head that Dee is some sort of Ma Barker, leading a gang of criminal quilters. He kept ranting about two previous murders connected to the guild and who knew what lesser crimes they might have committed?"
"If Dee led a criminal gang, Emma would make sure the bodies were never found."
"True." Gil smiled ruefully. "I'm just sorry the timing is so bad. If Miriam's murder weren't so recent, the board might be more inclined to remember all the good things associated with quilters, so I could let the guild use the boardroom for all of their meetings instead of just the special ones like today's. Although, at this rate, they may vote against letting the quilters use the boardroom at all, ever, and then my hands will be tied."
"I'm sure you won't let that happen." I stood to leave. "I'd better go see what Dee and Emma are up to. They're counting on me to take care of everything in the wake of the eviction notice, but they always have a backup plan, and trust me, you don't want to know how bad those plans usually are."
* * *
The heavy double doors of the boardroom had been propped open. When the museum had acquired the historic mercantile building from the late 1800s, the second floor had been divided into the boardroom, Gil's office suite, and two archive areas. The boardroom still had something of a warehouse feel to it, with a high ceiling, scarred wood floors, and fifteen hundred square feet of open space.
The huge conference table that seated eighteen people had been shoved against the wall across from the entrance, beneath the large windows overlooking Main Street. The chairs had been lined up along the opposite wall, just as they'd been during the ornament-making event a few months ago. Sewing machines had been set up on two banquet-sized folding tables with laminate tops, and another table held cutting boards and stacks of two-inch squares made out of two right triangles, one a dark print and the other a solid light blue.
The quilters were busy turning the pieced squares into Ocean Waves blocks, a traditional pattern that dated back to before the Danger Cove Lighthouse had been built in 1894. I'd been assured that the blocks were simple to make, but once the blocks were laid out in rows, they would create the illusion of intricately interwoven triangles surrounding large light-blue squares.
Dee was at the front table, sewing the pieced squares into blocks, while Emma circulated, politely cracking the whip over the workers. Dee's eyes no longer looked like a cat's, but apparently she'd taken a fancy to the top hat, because it was on the table to her right. She didn't notice my arrival, and I didn't want to interrupt her work just to give her bad news.
The table beneath the huge windows overlooking Main Street was filled with snacks. Probably Emma's doing, since there was nothing like free food to bring out volunteers.
I wasn't hungry, but I needed some additional hydration. When I'd left the house this morning, I'd forgotten to bring a water bottle with me, and the cup of tea I'd gulped down at the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery had barely taken the edge off my thirst.
I made my way over to the refreshments table. Faith Miller, the woman who'd demonstrated the appliqué stitch for me earlier in the week, was there, filling a small paper plate with crudités and a drizzle of dressing.
She turned to greet me. "How's your pillow top coming along?"
"Slowly," I said. "I've been distracted."
She nodded. "Finding us a new meeting place. Dee said you'd take care of it."
"Dee sometimes has more faith in me than I deserve. I hope I'm not the only person looking for your new meeting space."
"I wish I could help," Faith said, "but between homeschooling my kids and dealing with contractors on some major repairs to my house, I'm lucky to get to do anything at all with the guild. I could only be here today because another homeschooler in my network owed me a few hours from when I watched her kids last week while she was sick."
"I'm sure Dee understands. And appreciates your helping with the raffle quilts."
Faith twirled a carrot stick in the puddle of dressing on her plate. "I heard you're a lawyer as well as a quilt appraiser."
"Not any more." I grabbed a bottle of water and uncapped it. "I've retired from practicing law."
"Still, you know legal stuff, right?"
I nodded warily.
"It's just that, well, I know it's not nice to speak ill of the dead, but I can't stop thinking about how Miriam stole my quilt design. Back when I first saw what she'd done, I went to see a lawyer about my rights. He said I couldn't do anything about it, and when I asked questions, he got impatient with me, so I never got any helpful explanations."
"Copyright law is a very specialized field of law, not one that I ever studied in law school or during my practice." It had been touched on briefly in the quilt-appraisal training, and I'd done some extracurricular reading at the nearest law library, but my knowledge of the field was still limited. "I only know the basics as they relate to quilts."
"Perhaps you can explain why it's okay for Miriam—may she rest in peace—to steal my design, and there's nothing I can do about it."
