Disappearing Nine Patch (A Harriet Truman/Loose Threads Mystery Book 9) (2 page)

He held a couple of carrot sticks over his shoulder, and she took them.

“How do you get these so crisp?”

“Chef’s secret,” he said and laughed.

Harriet sighed. “I better leave you alone so you can get your work done. Besides, my aunt and Mavis arrived at my house as I was leaving. I think they’re staging some kind of intervention. Since I’m their subject, I better go let them do their thing.”

He glanced up at her. “I can’t wait to hear the story behind that.”

“All in due time,” she told him and grinned.

Cars lined her drive when she arrived back at her house. She parked in the garage then took a deep breath before going in to face her friends.

“Hey, looks like the gang’s all here,” she said, trying to sound cheerful as she came into the kitchen and found her aunt filling the tea kettle. “Did I miss the meeting notice?”

Mavis joined them.

“Honey, why don’t you come into your studio. We have double chocolate brownies and salted caramel blondies.”

Harriet set her purse on the counter and hung her jacket in the closet then turned to Mavis and Aunt Beth.

“If you put it that way, I guess I could hear what you have to say.”

“Who said we have anything to say? Can’t we just drop in for tea?” Aunt Beth said sweetly.

“Oh, please. You and Mavis could drop by, or even you guys and Connie, but the whole bunch of you all at one time? Never happen. You’re here to ambush me about something. If you’re willing to give me a brownie and a blondie, I’m putty in your hands.” She brushed past her aunt and went on into her studio.

“Harriet, we’ve missed you,” Connie Escorcia said from her seat by Harriet’s big table. “You’ve missed the last three Tuesday Threads meetings.”

Leave it to Connie to take roll, Harriet thought. As Foggy Point’s former favorite kindergarten and first grade teacher, she couldn’t let go of her old habits.

“We were getting worried about you,” Robin McLeod added. “I know it’s been rough having Aiden gone for so long.”

“You look like you’ve lost weight,” DeAnn Gault told her. “Have you been eating?”

Harriet held her hands up.

“Everybody—stop, already. I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. I’ve asked you out to dinner five times, and you’ve turned me down flat,” Aunt Beth, who had followed her from the kitchen, complained.

“And I’ve called you each night before our Tuesday meeting,” Mavis added.

“If any of you would have let me get a word in edgewise, I could have explained. As soon as I say I can’t go do something, you launch into how sorry you are that Aiden is gone for three months and how bad he must feel, and how I must feel, etc. etc. etc.”

She reached across her large cutting table and picked up a brownie, putting it on a napkin before she sat down on a wheeled chair.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go out to dinner, I said I
couldn’t
go. Likewise, I wasn’t able to take the time to go to a meeting. If anyone had bothered to ask why, I’d have told them.”

She was interrupted by Lauren Sawyer coming into the studio from the porch.

“Sorry I’m late, I just got the message. What did I miss?”

“We’re having an intervention,” Harriet said. “Grab a brownie and join the fun.”

Lauren did as instructed and sat down.

“What are we intervening about?”

“I was about to explain why I’ve missed the last three meetings.”

Lauren took a bite of her brownie.

“You were working on that big order, what’s the big mystery?” she said when she’d swallowed. She looked around the table at her friends. “
I
could have told you. Harriet got a big job and was working night and day to finish it.”

“Thanks for telling us,” Mavis scolded her.

“Don’t get mad at me. I missed the last meeting, too.” She turned to Harriet. “Why didn’t you tell me you were MIA when I brought dinner over? I could have filled them in.”

“Geez, enough,” Harriet said and laughed. “I was just saying—everyone is so busy being sympathetic about Aiden they haven’t given me a chance to tell them what I’ve been doing, and frankly I haven’t had a lot of time to spend on the phone waiting for a chance to talk.”

Mavis looked at Beth. “I think we’ve been insulted.”

Harriet ignored them.

