Tree of Life and Death (3 page)

I relaxed, and my smile was genuine. I was convinced, at least by a preponderance of the evidence if not all the way beyond a reasonable doubt, that Alan really was just a thoughtful grandson trying to do something nice for his grandmother. Okay, so maybe he also had a drug problem, but at least I probably wasn't contributing to the theft of a quilt.

*   *   *

After I helped Alan fold up his grandmother's quilt and gave him the envelope with the appraisal, he tried to call a friend to pick him up, but most of the museum was a phone service dead zone. I suggested he'd have better luck out in the parking lot, and if he wanted to leave the quilt with me while he ran outside, I'd keep it safe for him.

Alan left, and I looked for Trudy, but she'd taken full advantage of her bathroom break and hadn't returned yet, so I couldn't ask her to watch over his quilt for me. I stayed at the appraisal desk, sorting the forms I'd collected so far. Several were for the registry of locally made quilts, and I needed to hand them off to the museum's director. I surveyed the room, but Gil must have left, perhaps to deal with something in the exhibit halls, which were open today until 8:00 p.m. Saturdays were a relatively busy day for the museum, after all, even apart from the special events like today's in the boardroom.

Alan returned a few minutes later to reclaim his grandmother's quilt and thank me again.

"Did you reach your friend?" I asked.

He nodded. "He's busy and can't leave for about half an hour, but waiting is better than walking home." He glanced at the older man who'd confronted him earlier and was glowering at him now. "Don't worry. I'll wait outside. I know when I'm not wanted."

Alan wouldn't literally freeze to death out there, but he wouldn't be comfortable in his light clothes. Still, it was probably best if he didn't linger here in the boardroom. When Alan had left to make his call, the older man in the denim shirt had claimed a sewing machine near the front of the room, but now he was turned around, making good on his promise to keep an eye on Alan. "Do you want a box to put the quilt in to make it easier to carry? I'm sure the quilt guild can spare one for you."

"Probably a good idea, huh?" he said. "So it doesn't lose any more value from wear and tear."

I was running out of time to get a snack before I needed to return to do the last few appraisals, so I couldn't help him with the box. I knew who could though. I pointed him in the direction of Emma Quinn, who was still hovering beside her friend Dee at the table closest to me. "Emma can help you. Just tell her I sent you, and she'll take care of it."

Alan headed over to talk to Emma, the quilt tucked under one arm and the appraisal paperwork safely secured inside a buttoned pocket of his cargo shorts. He passed Stefan, who was being dragged over to my corner of the room by the stocky, black-haired woman who'd been lecturing him earlier. Stefan stopped halfway to my table and turned to watch Alan until the woman at Stefan's side snapped something in a tone too low for me to hear.

"Sorry," Stefan said to the woman, and they continued over to my desk. "Was that Alan Miller with a raggedy Tree of Life quilt?"

I nodded. "He was getting it appraised for his grandmother. Do you know him?"

"A little," Stefan said. "Mostly just by reputation. His family has lived here forever, and they have a long history of underachievement. Judging by the way he's dressed today, I'm guessing he's living down to the family reputation. Too bad, really. I thought he was going to be the one to break the family curse. Got a scholarship to the University of Washington, Tacoma, did well there, and then I don't know what happened, but it doesn't look like he's made anything of himself."

The woman at Stefan's side finally spoke, in a fierce whisper addressed to Stefan. "Introduce us."

"Oh, sorry," he said. "Keely Fairchild, this is my girlfriend, Sunny Kunik."

I hesitated. Everyone I'd ever discussed it with believed that Stefan's girlfriend was largely a figment of his imagination. We knew she was a real person—Dee and Emma had told me about her plans to open a quilt shop here in Danger Cove—but it seemed unlikely that Stefan actually had a relationship with her. No one could be as perfect as he'd described her, and if he'd spent more than ten minutes with her, he'd know she was as human as the rest of us.

But here she was, standing next to Stefan and acting very much like a girlfriend. Sunny was about the same height as Stefan, who was shorter than the average man, but she was stockier than his slight build. Her expression was more cloudy than her name would suggest, and her round face, coupled with her last name, suggested she had Inuit blood. Her black hair was long and thick, pulled back in a complicated braid that fell down to her waist. One ear had a whole row of piercings, each hole featuring a different sewing notion: scissors, thread, and even a tiny rotary cutter.

