'Did he?'
'No, he went right by me like I wasn't there-and after I've been so nice to him and his geeky friends. I even touched his lizard.'
'I'm not sure I'd mention that in polite company,” Harriet said.
Carla chuckled then blushed. Aunt Beth glared but didn't say anything.
'So, DeAnn,” Harriet said. “What were you about to say you're doing in the absence of Joseph?'
'We went to Phyllis, of course, but as I said, she told us he had taken our file home and apparently everything else associated with Iloai.'
'I wonder if that's usual,” Mavis said. “We'll have to check with Phyl.'
Aunt Beth excused herself and went into the kitchen. Harriet watched her leave and wondered what she was up to. Everyone had fresh drinks, and Connie had brought a plate of layered bar cookies.
'Go on,” Harriet said, giving DeAnn what she hoped was an encouraging look.
'My husband decided we needed to investigate more, so he called a friend of his at the University of Washington, and that guy checked with the campus foreign studies center and found us a translator. The guy is great. He speaks several island dialects, and he has small children himself. He agreed to come to our house yesterday and talk with Iloai.'
'And?” Harriet was anxious to hear the punch line.
'She was quite chatty with him, once she got comfortable. Unfortunately, she was chatty at a three-year-old level. The perplexing thing is that she talked about Mama, Dada, Sister and Aunt-in Samoan, of course. She talked about a dog and about fish, and she said her dad fished. She has a whole fantasy world peopled with family members who work a lot and fish a lot.'
'That's weird for a child who was raised in an orphanage,” Harriet said.
'Maybe it was in a fishing village, and they took the children to the beach,” Jenny suggested.
'Children are able to do imaginary play when they're that age,” Connie said. “But usually it's simple-they pretend they're their dolls’ mother, or other basic games. I'll look in my child-development book when I get home and see what it says, but I think that kind of detail isn't usual. I don't know how being in an orphanage might affect a child's fantasies at that age.'
'Lauren's list of words has been a big help, and the professor helped us with proper pronunciation, but it's clear, even though she's not crying all the time, Iloai wants to be somewhere else.'
'Oh, honey, I'm sorry this has been so hard on you and your family,” Mavis said.
'I just feel for Iloai,” DeAnn said. “She's been miserable, and until Lauren brought us the Samoan word list we weren't getting anywhere. Now at least we have somewhere to start trying to figure this thing out.
'And I'm here. Things were calm enough this morning that David and the boys should be able to handle it. I put the binding on one of the quilts last night. I needed to do something that wasn't related to small children for a few hours and to feel like I'd done something toward the auction.'
'We're glad you're here,” Aunt Beth said as she came back into the studio.
'Speaking of the quilts,” Mavis said. “Let's get them out and see what we've got.'
Connie and Lauren got up and pulled a quilt out of its pillowcase, then held it up for the group to see. Connie had provided a slate-gray landscape fabric for the doghouse roofs, and Lauren had hand-dyed a pale-blue fabric so it had random streaks of white that looked like clouds. These two features provided a unifying effect among the blocks made by the various Loose Threads members. Mavis had found a print with small doghouses for the outer border, and they had used a dark-brown Moda Marble for the inner one.
'That came out nice,” Jenny said.
'It's okay,” Lauren said, “but let's be honest-if this is the best we've got, we're in trouble.'
Mavis and Beth got up next but kept their quilt folded in half, obscuring the front.
'As you know, we've been working on the snowball blocks. We tried fussy-cutting images for the center, but once we saw the star blocks, we felt ours were too similar,” Mavis said.
Aunt Beth took up the story. “Next, we tried using small-scale coordinating prints-bones, paw prints, that sort of thing. They would have made a serviceable quilt, but when we put a couple of rows together, it was too boring.'
'We decided it was time to get creative,” Mavis said.
'So, when you guys go off the rails it's creativity, but if I do it, I'm not being a team player,” Lauren said. “How's that work?'
Mavis ignored the interruption.
'We were doing a computer search for dog pattern fabric when this one came up.” On cue, Beth stepped to the side, opening their quilt. “It's dogwood and daffodils.'
The main fabric used for the quilt had a mauve background with pink dogwood flowers and cheddar daffodils with brick-red trumpets. They had alternated the snowball blocks with green and dark-salmon-colored nine-patch blocks.
'Who makes that fabric?” Jenny asked.
'It's a Phillip Jacobs print for Rowan,” Mavis replied.
'Well, it's cheating, but I have to admit, we might have a chance with that in our arsenal,” Lauren grumbled.
Robin stood up and removed the quilt that was folded up in her bag, Carla took one corner and stepped aside, opening it to the group's view.
The quilt was composed of multiple-sized star blocks with a fussy-cut realistic dog for the center and a taupe background. The points of the stars were made from prints that coordinated with the center images.
'That came out real cute,” Mavis said.
'How did you find images that were spaced far enough apart to fussy-cut like that?” DeAnn asked, referring to the technique of cutting a quilt piece at any angle or direction that resulted in a particular image being centered in the piece.
'We didn't,” Carla said. “If you look close, you can see where we added solid-colored fabric to the edges of the dog fabric.'
DeAnn stood and picked up the corner of the quilt, looking closely at one of the blocks.
'Very clever,” she said and went back to her seat.
'What about Harriet's quilt?” Sarah asked. “Do you need me to finish it?'
Harriet blanched at the thought of Sarah touching her quilt. Even knowing Aunt Beth and Mavis had already finished it, the idea of Sarah, who never met an instruction she couldn't disregard, even coming close to her design was frightening.
'Thank you, honey,” Mavis said, “Beth and I finished the quilt for Harriet when she got hurt.'
Beth stood up and went to Harriet's work table to pick up the folded quilt. She handed two corners to Mavis and stepped to the side with the other two, allowing the quilt to unfurl.
'Whoa,” DeAnn said when the image was revealed.
Blocks appeared to cascade from the center of the quilt. The three dimensional cubes each appeared to have a dog inside it, due to Harriet's clever instruction to everyone to fussy-cut a diamond-shaped dog image to form one side of each block.
Harriet had chosen deep reds and brown tones that ranged from a light caramel to a brown so dark it was almost black. The overall effect was striking. The pile of blocks were appliqued onto a black background.
'Wow,” said Robin. “You sure couldn't tell how dramatic that was going to come out just from doing a single block.'
'I think we have a contender for raffle quilt,” Jenny announced then looked around the group, silently daring Lauren or Sarah to challenge her assessment, but they remained silent.
'Let's see the dog-bone quilt,” Harriet said.
'We made a change after the last meeting,” Jenny said and got up to take the quilt from Aunt Beth's work table. “The original plan was to have a different breed of dog in each bone wreath, but when I drew up the diagrams, it looked too disjointed, so I changed the plan and made each dog face different colors and expressions, but all based on a Yorkshire terrier.” She unfolded the result and held it up for the group to see. “Beth just finished it, so of course, it isn't bound yet, but here it is.'
The dog faces were appliqued in tan, white and black with touches of gray. Pink had been used for the dogs’