“As Lauren said, I’ve had a big stitching job for the last couple of weeks. A woman in Port Ludlow is planning a ninetieth birthday celebration for her mother. Mom was a big-time quilter in her day, but like lots of people, she’d made many more tops than she could ever quilt, especially since she was a hand quilter and now has arthritis so bad she can’t really do any handwork.

“Mom has always wanted to get enough quilts finished that she could give one to each of her seventeen grand- and great-grandchildren. The daughter has a long-arm quilter she uses in PL, but given the tight schedule, she needed to spread the quilts around to several of us hired needles. I agreed to take six, and I’ve been stitching my fingers to the bone getting them finished and off to the women in her quilt group for binding. They rented a hotel ballroom and are having a big bash complete with news people from Seattle.”

Aunt Beth put her mug down on the table hard.

“Why didn’t you say so?”

Harriet laughed.

“And before you ask, yes, I’ve heard from Aiden. His research group has a satellite phone the doctors get to use once a week. He’s called me a couple of times.”

Mavis and Beth exchanged a glance, and Harriet knew her aunt and her aunt’s best friend were calculating how many weeks Aiden had been gone and counting how many weeks must have gone by without a call. She could have saved them the trouble—she’d done the math herself. He’d been gone seven weeks and called twice; once to say he’d safely arrived in-country. So, really, he’d only called once. That was fourteen-point-two percent of the times he had a phone available.

She raised her chin, silently daring anyone to press the issue.

“He’s keeping busy doing the project work and taking care of the domestic animals and pets in the village near their research station. He said they spend a fair amount of time each day hauling water and boiling it.”

Carla’s cheeks reddened, but she didn’t say anything.

Harriet didn’t want to think about why that was. She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know the answer.

Connie stirred her tea and set her spoon down.

“In a way, it’s probably good that he’s keeping too busy to think too much, but it will catch up with him. He’s going to have to deal with what his sister did at some point.”

Mavis tapped her teaspoon idly on her napkin.

“Denial is a pretty potent coping mechanism.”

Harriet reached across the table and took a blondie.

“As to your point, Robin…” She took a bite, chewed and swallowed before continuing. “…I’d actually rather have Aiden off sorting himself out. Having him either no-showing for our dates or showing up and being so down that we can’t enjoy ourselves was getting old. I know that sounds harsh, but I’m tired of all the drama. Speaking of which, what’s been going on in Loose Thread-ville while I’ve had my nose to the grindstone?”

“I finished two more blocks of my crazy quilt,” Connie announced.

Carla twisted her napkin between her fingers.

“I started a baby quilt for one of the mothers in Wendy’s play group at church. She has four-year-old twin boys, a girl Wendy’s age, and she’s having twins again in August. One of the other moms is making a quilt, too.”

Connie patted her hand. “That’s very nice of you to make her something new for the babies.”

The talk went around the table, with each quilter reporting on progress or problems on their current project. It stopped when they got to DeAnn.

“I have a mission for us, should we choose to accept.”

Lauren leaned forward. “Oooh, tell us more.”

“Most of you know I have a younger half-sister,” DeAnn continued. “She runs a non-profit that’s an umbrella organization for the various smaller missing and exploited children’s groups around the state.”

“I heard something about that,” Mavis said. “Aren’t they doing some kind of an event in Port Angeles in a couple of weeks?”

DeAnn took a sip of her tea.

“That’s what I was going to ask you guys about. Molly is doing a dinner and auction, and she has two donors who have pledged ten thousand dollars each already.”

“Here it comes,” Lauren said. “And she wants us to make a…”

DeAnn’s shoulders slumped, and she looked at Lauren.

“She was trying to think of a special thank-you present, and we were talking. It was my idea.”

“Spit it out,” Lauren said.

“Since they deal with missing children, I was thinking it would be cool to give them each a disappearing nine-patch quilt.”

Carla, the youngest member of the group, looked confused.

“What’s a disappearing nine-patch?”