"I'm so glad to meet you finally," I said, finally recovering from my surprise. "I've heard so much about you."

"Likewise," Sunny said, and I had to wonder if the woman had similarly doubted Stefan's stories about me, since they had to have sounded far-fetched, given my recent experience with a homicide investigation.

"I need to go back to my shop for a few minutes," Sunny continued, "but I wanted to make sure to meet you first, in case you have to leave before I get back. Maybe you could come over for dinner with Stefan and me sometime?"

"I'd like that. Just let me know when. Stefan's got my contact information."

"Gotta run," Sunny said. "We're out of batting, and I've got some scraps at the shop that would be perfect for a little project like these ornaments. I should have thought to bring them this morning, but this way I can check on my staff while I'm there."

"Stefan told me you were looking for the right location for your quilt shop," I said. "I didn't realize it was open yet."

"Since the beginning of November. There wasn't any suitable space available here on Main Street, so I settled for a spot near the pier, in the old cannery. The local quilters know where it is, and it's not hard for the tourists to find, even if it's not quite as visible as it would be here in the center of town." Sunny gave Stefan a quick kiss on the check. "I've really got to go. Nice meeting you, Keely."

Sunny took off at top walking speed, almost colliding with Alan at the exit. He hugged his boxed-up quilt to his chest, took a step back, and made an exaggerated half bow to encourage Sunny to precede him through the doorway. He said something, and Sunny responded, but they were too far away for me to hear the exchange. Something about Alan's behavior had upset her though, judging from the stiff way she brushed past him.

Alan followed her, and a moment later, the
Cove Chronicles
'
arts reporter, Matt Viera, came in through the double doors and paused to take in the crowd. He was a little taller than the statuesque Gil, but not as massive as the denim-shirted quilter who'd confronted Alan Miller earlier. Matt wore his usual style of cargo pants that had more than the standard number of pockets. I knew from past experience that he could indeed manage to find a use for each and every one of those pockets. His sport shirt was an ochre that clashed with every conceivable shade of human skin and probably every inhuman skin too. Only Matt could wear it without looking deathly ill.

Elizabeth Ashby stopped him to chat for a moment. She headed out, and Matt remained in the doorway, apparently searching the room for something. A moment later, before he'd found whatever he was looking for, the quilt teacher approached the doorway. Matt said something to her, and for a moment I thought she was going to ignore him. She gave the exit a brief but longing look before smiling and letting Matt escort her over to the refreshment table. It seemed that no woman could ever resist his charm. I'd even been susceptible before I'd learned that he couldn't be trusted to follow through on his promises.

I forced my attention back to Stefan. "Sunny seems very…efficient."

"She is." Stefan was still staring dreamily in the direction where Sunny had last been visible. "I don't deserve her, but if she has any flaw at all, it's that she doesn't realize how hopeless I am."

I'd heard him rhapsodize about Sunny before, much like he did when talking about folk art. If he got started talking about her, he'd never stop, and I needed to get something to eat before I passed out. To distract him, I said, "Have you seen Gil? I need to give her some quilt-registry forms."

"I think she had some stuff to do in her office. I was going to spend this morning at my gallery catching up on paperwork myself, but Sunny thought I should be here with her. It's her first community event since opening the quilt shop, so she was a little nervous. She shouldn't have been. Everyone loves her. She donated a lot of the tools for today's use, you know." Stefan pointed at the cutting tables. "The mats and rulers and rotary cutters are all on loan from the shop. The scissors too. They're sort of her trademark. She had them made specially with the sunny-yellow handles."

"Donating all those supplies was very kind of her."

"Smart too. She's getting some good publicity for the shop, narrowly directed to her target audience of quilters, and it doesn't really cost her anything except a few replacement blades for the cutters." Stefan glanced at the ironing board where he'd been stationed earlier. "I'd better get back to work. The blocks are piling up."

