A Quilt in Time (A Harriet Turman/Loose Threads Mystery) Read online

  “They’re also more vulnerable,” Robin cautioned. “Remember, the center controls their food and drugs. If whoever killed Seth works there, it would be easy for him to drug those old people if he becomes suspicious.”

  “If the killer does work at the center, they’re all in danger anyway,” Harriet pointed out. “The killer might not be done yet.”

  Connie stood up.

  “For all we know, Seth might have figured out who killed Rod’s aunt and others. If he was murdered for that knowledge, the killer might go back to his angel of death activities.”

  “We need a little more information before we go down that path,” Robin said. “It hasn’t been confirmed that Rod’s aunt was murdered yet, has it?”

  “No, but we’ve hired a private medical examiner to investigate our suspicions.”

  Harriet cleared her throat.

  “Let’s take one case at a time. I agree we don’t want to put our new quilting friends in danger, but on the other hand, they do have a lot of information. I think we should at least talk to them. Before we go any further, though, I’d like to talk to Sarah. She should be able to answer a few questions.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Aunt Beth said with a smile for her.

  “We have all the curtains finished, too,” Mavis added. “Now you have a real reason to go.”

  Lauren sighed and looked at the ceiling, then pulled out her smartphone and opened the calendar app.

  “I know, Kemosabe, checking my schedule as we speak.” There was a pause. “I’ve got a nine o’clock conference call, and then I’m free. Not free free—I have to work sometime, but I can go with to the shelter and to take batting to the batty, I mean, the seniors.”

  “While you all are doing that, I’ll research the newspaper archives for stories about Janice and Mickey,” Aunt Beth offered.

  “You go, girl,” Lauren said.

  “Anyone want to quilt at my house tomorrow?” Harriet asked. “We all should know more by then, and I don’t know about you all, but I need to work some more on my bed quilt for the shelter.”

  Mavis took a sip of her coffee.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  The group agreed to meet in the afternoon to give everyone time to do their agreed-upon tasks.

  Chapter 12

  “I can’t tell you how much the women here will appreciate your gift,” Georgia Hecht said to Lauren and Harriet as they installed the last rod and straightened the curtain hanging from it. “The rooms look so much brighter already.”

  Harriet stepped down from the ladder she been on so she could reach the top of the bathroom window.

  “Would it be appropriate for us to provide some coordinating paint for the walls? We’d be sure we got the kind that was safe to use around babies.”

  “I think that would be wonderful,” Georgia replied. “As you can tell, we had a large batch of commercial paint donated by a contractor who was working on our original remodel. She had it left over from another job. It was good to have, but pale gray is a bit monotonous.”

  “Great. I’m happy to buy a few gallons, and I’m sure my aunt will donate some, also.”

  “Me, too,” Lauren said with a small sigh. “A little color on the walls will show our quilts to their best advantage.”

  “I can’t thank you enough. I’m sure our residents will be happy to do the actual painting, so don’t worry about that.” Georgia stepped back to look at the curtain as Harriet tugged again at its bottom edge.

  “My aunt said to tell you the wrinkles will disappear on their own, but if you want to speed the process, you can spritz the curtains with a little water.”

  “Good to know,” Georgia said. “Tell your aunt I appreciate the tip. Before you go, your friend Sarah asked if you could come up to her room for a few minutes and talk to her. She’d come down, but the doctor doesn’t want her going up and down stairs until her knee injury is more healed.”

  “We’d love to see her,” Harriet said.

  “Especially since that’s the whole reason we’re here,” Lauren murmured so only Harriet could hear.

  “I think she could use the support,” Georgia said. “She’s having a pretty hard time. No one comes here in great shape, but—and believe me, I wouldn’t be talking to you about this if we weren’t seriously worried about Sarah—she’s not doing well.

  “Even though her fiancé was her abuser, she’s grieving his loss. When someone comes here, our staff and the other residents make an effort to let the new person know they aren’t alone, and that they’ve all had a similar experience.

