The Double Cross (15 page)

He walked toward the house, leaving Helen and the twins to discuss what meals they could cook and whether there was adequate space in the kitchen to make them at the inn, so they could be close if Rita needed them.

I walked into the woods, letting my feet take me in the general direction of the crime scene. When I got there, I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t exactly sure which tree George had died under. I had expected to see crime-scene tape cordoning it off from hikers and helping with the collection of evidence, but aside from a few small bloodstains on the tree trunk, which took me nearly twenty minutes to find, there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the woods.

If McIntyre was right about the weapon being a hunting rifle, the killer could have been several hundred yards away. But even at a distance, it seemed unlikely that the killer could have mistaken George for a deer. George was tall, over six feet. Though my experience of deer is limited to occasionally spotting one in the woods near Archers Rest, and a traumatizing viewing of
Bambi
when I was six, I knew that deer average only about three or three and a half feet in height. Whoever shot that rifle knew a person was on the other end of it.

It seemed pointless, but I began walking the circumference of the tree, making a wider circle each time. If the police in Winston were careless enough to let the crime scene be open to anyone, they might have missed a shell casing or something that could lead to the real killer and away from Bernie. At least I hoped so. But there was nothing on the ground but leaves, twigs, and dirt.

Just as I was about to give up, I saw something shiny in the dirt. I crouched down to get a better look and realized it was exactly what I thought it was: a seam ripper, a little metal tool with a blade that looks like a hook on one side and usually has a plastic grip on the other. The grips come in different colors and thicknesses depending on the brand and price. In this case the plastic was thin and medium blue, about the cheapest seam ripper around. Since a seam ripper is used to undo sewing mistakes without ripping into the fabric, it’s an essential tool for any quilter, the sort of standard sewing item we might carry in our pockets and forget about. Or that might fall out of them during a romantic rendezvous. Or a struggle.

I picked up the tool and examined it closely. The only thing that distinguished it from the millions of others just like it was a spot of shiny red paint, but that wasn’t much help. If George was planning to paint the house, like he said when we arrived, maybe he had red paint. How it got on a seam ripper was something I couldn’t even guess. Obviously the police had been through the scene and missed what could be an important piece of evidence—another reason why I wouldn’t entrust Bernie’s fate to McIntyre.

On my way back to the inn, I got a little lost. I’m no Girl Scout, and one tree looks pretty much the same as the other, so it wasn’t difficult. At one point I thought I was taking a shortcut but I ended up in an unfamiliar area. There was another hiking path that I followed for a while. I could see a house in the distance, and I wondered if it was Pete’s, but I wasn’t sure if I had been walking toward his house or in another direction entirely. Whoever the house belonged to, I reasoned, they would probably know the way back to the Patchwork Bed-and-Breakfast, so I started toward it.

As I walked I saw an open basket near a tree. There was no one around, so I went over and checked it out. A half-empty bottle of wine, a few glasses, and the bones of what had probably been a chicken leg were lying on the ground nearby. Whatever food had been in the basket was pretty much eaten by animals. It might have been the one Bernie used, making it another piece of missed evidence. I wasn’t going to help McIntyre with anything that might strengthen his case against Bernie, so I left it there and walked on.

Then I heard a shot. I gasped and whirled around.

“I could have blown your head off,” Frank said to me. “What are you doing in the woods?”

“Me?” I yelled back. “Shouldn’t you be with your wife?”

“I’m looking for found objects for my quilt, just in case we have class today.”

“With a gun?”

He shrugged. “I keep it in my car. I’m no good sitting around being sad, and that is what the women will do today, so I thought I could bag a deer.”

As Frank was talking, I stared at this gun. He wasn’t exactly pointing it at me, but he wasn’t pointing toward the ground either.

“I should get back,” I said.

Frank looked at his gun. “This make you nervous?”

“I just should get back.”

He grabbed my arm. “Don’t go anywhere.”

I pulled back anyway and was prepared to run, but Frank handed me the gun.

“Hold the butt under your right arm, just under your armpit, and rest your left hand under the rifle and your right hand on the trigger. Aim it toward that tree over there.” He pointed toward a tree about thirty feet away.

I did as I was told.

“Look through the sight.”

I did. “It seems closer,” I said.

“Makes it easier to hit your mark,” he said. “Now pull the trigger.”

I did. And as I did, I fell back on the ground.

“Sorry. I should have mentioned that. You need to have solid footing if you’re going to shoot a big gun like that.”

I handed him back the gun and walked toward my target. Sure enough, there was a hole in the tree trunk just where I had aimed.

“It’s important to have a healthy respect for a weapon,” he said, “not a fear of it.”

I suppose that was true enough, but it was the way he said it that made me shudder. I looked back at the tree trunk, and the hole I’d just put into it, and wondered if it had been that easy to shoot George.

CHAPTER 22

There was a lot of activity when I returned to the house. A pickup truck with paint cans and rollers in the back was parked outside. Several cars I didn’t recognize were parked behind it.

As I was about to go into the house, Pete walked out to the truck and grabbed a paint can.

