Quilting Mystery: Knot In My Backyard Part 28

"The councilman used his influence to bypa.s.s the permit process. It wasn't hard to do. The head of Building and Safety has a kid in Beaumont. There is the possibility, though, that because the stadium was built illegally, the school will be forced to tear it down and restore the land to open s.p.a.ce. The fraud division is working on that right now. As far as we're concerned, Dax Martin's killer has been caught and our job is over."

Lucy said, "That would make a lot of people around this neighborhood awfully happy, wouldn't it, Martha?"

I thought about the people who were still homeless. "It's a beginning." Then I asked Beavers, "What was the deal with Noah Kaplan and Diane Davis?"

"Kaplan didn't do anything worse than leak information about the investigation. He had no clue he was dealing with the killer. He just thought he was talking to his old school friend. The captain gave him a warning and a lecture about poor judgment."

Through the fog enveloping my brain, I remembered something. "I think you should know your partner told Diane Davis you were a 'stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'"

Arlo shrugged. "Was that before or after he was pulled from the case for leaking information to the killer?"

I giggled. Happy place.

"The US Attorney's Office is all over the misappropriation of public funds and the mismanagement of public resources by the Army Corps of Engineers. The commanding officer of the Los Angeles office, Colonel Trane, has already been replaced. Between the City of Los Angeles and the Feds, there are enough crimes and malfeasance to keep the prosecutors busy for the next decade."

My eyes got heavier and Beavers's voice receded into the distance until it was only a droning sound and then nothing. I floated in sweet oblivion for the next few hours.

Lucy gently touched my shoulder, waking me at seven. "Come on, Martha. Time to eat some of that nice soup Yossi brought."

I opened my eyes and found the room filled with bouquets of flowers. I turned to Lucy in amazement. "Where'd these come from?"

She smiled. "Your friends and neighbors. I guess Sonia got the word out."

Good old Sonia. The ATT and CNN of our community.

I stretched my stiff body and walked into the kitchen, where a steaming matzo ball the size of New York sat in a bowl of savory chicken soup. When she opened the refrigerator to pull out the loaf of rye bread, the shelves were filled with covered ca.s.seroles. The countertops all around me were laden with plates of brownies, homemade cupcakes, and chocolate chip cookies.

I looked at her. "Really? These all arrived when I was sleeping?"

She smiled. "I had to put a sign on the door that said, 'Please knock softly. Do not ring bell.' People are grateful, Martha."

The following day, Sat.u.r.day, Ed threw a party and asked Sonia to get the word out and invite all the neighbors. Two folding banquet tables stood under the mulberry tree in Ed's front yard topped with barbequed burgers and hot dogs. I insisted on donating all the food everyone had so generously given me.

People arrived with their folding chairs, tables, and umbrellas; the lawn and sidewalk in front of Ed's house and three of his nearest neighbors were filled with dozens of chatting adults and playful children. The teenagers sat in the primo spot on Ed's roof underneath the mulberry branches, while Parker told them the story of how his quick thinking saved my life.

Ed thanked everyone for showing up and gave a little speech about friendship, neighborhood, and community. He asked me if I wanted to say a few words.

Flanked by my friends Lucy and Birdie, I praised Tony, Sonia, and the Eyes of Encino. I thanked everyone for their flowers and food. Per Lucy's insistence, Crusher stayed his distance, although he watched my every move.

A cheer went up from the crowd when Simon Aiken announced his law firm would sue the Army Corps of Engineers and the Beaumont School pro bono to remove the baseball stadium and restore the wildlife reserve on behalf of the community.

Finally Crusher walked over to where Tony sat on his Chair-A-Go-Go to make him an honorary Valley Eagle. He presented Tony with a new battery for his scooter and a black leather vest with VE painted on the back in purple letters. Tony got the biggest cheer of all when he put on the vest and stuck out his scrawny arm to b.u.mp fists with all the other Eagles.

After another twenty minutes, I walked back to my house with Lucy and Birdie. My poor Corolla was gone from the driveway, and all the broken gla.s.s had been swept away. A loaner BMW from Lucy's husband, Ray, sat waiting for me to use.

Back inside, Birdie made a pot of tea while Lucy put fresh linens in Quincy's room, started a load of laundry, and packed up her things to go home.

"You sure you're going to be okay by yourself now? Those pain pills are rather strong."

"Yeah. The pain isn't so bad now. I'm done with the pills. Besides, I need to be functional. Tomorrow's Sunday and Quincy's coming home."

