Tree of Life and Death (4 page)

"No problem," I said. "I just got back here myself, and I can handle the few remaining appraisals without your help. Why don't you go see if Emma has another project for you? And tell her how much I appreciated your help this morning."

Trudy left, and I finished the next two appraisals quickly, since the quilts had only recently been completed by the people who brought them in, so I didn't need to come up with a date for when they were made, and they were fairly common designs that didn't require me to look them up in my reference books. That left just two more quilts to appraise. They were owned by sisters in their sixties, who asked to have their appraisals done together. They'd brought in a pair of almost identical quilts. They'd designed them together, chosen the fabrics together, and then one sister did all the piecing for both quilts, and the other did all the appliqué. Once the tops had been completed, they'd each finished one, choosing different backings and making slightly different choices with their machine quilting so they could tell the two quilts apart.

The current value wasn't anywhere near what it should have been for all the work the women had put into the quilts, but they were definitely worth insuring. I advised them to get a more complete appraisal and also encouraged them to participate in the museum's registry of locally made quilts. Once they filled out the form, I made a little note at the bottom for Gil to keep in touch with the sisters in case they ever wanted to sell the quilts. Someday, if the quilts were kept together in good condition and with clear provenance, they might be a nice addition to the museum's collection. Linked quilts like these, where the provenance was established definitively, were extremely rare.

The women left happy, and I was able to pack up my supplies in my messenger bag. I kept out the registry forms for Gil, who had returned to the boardroom, but was deep in a conversation with a quilter I didn't recognize. I took the papers with me and headed over to the refreshment table for another cup of the mulled cider, which I hadn't had time to appreciate fully before.

While I waited for the cider to cool to drinking temperature, I watched the quilt teacher, Meg McLaughlin, return from yet another trip to the bathroom. She resumed making her rounds of the room, inspecting the work of each person at a sewing machine. Judging by the deepening frown on what seemed to be a naturally cheerful face, she must have found the finished pieces to be defective.

Meg walked over to the white board in the front of the room. Her shrill-voiced assistant, a woman as tall as Gil, but leaner and blonder, wearing ironed jeans and a green cashmere sweater, appeared at the teacher's side and clapped her hands. "Attention, everyone. Meg needs to talk to you."

Gil had been humming along to a traditional carol, but she stopped, leaving Peter, Paul, and Mary to carry on without her. The roar of the sewing machine motors and the background chatter faded.

"Thank you, Jayne." Meg adjusted her Santa hat. "I just wanted to make sure all the newcomers know that we have a diagram up here to follow."

Meg walked over to the nearest row of sewing machines, where the denim-clad man sat at one end. The service dog beside him stood and walked around to the front of the table, creating a barrier between the man and Meg. It wasn't hostile, exactly, but it was definitely anxious. Maybe it had something to do with the large pair of yellow-handled scissors that Meg had pulled out of the pocket of her pinafore apron.

Ignoring the dog, Meg reached over the table to snip off a completed block from the chain of them that draped over the back of the male quilter's sewing machine. She dropped the scissors back into her apron, held the block by two opposite edges, stretching it slightly, and then raised it to show everyone the side with all the seams. "Don't forget that for miniature blocks, it's absolutely critical that your seams be a scant quarter inch. There's just no room for error. Carl here has done an excellent job with his piecing. Everyone should look to him for inspiration."

The man flushed as if he'd just been criticized instead of praised. He pushed his seat back abruptly, stood, and snapped his fingers for the dog to follow him, which it did without hesitation. They both stomped out of the room.

Meg laughed and said, "Some men just can't take a compliment. Right, ladies?"

Meg's assistant led a chorus of agreement, and then Meg said, "Back to work now. No time to lose if we're going to finish enough ornaments for the museum to have a truly spectacular tree."

The sewing machines immediately roared into action, and Gil started humming along with "I'll Be Home for Christmas."

I decided to take that as my cue to head on home after a brief detour to hand off the registry forms to Gil.

