Four-Patch of Trouble (14 page)

"It doesn't really matter. Let's just hope Nancy Grant is right, and Tremain was an honest but misunderstood businessman. And the rest of the board continues to listen to her instead of to the rumor mill. Is she more pleasant with them than she is with mere appraisers like me?"

"Not really," Gil said with a smile. "She can be a bit…difficult. You saw her yesterday. She's impulsive, and she doesn't have that hobgoblin of little minds—consistency. She is perfectly willing to take one position one day and the opposite position another day."

"That must be a challenge for you. Are you going to be stuck with her on the board forever?"

"I'm afraid so," Gil said ruefully. "She's part of a power couple, married to a state senator. She was on Danger Cove's town council, and they met when he came here for a fundraiser during her reelection campaign. She won her election and then gave up her seat to work on his campaign for the state legislature. There's some talk that he's planning to run for governor. Personally, I think she'd be a more effective politician than her husband, but she can be abrasive at times."

"I hope she doesn't pick this issue to push the board too far. You're stuck with her, but the other board members don't have to listen to her. Or at least they don't have to vote with her to support you."

"They don't have to, but unless she goes completely off the deep end, there's a strong incentive for them to do her bidding, because of the influence her husband wields over state grants to local museums like ours." Gil glanced into the corridor behind her, as if making sure no one had followed us. "She's lobbying against signing a long-term contract with you. She knows Dee and Emma have been vocal about Tremain's business dealings for a while, but for some reason she thinks they got the idea from you. She claimed you were just ginning up a fake scandal in order to drum up business for your appraisal services."

I shook my head, mostly at how naïve I'd been to believe that my new career in the quilting community that generally lived up to its reputation for being sweet and welcoming would completely insulate me from this sort of unfounded attack. From what I'd seen and heard of Nancy Grant, she was one of those charmed people who never experienced any stress themselves. They passed it off to everyone around them with their unreasonable demands and poorly thought-out allegations. "I'd never talked to Tremain before yesterday. I never even met Dee and Emma until then, and I tried to stay out of it. I only agreed because I owed Dee's granddaughter a favor."

"I didn't know about the favor, but I told the board you weren't behind the rumors. They're still falling in line behind Nancy, except for some token objections. They don't know you, and they do know how much money Nancy's husband sends to this county and this museum."

"Do you want me to do some sort of presentation for them?" I so didn't have time for this, but if I didn't make the time, my second career was likely to go down in flames. "I could probably rework the speech I'm doing for the quilt show into something that would reassure the board I know what I'm talking about."

"Maybe in a month or two," Gil said. "Once things calm down. Right now, while the investigation into Tremain's murder is active and it's all over the news, I don't think anything either of us could say would sway them."

Gil was likely to be disappointed if she thought the cloud over her quilt acquisition program was likely to blow over that quickly. The initial murder investigation, just to the point of being able to file charges, was likely to take months, and then it could be a year or more before the trial itself. If Gil had to wait until people forgot about Tremain, it could be a couple of years before the museum could move forward with the quilt acquisition program.

Gil wasn't the only one who would be disappointed. I'd hoped to have secured the museum as my first steady customer within the next few weeks, not two years from now.

I couldn't worry about that right now, not without sending my stress levels into the stratosphere. Passing out at Gil's feet wouldn't be as bad as passing out in front of a jury, but still embarrassing.

"I should let you get back to your work." I took a seat at the table next to my bag. "Just one question first. Stefan's quilt has an embroidered name—M. Dolores. I was wondering if you had ever heard it before."

Gil didn't need to think. "There was a famous Dolores family early in Danger Cove's history. In fact, it was an M. Dolores—Maria—who was the first lighthouse keeper here."

"Was she a quilter?" 

"That I couldn't tell you." Gil pointed at the far end of the room. "We have some of her artifacts in that last case. If there's nothing useful there, you might have better luck talking with her family. One of her descendants recently moved back to town. Same name as her ancestor even. You could ask her what she knows of the first Maria Dolores. I have her number in my office. I'll text it to you."