After they left, I carried one of the flower arrangements into Quincy's room. Then I ran my hand slowly over the b.u.mpy texture of the Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt on top of the bed. My little girl was coming home for a visit after a long time away. While she was here, she'd get all my attention. The other thing-my Beavers/Crusher dilemma-would just have to wait for another day.

I hung some fresh towels in the bathroom and spotted the scale on the floor. Two weeks had pa.s.sed since I joined Weight Watchers. After all the running around, skipped meals, and physical activity, my jeans felt a lot looser. I stepped on the scale and smiled when I saw the numbers. Tomorrow Charlissa would give me a gold star.

Sometime during the middle of the night, I awoke to the smell of smoke. We were in the height of the fire season in Southern California, and the mountains ringing the San Fernando Valley were covered in dry forest and chaparral, the perfect fuel for out-of-control brush fires. The Santa Ana winds coming from the northeast had been responsible for the recent heat wave and were notorious for fanning small brush fires into conflagrations that could burn for days, consuming thousands of acres. I was afraid the smoke meant one of those fires was close by.

As I got out of bed and put on my robe, the guttering of a motorcycle receded into the distance. I opened the front door and looked to the south for signs of fire: a pink light in the night sky or a corona of flames on a mountain ridge. Even though the smell of smoke was strong, I saw nothing unusual. The winds had died down and all of Encino seemed to be sleeping peacefully. So I turned around and went through the house to the back door to see if the fire was burning in the north.

As soon as I opened the back door, flickering light came from the direction of the baseball stadium. I rushed outside in my bare feet to get a better look. At the edge of the field, the maroon-and-gold two-story monstrosity-the place where Dax Martin was king, the place where he and Diane carried on their affair-was in flames. Fortunately, because the air was still, our houses were in no immediate danger from the fire spreading. Fire House Eighty-Three was just a few blocks away. If I called right away, it was possible they could save the building.

I walked back in my house, put on some water, and placed a bag of Taylor's Scottish Breakfast Tea in a cup. All was quiet as I waited for the water to boil. After about five minutes, I brewed the tea, stirred in some milk and sugar, and sat on the sofa to enjoy a slow, satisfying cup. Then I picked up the phone and dialed 911.

Please turn the page for a quilting tip.

from Mary Marks!.

CHOOSING A.

NEEDLE AND.

THREAD.

You've pieced the top of your quilt and made a "sandwich" by laying it over a backing with a layer of batting (wadding, if you're British) in between. Now it's time to st.i.tch the three layers together. What do you do?

First you choose the right needle. Needles come in different shapes and sizes. The shapes are determined by what you're going to use them for: embroidery, applique, basting, or quilting, to name a few. The sizes are numbered. (Note: the larger the number, the smaller the needle.) "Betweens" are the preferred needle for quilting. A size twelve between is the shortest at one inch. I prefer to use the hybrid size eleven, which has the short length of the twelve but the bigger eye of the ten. (Larger eyes are easier to thread.) Why choose the shortest needle? Small needles make small st.i.tches, and the mark of a skillful quilter is in her small, even st.i.tches.

Now you're ready to choose the right thread. Avoid thread made with polyester. Polyester is a hard synthetic fiber that will eventually saw through the soft cotton fibers of your quilt. Choose an all-cotton thread instead.

Threads are also numbered; the smaller the number, the heavier the thread. Regular cotton sewing thread has a weight of fifty, and is more easily broken. For durable quilting st.i.tches, I use a quilting weight thread, which is around thirty.

In the olden days, women used to run their thread through beeswax to prevent it from tangling while they st.i.tched. The drawback of using beeswax is that it can deposit a yellow residue on your quilt. Nowadays some quilting thread comes already coated with a glace finish, which accomplishes the same thing without leaving a residue.

In today's world, hand st.i.tching has been largely replaced by quilting machines. But in times past, women used to compete with each other to be the best quilter, aiming at twenty st.i.tches to the inch. I find that seven to ten st.i.tches to the inch, evenly s.p.a.ced, produce a stunning quilt.

With the right tools and lots of practice, you can produce a hand-quilted work of art that will be treasured for years to come.

Please turn the page for an exciting sneak peek of.

Mary Marks's next Quilting Mystery.

GONE BUT KNOT FORGOTTEN,.

coming soon from Kensington Publishing!.

CHAPTER 1.

So far, the morning mail had only yielded credit card invitations, an interesting flyer for yoga cla.s.ses and-now that I was a member of AARP-another postcard advertising the Neptune Society. I picked up a white number ten envelope, glanced at the unfamiliar return address, and almost tossed it in the junk pile, but something stopped me.

