The Name of the Quilt

Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder

Carolyn McPherson

Published by Carolyn McPherson at Smashwords

Copyright 2010, Carolyn McPherson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is also available in print at Amazon.com.

* * * * *

With special thanks to redheaded heartthrob Dr. Jay Alan Siegel, formerly of the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice, now Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Director of the Forensic and Investigative Sciences Program at   Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, who (as you will see) gave me countless bits of excellent advice.

1/ The Name of the Quilt

Lafayette Orange Peel started it.

It was Ramona's first visit to our quilt group, and she wanted to know how the patchwork pattern called Lafayette Orange Peel got its name. Ramona is something unusual—one of the first women lawyers in our state—and she asks her fair share of questions. But nicely. I met her at a coffee for the new Methodist minister. Now we were seated around Karen's quilting frame.

Without skipping a stitch of their feathered circles, Arden and Karen each took a stab at it. I pride myself on being the definitive font of all quilt knowledge, so after they'd stumbled around a bit I pronounced that Lafayette Orange Peel commemorates a fête given here in America for French general Lafayette during the Revolution, and a young lady taking away a souvenir orange, which she peeled.

Eye-rolling and skeptical mutterings from the other two, naturally. "That's interesting," Ramona said, tapping the work under our hands. "And this?" We had Karen's gorgeous Lone Star (in pinks and blues) on the frame, and had shown Ramona how to quilt. She was slow but meticulous—little tiny stitches.

Karen had been a bit nervous about letting a novice work on her quilt but, as I reminded her, you can always pick out bad work later. Besides, anyone's quilting would be better than Sheila's quilting; thank heaven she hardly ever shows up any more. Sheila has an unceasing cold, and hacks and sputters and blows her nose damply over your masterpiece, so that a final rinse through a double dose of Lysol definitely seems indicated before you can decently consider placing your latest creation on the bed of anyone whose health and safety you value.

But Ramona was very good for a beginner. I watched as her neatly manicured fingers carefully, carefully rocked her needle through a section of the border.

"Tell me more about these names," she said during our break. I was making my way through a number of Karen's excellent Tollhouse cookies. "This fascinates me."

"Me, too," I said. It was nice to be talking about something besides politics for a change. I was tired of re-hashing the Presidential Campaign of 1956 and the gloomy prognostications that Dwight Eisenhower was going to trounce Adlai Stevenson—for the second time.

"Well," I said, "every quilt patch has a name. Sometimes the names are geographic or historical references. Like Missouri Puzzle or 54-40 or Fight. Sometimes they refer to a person, like Little Giant, the nickname for Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln's senatorial opponent in 1858. Sometimes the design itself suggests the name, like Rail Fence or Storm at Sea. Or biblical references, like Walls of Jericho or Rose of Sharon or Jacob's Ladder. People's names: Tail of Benjamin's Kite, Sunbonnet Sue."

She seemed to be following this.

"It's more complicated than it should be, because one patchwork design can have several names. It's almost as if people used a pattern in Ohio, carried it out west with them, and renamed it in honor of settling in Idaho, for example. Though I can't think of a block named for Idaho. . . ."

I was dropping chocolate chips all over Karen's carpet, which is, fortunately, deep blue. Ramona wasn't eating cookies, which may account for how she stays so outrageously slim.

"Now the Log Cabin name," I continued, "is a bit different. You've probably guessed it's a very historic pattern, and there are actually dozens of different blocks all with that same name. I've got a whole book that's only Log Cabin patterns. I'll bring it sometime."

"I'd like to see it," she said.

Karen tiptoed down the hallway to make sure her two young children were sleeping soundly, then returned and called us back to the quilting frame. She had hopes of finishing the quilt in her lifetime.

Once we'd gotten ourselves settled, Ramona asked me more. She's soft-spoken and seems a bit shy—kind of peers at you from under a shingle of smooth dark hair. Certainly it didn't feel like I was being cross-examined.

Arden and Karen, meanwhile, were discussing the presidential elections. Arden was one of those who was sure Eisenhower was going to beat Stevenson. As a good Democrat I hated to admit it, but I had a queasy feeling she was right. Among other things, Stevenson had been photographed recently with a hole in the sole of his shoe, and that hole had been the subject of considerable fun-making in the newspapers. Hard to imagine a day when our nation will be seized by a holey clothing fad.

"One of my favorite things," I said, after trimming off a thread, "is to tell a story using the names of quilt blocks. For my in-laws' thirtieth wedding anniversary, I made a wall hanging five blocks across by three down. As you read it from left to right, it tells the story of their life together. The abridged story, anyway."

Even though I'm now divorced, I'm still on good terms with my former in-laws, and I love talking about their Anniversary Quilt. Arden and Karen moved on to recent reproductive dramas in Arden's fish tank. Karen and Arden knew the story of the Anniversary Quilt. Had quilted on it, in fact. I'd used turquoise calicos to match my mother-in-law's refrigerator and stove, and I, at least, had liked it.

"The first block of the anniversary quilt," I said, "is Kentucky Chain, because my father-in-law was born in Kentucky. Then Dutch Rose: her ancestors were Dutch. They met in Michigan, so next comes a block called Michigan Star."

Here I paused for dramatic effect. "Here's where a little imagination was required. When my in-laws first met, she was studying nursing, so I included a block called Red Cross—as a nurse myself I know several blocks by that name. But my father-in-law was studying physics. In fact, his field of specialization was ceramic physics: glass, porcelain, and the ceramic insulators on spark plugs."

Ramona's brow furrowed; she could see I'd been faced with a terrific quilt-making obstacle in trying to find a quilt block with a name related to physics.

"So what did you do? Take out the Red Cross?"

"Oh, no," I said. "I don't give up that easily! First, I researched physics vocabulary. I can say unequivocally there are no patchwork patterns named Spectrum, E=mc2, Newton's First Law—or anything even close.

"Then I read about ceramics and pottery-making for a while, thinking I'd cobble together my own design—name it something like Fine Bone China or Hot Day at the Kiln. And then I discovered," I said with a triumphant flourish of my arm that knocked down the gooseneck lamp leaning over my shoulder, "a traditional, real block called Broken Dishes!"

She looked blank.

"You know. Ceramics? Porcelain? Broken Dishes?"

She got it. "Clever," she said.

* * * * *

The following week we met again at Karen's. When I peered at last week's work I noticed Karen had left in Ramona's stitches and picked out mine. Every once in a while Karen has an unfortunate flare-up of perfectionism.

Ramona arrived carrying a large bundle. "Do you have time to look at something?" she said. We did, of course.

She laid it on the floor. We got down on our hands and knees and cautiously helped her open it up. It was an old, old quilt.

Musty—thank goodness Sheila of the Perpetual Kleenex wasn't there. Fragile. Threadbare in some places and rotten right through to the batt in others. Predominantly deep blue and ivory, with an errant pink here and there. Hard to tell if that pink started life as pink or had faded from something else.

We love old quilts. For several minutes we knelt silently and just admired. Arden patted the corner. Karen smoothed the edge. I peered at the closest stitches. Finally, we got up.

"Tell us about this," Karen said.

"It was made by my Great Aunt Lucy, my grandmother's older sister. Aunt Lucy gave this to Grandma on her—Lucy's—deathbed. Literally. As Grandma tells it, the day Aunt Lucy died she couldn't talk, but moaned and babbled fitfully. Finally Grandma understood that Lucy wanted Grandma to take the quilt right off the bed, which didn't seem right, but Grandma did it anyway. And Lucy died a few minutes later."

"Interesting," I said, not really meaning it.

"Afterward there was a quarrel over the quilt. Lucy's other sister demanded it be given to her. But Grandma, who's usually a marshmallow and gives in to everyone, was resolute: the quilt was hers now. And when I told Grandma I'm doing a little quilting, she was delighted and said, ‘I'd be so happy to give you your Great Aunt Lucy's Last Quilt.'"

Karen said reverently, "Your grandmother wanted to find someone who would appreciate what a treasure this is."

"Beautiful," said Arden.

"So what should I do with this?" Ramona asked. "Wash it, I suppose? It's terribly dirty."

The three of us gasped in simultaneous horror, and I charged in with my authoritative opinion. "A quilt this old, with so many damaged spots, would certainly disintegrate if you washed it!"

Ramona looked like we'd slapped her, and I felt guilty for having jumped all over her. Perhaps I could redeem the situation with my own tale of personal quilt tragedy.

"Don't feel bad about your suggestion," I said. "It's the logical-sounding thing to do. When I was married, my mother gave us a gorgeous Double Wedding Ring that had been wedding present to her twenty-five years before. At the time, I didn't know anything about old quilts, so I gleefully tossed it in my brand new washer—no old tub and wringer for me! I was picking Q-Tip-sized pieces of that poor quilt—may it rest in peace—out of my Maytag for days. I guess," I said, sighing from the burden of all the quilting sins I've committed in my lifetime, "if you learn from your mistakes, I've probably learned the most."

"Oh, no more than the rest of us," Arden said kindly. "Remember the forest green border I forgot to pre-shrink?"

I did remember. It wasn't that it shrank later, actually. It was that it bled a horrid bile color into the rest of the quilt, turning her appliquéd tangerine dahlias into, well, lumps of manure is the kindest way to describe them.

"So what should I do?" Ramona asked. This was the cue for a friendly argument between Karen, of the Bring-It-Out-Only-on-Special-Occasions School, and Arden, whose motto is "If you haven't used it for five years, toss it." (Arden is very practical and turned her wedding dress into curtains for her bathroom.)

So we gave Ramona a variety of conflicting suggestions she might pursue, depending on whether or not she was willing to take up a life dedicated to museum preservation standards. We, the advice-givers, could agree on one thing: "Wrap it in a clean sheet and let it breathe."

We got back down on our knees and began folding up the quilt, picking new places for the creases to give the old lines a rest. "Oh," said Ramona. "I forgot to ask. What's the name of my quilt?"

That took me aback. Me, the self-appointed Quilt Nomenclature Queen. I hadn't the foggiest. Neither did Arden or Karen. While we finished the folding, we hemmed and hawed a bit. Someone's knees cracked as we stood up.

"One of the Ohio Stars?" Karen ventured.

"Not one I recognize," said Arden.

Karen has a few quilting books. I rummaged though her bookshelf, located her copy of 100 Quilt Patterns, and leafed through the "Stars" section. 100 Quilt Patterns is not the definitive resource, but it pictures one hundred common patterns, and Ramona's quilt certainly wasn't a common Ohio Star, Texas Star or Missouri Star.

Mildly frustrated, we took our places at the quilting frame, and resumed where we'd left off the week before. This quilt was for Karen's niece, graduating from Rice University in Texas—hence the Lone Star pattern.

Still, as I told Ramona when I dropped by her bungalow later that week, it bothered me I couldn't put a name to her quilt. I'd been poring over my own references, including my favorite, 1001 Quilt Blocks, when I suddenly realized I couldn't remember exactly what her quilt looked like. Could I take another peek?

We spread it out on her dining room table. I searched the corners and borders for embroidered initials, a signature, an inscription or a date. Nothing. Then I turned my attention to the quilting. Under the bright dining room light it was easy to see that Great Aunt Lucy was failing when she finished this quilt. The stitches were close and uniform at the center, where she'd begun, but were straggly and irregular and even missed spots as she'd moved toward the edges. The quilted feathered circle near one corner looked more like a feathered pear.

"Oh my," I sighed. There's something touching about an old quilt. Lucy was long gone, but she'd left a lovely memorial—and a glimpse of an unhappy ending. Thinking of the last, uneven stitches, I asked, "Was she sick for a spell?"

"Yes. The illness I told you about."

"Illness?"

"Didn't I tell you? Great Aunt Lucy developed some sort of slow, wasting illness and died. She was quite young."

This was news. I'd pictured Aunt Lucy as ancient and decrepit, sitting in her rocking chair, quilting away her final hours.

Ramona ran her hand over the edge of the quilt. "Great Aunt Lucy and her husband lived in a sod house somewhere on the Kansas plains. With their two children and her sister, my other great aunt. My Grandma went out to visit and found Lucy terribly ill. Lucy died soon afterward, giving Grandma the quilt just moments before she died."

Sod houses. I knew about them. Some of those early settlers traveled west and, while trying to establish their farms, built themselves horrid, dank hovels of the only building material available in abundance: pieces of sod, stacked to make walls.

I'd read the journal of one of those women who lived in a sod house. She'd led the dreariest, most miserable life, smack dab in the middle of nowhere, her babies dying one after another, with no end in sight to the dreariness or the misery or the dying. In her journal, that woman wrote, "Here on the prairie, this wintery desert, the quilt I make is the only color in my life. It keeps me from going mad."

I wondered. "Did Great Aunt Lucy keep a journal or diary? It would be fascinating."

She shrugged. "I'm not even sure she could read or write. Everything I know about her I learned from Grandma."

There was a story here; I could feel it. I had to meet Ramona's grandma.

"It was dreadful," Grandma said. She looked like a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover: tiny, pink, ninety-ish and as sharp as one of my needles. We were sitting at her kitchen table covered with yellow checked oilcloth. She'd set out a plate of stale graham crackers; only I was eating them. "In those days people left the East to homestead, and most times never came back. I was young and adventuresome—they called me wild—and I took off on my own to see Lucy.

"I was so upset by what I saw! A dreadful way to live! A worse way to die! There weren't any of these wonder medicines we have now, like penicillin. A doctor from miles away looked in, but he was no use. And by the time I arrived it was far, far too late. Lucy just grew grayer and thinner and more wasted after I got there, and soon after that, she passed on."

I tried to think of something to make the picture less bleak. "Your other sister was there, though. I bet she cheered Lucy up."

Grandma's lips drew into a tight knot.

Ramona, filling in the blank, said, "Grandma and Aunt Ann were never on good terms. And after Lucy died, Ann married Lucy's husband."

"Ann?" I hadn't heard about anybody named Ann before.

"There were three of us," Grandma explained. "Lucy, Ann and me. I was the baby of the family. Ann nursed Lucy through her illness, fixed her meals, cleaned up as best she could. You know—the unpleasantness. But I didn't approve of Ann's unkindness to the children, and I did NOT approve of them marrying so soon after our sister's passing." Her dentures clacked emphatically. "Ann wasn't, well, a happy person. Had dreadful notions." Her hands shook as she passed them over the folds of her skirt.

I was wondering how you defined unpleasantness when you lived in a sod house. Buffalo in the kitchen? Freezing temperatures and heat waves? Starvation? TB? Diarrhea? Typhoid and other gastrointestinal infections—"the nasties," one of my nursing professors used to call them—were everywhere. Though with typhoid, cholera, salmonella and primitive sanitation, the chances were excellent the others would have been sick to some degree, too. I asked.

"No," she said, "only Lucy was sick. Vomiting, diarrhea. She could hardly even swallow. Her throat was so tight she could barely eat the broth Ann made her. Poor, poor thing." She shook her head sadly.

Ramona was pursuing a different tack. "You mentioned 'Ann's notions,' Grandma. Such as?"

Grandma looked pretty severe for someone her granddaughter had described as "a marshmallow." "She wouldn't stop wearing that red dress!"

"Red dress?" Ramona and I said together.

"It was a saloonkeeper's dress," she said. "A barmaid's dress. Scarlet with black fringe and jet beads, cut low in front." Here she patted her chest, indicating where the fringe and beads would have been. "A dress no decent woman would wear! And Ann washed in it and cooked in it and slept in it until Lucy died. And the day Lucy died, Ann burned it." She rose painfully from the table.

"Do I have this right?" I said, my mouth full of crackers. "Your sister Ann wore this inappropriate dress while she kept house? And the day Lucy dies, Ann burns the dress?

Ann. Ann. Something about Ann.

"Grandma," I said, experiencing an unusual lapse in my ordinarily impeccable manners, and swallowing hard to get rid of the crackers, "was Ann out there with Lucy and her husband for a long time?"

"Went with them to Kansas, actually. Not a wise choice—there'd always been strife between my sisters. It was a year later that Lucy died."

I bet there was strife: there's actually a quilt pattern named Kansas Trouble. If there hadn't been discord before the westward trek, there surely would be after. Two women, one man, children, chickens, maybe pigs or goats, cooped up in their no-room hovel. Greased paper windows. No indoor plumbing. No privacy. And Lucy had fallen ill, fatally ill as it turned out. I had one further thought. . . .

In those days it was a popular custom to collect locks of the dead person's hair and weave them into a "mourning wreath" to display in the front parlor, or into braids for "mourning jewelry." I have a gold-filled mourning brooch I never wear; it contains some of my great grandmother's beautiful white hair. The brooch itself is little oval box with a clasp on the back, and you can see a minute braid through a tiny glass window in the front. Mourning jewelry was one of those bizarre things the Victorians did.

I asked: did anyone make jewelry from Lucy's hair after she died?

"Why, yes," Grandma said, and went upstairs. After a bit she returned with a tattered necklace box. She took off the top, lifted a sheet of tissue paper, and held it out for us to see. Inside were a heavy gold mourning ring and an intricately woven thing of chestnut brown hair.

"I don't know why I keep these," Grandma said.

"What is this?" I said, pointing to the woven hair. It was about six inches long and an inch wide and as thin as a sheet of paper. Several clumps of hair had broken off the object, whatever it was, and were hiding in the folds of the tissue paper.

"It's a bookmark," said Grandma, looking unhappy. "Ann made a bookmark of Lucy's hair. We sometimes did that in those days." Ramona and I must have looked shocked. "Please take these, Ramona, and do something respectful with them. I don't want them any more."

The idea of making bookmarks of dead relatives' hair was a bit unsettling, but it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for a theory I'd been hatching.

"That's great," I told Ramona as we walked down Grandma's front steps. "Now we have some evidence."

"Evidence?" Ramona gaped at me. For a lawyer, she was surprisingly unfamiliar with the word.

"Hmmm," I said, as we climbed into my rickety gray Studebaker. "I've remembered the name of your quilt. My idea may be farfetched," I said, sure I was actually on the brink of deductive genius, "but listen to this." I explained it to her as we roared the short distance to State College.

"Your great aunts go out west. One man and two women, and one of them is mentally unstable, if the business with the tarty red dress is any indication. Now listen to this. Ann poisons Lucy! Several poisons have symptoms resembling the diseases that were so common then. Diarrhea, vomiting and throat constriction, for example, are all symptoms of arsenic poisoning."

Ramona looked stunned.

"Anyway," I said, veering a bit close to a fire hydrant, "Lucy correctly guesses the cause of her illness—that she's being poisoned—but what can she do? Maybe she believes her husband's in love with Ann. No matter what she knows, how can she escape? Who can she tell?"

"Ah," said Ramona. "That's why you asked about the lock of hair. Can't some poisons can be detected in the hair?"

"Right, in the hair and nails for starters, especially when they're administered over a long enough period of time. So Lucy is dying, and has been dying for a while when your grandma arrives. And though there's no way to keep secrets in that house, Lucy nevertheless manages to finger her killer."

Ramona's jaw dropped. Score one for me: I'd caught her completely off guard. "Really? Who? How?"

We'd reached the State College Chem Lab and found a lucky parking place half a block away. "I'll tell you in a second," I said, fervently hoping my buddy Jay Allen was in. We hurried to the lab in question, and up two flights of stairs.

Besides being a chemistry professor, Jay does forensic work and has testified in some newsworthy national criminal trials. Indeed, he was in, supervising a couple of bored-looking freshmen who appeared to be watching beakers of liquid come to a boil.

Jay is tall and very handsome, with stunning red hair and a red beard. Much as I wanted to, I couldn't waste time flirting with him now. I was a woman with a mission. "Could you check this hair for arsenic poisoning?" I asked him, pointing to the hair crumbs tucked in the tissue paper. "It's important."

Jay had the audacity to glare at me suspiciously. "Now?" he said. "What is this? We're not tampering with evidence of a crime here, are we?"

"How could you even THINK such a thing?" I said, giving him my most withering look. "Can you can test for arsenic using this hair or not?"

He sighed, nodded yes, and led us to his tiny work space in the back of the lab. It was crammed with complicated arrangements of bent glass tubing and Erlenmeyer flasks. "Atomic absorption spectroscopy's what's needed," he said. "I'll be destroying this bit," he said, pulling one of the little hair clumps out of the box with a pair of tweezers. "Is that okay?"

Ramona nodded yes.

The test took longer than I expected. He had to dissolve the hair in acid, burn it in a flame, and look at the light given off through a spectroscope. I quickly grew bored with this and wandered back out into the lab. Ramona followed. There we passed the rest of the time helping the two college students clean up the mess they made when their beakers shattered all over the countertop.

Eventually Jay emerged from his cubbyhole. "Six hundred parts per million," he said.

"Meaning?" I said.

"Chronic arsenic poisoning."

Ramona was genuinely impressed. "How on earth did you figure that out?" she said as we left Jay's lab, the box containing the mourning ring and hair bookmark safely tucked into her purse. "I never had a clue."

I was pleased with myself, so pleased I didn't waste time with a splashy Ed Sullivan buildup. "The clue was the name of the quilt," I said. "The name of the pattern of Lucy's last quilt is Crazy Ann."

2/ Patch As Patch Can

Hi. My name's Barb Hoxsie. As you can tell from the previous (true) story, I'm a quilter. At least that's what I do in my spare time. I teach quilting to beginners, and write a quilting column (for which they pay me a pittance) for Aunt Maggie's Needlework Magazine. You may have seen it, tucked on the magazine rack next to Better Homes and Gardens. I'm also a registered nurse and general busybody.

Some people I've talked to over the years have actually suggested quilting is boring—even a little lowbrow, if you can believe it. Several of my acquaintances (I couldn't possibly consider them friends) have said to me, "Barb, this is the modern age! It's the 50s! Get hep!" But quilting has been anything but boring for me. Heck, I nearly got killed over a quilt. (More about that in a bit.)

Presumably you've gotten this far in this book because quilting interests you, too. Or else someone has left a copy of this book in the doctor's office, and it's the only thing available to read during your interminable wait. (Desperate times drive people to desperate measures.)

Anyway, let me tell you a little bit more about myself, and then I'll get on with the quilting business.

My name is Barb Hoxsie—did I say that before? ("Hoxsie," by the way, rhymes with "boxy.") I live in Spotsburg, Michigan, which is a little spot in the palm of the mitten, as we Michiganders are wont to say. Spotsburg is not far from Hell, Michigan, though Spotsburg is nicer than Hell. (That's an example of typical Spotsburg humor.)

Anyway, I'm forty-one, happily divorced from the jerk-of-the-universe, not bad looking, have two very fine grown sons, and a couple of— Help me here. Boyfriends sounds a bit juvenile, don't you think? Lovers sounds romantic, but may not give you an accurate picture, if the picture it gives you is assignations in romantic French inns over steaming cups of Nestle's Instant. Anyway, I have some intimate men friends. (The devastatingly handsome Jay Allen, mentioned in the last chapter, is not one of them [sigh] because he's married, and I have a thing against breaking up marriages. HOWEVER, should his wife Betsy ever leave him or die, you can be sure I'll be the first through his front door with my casserole and sympathy.)

I've got some great women friends, too, though not in the sense of lust. (You've met Arden, Karen and Ramona already. They're kind and smart and just the types to be stranded in a lifeboat with.) I pride myself on being a good friend, a good visiting nurse, and pretty darn smart about quilts. Not bad at political prognostication, if I do say so myself. As I predicted at the time we were introduced to Ramona's interesting quilt (on which occasion I covered myself in glory solving her great aunt's murder—decades later), Adlai Stevenson was soundly defeated by Dwight Eisenhower. Since then, somebody has actually come up with a patchwork design called Eisenhower Star, but you won't see that pattern in any of my quilts!

Anyway, here's one of the finest columns I ever wrote for Aunt Maggie's Needlework Magazine.

The Ten Commandments of Quilting

[This appeared in the February 1958 issue of Aunt Maggie's]

The launching of Sputnik—the beep heard round the world—last October seems to have been a shock to everyone's system. Now we're rethinking our schools, our science programs, even our guiding philosophical principles. But some things should never change. And among those are the Ten Commandments of Quilting.

I don't want to mislead you. These weren‘t handed to me on tablets of stone. No, these are things I've figured out over the years, and they're a mixed bag of work strategies and rules I've learned for survival. (As I often say, if you learn from your mistakes, I've learned the most.)

1. Always buy a little extra fabric for your project.

Why? Because buying exactly the right amount leaves you no flexibility. And if, as so often happens, you decide to rearrange your fabrics or reverse your colors or make a major motif out of the fabric that was previously just a minor chord—as sure as I'm sitting here at my typewriter, you'll go back to the store and find they're ALL OUT OF EVERY SCRAP OF THE FABRIC YOU NEED TO FINISH YOUR PROJECT!!

I can't tell you the number of quilting students who have come to me sobbing their eyes out, because there is no more of their fabric to be had anywhere in the universe! In fact, more than once not only have the stores been out of that fabric, but there's been a major shift in what manufacturers call "the color story" (a year's prevailing colors and their coordinates), and my poor students haven't been able to find a fabric that even remotely matches. (You know how that goes. Last year everything was tangerine; this year it's maroon.)

Such an experience has left several of my students permanently scarred. (Plus they never finished their bedspreads!)

2. When starting a major project, always make four test blocks first.

The reason for this is evident in Commandment Number 3.

3. If you don't like how your first four quilt blocks look, quit.

Most quilters have at least one project they started and never finished. And why didn't they finish it? Very simple: because they didn't like it. And they kept on cutting and piecing (or perhaps, even more heartbreakingly, cut it all out, and then started piecing), and then discovered it was awful.

People rarely like a project better if they work on it longer. Usually they like it less, and become grumpy to boot. Chalk it up to an experiment that didn't work, and add the fabric in your fabric collection. Or donate it to your high school's home economics or theater program or your favorite charity.

4. Always pre-shrink.

And look in the washer tub while you're pre-shrinking. If the water is loaded with color, I'd recommend you pre-shrink twice to get completely rid of that extra dye.

5. Make no apologies.

You don't have to justify what you like. Some day orange and purple and olive drab will be cool. And you can feel smug because you saw it coming!

6. Don't bite your thread. Really!

People (like my mother) told me not to do this, and I accused them of perpetuating old wives' tales, and I laughed. Now that I've ground down the teeth that bit the thread, and need special dental work, only my dentist is laughing. (I hate it when my mother is right.)

7. Leave the coffee and cookies in the kitchen.*

My heart skipped a beat when we all sat down at the quilting frame, and one of my acquaintances put her CUP OF COFFEE ON THE QUILT! A sneeze would have dislodged the cup, with resultant catastrophes including, possibly, murder.

If you hold a quilting bee, set out refreshments in the kitchen, and make sure no one carries them into the work area.

8. Don't strive for perfect.

Perfectionism is a killer life-style. Don't keep ripping out your stitching, trying to make it better.

The following is good to know when the day comes that you're proudly showing off your completed pieced top and discover—horror of horrors—that you've put in a block wrong: the Amish have a lovely philosophy. As I understand it, they worry that if a quilt top—or any artistic endeavor—is too perfect, it may be an affront to God, whom they see as the only creator of perfection. And so the Amish put one intentional mistake in their work.

Doesn't this mean we can all breathe a little easier?

9. Respect what you're doing.

When I was a little girl, our city's main street was named General Logan Boulevard, after a Civil War general.

In more recent years, in a stroke of unparalleled creativity, the city fathers (there were no city mothers present—if there had been, such stupidity would, no doubt, have been avoided) changed the name of the main street (the aforementioned General Logan Boulevard) to Main Street. How daring! How exciting! How utterly new!

City councils change street names. College trustees change building names. And another forefather is irrevocably lost in the mists of time.

Not so with quilts. People keep quilts. Your quilt will be an immortal remembrance of you and the person or event you're commemorating. (It gives me goose bumps just to think about it.) So respect your quilting. It will brighten countless lives even after the next generation of baseball fields named after presidents is a just a heap of rubble.