"Thanks." I unzipped my messenger bag. "I'll give her a call after I finish here."

"Take your time. We won't forget about you and lock you inside the building. And if we do, you can always push the panic button." Gil slid her hand along the edge of the table with her fingertips under its top. She stopped a couple of inches from the corner. "There's one right here. Originally, I was just going to put them at the guards' stations and at the ticket desk to keep the employees safe, but I got a good deal on the system, and I used the savings to put a button here too. It can feel a little creepy in here sometimes if you're the only person on this floor."

"I don't panic easily." Which was fortunate, since otherwise I'd wake up on the floor more often.

"I wish more people were that easygoing," Gil said on her way out. "You're only the second person who's visited this room since I started. It's only been a couple of weeks since the last visitor though, so maybe it's the start of a trend. I'm hoping we can attract more researchers by making the archives a little more user friendly. It's just not in the budget yet."

Gil left, and I couldn't help going over to take a quick look at the quilts hanging on the back wall. One was from the late 1800s, like Stefan's, and I thought they both even had some of the same prints. I took my camera over to the quilt and compared the prints in some close-ups to the prints in the hanging quilt. Sure enough, there were several matches, including one distinctive blue print that I might otherwise have thought was manufactured at a later date.

I was confident now that the date embroidered on Stefan's quilt was correct. The only remaining question was whether it had a connection to the first lighthouse keeper in Danger Cove. I might never know whether M. Dolores had made it or had been the recipient of it, but any connection with her would make it particularly valuable to the museum.

What if the board of directors passed on the acquisition simply because I was the one recommending it? I just couldn't let them pass up this opportunity. The lurking nausea worked as a reminder that I was getting ahead of myself. First, I needed to confirm that the quilt really was connected to the lighthouse keeper.

I lost track of time as I went through the documents in the case holding Maria Dolores's belongings, looking for some hint that she was a quiltmaker. As Gil had said, Maria was the first lighthouse keeper in Danger Cove, after it was built in 1894. The job had initially been intended for her husband, a political appointment in recognition of his status as a Civil War veteran, but he'd died shortly before the lighthouse had been completed. Maria had successfully argued that the country owed it to him to provide for his widow and six children by letting her keep the appointment, which was a lucrative one for the times.

If Maria Dolores had made the quilt, she'd done so while occupying the lighthouse, since she, her daughter and her granddaughter had lived and worked there until it was decommissioned in the mid-1900s. Or possibly it had been made for her by a mariner's wife grateful for not being widowed thanks to the lighthouse and its keepers.

Gil's voice came through an overhead speaker, announcing that visitors had fifteen minutes to find their way to the exit before the museum closed. She ended with a few bars of "Goodnight, Irene."

Just as I was leaving the museum, I got a call from Wolfe to say he'd meet me at Monograms in half an hour. I got there before he did—I was only a block away, after all, not because I'd planned to be early—and Alyse let me inside.

The side door was propped open again, and from the sounds of footsteps and thumping upstairs, someone was working up there. After one particularly loud thump, followed by the distinctive sound of muffled swearing, Alyse apologized for the distraction. "I'm afraid some things can't wait for a respectful mourning period. Leaky plumbing is one of them."

"Did the landlord call in a real plumber, or is he still trying to fix it himself?"

"The landlord's too cheap to hire a professional. He didn't want to fix it at all. The problems started six months ago, and Randall had to withhold rent before the landlord agreed to take care of it."

"I hope you made it clear you wouldn't be paying rent either until it was fixed."

"I didn't have to," Alyse said. "He kept working after…you know. Told me it would be done before the shop reopens next week."

If the landlord had been reluctant to do the repairs before, then why was he being so diligent now? If he had killed Tremain, he could have been using the repairs as an excuse to return to the scene of the crime, either for the vicarious thrill of it or to retrieve some incriminating evidence he'd left behind. I had to hope Detective Ohlsen could get some answers from the landlord before it was too late.

