2 The Patchwork Puzzler (7 page)

Chapter Fourteen

T
hey got home around midnight, having caught a ride with a UPS driver outside of Burpyville. All the lights were blazing in the Madison household where everyone had gathered, thinking Maddy and Bootsie had been kidnapped. Jim Purdue had organized a search party, but thankfully the two women returned just in time for him to call it off.

Boy, was the police chief steamed! “You what?” he shouted. “I oughta arrest the two of you!”

“For what?” challenged his wife.

“Obstructing justice. Interfering with an ongoing investigation. Worrying the heck outta me.”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry we worried you.”

“Yeah, well – ”

“Sorry, Jim,” apologized Maddy. “We were only reconnoitering. We didn’t expect to run into Henry Caruthers. I thought he and Nan would be long gone.”

“What’s this you were saying about a list?” interjected Mark the Shark. Exhibiting a lawyer’s instinct for getting at the facts.

“We found a to-do list written by Nan Beanie. It suggests they are heading for Indianapolis to meet someone.”

Beau looked over his wife’s shoulder at the yellow foolscap. “Yep, that’s Nan’s handwriting. I’d know it anywhere.”

“Who’s this guy Kramer?” asked Bill, not to be outdone by his lawyer brother-in-law.

“He was on the
Seinfeld Show
,” announced little N’yen, a devotee of television sitcoms.

“No, silly. This is a different Kramer,” whispered Aggie, her new cousin’s self-appointed protector.

“Oh.”

“I suspect he’s a fence,” opined Chief Purdue. “Someone Henry and Nan are planning to sell the quilt to.”

“I can’t get over Nan and Henry Caruthers,” said Lizzie Ridenour, a woman who loved juicy gossip. “Do you think they’re an item? Or merely partners in crime?”

“Dunno,” said Cookie. “But I hear Nan’s husband Jasper is not particularly happy about this turn of events.”

“Do you think Jasper will take matters into his own hands?” asked Tillie, belly as big as a basketball. You could see her delivery date was eminent.

“If he does, he’s going to need a good lawyer,” said Mark, almost as if thinking out loud.

“Ambulance chaser,” teased Bill’s wife Kathy.

“Hey, nobody’s chasing me,” rumbled Ben Bentley, who drove an ambulance on weekends for Caruthers Corners Fire and Rescue. You could tell by his joking remark that he was a good-natured guy, a gentle giant.

“Don’t worry about Jasper. He reacted in his usual manner, with a bit of the barley. He’s sleeping it off in my holding cell at this very moment.”

“Do I need to serve a writ of habeas corpus?” said Mark, just to show that lawyers had a sense of humor too.

“A what?” asked little N’yen.

“It’s Latin for ‘
You must have the body,’” explained Cookie. She’d been perusing her dictionary again.

“A body! Is somebody dead?” Aggie wanted to know.

“No, no,” laughed her father. “It’s just lawyer talk, saying ‘You can’t hold someone in jail without a body of evidence justifying their arrest.’”

“Henry Caruthers is going to wish he was dead if I get my hands on him,” growled Cookie. “Tomorrow I’m going to have to call the Smithsonian and tell them one of their valuable quilts is missing.”

“Honey, calm down,” soothed Ben Bentley, patting his wife’s hand. A bearded behemoth, he reminded you of Hagrid from the
Harry Potter
movies. “Don’t get so upset over this. It’s just a patchwork quilt.”

That’s when all four members of the Quilter’s Club – five counting Aggie – went berserk.

“Just a quilt,” huffed Lizzie. “That’s like saying the Mona Lisa is just a painting.”

“Don’t you realize these quilts have been valued at forty grand each?” asked Bootsie.

“They’re irreplaceable,” declared Maddy. “Sarah Connors Pennington was a master craftsman, perhaps the best quilt designer ever!”

“What’d I say?” moaned Ben, cowering at this onslaught by his wife’s friends.