PS: Sign your quilt with your embroidered signature. Date it, too.

10. Enjoy.

We don't have to piece or quilt any more. It's cheaper and easier to buy a nylon blanket for $5.95 through the Sears Roebuck catalog.

So quilt because you love it.

*This one's hard for me, since Karen makes excellent Tollhouse cookies.

3/ Eight Diamonds and a Star

I mentioned earlier that I nearly got killed over a quilt. (For those of you who are just starting quilting, let me say this: don't be alarmed. Getting killed over a quilt is a fairly rare occurrence. It's still safer to quilt than, say, cross the street.) Anyway, here's what happened.

I special-nursed Florence Montgomery for almost a month before she died. A sad case

—pancreatic cancer—and not a thing she or anyone else could do about it but try to ease her last days.

Now I don't snoop when I'm in people's homes. Of course, I can't help noticing things—especially if they're lying about begging to be read—but I don't snoop. So it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that not only did Florence Montgomery's son Gilbert never visit, but he never wrote or called, either. That made me mad because Florence was a lovely lady who helped everyone, especially kids. In her will she established the Florence Bascombe Montgomery Trust Fund, administered by the school board, to buy clothes for needy children. That was the kind of person she was. Her son contested the will. That was the kind of person he was.

Florence lived in one of those amazing old Victorian homes you still see in parts of the Midwest. Not everyone in Spotsburg cared for the house, but I loved it. To me it was a real jewel: set on three acres of parkland right inside the city limits: clapboard exterior painted emerald green and maroon, three stories (the third floor was a very grand ballroom, with an immense crystal chandelier), twelve-foot high ceilings, dark wood paneling and banisters, eight bedrooms (including one in the dear little turret in the northern front corner, just right for Rapunzel to let her hair down from), two immense front parlors, a kitchen the size of my whole house, a huge front porch loaded with gingerbread, four bathrooms with claw-footed tubs and gleaming brass fixtures. All in all, a white elephant in Gilbert's beady, porcine eyes (if eyes can be beady and porcine at the same time), and something—I'm talking about Florence's house again—that ought to have been torn down years ago to make way, if he had his way, for a dozen absolutely undistinguished ticky-tacky houses constructed of cinder block. And painted white.

Under the terms of Florence's will (which, of course, in a small town like Spotsburg everybody knew), the house went to Florence's daughter Maureen (who lives in Ohio and really had no use for it), and the contents went to Gilbert. Gilbert wasn't completely hard-nosed about this. He generously invited his sister to buy anything from him that caught her fancy.

So within a month of Florence's death, there was an auction of the contents of the house, and though most of us Spotsburgers felt uncomfortable poking through Florence's things, we felt even more strongly that her belongings should go to people who would treasure them.

Auction day arrived, and we turned out in force to look over a century's accumulation. It was a warm August day, and the grounds surrounding the house looked like a party, with tables and small items of furniture and even a refreshment booth provided by the auctioneer.

"Gotta get rid of this junk," Gilbert said to nobody in particular, bringing more heaps of old linens and books and cut glass mementoes and china and souvenirs of world's fairs out of the house, and dropping them on tables. We were allowed to go though the house, too, and look at the furniture and rugs—heavy, dark Victorian pieces: tables and sideboards and beds and dressers and wardrobes and her old grand piano, still covered with the paisley piano scarf that was there the day I closed Florence's eyes. All of it was excessive, as the Victorians loved to be, but it also had a charm that would never be reproduced in one of Gilbert's proposed bomb shelter dwellings.

What interested me—surprise, surprise—was Florence's quilts. I've always thought I'd love to have a collection of old quilts, but it's just impossible. They take up room. They need to be kept cool and dry. And so Arden, Ramona and I studied the quilts more for their designs and fabrics than with the thought of buying one.

Until I saw the velvet crazy quilt.

You know about crazy quilts. Unlike earlier (and later) quilts, crazy quilts did not feature symmetrical, repeated blocks of calico patchwork. Instead, they were made of oddly-cut chunks of velvet or silk. This particular crazy quilt was made of silk velvet in jewel tones—ruby, emerald, topaz, sapphire, aquamarine—and as silk does, even old silk, it glowed. The blocks were joined with exotic embroidery stitches executed in golden silk buttonhole twist. And (and this is what really intrigued me) occasionally instead of a velvet patch there was a silk ribbon or a fabric card.

For example, between two pieces of ruby and sapphire velvet was a white ribbon printed with words inviting one and all to a cotillion being given in Spotsburg's Opera House in June 1884. (The Opera House has since been torn down to make way for the bank's parking lot.) Between two other chunks of velvet was a strip of pink satin printed with one of those goopy Valentine messages the Victorians loved so well. (The Victorians never seemed to know when to quit.) The quilt featured a half dozen fabric cigar bands, too. And in one corner of the quilt a fat embroidered bullfrog and, in large red letters, "To Charlotte Conway, Spotsburg, 1886."

I can't say the quilt was beautiful. It was lumpy and musty and it certainly wasn't in very good shape, either: that old silk was rotten in many places. There were other, nicer, quilts on the table, including a Sunbonnet Sue and a really handsome Amish Roman Stripe, in bold, plain colors and black. But the crazy quilt was an excellent example of that genre (as we say) and, conveniently identified as it was, I thought it might be possible to find out more about its owner. And that intrigued me. I thought my quilting students would like it, too.

I was just deciding to buy the crazy quilt when old Gilbert (Florence's aforementioned worthless son) sauntered over to me. Gilbert is the first person in Spotsburg to have adopted the hairstyle worn by that new music idol, Elvis Presley. It's not the only thing about Gilbert that's unattractive. He also chews gum, wears some sort of nauseating perfume, and leers.

He kind of leaned into me and dropped his heavy eyelids. "Hi, doll," he said, chomping his gum noisily. "You busy tonight?"

Off to the side, Arden made a little disgusted noise.

"Sure am," I said, looking away.

"With anybody I know?"

I wanted to say "One of your old high school buddies, Joseph Stalin," but, fortunately, Ramona began asking me something about the crazy quilt, and better manners won the day.

Somehow Gilbert sensed that his presence wasn't wanted (perhaps he intuited this from the fact that we weren't speaking to him), and he trudged off, anxious, no doubt, to cash in on more of his mother's priceless belongings.

"Not one of Spotsburg's leading citizens," I muttered to Ramona. Arden shook her head grimly in agreement.

Now, I'm a nurse and in a position of some responsibility and confidentiality, and I do NOT spread gossip. So I did not tell Ramona the rumors: that the eminently resistible Gilbert was involved with big-time hoods in Detroit, in prostitution rings, and some sort of pornography racket. Instead I told her what was well-known actual fact, as reported in the Spotsburg Sentinel: that Gilbert Montgomery had served time in Jackson State Prison for the robbery of a jewelry store several years ago. His accomplice had never been caught, and the jewels (eight diamonds and a very valuable star sapphire—I remember that because there's actually a patchwork design by a similar name) had never been found. So Gilbert had cooled his heels for a few years behind the walls of the world's largest walled prison. No doubt Jackson Prison had improved him, giving him his present polish and savoir faire.

The auction lasted all day, but the crazy quilt was auctioned off early, and I took it home for seventy-five cents.

And then a funny thing happened. Gilbert appeared on my doorstep a week later and wanted to buy back the quilt. I was definitely displeased to see him. He stood in my doorway, leered even more offensively than before, and said, "Say, darlin', I'm feeling mighty sorry I sold that quilt, which was such a dear remembrance of Ma, and I wondered if you'd be a real pal and sell it back to me. How much did you pay for it? Whatever it was, I'll double it. Just so I can have—"

"'—That dear remembrance of Ma,'" I finished with him.

Friends, every little red warning flag in my psyche was flying. You know how it is: a woman comes into the emergency room all banged up and her husband tells you he had no idea how it happened, and you know he's not just a creep, but a lying creep. Well, I only had to look at the way Gilbert's unappetizing torso (in a shirt open three buttons down) was leaning itself against my door jamb, his lips smacking as he chewed his gum, his eyes half-open under puffy, red lids, to know that this was a genuine skunk I had on my premises.

"Gilbert," I said, deciding to lay a trap for him, in the wildly remote event I was misjudging him, "I'm glad to hear you like that old quilt. What do you like most about it?"

Of course, he had no idea what I was talking about. "It's real, real pretty," he said, shifting his weight slightly in the doorway.

"Oh," I said sweetly, "I agree. But it's always interesting to know what appeals to people. So tell me what you like best about that quilt." Someday I'm going to regret my big mouth. In fact, Gilbert gave me a look that said he was probably the one who would make me regret it.

"Pretty colors," he said, struggling (I have no doubt) to assemble a coherent thought. "Um. Cute little girls in hats. Old-time bonnets. It was one of Ma's favorites."

I hope all life's baloney is as easy to spot as this was—what pure, unadulterated balderdash! I did NOT say what I was itching to say: how would he know what his mother's favorites were, since he couldn't take the time to visit her?

There had been a Sunbonnet Sue on that table at the auction, but I hadn't bought it. Did he really think I'd bought the Sunbonnet Sue? Was it really the Sunbonnet Sue that he wanted? No matter. With complete honesty I could say to him, as I slowly began to close the front door, "Gilbert, I'm so sorry, but I didn't buy the quilt with the little girls on it." And then, to excuse myself, a small dose of fiction. "And—oh my!—I hear my apple pies burning."

I shut my door and—unusual in Spotsburg—locked it. He stumped down my front steps and drove off in his Chevy clunker. I watched to make sure he was gone. Of course I had no pies in the oven. Instead I went upstairs—two at a time—to my second bedroom and opened the trunk in the back of the closet. The crazy quilt was still there. I had this definite notion that somehow I'd better store it somewhere else.

The next chapter of this adventure won't surprise you. The following Monday night, while I was at Spotsburg High School (home of our renowned Spotsburg Dalmatians) teaching my class of novice quilters how to draft diamond-shaped templates, my house was broken into. The first floor wasn't so bad, but the second floor was a real disaster, with bookcases tipped over, drawers pulled out of their dressers and the contents strewn everywhere. I was furious. I was even more furious when I saw that the thug or thugs who had messed up my house had mutilated the beautiful Maple Leaf quilt my grandmother (who came from Winnipeg, Canada) made for me when I graduated from nursing school. It had been on my bed and was now literally slashed to ribbons.

I stormed around my bedroom for a goodly while (I loved my grandmother, and would have happily strangled—slowly and painfully—the person who ruined the quilt she gave me), had a very thorough cry, and then called the police. Ted Dancer (who is good-looking and nice, but also very married—and several years my junior) arrived in five minutes.

It was Ted who made the interesting observation that, in spite of the mess, and the heartbreaking vandalism of my Maple Leaf quilt, nothing had actually been taken, not even my jewelry, which looks like it came out of Cracker Jack boxes. I told him about Gilbert Montgomery's unnatural interest in my quilt and his attempt to buy it back, and I explained where I had hidden the crazy quilt: carefully wrapped in a clean, white sheet and locked in the trunk of my old gray Studebaker.

We both had the same idea at the same time: that Gilbert (or more likely, his partner, assumed by Spotsburgers to be the so-called brains of the operation) might have used the crazy quilt as a place to store the jewels from the long-ago robbery. Certainly, that would explain why dear old Gilbert had suddenly taken a fancy to a quilt he couldn't even identify. I had already told Ted that the quilt was tattered and lumpy. Mightn't those lumps be eight diamonds and a sapphire? Why not?

I raced out to my Studebaker, unlocked the trunk, lifted out the quilt, and lovingly brought it inside. We quickly unwrapped the white sheet I'd wound around it and tossed it in the corner, then gently unrolled the quilt and spread it out on my living room rug. Slowly and carefully we began feeling every inch of it with our fingers. It took a very long time—the quilt was in worse shape than I'd realized, with out-and-out holes every once in a while—and when we were done, we felt discouraged and dissatisfied. It didn't seem like there was anything in the quilt, but we didn't feel 100% certain. And I definitely wasn’t going to cut up the quilt to make sure!

Then I had one of my typical brainstorms. We could x-ray it! Of course, this would cost some money, but Ted thought maybe the county sheriff's department would foot the bill if there was hope of recovering those stolen jewels. So Ted wrote me out a receipt, and took the quilt away with him in his squad car.

This was a dumb mistake. We should have realized my vandal hadn't found what he was looking for, and would come back. For a while I straightened up my house, then I cried a little more over my poor Maple Leaf quilt, and eventually I went to bed and fell into a restless sleep. All Spotsburg's noisiest cars seemed to be in my neighborhood that night.

At about two o'clock in the morning, I heard what sounded like a family of woodchucks cavorting in my heating ducts. (I know what that sounds like, since I had once had a family of woodchucks who cavorted in my heating ducts.)

My house has what we call a Michigan basement. It means a dirt-floored area under the house. My Michigan basement, like so many of them, is only accessible via the storm cellar doors on the outside—just like Auntie Em's house in The Wizard of Oz.

I put on my slippers and my pink terrycloth bathrobe (beautifully embroidered with an immense maroon B, a gift from a former admirer), and once I got to the kitchen, I took the broom (for shepherding those rascally woodchucks), and went out to the side of the house. With some effort (because they're metal and quite heavy), I lifted the storm cellar doors.

It wasn't woodchucks. It was Gilbert and a lowlife I'd never seen before, who by the light of two Coleman lanterns were tearing my basement apart. Boxes, cordwood and several old chairs I was storing there were flying every which way, and they had actually been shoveling the coal out of my coal room!

I put on my ferocious nurse voice, the one I use with cranky old men patients who tell me I can't give them a shot in their rear ends. Unfortunately, my ferocious nurse voice didn't have its usual blood-curdling effect. Gilbert and Associate flew up the stairs, jumped me, hauled me by my arms into the basement (very uncomfortable), and punched me hard a couple of times, demanding all the while to know "where the stuff" was. Then they grabbed their lanterns, ran up the stairs and, before I could say "You'll be sorry!" slammed the basement doors and locked me in with my broom, which they ran through the outside door handles. And there I was. Imprisoned in my own basement.

The basement was absolutely pitch black, as well as dank and musty. I could hear the scritch-scratch sound mice make when they're chewing on your beams and load-bearing members. I could also hear two huge rats (Gilbert and Friend) thumping around upstairs, finishing their fiendish work. I sat down on the stairs, poked my sorest spots for broken bones (couldn't find any), and pondered the situation.

Thinking about quilting always seems to release my considerable creative talents. I began to mentally flip through the pages of my Bible, 1001 Quilt Blocks. I could picture the pages clearly. If I ever got out of my basement alive—not a certainty at that moment—I would commemorate the month's activities with a quilt. I would start with a tribute to Florence Montgomery. I didn't think there were any blocks named Florence, but Florence means "flower," and there are plenty of flower-associated patterns. Then another block to indicate that she'd died—although I didn't want to be macabre. How about something poetic—even metaphorical—like a block of End of Day?

Then the quilt I'd bought, represented by a block of Crazy Quilt, and the missing jewels (a block of Jewel Box), and then I would introduce the appalling Gilbert (whose elephantine tread I could still hear over my head). There's no patch named The Big Jerk, but Turkey Tracks might do quite nicely. Or Snake's Trail. There is a block called Toad in the Puddle. Too bad there wasn't one named just for Gilbert, like Pig in a Poke—

And then it hit me. I knew where the jewels might be. At least, where they might have been before Gilbert and Co. arrived on my premises. I just had to get out of the basement, that was all.

After what must have been over an hour, the thumping and thudding overhead stopped, and I assumed the Reign of Terror had ended. I could easily make out the sound of a car being driven away—Gilbert's pleasure craft, judging from the reports of the muffler.

How to get out? Or how to signal someone? I waited a couple more hours, until the first rays of dawn's early light crept through the cracks in my foundation, and when I could finally see a bit, I carefully negotiated my way through the mess to my furnace.

It took me a while, but I gathered up everything burnable I could find—cardboard boxes, cordwood, coal—and I stacked them in my furnace and lit them. They instantly leapt into a gratifying blaze and then, when I was sure the fire was well established, I threw handfuls of the earth from my damp Michigan basement floor onto the fire, closed the furnace door, and waited to see what would happen. Hopefully, a smoky mess was emanating from my chimney and would arouse suspicion on a summer's day.

But why leave anything to chance? Another bright idea occurred to me. I pulled off my beautiful terrycloth bathrobe (I had nothing on underneath) and opened the furnace door. Would this work? Possibly. I was certainly producing the smoke I had hoped for. Rather awkwardly, I threw the upper half of my robe on the fire, and (using the sleeves) yanked it off as fast as I could, and then repeated this, again and again, until I had about one quarter of my bathrobe left—and it wasn't a very useful quarter at that—plus two slightly singed arms.

Yes, my neighbors (and half of Spotsburg) saw my smoke signals. Soon I was out of my basement and into a nice warm blanket. Ted the Policeman was back, looking a mite sheepish, but whether he was embarrassed by my lack of appropriate attire or his having abandoned me when foul fiends were still on the loose, I couldn't tell.

I led him and the entire neighborhood to my living room (which now looked like a replay of World War II), and found the sheet that had been wrapped around the quilt, still lying where we tossed it. Thankfully, Gilbert and his evil twin had ignored it. And there, in one of the folds of the sheet, was a twist of white paper, and in that twist of paper were—you guessed it—eight gorgeous diamonds the size of my pinky fingernail, and a large, deep blue and utterly entrancing star sapphire.

My fellow Spotsburgers were impressed by the jewels, and eventually someone had the presence of mind to ask how on earth I'd figured it all out.

"Simple," I said, preening myself a bit, "once I began to think about patchwork patterns. For reasons I won't explain now, I was going through names relating to animals, and turkeys, snakes and pigs came to mind. And when I thought of pigs, I thought of the expression pig in a poke, and then I thought of carrying a pig wrapped in a blanket, and then I thought of how I'd been toting the quilt around, wrapped in its sheet, and then it seemed logical that the jewels—if they'd been hidden in the quilt in the first place—might have fallen through one of the holes and into the sheet!"

The Citizens of Spotsburg were speechless at my brilliant deduction, and Officer Dancer shook his head. I was now beginning to feel a bit conspicuous and was hoping that no one would make a crack about ME wrapped in a blanket! People began filtering out the front door. As they left, several of my neighbor ladies called out that, when I was ready, they'd be happy to help me straighten up my house. Spotsburgers make good neighbors.

Gilbert and his pal were arrested, of course, and tried and convicted and jailed—although the prosecutor refused to charge them with Maple Leaf Quilticide, which was the worst of their crimes as far as I was concerned. And to commemorate this event, I put a patch in Florence's memory quilt named Leavenworth Nine-Patch, in honor of the maximum-security prison where Gilbert and his pal so richly deserved to be incarcerated.

4/ Diamonds Are STILL a Girl's Best Friend

[This appeared in Aunt Maggie's after the Incident with Gilbert, as I came to call it.]

I hate to see people suffer. I especially hate to see warm, wonderful people like beginning quilters suffer. And so I'd like to take this opportunity to say a few wise words about diamonds and their look-alikes, rhomboids.

Huh? you say. What's a rhomboid? Well, let's go back to diamonds for a minute. According to the dictionary, a diamond is "a geometric shape having four sides that are equal in length, and two interior obtuse angles and two interior acute angles." It's one of those dictionary definitions where you're more confused after you've read the definition than before.

Simply stated, and in terms meaningful to a quilter, a diamond is any shape that isn't square but where the four sides are identical in length.

This, then, is a diamond, because all four of its sides are identical in length,

and it isn't square.

This is also a diamond.

And so is this.

Diamonds can be fat and they can be thin, and when cut to certain dimensions (with those interior angles the dictionary talks so blithely about) will fit together in the interesting geometric pattern we call Baby's Blocks. And there is no place in the firmament where diamonds shine more brightly, so to speak, than in stars, and the Texas Lone Star is the most heavenly of them all.

Here is where my cautionary words about the diamond's evil twin the rhomboid become important. A rhomboid is "a parallelogram having unequal adjacent sides." Such a help the dictionary is! Practically speaking, what this means is that a rhomboid looks like a diamond, and has four sides like a diamond, but the four sides are not all the same length. Two of the sides are one length, two are a different length. Like this:

rhomboid

diamond

See the difference? Two of the rhomboid's sides are longer than the other two.

The difference between a diamond and a rhomboid becomes important when beginning quilters get stars in their eyes and decide to create a Lone (or any other) Star. As their teacher, I have them study the pattern carefully to make sure they're dealing with diamonds, not rhomboids. Why? Because rhomboids are tricky. Since their four sides are NOT the same, there is a right-hand and a left-hand way of looking at them and sewing them together. Like this:

left-hand rhomboid

right-hand rhomboid

See? You can't simply pick your rhomboid up and sew it any which way to the adjacent piece. No, you've got to make sure that you're sewing right-hand pieces to right-hand pieces, and left-hand to left-hand. Advanced quilters may love this challenge, and the slightly unusual appearance rhomboids give, but beginners are frequently frustrated by the rhomboid's quirks, and make a lot of mistakes sewing the wrong pieces together—or the wrong sides—and I personally hate to hear quilting accompanied by the sound of gnashing teeth.

I composed a little poem about the hazards to the unwary of the rhomboid. It goes like this:

Avoid

the rhomboid.

Of joy

it is devoid.

For if you tinker

with the rhomboid

you may be—

ANNOYED!

For the beginning quilter, diamonds are still a girl's best friend.

5/ The Lincoln Deathbed Quilt

During the 1950s, Spotsburg was swept by one craze after another. One month it was the Mouseketeers, and everyone was arguing furiously about whether Darlene or Annette was prettier and more talented. Then it was hula hoops, and several of our most august citizens actually dislocated parts of their anatomies trying to get the hang of them. At some point Elvis Presley burst into our collective consciousness, and earnest Spotsburg mothers and fathers trembled in fear that their children would come home with their hair in d.a.'s and pegged pants. (Not their hair in pegged pants. Their bodies!)

But none of these fads could match the frenzy that erupted the day word got out that the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt might be secreted in one of Spotsburg's attics.

Until that balmy September's eve, none of us had even heard of the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt. It began innocently enough—as crazes do—at a meeting of the Spotsburg Historical Society. Spotsburg Historical Society meetings are inclined to be long and dreadfully BORING, and more often than not are simply an excuse for old-timers to gather 'round a plate of cookies and tell each other yarns everyone else got tired of hearing years ago.

So I don't usually attend, and certainly didn't attend that particular meeting. Ramona gave me the details. As a lawyer, she seems to have more patience with boring than I do.

Anyway, once she'd found her reading glasses, Secretary Eunice Pemberton read the minutes of the previous meeting in her interminable adenoidal whine, and Eldred ("no relation to the General") Herkimer droned through the treasurer's report, and then Society President Hilda ("No relation to James Fennimore") Cooper called for Remarks from the General Public. This was the cue for Eldred to stand up and ask for clarification regarding the geographic location of the Potawatomi Indian settlement before the 1837 Removal. They discussed this for a while. (Another reason I avoid Historical Society meetings is that I get very upset about the way the white settlers treated the Indians. This viewpoint mystifies everyone else.)

Then Jonathan ("no relation to the Jonathan") Edwards rose and wondered out loud if anything further had been done about the restoration of the outhouse for Standard School #2. Standard School #2 has been the Historical Society's ongoing historical project for about a thousand years, and on-site bathroom facilities have been a thorn in the group's side, with Society members evenly (and acrimoniously) divided between those who want modern indoor plumbing, and those who think it would be a terrible historical travesty to have anything other than two old-fashioned two-seaters out in the back. President Hilda appointed a committee to look into the other committee that was already looking into it.

Finally, Charlene Cuthbertson rose and announced she'd found a most interesting letter in a trunk in her attic. Charlene is one of the many Spotsburg residents who have lived here all their lives, and whose parents and grandparents have lived here, too, and all these old-timers have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of old trunks containing old letters, old locks of hair, old Bibles, and other old memorabilia in their attics, which are also old.

Charlene apologized for not having gone through the trunk in question a decade or so sooner. It seems she had tumbled onto a correspondence between her grandmother, Emma Bankert, and Emma's best friend, Elizabeth, last name unknown, whose letters also bore a Spotsburg postmark. (Why so many Victorian ladies wrote each other, even when they lived only a few blocks apart, I've never understood.)

Charlene told the eager Society members that most of the letters she'd found were from the mysterious Elizabeth to Emma. (A few, wrapped in a blue ribbon, were Emma's letters to Elizabeth. Another mystery. Why—or how—had Emma gotten her letters back?)

Charlene recounted several happenings of the day (as described in the letters), including a riveting lecture on women's suffrage that had been shut down by the Spotsburg constabulary, and the scandalous news that the minister of the First Baptist Church had been discovered to have a second wife and family (many exclamation marks) in Hobart, eight miles away!!!

And then Charlene dropped the bombshell. In one letter (dated June 1865), correspondent Elizabeth indicated she'd just been given a quilt that had been on President Abraham Lincoln's bed as he lay dying! As Elizabeth explained (and Charlene read—and I corroborated in a history book), after he was shot, the wounded Lincoln was carried from Ford's Theater to the house of William Petersen, a tailor, several doors down. Elizabeth, in her florid Victorian hand, wrote that her Uncle Thaddeus was "in attendance on Mr. Lincoln" (in what capacity he attended she did not say), and was given the quilt after the President died, and Uncle Thaddeus sent it to Elizabeth. It was a lovely quilt, Elizabeth wrote, although it "bears many terrible stanes [sic] of President Lincoln's prescious [sic] blood."

Charlene could not have sent the Historical Society into a greater tizzy if she'd run around the room naked shouting "Fire!" The questions came fast and furious: Who was Elizabeth? (She didn't know.) Had Charlene read every letter in the correspondence? (She hadn't.) What did the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt look like? (Charlene didn't know that, either.) And most important of all, where was it now? (???)

President Hilda called the meeting back to order. A communication of such importance, she said, must be investigated in a systematic fashion. She appointed a committee to read all the correspondence in Charlene's attic. (Charlene objected to this suggestion, but was gaveled out of order. Hilda and her gavel are not to be trifled with. Did I ever tell you about the time she banged the gavel so hard it broke, and the working end of it flew across the room, nearly taking out Chester Smith's eye?) Furthermore, President Hilda ordered, a systematic study must be made of the city's genealogies, to find out who the unnamed correspondent Elizabeth might be. (Good luck, I thought when I heard that. Elizabeth must be just about the most common name of that era—right up there with Victoria and Mary.) Furthermore, President Hilda said, she would meet with the editors of the Spotsburg Sentinel and have them urge all high-minded historic Spotsburg citizens to scour their attics and basements for quilts, to see if the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt was among them.

So animated were the members of the Historical Society by all these goings-on that they adjourned without touching their refreshments—even though Ruth Wallace brought her absolutely irresistible Double Devil's Food Chocolate Brownies! (For all the good they do, sometimes the members of the Historical Society lack a sense of purpose.)

As I say, I was oblivious to all this excitement because I missed the Historical Society meeting, but Ramona filled Arden, Karen, and me in when we gathered at Arden's house to work on her latest treasure, a splendid Mountain Meadows for her brother Fred, who climbs mountains for fun. I'll be honest with you: the prospect of finding an interesting and no doubt valuable old quilt somewhere within the city limits of Spotsburg was mildly exciting, but I had an unpleasant feeling that this could turn into a donnybrook, and I might get dragged into it.

How right I was. One evening after dinner, about a week after that fateful meeting of the Historical Society, I got a call from Charlene Cuthbertson, the owner of the letter that had started the excitement. Her attic had been examined within an inch of its life. Every trunk had been opened. Every box had been unpacked. Every letter had been read. Every newspaper had been studied for clues. Every old book had been shaken for mementos tucked in its pages. She had (she told me) drawn the line at letting the members of the Historical Society rip up her attic floor boards. She was now the proud owner of a somewhat better organized attic, and countless treasures from between the pages of old books: locks of hair, ladies' hankies, and enough pressed flowers to make a large (albeit flat) table arrangement.