Aunt Beth explained. “It’s a simple pattern that ends up looking complicated. You make a basic nine-patch, kind of big, and then you cut it into four parts. You rearrange the four parts and sew them back together.”

“Which direction do you cut it?” Carla asked.

“That’s a very good question. You can cut it evenly in half and then cut those halves in half or you can cut corner to corner,” Aunt Beth said.

“Cutting four small squares is a lot easier than working with the triangles, if you ask me.” Mavis added.

“I’m willing to buy all the fabric,” DeAnn continued. “That could be my donation. I mean, besides working on the quilt.”

“I can quilt them on the machine,” Harriet offered. “I’ll sew blocks, too.”

“I’m willing to do anything,” Robin said.

Mavis and Connie nodded their agreement.

“Me, too,” Carla said.

Harriet got up and went to her desk, where she picked up a box of colored pencils and a large sheet of grid paper. She brought them back to the big table.

“Okay, let’s see if we can map this out and figure out what we need fabric-wise then decide who will do what.”

The crunch of tires on gravel drew Harriet to her studio window. When she saw James getting out of his white catering van, she went to the door and threw it open.

“What are you doing here?”

He handed her two plastic cold-bins.

“Take those to your kitchen.” He skipped back down the porch steps and leaned into the back of his van, coming out with a large cardboard box. “I told you I’d make it up to you for finding Cyrano. And this is nothing. Consider it a down payment.” He followed her into the kitchen, carried his box to the dining room and returned. “Do you have a deviled egg plate?”

“Probably. Aunt Beth left a hutch full of dishes in there.” She pointed back toward the dining room.

“I made eggs, a fruit salad, and an assortment of pastries for you ladies. Just a light snack,” he said and went back to the dining room to fetch the desired serving dish.

“How did you even know I was hosting a meeting this morning?”

“I ran into your aunt at the grocery store last night. She was at the meat counter buying chicken breasts. She told me she was making salad for a work day at your house, and I asked if I could bring breakfast.”

“Well, this looks delicious, but you really don’t owe me anything.”

“I can’t begin to describe how shocked I was when I went out to check on Cyrano and discovered he wasn’t there. I couldn’t breathe, my heart started racing…man…” He ran his hand through his short hair. “If the gate had been open, or if he’d dug a tunnel under the fence, I’d have been upset, but it wouldn’t have been so shocking. He was there one minute and gone the next with no indication of what had happened.”

“I’m glad it all turned out okay. Melanie thought she could trust her kids to stay in the house while she ran around the block. She knows better now.”

James’s face became serious. “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to him. My dream for a lot of years has been to own my own restaurant, and I know that means I don’t have time for a committed relationship. If the restaurant is my wife, Cyrano is our child. Until the business is more established, he’s all I’ve got.”

“Well, I was happy to help you both. I know I’d be heartbroken if either of my boys disappeared.”

“Speaking of that, how are you doing with Doc being gone?”

“I meant my dog and cat, but since you mention it, I’m doing fine. It’s actually a bit of a relief. Aiden’s life has been in such turmoil since he returned from Africa last year that he wasn’t really in a position to be in a relationship—with me or anyone else. Now, instead of being emotionally unavailable but physically present, he’s not present on either count.”

“I guess that makes sense. It just seemed like you two fit together. Even when things were tough, you seemed like a team.”

“Looks can be deceiving, I guess. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in.”

“Let’s hope that’s all behind you and things will be good when he gets back.”

“Yeah, let’s hope. In the meantime, I have a meeting to get ready for.”

He unboxed the pastries, which were on stacked baking sheets.

“Preheat your oven to four hundred and then pop these in for about five or six minutes—just enough to crisp them up—then serve them warm.” He looked out the kitchen window. “Your aunt just arrived. I better get back to the restaurant. I can stop by tomorrow and pick up my pans, or if Lauren is coming to your meeting, you could send them with her, since it’s not that far out of her way.”