I went with him, since it was on the way to the refreshment table. I didn't have time for any real sustenance, but I needed something to get me through the last twenty minutes of appraisal work before my part in today's event was done.

As we reached the ironing board, the quilt teacher in the Santa hat beckoned for a woman, who was apparently her assistant for the day, to come over to take her place with Matt. As the teacher headed for the exit at top speed, she muttered, "'Scuse me. 'Scuse me. 'Scuse me. Stupid overactive bladder. 'Scuse me. 'Scuse me. 'Scuse me."

"Meg's been running to the ladies' room every two minutes," Stefan said. "Don't they have treatments for that?"

I had known Stefan long enough to know that he wasn't being as judgmental as it sounded. He was honestly perplexed whenever people failed to take whatever steps he thought would help them live up to their full potential. He worked very hard at being the best folk art dealer in the county, possibly the entire state, and he expected everyone else to know what their goals were and then to go after them with all their energy and passion. It was why he tended to bristle around his childhood friend, Matt Viera, accusing Matt of frittering away all of his considerable talents. Matt had once been a highly sought-after fashion model and had quit at the peak of his popularity to become an underpaid and underappreciated arts reporter.

As if Stefan could read my mind, he said, "Have you talked to Matt today? He was supposed to be here early to do a story on the event. We were hoping he'd mention Sunny and the Sunny Patches Quilt Shop."

"I didn't even know he was going to be here." I hadn't talked to Matt Viera since the opening luncheon for the Danger Cove Quilt Show in August, when I'd given the keynote speech, and he'd been in the audience. Before that, we'd worked together to find a killer, so he'd been at my home—an abandoned bank branch that had been converted into a residence and home office—and had been fascinated by the idea of the bank vault that I'd kept during the renovation. I'd promised to give him a tour, and he'd said he'd call. Over the course of the next three months of silence though, I'd come to accept that his flirting during the investigation had just been part of his job as a reporter, nothing personal. Once he'd had his scoop for the
Cove Chronicles
, he'd completely lost interest in the bank vault and me. It had hurt, but it wasn't like he'd ended a real relationship. We'd barely gotten to know each other, after all, even if it had felt like more than a brief acquaintance, because of the highly emotional experiences we'd shared while finding a dead body and then working together to exonerate a wrongly accused suspect in the murder.

"I talked to Matt last night, and he said he'd be here first thing this morning," Stefan said. "He sounded a little tired. Sunny thought I'd woken him up. It was only 9:00, but he might have been jet-lagged and trying to adjust to local time."

The airports would have been clogged this week with people traveling for Thanksgiving. "He probably slept in this morning. Spending the holiday with family is fun, but it's also exhausting."

"He doesn't have any family," Stefan said absently. He looked past me and froze for a moment before saying, "Sorry, gotta get back to ironing."

He scurried away, and I turned to see Emma Quinn scowling at him. She might not yell at anyone, but she did give emphatic orders.

*   *   *

The air inside the museum was incredibly dry, making me wish I had a water bottle like the one I'd seen clipped to the male quilter's belt. I hurried over to the refreshment table to grab a couple of sugar cookies and look for something to drink. A sign next to the slow cooker announced that the mulled cider had been donated by a local farm, Pear Stirpes Orchard. I ladled out half a cup of the cider. I was in too much of a rush to drink it and burned my tongue, but at least it washed away the dryness, and the snack calmed the growling of my stomach.

At the other end of the table, the quilt instructor's assistant was talking nonstop in the shrillest voice I'd ever heard. Her words were addressed to Matt, who was listening politely. He looked in my direction, and I thought his eyes lit up with genuine interest, but I wasn't going to fall for his charm again. He was probably just hoping I'd rescue him from the assistant, and he would have been happy to see anyone who might rescue him from her.

I wasn't a naturally vengeful person, but it did feel good to leave Matt to her shrill mercies. Back at my appraisal station, one of the women who'd been waiting there earlier had disappeared, leaving only four women with quilts for me to look at.

Trudy rushed up to the desk, slightly out of breath. "I'm sorry. Meg's assistant caught me when I was in the bathroom, and she sent me out to the parking lot to get six boxes of supplies from her car, and I tried to explain that you needed me, but she didn't care."