And—I'd known this was coming—they'd found a quilt. Actually, she said, they'd found two quilts, but one of them, wrapped in brown paper and string, had several suggestive brown stains on it. Since I was Spotsburg's quilting teacher, a published authority and expert, etc., etc., could they bring it over for my opinion?

Sure, I said. In thirty minutes, driving at about ten miles an hour in her old McCord, Charlene arrived with Historical Society President Hilda Cooper barely at bay.

Please don't misunderstand me. Charlene is a nice old lady of about seventy, rather frail, rather slow, but a nice old lady. But I was tired that evening from helping Officer Ted Dancer's wife with their new twins (Ted ought to spend more time on his police beat, and less time fathering children—they now have four under the age of five!), and I'd been looking forward to stretching out and reading the latest Agatha Christie mystery.

Charlene trudged up my steps, knocked and, when I opened the door, shuffled in, with Hilda close behind her, pawing the ground and snorting. Hilda's eyes glittered and she kept muttering, "Stay calm, Charlene. Stay calm."

Under her arm Charlene had an old cotton quilt. I motioned for her to set it on my kitchen table, where the light is good. Very carefully, I opened it up. Charlene sat down slowly and watched. Hilda stood and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, breathing heavily.

"What did the wrapping paper say?" I asked Charlene, wishing she‘d brought that, too.

"Not a word," she said.

"That's right," said Hilda, nodding vigorous agreement.

It was a double bed-sized quilt, a gorgeous blue and ivory Log Cabin, in a barn-raising set. As you know, Log Cabin is an ancient American patchwork design, so it was certainly conceivable this quilt could have been in existence in 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated. Along one side were two rust-brown spots about the size of dinner plates, plus some rust-colored specks, and all those spots bore a very great likeness to blood. I must say, it gave me a little shock to see those stains. Whether or not this was what we were all now calling the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt, there was a story here. Quite likely it was not a pretty one.

I examined the front carefully, especially the bars of light color, where an inscription or a date might have been embroidered. Nothing obvious.

Then I turned it over. The back was unbleached muslin. I ran my fingers along the edge: sometimes your fingers are better than your eyes at catching details. And I felt a small raised area under my fingertips.

I went to my desk and got a magnifying glass, but I didn't really need it. Embroidered in ivory stitches on the ivory back, in very tiny letters, were the words, "To Maud from her Loving Mother on the Occasion of Her Wedding." I read the words out loud.

"Really?" said Hilda, who's too vain to wear her glasses. If she had worn them, she would have seen the inscription.

"Oh," Charlene said, looking very disappointed. "My Mother's name was Maud. I think that quilt must have been a gift from my grandmother to my mother when she got married."

"Where did they live?" I asked, wishing that Charlene's forebears had been residing in Washington, DC, at the time of Lincoln's death. . . .

"Here in Spotsburg," she said. "Mother was married in 1886. I was born the next year. She died birthing me."

We were all three of us quiet for several minutes, thinking the same thing: that the bloody stains were associated with Charlene's mother's lying-in and death. Very slowly, Charlene stood up and began folding the quilt.

"It was foolish of me to have brought this to you."

"No," I said. "It was a privilege to see it." And I added, "Don't try to clean it. It's too old. Just wrap it in a clean, white sheet and store it in a cool, dry place."

"All right," Charlene said, but she looked so forlorn (as well as unhappy to encounter such a vivid reminder of her mother's death) that I visited her later that week, and let her show me her prize-winning nasturtiums, which I generally appreciate about as much as poison ivy.

After this reverse, the members of the Historical Society redoubled their efforts. They were having no luck in figuring out who Elizabeth, author of the letter about the quilt, was. Arden had the excellent idea of scanning old Spotsburg Sentinels to see if there were any articles about the arrival of such a quilt in Spotsburg. In those days the Sentinel was only four pages, but it still took her two weeks to read every issue published in 1865.

My next visitor was Edna McCoy, who brought me a tattered red and white gingham quilt, soiled with what looked like axle grease. In fact, it also exuded a faintly oily smell. Edna is bossy and loud, but I was trying to be nice. (It's always a struggle with her.)

She appeared on my doorstep without phoning ahead, threw her shoulder against the door, and barged into my living room. "This will only take a minute," she said, "but I want you to look this over right away."

"I was just going out," I lied.

"Never mind that," she said. "This is important!" She unfurled her quilt like a flag and dropped it on my living room floor.

"I think," I said firmly, rolling up the quilt up and carrying it out of the living room, "that we need to take this into the kitchen and look at it under a brighter light. Now, of course, I can't give you a definitive opinion, but a scientist could probably do something with carbon-14 dating. It might, however, mean he would have to DESTROY part of the quilt. . . ."

She muttered "Humph!" at me, and followed me to the kitchen table. "Naturally," she said, "I can't pay you for your time and your trouble, but I knew you'd be interested."

How Edna McCoy would have the vaguest notion of what would interest ME was a puzzle, but I bit my tongue. (I still have scars on my tongue from biting it during a previous encounter with this lady and her husband, who sells insurance. Even at church suppers. If you see him approaching you with an ingratiating grin and an outstretched hand, plead an urgent need for the bathroom!)

Anyway, this quilt was easy. "What you've got here," I said, "is a Lindy's Plane, and since Charles Lindbergh flew that historic flight to Paris in 1927, I think I can say without fear of contradiction—" (okay, I was showing off) "—that this quilt is too new to be the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt."

Edna was not to be deterred. "I'm positive," she cried, "that this quilt has some great historical importance! I'm very sensitive to these things! Almost psychic! At least TWO of my friends think so, too."

"Well, they may be right," I said, trying hard not to let my extreme irritation get the best of me. "This stain certainly looks like grease. Perhaps," I said, deciding to suggest something that was obviously ludicrous, "Charles Lindbergh used this to wipe off his hands after doing repairs on the Spirit of St. Louis."

"That's it!" she said, roughly gathering up the quilt in a heap and heading toward my door. "It's got to be worth a lot of money!" She stormed out.

"I think I'd get another opinion on that," I called after her, but she was already at the end of my drive.

So the next week, in addition to attempting to earn an honest living, I spent my evenings viewing people's comforters and old bedspreads. Spotsburg's floodgates had opened, and out spilled a torrent of abused, mangled, and filthy quilts. I must have examined at least thirty quilts in five nights.

Sometimes they made me sad: a quilt represents a considerable investment of human effort and time, and the treatment some of those quilts had received was atrocious. Several smelled of birdcage, others of wet dog. Sometimes the quilts were educational: interesting colors or arrangements of blocks I hadn't seen before. Sometimes I became quite vexed: people brought me quilts with no evidence of the stains mentioned in the letters, explaining that they thought I should look at them "just in case. . . ."

In addition to alternately feeling sad and angry about the quilts, I also became grouchy that week for another quite different reason. My pal Jay Allen (that heart-throbbingly handsome redheaded forensic chemist I've mentioned before) had told me about a new associate he wanted to introduce me to, some guy named Mike in the Physics Department. For several days I'm ashamed to say I questioned Jay's motives, wondering if he could be tired of doing crime-solving scientific experiments for me—for free. Then I rejected that notion as ridiculous. As long as Jay wasn't trying to foist me off on some other—less qualified—scientist, I was happy to meet an interesting new man. Spotsburg's quilt hysteria, however, was making arranging a rendezvous with the Mike person impossible.

One of those evenings I thought we'd found it—the Deathbed Quilt, I mean. Doris Nelson brought in a lovely and very old-looking Cowboy Star, also known as Arkansas Traveler or Travel Star.

What Doris showed me was beautiful: blue, purple and a funny pinkish-colored putty, which sounds unattractive, but went very well with the other colors. In the center it had the requisite dark stains. I must say I was immediately suspicious of the quilt, even though it was lovely, and even though the Cowboy Star pattern first appeared in 1860, (and so the date would have worked out right), because Doris said she'd also found a little collection of scraps that matched the quilt. And I asked myself: if this was really the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt, how would Uncle WhatsHisName who sent his niece this quilt have also acquired the scraps?

The scraps helped me solve the problem—without Jay Allen's help, ha-HA! I took pieces of the three different colors and put them on my ironing board. Then I turned on the iron to its hottest setting, and then I ironed them and—nice as you please—the putty-colored scrap stuck to the bottom of the iron! Doris watched me while I was doing this and was totally baffled.

"It's simple," I said. "This piece that's sticking to the bottom of the iron is made with a man-made fiber: either rayon, nylon, or Dacron. I know that because it can't be ironed at the high temperature I use on cotton. See, it's sticking because it's melting. Now," I said, warming to my subject, "Rayon was first manufactured commercially in 1905, Nylon wasn't patented until 1937, and Dacron appeared in 1941." (Sometimes the stuff I know even amazes me.) "So whichever man-made fiber was used—and a scientist with a high-powered microscope could tell us—" (I kept my mouth strictly shut about which scientist I was thinking of) "—this quilt was made long after Lincoln died."

We both sighed sadly.

"But it looks so old," she said.

"Yes," I said, "I was fooled, too. But it's faded. That's all."

I was proud of my detective work, but Doris looked crestfallen.

"It IS beautiful," I said. "Say," I added, having just had one of my brilliant afterthoughts, "why don't you suggest to the Historical Society that they host a quilt exhibition and show off all these wonderful Spotsburg quilts, now that everyone's so excited about them."

Doris seemed delighted with this idea. We folded up her prize, and she went off looking pleased.

Eventually I came as close as anyone to finding the much sought-after quilt. It happened this way. Spotsburg's most prestigious men's club is the Sons of Sasquatch. Many a citizen has been rendered nearly speechless by the imposing sight of the Sons of Sasquatch costumed in their Sasquatch furs, marching in the Fourth of July parade to the stirring cadences of their anthem, "Bigfeet on the March."

As is so often the case, the Sons of Sasquatch were completely oblivious to what the rest of the community was doing, and in late September they were holding their annual rummage sale and chicken fry. Among the rummage, on the old clothes and blankets table, was a very old quilt.

As luck would have it, I was the one who found it. Moving aside the old jeans, t-shirts and broken tennis rackets, I gently removed the quilt and laid it on top of the pile. It was a very handsome black and white Light and Shadow, a pattern I remembered from 1858 Godey's Lady's Book, and which was probably in existence a lot earlier. So it could be the right age. . . .

It was stained, too, with two large rust-colored stains shaped like giant irregular flowers. I recognized that kind of stain: blood.

With shaking fingers I examined the front of the quilt, then turned it over. On the backside, in one corner, embroidered in red, white, and blue thread, were the words "From Thaddeus, 1865." Oh my goodness. The right year, and perhaps the right uncle? I carried the quilt over to Jim Brewster, who was supervising the cash box and chatting with other Bigfeet. "How much?" I asked him, able to contain my excitement, but just barely.

"For that old rag?" he said, eyeing it indifferently. "How about a dime?"

"Sure," I said, thinking I was going to faint.

I dashed home with my prize, endured several painful seconds of indecision, and then called Jay Allen at home. No answer. I tried his lab in the Chemistry Department at State College.

"What?" a gruff voice answered.

"Jay!" I yelled.

He actually sounded disappointed that it was me. "What do you want?" he grumbled.

"I think I've found the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt!" I shouted.

"Come again?" he said.

Incredibly, Jay, too, had missed Spotsburg quilt-mania, having been COMPLETELY absorbed, he told me pointedly, with a murder case in Grand Rapids that involved SEVERAL MILLION DOLLARS AND A STATE SENATOR.

So, in spite of the fact that he kept muttering something about GETTING BACK TO PAYING WORK, I sketched out the whole saga to him in several well-worded and compact paragraphs.

"What's the bottom line?" he said.

"Can you tell if it's Lincoln's blood?" I asked.

There was a long pause. "Maybe, maybe not," he said.

I was scandalized. "Jay Allen," I said, "you can figure out anything! Just take a little snip of this quilt and see if it's blood, and then we'll know."

"Sorry, Barb," he said, "but it's not that simple. Yeah, we could analyze the stain in your quilt, find out if it was human or animal blood—" (I hadn't thought of that before. Maybe some of the bloody quilts I'd inspected over the past few weeks had non-human blood on them!) "—but we'd have to compare it with a sample of blood known to be Abraham Lincoln's, and that could be difficult." And then he said, and he seemed genuinely interested, "I'll see what I can find out."

It turned out that the second half of the problem was the problem. There are actually samples of Abraham Lincoln's blood and tissue in existence today, and they're stored at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC. HOWEVER, the high muckety-mucks there in Washington, DC, were not prepared to release enough of those cells so Jay could run any sort of tests. When he told me this two weeks later, he sounded regretful

"They sent me a rather stiff note," Jay said. "It seems the world is full of quilts, shawls and blankets which, as they so generously phrase it, ‘unscrupulous persons fraudulently assert were on President Abraham Lincoln's bed at the time of his death.'"

So we were never able to prove that the quilt I bought at the Sons of Sasquatch rummage sale was definitely the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt. But its design, stains, and inscription made me believe with all my heart that it was, and the note from the Armed Forces Institute gave me an idea.

And when the Historical Society held its Old Quilt Exposition (which so many people attended at twenty-five cents per person that the Society was able to install both indoor plumbing and two two-seater outhouses behind the Standard School #2), the quilt I entered (and gave to the Historical Society afterward) was carefully identified thusly:

THE LINCOLN DEATHBED QUILT

Believed to have been on President Abraham Lincoln's bed at the time of his death.

6/ Think Hockey Takes Guts? Try Fabric-Hunting!

Once the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt furor subsided, we were able to get back to our more-or-less normal routines, and Arden had a great idea. We would launch a co-educational expedition to Northern Indiana, and do some serious fabric shopping and lunching at the all-you-can-eat Amish buffet there. So Arden and her husband Tom, Karen and her husband Peter, and Jay and his wife Betsy, and I signed up. And Jay invited the interesting-sounding (to me, at any rate. He was single. I checked it out) Mike Mackenzie of the State College Physics Department to go along.

You can imagine my amazement when Mike turned us down because our plan conflicted with a State College hockey game! I'm well known in Spotsburg for my willingness to share my opinions with everybody—whether they're interested or not—and so I sent Mike the following letter, in a plain brown asbestos envelope.

Dear Mike:

Perhaps we did not sufficiently explain. Fabric-hunting in northern Indiana is very much like hockey, which we know you love. In fact, many days it is indistinguishable from hockey.

Like hockey, in fabric-hunting there are two teams: Us and Them. The object of fabric-hunting is for Us to score more goals in a given time span than Them. Experienced fabric-hunters, like hockey players, know that however much time is allotted is never enough.

At the starting signal of a fabric hunt, Us and Them face off in a large area called Yoder's Department Store. Not for the seasoned fabric-hunter to put on a pair of wimpy skates and a whole bunch of protective gear and slide insouciantly across some ice—heck no! The fabric-hunter, equipped only with her purse, and assisted only by her flying squadron of sister fabric-hunters (who cannot be relied upon if there's a special over in the corner on zippers or bias tape) fearlessly elbows her way past rapacious bargain seekers to the goal: the last remaining yard of fabric on the bolt that perfectly matches the project she's been laboring on without ceasing since seventh grade. A few noses may bleed as she makes her way across Yoder's, but as long as it's not on that last remaining yard of matching fabric, who cares.

As in hockey, in fabric-hunting just about anything goes. Tripping your opponent with a quilt rack you are pretending to consider purchasing is entirely legal. Pulling out the keystone fabric bolt from a teetering display, creating a fabric avalanche and a subsequent impenetrable barrier in your opponent's path, is splendid strategy. Entwining your opponent in twelve yards of Battenburg lace and consequently immobilizing her from further play, will delight onlookers. Clobbering her in the mouth with your purse is good clean fun. Clobbering her in the mouth without your purse is even better. In other words, in fabric-hunting, as in hockey, violence in the service of a higher purpose (more violence) is the name of the game.

Fabric-hunting is not for everyone. It takes guts, stamina and absolute ruthlessness. In some parts of the globe, descendants of Genghis Khan give useful seminars on the finer points. But here in the Midwest we are privileged to have some of the world's ablest practitioners of the sport of fabric-hunting. You are fortunate, Mike—and should be grateful!—to have been invited to see them in action.

Any questions?

Sincerely,

Barb Hoxsie

In retrospect, I suppose this letter might be considered a bit, well, strong.

Two days later I got a call from him. His voice was very pleasant: warm and deep, with the merest trace of a Southern accent. He said, "I enjoyed your letter. It was funny."

That surprised me. We chatted a bit and then he asked me if I'd like to go with him to the Robert Burns Festival in Ann Arbor. Men in kilts and haggis would be the order of the day, he said.

I didn't know what haggis was (I do now!), but I said "Sure!" Before we could do that, however, we all had to live through:

Spotsburg's Annual Treasure Hunt.

PS. Mike still went to the hockey game.

7/ The Game of the Quilt Disaster

I see I really haven't told you much about Spotsburg. It's a pretty place, set amongst the rolling hills and deciduous forests of southern Michigan. We've got a population of 4,000 (not counting 900 college students on the Spotsburg campus of State College) and the necessities: police, a volunteer fire department, a bank, a bar, a tea shop (The Spotté of Tea), three churches, pretty good schools, a train station (with frequent trains to Lansing, Jackson, and Detroit), some shops, including Dean's great dime store that sells everything from children's toys to pencils to athletic supporters, a drug store, and (most important!) Janine Runyon's fabric shop, Sew and Go.

Most of our businesses are built around a pleasant central town square that has some fine old maples, a few flower beds (well-maintained by the members of the Garden Club), a statue (of Harold Thripp, founder of Spotsburg and its first mayor, state representative, and circuit court judge), a memorial to Spotsburg's men and boys lost in the various wars and, in the southeast corner of the square, a bandstand big enough to accommodate ten or twelve well-fed musicians playing large instruments. The campus, a branch of State College where Jay Allen, forensic chemist and redhead extraordinaire (as well as Mike Mackenzie, heartthrob-in-waiting) both work, is on the western side of town, just past the grain elevator and Agriculture Experiment Station.

Things are usually quiet in Spotsburg; it's something our young people complain about constantly. Occasionally the college boys stage a panty raid in one of the girls' dorms, which stirs things up a bit at that end of town. Spotsburg High's Fighting Dalmatians won the state's high school basketball Class D championship one year (1937, to be exact). That was exciting. And, of course, there are all the events—births, deaths and marriages—that are important to the people involved, but can't be considered remarkable.

For entertainment we do highly conventional things: the county fair in August, the Methodist Church ice cream social, The Ham Sandwich Festival, and our very stirring Civil War battle re-enactment, where (as the name suggests) we all dress up in Civil War clothes and re-enact a Civil War battle. Stirringly.

And in May there's the Treasure Hunt. Nobody seems to know how the Treasure Hunt started, but it's gotten to be a Big Thing. It consumes a great deal of energy that might otherwise be spent on useful activities, and here's how it works. Usually works, that is.

One May evening, the participants—who by light of day are sober, high-minded city fathers and mothers—dress up in funny clothes and assemble in the Spotsburg High School parking lot. They arrange themselves into teams. Each team is given a manila envelope containing the treasure hunt clues, and off they go. As you might expect, the first team to find the treasure wins.

What makes our treasure hunt different from other towns' treasure hunts in which their city council members, church leaders, teachers, farmers, and insurance salesmen dress up like idiots and chase maniacally around the countryside, is the clues. They're not sequential. You know how traditional treasure hunts work. The first clue directs you to the location of the second clue, hidden, for example, in Roberta Findley's mailbox. In Roberta Findley's mailbox you get instructions for the third clue, which happens to be tucked in one of the nests in Elmer Swope's chicken coop. And so on.

No, Spotsburg's treasure hunt is written so that you can solve the clues in any order. Each clue reveals one letter of the final answer, which is an anagram. By anagram I mean that when you've found all the letters, you still have to unscramble them.

Here's a typical clue, which actually appeared in the 1952 treasure hunt. "Here we go to kneel and pray, counting out the night and day, the FIFTH WORD (just the SECOND LETTER) hopefully will make life better."

Dreadful, isn't it? Anyway, when your team receives a clue like this, you and your teammates ponder it for a bit and conclude after much hard thought that "kneel and pray" means you should dash to the METHODIST CHURCH! "Counting out the night and day," you deduce, refers to the CLOCK on the Methodist Church's marble façade. (There are some fine minds in Spotsburg.) Once you've arrived at the Methodist Church, you envision finding the fifth word of the inscription under the clock, and then taking the second letter of that word, and that will be one of the letters in the name of the treasure's location. Eureka!

All the teams receive all the clues at once. Once the starting signal is given (on the treasure hunt master's battered and out-of-tune trombone), Spotsburg's surrounding woods, hills, and dales resound with the glad cries of weirdly-dressed people leaping out of cars and jumping back in. Chaos frequently ensues. For example, teams tear off to the Methodist Church and discover, once they've gotten there, that it's the Baptist Church that has the clock on the front! That sort of thing.

In recent years I've grown too stodgy to be one of the treasure hunters (as have Arden, Karen, Ramona, Jay, and their hangers-on, who spend that evening doing something more intellectual, like playing Go to the Head of the Class). No, I prefer to associate myself with the treasure: a lavish buffet supper held in the secret location concealed in the anagram answer, and the splendid grand prize, frequently a new AM radio or a set of spiffy new highball glasses.

May's treasure hunt was no different from previous hunts. At least, it started out like the others, although it ended in disaster. (So I don't worry you, let me clarify: I'm talking about a Spotsburg-style disaster, such as the day the water main burst directly under the bleachers during the high school's graduation ceremony. Not a DISASTER disaster, like the sinking of the Titanic.) The treasure hunt's costume theme was "Literary Classics," and participants were supposed to arrive dressed as characters in great books.

There was much laughing and eye-rolling under the klieg lights in Spotsburg High's parking lot that night, as the treasure seekers surveyed each other's get-ups. Ruth Wallace went just long enough to survey the crowd, and returned to give us her lucid report.

Notable among the treasure hunters were Bill Shumaker, who's a loan officer at the bank and was dressed as Scrooge McDuck. (Ruth said a number of people were having a good laugh at Bill's expense about what kind of literature he reads.) Lloyd Price, City Council President, was Napoleon (War and Peace), thereby unintentionally reinforcing the notions many of Spotsburg's citizens harbor about Lloyd's city management style.

Dear, quiet, conservative Parson Dargan Scott was startling as the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland: he kept looking at a huge pocket watch, blinking his eyes and saying, "I'm late!" in a querulous voice. And Hilda Cooper (president of the Historical Society, who teaches high school history and civics, and is renowned for her barking voice, authoritarian manner, drab tweed suits, and stout brown orthopedic oxfords), stunned the assembled multitudes by arriving in a daringly low-cut, hoop-skirted gold brocade dress, elegant satin high heels, and towering white wig, and announcing loudly to one and all that she was Louis XIV's mistress Louise de la Vallière. "From what book?" I asked when Ruth told me this (I was feeling contrary), but I was certainly amazed. I could easily picture Hilda costumed as an Amazon or valkyrie, her helmet and breastplate glinting in the moonlight. Heck, behind her back some people even call Hilda Brunhilda. But Hilda in a low-cut brocade dress? And mind you, NONE OF THESE PEOPLE HAD HAD ANYTHING TO DRINK!

So twelve teams of four people received their clues at 8:15 p.m., dashed to their cars (where they sat for a few moments and read the clues), and roared off. The exception was Hilda. Hilda and her La Vallière get-up, with its immense puffy panniers at the hips, could not be pushed, stuffed or otherwise shoehorned into Parson Scott's tiny Volkswagen Beetle, and so she was traded off to Jim Brewster's team, who had foresworn their Sons of Sasquatch furs for the evening and arrived in a big new Buick in various states of Biblical undress, including loincloths and sandals.

I, as I've said, was not involved with this part of the hunt. I was setting tables at the treasure hunt's final destination, the basement of the Masonic Temple. (The clues were supposed to yield M-a-s-o-n-i-c.) The basement was selected because it is a large (albeit drab green) interior space and has no windows that might possibly suggest to passers-by that there was something going on inside.

I think I've mentioned Edna McCoy before. She nearly broke down my front door during the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt mania in an attempt to get my (free) advice regarding the quilt she'd discovered in her attic, a ratty red-and-white checked Lindy's Plane, which she was determined must have great Civil War significance. (It didn't, obviously.)

Edna is abrupt, bossy, and rude, and considers herself a major luminary of the Spotsburg social scene. She and her husband Alvin (who sells insurance) are tolerated by the rest of the community because in a city of 4,000, everyone has to pull their weight, and everyone has to get along, and Edna and Alvin do work hard, even though they work hard obnoxiously.

And that is how the treasure hunt clues got so badly messed up, and why it ended in disaster. Edna and Alvin were the two responsible for writing the clues, and they couldn't maintain the spirit of objectivity that's absolutely essential to such a creative endeavor.

Edna felt her Lindy's Plane quilt had not received its due as a Great American Art Treasure and Historic Relic, and so she determined to publicize it further via the treasure hunt. To do this, she talked Janine Runyon (who owns the fabric store, Sew and Go) into hanging her (Edna's) quilt in the fabric store's front window. Furthermore, she (Edna) secretly convinced several other ladies of Spotsburg to hang their quilts out on their clotheslines the night of the hunt; those quilts were supposed to be red herrings. Edna's plan might have worked except, as those of us who stalk antiques and rummage sales say, "One man's treasure is another man's trash."

I, as I've already indicated, was sequestered (with Ruth and some others) in the ever-so-lovely cinder block basement of the Masonic Temple, arranging plates, silverware, and candles on the tables, receiving the hot dishes as they were delivered (the entrée was a delicious oven-barbecued chicken Shirley Moray prepared in her own kitchen), and checking out the desserts to make sure they were fresh.

(On this subject: one of the things I don't understand is why so many of today's pies don't cut well. I'm sure you know what I mean. You cut a slice and maybe the knife isn't sharp enough, because it makes a raggedy edge and you have to clean up the pie's edges. Also, today's brownies don't slice the way they used to, and you have to keep disposing of the crumbs.)

Anyway, as we performed our tasks that evening, the treasure hunt was swirling above us. I've pieced together other people's accounts (not quilts this time), to give you an approximate idea of what was happening.

One of Edna and Alvin's ridiculous clues read: "This gorgeous quilt (it's Spotsburg's best) is colored ____ and ____. Look through the glass, FIRST WORD, THIRD LETTER, and the booby prize you'll shed." No doubt Edna thought all Spotsburg's citizenry would trot straight over to Sew and Go, gape through the window, and exclaim, "Gee whillikers! Spotsburg's best quilt!!!"

But there were several things wrong with that clue. For one thing, as my English professor at nursing school used to write in my margins with annoying frequency, this clue was "AMBIG!!!" Meaning, of course, it was ambiguous, and that ambiguity certainly confused Lloyd Price/Napoleon and his teammates and henchmen (dressed as the pirate crew from Peter Pan), because they were driving toward Spotsburg Cemetery in search of a different clue (something written on a tombstone), when they saw Doris Nelson's quilt draped (at Edna's request) over her clothesline, and Lloyd et al came to a screeching halt and jumped out of Lloyd's car and ran into Doris's back yard, piratical swords clanking and swashbuckles swashing, and stood there in the moonlight, studying her quilt. Doris, inside, had heard them approaching, had turned off her lights, and was hiding next to her open upstairs window, chuckling quietly.

You can fairly picture the men's conversation.

LLOYD/NAPOLEON: Avast! A quilt!

OTHERS/PETER PAN PIRATES: Yo-ho-ho!

BRAD TILLSTROM/PIRATE WITH AN EYEPATCH: Say, Napoleon, read us that quilt clue again. Not the one about the airplane or still waters running deep. The other one.

