Cathedral Windows
A PLUME BOOK
CATHEDRAL WINDOWS
CLARE O'DONOHUE
is the author of the Someday Quilts series, as well as the Kate Conway Mysteries. She's also a TV producer and writer, and is right now buried under a pile of unfinished quilt projects she hoped to complete by Christmas.
Also by
Clare O'Donohue
SOMEDAY QUILTS MYSTERIES
The Lover's Knot
A Drunkard's Path
The Double Cross
The Devil's Puzzle
KATE CONWAY MYSTERIES
Missing Persons
Life Without Parole
Cathedral
Windows
A SOMEDAY QUILTS MYSTERY
A Penguin Special from Plume
Clare O'Donohue
A PLUME BOOK
About the Book
Christmas is just around the corner in the Hudson Valley. Nell and her friends at the Someday Quilts shop should be making eggnog and finishing up the stitching on their last homemade gifts, but when an arsonist strikes and a beloved teacher becomes a suspect, the ladies rally behind him to clear his good name. Will they succeed in time for him to spend Christmas among loved ones or will this be a chilly winter for the town of Archers Rest?
PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2012
Copyright © Clare O'Donohue, 2012
All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARKâMARCA REGISTRADA
ISBN 978-1-101-61584-3
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
It was the kind of scream that would have woken the dead if any were within earshot. Fortunately, the only people who could hear it were the third grade class at Archers Rest Elementary, and me.
I walked over to the table Jacob Schultz was sharing with Emily Long. They were engaged in a battle to the death over a small blue piece of fabric.
“I need it,” Emily yelled to me as she wrestled for control.
“I saw it first,” Jacob yelled back.
So much for the season of peace on earth and goodwill toward men.
“Isn't there more of this?” I asked.
“It's the last of it.” Emily was on the verge of tears. “And it's the perfect blue for what I want to do.”
“Well, I saw it first.”
“I know that, Jacob,” I said.
“And Miss Nell, you said that we could pick our own fabrics for our square, and blue's my favorite color so I picked that one. First.”
I smiled, trying to seem patient and wise, neither of which were my strong points. But it had been my idea to bring quilting to the kids in town, by teaching a one-day class in each of the classes at the local grade school. Christmas was less than a week away, and judging by the construction paper garland, and the drawings of Christmas trees and dreidels, these were creative kids already in the holiday spirit. It should have been easy. My idea was that each student would hand-sew a simple nine-patch square that could be joined together to make a quilt, and each class's quilt would be auctioned off in a week at the library Christmas Eve party, an annual event that raised money for various town needs.
Someday Quilts was one of the sponsors, and my grandmother was chairwoman of the committee, so it was especially important we contribute as much as we could. Not that Eleanor would have it any other way. My grandmother loved helping people even more than she loved quilting.
I'd brought four-and-a-half inch squares from the shop in a variety of colors and patterns, something for everyone. Until now. While the first and second graders were thrilled with their options, this class was picky and restless. It didn't help that their teacher, Charlie Lofton, had disappeared the moment I arrived.
Neither kid was going to be happy if I gave the other the square, and cutting it in half would ruin the look of a nine-patch. I had no other choice.
“There are lots of other fabrics.” I took the blue square from Jacob and Emily, folded it, and put it in my purse. “Use those.”
Two unhappy kids and another half hour until the class ended. It was time for something new.
“Does anyone know why we're making quilts?” I asked.
“Because you're making us,” Jacob quickly answered.
I suppressed a smile. “Any other reason?”
A little girl named Susie raised her hand. “To raise money for the Morristown Fire Department. To help them get new equipment.”
Jacob jumped up. “Why are we raising money for them? Why don't we have our own fire department?”
“Archers Rest is too small,” I explained. “And luckily we rarely have any reason to need a fire department, so we share one with our next-door-neighbor Morristown. Sharing is very important.”
At that, Jacob sat. He wasn't interested in a conversation on sharing.
*Â *Â *
The rest of the class went smoothly. The kids focused on hand-sewing their squares and comparing their work with others. But as the clock ticked toward three, I became a little anxious. It was the last class of the day and I had no idea if Charlie usually gave them homework or walked them out to the bus or just let them leave on their own. It had been a long time since I'd been in third grade.
Luckily, just as the bell rang, Charlie walked in, carrying a large battered-looking cardboard box. At thirty, Charlie was only three years my senior, but he had a baby face and spiky, needing-a-haircut, brown hair. He was quirky-handsome, nearly six foot six, and so thin he almost disappeared in a side view.
As he put the box on the desk, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter fell out of his pocket. The lighter was old-fashioned looking, silver and large. It had an emblem of the U.S. Army on it, a souvenir of Charlie's time in the service, I assumed. “How much did I miss?” he asked.