“Dear, you’ve put your foot in it now,” said Cookie, amused at her new husband’s bewilderment. “You’ll have to learn that we members of the Caruthers Corners Quilter’s Club take our stitching pretty seriously.”

“Ease up, girls,” said Edgar Ridenour, looking almost as fierce with his briar-patch beard as Cookie’s muscle-bound husband. “Ben didn’t mean anything by his remark.”

“Yeah, you girls should be worrying about catching Henry Caruthers and Nan Beanie,” added Maddy’s husband.

“No,” she replied. “We’ll leave that up to Chief Purdue. Wouldn’t want to be thrown in jail for worrying him.”

“Yes, we’d have to call Mark for a habeas corpus,” smiled the policeman’s wife.

“Don’t worry,” said Jim Purdue. “I’m gonna stake out the Burpyville Trailways station. We’ll pick up Henry and Nan when they try to board the bus for Indy.”

“You’ll get Nan, but it might be someone other than Henry,” murmured Maddy, almost a throwaway comment.

“S-someone other than Henry?” sputtered the police chief.

“You do realize Henry and Nan have an accomplice, don’t you?”

“Just how do you figure that, Maddy Madison?”

“We all know it took someone with great sewing skills to make that fake Pennington. Except for using synthetic thread, you can’t tell it from the real thing. Neither Henry nor Nan can sew that well. So they had to have a third partner, someone who’s a master quilt-maker.”

Chapter Fifteen

A
ggie put it into perspective for them. “It’s really quite simple,” she said as everyone polished off the last of watermelon pies. “Who d’you know that’s good enough at quilting to make a fake you can’t tell from the original?”

“I don’t know anyone
that
good,” admitted Lizzie. “Even I couldn’t do it.” The nimble-fingered redhead was considered to be the best quilter in Caruthers Corners, having won First Prize in the Watermelon Days competition three years in a row.

“
Some
body did it,” Bootsie pointed out.

“It couldn’t be anyone we know,” insisted Cookie. “Maddy and I already went down that road.”

“How about Holly Eberhard,” said Bootsie. “I’ll bet she could do it.”

“Well, of course,
she
could,” shrugged Lizzie. “After all, she’s the statewide champion.”

“Yes, but who else?” asked Cookie.

“Why not Holly Everlast?” asked Aggie.

“Eberhard,” corrected her grandmother. “Holly Eberhard.”

“Don’t be silly, Aggie,” her mother spoke up. “Holly Eberhard’s a famous quilt designer written up in all the magazines. I once saw a profile of her in
Quilter’s Quarterly
. That magazine features the very best quilters in the universe.”

“Okay, but who else could make a perfect copy?” persisted the ten-year-old girl.

“Lots of people I’m sure,” said Cookie. “Just not anyone we’d know.”

“Besides,” added Lizzie, “it wasn’t a perfect copy. Daniel Sokolowski spotted the synthetic thread, proving it wasn’t made back in the 1920s.”

“Close enough it fooled us,” said Maddy. “We would have never spotted that modern thread.”

“That’s true,” said Cookie, “but the Smithsonian would’ve when we tried to return a fake instead of the genuine article.” She was dreading tomorrow’s phone call to the famous museum.

“You know, Holly Eberhard grew up here in Caruthers Corners,” said Beau. “Her mother was a Caruthers.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Cookie, obviously miffed. She prided herself in being an authority on the town’s genealogy.

“Beau’s right. She was raised over on Melon Hill,” said Edgar Ridenour. “The Savings and Loan held the family’s mortgage. As I recall, her mother was Henry Caruthers’ aunt. That makes her Henry’s first cousin.”

“No kidding?” said Tillie, chair pulled back from the kitchen table to make room for her tummy. “She’s related to our criminal mastermind?”

“Well, that certainly adds her to our suspicious characters list,” said Maddy, speaking for the Quilter’s Club.

“I’ll say,” intoned Bootsie.

