Make Quilts Not War (32 page)

True to his word, Colm Byrne was on her doorstep at three minutes after eight. She had just come downstairs, tucking her cell phone into the sling the doctor had insisted she wear when she was up and about. As far as she could tell, that was the only thing the sling was useful for.

“Hi,” she said as she opened the door. “Come on in.”

“Where can I put this?” he said and held out a white cardboard baker’s box balanced on his right hand; his guitar case he held by its handle in his left.

“Follow me.” She led him into the kitchen, where he set the guitar down. He opened the box, revealing four individual-sized pies. Two were quiche of some sort, and two looked like miniature fruit pies.

“Cook said if we ate our eggs, we could have our fruit pies. And her pies are to die for.”

“They look great and smell even better,” Harriet agreed.

She pulled two plates one-handed from her cupboard and gathered silverware and napkins.

“I hope you don’t mind eating in the kitchen,” she said.

“I prefer the kitchen. My dear mother always fed us kids in the kitchen. It makes me feel a little like I’m home.” He rolled up the cuffs of his white button-down shirt before reaching into the box to lift out the quiches and place one on each plate. Harriet noticed the edge of a tattoo on his arm.

“Is that a tattoo?” she asked. “Can I see it?”

He pulled his shirtsleeve up, revealing a familiar stylized peace sign.

“Do you like it?” he asked, rubbing his hand over it.

“I like the colors,” Harriet said, trying to think of something positive to say about the tattoo.

“This was the first one I got,” he said with a rueful smile. “My friends and I all got the same tattoo when we were eighteen years old. I was the youngest in the group, and the day after I passed my eighteenth birthday, we all went and got matching ink. My mother almost had a stroke.” He smiled. “It was my first big rebellion.”

“The first of many, I take it?” She smiled back.

“Do you have any?” he asked. “Tattoos, that is. I can see you’re a rebel at heart.”

“No, my parents would have killed me. I definitely was a rebel, but I never really had the urge to be marked in such a permanent way.”

“We considered it a rite of passage.”

“Was that peace symbol a common image when you got it?” she asked.

“There were plenty of people with peace signs, but we had the artist modify ours so it would be unique.”

Harriet knew she’d seen it before.

“Enough about me. I get bored talking about myself all the time.” He reached across the table and put his fingers lightly on the back of her hand. “How are you doing? Last night you said you weren’t getting better. What do your doctors say?”

“It’s no big deal,” Harriet said. “My burn is having a little infection trouble. They don’t really know if the woman who threw the acid purposefully contaminated the brew she threw on me or if it’s just the typical sort of infection you can get as a result of being in a hospital.”

“She’s not that clever,” Colm said, and then hurriedly added, “At least, from what I’ve read in the paper she wouldn’t be that clever. They said she was too mentally ill.”

“She did seem pretty crazy,” Harriet agreed, but she wondered at his choice of words.

“Speaking of mentally ill,” he said, changing the subject. “Have you heard anything new about the murder?”

“No, have you?”

“Not really. Most of the people I’ve heard talking agree your
friend was the intended target. Do you ladies have any idea why anyone would want to kill her?”

“You seem awfully interested in our small-town murder,”
Harriet said with a smile. “But don’t worry, we’ll figure out who did it.”

“I’ll just bet you will.”

“My friend Jenny would be happy if it all just goes away. She doesn’t want to know who wants her dead, she just wants them to stop.”

“She doesn’t like the attention?” he asked.

“Would you?”

“No, I suppose not,” he conceded. “But you’re willing to be the talk of the town if it means justice for the victim?”

“That ship has sailed,” she said. “A few murders ago. So, yeah, I will find out who killed Pamela and see that they pay.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Colm got up, went over to his guitar case and knelt down to open it. Was he going to sing to her after this weird conversational turn? she wondered as he fumbled around in the case.

Her smile froze when he turned around, a shiny black nine-millimeter pistol in one hand, a matching silencer in his other. He began screwing the two pieces together.

“What are you doing?” she squeaked.

“Oh, I think you know,” he said. “I was hoping it wasn’t going to come to this. I gave you every chance I could. All you had to say was you were going to let it go.”