The envelope looked personal. First, it was addressed to Martha Rivka Rose, my full legal name. I never used my middle name, even on my checks, credit cards, or driver's license. Second, I realized the postmark was not one of those presorted things, a sure giveaway of a ma.s.s mailing. The law offices of Abernathy, Porter & Salinger of Los Angeles, California, had paid full price for the stamp.

I reached for the white plastic letter opener, a prize I received from the UCLA Department of Internal Medicine after having my first colonoscopy. The envelope tore neatly along the top fold, and I pulled out a one-page letter: Dear Ms. Rose: We regret to inform you of the death of Mrs. Harriet Gordon Oliver. You have been named the executor of her estate. Please contact me personally at your earliest convenience to initiate the process of probating her will.

Very truly yours, Deacon "Deke" Abernathy, Esq.

Harriet was dead? I hadn't heard from her in over twenty years. We had been best friends in high school, but we had lost touch when she moved to Rhode Island for an Ivy League education at Brown and I lived at home and attended UCLA. One of the last times I saw Harriet was at our fifteenth high school reunion in the late 1980s. She had moved back to Los Angeles with her husband, Nathan Oliver, a fellow Brown graduate, and I had married Aaron Rose, a local boy finishing his psychiatric residency at LA County Hospital.

Since Harriet and I lived in Brentwood, a tony part of the west side, we met a few times for lunch after that. Harriet and her East Coast husband collected wine and art; Aaron and I focused on raising our three-year-old daughter and paying the mortgage on our much smaller home. Eventually even the lunches stopped. By the time I divorced Aaron and relocated to a not-so-tony part of Encino in the San Fernando Valley, Harriet and I had long since lost touch.

Now she was gone at age fifty-five. What had taken her so soon? Why hadn't she made her husband executor? What about children? The more I thought about the letter, the more questions I had.

The telephone number Deacon Abernathy gave me must have been his cell phone because he answered it himself. "Deke here."

"Mr. Abernathy? My name is Martha Rose and I just received your letter about Harriet Oliver."

"Oh, right. Thanks for calling, Ms. Rose. We have some details to go over, including Mrs. Oliver's funeral instructions. How soon can you come to my office?"

"Wait a minute. Please slow down. When did Harriet die? How did she die?"

"I'm sorry. Got ahead of myself. Has it been a while since you spoke to Mrs. Oliver?"

"Decades, actually."

"That explains the problem we had in locating you. The last address she had for you was in Brentwood. Under the circ.u.mstances, I guess I'm not surprised."

"What do you mean, 'circ.u.mstances'? What's going on?"

"There's no delicate way to say this, Ms. Rose. Your friend Mrs. Oliver's body was discovered in her home about three weeks ago. The coroner estimated she had been dead for at least ten months."

I was glad I was already sitting down. My ears started ringing and a black circle closed out my peripheral vision. I saw horrible pictures of desiccated corpses and skulls with gaping jaws. "Ten months? Didn't she have family? What about her husband?"

"It's too complicated to explain over the phone. The thing is, Mrs. Oliver hasn't been buried yet. We had to wait until we located the executor to make certain, ah, decisions. So you see, Ms. Rose, the sooner you get here, the sooner we can, ah, lay her to rest."

Poor Harriet. How was it that n.o.body missed her? She had been such a vibrant and pretty teenager with long black hair that she ironed straight every morning before school. During our sleepovers, we would whisper about our plans for college, our hopes for the future, and which girls at school were having s.e.x. When she left for Brown, we hugged and cried and promised to write letters every day. But time and distance eventually slowed our friendship. With the exception of our brief reunion in Brentwood, we moved into completely separate lives.

I shuddered at the thought of her body lying unattended for ten months. It really bothered me that n.o.body had missed her. Didn't the neighbors notice any bad odors? I agreed to meet the attorney at the Westwood office of Abernathy, Porter & Salinger later that afternoon.

After ending my conversation with Deacon Abernathy, I gave my shoulder-length gray curls a once-over with a wide-toothed comb. Then I stuffed my Jacob's Ladder quilt, my sewing kit, and an emergency package of M&M'S into my large red tote bag and headed for my best friend Lucy Mondello's house. Today was Tuesday, and I never missed our weekly quilting group. I drove in a daze, trying to make sense of the shocking news about Harriet's death. What a horrendous way to go-alone and evidently forgotten.