  “Sarah won’t talk to anyone. She just insists no one could possibly understand what she’s been through, and then she goes off by herself. We hear her crying during the night. She hardly eats, and she can’t possibly be healing properly without adequate nutrition and enough sleep.”

  Harriet took a deep breath.

  “We’ll see what we can do.”

  The Sarah Harriet and Lauren found in the upstairs bedroom bore no resemblance to the young woman they’d been quilting with for the last year or more. She looked like she’d lost thirty pounds. Her previously rounded apple-cheeks were now sharply angled, the flesh of her face gray and sunken, making her bloodshot eyes look larger than normal.

  She sat up in her bed, her ratty quilt clutched to her chest with her good hand, her mangled arm on a pillow lying on her belly. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been washed since they’d seen her last.

  “Sarah?” Harriet said in a hushed voice.

  Her eyes jerked toward the sound of Harriet’s voice, but she didn’t move.

  “May we come in?”

  When she didn’t reply, Lauren and Harriet eased into the room, shutting the door quietly behind them.

  “Is he really dead?”

  Harriet looked at Lauren and then back at Sarah.

  “Do you mean Seth? Yes, Seth is dead. Someone shot him at your cabin.”

  A strangled sob escaped Sarah’s lips. Harriet moved closer to the bed, but Lauren stayed by the door.

  “Georgia said you wanted to talk to us?” Harriet suggested.

  “She told me Seth was dead, but I needed to know from someone I could trust.” Tears ran down Sarah’s hollow cheeks.

  “You know he was shot. You were there. You called me and told me you woke up beside him, and he was dead,” Harriet reminded her. She wasn’t sure if she should press the matter at this point, but she didn’t know what else to do.

  Sarah sighed and dropped her good hand to her lap.

  “I was hoping it was all a bad dream. They’ve given me so much pain medication since I’ve been here, it’s been hard to tell what’s real. For a while, I wasn’t sure I’d ever left the hospital. I thought maybe I’d imagined it all.”

  “That’s magical thinking,” Lauren said. “Not only is Seth dead, we’re fairly sure you’re suspect numero uno.”

  “Lauren, stop,” Harriet said.

  “She needs to know what she’s up against. We don’t have time for this psycho business.”

  Harriet glared at her.

  “She’s right,” Sarah said. “I have to figure this out. I don’t remember much, but I’m sure I could never have hurt Seth. We were going to be married.”

  “Give it up, Sarah,” Lauren said. “You weren’t going to be married. He was going to kill you. If you did kill him, he had it coming.”

  Sarah began to cry again.

  “Lauren, this is not helping.”

  “I was hoping to shock her out of this.” She gestured toward Sarah. “Whatever this is.”

  “It’s not helping, so lay off.”

  “Fine. Why don’t you show me how it’s done, then?”

  Harriet moved to the edge of the bed and put her hand gently on Sarah’s shoulder.

  “I know this is difficult, but we need to figure this all out. We know you didn’t shoot Seth, if for no other reason than your arm was too injured for you to have done it. So, we need to know
as much as you can remember so we can help the police find the real killer. Unfortunately, your stepdad is not going to help you.”

  “Howard is an evil man. Seth was going to leave the senior center because of him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Seth wouldn’t tell me. He said he was gathering evidence. He said if anyone found out what his dad was doing, it could implicate him and he could lose his license.”

  Lauren came closer.

  “And you have no idea what he was talking about?”

  “No. Seth didn’t want to say anything until he’d gotten evidence to back up his suspicions. He said he couldn’t risk having me blab to Howard if his suspicions turned out to be not true.”

  Harriet looked at Lauren, and Lauren pulled a small notebook from her bag and made a note.

  “Can you think of anyone else who would want Seth dead?” Harriet asked.

  “I don’t know.” Sarah twirled the torn edge of her quilt into a tight spiral. “Joshua, maybe.”

