A Quilt in Time (A Harriet Turman/Loose Threads Mystery) (10 page)

“I’ll e-mail the schedule to everyone when I get home from my visit with her. Connie, if you could go during dinner tonight that will give me time to get the schedule made and emailed to everyone.”

“Sounds good to me,” Harriet said. “Everyone?”

She looked around the table. One-by-one, the Threads nodded their agreement.

Robin stood up.

“I’m going to head over to the senior center. I’ll be in touch.”

“I better go get stitching so I’ll be ready when I get my assignment,” Harriet said. “By the time you get back, Mavis should be done with her hair appointment, so you can give her a buzz. I’m sure she’ll want to do a shift, too.”

With that settled, everyone left for their various assignments and activities.

“Come on in.” Harriet called as she pressed the red stop button on the hand grip of her long-arm quilting machine. “It’s open.”

She hadn’t heard the car pull into her driveway over the noise of her machine, but she recognized Mavis’s silhouette through the curtained bow window beside her studio door. If Mavis hadn’t seen Harriet at the machine through the same window, she would have let herself in instead of knocking; but she wouldn’t have wanted to risk startling Harriet and causing a misplaced stitch.

Scooter jumped from his bed under Harriet’s desk and began barking at her as she came in.

“Your timing needs a little work,” Mavis said with a smile. She bent and picked the little dog up. Scooter licked frantically at her face, causing her to laugh.

“Some watchdog, huh?”

“He’ll get there,” Mavis said. She pulled a small plastic bag from her purse and plucked a strip of dog jerky from it. “Here you go, little one.” She handed Scooter the treat and set him gently on the floor.

“You want some tea?” Harriet asked. She stood and bent forward, reaching for her toes. “I’ve been stitching on this quilt for hours. I could use a break.” She straightened back up. “Hey, your hair looks great.”

A redhead in her youth, Mavis’s hair had been a faded rusty gray before today’s makeover. It was now a more distinct auburn with golden highlights.

“Thanks, and yes, I’d love some. My daughters-in-law got me a gift certificate for a new hairdo for my last birthday.”

“That was a few months ago, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Well, it’s never good to rush these things. Anyway, I went to Mr. Max in Angel Harbor, and I have to confess, I like his handiwork.”

“How are you going to break the news to Miss Shirley?”

“That’s why the girls got the gift certificate. They knew I wouldn’t waste the money they’d spent buying it for me, and they also knew it would take something like that to get me to break away from Shirley.”

“It looks good. You look younger.”

“He cut the sides shorter and added a little color. I swore I’d never color my hair, but he said highlights don’t really count.”

Harriet circled around her. There were lighter areas, but it was obvious Max had darkened the background color as well.

“Mr. Max sounds like a smooth talker. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen, and I’ll see if I can scrounge up a snack to go with our tea.”

Mavis filled the kettle while Harriet dug in her cabinets, coming out with a box of gingersnaps.

“Will these do?”

“I love gingersnaps, and they don’t have to be homemade to be good.”

“Has anyone filled you in on what our lunch was about?”

“Not yet. I called your aunt when I got done, but she must have the sound turned off on her phone.”

Harriet poured hot water into their mugs and put the cookies on a plate, then brought it all to the kitchen table.

“So, we seem to be in the bodyguard business,” she said when she’d finished explaining to Mavis what had been decided at lunch.

“I’ll call Robin when I get home and get on the schedule.” Mavis picked up her tea and took a long sip. “I wasn’t completely slacking today on that front.”

“Do tell.” Harriet leaned forward in her chair.

“Mr. Max and I were making small talk, and I mentioned making the adult bibs for the senior center. As it turns out, he’s familiar with the center. He went to school with Howard Pratt.”

“That’s interesting.”

“It gets more so.” Mavis took a bite of her cookie. “Howard’s been quite the marrying man. Sarah’s mother is his third wife, that Max knows of—that was how he put it. And the first one died under mysterious circumstances.”

“Mysterious how?”

“Mysterious as in everyone thinks she was murdered, and no one was ever arrested.”

“That
is
interesting.”

“Max says Howard played the hero, adopting the second wife’s son after she killed herself. He says there wasn’t any other family to take the boy, and Max was didn’t doubt sure Howard would have made sure the boy never forgot that. That last part was him speculating—he didn’t have any direct knowledge.”

“We need to get Lauren to dig deeper into Sarah’s family. According to Georgia at the women’s shelter, domestic violence tends to be generational. I realize that doesn’t excuse Sarah’s abuser, though.”