“Hey now, don’t get carried away,” said her policeman husband. “Being Lefty’s cousin isn’t a crime.”

“Lefty?” said Bill.

“A nickname from high school,” explained his dad. “Henry’s left-handed. He used to be a great pitcher. Had a winning season senior year.”

“Don’t feel bad, Cookie,” said Edgar. “Eberhard’s Holly’s married name. If we’d said Holly Lazynski, you would have placed her.”

“Lydia Lazynski’s daughter?”

“The same.”

“Well, I’ll be a ring-tail raccoon.”

Her husband Ben patted her arm. “You’re my little raccoon,” he said affectionately.

“Thanks, Big Bear.”

“Big Bear?” repeated little N’yen.

“Just a term of endearment,” Cookie said. “But he’s as big and powerful as a bear.”

“A Teddy Bear?”

“More like a grizzly,” said Aggie as she assayed the squat brawny man.

“
Gr-r-r-r-r!
” Ben gave his imitation of a bear, hands raised like giant paws, lumbering toward the wide-eyed children.

“Oo-o-o,” said N’yen.

“You’re funny,” said Aggie.

“We need to take a closer look at Holly Lazynski Eberhard,” conclud
ed Maddy Madison as she began to clear away the dishes.

≈≈≈

“How are you adjusting to having a Vietnamese grandson?” Maddy asked her husband as she brushed her hair, preparing for bed. The brown sheen of her hair looked fairly natural, nary a sign of gray strands.

“Fine.”

“No, really?”

“Really. He’s a nice kid. Bright, funny.”

“And Asian.”

Beau looked up as his wife from the big double bed. “Just because I served in Nam doesn’t mean I’ve got anything against Asians.”

“You seemed upset when you first learned that Bill and Kathy had adopted N’yen.”

“It wasn’t that the kid was Asian. More that the Madisons are a proud bloodline going back to the early 1800s. We’ve never had an adoption in the family before.”

Chapter Sixteen

“W
hy are we going to Indianapolis?” asked Lizzie. She’d had a dental appointment before Maddy shanghaied her on this idiotic mission.

“To find Kramer.”

“Who?”

“The name on Nan’s list. You know, the one Bootsie and I found in the old shack.”

“The funny man on Seinfeld,” said N’yen, sitting in the backseat with Aggie. Maddy was babysitting the children today. Little did their parents know they were on a road trip to the state capital, a three-hour drive each way.

“Can we stop for a milkshake?” pressed Aggie.

“Yeah, at MacDonald’s,” chimed the boy.

“How are we going to find this guy Kramer?” said Lizzie, a bit put out by her friend’s cavalier attitude. Expecting her to drop everything and flit off to Indy.

“I’m not sure. But we know Nan’s planning to meet him.”

“But where?”

“Jim thinks the guy might be – what did he call it? – a fence. So we could check out the pawnshops. I’ve heard they sometimes buy stolen goods.”

“You’ve heard?”

“Well, I saw it in a movie once.”

“Great. For a minute there, I was worried you didn’t
have a sound plan.”

≈≈≈

Maddy and Lizzie were thumbing through the Yellow Pages at the pay phone back near the restrooms, while the kids sipped on vanilla milkshakes and ate Big Macs – a gourmet lunch, American-style.

“Here we are, the P’s. Pawnshops. Wai
t, wait, I don’t see any Kramer Pawnshops,” said the redhead.

“Maybe that’s not the name of the shop. He might only work in one.”

“There must be a dozen listed here. Do you intend to phone every one of them?”

“Why not?”

“We could have done that from Caruthers Corners.”

Maddy glanced up at her friend. “Didn’t have an Indianapolis telephone book,” she said smugly.

Twenty minutes later they had completed the list of pawnshops, none claiming an employee named Kramer. Maddy and Lizzie were barely speaking. The two kids were on their second Big Macs.

“Now what?”

Maddy shrugged meekly. “We could go to the bus station and look for Nan Beanie.”