"Dee sent me over to get you," Emma said before I'd taken a single step in Gil's direction. "She wants to make sure you're enjoying yourself."

There was no denying Emma or Dee, not that I wanted to. I liked them, and I could spare a few minutes before I went home. I finished the last of my cider and tossed my cup into the trash before following Emma back to the last of the long tables topped with sewing machines.

Physically, Dee Madison looked like the stereotype of a quilter: ancient, white haired, and a little stooped. Her businesslike red jacket and skirt messed with the expected image a bit, and anyone who'd spent more than five minutes with her knew she was more like a ruthless entrepreneur than a cuddly grandmother. A few months ago, when Dee had been frustrated by the lack of legal methods to shut down the seller of fake antique quilts, she'd proposed hiring a hit man to take care of the problem, and it hadn't been entirely clear to me that she was joking.

With her friends though, Dee was kind and generous. She patted the seat at the sewing machine next to her. "I saved you a spot."

"Someone who can actually sew should sit there." I remembered only too clearly my one and only experience in a sewing class, which had involved making a simple apron with just two large pieces of fabric, and I'd still managed to make a mess of it. In the wake of Meg's little lecture about precise seams, I wasn't about to try making miniature blocks made out of tiny bits of fabric that needed to be joined with absolute precision.

"These ornaments are so easy a child could make them," Dee said. "The Friendship Star block is particularly good for beginners."

I was familiar with the traditional block, at least in its completed form. It was a nine-patch variation, three rows of three squares each, some of the squares divided diagonally into two triangles of contrasting colors. Keeping with the holiday theme for today's blocks, the middle square was a red print, a red triangle butted up against each side of the center square, and then the four outer corners of the block were a white print. When everything was sewn together, the pieces formed a four-pointed star that looked a bit like a spinning pinwheel. It was a simple block, certainly, but still beyond my sewing skills

"Here," Dee said, picking up a pile of squares that were next to her sewing machine and placing them to the left of the machine she'd assigned me to. "I've already sewn the pairs of triangles into squares. All you have to do is sew the pieces into three rows. It's easy. Emma will iron them for you, and then you can sew the rows together, and you'll have made your very first quilt block."

Dee lined up a white square, another square made up of a red triangle and a white triangle, and then another white square. "Just sew them together in that order."

They were so tiny. Just one-and-a-half-inch square, including the seam allowances. I couldn't imagine how Dee had managed to join the tiny triangles into such a perfect square, and from what I'd heard the instructor say, anything less than perfection was a disaster. "I'm afraid I'll waste all the hard work that's already gone into them."

"Don't worry about it," Dee said. "It's not like someone will die if you mess it up. You can always rip out the seam and do it again. Go ahead and try it."

I glanced at Emma, knowing before I did that she would support whatever Dee wanted, so I wasn't surprised when I got a nod of encouragement in response. I turned back to the sewing machine. In theory, I knew how it worked from my one and only sewing class. But that was a long time ago, before I'd started passing out at the least little bit of stress. I didn't like to think about what could happen to fingers that weren't controlled by a conscious brain and drifted too near the speeding needle.

When I didn't immediately start sewing, Dee said, "You can watch me do a seam first, if you want. Just pick up the first two pieces. Align the two edges like this, and place them on the feed dogs so the needle will be a quarter inch from the raw edge. Drop the foot to hold them in place. Do a few backstitches, and then zoom on down to the other end before doing another bit of backstitching."

Dee demonstrated as she spoke, barely even looking at her hands. When she got to the zooming part, she stomped on the foot pedal like she was the little old lady from Pasadena who couldn't keep her foot off the accelerator.

"Isn't she a beaut?" Emma said from behind us. "It's a semi-industrial machine. Does up to fifteen hundred stitches per minute, about twice what the average home machine does. I don't know if you've met Sunny Kunik yet. She let us borrow the machines from her shop for the day, and now I don't want to go back to my own more basic model at home. I might have to ask Santa to bring me one just like this for Christmas. And I'm definitely getting a pair of Sunny's scissors for someone's stocking."