LLOYD/NAPOLEON (fumbling with his flashlight which, it turns out, doesn't work, and the envelope of clues): Here it is. Hmmm. I think it says, "This gorgeous quilt (it's Spotsburg's best) is colored ____ and ____ . Look through the glass, FIRST WORD, THIRD LETTER, and the booby prize you'll shed."

BRAD TILLSTROM/EYEPATCH: What does "Look through the glass" mean?

(All stand there baffled.)

FRED MURPHY/PIRATE WITH FAKE STUFFED PARROT ON SHOULDER: Well, mateys. Maybe we're supposed to look at this through our telescopes. Wasn't "glass" another word for telescope in the old days?

LLOYD/NAPOLEON (Attempting a French accent, and failing): Blimey! You're right. So we're supposed to look at the colors through telescopes and—

JEFF SESNO/PIRATE WITH NO FRONT TEETH AND A VERY REALISTIC AND GRUESOME SCAR DOWN THE LEFT SIDE OF HIS FACE (He's usually very quiet): One of the colors in the clue must be red.

LLOYD/NAPOLEON: Sure and begorra! (Scratching his head in perplexity.) How'd you figure that out?

JEFF/NO FRONT TEETH, ETC.: From the rhyme. Read the clue again.

LLOYD/NAPOLEON: Um, "This gorgeous quilt (it's Spotsburg's best) is colored ____ and ____ . Look through the glass, FIRST WORD, THIRD LETTER, and the booby prize you'll shed."

FRED/FAKE STUFFED PARROT: Is this Spotsburg's best quilt?

LLOYD/NAPOLEON (Ignoring Fred's excellent question): "Shed" rhymes with "red"! The second color must be red! Righty-O, Jeff! And so the other color is—

I think I mentioned to you in "The Lincoln Deathbed Quilt" that the quilt Doris Nelson brought me to examine (which was the quilt she hung out for treasure hunt, the very quilt the men were looking at at that moment) was three colors: blue, purple and a funny pinkish-colored putty. In other words, another chance for Edna and Alvin's clue to go seriously astray.

What happens to colors when it gets dark? It's not just that they're hard to see. When the lighting is poor, they're also very difficult to distinguish from each other. (Do this little experiment. Take a multi-colored shirt or dress into a dark closet and try to correctly identify the colors. It's hard, isn't it?)

And so Napoleon and the pirates, standing in Doris's back yard, studying her three-colored quilt by the light of the moon and broken flashlights, and hoping to find a two-colored quilt, had no idea what colors they were actually looking at. ("Bunch of dumb men," Shirley said afterwards, when she heard about this from Doris.)

LLOYD/NAPOLEON (Pointing to one of the darker-colored blocks): Sacre bleu! Is this red?

JEFF/NO FRONT TEETH, ETC.: Looks kind of purplish to me.

FRED/FAKE STUFFED PARROT: Kinda like two shades of purplish. And something light.

LLOYD/NAPOLEON (Insistent): Gray! Guys, it's definitely gray!

BRAD TILLSTROM/EYEPATCH: Wish the light was better. I think it's tan.

Finally, Lloyd, who as City Council President, was used to having his opinions listen to, prevailed: the quilt was declared to be two colors, dark red and gray. Jeff, the pirate with no front teeth, almost got himself flattened when he quietly asked Lloyd if he was spelling gray gray or grey. But Jeff had a serious point: it made a lot of difference if you were counting the third letter.

The damage caused by one wrong letter would have been minor if Edna and Alvin's other clues had been better. But Edna was so determined to cover herself with reflected quilt glory that she unintentionally misled the treasure hunters with most of the clues. (There's an expression we have about people who are obsessed with their houses: "house-proud." I think you could say Edna was "quilt-proud.")

Another brilliant clue went thus: "While Lindy's Plane o'er town flies highest, Doris's is lovely, too. Observe the SECOND of the colors: purple and ___ and ___." Of course, by "Lindy's Plane," Edna meant her own quilt, which was a Lindy's Plane, but this clue went right over the heads of two of the treasure-hunting teams, who supposed the reference to Lindy's Plane meant they should drive to the nearest airport, in Jackson, thirty miles (of mostly back roads) away. They finally reappeared in Spotsburg the next morning at six.

Those of us ensconced in the Masonic Temple basement began to realize something was amiss when midnight rolled around and no treasure hunters had appeared. Weak from hunger, weary from waiting, we helped ourselves to ample servings of the barbecued chicken, scalloped potatoes, cloverleaf rolls, tossed salad, and several desserts apiece. (It was easy to see the desserts were going stale. I thought it wise to move quickly and salvage as many as we could.)

We didn't touch Shirley's magnificent molded Mile-High Tower of Ruby Jell-O, although I deduced from the little puddle of red liquid on the cake pedestal on which it stood that it was beginning to lose its oomph. While we were eating our second helpings of Ruth's Heavenly Chocolate Fudge Eclairs, the treasure hunt was in jeopardy, but not yet a total flop.

HOWEVER, also at that moment, at the western edge of town, some students—variously described the next day as "high-spirited young bucks," "scalawags," and "heroes"—from State College decided this would be a great night for a prank.

The two largest men's dorms, Wakefield and Morris Halls, had been in a state of intense competition since the beginning of the school year. Wakefield had won the Tug of War without cheating; Morris had won the Canoe Race with cheating; the two dorms had tied in the Snow Sculpture Contest (this decision came under heavy protest, but what can you do? The judges declared that Art is Art). And the entire campus was gripped with anticipation regarding the upcoming All-Campus Obstacle Course Run, scheduled for two weeks hence.

Jay Allen told me afterwards that Wakefield Hall's residents are inclined to be brighter than Morris's, as many pre-engineering students are housed in Wakefield, and have a certain practical turn of mind. And so at half past midnight, the same night the rest of Spotsburg was being treated to the antics of the treasure hunters, a band of Wakefield men, disguised in sheets, sneaked into Morris Hall, and quietly and carefully removed all the handles from the Morris bathrooms: sink handles, toilet handles, shower handles, and doorknobs. And these they collected in two pillowcases and decided to hide somewhere in Spotsburg proper.

At 1:30 a.m. I announced we must do something to acquaint ourselves with the progress—or lack thereof—of the treasure hunt. I volunteered to emerge from the Masonic basement and drive around town on a reconnaissance mission.

Washington Street runs along the Masonic Temple, and if you drive out the Masonic parking lot and head south and the east, in two blocks you'll arrive at the town square. I only drove half a block, however, before I came upon a most interesting sight.

Appearing in Eleanor Duffendack's back yard were: Hilda Cooper, stretched out flat on Eleanor's grass, her brocade gown and hoop skirt over her head; three men in Biblical loincloths (Jim Brewster and his buddies); four unhappy-looking young men, trussed up like mummies in white sheets; two lumpy-looking pillowcases; and Eleanor's husband Ralph, with a shotgun.

Eleanor hadn't been involved in the treasure hunt at all. She'd simply failed to take her wash off the line and was awakened by the noise of three scantily-clad men and a hoop-skirted wench skulking around in her back yard, searching for Spotsburg's "most gorgeous quilt" by pawing through her old wool blankets and a chenille bedspread, not a quilt among them. ("Bunch of REALLY dumb men!" said Ruth and Shirley together after hearing this part.)

Being the forthright person she is, Eleanor awakened Ralph and sent him out into the yard (with his shotgun) while she called the police. The sight of cantankerous old Ralph Duffendack with his shotgun startled Hilda/Louis XIV's mistress, and she lost her footing in Eleanor's rock garden, broke her dainty satin-clad high heel, badly wrenched her ankle, and collapsed in a heap on the grass. And onto this scene stumbled the four young college men disguised in sheets and carrying their two pillowcases, which the Biblical types assumed were Spotsburg valuables in the process of being stolen. The Biblical types overwhelmed the college boys, immobilized them with their own sheets, and stood at attention under the watchful eye of Ralph and his firearm (which I later discovered, to my intense relief, wasn't loaded), while awaiting Officer Ted Dancer, who arrived as I happened by.

From the looks of things, Ted needed my help. I got out of my Studebaker, hurried over to Hilda, and knelt down beside her. It was almost impossible to get a good view of her face because the hoop skirt was in the way, and when I pushed it down, it bounced back up with a sproing! Hilda is (ordinarily) a rather tough cookie, so I treated her, in spite of her ridiculous get-up, as if she were an intelligent adult.

"Trouble here?" I said.

You never know what to expect when a person's sick or hurt. I've seen the meanest old coots whimper like babies from a tiny scratch. To her credit, Hilda was no complainer. "Yes," she said through gritted teeth. "I've done something to my ankle."

I didn't need to touch it to know from its peculiar position she'd probably broken it. I called out to Ted, who was milling around the yard being useless.

"We need a stretcher to carry her to your car," I said, "and then we've got to get her to Jackson Hospital. Pronto!"

Ted, who'd obviously been asleep when roused by Eleanor's call, muttered, "But I've got some criminals here!" he said.

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" I said, standing up and glaring in the "criminals'" direction. "Who are these desperadoes, anyway?"

"I dunno," said Ted, gesturing in the direction of the breech-clouted Jim Brewster. "Jim can tell you."

I‘m sure some of our Biblical patriarchs must have been paunchy and bald, and in spite of this were still revered by their followers. But Jim Brewster and his cohorts looked so ridiculous (perhaps it was paunches, breechcloths and watches that struck me as funny, although Alfred Pike—one of our most avid American Legionnaires—had also pinned a tiny American flag pin to his garment, and Lyle Schultz was wearing black socks with his sandals!!!), that the only thing that kept me from laughing hysterically was that Hilda was obviously in great pain, and something needed to be done for her as quickly as possible.

I looked at the four young men tied up like cocoons. "And who are you?" I said.

A cute kid with ash blond hair (who looked so much like my darling Steve that I did a double-take) said, "We're from campus."

Jim Brewster said, "We've apprehended them in the act of stealing people's valuables!"

"No worse than mucking up my washing with your grubby hands, Jim Brewster!" came Eleanor Duffendack's voice from somewhere behind a bedspread.

"No, ma'am," said the boy who looked like my Steve. "If you look in the pillowcases, you'll see hardware."

I'd been studying the boys' attire: i.e., the bedsheets, which looked like they might be useful.

"Jim and you other guys," I said. "Untie these boys, and make a pile of their sheets. Knot the sheets at the corner, and we'll put Hilda on it—very carefully—and Ted, we'll rush her to the hospital. You can straighten out the rest of this mess when we get back."

Ted tried to say something, but I cut him off: Hilda was white as a ghost. "Quick!"

So we untied the four college students (who had clothes on underneath their cocoons), and while the men were knotting the sheets together, I was untying the hoop skirt, pulling it over Hilda's head and throwing it aside. She looked terrible and I hoped she would faint, which would make the thirty miles to Jackson easier for her.

Then, under my unfailingly calm direction, the college boys very carefully and gently lifted Hilda from Eleanor's lawn onto the sheets. Gripping the corners of the sheets, they carried her to Ted's squad car, and we laid her out in the back. While we were accomplishing this, Jim opened one of the pillowcases.

"It's doorknobs!" he said. "Faucets and doorknobs!"

"All right, everybody," I said loudly, indignant that Ralph Duffendack had now trained his gun on ME, the old fool. But first things first. "Pay attention! Ted and I will go with Hilda to the hospital. While we're doing that," I said to the four college boys, "I want you nice young men—" (I'm an excellent judge of character) "—to go to the Masonic temple two blocks down the street, to the basement, and eat some of the most delicious barbecued chicken and chocolate eclairs you've ever tasted in your life. Ask for Ruth and tell Ruth Barb sent you.

"Jim! You and your henchmen go wake up EDNA and ALVIN and tell them something's gone wrong with their precious treasure hunt, and they should drive around Spotsburg and find our lost treasure hunters.

"And you, Ralph Duffendack," I yelled, looking straight at Ralph, who scowls and grumbles and refuses to wear his hearing aid, "you GO INSIDE AND PUT THAT GUN AWAY!"

And that is how the treasure hunt, which came to be called the Game of the Quilt Disaster, ended. The college students enjoyed the buffet, which suffered only slightly when the Mile-High Tower of Ruby Jell-O toppled off its pedestal and slopped all over its end of the table, inundating the cloverleaf rolls in a tidal wave of red ooze. Afterwards those nice young men wrote us thank you notes, with many kind words about the food. (The only strange thing—which they didn't comment on—was that there didn't seem to be enough desserts to go around. . . .)

Edna and Alvin located most of the treasure hunters (except the two teams who'd driven to the Jackson airport), and sent them to the buffet. Edna and Alvin also graciously declined the chairmanship of the next year's hunt, to everyone's enormous relief.

Jim Brewster and his Biblical followers went home and got dressed!

And poor Hilda Cooper spent the remainder of the school year and most of the summer recuperating from her broken ankle, which turned out to be severe, and required several surgeries. She asked me to special nurse her for a few days when she got out of the hospital, which I did.

I hadn't been friends with Hilda before—she was too bossy for my tastes—but I felt sorry for her, with nothing to do but sit at home: nurses and teachers make bad patients. And so I had one of my typical brainstorms, and I got Hilda started quilting, something she told me she'd never done before.

It was her idea to make a four-block wall hanging about the disastrous treasure hunt. She wanted to use a block of Boy's Nonsense, to represent the college boys and their prank. I suggested a block of Breeches, for Jim Brewster and their outrageous costumes. (Hilda approved. Of course, driving around the city with them, she'd had a closer look than I, and now we both know that Jim had his appendix removed not so long ago!)

Hilda studied my quilting Bible, 1001 Quilt Blocks, and decided the third block could be Tirzah's Treasure, because of the treasure reference, or Broken Path, because of her ankle. She finally settled on Tirzah's Treasure.

And then I remembered a patchwork block I thought would be perfect for the fourth corner of Hilda's wall hanging. It was a not-very-veiled allusion to the quality of Edna and Alvin's treasure hunt clues, and I wasn't too sure how Hilda would take it. Sometimes sickness dulls people's sense of humor, and I didn't know what kind of sense of humor Hilda started out with, if any.

What, I said, did she think about a block of Fool's Puzzle?

She guffawed.

8/ Patchwork on the Job

[More excerpts from Aunt Maggie's]

It's especially fun to tailor-make a gift that's relevant to a person's passion, hobby or work. For example, a pillow constructed of one large quilt block makes a great gift. Four or six blocks make a wonderful wall hanging for an office. The question is: are there many quilt blocks that represent people's occupations?

The answer is yes and no. A hastily-conducted census (it took me about a minute and a half) of my quilting books reveals that patchwork leans heavily in the direction of the stars. We Americans love stars: Ohio Stars, Texas Stars, Iowa Stars, and so on. So if your special gift recipient is a star—either an astral body or a star of stage or screen—you're in good shape.

On the other hand, there's a dearth of quilt patches that represent marriage counselors, auto mechanics and dishonest politicians.

But don't give up hope. With a little imagination—and willingness to joke and even insult your gift recipient—you can find patterns suitable for many walks of life. Consider these jobs and hobbies, and their possible piecework representations:

ACTOR (just starting out): Butterfly at the Crossroads, Bright Hopes

AUTO MECHANIC: Wheels

AVIATOR: Lindy's Plane, Wings (and, under certain unfortunate circumstances) Chuck-a-Luck

BABYSITTER: Baby Blocks, Seesaw, Children's Delight

BRIDGE OR POKER PLAYER: Card Tricks, Fair Play

BROTHER-IN-LAW (annoying): Clown's Choice

CARPENTER: Carpenter's Square, Sawblades, Barn Raising, Building Blocks

CLERGYMAN: Star of Bethlehem, Crown of Thorns, Garden of Eden, Walls ofJericho, Jacob's Ladder, Joseph's Coat, Job's Troubles, Children of Israel, King David's Crown, David and Goliath

DOCTOR OR NURSE: Red Cross

ELECTRICIAN: Tangled Lines, Lightning

ENTREPRENEUR: Small Business

FARMER: Country Farm, Farmer's Fields, Buckwheat, Corn and Beans, Squash Blossom, Clover Blossom, Turkey Tracks, Hen and Chickens

FISHERMAN: Flying Fish

FLORIST (There are many flower-related patterns. Among them are): Fancy Flowers, Flower Basket, Flower Pot, Rosebud, Lily, Aster, Chrysanthemum, Nosegay, Basket of Tulips

GRANDMOTHER: Grandmother's Flower Garden, Grandmother's Own, Grandmother's Puzzle, Grandmother's Fan

HOUSEWIFE: Homemaker, Home Treasure, Mother's Delight

LAWYER: Courthouse Steps, Lawyer's Puzzle, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

LIBRARIAN: Borrow and Return

LOGGER: Falling Timbers

MARRIAGE COUNSELOR: Single Wedding Ring, Broken Path, Battlefields, Thorny Thicket

MORTICIAN: Coffin Star

POLICEMAN: City Streets, Stop Sign, Blue Blazes, Catch As Catch Can

POLITICIAN: Road to the White House, Tippecanoe & Tyler, Too, and Washington Puzzle

POLITICIAN, DISHONEST: Spider Web, Twist and Turn, Secret Drawer, Leavenworth Nine-Patch

RECKLESS DRIVER: Right and Left, Hit or Miss

REPAIRMAN: Handy Andy, Hole in the Barn Door

SAILOR: Sailboat, Flags and Ships, Mariner's Compass, Storm at Sea, Wild Waves

SAILOR, INEPT: Crossed Canoes, Lost Ships

SEAMSTRESS: Spools, Pincushion, Buttons and Bows

TEACHER: Little Red Schoolhouse

VETERINARIAN: Goldfish, Kitty Corner, Bull's Eye, Turtle, Mare's Nest

WEATHERMAN: Weathervane, Four Winds, Whirlwind

The greatest patchwork nomenclature challenge I ever faced was when I was asked to create a wall hanging for a famous chest surgeon. I looked over my patchwork choices and rejected Sawtooth as lacking dignity. Wheel of Fortune lacked sufficient awe for a doctor's carefully acquired skills. Finally I settled on Hearts and Gizzards.

I know. When I told my friends my choice, they groaned, too.

9/ The "Good Parts"

If you're like me, when you get your hands on a new book, you flip through the pages frantically, trying to find the "good parts" as quickly as possible. The "good parts" (as I define them) are the first murder or the first kiss. The good parts are even better if there's a first murder followed by a first kiss!

Here's one of the good parts of this book. In this chapter you will learn how things went the first time I went out with Mike Mackenzie, and will be given some tantalizing hints about what might happen between us in the future. I promise to spare you no details; I trust you'll wildly applaud my absolute frankness vis-à-vis my love life.

As you remember, Jay Allen the Gorgeous had suggested he introduce me to this guy Mike Mackenzie in the Physics Department. (Of course, I had NO idea what kind of matchmaker Jay would be: men's interests are so different from women's. For all I knew, maybe this fellow was a good fly fisherman, and that was Jay's standard!)

Then Arden suggested Mike join us on a Quilt Country expedition, and Mike passed it up, and I showed you the letter I wrote Mike about his unfortunate (and quite incomprehensible) preference for a hockey game over a Quilt Country expedition. Then, much to my surprise, Mike called me, told me he enjoyed my letter, and invited me to the Robert Burns Festival in Ann Arbor. He sounded nice over the phone, and I accepted.

I'll admit: I was a tad nervous about this. It's a bit disconcerting to be forty-ish and going on blind date. I spent early Saturday morning pulling clothes out of my closet and throwing them back in. I mean, what do you wear to an event where the men will be wearing skirts? My usual strokes of brilliance were deserting me in droves!

Fortunately, Ruth Wallace called me Saturday noon to ask about playing bridge that night, and I told her my dilemma. I'd forgotten (or maybe I never knew) that Wallace is a good Scottish name, and so I threw myself at her mercy. Should I wear plaid? I asked. Pants? Sequins and feathered boas? What?!!?

Ruth is very calming and logical. "No," she told me, "don't wear plaid to a Robert Burns night, because you're not Scottish and in that crowd you don't want to show up wearing the wrong tartan. They'd notice."

Good point.

"And," she continued, "don't wear slacks because a Robert Burns night is a very formal occasion. Do you have something fancy to wear?"

I thought about it for a minute. I do have a rather strange costume—by the standards of our day—a very slim patchwork skirt I made a while ago of randomly arranged blocks of black, ruby and sapphire velvet, and a matching black satin blouse. Because of the fabric it's quite elegant, although it's so out-of-the-ordinary (remember, this IS the Eisenhower Administration) that my sons say it makes me look like a beatnik.

"Sounds perfect," Ruth said. Ruth has a fine appreciation for individuality—in clothes, opinions, whatever.

So five o'clock rolled around, I'd tried on my skirt with and without a girdle (I finally said, "To hell with the girdle. After all, I've had babies!"), and I'd pulled myself into some semblance of order. I looked pretty good. I hoped I wouldn't sweat all over the satin blouse. It was exactly five o'clock. There was a knock on the door. I opened it.

There on my doorstep stood a bonny Scots laddie if ever I saw one. Not fat, not thin, just sturdy. Tall—over six feet—with dark hair and a neatly trimmed dark beard that made me think immediately of Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales, but before he became fat. In other words, HANDSOME!!! And wearing a most amazing costume.

Taking it from the top, a white wing-collared shirt such as men wear with formal wedding clothes, a black bow tie, and then a black jacket thing, that looked like the upper half of a cutaway, but without the tails. The jacket had black satin lapels and square silver buttons. (An expert seamstress notices these details.)

And the kilt. I guessed I was looking at the Mackenzie tartan, which is dark and quite beautiful: blue and black and green. And that funny thing Scottish men wear in front (now, now—no naughty jokes, please) which I've since learned is called a sporran (rhymes with "Lauren") and actually serves as a wallet. His sporran (which hung from a silver chain at, roughly, his hips) was made of spotless white fur with white tassels, and the top edges of the tassels and sporran were silver, engraved with some sort of intricate Celtic design.

As for the rest of this Gaelic apparition: dark blue knee-high Argyll socks (who says you can't mix plaids?), and a chunk of v-shaped green ribbon at the top of each stocking (they're called "flashes," he told me later), and gleaming black shoes.

Some part of my anatomy did back flips.

"Hi," he said, smiling broadly and sticking out his hand. "I'm Mike."

I shook his hand, acutely aware I was going to sweat all over my satin blouse after all.

It took me a moment to remember my usually impeccable manners. "Uh, come in, won't you?"

He did.

"Would you like something to drink?" I said.

"I was thinking," he said, "we might like to take the back roads to Ann Arbor. There's an inn on the way where we could have a drink."

"That sounds very nice," I said, thinking it sounded very nice indeed.

"It may get cold," he said. "Do you have a coat?"

I was making a mental list: it was considerate of him to think of taking a coat. And he was prompt, too, if his timely arrival was any clue. (I can't stand men who are late.)

I looked in my closet and found an emerald green cape with a hood, something my aunt brought me as a souvenir of her trip to Austria. I love it, but I never wear it because it‘s way too exotic for Spotsburg. Tonight it looked just right. He helped me on with it. (Nice manners, I added to my rapidly growing list of his virtues.)

And so we got into his car, a modest green Chevy, and were off.

Dear reader, I've promised you complete and utter candor—none of those infuriating phrases silly Victorian novelists adored, like "And now, gentle readers, we draw a curtain across this blissful scene, blah, blah, blah." But the appalling fact is that I'm trying to write down exactly what we talked about on our way to the festival, and I CAN'T REMEMBER! You know, usually when there's a crisis, I'm the most clear-headed person in the room. But it's like I had an acute attack of senility—most of which fortunately cleared up in a few days—but it left me with some memory loss. You have every right to be irritated about this.

But maybe you understand, too. Have you ever been in a situation where you were so frightened or amazed or excited that you couldn't sort out the details afterward? Where you were so distracted by what you were hearing that you couldn’t remember what you were seeing? Or so distracted by what you were feeling that you can't remember what—or if—you were thinking?

The first part of that evening was like that for me. I do know I asked Mike what the Robert Burns Festival would be like, in case it was a sacred ritual, where I might easily make a mistake and do something stupid or ill-mannered.

And he explained this celebration of Scotland's greatest poet to me, and I could see that being Scottish wasn't a RELIGION for him, because he could tell jokes about being Scottish, too. Like this one: "Question: How was copper wire invented? Answer: Two Scotsmen quarreling over a penny."

And I do remember that he told me my skirt was pretty, and he asked if I'd made it myself, and how had I gotten involved in sewing?

And I told him. And for those of you who are relentlessly curious and must know EVERY blessed detail, let me say this. At no time on our drive TO Ann Arbor was there any kissing or even any handholding—not that I didn't think of it, I admit! We just drove and talked and laughed, and my cheeks got pinker and pinker, and during the quiet spells I noticed his eyes twinkled in a most charming sort of way. And we laughed a lot more, and it got rather warm in the car (very odd—I'm too young to be having hot flashes), and even though I only had a ginger ale at the tavern we stopped at on the way, an ancient (by Michigan standards) converted fieldstone inn, and he only had a root beer, I felt quite giddy by the time we arrived at the Chesterfield Hotel on Main Street in Ann Arbor.

Picture the scene in the Chesterfield Hotel. Even without such a pleasing companion, any quilter's blood pressure would have rocketed sky-high. The Chesterfield's main ballroom is elegant: brass chandeliers and red wallpaper and red plush carpeting. My escort's garb was multiplied a hundredfold, with variations in the plaids and in the accessories, creating a dazzling vista of gorgeous reds and greens and peacock blues and even bright yellows. Many of the women were kilted also, although several wore plain white dresses, with a length of plaid fabric drawn over the shoulder and pinned.

And it occurred to me then that today's usual gatherings are so drab. Go to church or a city council meeting or a high school graduation, and we're all wearing such dull Republican clothing: beiges and grays and browns. But the Chesterfield Hotel's ballroom that night gleamed like two handfuls of jewels.

We'd been assigned a table at the front of the room near the speaker's podium. The tables had centerpieces of cut flowers and thistles, of all things ("a Scottish motif," Mike explained), and name cards decorated with little pen-and-ink sketches of thistles and our names, carefully written in fancy calligraphy. Each of us had a tossed salad at our place and a small glass containing an amber-colored liquid. Mike must have guessed I was puzzled. "Whiskey," he said, "for toasting the haggis."

"Ah, yes!" I said, noting from the name card (which bore the inscription "Alexander Greystoke McFarland IV") that I was sitting in the wrong place, in the place to Mike's left. I quickly moved around him to the place—and place card—on his right. "Yes, the haggis!" Not, of course, that I knew what a haggis was.

Other guests soon appeared at our table, many of them with drinks in their hands. Mike seemed to know most of them, and he introduced me and we all nodded and smiled and I promptly forgot their names, except for Alexander Greystoke McFarland IV, which had a lilting ring to it, like a nursery rhyme by A. A. Milne. And all of a sudden I was saying to myself (not to others, you'll be relieved to hear): "Alexander Greystoke McFarland the Fourth went out for a cup of tea, and said to the Queen, as he buttered his scones, Alexander the Fourth, that's me!" No, I wasn't drunk. But there was something in the air. . . .

This poetic reverie was interrupted by a terrible low growling in the back of the room. Something drastically wrong had just happened to the hotel's ventilation system. This growling was followed by the screeching of two large tomcats in a duel to the death, and then it dawned on me: bagpipes. The wailing was almost unbearable to my sensitively-tuned ears, and I started to grimace, and then I realized that the others at the table had stood up and were exhibiting various degrees of rapture and reverence, so I reined myself in sharply.

From the back of the room came two bagpipers in yellow and black kilts and the same sort of jacket Mike was wearing, followed by a gentleman in a bright red kilt and the same sort of jacket. And the man in the red kilt held aloft a large silver tray, and on the silver tray was a—a—what?