“We’d just be in the way. Chief Purdue has that covered.”

“I love Jim Purdue, but he’s not exactly Elliot Ness.”

Lizzie glanced to the front of the fast-food restaurant to check on the kids. “Don’t be so hard on Jim,” she said to Maddy. “He’s working closely with the Indianapolis police. If Nan shows up, they will get her.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

The two women gathered up the kids. “Ready to go home?” Lizzie said to them as they polished off their French fries.

“Sure,” said Aggie. “But don’t you want to find that Kramer guy?”

“Of course,” replied her grandmother. “But looks like we’ve struck out.”

“Did you look in the phone book?”

Maddy smiled patiently. “Yes, we checked all the pawnshop listings in the Yellow Pages.”

“But did you look him up in the regular listings – the white pages?”

≈≈≈

Maddy found dozens of Kramers listed in the white pages of the telephone book, too many to sort through. But one business listing caught her eye: Kramer Sewing Notions & Quilting Supplies.

Bingo!

“Aggie, you’re a genius!” declare her grandmother.

“What
’d I do?”

“Never mind, dear. Just give us another hour and we’ll head home.”

“Good. My dog misses me.”

“Grammy, may I have another milkshake?” wheedled little N’yen.

“Enough for you, young man. Your mother will kill me if I bring you home with a tummy ache.”

“My mom was having tummy aches this morning,” said Aggie matter-of-factly.

“Tummy aches? Do you mean labor contractions?” Maddy could feel her pulse rate increase. She’d never forgive herself if she weren’t by Tillie’s side when she gave birth to her second child.

“Dunno. She was timing them with her watch.”

“Oh my.”

“Should we start home?” Lizzie asked her anxious friend.

“Absolutely,” said Maddy, glancing down at the phone book. “But we might stop by this quilt shop for two minutes. This address is just down the street from here.”

≈≈≈

Kramer’s Sewing Notions was a small shop that tried to aggrandize itself with a sign in the window claiming
“Indy’s Largest Source of Quilting Supplies.”

True or not, the corner windows featured an array of patchwork quilts, sewing machines designed fo
r making quilts, and bolts of colorful fabrics. A sign on the door advised
BACK IN 10 MINUTES
.

“Rats!” said Maddy. They couldn’t afford to wait, not if Tillie was having contractions back in Caruthers Corners.

“Sorry,” said Lizzie. “Bad timing.”

“Look,” pointed N’yen. “I see somebody moving around inside.”

Aggie put her face to the door, shading out the glare of sunlight with a hand over her eyes. “I see him too. There behind the counter.”

Maddy pecked on the glass door. “Hello in there,” she called. But the shadowy figure did not acknowledge her greeting.

Lizzie joined in, pounding her palm against the door. “Yoo-hoo, hello!”

The cacophony of their banging couldn’t be ignored. The man finally made his way to the front door and waved them away. “We’re closed, can’t you see?” she shouted through the glass. He was a tall fellow with heavy brows and a thick beak-like nose. The perfect candidate for rhinoplasty. “Go away or I’ll call the police.”

“Call them if you like, Mr. Kramer.”

“I’m not Kramer. I’m just the janitor service.”

“Where’s Mr. Kramer?” pressed Maddy.

“Outta town. Left this morning.”

But the sign here on the doors says ‘Back in 10 Minutes.’”

“Don’t reckon he has a sign that says ‘Back in 10 Years.’ He’s closing the shop and moving to Canada.”

“Canada?”

“He has a brother up there. Think that’s where the family’s from.” The man turned back to his work, pushing a mop lazily around the tile floor, wet streaks marking his effort.

“Wait,” said Lizzie. “Did Mr. Kramer go alone?”

The man paused and looked over his shoulder. “He had a woman with him. I’d never seen her before. He called her ‘String Bean’ or ‘Butter Bean,’ something like that.”

“Mrs. Beanie?”

“That might be it.” He went back to his mopping.