“All of it. But it went okay, I guess.” I pointed to the finished nine-patches that each student was piling on Charlie's desk as he or she left.
As Emily passed his desk, she held up her square to show Charlie, who seemed awed by her skills. Jacob, behind her, said, “Mine would have been better if I'd gotten to use the colors I wanted.” He threw his completed square on the pile.
“I think you did a great job,” Charlie told him. “You certainly sew better than I can. Whenever a button fell off my uniform, I'd sew it back on and the next day it would fall off again. But it looks like your square is really sturdy.”
“You wore a uniform?” Jacob asked, forgetting completely about his quilt project.
“Charlie's a hero,” I said.
“Not a hero, a soldier,” Charlie told Jacob.
“Same thing.” I smiled, but Charlie blushed.
“Wow!” Jacob went running after Emily to tell her what he'd learned about their teacher.
Once we were alone my eyes went to the box. “What have you got there?”
It was an old box, beaten around the corners, with the flaps folded and refolded. But Charlie treated it gingerly. “It was in the attic at my mom's house,” he explained. “I've been going through her stuff and there's a lot of it. She kept everything: broken furniture, stained drapes, even magazines that go back for years. It's all in a big a pile in the backyard until I have time to take it to the dump.” He patted the box. “But this was something I thought maybe you or your grandmother could use.”
I hadn't known Charlie's mother, not really. She'd died suddenly of a heart attack last year, just after I moved to town. Charlie was in Afghanistan on a second deployment and came home for only a few days. His house, a two-story frame house a few blocks from the school, sat empty for months. He was discharged around the time that the regular third grade teacher decided to switch careers. Without really deciding if he wanted it, Charlie had a job and a house back in his hometown. Not that he was happy about it. Or unhappy, for that matter. Whenever I saw him he seemed friendly but unsettled, as if at any moment he might have to run for cover.
Charlie began taking objects out of the box, slowly and carefully arranging them on his desk. Every item had something to do with sewingâan old iron, some needles, spools of thread in more than a dozen colors, and several pairs of scissors.
I saw a cobalt-blue glass tube among the items and picked it up. “Where's the top?”
“It has a top?”
“I think it's a needle holder. My grandmother has some antique ones like this. They all have round glass tops the same color as the bottom. Women used to put needles into them, so you need the top to keep them from falling out.”
“It might be in the pile in the backyard,” Charlie said. “I threw a couple of other boxes from the attic out there. There were some pieces that seemed like they didn't belong with anything. I'll look for it.”
I continued my search through this treasure of sewing history. So many ornately decorated items, beautiful and useful. The one “not like the others” was a boot box. I opened it and saw that it contained hundreds of folded squares of muslin, along with stacks of colorful squares piled next to them.
“My grandmother quilted,” Charlie explained. “I think this is something she started years and years ago, but I don't know what pattern.”
I did. It was the makings of a cathedral windows quilt, an extraordinarily beautiful pattern that is traditionally hand-sewn from large muslin squares, repeatedly folded to form a windowpane around smaller colored squares. The colored squares surrounded by the subtle texture of the folds have the effect of stained-glass windows in a Gothic cathedral.
“My grandmother didn't usually leave things undone,” Charlie said, “so it's kind of weird she didn't finish this.”
“Well, it's a really time-consuming quilt, mostly hand-sewn, lots and lots of squares. It's practically a quilting tradition to start one and never finish it.”
He lightly stroked the fabrics. “I miss her,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “I miss them all. My mom, my dad, Granny.” He took a deep breath. “But it seems stupid to hang on to a bunch of old stuff that I can't use. Especially if maybe you could.”
There was something very firm in his voice that made it clear there was no point in arguing with him. I just nodded, returned the items to the worn cardboard box, grabbed the new nine-patches, and left him alone in the classroom. It seemed to be exactly what he wanted, but I felt a little like the latest in a long line of people to leave Charlie alone.
I closed the classroom door behind me just as Bill Davis, the fourth grade teacher and baseball coach, pushed past me. “Is that idiot in there?”
“Idiot?”
“Lofton.” He didn't wait for my answer. He flung the door open and strode into Charlie's classroom, slamming the door behind him. “What kind of fool do you think I am?” I heard Bill yell. There was no answer from Charlie, none that I could hear anyway, and despite every instinct to interfere, as well as a reputation for being the town's Nancy Drew, it wasn't my business. Besides, I already had a full plate. I had to turn the blocks into quilts, do all of my Christmas shopping, and help my grandmother prepare for the fund-raiser. I balanced the box and my pile of squares and headed to my car. Whatever chaos I was leaving behind at the school, I knew there was plenty more waiting for me at the shop.