And someone cried out "To the haggis!" and everyone in the room picked up their little glasses of whiskey and shouted, "To the haggis!" And to the cadence of the music, they all downed the contents of their glasses in one gulp. (I sipped mine.) Stepping smartly, the bagpipers reached the front of the room and wheeled around in perfect synchrony to face the crowd. Behind them, the man holding the tray carrying the Whatever-It-Was stepped in time to the bagpipes, then moved between them to face the crowd. The man standing on Mike's other side, Mr. Alexander Greystoke McFarland IV, who wasn't a merry-looking gentleman at all, but rather a burly-looking man with a scowling face, dropped his glass on the table, gasped, clutched his throat, and fell like a boulder to the floor.

What with the group's attention focused on the THING on the silver tray, and the screeching of the bagpipes, it took everyone a moment to realize what had happened. Then a lady at the next table, directly behind the fallen man, began to scream. At that moment, I was actually glad for the bagpipes!

I quickly turned and knelt beside Mr. McFarland Etc.—a considerable feat considering how tight my skirt was. He didn't look good: his skin was gray, he was perspiring profusely, his breathing was shallow and rapid. Naturally, my first thought would have been a heart attack, except that there was a very odd odor emanating from his lips. . . .

"Mike!" I barked, forgetting for a moment who and where I was, and who I was talking to. "Get an ambulance and the police immediately! Tell them we'll need gastric lavage!"

"Right," he said, and half-ran out of the ballroom. (I hope I can be forgiven for observing that the rippling hem of his kilt as he hurried revealed he has very nice legs.) Several other people gathered their wits and pushed back the crowd that suddenly seemed to be pressing in and leaning over the stricken man and me. And—thank heaven!—the bagpipes stopped!

I hope some day we'll have a system where medically-trained emergency people arrive and assist an acutely ill person before he dies. But that night it took far too long for the hotel staff (evidently dimwits all) to figure out the correct emergency number to call, and far too long for the ambulance to negotiate Ann Arbor's congested streets. By the time they finally arrived, the ambulance personnel were ready to transport the sick man, but had no clue how to do a gastric lavage (that's stomach pump in ordinary parlance) and no equipment to do it with, either, and by the time I'd yelled at some of the hotel staff and ordered a length of rubber tubing, a funnel, and some others things (for a homemade effort), I'd done everything any of us could, and Mr. McFarland was dead.

A very young policeman, who identified himself as Officer Wayne Hertler, appeared in the crowd, asked a few questions, and took some notes. The body was placed on a stretcher and sent to the county morgue, and the Master of Ceremonies declared into the microphone that Robert Burns night was over, and that he hoped we would return the next year, for a happier turn of events. The crowd, most of whom looked badly shaken, drifted out of the room, but I stayed by our table to consider the situation.

Officer Hertler flipped over a page in his notebook and said to me, "So, a heart attack, would you say?"

"No," I said, "I wouldn't. Take the glass," I told him, "and see what was in it."

"What?" he said. I can forgive his being so dense: he was very young. It was easy to imagine this might be his first real assignment. (I note parenthetically that he was cute, too.)

"Take the glass," I said. "No, no!" I snapped, as he reached for it with his bare hand. "Wrap it carefully in one of these napkins and take it to your laboratory. Or leave it where it's fallen and have a detective come here. It needs to be checked for fingerprints and for whatever was inside."

The young man nodded, bent down to look at it and sniffed at it, but did not touch it.

I mentioned at the start of this tale that the "good parts" of a book are the first murder or the first kiss. I felt pretty sure I'd witnessed a murder. I also felt pretty sure I'd lost a most interesting new friend. By now, Mike was undoubtedly completely fed up with his bossy, order-giving date.

I was wrong. He appeared at my side and surprised me by saying, very earnestly, "I'm sorry they couldn't get here faster. I'm very impressed by the way you handled everything." And to my astonishment, he bent over and gave me a kiss—smack. Just like that!

We'd had the first murder and the first kiss. Yet the excitement wasn't over. Maybe I was exhausted, or maybe my skirt was tighter than I thought. Because for the first time in my WHOLE life, I did something so astonishing, so unexpected, so UTTERLY UNLIKE my usually tough and resolute self. I fainted.

Picture how embarrassed I felt when I awakened and found myself stretched out on the glorious red carpeting of the Chesterfield Hotel's ballroom, my feet very professionally elevated on pillows, Mike bending over me, Officer Hertler bending over me, the Master of Ceremonies bending over me, all with looks of consternation on their good-looking features. The bending over me part wasn't so bad, but the EXTREME humiliation a nurse feels when SHE gets sick is not easily glossed over.

Mike helped me up. "You need something to eat," he said.

"Oh, I don't know. . . ." I mumbled unconvincingly, my stomach doing an imitation of a sailor's hornpipe.

My hesitation didn't fool them, and I was expertly shepherded to a table—a different table from the one to which Mike and I had been assigned, and at which our hapless former tablemate had drunk from his poisoned glass, and which was now being examined by two other policemen, whom I hoped were experienced detectives. Somehow I was coerced into sitting down, and then, in a grand gesture, the Master of Ceremonies (whose name, it turned out, was Prezbilowitz) presented me with the silver tray on which the haggis sat, and I was urged to EAT.

A haggis is not a thing of beauty. In fact, it is repellant: a grimy gray football, roughly textured, sewn at one end. (Really! with STRING!) It did, however, smell delicious. The three gentlemen brought me rolls, a fresh salad, and a lovely-looking bowl of barley soup.

I couldn't eat alone, and so I urged them to join me. (Also, I had no idea how to eat haggis!) Officer Hertler declined, saying his associates needed him. "But I'd like to ask you," he said nicely (he had an adorable dimple in his chin) "what made you think the man had been poisoned?"

"The smell of almonds," I said. "The whiskey smell was strong enough to cover it up in the glass, but I thought I detected almonds on his breath. It's likely to be cyanide." (It was then it struck me that I was certainly glad I'd moved from the place on Mike's left—where the glass with the poison had been—to the place on Mike's right. From now on, I'll always sit where the place card tells me to!)

"Not a very pleasant way to commit suicide," Officer Hertler said, looking unhappy. I reflected sadly that time would undoubtedly harden him to these sorts of events.

"I don't think it was suicide," I said, "but that's something you might learn from the fingerprints."

"I see," he said, sounding like he didn't.

Mike sat down beside me, and looked so interested and attentive I couldn't help expanding on my idea, which was clever, if I do say so myself.

"The fingerprints should be helpful. If it was suicide, then you'll find at least two sets of fingerprints: those of the person who set the table, and the fingerprints of Mr. McFarland, who drank from the glass and died. But if it was murder, then you'll only find one set, because the murderer—assuming he or she is not a complete dope—will have wiped the glass to remove his or her own fingerprints, and will have wiped off the table-setter's prints, too."

The three men nodded their heads, obviously appreciating this point, and we returned our attention to the haggis.

"Why don't you start?" I said to the Master of Ceremonies, feeling it was his ceremonial due. Besides, he would know how to break into the thing.

"I'd be honored," he said, and from his argyll stocking he pulled a beautifully ornate and very slim silver knife and, with a quick downward movement of his wrist, slashed the haggis open.

It was delicious.

In the next few hours, several interesting things happened. Mike drove me home, and I learned that kissing a nice man with a beard is very, very pleasant. . . .

And Officer Hertler phoned, to tell me that Mr. Alexander Greystoke McFarland the Fourth had indeed been poisoned with cyanide. "If it hadn't been for you, Mrs. Hoxsie, I might still be thinking it was a heart attack," he said. I could picture his handsome young features, looking shamefaced.

"An easy mistake to make," I said, although though it wasn't, if you knew the telltale signs.

It later emerged that Mr. McFarland's business partner was his murderer, the partner having hoped to gain control of their company, and Mrs. McFarland, too. (I correctly deduced the wicked partner was not Scottish from his having so little sensitivity to the proprieties of a Robert Burns night!)

AND I found a recipe for haggis, the traditional Scottish dish, and now I know what it was I was eating that night. I would advise you not to read the following on an empty stomach!

RECIPE FOR HAGGIS

(I found this in Authentic Scottish Cuisine by Dame Roberta McGinnis Campbell and now, thankfully, out of print)

1. Slaughter a healthy, young sheep.

2. Remove the sheep's stomach, heart, lungs and liver, and rinse in cold water.

3. Turn the stomach inside out and scrape the lining with a sturdy knife.

4. Boil the heart, liver and lungs in salted water until tender. For the most satisfactory results, hang the windpipe over the edge of the pot so it drains into a saucepan or bowl.

[What fun Dame Roberta must have been! Imagine having her to tea, and the conversation that undoubtedly ensued: "And what, pray tell, Dame Roberta, are you fixing for dinner tonight? And how?"]

5. Chop the meats and season with salt, pepper, nutmeg, mace, onions, meat fat and oatmeal. Mix with the liquid in which you cooked the meats.

6. Fill the stomach with the mixture and sew it up with very fine string.

7. Poke the stomach with a needle and boil it for three hours.

8. Remove from the water and serve on a platter, accompanied by turnips, potatoes, and a kilted piper.

[Presumably the "kilted piper" stood near the plate, not on it!]

PS: The next time my quilt gang organized a fabric-hunting expedition to Northern Indiana, Mike called me immediately and said he wanted to join us: he'd already given away his hockey tickets. We had a great time that day, and on the way home he squeezed my hand and said, "That was fun." He looked very happy.

I looked very happy, too.

PPS: When he asked if I wanted to go to a bagpipe concert, I said NO.

10/ Border Dispute

You know how small towns work. It took about a minute and a half for the word to get out that Mike Mackenzie and I were, as Shirley Moray put it, "an item."

Like I've said before, Spotsburgers are generally pretty nice people, and everyone approved of my romance. My former husband, Ron, had not been popular in Spotsburg, something, no doubt, to do with the money he borrowed—and never returned—from a number of accounts at Spotsburg State Bank. In fact, so complete was the shame Ron brought upon himself that he was officially drummed out of the Sons of Sasquatch, only they didn't actually use drums. Jim Brewster simply received Ron's resignation—and Sasquatch furs—without comment, although later Jim did say something to me about how Ron's furs should have been black, with a white stripe painted down the back.

Anyway, that was ancient history. I was in love. And we spent the next few months doing those ridiculous things you do when you're in love. Calling each other on the phone and talking (about what?) for two hours. Cooking for each other—Mike's an excellent cook—although neither of us produced even one tiny haggis. Having "study dates," during which he tried to prepare lectures for his physics classes, and I tried to work on my latest quilting project, and we ended up kissing and hugging and generally realizing we weren't getting much accomplished. Not much work, at any rate.

So life in Spotsburg went on. And one day I got a call from a former quilting student of mine, Judy Brewster, wife of Jim Brewster, the grand-high Sasquatch. Her grandmother Lucinda Pike had (as everybody in town knew) died. The will hadn't been read yet, but Judy and her mother were spending the intervening days engaged in the unhappy task of sorting through Lucinda's clothes and linens, and giving away the useable things to the Methodist Church clothing bank. And they'd come across a partly finished quilt. Could Judy and her mother bring it over and get my advice?

Sure, I said. Mike was taking his Introductory Astronomy class out for night of observing, and I had nothing in particular to do. (Mike has taken me out a couple of times for observing, and I've learned that standing in a cornfield under the velvety black night sky is sensational—and the stars aren't bad either!)

Judy and her mother, Mildred Hawn, are known in Spotsburg as "quite a pair." They look alike and dress alike, and rumor has it that they talk to each other twice a day on the phone, although they live only two blocks apart. Wearing nearly identical pink plaid blouses and brown skirts, they arrived at my house soon enough, and I couldn't help noticing once again that, except for the fact that Mother Mildred's hair was all gray, and Daughter Judy's hair was just beginning to gray, they so strongly resembled each other they might have been sisters.

Mildred was carrying a bundle in her arms, and together they quickly unrolled it on my kitchen table. The three of us studied the situation.

What Mildred and Judy had found in the late Lucinda's linen cupboard was a mostly-finished Trip Around the World quilt top. I suppose Trip Around the World gets its name from the arrangement of the pieces: one square in the center, then different colored squares north, south, east and west; then subsequent rows of one contrasting color after another, so that the final effect is nested diamonds. [See the front cover of this book!] It's a design frequently seen among the Amish who, perhaps to compensate for the drab colors they wear, often execute it in bold primary colors and black. Done that way, it can be very striking.

Mildred and Judy's quilt top (it was only the top; it hadn't been put together with a batt and backing) wasn't so dramatic. The blocks weren't solid colors, but calicos in various insipid shades of brown and green. Of course, as I tell my students, "De gustibus non est disputandem" —it's the only Latin I know, but it never fails to impress them— which means "There's no disputing taste," which I also interpret to mean that there's no accounting for taste, either. In other words, it's just plain foolish to fight about whether something is beautiful or not.

Anyway, I felt lukewarm about the quilt top they'd brought me, but it wasn't my job to like it. The question (I thought) was: what to do with it?

"Well," I said, "what do you want to do with it?"

"I—" they both began at once.

"Okay," I said, feeling like a schoolteacher, "let's do this one at a time. Mildred, what would you like to do with your mother's quilt top?"

"Isn't it wonderful?" the elder woman said breathlessly. I nodded. "I just love it. Finish it and use it on my bed, of course, but it's only large enough for a twin bed. My bed's a double. And I think it ought to be MINE because she was my mother."

She was right about one thing. The quilt top in its present form was too narrow and too short for a double bed.

"And you, Judy, what do you want to do with this top?"

"Isn't it gorgeous?" the younger woman said, panting lightly. I nodded dutifully. "I simply adore it. I want to finish it and use it on my bed, of course," she said, "but Jim and I have an extra-long double mattress, since he's so tall. And I think it ought to be MINE because she was my GRANDmother. Whom I LOVED," she added, with a pointed look at her mother.

I sighed. "Well, ladies," I said, beginning to fold the quilt top, "why don't you come back when you decide what you want to do. We can talk more then."

I finished the folding and stuck the quilt top in Mildred's arms. Steering them toward the door, I thanked them for giving me the opportunity to see it, and pushed them outside. I hoped they would go home and come to some satisfactory solution—without involving me!

They couldn't. They were back the following week and told me their solution—once I got them to talk one at a time.

"We're going to share the quilt—" said Mildred.

"Share the quilt—" said Judy.

"This was my clever idea," said Mildred. "I'll use if for a month, and then I'll take it to Judy's house—"

"—And I'll have it for a month," said Judy, "and then I'll take it back to Mom's! If," she said, sniffing slightly, "she really HAS to have it back."

"That's great." I said, without enthusiasm. "So the problem is solved."

"No," said Mildred, "because it's still too small for both our beds. So what do we do now?"

"Unless we do something," Judy chimed in, "it will be too small!"

"You're right!" I cried. "It will be too small!"

I'd spent the whole day with Chester Smith, who's been ill with pneumonia, and I was tired. Chester, alas, turns out to be one of those men who WHINE when they're sick. (It's usually the men, I've noticed.)

I didn't want to be King Solomon. At least King Solomon had one advantage: he had only one baby, in one size. Our baby had to fit two different beds!

"Well," I said, not realizing I was opening the door to a whole new dispute. "As it stands, the top is too small for either bed." (Now I was beginning to repeat myself!) "I suggest you add some borders to your quilt top, for more width and length. And if you make it long enough for your bed, Judy, it will fit both beds. Although there will be more overhang, Mildred, when it's on your bed—since your bed's shorter. Perhaps you could take up the extra length by tucking it under the pillow when you make the bed."

"Brilliant!" they said together, clapping their hands. And then: "What kinds of borders?"

To this day, I can't understand why two souls so apparently well synchronized in their thoughts and speech could not solve their differences more harmoniously. Even as I answered, I experienced one of my usually reliable premonitions which, unfortunately, I did not heed.

"I don't know," I said. "Some borders. Three or four strips along the top, bottom and sides. Varying widths and fabrics. You know: calicos to coordinate with the browns and the greens that are already there."

"You're so clever!" they exclaimed in unison, and after a brief doh-si-doh to see who would go out my front door first, they left.

The next evening I heard from Janine, owner of Sew and Go, the fabric store on our central town square. Janine is an old buddy of mine. (As you might expect, the ties that bind the town's quilting teacher and the town's fabric store owner are powerful indeed.) It seems that Mildred and Judy had arrived at the crack of dawn, quilt top in hand, and spent the next three hours quarreling over what borders they would add to their quilt top.

From Janine's shelves they removed every bolt of fabric that had even a trace of green in it, and piled those bolts up at one end of Janine's cutting table, and then all the bolts with even a speck of brown in them, and made a stack of those at the other end of Janine's cutting table, and then unrolled the bolts, and laid them on top of and underneath each other, and tried to visualize what a light green border with a floral motif would look like next to a dark green border with large ivy and brown berries next to a fabric with medium brown chicken tracks next to the quilt top itself. And this task could not be accomplished without knocking a number of these bolts on the floor, and without engaging in rapidly escalating characterizations of the other person's suggestions and tastes, so that the two women went from "Hmmm, I can't really say I like that," to "You seem bound and determined to put those two pieces of fabric together, don't you?" to (at the end of the three hours) "I've seen some ugly color combinations in my life, but that takes the cake!"

And whether it was by accident or by design, Daughter Judy struck Mother Mildred in the forehead with a card of heavy brass coat buttons, and Mother Mildred just happened to lay her hands on a sleeve board, and then Daughter Judy grabbed a handful of thread and some bias tape, and Janine, who's a most peaceable person, was forced for the first time in her long career as a fabric store owner to throw two customers out of her store, which by now looked like photographs of downtown Flint, after the tornado. And in the mêlée, Mildred and Judy left the quilt top behind.

I told Janine I'd meet her at her store and help her clean up the mess, and while we were picking up (and dusting off) bolts of fabric, spools of thread, cards of buttons, and bias tape, I had one of my brilliant ideas. Why not put the quilt top in the window and have a contest? Enlist the aid of Spotsburg's clever citizens, and ask them for suggestions regarding the quilt borders!

"And," said Janine, "have Judy and Mildred be the judges!"

"NO!" I shouted. "NOT be the judges! They can't agree on anything! Not Mildred and Judy!" I pulled myself together, and continued more calmly. "You and I can be the judges. Or," I said, having a positive brainstorm, "Ramona! She's a lawyer. Ramona could be a QUILT JUDGE!"

And so, with a quick phone call to Mildred and Judy for their permission, and one to Ramona (who gave me neatly argued reasons—which I ignored—as to why she wasn't qualified to judge a quilt design), it was arranged. The quilt top was hung in Janine's front window, and the citizens of Spotsburg were invited to enter their suggestions vis-à-vis the borders. Janine put little numbered tags on each of her fabric bolts, and she and I mimeographed some official-looking entry blanks, and people were invited to sketch their suggestions, or write ideas like "Put a foot-wide border of fabric #12 on the danged thing and be done with it!" And over the quilt, Janine hung a neatly lettered sign that read, "Help Solve a Border Dispute!" (I quipped that Ramona, since she was going to sort this out at the end, was the border patrol.)

To my surprise, this project became the talk of the town. People were in and out of Janine's store, including a remarkable number of men. (It was very good for her business. Also Jeff Sesno, who is recently divorced, good-looking, and very nice, asked her out to dinner. She accepted.)

At first I assumed the crowds at Janine's were the result of the recent Spotsburg whoop-de-doo over quilts in general. I dreamed a lovely dream in which our town was being magically transformed into some kind of midwestern quilting Shangri-La, where every man, woman, and child within the city limits was eager to learn to quilt a feathered circle and piece a nine-patch.

And then I discovered the truth: that Mildred and Judy had carried their dispute into their bridge clubs, into their church circles, and into their homes—making Jim Brewster's life an absolute nightmare—and that most of the quilt-viewers were, in fact, just curiosity-seekers, wanting to know what the brouhaha was all about.

And then a strange thing happened. Mildred's mother's (and Judy's grandmother's) will was read, and the situation, already confused, became totally baffling.

I once heard my divorce lawyer expound (offensively, I thought) on "Old Ladies' Wills." "The problem," he said, "with wills written by old ladies is that they delight in making a plethora of specific bequests." (Why do lawyers talk like that? It's so irritating.)

As it turned out, Lucinda Pike's will contained just such a long and detailed list of specific bequests. Among those bequests: her ruby ring with diamond side stones was to go to "my daughter Mildred Hawn, because the ruby is her birthstone. Also the matching earrings." Her copy of My Life Among the Indians (by General George Custer) went to "my son Alfred Pike, who has proudly and fearlessly served as a Captain in the US Army." Her set of pink and green Havilland dishes went to "my son Alfred's daughter Rachel, who studied French in high school and will appreciate French fine bone china." Her black jet beads went to "my granddaughter Judy Brewster, who looks so very nice in black." ("I HATE black," Judy told me.) Lucinda's cobalt blue glass plate went to "Boopsie, my cat, who has always been true BLUE to me."

And "my quilt, which I hope to have finished by the time of my death, and is named Trip Around the World, I hereby bequeath to my Canadian offspring."

Mildred, Judy and Mildred's brother Alfred were completely slack-jawed when they heard this. Who was Canadian? WHAT Canadian offspring? Who got the quilt? And WHAT ABOUT THE QUILT CONTEST?

Mildred and Judy appeared on my doorstep later that week. I was surprised to see them together, but there they were, side-by-side and very subdued, too, in matching gray checked blouses and turquoise skirts. They wanted the quilt border contest suspended, they told me, until the mystery surrounding the bequest of the quilt was solved.

I agreed. After all, the quilt top might not actually be theirs. And (and this will come as no surprise to those of you who know me), I found myself getting interested in their story, and they were happy to fill me in on the details, which grew curiouser and curiouser by the day. And here's how the mystery unraveled.

Unlike most of Spotsburg's old-timers, the late Lucinda Pike and her two children, Mildred and Alfred, weren't actually born in Michigan. They were born in Vermont, and migrated here forty or so years ago. That was after Lucinda's husband died, when Mildred and Alfred were still quite young.

"Spotsburg looks very much like Vermont," Mildred explained. "So many lovely maple trees. Although it's flatter here. . . ."

"It certainly does," said her daughter, who added, "Spotsburg looks VERY much like Vermont, with the trees and all, though they've got mountains. I've visited there many times. I was born here in Michigan, of course."

"Of course she was," Mildred said, "since I married a Spotsburg man."

"Of course she was," I said, "since you married a Spotsburg man."

To be exact, Lucinda and her children were born in Derby Line, Vermont. I found Derby Line at the tippy-top of the Vermont map—you can see it's right at the US-Canadian border. On the other side of the border is Rock Island, Quebec. But, as Mildred and Judy explained to me, Derby Line and Rock Island are really one community, one community that happens to have an international border running through it.

"The place is unique!" they both cried at once.

"The line runs right through some people's houses!" said Mildred. "Including my parents'! Where I was born!"

"And this is amazing!" said Judy. "The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is firmly planted on the line! So the front doors are in the United States, and the books are in Canada!"

Mildred took up her daughter's cry. "Mother actually had to go THROUGH CUSTOMS just to take her aunt a jar of jelly!"

"And if that's not bad enough—" began Judy.

"Wait a moment!" I said: I was beginning to have the glimmer of a very bright idea. Where was Lucinda's house located exactly, I asked.

Judy asked for a piece of paper and pencil. As I searched for them (in the considerable mess on my desk), she told me that another one of the funny things about Derby Line, Vermont, and Rock Island, Quebec, was that there'd been no way to fight the War of 1812, which pitted the British and their Canadians allies against their American neighbors. So a town council met and voted to ignore the whole war!

"And so," echoed her mother, "they ignored the war!"

"They ignored the war!" I cried, handing Judy the pencil and paper.

With her mother's continual assistance, Judy quickly sketched out a rough map of the two towns, their grand total of about six streets, and a box with an X in it, indicating Grandmother Lucinda's house. ("Dear, I think you've made the house look SMALLER than it is," remarked Mildred. "And I believe Caswell Street doesn't turn northeast quite so sharply.")

Whatever the deficiencies of Judy's map, I could see clearly: Lucinda Pike's house on the west side of Main Street—where Mildred and her brother Alfred were born—was neatly bisected by the international border. Half of it was in Derby Line, Vermont; half of it was in Rock Island, Quebec.

"And you were born where?" I asked Mildred.

"In the house."

"Yes," I said, trying to be patient, "but where in the house?"

"As you face the house, it's the upper left-hand bedroom," she said.

"And that part of the house is in what country?" I asked.

"That part of the house is in the United States," Mildred said.

"Is it possible," I said, "that your brother Alfred was born in a different room, and would, therefore, be a Canadian? The ‘Canadian offspring' referred to in the will?" (Or, I wanted to add, that your mother might have had another child you don't know about? But I didn't say it. Some days even I know when to keep my mouth shut!)

Both women looked thunderstruck. "NO!" they exclaimed in unison. "Alfred was a captain in the US Army! AS EVERYBODY KNOWS!"

This was true. Everybody in Spotsburg knows that Alfred Pike was in the US Army, because he flies an American flag from his front porch, and always wears a little flag pin in his lapel, and reminisces incessantly and tediously about his days in the army ("when we had REAL men who REALLY knew how to fight a war"), and in addition to being a Sasquatch, he's also one of Spotsburg's most ardent American Legion members, and he's frequently heard to mutter about the United States being the best country in the world, and how proud he is HE's a US CITIZEN!

But my eagle eye noted that neither Mildred nor Judy was absolutely positive where Alfred was born, and why would Lucinda have put that line in her will about her Canadian offspring, unless she knew something about her children that they didn't?

"I think," I said, "there's a very simple explanation. I expect you'll soon find something that clears the matter up."

And, of course, they did. The attorney who drew up Lucinda's will had been keeping a letter for Alfred, to be delivered to him after his mother's death. By that time the public curiosity about the quilt top (and the thought-provoking line in the will about "Canadian offspring") had become so great that the entire affair was written up in the Spotsburg Sentinel, including Lucinda's letter to her son.

If you live in a large city, you may have a hard time understanding why anything so personal as a private letter from one's deceased mother might be printed in the local paper. Indeed, I myself was astonished that Alfred would allow such a letter to be printed, because it was certainly not very complimentary to him. But in a small town like Spotsburg, everybody knows your business and you might just as well publish the story, so everyone has the same set of facts. Especially once rumors reached their peak, as they did in this case, insisting that Mildred and Alfred had a heretofore-unknown brother or sister living in the Yukon, born of their mother's youthful and illicit passion for a French-Canadian stable boy!

Here's the letter.

Dearest Alfred:

By now I have passed over, and dear Mr. Frome, my attorney, has given you this letter. I hope and pray you will not be too deeply troubled, my dear, by what I have to tell you.

I believe you and your sister Mildred assumed your father and I were always happy together. But such was not the case. Without causing you further pain, I must tell you that there was a time when his behavior could no longer be borne, and while I could not, of course, leave our home, I refused to any longer share the marital bed.

In these modern days, there is no great shame attached to such a separation, if it is tastefully conducted. But at the time of your birth, such a rupture would have been a terrible scandal indeed. When I left your father's bed, I did not know I was in the family way. And so, when my time came (and very precipitously, too, as there was not even a moment to send for the doctor, and it was poor frightened Molly who had to assist me), I did not give birth in what all the world must have thought was “our” bed, your father’s and mine (which happened to be in the American half of our house), but in the bed across the hallway on the north face of the house, where I had, in fact, been sleeping of late.

And thus, poor, dear Alfred, you were not born in the United States at all, but in Canada. And this fact I have concealed from you all these years, lest you also inquire about the shameful state of my marriage. And I compounded my sin (as lying, I believe, is most certainly a sin) by swearing Molly to secrecy, and never correcting your birth records (which falsely stated your birthplace to be Derby Line, Vermont), and by allowing you to enroll in the United States Army, and by never challenging you when you spoke so heartily and with such deep feeling of how proud you were to be a citizen of the United States of America, and how glad you were that you were not one of THEM, the people of other lands.

My time on this earth could not last forever, and God will judge me for what I have done, and I can only ask His forgiveness—and yours. I pray that you will learn greater tolerance, my dear, for the splendid people fortunate enough to have been born in Canada, a number of whom (should you choose to visit them) are your relatives, and are buried in the Canadian cemetery in Stanstead nearby.

