Old Maid's Puzzle (2 page)

I knew when to back off, too. I nestled into his chest, being sure to give an extra grind with my hip. "You do remember that Saturday is the anniversary sale? And that you promised to work."

"When did I promise that?"

"Probably the same night I agreed that not having sex was a good idea."

He grinned and moved in on my neck, planting tiny kisses. His stubble tickled my chin. I felt heat rise and my brain start to muddle. He always won this argument in the same way. By driving me out of my mind.

"Let's end this now," I said, reaching for his belt.

"Two more weeks. I'm a man of my word."

I said, "Save your integrity for someone who cares."

"You don't mean that."

He knew I didn't. I loved his overdeveloped sense of honesty. That was what made him a great homicide detective, the youngest in the San Jose Police Department.

"We could put on another coat of stain," he said, pointing with his chin to the dining room. I followed his direction. My collection of art pottery was spread over the dining room table. We'd propped up the glass shelves of the cabinet against the wall. I couldn't wait to see my pots inside the cupboards. The colorful glazes were going to pop against the rich mahogany stain.

I'd been trying to get to this for months. My renovations were behind schedule. My attention had been focused on the quilt shop, for all the good that did me. The shop was barely staying open.

I sat up, flinging my arms open wide. My voice carried in the small house. "I'm out of stain and out of budget. I can't buy what I need for the house, because the store isn't making a profit. The store's not making a profit, because I can't afford Kym, but I can't fire my sisterin-law. I can't have sex, because my boyfriend has this silly idea that we need to get to know each other better. I know you, I know you. Let me get some satisfaction in this one aspect of my life." I leaned in and kissed him, giving him an adoring look.

Buster ignored my batting eyelashes and said, "I might have to work on Saturday."

I squinted. "Since when do you work weekends?"

The SJPD had moved him up to homicide a year ago to take advantage of his computer skills, then, to his endless frustration, put him on cold cases. He spent most of his days at a desk, reading old files. Good because his nights and weekends were free, but not what he'd signed on for.

"I'm close to identifying an inmate in SoCal as a suspect for the Jenkins murder. I need to go down and see him. Get a look at him myself. If he'll let me, I'll get a new photo to scan into the facial recognition software for comparison."

"That was twenty-five years ago, wasn't it?" I wasn't old enough to remember when the young Traci Jenkins had gone missing after a blind date, but the Merc did an update nearly every year. "The murderer would be a lot older. Would he look the same?"

"The computer doesn't care. It tracks landmarks, plots points. Underlying bone structure doesn't change." Buster traced a line on my face. "For example, even when you're old and wrinkled, these cheekbones will still have the same beautiful shape."

I batted his finger and the left-handed compliment away. "I remember that from anthro class in college. We did a unit on identifying indigenous people by their facial similarities. They can tell who came from Asia originally and who came from North America."

I loved talking about Buster's work. I settled next to him on the couch, feeling his warmth as I listened.

"Like that. The software maps the face, in this case, the suspect's mug shot, and then we can overlay it on another photo to see if they match. The trouble is, the old picture of this guy is not a full shot, and it's not conclusive. There's no DNA to test, so I've got to go down and see if the suspect will talk to me. I'll try to do it before Saturday."

"I'd like to have you around at the sale," I said. Worry about the shop crept into my voice and Buster heard it. He squeezed my waist with his arm and kissed my neck.

"It's going to be fine."

"This sale is make or break for the shop," I said. He knew this as well as I did.

His voice was muffled by my hair. "You've done everything you can, right? Ordered lots of new things, advertised the sale, prettied up the place?"

I nodded.

"So. Relax." He punctuated his command with a kiss. "The customers will come and spend a lot of money. Even if I have to drag people in off the streets," he said.

The picture of Buster pulling quilters out of their cars made me laugh. It was so nice to have someone completely on my side. Buster made my heart lighter.

That made me feel hornier.

