telling me you haven't been looking for, what did you call them, clues?'
'I haven't, actually. You told me to stay out of it.'
'And that worked?'
'Yes,' I said a little indignant. Then I leaned in. 'But that doesn't mean it has to do with the quilt shop. You're leaving out the possibility that it could have been a robbery or something. Some stranger came into the shop and killed Marc.'
'Yes, I am. I'm leaving out the possibility that a robber came into an empty quilt shop and Marc let him in. And then, with nothing to gain, the guy stabbed him with a pair of scissors he found at the shop.'
'Marc had fifteen thousand dollars. Maybe the robber killed him for that.'
'How would a robber know that? And that's assuming that Marc still had the cash on Friday. For all we know he went back to the OTB and lost it the next day.' Jesse stopped talking and finished his sandwich, but I'd lost my appetite.
'If your suspects are now my grandmother and her friends, you're crazy. It can't be anyone connected to the quilt shop,' I said.
'It doesn't have to be.'
'It can't be Ryan either.'
We sat at the table quietly staring out the window.
'How's the quilt coming?' Jesse finally broke the silence.
Glad of the change in subject, I said proudly, 'I cut out a bunch of flowers.'
Jesse smiled. 'Well, that calls for a celebration. They have a really good chocolate cake here.'
'You don't have to ask me twice.'
Jesse jumped up, a wide grin across his face, and brought over chocolate cake and coffee. For the next half hour we sat and talked about quilting, his daughter, Allison, and the way the last of the autumn leaves were already falling.
Ryan, Marc, and the identity of a murderer were far away and forgotten subjects, and it seemed that Jesse was as glad of that as I was.
CHAPTER 44
By the time I got home all the members of the quilt club had already arrived. Nancy was pouring M &M's into a bowl while Carrie set out coffee for everyone. Bernie sat with my grandmother looking over a new quilting book that had arrived that morning. Maggie and Susanne leaned over a vibrant quilt top Natalie had made.
'I still have to quilt it,' she was saying, 'and I just can't figure out the best design.'
'Since it's strips, I would do circles,' Susanne suggested. 'You want to do something simple, so as not to interfere with the design of the top, but you also want to play against the strong rectangles the strips make.'
I walked closer to see the quilt they were studying. When Natalie saw me, she held up the top she called a Bargello, and I was stunned. The quilt was made of two-inch strips of about forty fabrics that were then cross-cut into strips that varied in width from a half inch to three inches. Then these strips were sewn together to make a kind of wave effect. The quilt pattern was, according to Maggie, named after a needlepoint stitch and replicated the look. It looked like about the most complicated pattern I'd seen so far, but everyone loudly assured me it wasn't.
'The hardest thing for this quilt is choosing the right fabrics,' Bernie told me.
'And putting them together in the right order,' Susanne added.
'Still,' I hesitated. 'It looks like you have to be precise.'
'That just comes from experience.'
I walked over and took the quilt top in my hand. A red square caught my eye. In the first strip it was near the middle but its position moved up and down on each succeeding strip across the quilt. It was quite a beautiful effect until I got to the last three strips. There two red squares were next to each other.
'Is this on purpose?' I asked, as I pointed to the red squares.
Natalie grabbed the quilt. 'Damn,' she said. 'I can't believe I missed that.'
The other women circled around. 'You can fix that easily,' Maggie reassured her. 'You just have to unsew the last bit.'
'Unsew?' I asked.
'That's our way of saying rip up the part you got wrong and sew it back together,' my grandmother told me. Natalie grunted at the thought.
'I thought if something didn't work, you threw it out,' I said. 'UFOs, you called them, right?'
'That's only if you don't like it,' Carrie spoke up. 'If you make something and realize that the design isn't working or the fabrics are wrong, something that can't be fixed.'
'If you like it, if you just made a mistake, then you do whatever it takes to fix it,' Natalie sighed. 'No matter how depressing that is.' She looked down at her quilt, fingering the mistake in her sewing that put the two red squares next to each other.
'But how do you know when to give up and when to repair?' I asked. 'It seems like a lot of work when you could just move on to something else.'
'It is a lot of work,' Natalie said. Maggie put an arm around her.
'That's the tricky part,' Bernie acknowledged. 'When you put a lot of work into something and then realize that you've made a mistake, or something isn't working, you can get so frustrated that you want to throw it away. What I do is give myself some time.'
'That's right,' Nancy agreed. 'I put it away for a little while, maybe a few days or a week, then I look at it with fresh eyes.'
My grandmother shifted on her chair. 'The thing is, Nell, if you decide that something isn't worth the effort, then you have to let it go. But if you decide that it is, then you have to do whatever is necessary to make it work.'
I nodded. The metaphor wasn't lost on me.
An hour later, as the discussion turned to the quilt we were making for Tom, I left the room for the kitchen. My grandmother had asked me to put together gift bags of fat quarters of fabric as a thank-you for all the pies, cakes, casseroles, and brownies the quilt club had been bringing us.
'Well, hello there,' Susanne said cheerily as she walked into the kitchen with an empty coffee mug.
'We're out of coffee,' I said. 'It will take a minute for me to make some more.'
'How about tea?' I put the kettle on and Susanne leaned against the kitchen counter, watching me fill the bags. 'How are things going at the shop?'
'Tom's doing a great job. He may be finished before you're done with the quilt.'
'Not a chance.' She held up several finished blocks. They were shades of purples, blues and reds. They looked pretty, but I couldn't figure out what they would look like once they were sewn together. 'Natalie told me about what you said. About the baby. It's a big relief.'
'I'm glad.'
'And it means that Jesse can leave Natalie alone about this Marc thing.'
'Yes, hopefully.' I didn't want to say anything about a possible new motive, so instead I was a little out of line. 'But Marc was still harassing Natalie. She still had a motive.' I swallowed hard. 'So did you.'
Susanne smiled widely and warmly. 'I certainly did. I would have happily killed that SOB if I'd had the courage.'
I nodded. 'Look, for what it's worth, I don't think Jesse would try to railroad Natalie into a murder charge just because she bailed on a friendship with his wife.'
'Is that what he's telling you?'
'He isn't telling me anything.'
'Well, then, you should ask him,' she said.
'I find that he's better at listening than talking.'
She laughed. 'He is a man with many secrets,' she said.