“Let what go? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play coy with me. What have we been talking about? The murders, of course. And strangely, you may have saved your friend Jenny.”

“You?” The quiche she’d just eaten was threatening to come
back up. “What have you got against Jenny?”

“Well, now, that’s an interesting story,” Colm said. “It turns out your friend Jenny is my friend Jonquil.”

Colm’s accent had changed; his last sentence wasn’t spoken in the lilting Irish she’d become familiar with. His was a distinctly American accent—Pacific Northwest, if she had to make a guess.

“Who are you?” she said.

His answer was interrupted by a knock on her outside door.

“Are you expecting company?” he demanded.

“It could be any of the Threads. They’ve all been spending time here since I got burned.”

“It’s not them. Your group is all at a post-festival meeting for the volunteers and vendors. I checked. Their cars were all in the parking lot when I left.”

“I can’t tell you, then. What I can tell you is if I don’t answer the door, whoever it is will likely get the hidden key and come in anyway.”

“Answer it and get rid of whoever it is,” he barked at her, and waved his gun toward the connecting door. “And don’t try anything cute, or you won’t be the only one with a hole in their head.”

Harriet got up, tilting her arm slightly down as she turned her back to Colm and went into her studio with him following at a distance.

“Aiden,” she said in surprise. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“You are?” He raised his left eyebrow. A muscle in his jaw tightened.

“Scooter’s back is really bothering him. I was afraid I was going to have to wait until one of the Threads came over to take him to see you.”

She took his hand i and pulled him into the room.

“This is Colm Byrne,” she said. “You know, the rock star.”

“I know who Colm Byrne is,” he said, giving her a questioning look.

She stared into his eyes, willing him not to go into his jealous routine.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, turning to Byrne with a smile. Colm nodded, but kept his distance, the gun held straight down, hidden behind his leg.

“Dr. Jalbert is my little dog Scooter’s doctor,” Harriet explained, realizing she was babbling but unable to stop. “He rescued Scooter from a hoarder a few months ago, and Scooter still has some health problems. He needs to check the burn on his back.”

She called Scooter, who came to the kitchen door and barked to be let into the studio. Harriet turned and went to the door, Aiden close on her heels. He saw the half-eaten pies on the kitchen table and looked back at her.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“We were eating breakfast,” Colm said.

“But it’s okay,” Harriet added, pointedly looking at Aiden and hoping he was reading between the lines. “His back is really bothering him.”

“Make it quick,” Colm said, his accent firmly back in place. “My busses are pulling out within the hour.”

Aiden picked up the little dog and examined the burn scar on his back. There was a small remaining scab, but he knew it was of no consequence. With a silent apology, he deftly scraped it open, causing Scooter to yelp and the wound to bleed.

Harriet was relieved Aiden had picked up on her ruse. While the two men were focused on her yelping dog, she retracted her burned arm into the sling, blindly stabbing the face of her concealed phone with her fingers and hoping she’d hit the speed dial number she was aiming for. She pressed the volume button down when she heard a woman’s voice.

“I’m going to need to get my bag from the car,” Aiden said.

“I don’t think so,” Colm snapped, revealing the gun. “Nice try, though. I’m not sure how she got you here, but now that you are, I’m afraid you won’t be leaving.”

“I have no idea what’s going on here, but Harriet didn’t ‘get me here.’ I came to check on Scooter, which is something I do every day on my way to the clinic,” Aiden lied.

“Well, that’s unfortunate.” Colm’s accent was once again gone. “I’m afraid your devotion to the dog is going to get you killed.”

“What?” Aiden gasped. “What on earth are you talking about? If you’re going to shoot me, can I at least know why?”

“The short version is that your friend here is too nosy for her own good.”

“Come on, you have to give me more than that. If I’m just collateral damage, at least tell me what cause I’m dying for.”

“I’m curious, too,” Harriet said.

Both men turned and glared at her.

“This is all about her friend Jenny,” Colm said.

“Jenny Logan?” Aiden asked. “What could she possibly have done to you?”

