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

  “I hope it’s okay that I brought food to your meeting.”

  Lauren slid the snack to the center of the table.

  “Food is always welcome,” she told Violet.

  Harriet pulled out a ZipLok bag of precut squares of fabric and a plastic hexagon template then dug in her bag for a pencil. Beth reached into her own bag, pulled one out and handed it to her.

  “I brought the flip chart. Should we go ahead and talk before we start stitching?”

  Lauren got up and headed to the kitchen.

  “Works for me, as long as we get to eat our snacks while we talk. Anyone need anything to drink?”

  There were enough requests that Harriet got up to help her.

  “Did you guys learn anything interesting from the coroner?” Lauren asked.

  Harriet pulled cups from a hanging rack and set them in a line on the counter.

  “Not really. She says it looks like Jill was a battered woman to the point that suicide could be a credible possibility. In any case, there wasn’t enough evidence to determine whether she was killed or killed herself.”

  Lauren poured coffee into some of the cups while Harriet poured hot water into others.

  “Howard has an alibi, in any case,” Lauren said.

  “Yeah, that’s what Mavis was saying.” She pulled a tray from the cupboard under the sink and set the cups on it. “Let’s go see what the group has to say.”

  “Jo and Violet have something to report,” Connie said as each one took the beverage of her choice from the tray.

  Harriet reached back and set it on a table that sat against the wall behind the large main table.

  “What have you got, Jo?”

  “In my working life, I’ve had some experience in memory retrieval. Some people consider it to be hypnosis, but it’s more just helping the person relax and guiding them to search their memories. Janice agreed to all this. In fact, it was her idea.

  “She also did something risky. She’s been combing the Internet for new research into memory recovery. The Chinese have done some promising research that involves a drug currently being used to treat Huntington’s disease. You can imagine where this is going. She found a resident who was being given the drug and talked them into ‘sharing’ some of their medication. She took the medicine for a few days, and then I did my thing.”

  “Did it work?” DeAnn asked.

  “I got her relaxed, and then we started talking about her life as a reporter. We got to her arrival in Foggy Point, and her memory still isn’t perfect. She did remember having an affair with Howard, but she’s pretty sure she was doing it to get information from him. That may be wishful thinking, but it’s hard to tell. It seems like he’s made a career out of charming vulnerable women.

  “I don’t think she remembers anything about the day of her accident. Memory is a funny thing. If you revisit a real memory or lack of memory enough times, it can change into whatever you want it to be.”

  “That could be huge, if she’s right,” Harriet said. “We know he was driving the car. If Howard was on to her, and he was driving the car…”

  Aunt Beth took a sip of her coffee.

  “Then she could be in danger living at Howard’s center.”

  Robin cleared her throat.

  “She’s been living in Howard’s ‘house’ for a long time. The only danger will be if he finds out she’s trying to retrieve her memory.”

  “We made sure Howard wasn’t in the building when we did our session,” Jo assured them. “And believe you me, they sell us residents very short.”

  Harriet stood up, went to Beth’s chair and pulled the flip chart from between hers and Mavis’s chairs. She unfolded the stand and set it up on the table. Beth pulled a bag of markers from her quilting bag and handed them to her.

  She flipped to the last page they’d written on. She added the new information under the heading “Janice’s accident” then turned to the group.

  “We’re adding more and more information to support the idea that Howard is an awful husband who may have killed or attempted to kill more than one wife. He may or may not be doing something shady with the medications at the senior center. But, the fact remains, Howard has an airtight alibi for the night of the shooting and our car bombings.”

  Carla scooted her chair closer to the table then coughed into her hand.

  “None of this gives us any reason to believe Howard would have to kill Seth.”

  “That’s the more important point,” Harriet acknowledged. “Aiden said Hannah is upset because Howard wants her to go to pharmacy school, now that Seth is gone.”

  “That makes it seem like Howard didn’t want Seth dead,” Mavis said.

  Harriet set the marker back on the table and went to her seat, then picked up her pencil and started drawing hexagons on her fabric again.

  “After talking to Sarah this last time, it sounds like Seth was marrying her to gain control of the senior center. Sarah inherits the place from her grandmother. Her mother has control until Sarah turns thirty-five, and then it’s all up to Sarah whether she keeps it, sells it, or hires someone else to manage it.”

  “Diós mio,” Connie said. “Sarah turns thirty-five this year.”

  “This changes everything,” Robin said.

  Harriet set her pencil down.

  “What if Sarah was the real target?”

  Robin looked thoughtful.

  “That would only matter if Sarah’s mom and/or Howard were set up to inherit. If they weren’t, they were better off with her alive and under their control.”

  “Can we find that out?” Harriet asked.

  Lauren set the cup of coffee she’d been holding down on the table.

  “As far as I know, there’s no requirement that a will be filed with any public entity before the person dies. She could just have it notarized or not and keep it with her personal papers.”

  “Her lawyer probably has it, but you’re right, it could be handwritten,” Robin said. “She’d want someone outside the family to know about it if she’s not leaving everything to them. Otherwise, they could simply destroy the will and essentially do whatever they want.”