"So," I said. "Do you want to wait for the prosecutor, or shall we get started?"

"The sooner we start, the sooner it will be over with." Alyse reached into her jacket pocket for the reassurance of her cigarette case. "Where do you want to start?"

I pointed to a cupboard on the wall opposite the side door. "How about the stack of quilts in there?"

While I pulled on the white gloves I kept in my messenger bag, Alyse strode over to the cupboard and pulled down the first quilt from the top shelf. "Do you want to take them into the back room so you can spread them out flat?"

"That won't be necessary. I'm not doing a full workup, just an initial impression. I can see as much as I need if we drape them over a chair."

Alyse unfolded the first quilt with jerky motions, and one of her silver rings caught on a tag hanging from the corner. I helped her untangle herself before I read the tag. On one side there was a brief description of the quilt as a variable star made in California in 1982, and a price substantially higher than the simple design and the age should have commanded. On the back was an alphanumeric code I assumed was Tremain's do-it-yourself version of a bar code.

Alyse ran her fingers over the numbers. "The first thing Randall always did, the minute he brought in new inventory, was to put a tag on it and code it to the provenance in his files. He kept such excellent records. He could tell you everything you'd ever want to know about the quilt just by looking at that code. That's why I just can't believe he had any reproduction quilts. He had provenance for everything. I've seen it."

It sounded like Alyse was still trying to convince herself the fraud complaints were false. How would she react if I concluded
all
the quilts were fakes?

Fortunately, I didn't have to burst Alyse's bubble with the very first quilt. While substantially overpriced, it was a variable star quilt from the 1980s. "This quilt matches the description on the label. I'll fold it while you get the next one."

The relief in Alyse's face suggested she was less confident about her partner's ethics than she was pretending. She pulled out another quilt, this one a pastel-print Irish chain, with utilitarian rather than fancy quilting. It was a larger quilt than the twin-sized variable star, so only a small portion of it could be spread across the back of the wingback chair, with the rest of it bunched up.

I held off looking at the tag until I'd made my own estimate of the quilt's age. It looked older than the variable star by at least fifty years, and it was in excellent condition. Too excellent. A quilt with this simple design would generally have been used as an everyday quilt, but this one didn't seem to have been used at all. It was always possible someone had made it and then packed it away where it was forgotten for many years, but that wasn't a common occurrence.

The quilt's fabrics were the immediately recognizable pastel colors of the 1930s, with many of the novelty prints that had been popular then. In theory, the quilt had all the features of a Depression Era quilt, but something didn't feel right.

I dug in my messenger bag for my magnifying glass and chose some random blocks to inspect more closely. They were all consistent with the 1930s in their colors and the style of prints, but I couldn't rely on that fact alone. For the past twenty years or so, after a significant number of quilters had developed a passion for the 1930's colors and prints, several fabric manufacturers had begun offering reproduction prints that were difficult to distinguish from the originals. The minimal aging on this quilt suggested it was made of reproduction fabrics, but I couldn't be sure without doing more in-depth research.

Just out of curiosity, I looked for the tag to see what Tremain was claiming for the quilt. I had to un-bunch the quilt to find the label, and then I knew what was off about the quilt. The blocks didn't continue all the way to the binding but were framed by a wide border made out of a single length of a print fabric.

The odds were completely against a quilter in the midst of the Depression making a quilt in a design developed for using leftovers, and then deciding to buy yards and yards of new fabric for the border and binding. Based on that and the lack of wear and tear, I'd stake my reputation on the quilt's being a reproduction.

I found the tag and read
Double Irish Chain, NV, 1930s
and a price that would have been about right for a legitimate quilt of that era but was many times too much for a reproduction. If Tremain knew anything about 1930's quilts, he would have known this quilt had been completed more recently.