“You’d be surprised,” Colm said. “She seems to have set herself up as a suburban housewife now, but she has a past you-all don’t seem to know about. And see, that’s the thing—we share a past that I need to make sure stays in the past.

“I’ve been able to hire most of the people who did jail time. They’re dependent on me, so it’s in their best interest to keep their mouths shut. But Jonquil and Paisley escaped scott-free.”

“I don’t mean to be dense,” Aiden said, “but I still am not following what you’re telling me. Who are Paisley and Jonquil, and what do they have to do with Jenny and Harriet, and why do you want everybody, including me, dead?”

“It’s like this. I got involved with a group of people when we were all in our teens. We had a crazy idea to make a political statement, and we got involved with some people with a different agenda. They robbed a bank, killed a policeman, and we all were incarcerated for various amounts of time. Everyone, that is, except two girls, who disappeared off the face of the earth.

“After that, two things happened. I got forged papers and left for Ireland, where I played my guitar in pubs full of drunks. A funny thing happened, though. Without the drugs, I got better, and then I got real good. As soon as I started making real money, I hired private investigators to find Jonquil and Paisley. I also had a little reconstructive surgery done—my face needed to match my new age.”

“I take it Jonquil or Paisley is who we know as Jenny?” Aiden asked.

“I found Paisley about ten years ago,” Colm continued. “Just in time, it turned out. She was about to publish a memoir, and unfortunately, she included a chapter on me and how a drug-using ex-con became an Irish rock singer. I’m not saying it would have destroyed my career to be outed. It’s not like I was lip-syncing like Milli Vanilli or anything, but you know, I can’t take that chance. I could be run out of the business on a rail—you never can tell about these things.”

“How did you find Jenny?” Harriet asked.

“Well, that’s what’s funny, you know? All the high-priced detectives I’ve paid for over the years, and a newspaper article about this festival did it for me. I wasn’t expecting it. I was looking to see what they said about the band, and there was a picture of my old shirt. Well, not my shirt, but a piece of it. Jonquil was always sewing patches on jeans and stuff, and she’d use whatever material she could find. She made her and Paisley skirts from some old jeans one time.

“Anyway, there was the back of my favorite shirt, right in the middle of that quilt. It disappeared the day of the robbery. I had bigger things to worry about on that day, but when I saw the quilt, I figured out where it came from. That shirt was hand-dyed, so it was an original. There wasn’t a chance it was anything else
but
my shirt.”

“So, you just decided to kill Jenny without even talking to her?” Harriet persisted.

“Come on, give me a little credit. I had my PI check her out. There didn’t seem to be anything I could leverage in her background, and it was obvious that, if she was confronted, she’d crack. Her brother was a bit of a problem, too.”

“What do you mean?” Harriet interrupted him again, hoping whomever she’d reached had called 911 and could hear what was being said.

She wiggled her arm again as if it were hurting her, sliding her phone forward toward her hand. She used her good hand to reposition the sling, brushing her finger over the screen. The face illuminated, and she could see she was still connected.

“Ole Bobby was finally cleaning up. My guys interviewed Bobby’s fellow rehab inmates. He was coming up on steps eight and nine in his process—identify people you have wronged and make amends. We couldn’t have him making any amends that involved me or the band.”

“If you had plastic surgery, how was he going to know it was you?” Aiden interrupted.

Colm pulled his sleeve up, exposing the peace sign tattoo.

“We all had these,” he said. “And Bobby was snooping around backstage and saw mine. I offered him cash to go away, but he said he couldn’t leave until he’d connected with his sister and made amends. He had a lot of guilt about involving her with the rest of us. And he was ready to do whatever she wanted him to do to make it right.”

“Too bad he didn’t know that what she wanted most was to bury her past deep. She had no desire to dredge it all back up,” Harriet said.

“That is too bad, but there was no way for my PI to figure that out. All we can do now is clean up. You two are, unfortunately, going to be the victims of a murder-suicide.”

“No one will believe that,” Harriet said. “He’s just my veterinarian. Why would he kill me?”

“Good point,” Colm said. “You’ll kill him accidentally and be so remorseful you’ll kill yourself.”