I picked up the first two pieces the way Dee did and managed to get them under the presser foot. "Are you sure I won't ruin anything?"

"I'm sure," Dee said. "Go ahead and step on the pedal."

My foot hovered. "But what about the seam allowance? How do I know it's right? I just heard Meg saying how important it was, but I didn't get a chance to go look at the sample she said was done so well."

"Don't worry about that," Dee said. "You'll never be as good as Carl Quincy, but that's okay."

Seizing on that as an excuse to avoid demonstrating my incompetence and ruining the pretty little triangles, I said, "Is that the man in denim who stomped out of here? Why was he so upset anyway?"

Dee sighed. "Meg had no way of knowing, but I wish she hadn't chosen Carl's work as an example. He's terribly conflicted about his quilting. It's not a macho enough hobby, you see, and he's terrified his friends on the police force will find out about it."

Emma reached down to realign the pieces under my sewing machine's presser foot. "Dee's been teaching him in private, and we've been trying to get him to come out of the quilting closet, because he really is quite talented. The other guild members could learn so much from him. And vice versa."

"But no," Dee said, shaking her head. "He's an ex-cop, you know. Retired on disability, and he hasn't come to grips with that either, so the idea of his friends knowing he enjoys what he still considers to be a hobby for little old ladies and invalids just makes it that much more difficult. It's such a pity. He loves quilting, and it's helped him cope with his anxiety over being retired, but doing it in public is another matter altogether."

"I was surprised he showed up today, even if it's a pretty safe bet none of his buddies from the force will be here," Emma said, making yet another infinitesimally small adjustment in the placement of the pieces on my sewing machine. "And now I'm not sure he'll ever come to another guild event. What a waste."

"He does really intricate work with near record-setting numbers of tiny pieces in each quilt," Dee said, "so it's not surprising Meg singled him out for his precision. I'm sure she thought he'd be pleased."

Emma reached down to adjust my fabric squares yet again. At this rate, they were going to be frayed to nothing but threads from all the friction against the feed dogs.

I slid out of the seat and stood up. "Why don't we switch places, Emma? You do the stitching, and I'll take the finished pieces to do the ironing. I think that's more my speed anyway. Unless you've got turbo-charged irons too?"

*   *   *

I carried the quilt pieces over to the ironing board where Stefan had been working, but he wasn't anywhere in the room that I could see. Neither was Meg McLaughlin, who was supposed to be in charge of helping beginners like myself. Even Gil was missing again, although I wasn't sure she knew any more about ironing than I did.

At least the iron didn't appear to be any different from the standard models I'd used before. What stumped me though was what exactly I was supposed to be doing with the three little rows of joined red-and-white fabrics. They weren't exactly wrinkled, so why was I ironing them?

I placed the three rows of the Friendship Star block on the ironing board and picked up the iron. I ran it over the surface of the board to confirm that it was working, and steam swirled up from the base plate. That much I knew how to do. Now what?

My uncertainty must have been obvious, because Meg's assistant came rushing over. She snapped, in her painfully shrill voice, "If you don't know what you're doing, you need to ask someone for instructions."

My pulse spiked as I fought the urge to snap right back at her. I took a calming breath and reminded myself that passing out with an iron in my hand wasn't any safer than losing consciousness with my fingers near the sewing machine's needle. "Okay. Can you help me?"

"Of course." The words were encouraging, but the shrill tone made them sound like an accusation. She took the iron out of my hand and set it down at the wide end of the ironing board. "I'm Jayne Connors. I always assist whenever Meg McLaughlin comes to Danger Cove. She taught me everything I know about quilting."

"Does she give classes in ironing too?"

Jayne didn't respond, but instead took the top row of the block and laid it upside down between us. She pointed at the seam allowances. "They all need to get pushed to one side of the seam, not spread apart like you'd do if you were making clothes." She turned the row over, right side up, and smoothed the seam allowances with her fingers before dropping the iron on the fabric. "Press it carefully until it's flat, making sure not to stretch the pieces out of shape."