I pulled on his belt buckle, rubbing my body along his and tried one last tactic. "Every fireworks show has a grand ending. I mean, all those waterfalls, palms, and chrysanthemums are spectacular, but the best part is always the finale. How about my finale?"

I'd been working on this fireworks analogy for a week, but Buster was unmoved. His kissed me quickly, throwing on his shirt and buckling his belt. I hated that he was covering up his beautiful shoulders.

"Nice try," he said.

"Aren't you worried that by the time we actually do it, it won't be any good?" I asked.

Frank Sinatra was singing "Nice and easy does it every time." Buster barely tolerated my CD collection. As his idea of mood music was Metallica, I played what I wanted to hear.

"Are you?" He kissed my palm and sucked on my finger. I felt myself sink.

"Well, I mean, if I get used to a certain level of..." I couldn't think of the word I wanted. He had two of my fingers in his mouth and, unlike me, words wouldn't come.

"Foreplay? Arousal?" he said.

Just hearing the words was stopping my breath. I nodded. His mouth moved off my fingers. I felt cold where his lips had been. Then I felt his hot breath on my ear as he whispered. "Why would I stop? I'm having a grand time."

I fell onto the couch. "Well, for one thing, who has time for this?"

Buster continued huskily, "Did you know the average person watches four hours of television every night? Who needs that?"

He leaned over and slipped a wet finger along my ribs.

I leaned back away from his one-sided gestures. "No way. I'm not going there unless you go with me."

He straightened, and said, "My work is done here tonight."

I pushed him toward the door. "That's the last time, Healy. Next time it's all or nothing."

"Don't forget this week is my Date Night. I get to chose what we do," Buster said with a grin. "My choice."

"I better like it," I said.

He laughed. "Oh, you will."

Two

THE NEXT DAY AT work, I was making my job list on the whiteboard when Pearl Nakamura skated into the classroom.

"Hey kiddo," she said.

Dropping the Kenyan market basket she was carrying on a table, she retracted the wheels on her Heelies and walked over to me. Seventy-two years old, barely five feet tall, Pearl just cleared my shoulder as I stood at the whiteboard. Her black hair was cut short with a stubborn cowlick that rose from the back of her head like a broken feather.

Pearl looked like she'd been shopping at the Gilroy outlets with Vangie again. The fifty-year age difference did not matter to those two kindred spirits. Pearl eschewed grandmotherly garb for rolledup jeans and layers of brightly colored Tshirts. Her sunglasses were tucked into the neck of today's sunny yellow one. They were rose-colored, of course.

She scrutinized the to-do list I was writing. I was pretty happy with it. Jobs that needed to be done before the sale were color coordinated to indicate their priority. Red for must-get-done, blue for should-get-done, and pink for nice-if-we-get-to-it. One column was designated for the responsible party to initial when the job was finished. Accountability. Responsibility. Organization. Welcome to the new Quilter Paradiso.

Pearl frowned. "Do you really expect Kym to work your system?" she asked.

I shot her a don't-start-with-me look. "This is all for her benefit. You know she doesn't like taking direct orders from me, so I figured if I write all the jobs down and let all of my employees have their choice, the work will get done and I can avoid some drama."

My vision of the quilt shop had changed in the last six months. When I'd first inherited the shop a year ago, I'd stalled, trying to decide what I wanted to do with the place. After a failed attempt to sell, I'd decided I would make the shop into a place I wanted to work. To Kym's despair, that meant letting go of the old ways.

My mother had started Quilter Paradiso in the early eighties with a few bolts of calico in a corner of her father's hardware store and had grown it accidentally into a million-dollar-a-year business. That had been at the beginning of the quilting boom. Customers, and money, flowed into the store without much effort. But the quilting business had changed. Competition had gotten fierce. By the time I took the store over last year, there were eight quilt shops within twenty miles, and I had to fight for every consumer dollar.