  “He’s your stepsister Hannah’s brother?” Harriet asked.

  “Her half-brother. Howard adopted him when his mom Jill died. He’s a little younger than Seth. He never got what Seth did, though. Howard wouldn’t pay for Joshua to go to college. He wouldn’t even pay for him to play sports or do activities in high school, even though he paid for Seth and Hannah. I’m not really sure why he adopted Josh other than to please Hannah.”

  “Josh and Hannah are close?”

  “Not really.” She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Maybe they were when they were younger. I don’t think Josh likes any of us now. I can’t say I blame him. He’s always been a sort of indentured servant. Howard would make him do the jobs no one else wanted.”

  “That sounds grim.” Lauren looked up from her notebook, where she was making additional notes.

  “Ours isn’t the traditional family unit,” Sarah stated.

  “Does Joshua live in Foggy Point?” Harriet asked.

  “Of course. He works at the senior center. That was why I said Howard could make him do whatever he wanted.”

  Under normal circumstances, Sarah’s sarcastic remarks got on Harriet’s nerves, but today she was happy to see a glimpse of the old Sarah. She pulled the desk chair to the bed and sat down.

  “If Josh is so abused, why doesn’t he just leave?”

  “Seth and I couldn’t figure that out. I mean, Howard made it clear to Seth that he had to stay because he’d gotten a ‘free’ education, even if he didn’t get to choose what to study. Josh had gotten nothing. We assumed Howard had something on him—Howard is that sort of person. He’s got something on about half the people in town. No one likes him, really, but they can’t afford to be anything but nice to him.”

  Lauren looked up from her notebook again.

  “If Howard is so awful, why did your mom marry him?”

  Sarah slumped back against her pillows.

  “That would be the question, now, wouldn’t it?”

  Harriet stood up.

  “Anyone else?”

  “Detective Morse keeps asking me that, but I don’t know what to say. Everyone loved Seth.” Tears started trickling down Sarah’s cheeks again.

  Harriet picked at a piece of lint on her pants leg and glared at Lauren and the response she knew was lurking in her friend’s mind. Lauren put her hand up in surrender.

  “Sarah, can you tell us anything about the group of seniors in the independent living hall at the center?” Harriet asked finally.

  “Like what? Their medical records are confidential.”

  “I was thinking more like what their backgrounds were before coming to the center.”

  “Violet claims to be a prize-winning quilter. There’s a faded blue ribbon hanging on the wall in her room, so I suppose it’s true. Everyone knows Mickey used to be a bookie and who knows what else.”

  “What about Jo?” Harriet asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Is she really a retired CIA operative?”

  “How should I know?”

  Harriet sighed and pressed her lips together to avoid saying what she was thinking.

  “You don’t have to look at me like that,” Sarah said. “Yes, I overheard Jo say she worked for the CIA, but we hear all kinds of crazy things, especially in the memory care area. Those people were normal once, too—right up until they weren’t. I haven’t been in Jo’s room, and short of calling up the CIA for a job reference, there’s no real way to know. Could be true, could be the wild imaginings of a deteriorating mind.”

  “She’s got a point,” Lauren said.

  “Rule of thumb is fifty-fifty,” Sarah offered. “People change memories every time they take them out and talk about them. By the time you’ve told a story for fifty or more years, it probably has lost half of its original truth. That doesn’t just start when you’re old. We all do it. Think about it, and you’ll see I’m right.”

  “Good to know,” Lauren said.

  “I did go to school, you know. I’ve got a masters in psychology.”

  That was interesting, Harriet thought. Robin had told her one time that three-fourths of the people who studied psychology do it to try to solve their own problems.

  “The director here is worried about you. She says you aren’t letting them help you.”

  “I don’t have anything in common with these people. They say our situations are the same, but how many of them had their fiancé, who they’d grown up with, murdered, probably by one of their own relatives?”