"It's not okay for anyone to steal your design," I said. "The problem is that it would be very difficult and very expensive to prove."
"But I have pictures." She jabbed another carrot into the dressing.
"That wouldn't be enough, I'm afraid. Your quilt is based on a traditional block, something that isn't copyrighted. You'd have to prove that your use of that block was significantly different from what quilters have been doing with the design for centuries."
"It is different. Unique even," Faith said. "The way I laid out the blocks creates a secondary design. Miriam copied that part of it, too, not just the underlying block design."
"You may well be right, but there are other possible explanations that you'd have to disprove," I said. "For one thing, Miriam had an antique Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt hanging on her living room wall, so it's a block she obviously admires. She also has a considerable library of quilt design books, which could have inspired her. The block goes back at least to the late 1920s, if I remember correctly, possibly longer under other names. There's also such a thing in the design world as synchronicity, where multiple people have essentially the same idea all at the same time. I've seen it myself, when for no apparent reason, several quiltmakers simultaneously became fascinated with a traditional block that hadn't been used much in recent years. No one knows exactly why it happens though. Perhaps they all read the same magazines or went to the same quilt exhibit, and were inspired to hunt out the uncommon block and make similar uses of it."
"It's just not fair," Faith insisted. "I know Miriam flat-out copied my design. I teach my kids that if they do the right thing, then other people will do right by them. How can I even say that to them now?"
"I'm sorry." The desire to make the world a little bit more fair had been part of why I'd become a lawyer. Probably part of why I'd had to retire too. The stress of trying to overcome such an immutable fact of life as unfairness had been immense. "I wish I could offer you some hope, but it would be false."
Faith stabbed the carrot stick into the dressing again, and I half expected the point to go straight through the reinforced paper. "It's just not fair," she repeated before setting down the last of her carrot daggers and wandering off to work at an ironing station.
I couldn't help thinking that the desire for revenge wasn't always triggered by something big. It could be something very small, at least to an outsider. To the person who'd been pushed to murderous thoughts, though, the incident was either the final straw on an overburdened back or the loss of something that made it possible to cope with that overburdened back.
For Faith, quilting was the coping tool that made it possible for her to keep moving forward with raising her kids, homeschooling them, and taking care of the household chores all alone. If she lost the joy she found in quilting and then learned that she had no legal recourse against the person who'd cost her that coping tool, would she be tempted to get it back, even if it meant turning violent?
I didn't believe Faith could be so irrational that she would premeditate a murder. Most killers weren't, after all. And yet murders still happened.
What if Faith had gone to Miriam's house to confront her about the supposed design theft and then lost her temper? She could have thrown the quilts in a fit of pique, leaving before she even realized that Miriam was in any distress.
That scenario seemed a little too plausible for my peace of mind. Especially since it didn't narrow down the suspects at all. It could apply to anyone who'd been inside Miriam's house before her death. I wasn't sure that Faith had visited Miriam, but I knew at least three other people who had been inside her home: Herb Stafford, Frank Dreiser, and Wayne Good. Miriam had refused to lend Herb the money he wanted, so he definitely had a motive for wanting her dead, and Frank Dreiser had argued with her loudly enough to trigger a call to the police. I wasn't sure about Wayne, but he obviously wanted something from Miriam, and he might have turned angry if she'd rejected him.
I thought I understood the basic picture of how Miriam had ended up dead—an impulsive act that wasn't intended to have deadly consequences—but that didn't resolve the ultimate question of who had been the one to lose his temper.
Or the one to lose her temper, I thought, taking note of the way Faith was using her iron. She wasn't pressing gently as I'd been taught to do by a self-appointed member of the quilt police—Faith was viciously throttling her blocks.
* * *
Dee called me over to her table and offered me the empty middle chair. I declined, knowing that if I sat behind a sewing machine, Dee would insist that I actually use it. Instead, I pulled up a chair next to the end of the table, and a moment later Emma came over to take the seat I'd avoided.
"Have you found us a new meeting place?" Dee asked me.
I was as stuck with that assignment as the police were in their investigation of Miriam's murder. "I've got some feelers out, but no leads yet. You're still looking too, right?"
Emma caught my eye and nodded, so I knew that she, at least, was still actively searching for a new meeting site.