With prayers for your continued safety, my dear son, and for your understanding love, I remain

Your loving

Mother

(Lucinda Butterick Pike)

The letter (which everyone else in Spotsburg thought was TERRIBLY touching—after it was published I saw women wiping their eyes and snuffling about it in their conversations)—perhaps the letter, as I say, was actually a first step in Alfred's personal reform movement.

And since he was the "Canadian offspring" alluded to in the will, the unfinished quilt top was his. He decided he wanted nothing done to it—no borders, no batt, no backing. As he told Janine and me the day he came by her store to retrieve it, "Mum left it to me looking like this, and I don't want anybody messing with it."

And since his sister Mildred and her daughter Judy were once again on such amicable terms—now that the quilt top was out of their hands—leaving the quilt top alone seemed like a splendid idea.

11/ Measure for Measure

[I wrote this for Aunt Maggie's Needlework Magazine after a particularly trying night in one of my quilting classes. Mildred Hawn's curiosity about quilts had been piqued by the quilt top escapade, and she and Judy enrolled in a class together. Judy had taken the class before, so she was proficient in drafting patterns. But Mildred became mightily upset when she couldn't get her triangles to be triangular. "I must be terribly stupid," she kept saying, which is something I don't like to hear, because it signals deep frustration—and isn't very good for the old self esteem, either.

So I sat down beside her, and discovered that 1) she was close to tears, and 2) she was working with a pattern that was very difficult to draft to her project's dimensions, and 3) her ruler was defective! (This was something I pointed out to Jim Dean, since she'd bought the ruler at his Five-and-Dime.)

And her experience inspired this article.]

NOTE: This column is NOT about the metric system. I will NOT attempt to convert you to the metric system in this column. Whenever I talk to my students about interesting alternative ways to measure quilt blocks, their eyes narrow suspiciously and they accuse me of trying to sneak the metric system over on them. But NOT in this column! I've read the most recent Gallup polls, and they indicate that people in the United States are still exceedingly grumpy about the metric system, and so I will NOT make you use the metric system to measure your quilt pieces. A shoelace, maybe, or a can of tuna fish, but NOT the metric system.

Trust me.

Every once in a while, a quilter faces a measurements problem. Yes, we all have days when our measurements are a problem, but I'm talking about a problem with a quilting measurement.

For example: You need to make a quilt block that's exactly 15 inches wide. Maybe it has to fit a particular pillow form or a tray top or the cover of a picture album.

You fall in love with a specific patchwork pattern. It's perfect—the only one that will do.

You start drafting your pattern. You draw a 15-inch line on your paper and realize, lackaday, that the design divides into 4 equal parts across, and 4 down. That's not so bad. Each division is 3.75 inches. It's awkward, but it's not bad. It could, after all, be fifths of an inch. That's bad.

But what about a quilt block 17 inches wide that must be divided in 3 equal parts? That's 5.666666667 inches (I'm rounding up. It's actually one of those decimals that goes on forever) in each division, and that's a pain. You'll never get an accurate measurement using your ruler. Nor will you get a nice even division if you're trying to make an 8-inch block with 3 segments: each division will be 2.666666667 etc. inches, and each division will be a little bit off. And, as we all know, a little bit off here and a little bit off there, and pretty soon you're way off. (Life's like that, isn't it? After wallpapering her switch plates to exactly match the walls behind them, a friend of mine once remarked, "It's amazing how close you can get and still miss.")

Back to your quilting measurements. What to do? This is primitive, but it works. Make a strip of paper as long as the side, and fold it into the number of divisions you need. Cut the folded sections apart, and make templates using your cut sections like a little ruler. Like I say, it's not perfect, but it does work.

You could use a shoelace in the same way. Measure the width you need on the shoelace, fold and cut the shoelace in the correct number of pieces, and use the piece of shoelace as a little ruler. This isn't perfect either.

My point here is that rulers are a human invention—just an agreed-upon and convenient way to measure things. After all, the first rulers, as we learned in school, were based on objects like the width of the king's thumb and the size of his feet.

But there's nothing sacred about a ruler. I was terribly shocked when I first realized that the foot-long rulers my quilting students were using were frequently SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LENGTHS! Several of my students were using those nice wooden school rulers with the little metal strip down the edge. Others were using pretty multi-colored plastic rulers. It turned out that the first inch on their rulers was sometimes only three-quarters of an inch long! No wonder people become cynical about life and take up robbing banks.

Like I say, there's nothing sacred about a ruler. An object can just as easily be measured in terms of other objects. For example, your living room may be 21 feet 4 inches long, as measured with that wonderful yardstick you got free from the hardware store during their last paint promotion. But, if you've paced it out, it may also be 7 1/2 paces long. Or 28 of your husband's sneakers long, if you let them (they're filthy) into the house. Or your living room could be 64 widths of a can of water-packed tuna fish long—64 cans laid side by side. I personally would prefer to use a chocolate chip cookie as a standard of measurement, but it's rough on the cookie.

Why am I wasting your time with this? Because if you're a quilter trying to draft a pattern, you want to divide your quilt block into very easy, very even pieces, and if it doesn't come out even, you're in trouble. So measure your pieces with something that will come out even. You know, I wasn't going to mention it, but yes, you could even use a METRIC RULER! Eight inches divided by 3 is, as I mentioned before, a nasty 2.666666667 (rounded off) inches. But 8 inches is almost the same as 21 centimeters, and 21 centimeters DOES divide easily into 3 accurate and even divisions. Twenty-one centimeters divided by 3 is 7 centimeters, right? That's not so scary.

No, I'm not telling you to go metric—after all, I said you could use tuna cans. Or chocolate chip cookies. But I'm being a pal and looking out for your best interests here, trying to save you from hardship and frustration and numbers that end in eight places after the decimal.

Check out a metric ruler. Seven inches divided by 3 is 2.333333333 etc. inches. The same distance is also 18 centimeters, which divides with blissful ease into 3 even parts of 6 centimeters each.

Try a metric ruler. Some days, it's the only thing that will measure up to the challenge.

NOTE: Okay, I DID suggest using a metric ruler after all. But I didn't tell you you HAD to. Fair enough?

12/ Trouble Spots

In a small town like Spotsburg, everyone has to do several jobs. For example, Jim Dean, who owns the Five-and-Dime, is also chief of our volunteer fire department. Fred Murphy, a carpenter, is also our mortician and the police photographer. (History tells us this isn't such an unusual combination. Often the undertaker in small towns had some familiarity with making caskets.) And Brenda and Sam Pierce run Pierce's Auto Repair and Dry Cleaning, located across the road from the grain elevator.

The Pierces got into the dry cleaning business by the back (garage?) door. When Sam was just starting out as a mechanic, his auto repairs, as you might expect, generated a lot of dirty clothes. Sometimes the guck from his hands and shoes also found its way onto their furniture and rugs, and this, Brenda told me with great heartiness (she's a hearty person) threatened the very state of their marriage. Brenda, however, is also a resourceful woman, and she found it was significantly cheaper to take an extension course on stain removal than get a divorce. Before she knew it, she was dry cleaning for the whole town.

I was in Pierce's establishment one day, having my spare tire patched and picking up my velvet patchwork skirt, the one I'd worn to the Robert Burns Festival. As usual, I'd lost my receipt, but that wasn't a problem: I only had to give Brenda my name (which, of course, she already knew) and a description of the item I'd brought in, and in a jiffy she found it on her racks of cleaned clothes. She hung my skirt, neatly draped over a fat coat hanger and wrapped in plastic, on a hook next to the cash register. There was a small paper sack stapled to the coat hanger.

"You left a pair of earrin's in your pocket, dear," she said, peering over her half-glasses at me and pointing to the sack.

At some point in the excitement that evening, I must have slipped off my earrings and stuffed them in my pocket.

"That wasn't very bright of me," I said. "And I didn't even think to check the pockets before I brought the skirt in. . . ." I was about to launch into an apology, but she cut me off.

"Heck, honey, think nothin' of it! Earrin's is nothin'. You wouldn't BELIEVE the stuff I find in pockets! I could write VOLUMES about the stuff I find in pockets." She leaned over the counter and dropped her voice. "For example—" she said, chuckling.

There's a silver-colored bell at the top of the Pierces' door, just like the bell inside Graham's Bakery. The bell jingled, the door opened, Brenda stopped in mid-sentence, and Lyle Schultz walked in. In a jiffy, Brenda switched from being the purveyor of fascinating information to being the owner of the dry cleaning establishment. "That'll be seventy-five cents," she said to me.

I paid her, asked Lyle how his wife's lumbago was doing, took my skirt, and walked through the connecting door to the garage part of the business to see if my spare tire was fixed. (It took a few minutes more.)

I couldn't quite get Brenda's remark out of my mind. That night I went to Mike's apartment for dinner (he lives in the faculty apartments and we take turns cooking), and while I was tearing (and nibbling on) the lettuce, I told him what Brenda said. We spent a few enjoyable minutes guessing what you might find in people's pockets, items worthy of having VOLUMES written about them.

"Jewelry," I suggested, remembering my earrings, although I didn't see how you could write a novel about a pair of earrings a woman had stuck into her own pocket. "Or stolen jewelry, maybe?"

"Letters," said Mike, measuring oil and vinegar into a cup. "How about letters from a lover, when the person's married to someone else?"

That seemed like a promising subject for a volume or two. Probably already had been, in fact. "But," I pointed out, "you can only get so many letters in a little pocket."

"True," he said, shaking some spices into the oil and vinegar, "but the right letter could create a sensation."

Dinner was ready—Mike's sensational grilled pork chops with a tomato chutney (that he made from scratch! It was scrumptious), green beans with almonds, popovers, and the salad.

(I freely admit that Mike is a far better cook than I am. I tend to get impatient and cut corners, which is frequently disastrous. Sometime I'll have to tell you what happened the day I substituted sweetened condensed milk and baking soda for buttermilk and baking powder in a waffle recipe I was making. Suffice it to say even the squirrels wouldn't touch the things when I threw them out in the back yard.)

I took a bite of the pork chop, which was heavenly, and simultaneously had a bright idea. (Food often does that to me.) "How about a secret code?" I said, still intrigued with the idea Brenda had given me. "Let's say you're a spy—an absentminded spy—and you've received a top secret encoded message, and you've just decoded it, and the phone rings, and you stuff it in your pocket—"

"Stuff the phone in your pocket?" Mike said, laughing. I made a face at him because he knew what I was trying to say. "No," he said, "I've got an idea that spies are trained not to be distracted by mere phone calls. On the other hand, the sight of a pretty woman. . . ." he said, bending over and kissing me.

That was the end of our discussion of pockets and their contents that night.

A few days later I was back in Pierce's Auto Repair and Dry Cleaning, this time with Mike's kilt and the burned-out overhead light bulb from my Studebaker. Brenda looked the kilt over and smiled broadly. "Hmmm," she said, "would this be the kilt of your Scottish friend, dear?"

To my profound annoyance, I blushed. I'm a hardened nurse, for pete's sake, used to seeing everything under the sun, and I never blush, and I BLUSHED!

No doubt egged on by my crimson face, she couldn't resist teasing me some more. "You know what they say when couples start bringin' each other's clothes to the dry cleaners?"

I couldn't imagine, and I wasn't sure I wanted to hear. I might even have bridled a bit, because she abruptly changed her tack. She patted my hand and said, "Honey, don't be gettin' all riled up with me. I'm real happy for you. Now let's look at this kilt."

She spread Mike's kilt across the counter, and we both admired the way it was sewn, and I pointed out to her what skill it took to make sure the horizontal lines in the plaid all matched up, and she pointed out to me that cleaning and pressing it would not be difficult, only time-consuming, so to expect it would be more expensive than "an ordinary garment."

"It's givin' a knife-edge to all those pleats," she said. "And it doesn't really look like it needs cleanin' and pressin'," she said, "but I never turn down work." She scrawled my name on a pad of paper, safety-pinned a number to the kilt, and tossed it into a bin underneath the counter.

"Mike said to ‘spare no expense,'" I told her.

Oddly (considering how curious I usually am about things), it wasn't until that moment that I wondered what event Mike was planning to attend, an event so important he was getting his kilt cleaned and pressed—even when it didn't need it.

Then Brenda said, "Can I ask you about somethin' someone brought in? It's got some funny spots on the sleeve."

"Sure," I said.

Brenda has consulted me before. As I've mentioned, people have this idea (mostly correct) that I know a great deal about sewing of all kinds, and quilting in particular.

She walked to the back of her store and into the little glassed-in cubbyhole that passes for her office. When she returned, she was carrying a hanger from which hung a quilted robe like a bathrobe, only far more elegant. A kimono, maybe. She hooked the hanger on a pole next to the cash register.

"What do you think?" she said.

"What's the question?" I asked.

I touched the robe. Silk, from the feel of it. Quilted silk. Exquisite to the touch. In a dazzling coral color— almost hypnotic, the color was so intense. Cotton and wool don't take dye the way silk does. You can only achieve such vibrant color in silk.

"Silk," I said.

"I thought maybe it was," said Brenda. "Here's the spots I was talkin' about."

She held up the right sleeve, and I saw it wasn't really a kimono: it didn't have long, rectangular kimono-style sleeves, and it was more fitted. There was a trail of small spots at the wrist. Not blood spots, I decided. (I'd become entirely too familiar with the appearance of blood stains on fabric over the last few months!)

The garment was very Asian-looking—Chinese or Japanese, with a high collar closed with those complicated fastenings made of knotted cord we call (for some reason) "frogs." More typical of Chinese clothing. Exquisite workmanship. Quilted in crisscross stitching, and all of it done by hand.

"No tags," I said, peering into the neck. "One of a kind. Probably made in China or Japan. Judging from the collar and the closures, more likely China," I said, although much Japanese art and fashion is a copy of Chinese art and fashion.

"That's interestin'," she said. "Now look inside."

Until then I hadn't opened up the robe. I unfastened the frogs, looked inside, and did a double-take. On the inside of the robe—on the inside, mind you—six or eight inches below where tags would have been (if there'd been tags) was a painting! An exquisite painting of tall white whooping cranes stepping majestically through a green marsh, with a soft gold background. The picture was neatly bordered in black, like a framed picture hung from a coral wall. It looked very much like a famous Japanese painting I'd seen once in a college Art History class. And then I looked again, and saw the cranes weren't painted at all, but were woven into the lining of the garment!

I could hardly believe it. But studying the picture closely (I have excellent eyes) there was no mistaking: each detail of the painting was composed of dozens of fine silk threads. You had to be very close to make that distinction. It wasn't embroidered, you understand. It wasn't crewelwork or petit point. It was woven.

"Wow!" I said. "I've never seen anything like this before. Who's is this?"

At that moment the bell jingled, the door opened, and in blew Parson Dargan Scott's son Art, the high school band's drum major. Art is a nice young man, blond, blue-eyed, plagued with dreadful acne. It makes me want to cry when I see a case as bad as his.

"Got it right here," Brenda said, scurrying to the back and returning with his drum major's uniform, a handsome jacket and pants in the Spotsburg Dalmatians' black and white, with red letters, gold buttons, and a red stripe up the pants leg. He stood there beside me, bouncing nervously on his toes.

"Now Arty—" she said, dropping her chin, her round, pleasant face looking quite severe over the tops of her reading glasses.

"I know, I know, Mrs. Pierce!" the young man wailed. "You don't have to tell me. Thanks a million for saving my skin! How much is it?"

Brenda said firmly, "That little adventure is gonna cost you all of six dollars, young man, and the next time it'll be more. Come to think of it, there'd better not BE a next time!"

Art looked grateful his problem—whatever it was—could be solved for a mere six dollars, pulled some crumpled bills from his pocket, dropped them on the countertop, and was out the door like a bullet.

Naturally, I was dying to know what the story was, but I imagined that dry cleaners, like nurses, have a strict code of confidentiality—the seal of the confessional and all that.

"Nice boy," said Brenda, not bound (it appeared) by any code. "But he went off after last Friday's game with a couple of the wilder members of the band," she said, "and one of them brought a couple of gallons of homemade hootch, somethin' made out of red berries, I could see, and he threw up all over hisself, and it made one heckuva stain down that beautiful uniform."

I saw the problem instantly. Even if Art had been old enough to drink—which he wasn't—his father, dear, quiet Parson Scott, is the Baptist minister, and would never have approved.

"Say, Barb," Brenda said. "You're medical and all. Can't they do somethin' about those awful spots?"

"What spots?" I said, turning once more to the quilted robe.

"His face! He'd be a good lookin' kid, otherwise."

I was glad she asked because, as usual, I had an opinion. "Brenda," I said, "maybe someday the grand high panjandrums of medical science will get off their rumps and figure out how to keep young people from that affliction. But there hasn't been any progress in the treatment of acne for years, and I don't see anything on the horizon, either." She made a little tsk-ing noise.

"It's not fair, is it?" I said. "To have that kind of trouble when it's the time in your life to be so sensitive about your looks?"

We both nodded for a moment, remembering our assorted children and their complexions.

"So where was I?" she said.

"Telling me about this amazing piece of clothing," I said, looking again at the inside of the robe, and its exquisite woven picture. It was then it dawned on me that the robe had been quilted, and then lined with the picture, because the picture wasn't interrupted by rows of stitching. The lining was smooth and ran the full length of the robe, from the collar to the hem.

"Well—" she said, winding up for a long explanation.

And then I noticed something. "Just a moment!" I said. "Look at this!"

I removed the robe from its hanger and laid it out on the counter. Towards the bottom of the lining there were more spots like the spots on the sleeve.

"What's that?" said Brenda, peering over, under and eventually through her glasses.

"More spots," I said.

"More spots?" she said.

The door opened. It was Bill Shumaker.

Brenda looked up and the smile on her face evaporated. "A tan jacket, right?" said Brenda. She headed toward the racks of cleaned clothes, picked a jacket off one of the racks, and brought it forward.

"Right, ha-ha," Bill said, laughing nervously, and tucking his shirt into his considerable waist.

Bill is a loan officer at the bank, and is reputed to be the fastest man in four counties to foreclose. Certainly he saunters through life looking like he'd enjoy nothing better than repossessing your house, your car, and your kids, if possible.

Bill turned toward me. "Oh, hi, Babs," he said, with false enthusiasm. "I had a little run-in with my fountain pen the other day. Ha-ha. You know me. Loaning out bundles of money for a new little home over on Sycamore Street. Love it. Love it. Nice couple of kids. Say," he said, looking me up and down and making my blood boil, "you're looking great today. How's every little thing? New baby okay?"

When he's rational, Bill knows perfectly well I don't have a new baby, so I instantly deduced he was suffering from the nervous strain of thinking up ridiculous things to say.

"They're both fine," I said, feeling wicked.

"Both of them," he said, blinking nervously. "Okay. Good. Say, that's great."

"That'll be fifteen dollars," said Brenda, sniffing, "and that's the last time I'm cleanin' that kind of stain off your clothes, Bill Shumaker. I suggest you go home and read your Bible tonight, especially the Ten Commandments."

I was fascinated by the little drama I was watching. Fifteen dollars is highway robbery for dry cleaning a jacket, but with nary a whimper Bill peeled three five-dollar bills off a roll he pulled from his pants pocket, while mumbling, "Great. Great. Thanks, ha-ha. Good to see you, too, Babs," he said in my direction, and was out the door at a run.

I cleared my throat. "Brenda," I said, "I had no idea you had your finger on the pulse of so many Spotsburg crises." I thought that was rather artfully expressed, but it flew right past her.

"What?" she said. "What finger? What pulse? Barb, we're talkin' lipstick in the wrong shade here, and I won't be a party to hanky-panky!" Her half-glasses quivered with emotion. "Bill Shumaker will have to settle his own hash from now on, I tell you! Graze in his own pasture!"

"Oh right!" I said, amazed to see my normally so good-natured acquaintance so indignant. I cleared my throat again. "What you need," I said, "is a sign out front that says, ‘We clean up the world's trouble spots!'"

"What?" she said, staring after Bill, still savoring her wrath. "The nerve of some people. Expectin' ME to save his flea-bitten hide!"

And then I remembered that Brenda and Sam had a run-in with Bill Shumaker several years ago, when their auto repairs trade fell off, and they almost lost both businesses. Bill didn't waste an iota of pity or help on them, I tell you. Wouldn't make any sort of concessions or write out a new repayment schedule, and it was only Brenda's mother's untimely death and her modest bequest that enabled them to keep afloat. Remembering that, I was thoroughly indignant, too!

"Bum!" I muttered.

"Louse-covered sewer rat!" said Brenda.

"Pond scum!" I said.

"Lower than a snake's belly at a railroad crossin'!" said Brenda with feeling.

"Mangy mutt!" I rejoined, realizing my epithets couldn't begin to compete with snake's bellies and railroad crossings.

"Smellier than an overweight polecat in heat on a summer's day!" cried Brenda.

I was stumped. How could I top that?

Emotions spent, we sighed heavily and returned our attention to the coral robe spread out on the counter. I fingered the spots at the hem.

They looked like drips from a candle. "What do you suppose they are?" I said. I ran my fingernail along a larger spot. "It's heavy, like wax." I sniffed. It felt and smelled like wax, too, although much more fragrant than an ordinary candle. Very exotic.

I lifted up the lining at its edge. Considering how fine the fabric was, the edge was surprisingly stiff. Then I flipped the hem over to look at the underside, and—

Money. Sewn into the hem were several large pieces of paper, which I instantly recognized as foreign currency!

"Money!" I exclaimed.

"Well, I'll be a blue-nosed gopher!" said Brenda.

There were ten bills sewn into that hem. You couldn't see the whole of each bill, you understand, only about two inches of the upper half. The lower half of each bill was tucked under the fold of the hem and secured with minuscule stitches.

From the top half I could see these bills were inscribed in what I guessed (correctly, it turned out) was an Asian language, and represented denominations of 100,000 whatevers.

It was time to talk turkey. "Whose is this?" I said.

"Alfred Pike's," she said.

"Lucinda's son?"

"One and the same."

Evidently being in love has not completely robbed me of all my faculties, and I had one of my typical brilliant ideas.

"Brenda," I said, "I realize this is unusual, but would you let me take this to Alfred and ask him about it? It could be important." I wasn't sure why it might be important, but I could figure that out later.

"Sure," said Brenda. "Just give me a receipt so I've gotta record of where the thin' went."

So while I wrote her out a receipt for "one coral-colored quilted robe" and signed it, she hung it back on the hanger, fastened the frogs at the collar, and covered the robe with plastic. I drove straight to our library and a copy of the encyclopedia—it took me over an hour to find what I wanted—then home. I made two long distance phone calls, another phone call to see if Alfred was home, and roared off to his house. It's a small, shabby bungalow not far from Thripp Creek.

I wasn't sure how friendly Alfred would be to me, considering the rôle I'd played in the adventure with his deceased mother's quilt top, but he opened the screen door and let me in. I carried the exquisite robe by its hanger.

"That was fast," he said rather listlessly, and turned away from me. "Didn't know the Pierces had home delivery, either."

As he shuffled toward a pair of unattractive brown velour overstuffed chairs, I watched him. In addition to the shuffling, the tone of his voice was flat—something I don't like to hear in my patients. Except that he wasn't my patient, just an acquaintance.

"They don't," I said. "And it's not clean yet. But I found something interesting in this robe of yours, and I thought you might want to know about it."

"Yeah," he said, standing beside one of the chairs. "I found it in the attic. Thought I'd get it cleaned and give it to my girl."

By "girl" I correctly deduced he meant his daughter, Rachel. Alfred's wife Myrna died in '47 or '48.

"Can I hang this over the door here?" I said, eyeing the open closet door.

Alfred has always looked a little iffy to me—color not so good—and so I thought we'd better take it slowly. I didn't want him to have a heart attack in the midst of this proceeding. "Let's sit down," I said, motioning to the armchairs.

The room was suffering from big league neglect: cobwebs in the corners, thick dust on the tabletops.

"Sure," he said, sat down heavily, and focused his bloodshot eyes somewhere on the wall behind me.

"There's something special about this robe that you ought to know," I said, "and you don't have to tell me anything about it if you don't want to. But if you don't mind," I said, "I'd be interested in how this particular robe came into your possession."

"Got it in Korea," he said. "You know, I was there with the US ARMY? The Army. . . ." he said, shifting his gaze to the threadbare rug, patterned with roses seriously past their prime. I supposed the whole business of learning that he had been born in Canada and that his US citizenship might be in jeopardy had taken the stuffings out of old Alfred.

"Now Alfred," I said, deciding he was one of those woeful souls who can benefit from some bullying (I see his type so often in my nursing work). "Everybody knows about the citizenship business, and nobody cares a thing about it. And you had a great career in the US ARMY—" (I said it with what I hoped was patriotic fervor) "—and nobody can take that away from you. You," I said, remembering my eloquence at the dry cleaners earlier in the day, "are one of those brave souls who clean up the trouble spots of the world, and generations of children will bless you. You've got every reason to feel PROUD of what you've done! So let's not have any more of this whimpering and feeling sorry for ourselves."

It was a fine speech, if I do say so myself.

"Oh?" he said listlessly. "You think so?"

"I know so!" I said, confused about which of my previous sentences he was replying to, but deciding to sound firm and enthusiastic anyway.

"Well, Barb," he drawled. "I don't suppose there's any harm in telling you about it."

"I'd be pleased if you would," I said. "And then I've got some good news."

He picked some lint off the arm of his chair, studied it for a moment, dropped it on the carpet, and said, "I was in Korea during some of the worst of the fighting. It wasn't all conventional warfare, you know. A lot of it was hit-and-run tactics. Not how you REALLY fight a war!"

"Of course not," I said.

"Nasty stuff. As a CAPTAIN I got to know some of the people in the villages near

us—"

"Good for you—"

"—Including a Chinese woman." He paused for a long time. "Her and her family lived in Japan before World War II. They fled from Japan—the Chinese weren't wanted there. Wandered for a while in China. Ended up in Korea." He sighed.

"Before WWII they were pretty well off. As a kid, she even came here to the US, to some fancy girls' school in Boston. Uh, when I met her, Myrna'd been gone for a number of years," he hastened to add. "You understand. There was nothing between us, the Chinese woman and me."

"Of course not," I said, though the light in his face told me different. He didn't actually look happy, mind you. But he looked less forlorn than I'd seen in a number of weeks.

"Then one night the Communists ambushed her village—there in Korea—and I had to escape from her hut pronto! And she handed me the robe, and told me keep it for her. You know: until we got together again. And I told her I would." He ran his hands across his face. "And I did. But," he said, "I never saw her again. After they partitioned Korea, her village ended up in the North—the Communist part. I've tried every which way to get word to her. Find out if she was alive, where she was—that sort of thing. Nothing's ever come of it."

"I'm sorry," I said, really meaning it. And then, brightly: "Well, there's a nice surprise in the robe. Come and take a look."

He rose from the chair, and slowly followed me to where I'd hung the robe from the closet door. I removed its plastic cover, unfastened the frogs, opened the front with a theatrical flourish, and voilà! there was the amazing woven picture of whooping cranes stalking the marshes. Only Alfred wasn't amazed at all!

"Yep," he said. "Looks like it always did."

Phooey. He went to all the trouble of bringing the robe home with him; I should have realized he'd look it over.

"Well, then," I said, determined to bring him good news. "What about these?" I lifted the hem of the robe with a dramatic air, so he could see the money.

"Yep," he said. "The way I figured it, her family's nest egg was in this robe. But the money's not worth a danged thing since North Korea was taken over and everybody's got new currency."

This was true: one of my phone calls had been to an international banking house in New York. His Chinese lady had given him a fortune. And now it was worthless.

"Alfred, you're right. The bills aren't worth anything. But I called an expert in Oriental art today, and he says the picture on the lining is probably very valuable."