  “So, we have no way of knowing what she’s done,” DeAnn said.

  Jo reached for a lemon bar.

  “Can’t you just ask her?”

  The Loose Threads glanced around the table at each other.

  “What?” Jo asked.

  “You have met Sarah, right?” Lauren asked her.

  Harriet started tracing hexagons again.

  “What Lauren means is Sarah rarely gives us a straight answer to anything.”

  Robin got up and made a note on the flip chart about Sarah being the actual owner of the senior center. She turned back to the group seated around the table.

  “So, where do we go from here?”

  Mavis pulled two sandwich bags containing precut diamond shapes from her bag and set it on the table in front of her then dug in her bag for her needle and scissors.

  “I can’t think of anything,” she said.

  Harriet sat back in her chair and rubbed her hand over her chin.

  “What are you thinking?” Lauren asked her.

  “Jo’s right. We need to talk to Sarah again and see who inherits if she dies. I’d like to have a chat with Joshua again, too. Sarah said she let him sleep at her place when Seth wasn’t there. That implies they were close, or what passes for close in that family. His sociopathic tendencies notwithstanding, he’s always seemed more normal than the rest of the crew.”

  She thought for a moment. “It seems like his goal is to survive Howard and get away from him. He has nothing to gain from Seth being dead or Sarah inheriting or not inheriting. I’d also like to know what, if anything, Howard gained when Joshua’s mother died, and if he knows anything else that might shed light on who Seth’s enemies might be.”

  “I don’t know.” Lauren paused while she reached for a lemon bar. “He hates Howard and thinks Howard killed his
mother. If Howard stole his inheritance on top of that, maybe he killed Seth to punish him.”

  “That assumes Howard cared enough about Seth for it to hurt him,” Harriet said. “Although I guess he did invest in making him his own personal drug expert.”

  Robin pulled a yellow legal tablet from her bag and made a note.

  “If Sarah doesn’t have a will or she hasn’t filed it anywhere but her home office, I’m going to encourage her to write one, get it notarized, and also to hire an estate attorney to help her select an executor for her estate who isn’t a relative. Once she’s done that, she can let the family know, which should protect her from any thoughts her family may have about eliminating her.”

  Aunt Beth closed up the flip chart and put it back under the table.

  “We’re just going in circles. Everyone has a reason to hate Howard and wish him dead. Howard seems to be an abusive lout, but he has an airtight alibi. Have I missed anything?”

  Everyone shook her head.

  “I suggest we leave it be for a while and work on our quilting,” Beth said. “Maybe if we stop thinking about it so hard for a while something will come to us.”

  Harriet looked at Jo and Violet.

  “Do you two have anything else to add to the discussion?”

  The two senior center residents shook their heads again.

  “Do we have an inventory of blocks from the senior center and the shelter?” Connie asked. “We need to see how many we need to make to help finish the quilts in a timely fashion.”

  The rest of the meeting was spent quilting, but Harriet couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah and Joshua and who had wanted Seth dead.

  Chapter 25

  A weak sun was trying to break through the clouds when Harriet took Scooter out for his morning walk.

  “The detective is coming to look at her quilt this morning,” she told the dog. “She’s not here on police business, so be nice.”

  Detective Morse tapped on the studio door just as Harriet came in from the kitchen after showering and then eating a carton of yogurt. She wished her aunt could have seen her eating so healthy.

  “Come in,” she said. “I left your quilt on the machine so you can check it out and see if you like it. I can add more stitching if you want, but if you like what I’ve done, I’ll take it to Carla’s friend so she can start binding it.”

  “If you think it has enough quilting, I love it. My most important criteria is that it’s finished. Besides, I’ve never seen you do a quilt that I didn’t like.”

  Harriet stepped over to her machine.

  “As you can see, I did an X in the center of each ring then used each leg of the X as the stem of a feather-like pattern.”

  Detective Morse rubbed her hand lightly over the surface of the quilt.

  “This is fantastic. When you said it would be simple, I thought you would do something akin to stitch-in-the-ditch,” she said, referring to the technique where the quilting outlines the seams in the quilt top. “This is much more detailed than I expected.”

  “If we’d had more time, I would have done something more intricate in the smaller spaces where the rings overlap. I would have done more in the border, too.”

  “If I’d had the time, I wouldn’t have put a border on. I’d have carried the rings to the edge and bound off the resulting scallops.”

  “Oh, well, next time,” Harriet said and laughed.

  Morse turned away from the quilt to face her.

  “I won’t forget this. I know you put in a lot of hours in a short time. I expect your fee to reflect that extra effort.”

  “I’ll trade my overtime for information. Do you have time for a cup of coffee or tea?”

  Morse shrugged out of her coat and tossed it onto the wing-back chair.

  “I thought you’d never ask. I really will toss you a few tidbits of info if you’ve got an old stale cookie or something to go with it.”

  “Follow me,” Harriet said and headed for the kitchen. “You can choose your pod for the coffee machine while I go rummage in the freezer.” She headed for the garage.