I drove across Ventura Boulevard and wound around a couple of side streets before pulling up in front of Lucy's house. The Boulevard was a natural dividing line between cla.s.ses in Encino, one of the many small communities in the San Fernando Valley. Small homes, condos, and apartment buildings were located on the valley floor north of the boulevard. That's where I lived, in a tract of medium-priced midcentury homes. Houses south of the Boulevard-especially those built in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains-tended to be large, custom-built, and tres expensive. Lucy lived somewhere in between: south of the Boulevard, but not in the hills; gracious home, but not a McMansion.

Lucy smiled and greeted me as I pushed open the front door. "Hey, girlfriend. You're a little late. Everything okay?"

I marveled at how perfectly put together my tall friend Lucy was. She was famous for always dressing with a theme. Today she wore canary-yellow twill slacks, a yellow-and-white long-sleeved T-shirt, and dangly citrine earrings. Her bright orange hair looked freshly colored; her eyebrows were perfectly drawn; her lips were painted a soft coral. Even at sixty-something, Lucy could have been a model. I, on the other hand, wore my usual size-sixteen stretch denim jeans and T-shirt straining under my ample bosom.

"I just had to deal with a last-minute phone call. Give me a minute and I'll tell you all about it." I settled down in one of the cozy blue overstuffed chairs in Lucy's casual living room. Every few years, she changed the decor in her home as easily as she changed her daily outfits. This latest version evoked an elegant cabin located in some snowy resort: furniture upholstered in richly colored woolen fabrics, Navajo and cowhide rugs on wide-planked wooden floors, and a coffee table made of polished burled tree roots. Above the fireplace hung a reproduction of a mainly yellow Remington painting of longhorn cattle. The room literally screamed Wyoming, where both Lucy and her husband, Ray, were born and raised.

"Was it an upsetting call? You look a bit peaky, dear." That was Birdie Watson, Lucy's across-the-street neighbor and the third member of our little sewing circle.

I fitted my multicolored Jacob's Ladder quilt in a fourteen-inch wooden hoop. The Jacob's Ladder block featured lots of little squares and larger triangles of contrasting light and dark materials. The more fabrics, the more interesting the quilt, and this one had dozens of different cotton prints. I threaded a needle with red quilting thread and looked at my friends.

"I got a letter from an attorney in LA this morning asking me to call him." I told them about Harriet's death and my surprise at being named executor of her will after such a long estrangement. "The creepy thing is, she was dead for more than ten months before her body was discovered."

"How awful!" Birdie, naturally predisposed to worry about people, frowned and twisted the end of her long white braid. Birdie was in her seventies and looked like Mother Earth. She always wore the same thing: white T-shirt (short sleeves in summer, long sleeves in winter), denim overalls, and Birkenstock sandals (with socks) to accommodate her arthritic knees.

Lucy handed me a cup of coffee with milk. "You must have been close, for her to make you executor. Yet, I don't think I ever heard you mention her name before."

"We were best friends growing up." I told them how our teenage friendship didn't survive our adult lifestyles. "After I moved to Encino, my West LA friends forgot about me, including Harriet."

Lucy shook her head. "Well, obviously, she didn't forget about you. Do you know what happened to the husband?"

"I really don't know any details. I have to see the lawyer this afternoon in order to get poor Harriet buried. The lawyer said he'd explain everything then."

Birdie tilted her head. "So you've decided to go through with becoming the executor? Without knowing what's involved?"

How could I say this without sounding morbid? "Let's just say I want to do one last favor for an old friend."

And I'm curious.

Lucy narrowed her eyes. "Uh-oh. Please tell me you're not going to get involved in another one of those again."

Lucy's voice was more than a tad disapproving as she alluded to my recent penchant for discovering dead bodies and getting sucked into murder investigations. And both times the killers came after me.

"This is way different, Lucy. First of all, the attorney never said we were talking about murder here. Second of all, being the executor of someone's estate only involves signing papers and selling stuff. There's nothing to worry about. What could be more straightforward?"

My redheaded friend shivered slightly. "You know, Martha, I'm getting a strong feeling about this."

Lucy swore she had ESP and could tell when something bad was going to happen. In the past, I dismissed her feelings as some kind of displaced anxiety. But if I were completely honest, I'd have to admit that in the last several months her warnings turned out to be real. Still, the lawyer gave no indication that poor Harriet's death was anything more than tragically premature.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Lucy. Don't you think I've learned my lesson? Don't you think I'd run straight to the police at the first sign of something suspicious?"