“This morning Rita said that she and George dreamed of fixing this place up and now she was afraid that dream would die,” he told me. “So Helen and I and the other ladies, the twins, called a few neighbors and we’re going to get started.”

“That’s incredibly nice of you.”

“As much as we enjoyed Susanne’s class, we figured it would be better to do something for Rita. She insisted we all stay, and all of you stay. She seemed to want activity at the inn, so we’re giving her plenty of that.”

“I should find my grandmother and tell her.”

He smiled. “It was her idea.”

I could hear voices inside the shop before I’d even opened the door. When I did, Eleanor, Susanne, and Bernie were standing at a large metal machine, turning a handle. It didn’t seem nearly as exciting to me as it did to them.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Nell, look at this. It’s a die cutter for quilts,” Eleanor said.

She showed me a piece of foam-backed wood. It looked like a giant rubber stamp, except that instead of images embossed on the foam, there were squares cut into it. She put the die on a metal tray and covered it with a layer of fabric, then put a piece of plastic over that and rolled the whole thing through the fabric cutter. She lifted up the plastic to reveal a dozen perfectly cut two-inch squares.

“Cool, huh?” she said. “You can cut ten layers of fabric at a time.”

I had to agree. “It would make pretty fast work for a quilt that needed lots of squares.”

“Oh, there are lots of other shapes.” Eleanor sounded like an old pro. “I’m just demonstrating this one for you. I don’t know how I lived without it. I can cut a whole quilt in ten minutes.”

I laughed. “This is one of those hip gadgets that Rita talked about, isn’t it?”

“I’m not anti-gadget. I just think it takes a little more than the latest tools to be a quilter.”

“So I get to play with it?” I asked. “And the long-arm machine?”

Eleanor looked back at the large quilting machine and table that took up nearly half the shop. “I suppose it’s worth a try.”

“Pete told me that you suggested helping Rita fix up the inn. So what are you guys doing hiding in here when there’s painting to be done?”

“Hiding?” Susanne laughed. “We’ve dug into the fabrics Rita bought and made three quilt tops already.” She held up a top made completely with squares in soothing blues and greens. “We’re going to make a different quilt for every bed at the inn.”

“And a few to hang on the wall,” Bernie added. “Cheer up the place once it’s painted.”

Not to be left out, I uncovered the long-arm machine, and Bernie and I carefully read the instructions, then crossed our fingers and pinned one of the quilt tops to the bracers.

A long-arm sewing machine is like a traditional quilt frame in many ways, with the quilt layered with the batting and backing, pinned at the edges, and then rolled up to allow for about eighteen inches of quilting space at a time. The difference, of course, is that a sewing machine makes the work much faster than the hand sewing done on a traditional frame. Long arms have a large throat, which is the space between the needle and the arm of the machine, and instead of quilting from the side of the machine you quilt from the front. The selling point is that quilters no longer have to roll, or shove, large quilts through their machines and can therefore quilt them faster and even be more creative. As I looked at the machine, it looked easy, and the instructions made it seem easy, but I was a bit intimidated.

I grabbed the handles, which looked like bull horns coming out on either side, and with Bernie reading the instructions, I slowly moved the machine. First I zigzagged along the edges to secure them. Then I stitched in the ditch, a quilter’s term for quilting along the sewing lines. It doesn’t add much to the design of the quilt, but it does secure the three layers together and is the easiest way I’ve found to quilt in a hurry.

“This is pretty easy,” I said, excited to have taken to it so quickly.

I got more adventurous as I quilted, making free-motion circles on the second quilt and simple flowers on the third. I was having fun.

Within a few hours, we had made five quilt tops and three finished quilts. Though they were all simple in design, they were beautiful. I hoped it would bring Rita some comfort to see that we were all trying to help, but even if it didn’t, it felt good to see Bernie happy and confident, at least for the moment.

I’d forgotten about what was going on outside the shop, but when I looked up, I realized that we had not been forgotten.

Rita was at the door. “What’s going on in here?”

She looked fragile, but when the three of us rushed over to suggest she sit down, she waved us off.

“I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself,” she said briskly. “I’m just trying to understand what everyone is doing.”

“Would you rather we stopped?” I asked. “We don’t want to disturb you.”

“I didn’t ask you to stop. I asked what you were doing.”

I watched Bernie as she took a deep breath then seemed to make a decision. She walked over to her childhood friend and gave her a hug.

“I’m sorry about George.”

Rita seemed more shocked by the display than anything. “It’s very sad,” Rita muttered. She moved past Bernie to Eleanor. “What are you doing?”

“We’re making quilts for the inn. If you’re going to cater to quilters, then you should have quilts on the beds and a few on the walls. Plus you’ll need samples in the shop.”

“You’re making them for me?”

“Yes.”

Rita blinked slowly. She looked around. “I was thinking about expanding the place to include other hobbies. Knitting, doll making, maybe ceramics. I could go into town and make some inquires about getting that started.”

“Now?” I asked, a little too loudly. I pulled back a little on the tone of my voice. “Don’t you want to concentrate on funeral arrangements?”