“It
would
be good to know. And Connie and Rod have been suspicious about Rod’s aunt’s death at that center. Maybe Howard is one of those angels of death you hear about.”

“If that’s true, it’s even more important that we keep an eye on Sarah while she’s there and get her out of there as quickly as we can. If we convince her she’s being battered, that might make her a liability in Howard’s eyes.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Mavis said. “Maybe we should talk to Detective Morse.”

“I don’t think we’re to that point yet. So far, this is all speculation—except for Sarah being battered, of course. You know, I suppose there’a chance it’s really Howard who’s beating her. Except she did say Seth hit her because she cooked the wrong thing for dinner,.”

They finished their tea in silence, and Mavis stood up.

“Have you worked on your pet quilts for Aiden’s shelter room yet?”

“No, I signed up to do a bed quilt, and I’ve spent all my time the last week on the customer quilt you just saw on the machine. The woman wants to enter it in the Tacoma show, and if it does well, she’s thinking about Houston or Paducah.

“To be in either of those shows, the quilting has to be really dense. I’m hoping she realizes that the top winners at the big shows have what must be hundreds of hours of stitching in them. So far, she’s not asking me to do that much.”

“Want to get together tomorrow and work on them? I’ve cut out some pieces, but that’s all.”

“Sure, I’ll dig out my dog prints and see if I have something that coordinates with any of the ones you’re using.”

“Let’s meet for lunch at the Sandwich Board. Then we can cruise the sale shelf at the quilt store. Marjory might have something we can use for backing.”

“Sounds like a plan. I think most of the Sarah-schedule openings are before noon, so that should work fine.”

“What are you two up to?” Lauren asked Mavis and Harriet as she pulled a chair up to their table at the Sandwich Board Deli in downtown Foggy Point the following day. “Mind if I join you?”

“Of course not,” Mavis said. “Since when do you need to ask?”

“Just checking.” Lauren pulled her laptop from her messenger bag and opened it on the table then spun it around to face her two friends.

“What’s this?” Mavis asked.

“My attempt at Sarah’s family tree. As you can see by the dotted lines, I’m not sure of all the connections, but this is what I’ve got so far.”

Harriet tried to follow the branches of the tree.

“So there
are
two girls, Sarah and Hannah, and two boys, Seth and Joshua. Am I reading this right?” She looked over the top of the computer. “Sarah’s not related by blood to any of them?”

“That’s right. Hannah is a half-sibling to each of the boys, but the boys aren’t blood relatives.”

Mavis sat back and rubbed her hand across her chin.

“And Sarah says she’s engaged to Seth?”

“That’s what she told us,” Harriet said. “At least, it was true when she was in the hospital. I talked to Carla this morning, and she thinks we’ve gotten through to her about going to the shelter, so hopefully that means the engagement is off.”

“I swear I will kidnap her and take her far, far away if she tries to marry that jerk,” Lauren said. “If you guys won’t help me, I’ll call the geek squad.”

Lauren had a group of computer programming students she worked with who saw themselves as superheroes of the cyber world.

“We need to try to talk to her sister and mother when we go to the open house,” Mavis said.

“Are you going to tell them about the shelter?” Harriet asked.

“No, I’m not suggesting that,” Mavis said. “It would be useful to get a sense of whether they’re going to help or hinder, though.”

“I want to talk to Seth and see what he’s all about,” Lauren said.

“Just be careful,” Harriet cautioned. “We can’t tip our hand.”

“We can pray she’ll move to the shelter
before
the open house,” Mavis said. “We’ve only got three days for that to happen, but I think they move quickly once the victim agrees to go.”

“Did you find out anything about her biological father?” Harriet asked Lauren.

“His name is Peter Ness. Other than that, nothing. I’ll keep looking, though.”

“It would help if he were available to Sarah,” Mavis said. “Maybe she could live with him until she gets her feet under her again.”

“I think we need to find out if he’s alive and make sure he’s not worse than Sarah’s current family,” Harriet cautioned. “I mean, there must be some reason she’s so close with her mom and stepdad, and we’ve never heard of her father.”

“Numbers twenty-three, twenty-four and twenty-five,” called a small woman with short dark hair and a tattoo sleeve covering her right arm.

“I’ll get them.”

Harriet stood and went to the service counter. The woman put three wicker plates loaded with deli-sandwiches and kettle chips onto a tray and slid it toward her.