  “Sarah, no one is going to have exactly the same story, but you all have experienced violence and loss.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Harriet had an idea.

  “You’re probably right, but could you do something for me?”

  Sarah wiped her nose with a tattered tissue and then looked at her for a moment.

  “What?”

  “The rest of the Threads and I are working on a quilting project with some of the residents at the senior center.” Harriet looked at Lauren, daring her to contradict her. “We were thinking we could do a joint project with the women who live here. We could teach these women to quilt, and they could make some squares for a quilt the senior women could finish and raffle off to make money to buy things the shelter needs.”

  She continued to look at Lauren. It took a moment for Lauren to realize Harriet was waiting for her to say something.

  “We thought we’d have both groups make grandmother’s flower garden blocks. They can either do English paper piecing or freehand it, but in either case, they would be hand sewing, so we wouldn’t need much equipment.”

  “We realize you can’t sew yet, but we thought you could watch them and give them pointers,” Harriet added.

  “None of them know how to quilt at all?” Sarah asked.

  “Not that we know of.” Harriet hoped it was true.

  “I suppose as long as I’m stuck here, I could make sure they don’t mess their blocks up. And they certainly could use the money. Did you know they make grocery store coffee in an electric percolator? Can you imagine? It’s undrinkable.

  “Can you make sure Detective Morse keeps looking for Seth’s killer? I know you’ve helped her before.”

  That’s one way of putting it, Harriet thought. Sarah apparently didn’t realize Lauren hadn’t been lying when she said Sarah was Morse’s number-one suspect.

  “We’ve got to go,” Harriet said. “Can we get you anything before we go? They have some magazines downstairs.”

  “No.” She raised her injured arm with its fiberglass-and-wire casing. “I can’t really do anything but lay here and think about Seth.”

  Lauren and Harriet picked up their purses and coats from the floor beside the door.

  Sarah sniffed. “There is one thing.”

  “Sure, what can we do?” Harriet asked.

  “Could you check on Rachel? I haven’t heard anything about her since I took her to Aiden.”

 
“I’m sure Mavis is taking good care of her,” Harriet assured Sarah. “But I’ll ask her for a report when I see her this afternoon. We’ll let you know the minute we can.”

  Lauren pulled the door closed behind them and turned to Harriet.

  “Does she not get that being battered is what she has in common with the rest of these women?”

  Harriet started for the stairs.

  “She’s not ready to face the truth about Seth yet. When she’s healed a little, and they’ve figured out who killed him, she may be more willing to get some counseling to help with that. Who knows? If she’s here long enough, maybe one of the other residents will get through to her.”

  They found Georgia in the kitchen.

  “Everyone’s working on quilts, so we’ll have those soon, and in the meantime, we’ll let you know when we have paint for you.”

  “I could pick it up from you after work someday, but I’m sure you want to deliver it yourselves so you can check on your friend.”

  Harriet had the good grace to blush.

  Chapter 13

  Mavis came into Harriet’s kitchen and set two pink boxes tied with string on the counter.

  “I brought two coffee cakes from the new bakery that went in at the opposite end of the block from Annie’s coffee shop downtown. One is almond and the other is Marion berry.”

  Harriet filled first the teakettle and then the carafe to the coffee maker and then set them on their respective heat sources.

  “Sounds great. I’ll get hot drinks ready. Do you know if Wendy is joining us?”

  “Yes, she is,” Mavis told her.

  She took a sippy cup from her cabinet and filled it with chocolate milk.

  “Sarah asked how Rachel is doing. I told her I was sure you were taking good care of her.”

  “She doesn’t like having that cast on her leg, but she’s otherwise good. Curly is a good nurse,” she said, referring to her little rescued dog. “They’ve started taking naps side-by-side on the sofa when the curtain is open and lets the sun shine on it.”

  “I’ll let Sarah know. I’m sure that’ll make her feel better.”