  Ten minutes later, she set a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies on the kitchen table in front of Detective Morse. Morse bit into one of the warm cookies.

  “Mmmm, these are delicious. Do you do a lot of cookie baking?”

  Harriet laughed. “I wish. No, Mavis and Connie bring them by periodically. They decided that, since I have the studio space, which means we tend to meet here more often than anywhere else, it wasn’t fair to expect me to always provide treats for the whole group. You can count your blessings, too. They’re both much better bakers than I am. I just slice the dough and pop them in the oven.”

  “I suppose you want to know if there’s anything new in the Seth Pratt investigation.”

  Harriet smiled and waited to see what the detective was willing to share.

  “We really don’t have anything new. As promised, I did ask my friend in Seattle to see what she could dig up on Howard. He still has an airtight alibi—that didn’t change. I asked her to see what she could find about the deaths of his first two wives. His first wife’s death is listed as an accident. She fell down a flight of stairs and landed on the cement basement floor. She died from head trauma.”

  “That’s awful,” Harriet said. “Did Howard benefit?”

  Morse picked up a second cookie.

  “As a matter of fact, he did. There was a life insurance policy to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a goodly amount. He could have gotten a good start in business with that.”

  “Only if he was conservative with his money, and that is not the Howard Pratt I know. Our Howard likes to throw his money around. He likes to buy favors from people in high places.”

  “How about wife two, Hannah and Joshua’s mom?”

  “I just visited the coroner about another case, so I know you’ve been to see her already about Jill’s autopsy.”

  Harriet had the good grace to blush.

  “So we found out that Jill’s manner of death is undetermined. Did your friend find out if Howard benefited from her death, too?”

  Detective Morse wrapped her hands around her coffee mug.

  “Like most criminals, if he is a criminal—and that’s a big if—he learned from his first crime. When Jill died, according to my friend’s confidential sources, he not only collected two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in insurance he also gained control of a similar amount of money that was being held in trust for Joshua.”

  Harriet choked on the bite of cookie she was chewing.

  “Whoa,” she finally said. “That’s huge. He adopted Joshua so he could control his inheritance and then makes the kid live like an indentured servant.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Morse asked her.

  “Joshua told me. He lives in a garden shed on Howard’s property and thinks he’s on some sort of probation.” Harriet stopped herself before she mentioned Lauren’s background check on Joshua. She wasn’t sure if Lauren and her geeks had hacked their way to that information or not.

  “What do you mean, he thinks he’s on some sort of probation?”

  “Let’s just say I have reason to believe the scared-straight diversion program Howard told him he’s on is a program with only one client.”

  “Do I want to know how you came by that information?”

  Harriet smiled. “Probably not.”

  “You’re lucky I’m feeling so grateful about my quilt.”

  She tried to make a stern face, but the effect was ruined by a smear of chocolate on her mouth. Harriet pointed at it and handed her a napkin.

  “To be serious for a moment, it’s interesting to learn more about Howard and his possible past crimes. My friend and her partner in Seattle are going to look into the two deaths of Howard’s wives, and if they think there’s anything there, they’ll pass on whatever they find to the proper authorities. What we keep coming back to, though, is that Howard has
an alibi for the critical time and there is no conceivable motive for him to want Seth dead. By all accounts, Seth was involved in whatever Howard is doing at the senior center.”

  “Unless Seth began to suspect that Howard killed his mother,” Harriet pointed out.

  “But there’s no evidence Seth suspected his father of anything. It could have equally been Joshua who suspected Howard of killing his mother. We know he hated Howard.”

  Harriet leaned back in her chair, her eyes unfocused.

  “It’s all a big circle. Everyone has a reason to kill Howard. Howard has reasons to kill any number of people if they’ve found out what he’s done or is doing. But none of this has anything to do with Seth.”

  “Welcome to the world of police work. Everyone thinks police work is so glamorous, but really, we spend all our time interviewing and re-interviewing people, trying to figure out where their stories don’t match.”

  “I’m going to take a page from your book and go talk to Joshua again. I think he knows more than he’s telling. And I think he’s the only one in the Pratt family that’s likely to tell me the truth.”

  “I can’t stop you from talking to anyone, but I strongly advise you not to. I have no real reason to believe Joshua is our killer, but you never know who’s guilty and of what. He may have secrets that have nothing to do with Seth’s murder, and who knows what lengths he might go to, to protect them. And there’s always the chance he is the killer, in which case, it could be truly dangerous.”

  “His sister Hannah says he a sociopath.”

  “Seems like everyone’s labeled a sociopath or psychopath these days,” Morse said. “But, still, sociopath or not, stay away from him.”

  “Can you guarantee that Sarah is safe?” Harriet asked her. “If you can promise me that, I’ll go back to my long-arm machine and not talk to anyone.”

  “You know I can’t guarantee that, but leave the protection of Sarah to the police.”

  “I’ll try,” Harriet told her. “Want me to wrap up a couple of cookies to go for you?”

  Morse smiled.