In my mother's time, the shop had been a gathering place for friends. Her employees were her quilting buddies, whose schedules were as flexible as their joints weren't. They gossiped between customers, sewed on their quilts when the store was slow, closed every day for lunch. Kym had fit right in, even though she was far younger than Mom and her friends. The hand-appliqued quilts she'd made back then were exquisite-with ruched flowers, sawtooth borders and other time-consuming detail.

I'd computerized the inventory, instituted regular staffing hours, and lured the lucrative lunchtime buyers by staying open and running specials. Any time customers weren't in the store, my employees were kept busy-assembling quilt kits, reordering books, or making store samples. Time was money.

I'd lost several employees and a few customers, and the shop was still not making the profit I needed. The regime had to start paying off soon-if just to shut up Kym.

Pearl snickered. "It's good to have a dream, girly."

I bumped her with my hip, and she laughed harder. "I have a dream, too," she said. "That the Stitch 'n' Bitch group will show up today." She skated a few feet away and circled back.

"Just because you're on time..." I teased.

"For the first time ever," Pearl finished for me. "I know."

According to the oversized schoolhouse clock on the wall, it was a little after nine. The Stitch 'n' Bitchers had been meeting here Tuesdays at nine since my mother had first opened twenty years ago. They came early and stayed all day, working on their projects. Lately, though, the members had been straggling in later and later. Most of them were Pearl's contemporaries. Women of a certain age, and then some. Seventy was the new forty-five and a half.

"Everyone's not like you, Pearl. Some people slow down as they get older," I said.

"I keep telling them, `You rest, you rust,' but they don't believe me. Gussie came to my yoga class. She only lasted fifteen minutes," Pearl snorted. "I've never seen anyone turn that color purple before."

"Poor Gussie. She's no match for you." Gussie Johnston, a charter member of this group, was one of my favorite customers. Naturally frugal and living on a fixed income, she was a careful spender, never adding much to my bottom line, but her sweet disposition and smiling countenance always brightened my day. It didn't hurt that I could do no wrong in her eyes. She treated me like a favored, spoiled granddaughter.

Pearl spread out a multicolored quilt top, as bright as Mexican pottery, and pointed to a particularly virulent violet patch. "Seriously, she was like this color."

"Is that the raffle quilt?" I asked. The Stitch 'n' Bitch group was selling tickets at the sale on Saturday to benefit Women First, the local women's shelter.

"Yup. Old Maid's Puzzle."

Old Maid. I chuckled, and Pearl looked up from digging in her basket.

"What?" she said.

I held the marker in my hand, and remembered. "My brother Kevin was one of those kids who took every word uttered at its literal meaning. This one day, Mom was driving a bunch of my friends to soccer practice, and Kevin was in the back seat, scrunched between me, Janie Rizzo, and Debra Lupo. When we went over the railroad tracks, the girls lifted their feet off the floor. Kevin said, `Why'd you do that?' Janie Rizzo told him it was a superstition. Over the tracks, raise your feet up or you'll become an old maid. The next set of tracks, up come Kevin's little legs. We all looked at him. `I don't want to be an old butler,' he said."

Pearl laughed. "Old butler, heh. No one wants that."

She unpacked her sewing supplies. I went back to my list. Thinking about Kevin, a small twinge of sadness passed through me. We were no longer those carefree kids. Ever since he'd married Kym, we'd grown apart. Maybe we'd have a few laughs at the sale on Saturday. He always worked the big events at the store.

After a few minutes, Pearl cast a significant look around the too-messy classroom. A huge pile of quilts took up the table under the windows. A shipment of notions, rulers, and books was spread over the three tables nearest the door, right where the UPS man had dropped them yesterday. Half-finished quilt kits littered the rest of the tables. With three full-time employees, and several parttimers and a phalanx of teachers all sharing the space, it was a never-ending struggle to keep this room neat. As soon as an empty spot appeared, someone dropped something on it. With the anniversary sale in just four days, the chaos had reached new heights.