I was thinking: his house needs repairs and redecorating badly. The expert in Chicago had thought the "silk tapestry" (as he called it) might fetch two or three thousand dollars at an auction house, depending on its condition.

Alfred looked hurt. "You're not saying I ought to sell it, are you?"

"Well, actually, yes I was."

He shook his head. For a moment my courage failed me and I thought: no amount of heartiness and enthusiasm on the part of an earnest health professional can cheer a person who's determined to mope.

"No, Barb," he said, slowly wandering back to the armchair and sitting down again. "I couldn't do that. It was hers, and I promised I'd keep it for her. After all," he said, "I WAS a captain in the US ARMY!" And he pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose noisily.

And then, like a thunderbolt, I had a brilliant idea. The pockets! If there was anything I'd learned from Brenda at the dry cleaners, it was to check the pockets. I returned to the robe and studied the right and the left-hand seams, where pockets would be if there were any. Nothing. But it was funny, because there was a little lump in the seam on the right.

I looked more closely. I felt the seam again with my fingers. I lifted the robe off the door and carried it over to the window, which was dirty, but admitted enough light so I could see better.

Little tiny overcast stitches had been used to sew the pocket shut.

"Albert," I said, my excitement rising, "have you ever looked in this pocket?"

"What pocket?" he said.

"There's a pocket here," I said.

I slipped my hand under the lining, past the money in the hem, and ran my fingers all the way up to the hip. There was the back side of a pocket. And, plain as day, there was something in the pocket. Something stiff. Something that crackled when I pressed it. I thought about it for a moment. In order not to damage the gown, the pocket should be opened from the outside.

I grabbed my purse, which is large enough to contain a small first aid kit, a screwdriver, the burned-out overhead bulb for my Studebaker (for which I'd forgotten to buy the replacement at Pierces'), several old receipts for dry cleaning, rubber bands for I don't know what, half a candy bar, and A SMALL SEWING KIT! I took the tiny scissors out of the kit and, feeling for all the world like a famous surgeon, I carefully, carefully slit the stitches holding the seam shut. It was certainly nervous-making work. One slip, and I'd ruin the robe.

And (just as I had suspected) there was a note in the pocket. A sheet of unusual white paper, actually, folded twice, and covered with carefully written words in some western language. I didn't read it. Well, I read enough of it to see that the letter began, "To my most loved Alfred—"

It looked like this was going to be a big year for Alfred and correspondence. First his mother's letter. Now this. Perhaps this one would bring him better news.

I handed him the note and, standing behind his shoulder, averted my gaze as best I could while he read it. Still, certain phrases leapt to my eyes.

It was a letter from his Chinese woman, pledging her undying love. Additionally, as I had hoped, she told Albert where she would be if she ever escaped the war and Korea altogether. She would seek, as she put it, "the sanctuary of my dear school chum's, several of they whom reside, I believe, still in the Boston city."

Quickly I moved toward the window, gathered up my purse and sewing kit, and headed for Alfred's door. "I hope it's good news," I said.

"Don't know," he mumbled. But when he looked up I could see his eyes were shining.

As you have undoubtedly figured out by now, I can't let go of a puzzle until it's solved. "Before I leave," I said, "do you know what the spots on this gown are?"

He looked baffled. "Spots? I don't know about any spots." He tilted his head to the side and I could see he was trying to remember.

"The place where she lived was a filthy hole," he said in a far-off voice. "Not a fit home for a fine lady. Dirt floor. Dirt, maybe? Smell of cow dung—neighbors' animals. Incense? Sometimes she burned incense to fight off the smell. Sometimes nice-smelling candles."

"Ah," I said.

Wondering what he was going to do next vis-à-vis his lost Chinese lady, and nevertheless magnificently restraining my considerable curiosity, I wished Alfred well, and headed for my house.

To my surprise, Mike was there. He had let himself in, and was sitting on my sofa, reading my latest Agatha Christie mystery.

"I hope you didn't lose my place!" I said, sitting down beside him and giving him a friendly kiss. "And I forgot the bulb for my car. Which reminds me," I said, wanting to solve the other little puzzle, "Brenda said your kilt didn't really need cleaning. So why waste money?"

"Well," he said, putting the Agatha Christie down on the coffee table and losing my place after all, "I'm going to wear my kilt at my wedding, and I thought it should look its best."

Something funny happened to my stomach. I think it fell into my metatarsal arches.

"You're getting married?" I said.

"Any day now," he said, looking very handsome and very serious.

"Uh-h-h," I stammered.

"I don't want a long engagement," he said. "When are you available?"

"I'm free all next Tuesday," I said.

13/ Trapunto on Broadway

I know. You're chomping at the bit, eager to read all the exciting details of our wonderful wedding. (Yes, it was wonderful.) But first things first.

Much to my surprise, it turned out that my groom-to-be was not unschooled in the arts of the needle. (My sensible friend Arden, reading the rough draft of this chapter, has pointed out to me that you may not understand my obscure and poetic reference to "the arts of the needle.") IN OTHER WORDS, Mike sews! Or sewed, at any rate, on one occasion.

Mike did a variety of odd jobs to put himself through the Ph.D. in physics program at Michigan State College (now, of course, Michigan State University) in East Lansing, Michigan. Michigan State is known for its usual types of courses—English, geography, chemistry, and that sort of thing.

But Michigan State is also world-renowned for its research in animal and plant husbandry. Those that snicker (they're often down the road at the rival University of Michigan) delight in calling MSU a "cow college." Sometimes they even talk about "Moo U."

I see it differently. There are millions of people in the world who are starving. I think it's HEROIC for a college to dedicate itself to solving the problems of subsistence-level farming and world hunger. If there's anyone out there who doesn't agree, just lead me to them!

So Mike took, as I say, an odd variety of jobs to help put himself through school. He sold tickets at MSU hockey games. He shelved books in the library. He mucked out the stalls in the Sheep Teaching Facility. (You can laugh, but that's what it's called: the Sheep Teaching Facility. Needless to say, many people ask what subjects the sheep teach!)

And he worked in the theater department, constructing sets. Until one day, when the costume designer led him to a sewing machine, for a most interesting project. And his tale resulted in this article for Aunt Maggie's.

(Notice how circumspect I am in the first paragraph, letting the reader assume, as I do, that I probably bumped into this guy at a university function. Something highbrow like an art gallery tour or a lecture on great books.)

Trapunto on Broadway

I have recently become acquainted with a member of Michigan State University's physics department. His name is Mike.

For several years Mike worked on MSU's theatre department's technical crews. [Okay, it wasn't really the Broadway to which I alluded in the title, but close enough.] And during that time Mike became very good at certain things: building balconies for balcony scenes, for one thing, and making LONDON FOG. And one year he was assigned to sew some Roman armor.

Yes, sewing Roman armor for Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. As he explained it to me, the costume designer sat him down at an industrial-strength sewing machine, and Mike was instructed to sew together two pieces of heavy muslin that had been cut into armor-like shapes. He sewed around the edges of the shapes, and also on marked lines that seemed to define chest and abdominal areas. And then—listen to this—he was told to slit a little hole in the back side, stuff cotton through the hole, and sew the hole back up again. This padded out the front and voilà: funny-shaped pieces of white fabric stuffed with cotton that bore an unmistakable resemblance to—funny-shaped pieces of white fabric stuffed with cotton!

But when the front was painted with bronze metallic paint, and shading was dabbed in the valleys created by the stitching, MSU's theatre department had something that was absolutely indistinguishable from hammered metal armor.

"My gosh," I said, having been swept away by the sheer drama of his narrative, and feeling tingly all over, "that's trapunto!" Because, of course, trapunto is a technique that creates a sculpted-looking effect with fabric. It can be used on clothing, pillows, coverlets, wall hangings, or any place where three-dimensionality would be attractive. Sometimes it's enhanced by quilting.

Trapunto is made just the way Mike made Julius Caesar's armor. Let's say you want to do something unique for a special child's overalls, embellish them with an airplane on the bib, for example. When you cut out the bib pieces of the overalls pattern, cut out an extra bib piece of some other light tightly woven fabric. We'll call this second fabric the trapunto backing. Sew the bib front and the trapunto backing together along the outlines of the airplane. If you're creating something large and complicated, like a picture of a giant goose, or the University of Michigan Stadium, you'll want to create several separate areas, so your object won't be one big lump.

Then slit the trapunto backing (and only the backing) and push loose washable stuffing through the hole. Repair the hole with a back-and-forth kind of stitch to pull the two sides together. The trapunto part of this exercise is now done. You can finish sewing your project as directed in your pattern.

It may take a little trial-and-error to decide what weight fabrics to use for trapunto projects. As you can imagine, corduroy is so heavy it's harder to trapunto than cotton batiste. But corduroy and denim do work—they're just more of a challenge.

Sometimes the trapuntoed (if there is such a word) shape is used for the top of a quilted project. Then it's basted to batting and back, and outlined (for emphasis) with quilting stitches.

I once saw an exquisite trapunto quilt in a museum. It was white-on-white—white stitching on white fabric. The motif featured grapes and grape vines. All the grapes were fat with trapunto, and the vines had been trapuntoed, too, and the final effect was breathtaking.

Practically speaking, trapunto presents only one problem: it can be fragile. That slit in the back where you pushed in the stuffing is a weak spot, and that's why I recommend a tightly-woven fabric for trapunto backing. In the case of Julius Caesar's armor, Mike could fortify the repair of the hole with heavy-duty shop glue. But this is not an option for those of us who want to use trapunto on pillows or bedspreads. (Or maybe it is. It's up to you. If I were making the aforementioned airplane on the afore-mentioned child's overalls bib, I'd seriously consider a VERY thin line of flexible, water-resistant glue, since the bib will be lined and the glue won't show. A silicone household glue would do nicely.)

If you're interested in trapunto, consider doing a little bit in a small area. For example:

· The bib of a child's jumper or overalls, as mentioned above, or:

· An apron for a grown-up.

· Make a fish (or any other kind of animal) hand puppet, with ordinary quilting for the scales, and trapunto in the eyes so they really pop out.

· Embellish a Halloween costume.

· A family crest, club insignia or business logo would look sensational executed in trapunto.

· How about trapunto doves on the ring pillow for a wedding?

· An album cover for a wedding or child's pictures?

· Motifs on holiday clothing?

· A satin evening bag with flowers in trapunto?

You'll undoubtedly think of ideas that are far better than these.

Try a little trapunto. In your matching poodle skirt and sweater—with the poodle executed in trapunto and very three-dimensional—you'll certainly take center stage!

14/ Three Weddings and Two Funerals and One Christening and Quite Possibly the World's Largest Potluck Supper Ever

(or—and this was Jay Allen's whimsical suggestion for an alternate title—The Blame of the Quilt)

And then we had a summer of what I once heard a tiresome person with a degree in sociology refer to as "life cycle events."

First, Ramona's grandmother died. As you remember from the first tale in this book, it was Grandma who gave Ramona the quilt that proved to be the vital clue in my clever solution to a decades-old murder.

Grandma had felt "puny," as she put it, for several days. Ramona had a trial in Lansing, something involving a will, a suspect signature, and hundreds of dollars bequeathed to a parrot. So I stepped in one afternoon to check up on Grandma, and I didn't like what I saw: terrible color, swollen ankles, difficulty breathing. Michigan summers can be beastly, but we were enjoying a rare temperate spell, and I knew it wasn't the heat that was getting to Grandma.

Right away I called Dr. Rasmussen, old Dr. Lunt's new associate. Dr. Rasmussen is young (in his 30s), movie-star handsome, and a pretty good doctor (for a kid). He took one look at Grandma and clapped her in Jackson Hospital. She expired a few days later with what he labeled "congestive heart failure." (I told Ramona Dr. Rasmussen was right.)

Grandma's funeral took place in the Baptist Church, and about seventy-five people attended. (She was particularly well loved in her Bible study circle.) Ramona was pretty broken up about it all but, as she told me, "Grandma lived a full and good life." Sometimes that's a consolation to the survivors.

The first wedding was Alfred Pike's, of all things. The minute my visit was over, (the visit in which I pointed out to Alfred the many treasures hidden in the exquisite quilted silk robe), he stirred his stumps and made a few phone calls—to put it mildly. He had no idea who the "school chum's" alluded to in his Chinese love's note were. (His love's name, he confessed to me, was Mei Li Chen. "'Mei Li'" means "'pretty,'" he said, scuffing the toe of his shoe in his ratty carpet like a schoolboy. "'Beautiful,' actually.") In fact, Alfred had no idea which of Boston's many elite girls' schools she might have attended before World War II.

But Alfred Pike is blessed with admirable bulldog tenacity, something he picked up, no doubt, in THE US ARMY. It was merely a matter of phoning all the girls' schools in Boston and environs, and, once he found the school at which Mei Li matriculated, phoning all the alumnae who had been in her class, and all the alumnae in the classes above and below hers, until he located her four closest friends.

This took several days, and here's what he learned. Mei Li escaped from Korea by cashing in her remaining family asset, a pair of fine diamond earrings. Risking death and dismemberment, she sailed in a miserable fishing boat all the way to Japan. From there, somehow, she got herself to the United States, where she contacted her dearest school friends—the very friends Alfred, by dint of sheer determination, located in Boston. To make a short story shorter, Mei Li reached Boston, recuperated from her journeys, visited a while, and then traveled back west to California.

Mei Li and Alfred were reunited in San Francisco's Chinatown, where she was settled and teaching English, having ultimately (and, of course, erroneously) concluded that Alfred had either not left Korea alive or had lost interest in her.

So Spotsburg was treated to a most unusual wedding. Because Mei Li's entire family had perished in the Korean Conflict, I declared she needed a new family, and I volunteered our quilting group and other interested parties. They happily agreed. As I've mentioned before, you can't keep Arden and Karen away from an activity that needs some kindly and really proficient organizing, and you most definitely can't keep Arden's husband away from good baked goods.

The wedding took place in the First Methodist Church. The bride (who was 35 and exquisitely beautiful—and criminally slim) was radiant in red: Karen and Arden made her wedding gown, a traditional Chinese silk chong sam that fit her like a second skin. We served a lovely international buffet luncheon in the church basement, featuring foods reflecting the bride's and groom's cultural traditions, including such delicacies as wonton soup and Spam. (No haggis, however. I put my foot down.)

Mei Li is now teaching one section of Chinese at State College, and Alfred looks quite beside himself with happiness. (I note parenthetically that he's also painted the house, and the tabletops have been dusted.)

Shortly thereafter, Police Officer Ted Dancer and his wife had ANOTHER baby—that makes SIX!!! I stopped by their house one evening after the baptism, admired the new baby, and gave Janet several brochures on birth control. She wrung my hands in gratitude.

Yes, Mike and I got married, and I know you're dying to hear all about it, but you'll have to wait. I'm telling you these events in the order they happened.

And then we had a murder. Yes, an actual murder, with a dead body and everything. Spotsburg hadn't had a murder in I don't know how many years. Knocking over rural route mailboxes is much more our type of crime.

Anyway, we had a murder. That, in and of itself, was pretty shocking. But the really shocking thing about it was that for a period of time certain official people (I will name names shortly) actually thought the murder weapon was a quilt! (Such a mistake would never have occurred if I'd been involved in the investigation from the beginning. But Ted Dancer—who is generally receptive to my clever suggestions—didn't have complete control over the case.)

As you know, I've been teaching quilting every Monday night for enough years so that by now every citizen of Spotsburg should have taken instruction. We meet in the high school's home economics class so those who decide to machine-piece have sewing machines nearby.

This particular July Monday, about six weeks after Albert and Mei Li's wedding, I had five beginners. (Enrollment in summer classes is never very good. March—when everyone's disgusted with winter—is my best month.)

Mei Li, for one, signed up. She told me, "Barb, I very much interest in learn your wonderful American needleworks. Especially as you have been so very nice to I." (I couldn't help noticing—with my professional eye—that pencil-slim Mei Li seemed to have gained some weight. . . .)

Shirley Moray signed up for that class, too: she was expecting her first grandchild and wanted to make a baby quilt. Beatrice Ramey and Gretel Miller were tired of bridge and wanted to try something new. (This, at first glance, was a blow to serious card-playing in Spotsburg, as they are the backbone of our competitive bridge tourneys. But I did not delude myself for even a moment into imagining their enthusiasm for quilting was likely to be long-lived. The previous year Beatrice and Gretel had an intense romance with hot-air ballooning that lasted all of three weeks.)

And there was a new citizen in our fair city, Anna Grummond.

Anna was young—a mere eighteen or nineteen. Sweet and terribly soft-spoken, thin and blue-eyed and with hair so blond it was almost white.

Right away I began to worry about her. For one thing, she had deep hollows around her eyes that gave her a hunted look. For another thing, she didn't drive, which is always, I think, a bad sign in a woman. I mean, it makes you so dependent. Her husband (she told me) had to bring her to class, and she arrived twenty minutes late for the first class, and half an hour late for the second, which seemed to mortify her, and I spent the next ten minutes reassuring her that it was all right, not to worry, I'd be happy to go over the material again, etc., etc. Then I repeated the lessons (with her apologetic interruptions), and she set to work.

I give six lessons for beginning quilters. Lesson 4, Making Your Own Bias Binding, is the most complicated. It requires some strange marking and folding of the fabric, and we always end up with strips of calico strewn all over the floor, things sewn together upside down and backwards, some swearing, and other interesting mishaps. It's a hard lesson to repeat, but I was more than happy to repeat it when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Anna walking in forty-five minutes late.

Then, to my horror, I looked her full in the face and saw her cheeks were fiery red and she had a nasty black eye a-blooming. I quickly walked over to her, slipped my arm in hers and said, quietly and firmly, "Come with me." I propelled her down the hall to the girls' lavatory, where I soaked some paper towels in cold water, and (finally remembering my nursely manners) asked if I might apply them to her face in general and to the black eye in particular.

"Please don't bother," she said halfheartedly, but she let me continue my ministrations, and after a while I urged her to lie down on the cot in the corner.

"Please don't tell anyone," she said, looking even more child-like than usual. She sounded desperate. "It was an accident. Really. I ran into a door."

That was baloney, of course. When I worked in the emergency room, entirely too many women came in with black eyes due to "walking into doors." My first impulse was to drive to Anna's house and invite her husband to lie down in the road while I practiced my parallel parking.

But the problem is that you can only do so much when you're a nurse. Telling people how to run their lives is risky. Frequently they resent your telling them their business. (It's hard for me to accept, especially since I give such EXCELLENT advice, but there it is.)

Anna eventually returned to the classroom, but there wasn't time to catch her up on everything she'd missed that night, so I just admired her project (a toaster cover in pink and gray polka dots), and asked if she needed any help. No, she said.

Quilting classes are three hours long, so we can really get some work done. At 10:00 that particular evening, everyone gathered up their fabric, bias binding attempts (successful and otherwise), rulers, pins, thimbles, needles, and thread, and left. It took me a few more minutes to collect my quilting supplies and books, which I carry to and from my house in a wicker laundry basket. Miles Cheney, the high school custodian, stuck his head in and asked some advice about a nasty-looking boil on his neck. ("Yeow!" I said. "Go see Dr. Rasmussen first thing tomorrow!") And although it was almost 10:30 when I walked out the front door to the parking lot, there was Anna, sitting on the bench in front of the high school.

"Hi!" I said, walking over to her, and quickly appraising the black eye, which was, by now, a doozy. "Do you need a ride?"

Her gaze dropped to the concrete walkway. "I think he'll be here eventually," she said. She didn't sound convinced. I hadn't met Mr. Anna, but was beginning to form a most unfortunate impression of him.

I couldn't in good conscience leave her sitting there next to the high school's empty parking lot. Besides, it was quite cool—unusually so for a summer evening in Michigan, although we Michiganders have a saying: "If you don't like the weather, wait a minute." Anyway, I insisted on taking her home, and after a moment or two of uncertainty, she accepted.

As we drove along, I asked her a couple of innocuous questions about herself—where she came from—that sort of thing. But she wasn't very talkative, and (unusual for me!) I didn't learn much.

We reached her tiny white clapboard house, just down the street and around the corner from mine, it turned out, and I reviewed with her reasons why she might want to call Dr. Rasmussen in the morning about her eye, then let her out. Her house was completely dark.

My house, on the other hand, was ablaze: Mike was waiting for me and had turned on every light I owned.

"I'm hoping," he said, "to avenge my recent ignominious defeat at Scrabble." He kissed me nicely—for a person bent on revenge. "And Ramona called. She has some exciting news. She wouldn't say what."

"It must be exciting," I said. "Everybody knows I teach Mondays. She obviously forgot."

But it was too late to start Scrabble, and probably just as well, too, since Mike (unfortunately) pays attention and has recently taken to beating me with the very words I've used to beat him with, including selections from my impressive list of words containing q but no u. (Which reminds me. Have I told you about the time I beat Jay Allen by using his c to make "zwieback" on the triple word score? Of course, Jay got his revenge the next week, and the following week Arden clobbered us both.)

I was just lifting the receiver to phone Ramona, when a police siren went roaring down the street. Torn between my irrepressible interest in Ramona's "exciting news," and my uncontrollable need to know what emergency was occurring nearby, I slammed down the receiver and dragged Mike outside. We stood on the sidewalk and peered down the street.

The siren had stopped, but it was easy to see where the red flashing light was coming from—around the corner—and we strolled in that direction. It was a good night for observing the stars, Mike opined, but I first had to satisfy my curiosity. After reaching the end of our block and turning, we saw that Ted Dancer's police car was parked in front of Anna Grummond's house. A number of neighbors were out on their porches, or were standing on the sidewalk, keeping a polite distance.

Of course, I had to know exactly what was happening. I walked up the walk and knocked. Ted appeared behind the screen door.

"Hi, Ted," I said, looking (as I always do) like a person who will be invaluable in a crisis. "Problems?"

Ted crossed his arms and pulled himself up in what I recognized as his Official Manner. (He's still very young, and His Official Manner looks silly.)

"Yes, ma'am," he said solemnly. "There's been a fatality."

Needless to say, I was provoked with Ted for going all high-and-mighty on me and calling me "ma'am." But I was even more shocked by his news, so I hid my irritation.

"Ted," I said, feeling a small prickle of anxiety, "Anna Grummond's my quilting student. She was at class tonight. I dropped her here at about 10:40. Is she all right?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "She's all right."

And then, after thinking the matter through very carefully, and glaring at me as if I were a total stranger and had asked him for America's atom bomb secrets, including blueprints and perhaps some samples of uranium, he added, stiffly, "Her husband has died."

"That's terrible," I said, not (I'm not ashamed to say) sure it was terrible at all, if Anna's black eye was any indication of her husband's character. "Is there anything I can do? Why don't I take her home with me?"

Ted shook his head. "No, ma'am—"

"Ted," I yelled, "QUIT CALLING ME MA'AM! WHAT IN HEAVEN'S NAME IS GOING ON?"

Ted looked only slightly deflated by my tone and said, "Foul play is suspected. I'm taking her in. I'm sorry that's all I can tell you."

And then, incredibly, he stepped back into the house and SHUT THE DOOR! I would really have been furious with him except that he'd been under a great strain recently, what with another addition to their family—an addition partly of his own making, I hasten to point out.

I walked back down the walk and told Mike what happened.

"Really?" Mike said. "Is she the type of woman who'd kill her husband?"

Mike, as you've seen, is a wonderful man. He's funny and clever and kind. (And handsome, too.) But I definitely had to take issue with him for the preposterous way he worded that question.

"And exactly what type," I asked him sternly, "is the ‘type of woman' who'd kill her husband?"

"What I was trying to ask," he said cautiously, watching me closely in case I was planning to bite, "is if she was angry with him. How he treated her. Things like that. Does she have any family around here?"

It was getting colder and I shivered. "Hmmph!" I said. I filled him in on the particulars surrounding her black eye.

Mike had given me an idea. The next morning, (having completely forgotten Ramona and her exciting news, I'm sorry to say), I was up bright and early. I arrived at the city jail before 8:00.

The city jail is located in our magnificent red brick City Hall, facing Spotsburg founder Harold Thripp's magnificent statue on our town square. The jail isn't really a jail at all, but one small room outfitted with bars at the window and door, situated behind the police department counter and the receptionist's desk. There's no visiting room in our police department plus jail, so Maisie (the receptionist) let me go right into the cell.

"I'm sorry about all this stuff in here," Maisie said, following me in and carrying a cardboard carton labeled "Fountain Pen Ink: 2 Doz. Bottles" out. "We don't use this cell much, so we store office supplies here."

I could see. Anna, poor, sad-looking Anna, had evidently spent the night with "STAMP PADS, 1 DOZ" and "Mimeograph Paper, 24 Reams.")

What a sorry sight she was. I was used to seeing her looking nice in her prim, quiet sort of way, but there she was, perched on the edge of a cot like a frightened bird, her pale hands clasping and unclasping themselves in her lap, her eyes downcast, the bruise from her eye now discoloring her nose and cheek, her nearly-white hair hanging like hanks of damp yellow rope around her face. I was grateful for one thing: they hadn't made her put on prison clothes. She was wearing a demure blouse and skirt.

"Maisie, did you get Dr. Rasmussen to look at this eye?" I said.

"Sam here called," she said, "but Dr. R.'s doing calls at Jackson Hospital this morning," she said. "So ol' Doc Lunt's coming in. After—" she said in a stage whisper so loud you could have heard it over Wally Ziegler's antique steam-powered combine at full throttle "—doing the autopsy. On you-know-who."

Maisie doesn't always know when to keep her mouth shut. I did my best to wiggle my eyebrows and shake my head at her, indicating this was neither the time nor the place to discuss Anna's late husband's autopsy.

Let me say a few words here about Dr. Lunt. I know it's considered the height of unprofessionalism to criticize the members of one's own—or adjacent—professions, but in the interest of improving medical care in Spotsburg, the outlying areas, and perhaps the rest of the GREAT STATE OF MICHIGAN, I'd like to tell you frankly what I thought of Doc Lunt. NOT MUCH!

Doc Lunt was as friendly and kind-hearted an old gentleman as you'd ever hope to find, but he was almost eighty. Being eighty was not, in and of itself, a crime. The real problem was that he was about two centuries behind in his medical techniques. For example, he was the last doctor in this county to use penicillin, which for years he dismissed as being nothing more than "scientific hooey." I hate seeing that in a doctor.

Furthermore, Doc Lunt's eyes were bad. That was dangerous. Somebody could get hurt. And if the person had the good fortune to be dead while experiencing Doc Lunt's ministrations, their autopsy was likely to be botched. So I was very relieved when Dr. Rasmussen moved into town, and I heartily wished that Doc Lunt could be convinced that a much-deserved retirement was, well, much deserved.

(You may be asking yourself how I know so much about Doc Lunt's eyes, as well as his doctoring techniques. I substituted in his office for a week once—while Libby Sawyer was on vacation—and after watching him with a few patients I realized he couldn't possibly be reading their charts. Oh, he made a show of running his eyes over his notes, but between asking each patient his history, and asking ME his history, I quickly deduced that Doc Lunt couldn't see a thing. Sad. Irresponsible, too.)

These thoughts flashed through my mind in a trice. It was time I turned my attention to the prisoner.

"Anna?" I said.

Very slowly, as if she were a stiffly jointed doll, she lifted her head. "Hmmm?" she said. She looked me straight in the eye, but if she recognized me, I couldn't tell.

It was most alarming. "It's Barb Hoxsie," I said, thinking I'd better treat her like one of my senile dementia patients.

"Oh, hello, Barb," she said, sounding like she was speaking to me from the next state. Or maybe the next galaxy.

"I see there's been trouble," I said, wondering where I could sit in the small cell, and finally deciding on a wooden crate marked, "Little Whizzo Mimeograph Machine."

"I guess so," she said. "Bruce is dead. I found him."

"Your husband," I said.

"Mmmm," she said, in the way that means "yes."

I felt awfully sorry for the poor thing. "Do you have any family around here that can help you?" I asked.

"Mmmm," she said, in the way that means "no."

