Tree of Life and Death (24 page)

I took a step backward, but Meg followed, shoving the rotary cutter toward my face and forcing me to continue backing up. Unfortunately, if I kept going, I'd be in a precarious position between the two stairwells. One good shove and I'd go tumbling down the steep stairs.

At least now I knew who had killed Alan Miller. Of course, that wasn't particularly comforting now that she was threatening me with a sharp blade. She'd probably intended to cut up the bloody apron and flush it down the toilet, and that was why she'd smuggled the rotary cutter out of the boardroom. Now, it was coming in useful for making sure I couldn't alert the police before she destroyed the evidence.

She had a weapon, but I had the advantage of height and relative youth. I planted my feet and refused to move any closer to the stairwell. My arms were longer than hers, so I had a reasonable chance of keeping her from hitting anything vital with the rotary cutter. Anything was better than a fall down those steep stairs.

"As long as we're not going anywhere," I said, "why don't you tell me why you did it?"

"Did what?"

"It's over," I said, bluffing. "Before Fred left, he set up an appointment for me to talk to Ohlsen, so the detective is expecting me in the parking lot. I should have been down there by now, and he's not a patient person. He's going to come looking for me in a minute. When he gets here, I'm going to tell him that you killed Alan Miller, and if he tries the thimble on your thumb, it's going to fit you better than the proverbial leather glove. Plus, I'm going to tell him that your apron is hidden somewhere in the ladies' room up here and that they'll find Alan Miller's blood on it."

"You're wrong." Meg waved the rotary cutter at me again.

I took a cautious sideways step, trying to force her to trade places with me so she would be closer to the stairs than I was. I had to move slowly, so as not to provoke a further attack from Meg and also to prevent my light-headedness from worsening. Meg might not even need to push me down the stairs if I got too close and my nervous system did the job for her, causing me to pass out at just the wrong time and place. I needed to remain calm. And vertical.

Easier said than done, in the circumstances.

"I'm not wrong about you," I said. "The only thing I don't understand is why you did it. Everyone seems to admire you and appreciate how generous you are toward your home town."

Meg shook her head and laughed bitterly. "It's true, you know, what they say about not being able to go home. Too many ghosts, too much unfinished business."

"Alan was just a kid when you left Danger Cove," I said. "You couldn't possibly have had any problems with him."

"Not with Alan directly. With his family," Meg said. "You're an outsider, so you don't know. The locals know. Ask anyone. The McLaughlins and the Millers were practically family to each other for generations. My mother and his grandmother would have considered each other BFFs if they'd had texting and Twitter back when they were growing up together."

"That would make Alan something like a cousin," I said. "I know families can have their arguments, but that doesn't explain why you'd want to kill him."

"There's more to it," Meg said. "My mother and his grandmother were best friends, but they were also complete opposites. We McLaughlins have always had a reputation for working hard and succeeding. The Millers have pretty much the opposite reputation. Not that they're lazy exactly, but no matter how hard they work, they still fail at whatever they set out to do. Only my mother didn't care. She accepted them as they were."

"Again, I don't understand," I said. "Perhaps there are mitigating circumstances, and I can let the detective know, but only if I understand, and I don't. You've just confused me even more. You killed a friend of your family."

Meg's laughter grew even more bitter. "That's the thing. They weren't really our friends. All this time I thought they were, and it was a lie. My mother, bless her soul, is gone now and doesn't have to learn the truth. The friends she cherished all her life had actually betrayed her."

"Not Alan," I said.

"Oh yes, he did," Meg said. "He lied to me. He said his grandmother made the Tree of Life quilt."

I did some quick mental math. "Assuming his grandmother is around fifty years older than he is, she could have made it when she was in her early twenties. The materials and design are right for that era, and it's got an embroidered date to confirm it."

"You got the date right," Meg said. "But it wasn't made by Alan's grandmother. It was made by my mother. You probably noticed that it wasn't a scrap quilt. It was made of five green prints and just one red print. All bought new. My mother scrimped and saved to buy that fabric before the first Christmas of her marriage. She was determined that her children would have a special quilt just to be used in December. It was supposed to be a tradition to be passed down through the family."

The longer I could keep Meg talking, the better the chance that the officer inside the boardroom would wonder what was taking us so long and come out to check on us. "Your mother sounds like a wonderful, caring person. I still don't understand how her tradition became a motive for murder."

"That quilt should have been mine," Meg said fiercely. "I would have taken care of it. Those Millers never took care of anything. I saw what they'd done to the quilt. It was a mess of stains and tears and broken stitches. My mother would have been heartbroken if she'd known how it would end up. She always stored it away from January to the end of November, and then she only brought it out in December, when we took turns sleeping under it. I still remember the first time I was old enough to be entrusted with it."

"Still," I said, "you can't blame Alan for what his family did."

"You don't understand. It should have been mine. He stole it."

"Alan did?" I said. "He didn't seem to have any particular attachment to it other than that it belonged to his grandmother."

"Another lie," Meg said. "I suppose I should have said that his grandmother stole it. All these years, and we never knew. See, it disappeared during my mother's wake. She died a few weeks after Christmas one year, and she'd been too sick to remember to put the quilt away. It was on my bed still. Maybe I should have folded it up and put it away on my own, but I was only twelve at the time, and I knew my mother was dying. The quilt helped me to cope, since I knew I'd inherit it someday, and I'd always have it to remind me of her."

I was beginning to understand. All this time, Meg had felt guilty for not putting the quilt away properly, and then she'd seen it today and realized who had stolen it. All of her guilt had turned to rage against the family that had caused her so many years of distress. "So you followed Alan out to the parking lot to demand that he return your property, and things got out of hand. I can see how that could have happened."

"It wasn't just the quilt," Meg said. "I recognized it at once, of course, and I was going to wait until after today's event was over, and then I'd go file a police report. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Not so much at the initial theft of the quilt, but at the ongoing betrayal. Decades of it. I can still remember Alan's grandmother comforting me over the loss of the quilt. She even helped me look for it when we thought it had just been misplaced. Everyone thought she was being such a good person, taking time out of her busy schedule to honor the friend she'd just lost. And all along, the bitch had actually stolen it. It wasn't some random thief who took it. She knew how much the quilt meant to my mother and the whole family. She
knew
, and she took it anyway."

I couldn't help saying, "I'm sorry." It really had been a terrible betrayal.

Meg didn't seem to hear me. "The least they could have done was to take care of the quilt, but oh, no, they treated it with as little respect as they showed our friendship. They took it and abused it."

I suspected there was another explanation. The damage to the quilt wasn't as extensive as it could have been if it had been mistreated. The wear and tear was consistent with reasonably careful but constant, everyday use over several decades. Alan Miller hadn't seemed like a bad kid, despite his rap sheet and his harassment of Trudy. Rather than coming from a family of cold-hearted liars, it was just as likely that Alan's grandmother had been grieving when Meg's mother died, and she'd "borrowed" the quilt on the spur of the moment during the wake, for much the same reason that Meg had left it on her bed beyond the holiday season: for the memories it held. And then the situation had gotten out of hand, and there had been no easy way for Alan's grandmother to return it.

Meg was too far gone with reliving her anger to stop now. "I tried to reason with him, explain that the quilt didn't belong to his grandmother, but he wouldn't believe me. Said his Gran would never steal anything, that she'd almost disowned him once for his shoplifting. He might have convinced the cops to let him keep the quilt if they'd heard his lies, but I knew better. He was just like everyone else in his family. He was evil through and through. People thought the Millers were the unluckiest family in town, but now I know they were just getting what they deserved."

As Meg relived the morning's events, she forgot to keep the rotary cutter poised to threaten me. Now was my chance.

I took a deep breath and prayed that a sudden move wouldn't be the last straw for my nervous system, and shoved Meg down the hallway, away from the stairwells, tackling her as hard as I could. We both fell onto the floor.

Meg was so startled that I was able to knock the rotary cutter out of her hand and send it careening down the wood floor before she realized what was happening. She went limp, and for a moment I thought she might have hit her head when we fell, but her chest was rising and falling. The struggle seemed to have gone out of her. I didn't trust her enough to roll off her though. I wasn't sure what she might do to me, or possibly to herself. As long as I kept her here, someone would eventually come looking for us. Besides, my head was swimming, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to stand up right now. Fortunately, she didn't know that.

"Where's the quilt now?" I said gently, hoping to get an answer while she was so wrapped up in her anger that she didn't realize how incriminating it would be.

Meg didn't say anything for long moments, much like Detective Ohlsen's prolonged silences while he mulled over a bit of evidence. Finally, she said, "If I tell you, will you do me a favor?"

"If I can."

"I know you're going to turn me in to the police, but would you explain to them why I did it? That I didn't mean to hurt anyone, but that the quilt meant so much to me that I just snapped. They'll listen to you, and you understand how people can get so attached to a family quilt."

I did understand. It wasn't the quilt itself that had set her off, but what it stood for, both the good memories of Meg's mother and then the bad memories of loss and heartbreak. That was true of all heirlooms, but in this case, it was an even stronger trigger, since it epitomized all the years of betrayal, the feeling that people who were supposed to be her friends had actually been keeping a secret from her, possibly laughing behind her back over her trust in them. "I can't promise they'll understand, but I'll do my best to explain."

"Thank you. It's in the trunk of my car." Meg took a deep breath. "One more thing. Would you make sure the quilt is taken care of when it's released from evidence?"

"That will be up to whoever ends up owning it. It sounds like you have a claim to it, but I'm guessing that Alan's grandmother is going to claim she's the legal owner." I didn't add that Meg was unlikely to be in any position to sue for possession of the quilt. She was going to have enough legal problems dealing with the murder charges.

"Just promise me that if you can do anything to make sure it's preserved, you will," Meg said. "My mother only made a couple of other quilts, and they were meant for daily use, so they fell apart years ago. This is the only one that survived."

"I'll do whatever I can." I thought it was safe now for me to get to my feet without passing out and without Meg doing something crazy. I stood and held out a hand to pull her up.

"Before we go talk to the detective, I really do need to use the ladies' room." Meg took my hand. "After you collect the apron from the ceiling tile where I stashed it, of course."

Two weeks later, everything at the Danger Cove Historical Museum was as perfect as I could have wished.

Gil was dancing around the lobby singing
"O Tannenbaum," alternating between English and German lyrics, while she waited for Dee to throw the switch that powered the strings of lights on the tree in the middle of the room. The mayor, Edward Kallakala, was mingling with his constituents at what had turned into Danger Cove's premiere social event of the season, and Elizabeth Ashby was keeping to the edges of the crowds, observing everyone and writing in her red-and-green notebook. Even Carl Quincy was there with his service dog.

The background music faded, the ceiling lights dimmed, and the twenty-foot tree sparkled with twinkling white lights, dozens of miniature wooden lighthouses, and hundreds of the red-and-white quilted ornaments. Apparently some of the quilt guild members had continued to make them at home until yesterday, when volunteers on ladders had hung them all.

A discreet sign next to the tree announced that there would be an auction to sell the ornaments on the Saturday after New Year's. According to Gil, the high preregistration numbers for the event were dancing in the heads of the museum's board of directors with more sparkle and allure than the more traditional visions of sugarplums. I had the Scrooge-like thought that the interest in the ornaments might have had more to do with the public's fascination with anything associated with murder than with an appreciation for either miniature quilts or the museum. Trying to hold on to the spirit of the season, I reminded myself that regardless of the buyers' motives, the money was going to a good cause.