For once, though, the two women weren't in agreement. Dee shook her head and said, "We've talked to everyone who came to today's event, and no one can think of a good place for us to meet. But that's okay. We have confidence in you. You'll take care of it."
Before I could explain that her confidence was misplaced, I caught sight of Herb Stafford coming through the double doors. He stopped next to the opening and scanned the room until he caught sight of me.
He came over and said, "Hello, ladies." He nodded at Dee and Emma before turning to me. "I know we got off on the wrong foot the other day, and now you're working for the other side of the case, but you did say you could give me the name of another appraiser."
"Keely's the best," Dee snapped. "No point in getting a second opinion if hers is the first one."
"I'm just doing what my lawyer told me to do," Herb whined. "It's nothing personal."
Dee sniffed. "That's what people always say when they're doing something they know is wrong. If you respected Miriam's wishes, you wouldn't be contesting her will to start with, so you wouldn't need your own appraisal."
Once again, the Danger Cove grapevine—or maybe it was the quilters' grapevine—had shown how quickly and accurately it could spread gossip.
"I do respect Miriam's wishes," Herb said. "That's actually why I'm contesting the will. I'm sure she didn't mean to give so much of her estate to the museum. I blame the lawyer for allowing an obviously incompetent old woman to sign a will."
"Miriam was no less competent than I am," Dee said.
"She was a big help with the last quilt show," Emma added. "Miriam was in charge of scheduling all the volunteer shifts and making sure everyone showed up. She created the most amazing spreadsheet I'd ever seen."
"That's different," Herb said.
I gave him a moment to explain what, exactly, was different about preparing a complicated spreadsheet and knowing what she wanted done with her assets after she died. He remained silent, and I was running out of time before Craig would be waiting for me at Miriam's house.
"If you really want to go ahead with the will contest," I said finally, "I can give you some names of certified quilt appraisers. I have them at home and can text them to you this evening."
Herb looked at me suspiciously. "You're not just brushing me off?"
Dee snorted. "If she wanted to brush you off, you'd know it."
"It's best for both sides of a case if everyone has access to a qualified expert," I said. "It will save a lot of time and money for both sides if you don't get unrealistic expectations of the quilts' value. You should also talk to the appraiser about the expenses involved in selling the quilts. That will take a big bite out of the bottom line."
"It won't cost much if I sell the entire collection to the museum," Herb said. "I'm not really interested in the quilts. It's mostly the other stuff in the house that I'm concerned about."
Things like a hundred grand in cash? Did he know about the wall safe?
As if he'd heard my thoughts, he added, "I don't even know for sure what's in the house. It's probably only sentimental things, but Miriam would have wanted them to stay in the family, and I'm all she had. The only way to guarantee I'll get what I deserve is to contest the will."
Despite his explanation, I was more convinced than ever that Herb did know about the cash in the house. On the other hand, he couldn't possibly know that we'd found it and turned it over to Aaron already, and I wasn't going to tell him. "Miriam did leave you her house. That's got to be a pretty substantial share of the estate's value."
"I suppose," Herb said, picking at one of the stains on his T-shirt. "It's going to take time to sell it, though. My lawyer said it could be a year or more. I'm betting it will be even longer. The house next door has been on the market for at least two years now."
I couldn't help asking, "What's your hurry? Whatever you get from the estate is a windfall, not something you ever expected to get."
He shrugged. "I've got plans."
"To start your own restaurant?" I asked. "I understand that's something you've dreamed of for a while."
Surprise flashed across his face before he affected a look of indifference. "Why would I want to own my own restaurant? They're money pits. Even if Miriam's quilts were worth ten times as much as you say, they wouldn't be enough to really get a restaurant off to a good start. Besides, I make a lot more as a chef than I would as the owner. Without the stress and long workdays."
"So what do you want to do with the inheritance?"
"I thought I'd buy a boat," he said. "Maybe live on it."
From what I'd heard, owning a boat was at least as much of a money pit as owning a restaurant, without even the distant chance of ever seeing any profit.
I completely understood why Miriam would have wanted the museum to inherit the quilts. It was obvious that Herb didn't care about them, and the museum would make sure that they ended up with someone who cared about them. But why hadn't she wanted Herb to get the cash? And why had Miriam been so secretive about it, not even telling her attorney that the real value in the contents of her house wasn't in the quilts?