Whew! This was tough. If Brenda Pierce at the dry cleaners had been there, she'd have known how to describe the scene, saying something picturesque like, "This is harder 'n stirrin' molasses with a wooden spoon on a winter's day."

Time to take the lead. "What kind of help can I get you? Call a lawyer? Call your friends?"

"No friends," she said. "No lawyer."

I decided she meant she didn't have a lawyer or friends, not that I shouldn't call them. "Okay," I said. "Anything else?"

A light came into her eyes, like a tiny flame suddenly flaring up, then dying down again. "I'm not sorry he's dead," she said. "But I didn't kill him."

"Of course, you didn't!" I said loudly. "You just stay here—" (a ridiculous thing to tell a person in jail, I realized afterwards) "—and I'll get everything taken care of."

I went straight home, called Ramona, and told her the situation. She would be happy to take the case, she said. The case for the defense, that is.

"By the way," she said, "I've got some exciting news. . . ."

"That's great," I said, thinking I'd better go back to the jail and check out Anna's eye. And maybe check with Ted Dancer about the autopsy. No, it was probably too early to have the autopsy results. Heck, with Doc Lunt doing the autopsy, we might ALL be dead before we got the results. Maybe Dr. Rasmussen could look in—

"Listen, Ramona," I said, cutting her off, "I want to hear the whole story. But I've got to dash. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?" I hung up.

I've got to say right here and now that I'm not proud of the way I behaved. I was rude to Ramona, I was short with Mike, I neglected my friends, AND I was distracted during quilting class the following Monday and completely forgot to tell my students during their lesson on Introductory Appliqué that they needed to pin or baste their appliqués to the background before stitching them down. Several mistakes, alas, occurred as a result.

But I was possessed, as I'm sure you can see. I was certain Anna wasn't her husband's murderer (you know me—I'm an excellent judge of character), and there was no one but me to help her out of her mess! No one!

So I took to hanging around the jail, irritating the living daylights out of Maisie, the receptionist. I talked with Anna about what she wanted to be someday. (She said she'd never finished high school, and didn't know what she wanted to be, although she liked kids.) I pestered Ted Dancer the whole week we were waiting for the autopsy results—which Dr. Lunt did finish, actually, in our lifetimes. And I'm sure I made Ramona's life a misery, except that I caught a glimpse of her at the far end of Sawyer's Drug Store (she was looking at greeting cards) and she had this unusual glow about her. . . . But, of course, I was too busy to inquire, and she's nice and didn't push it. (That's Ramona all over.) PLUS Mike beat me in two ferocious bouts of Scrabble—once with "jinxed" on the triple word score!

Finally, Tuesday, one week and one day after the murder, I got my hands on the autopsy. I will spare you the graphic details they love to include in autopsies, all those appetizing observations about the weight and condition of the deceased's liver and the size and appearance of his brain. Anna's husband, Bruce Grummond, a "white male approximately six feet four inches tall, weighing 279 pounds," had been suffocated around 7:00 that fateful Monday night. According to ol' Dr. Lunt's report, "nylon fibers and threads discovered in the mouth, nasal passageways, trachea, and lungs indicate the agent of death" (as Doc Lunt so delicately put it) "was the quilt under which Grummond's dead body was found." Another important fact revealed in the autopsy: Anna's husband had been drunk.

"So," Ted Dancer said to me, leaning over the police department counter, "it's simple. She killed him. He beat her up and she killed him. When I was at the Police Academy, one of my professors used to say, ‘Gentlemen, when you hear hoof beats, look for horses, not zebras.'"

"WHAT?" I said, thoroughly provoked with Ted, and no doubt looking at him as if he was some sort of crazy person. "ZEBRAS? Who said anything about ZEBRAS? We're concerned with MOTIVE and OPPORTUNITY here!"

"Barb," Ted said, pulling himself up a little taller, probably happy to be lecturing me for once, "it's an old saying that means the obvious solution is the most likely. Grummond died around 7:00, but, according Doc Lunt's report, it could have been a little bit earlier or later. Anna wasn't in your class at 7:00—you yourself told me that she didn't arrive until about 7:45. She had plenty of time to kill her husband AND walk to the high school."

"Mmmm," I mumbled, feeling like I'd been a stool pigeon. But Ted had asked me directly about her comings and goings, and while I may be prepared to tidy up the truth a bit, I'm not prepared to out-and-out lie. I have some standards!

"So she killed him," Ted said. "And even though she's tiny—just a little slip of a girl—and he was a mean old bruiser, if he passed out on their living room floor, which was where we found him, then it would have been no trouble at all to stuff the quilt in his mouth and hold it over his nose, and kill him."

It was an awful picture. I hated it. I also had to admit it was entirely possible.

Ted Dancer's really pretty nice. He must have seen I was feeling glum about this case. "You know," he said, dropping his voice a bit, "this isn't the first black eye he gave her. When Ramona calls me to the witness stand, I'll tell the jury about the other times, too. And I'm betting Anna will get off with a reduced charge and a lighter sentence."

"Gee, thanks," I said begrudgingly, but I walked around the end of the counter and gave him a quick hug. I could see he was trying to make things better.

And then I had one of my strokes of genius, one of those remarkable bolts out of the blue to which Spotsburg has yet to become accustomed. Why hadn't I seen it before?

"Ted," I said, "let me see that quilt!"

"What?"

"I want to see the quilt!" I said. "I've got an idea!"

He smoothed his shirt front, cleared his throat, and I feared he was about to go all official on me again.

He was. "It would be Highly Irregular," he said. "It's the Murder Weapon." He thought about it a little more, and grew a more incensed. "It's in the Evidence Room!" And then, exasperated, "Darn it, Barb! I can't let you go poking around in our Evidence Room, pawing through our Evidence!"

The picture he'd painted was certainly offensive, but I decided to overlook it in the Interests of Justice.

"Ted," I said very slowly and calmly. "I don't want to take the quilt anywhere. I don't even want to touch it. But I'd like to take a tiny look at it."

He was making those little "tst!" noises people make when they're irritated beyond belief. "Barb, I can't think of one good reason why I should let you do that. If we mess up the evidence, this case could be destroyed!"

And then—I could hardly believe it, and have to think that the exhaustion of intensive parenthood had dulled his wits—he added, "THAT'S not what you're up to, is it? Trying to WRECK THE STATE'S CASE?"

The boy deserved to be slapped down for such an offensive suggestion, and I slapped him down—hard.

"Ted Dancer," I said, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for implying such a thing. How long have you known me? Who took the gravel out of your nose the day you foolishly tried to fly your new bicycle over the railroad tracks at the speed of light and nearly obliterated yourself in the bargain? I want to see the quilt," I yelled, "because it's entirely probable YOU'VE GOT THE WRONG MURDER WEAPON!!!"

That took him aback, I can tell you.

Taking advantage of the surprise I produced, I forged ahead. "Do you suppose silly old Dr. Lunt took fiber samples from the quilt to match up with the fibers he found in the body?" (I've learned a lot from Jay Allen!) "Because I've NEVER seen a quilt that contains NYLON, and if this quilt contains NYLON, I SURE WANT TO SEE IT!"

We both stood there exhausted by this interchange. He rubbed his chin. "Hmmph," he said. "Where's Maisie?"

"If she's got any sense," I said, looking at the clock, "out to lunch."

"How about this?" Ted said, mulling it over and looking a lot like the cute kid he was in high school—NOT SO LONG AGO. "When Maisie comes back, we'll take her with us into the Evidence Room, and she can be our witness, and you can look at the quilt, and render your PROFESSIONAL opinion—" I gave him a hard look to see if he was being facetious, but he appeared to be quite serious "—and we'll take it from there."

"Okay," I said, more than satisfied. To while away the time while we waited for Maisie to return, I spent the next fifteen minutes with Anna in her cell. They'd let me bring her some books, and I saw with surprise she was turning the pages of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I'd also brought her an Agatha Christie, a quilt book or two, and a sweater, since the jail's radiator was busted.

"This is real good," she said, holding up the Dickens so I could see what she was reading. I was pleased to note that the black eye was definitely resolving. "I can't put it down. I guess it's lucky I'm in jail," she said with a rueful smile. "No interruptions."

So we chatted at bit, and I made a mental note that her spirits seemed better, and that I should bring her David Copperfield. Then Maisie blew in the office door, calling out to no one in particular, "Guess what I just heard down at Sew and Go?" Ted and I converged on her at once, and I said, "Never mind that now. We need to look at the quilt in the Grummond Case."

Maisie's eyebrows shot up. She grunted, stuck out her lower lip, dropped her purse on her desk, and led us down the corridor to the room marked "Evidence Room," which doubles, it turns out, as City Hall's broom closet. There, folded and wrapped in a plastic bag, and neatly tagged with writing and some numbers, was the so-called Murder Weapon, resting on a shelf, next to an unopened box of Dixie paper cups and a can of BAB-O Cleanser.

I decided it was in Anna's best interests to be nice to Ted. "May I pick this up?" I asked sweetly.

Ted looked at me suspiciously, but nodded yes. "I guess so. But for pete's sake don't open the package. Just look at it." And then he added—quite unnecessarily, I thought—"Can you do that, Barb? Just look at it?"

I was sorely tempted to recall—out loud—the day I removed the splinters from his rear end, after he'd made his escape from Wally Ziegler's barn (not his barn siding, though!). But I bit my tongue.

I really didn't need to look at the other side of the quilt. It was faded, but was entirely hand-worked, and must originally have been executed in hot pink, turquoise, bright yellow, orange and black.

"Ted," I said, "you need to send this over to Dr. Jay Allen at the State College Chemistry Lab right away. He's a national—an INTERNATIONAL—" (I was feeling expansive) "—expert, actually, on just this kind of thing. Fibers, blood, poisons. This isn't the murder weapon!"

"Yeah, I know Jay," Ted said.

"Doc Lunt," I continued, "says he found nylon fibers on Grummond's body, and he claimed the fibers came from this quilt. But this is a very old Amish Sunshine and Shadows, and the Amish never use nylon in their quilts. In fact, NOBODY uses nylon in their quilts, which is what I'd have told you at the beginning of this case, IF YOU'D HAD THE GOOD SENSE TO ASK MY ADVICE!"

To his credit—after he recovered his powers of speech—Ted phoned Jay Allen right away, and Ramona, too, since she was the defense attorney. I went back to the jail cell to tell Anna this latest.

"I didn't do it," she said, stating the obvious.

"Of course not," I said, patting her shoulder. "In fact, you were with somebody else at the time, weren't you?"

"Yes," she said, too unhappy to look startled at my astute deduction. "He saw my eye and he—"

And then it dawned on her: while being with a boyfriend might provide her with an alibi, it might also suggest someone else could have been angry enough with Bruce Grummond to kill him. There might be two people with motives. Huge tears began running down her cheeks and dropping into her lap.

"I'm so worried," she said. "I don't know where—where—my friend is. I don't know where my husband was after 5:00, either. That's the last time I saw him."

I handed her a handkerchief and said, "Don't worry. We're going to get this all straightened out."

I can't honestly tell you I felt that confident about it. But sometimes (I'm sorry to say) the job of a nurse is to spread false hope.

"I'll bring you War and Peace," I added brightly. "That will cheer you up!"

I left her cell. Maisie was sitting at her desk, typing furiously and pointedly ignoring me. "Was there something you wanted to tell me?" I said, still thinking hard about the developing murder case.

"No, no," she said, not looking at me, but with a shrug of her shoulders and that kind of "I'm-sure-you're-not-interested" air that makes you intensely interested. "It's just about Janine and Jeff. That's all."

Janine Runyon, proud owner of Sew and Go, and Jeff Sesno, the only brain in the treasure hunt team that stood in Doris Nelson's yard and tried to deduce clues from her quilt???

"WHAT?" I yelled, not wanting to be trifled with.

"They're getting married."

"That's wonderful!" I said truthfully, "Janine is great! And Jeff is very, very nice and deserves a wonderful wife. While she's at it, maybe she could make him some better-fitting pants. . . ."

"And you've heard about Mei Li?" Maisie said, having won the floor and being determined to run with it, if you'll allow me to mix my metaphors.

"Let me guess," I said, not wishing to be outflanked in the information-purveying department. "She's expecting."

"Twins!" said Maisie, triumphant at this extraordinary news. (Okay, I fudged the title of this chapter. There was more than one christening.)

"Omigoodness," I said, thinking how pencil-slim Mei Li is—or was, at any rate—and everything she'd been through in her life, and how Alfred must be busting his buttons. And all these revelations made me think of Ramona, my dear friend Ramona, who'd been trying for days to get in touch with me, and whom I had so shamelessly ignored. . . .

I grabbed Maisie's phone—over her protests—and called Ramona's office. Her secretary told me Ramona had "just stepped out."

Sometimes time passes too slowly. That‘s how the next few days were for me. Jay Allen brought his henchmen in, and they went over Anna's house with the proverbial fine tooth comb.

And one of Jay's expert friends at the University of Michigan Medical School came down and re-autopsied the autopsy. (It sounds ghoulish, but it can be done.) And then there was an infuriating period of two days when we didn't hear anything. I even phoned and offered Jay and Betsy a homemade blueberry pie (which I know is his favorite), hoping to winkle my way into their house and his confidences, but he turned me down, saying he was "too busy." (Probably he also suspected—correctly—that I had planned to buy the pie from Graham's, since I can't make a blueberry pie to save my soul.)

And then it all came out. Doc Lunt and his pig-headed refusal to admit he was past his prime had nearly gotten the wrong person sent to prison for life. Because what Jay and his associates found was that the fibers in Bruce Grummond's nose, mouth, and etc. weren't nylon. They were wool, jute, and wood excelsior. Occasionally you'll find a quilt made with wool filling, but certainly not jute (that scratchy tan stuff they make rope out of) or excelsior (which you pack around breakables), either.

Yet tiny fibers of navy blue wool, jute, and excelsior were present in Bruce Grummond's body, and a sliver or two of jute and excelsior were found in the footsteps across the Grummonds' living room carpet and—I'm leaving out the long, boring part of the forensic report and several more days of investigation— eventually the jute and excelsior were traced back to the Jackson City Jute and Cordage Company, where jute rope and string are manufactured.

Bruce Grummond worked for a gang that staged some pretty big antique and art robberies in the Detroit area. The stolen goods were taken to the Jackson factory, where they were packed in excelsior or tied with jute rope, crated and sent by train to a fence (you know: slang for someone who sells stolen property) in New York.

But Bruce Grummond, it seems, got greedy. Jay once told me that the person who first opined there is "honor among thieves" was, as he put it, "out to lunch." Because Grummond's gang—the gang involved in the robberies—was as ruthless a crew as you might find in any city in America. It was Grummond's job to drive the truck containing the crated stolen goods to the Jackson train depot. When it became clear that Grummond wanted more than his agreed-upon share of the proceeds, it was an easy matter to send someone to his house one night to kill him. This the murderer did with a navy blue wool sweater which, in the course of his everyday work around the jute factory, had become impregnated with jute and wood excelsior fibers.

I confess this part of the tale confused me. "I don't get it," I said. "Jay, why, did the killer use a sweater, of all things? Why not just shoot Grummond, or kill him with the quilt?"

Jay was nice and didn't give me one of his withering looks. "Barb," he said patiently, "professional killers arrive with the tools of their trade. They don't waste time wondering what might be lying around their victims' houses that they could murder them with.

"But this killer was somebody from the gang," he continued, "someone Grummond knew and was pals with, a thief first, a gunman second. He arrived with a gun hidden under the baggy blue sweater he was wearing. It was cool that night."

True. It was one of the reasons I offered Anna a ride home.

"Grummond and the killer had a couple of drinks, and—no doubt to the killer's surprise—Grummond passed out cold. Dr. Lunt was right about one thing, by the way: Grummond's blood-alcohol level was way, way up there. He'd had a drink—or four—before his killer appeared at his house.

"And the murderer decided to use his own sweater to suffocate the unconscious Grummond. Who knows why? Maybe when Grummond passed out, he saw it as a golden opportunity: suffocating Grummond would certainly make less mess and noise than shooting him. The police might even construe it as a natural death."

That made sense.

"Obviously," Jay went on, "the killer couldn't leave the sweater there once the deed was done. From the footprints it looks like he poked around the house a bit, found the quilt, and tossed it over Grummond's body. I'm sure he thought it would throw us off the trail." And then he added, most generously, I thought, "And it did. Except that you figured out the quilt wasn't the murder weapon, Barb."

I felt so proud!

The next few days were a whirlwind. Anna was released from jail, and we were all thrilled. Bruce Grummond's funeral was held in the Baptist Church and a polite crowd of ten attended for Anna's sake. Anna announced she was going back to high school and on to college, and was thinking of becoming a HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER (surprise and congratulations all round). And Doc Lunt returned to work, professing not even a smidgeon of embarrassment at his mistake in the autopsy results ("Well, well, well," he said. "That's interesting."). He refused to take the obvious hint that this was the ideal moment to quit, and that made me mad.

I know he had no intention of quitting because I asked him. Even I was astounded by my boldness. I bumped into him at Sawyer's Drug Store, where we were both pawing through bottles of aspirin, looking for the cheapest brand.

"Say, Dr. Lunt," I said point blank. "Did I hear that you're going to retire?"

"Certainly not," he said crisply.

And that gave me the idea for what is clearly the most meddlesome thing I've ever done in my life. I decided to start a rumor that Doc Lunt was quitting. Starting a rumor in a small town isn't difficult. After checking to make sure Doc Lunt had left, I dropped the first hint right there in the drug store. "Say!" I said to Jack Sawyer, loudly enough so my voice carried all the way to their soda fountain. "Doc Lunt says he's GOING TO RETIRE!"

It wasn't long—an hour at most—before everybody in town knew. (It helped that Jane Murphy, the hairdresser, was in the drug store at the time.) Then I called up Jim Brewster and suggested the Sons of Sasquatch host a retirement dinner honoring Doc Lunt for his almost fifty years of service to Spotsburg. After we went through the preliminaries ("Oh?" Jim said. "Is Doc Lunt retiring?"), he became wildly enthusiastic, and before anyone knew it, especially Dr. Lunt, he (Dr. Lunt) was eating Shirley's Mile High Tower of Ruby Jell-O in the Masonic Temple and receiving the keys to Spotsburg, a gold watch, a set of spiffy new highball glasses, AND a lifetime subscription to National Geographic, making out for all the world as if this retirement business was his brilliant idea.

(If you want more details about any of this, including the detailed account of Bruce Grummond's long criminal history, Bruce Grummond's murder and the subsequent trial, the break-up of the Jackson gang, or Dr. Lunt's life story—he wrote it himself, and it was so extensive it had to be printed in a special newspaper insert—consult the Spotsburg Sentinel. They were in journalistic heaven for more than a month with all our doings.)

And Ramona got engaged! That was her exciting news, the news I kept so rudely putting on the back burner, because I was so obsessed with my obsession. To everyone's astonishment—because they'd been so quiet about it—she and Dr. Robert Rasmussen (yes, Dr. Lunt's partner) announced their engagement, and within days, the further news that Ramona had been appointed District Court Judge by the Governor of Michigan!

That was REAL news. It's unusual enough in the Eisenhower era to find a woman lawyer. But a woman judge? And as always, Ramona wouldn't let us fuss over her, just smiled and smiled and smiled, and didn't say two words, which is a sign of high emotion in a lawyer, I think.

AND Mike and I were married. Because I'd been married before, I wasn't interested in anything very splashy, and it turned out he wasn't either. "I'd like to wear my kilt," he said happily.

"Anything else?" I asked, feeling high-spirited.

"Let's just have a party," he said.

And party we did.

Remember Florence Montgomery's house? Florence, sweet lady and mother of the appalling Gilbert, stealer of jewels and destroyer of quilts, who lived (before she died) in the amazing old Victorian home I described a few chapters back: three acres of parkland, emerald green and maroon clapboard, three stories (the third floor a ballroom), dark wood paneling and banisters, eight bedrooms, including one in the turret in the northern front corner, four bathrooms, two parlors, etc., etc.

Well, I had another terrific idea. Why not buy the old Montgomery place and turn it into an inn? Maureen Montgomery had put it up for sale, and it was so roomy and comfortable I realized instantly it would be perfect for guests.

I wrote out a blizzard of calculations to prove to Mike my scheme would work. The house was generally regarded by all and sundry in Spotsburg as a white elephant, so the price was lower than you'd expect for such a large piece of real estate. Mike would give up his apartment. I would sell my house. We would buy the Montgomery place and make up the difference between our old and our new house payments with paying guests. Assuming, of course, we ever had any.

"It would be so much fun!" I told Mike. "Goose down pillows and patchwork quilts on every bed, and I'll get up early every morning and bake fresh bread and muffins!"

"Quilts sound just great!" Mike said, thoughtfully failing to mention my recent cherry-nut muffins, which turned out like small red rocks.

Wally Ziegler voiced Spotsburg's general consensus about my plan when he said to me, "Barb, you're nice, but you're nuts. Buy that old rattletrap? Give me a moddurn bungalow with lotsa nice glass brick and lee-noleum in my kitchen any day!"

And SO, on a gorgeous, clear, not-at-all-humid September day, Ramona—who'd been sworn in as District Judge the week before—married us there on Florence's immense gingerbread-covered front porch, with the citizens of Spotsburg cheering us on. In a moment of total lunacy I had actually put mimeographed fliers in all Spotsburg's store windows and on all Spotsburg's telephone poles, so that everyone in town knew Mike and I were getting married, and everyone knew everyone was invited.

We borrowed supper tables and chairs from the Methodist Church and set them up in Florence's beautiful side yard, which was even more beautiful than usual that day. The unseasonably cool weather had given fall an early start, and Florence's maples were already turning glorious reds and golds and oranges.

Almost one thousand people showed up! Every family brought a dish to pass, their own table service, and blankets to spread out on the lawn in case there weren't enough chairs (there weren't). Ruth and Shirley made gallons and gallons of coffee and fruit punch.

Instead of greeting our guests after the ceremony, Mike and I greeted them as they arrived. Mike's mother and dad came—two lovely people who own a large feed store in Indianapolis. And my two darling sons, Eddie and Steve, arrived with hugs and kisses and a very touching surprise: each of them was wearing a necktie woven in the Mackenzie tartan! I must have looked startled, because Steve said, "We just wanted you to know we're with you all the way on this, Ma."

It was a little bit like a county fair, with people meeting and greeting and arranging their blankets and picnic baskets. Two of Jim Brewster's older children brought a baseball and bat, and were thoroughly dirty from sliding into third base before the wedding even started. Wally Ziegler arrived with a pony and cart. ("The little ones always like that," he said.) Two of the four State College boys who'd gotten tangled up in the Game of the Quilt Treasure Hunt appeared, with a small box. We'd told people not to bring gifts, but many people did anyway. The boys' present (which we opened later) was no doubt inspired by their evening raid on their rival dorm's bathroom hardware: a dozen rubber sink and bathtub plugs!

Danny Sawyer, who is seven, an adorable child and smart, smart, smart—reputed to be the world's next Einstein-in-waiting—kept popping over to me with his revised count of the goodies.

"Know what, Miz Hoxsie?" he said. "You got three hun'red and twenty-one watermelons here!" Later: "Hey, Miz Hoxsie, there's a hun'red and fifty-five plates of brownies, and ninety-two of them has NUTS!"

Eventually his mom intervened with an embarrassed "Danny, don't be bothering Barb—I mean Mrs. Hoxsie—with this silliness," but I told her it was fine—that I was delighted to know we had plenty of brownies—and when Danny later announced we had thirty-eight baked bean casseroles and no salt shakers, I was way too happy to fret about it.

We didn’t have attendants of any sort, but Jay Allen stood by, looking very proud of what he had accomplished in the matchmaking department, and (of course) excruciatingly good-looking and redheaded.

Ramona looked official (also very small and young) in her new black judge's robe, and Mike was extraordinarily handsome in his kilt and the rest of his Scottish garb.

And my wedding dress? After Mike proposed, I was back once again to the problem of what you wear when you're standing next a man wearing a skirt. The day I picked up Mike's kilt from the cleaners (and finally remembered to get the replacement overhead bulb for my Studebaker), I stopped by Sew and Go with the kilt and asked Janine her advice.

"Nothing white," I said. "I want something different."

We searched for different for quite a while. The Mackenzie tartan is dark blue with some touches of black and green. A dark blue or green dress, suggested Janine. A little handmade lace around the neck and sleeves. . . .

"Not splashy enough," I told her.

"Red?" she offered.

I thought about it for a minute. Mei Li's wedding dress had been red. "No," I said, "I don't want to look like I'm copying."

We took down bolts and bolts of fabric, silk and velveteen and even wool, laid them next to the kilt, and tried them with a touch of lace, and a black velvet bodice and silver buttons—to echo his black formal jacket. Boring.

We draped navy blue and forest green over a mannequin and pinned it into puffy sleeves, with fabric swags at the hem and flowers on the swags. Awful. It looked like a dress Little Bo Peep would wear to a funeral.

We tried BOLD and EXPERIMENTAL—in the spirit of the much-heralded Coming Conquest of Outer Space—and concocted a slim toga-like tube of fluorescent chartreuse silk with silver spangles. "Hmmph," I said. "Doesn't it need something more?"

Janine grimaced. "Yeah," she said, unpinning the silk and letting our latest attempt fall to the floor. "A three-foot high ostrich feather headdress. Or a silver football helmet." Scratch the chartreuse toga.

A number of people stopped into the store that day and offered their suggestions. By the end of it all, I was frustrated, still wedding dress-less, and the kilt was so wrinkled I had to take it back to the cleaners for another pressing.

"I want to be dramatic!" I cried. "I want to make an entrance!" And then I had a wonderful, a MARVELOUS idea.

On the appointed Saturday, that perfect, cloudless September Saturday on which Mike Mackenzie and I were married, he and I met our guests and engaged in the pleasantries I've described above. And then I slipped into the house to change into my dress, and Arden and Karen and our other friends organized everyone so they stood in two groups on the lawn in front of our house, leaving a grassy center aisle I could walk down. It took a while, with babies in baby carriages, rambunctious small children refusing to be shepherded into groups, a hunt for the Brewster children's lost baseball, and the sudden outbreak of a water pistol fight.

Eventually everyone was organized. Mike and Ramona took their places on the front porch. On a signal from Arden's Tom, I stepped out the door on the far side, came around the back, and appeared to the assembled multitudes dressed in a simple navy blue dress with a nosegay of red flowers at my waist, playing the bagpipes!

I was terrible. Playing the bagpipes well takes hundreds of hours of practice. I'd only gotten a few lessons from one of the men who'd piped in the haggis at the Robert Burns Festival, and I sounded dreadful. All by myself, I deftly transformed the ancient hymn "Amazing Grace" into "Appalling Racket"!

But if making an appearance was what I was striving for, and making an effort in the Cause of Love was what I was attempting, I achieved them both. Mike's eyes gleamed with astonishment, and everyone laughed and applauded. We said our few vows, Ramona pronounced us man and wife, and our guests cheered lustily. And the best part was that we were in love, we were surrounded by our family and friends—and we had what was quite possibly the world's largest potluck supper ever.

It was a beautiful wedding, if I do say so myself.

* * * * *

Barb Hoxsie Mackenzie and her 1001 Quilt Blocks aside, my sources of inspiration and guidance have been:

1001 Patchwork Designs by Maggie Malone, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., New York, ©1982.

The Illustrated Index to Traditional American Quilt Patterns by Susan Winter Mills, Arco Publishing, Inc., New York, ©1980.

101 Patchwork Patterns by Ruby McKim, c. 1932; new edition published by Dover Publications, New York, ©1962.

The Quilter's Album of Blocks and Borders by Jinny Beyer, EPM Publications, Inc., McLean, Virginia, ©1980.

The Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman, American Quilter's Society, Paducah, Kansas, ©1993.

###

Table of Contents

The Name of the Quilt: Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder