The Devil's Puzzle (33 page)

“He’s working on a Sunday?” I asked Jesse.

“He works every day.” He turned to me. “His heart is in the right place, you know.”

“I’ll let you tell Eleanor that.”

“You want to get something to eat?” he asked.

“I’m actually headed to Maggie’s.”

“That should be fun.”

“It should be,” I told him, “I’m just not sure it will be.”

Five minutes later I rang Maggie’s doorbell, and waited. I could hear shuffling and voices, but it took several minutes for Maggie to open the door. And when she did, she didn’t open it all the way.

“Can I talk to you?”

Maggie stepped outside and closed the door behind her. “Absolutely, Nell. What would you like to talk about?”

“Can we go inside?”

She looked back at her door. “The place is a mess.”

“I don’t care.” I sighed.

Maggie didn’t budge.

“Okay,” I tried again. “I was talking to Eleanor and she said that Ed had tried to ruin her life.”

Maggie nodded. “I guess this is something we have to talk about inside.” She opened the door.

CHAPTER 52

M
aggie led me inside the house, and I saw immediately what she had been trying to hide. Ed was sitting on the couch, looking worried and upset.

“If one of you is going to confess to something, I’d better call Jesse,” I said.

“What we have to confess does not require law enforcement,” Maggie said as she directed me to a brown leather chair across from the couch.

She sat down next to Ed and patted his hand.

“Oh my God,” I said without thinking. “You and Ed had an affair. He’s your son Brian’s real father. Is that what you’ve been hiding?”

Ed and Maggie burst out laughing. While I was glad to see the tension diminish, as the laugh went on I felt increasingly stupid. When they finally were able to compose themselves, Ed and Maggie turned to each other, seemed to wordlessly consult, and then turned back to me.

“While I would have been proud to have been Maggie’s better half,” Ed said, “if anyone could be better than Maggie, I was actually in love with a different woman that year.”

I hesitated but guessed anyway. “Eleanor.”

He smiled. “Eleanor.”

“And she was in love with you?”

“She was cautious, of course. She had the children to think about, but I think she could have been persuaded to that way of thinking eventually.”

“What stopped her? Was it Winston?”

“No,” Maggie said. “It was me.”

“You?”

“I didn’t think Ed was ready for marriage, for an instant family. He was . . .”

“Struggling with maturity,” Ed said. “Eleanor came to talk to me one day in early June about the nature of our relationship.”

“I persuaded her to,” Maggie said.

“It terrified me.” Ed shook his head. “I backed off. We’d only been dating for a few months, and while being with Eleanor was a dream, instant fatherhood was . . . well, it was more than I could imagine for myself.”

“So you broke up?” I asked.

“We broke up.”

“And never spoke again until the other day? Glad said you disliked each other.”

“We did speak, but only politely, and only when we had to,” he said. “That was my choice, not Eleanor’s.”

“But it wasn’t because of the breakup, it was because of what happened after.” Maggie nodded at Ed, encouraging him to continue his story.

“A few weeks later I went over to the house to talk to Eleanor,” he said. “To tell her I’d changed my mind. But Winston wouldn’t let me speak to her. He wouldn’t even let me in the house. A few days after that, Eleanor, Grace, and the kids were in Canada. Gone for a whole month.”

“When did you argue with Winston?”

“July 3rd. I remember distinctly. I was going into New York for the holiday and I went into the bank to get some cash. It was before ATMs, you remember, so I had to get it there. Winston was just leaving the bank manager’s office. He saw me and, well, one thing led to another.”

“Because he’d kept you from talking to Eleanor? Why would he care about your relationship? Eleanor wasn’t in love with him. Was he in love with her?”

Maggie shook her head. “No. Nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

“People with money, as F. Scott once said, they’re different than you and me,” Ed said. “Winston flaunted his money and supposed superiority. He kept his thumb on people like Eleanor.”

“I can’t image Eleanor being under anyone’s thumb.”

“She was different in those days. She had children and no money, no education beyond high school, and no husband. And when Grace died, nowhere to go,” Maggie said. “The day she opened Someday, her hands were shaking. Hard to believe now, but that goes to show you how strong a person can get.”

“Is that where she got the money to open the shop? Did Eleanor know something about Winston stealing money from Grace’s account and he paid her off to keep her silent?” I said.

Ed shook his head. “Eleanor never would have stayed silent about something like that. I assumed he paid her to take Grace to Canada, to get Grace out of the way.”

“They went every year, didn’t they? Eleanor said it was to get Grace out of the humidity of an Archers Rest summer.”

“They did,” Ed said, “but Eleanor was afraid the trip would be too much for Grace. Her health was very fragile.”

“But Winston insisted they go,” Maggie added. “So Eleanor took her. And within days of their return to Archers Rest, Grace died. Eleanor felt, as I did, that the trip killed her.”

I sat watching Ed. And watching Maggie. There was regret in both their eyes. But there didn’t seem to be guilt. I was glad of that. Considering for even a second that my dear friend Maggie had hurt someone was almost as unthinkable as imagining Eleanor capable of murder. But as far as Ed was concerned . . .

“After Eleanor returned,” I said, “and Grace had died, why didn’t you talk to her then?”

“I did. She told me that it was too late.”

“Why?” I asked.

“She didn’t tell me.”

I looked at Maggie and then at Ed. “Do you know now?” I asked.

“I know what a mistake I made, and what a lucky man Oliver is,” he said. “And that’s all that matters to me anymore.”

CHAPTER 53

M
aggie walked me to my car and hugged me a long time, as if I were going away somewhere.

“Ed and Eleanor have spoken. Whatever hard feelings there were between them are gone,” she said. “By the way, I have another quilt for you. It’s a grandmother’s flower garden made using reproduction 1930s fabrics, just like the one you wanted to make. I think it would make a nice addition to the show. I know its name might have an unfortunate connection to what’s going on, but I think if we want a beautiful traditional quilt in the show, we should do it.”

“Why did Ed come to your house?” I asked.

“My friendship with him ended when Eleanor and he broke up—out of loyalty to her.”

“And now . . .”

“We can all be friends again, so some good has come from all of this,” she said.

“The summer Winston died . . .”

She squeezed my hand. “I’ll bring it by the shop tomorrow.”

Then she turned and went back toward the house, where Ed was waiting for her.

Once she reached him, he smiled at me, and they both went inside and closed the door.

There was nothing left for me to do but go back to Someday and think. Surrounding myself with fabric often put me into a peaceful sort of trance. My brain would quietly work on my problems as I focused on color and pattern. Even if I hadn’t needed to finish my quilt for the show, I would have gone back to the shop to piece a few blocks of something. People always assume quilters do what we do so we can have a finished product. And, I admit, there is little more satisfying than sewing in the final stitch of the binding and knowing that another quilt is done. But mainly we quilt because we like the process of quilting. It is our meditation, our therapy, and our connection to the soul.

I got in my car and headed back toward Main Street, feeling confused, sad, and tired, but anxious to work on my devil’s puzzle quilt. But just as I pulled up in front of the shop, my cell phone rang.

“When’s the last time you saw Molly?” Jesse asked before I’d even had a chance to say hello.

“Again? When I left the house this morning, Mike was with her. He said he would stay at the house until Eleanor got home.”

“I just got a call that a woman fitting her description, with a bandage on her head, was seen breaking into the bank. Mike said she went up to take a nap, but when I called, he checked on her and she wasn’t there.”

“I’ll meet you at the bank,” I said.

Jesse was at the scene before me, as were a half dozen of his force. Being a Sunday, the bank was closed, but their cameras were working. Jesse and one of the bank’s security guards checked the tape, and sure enough Molly was using a screwdriver to open the back door to the bank. It looked like she was doing pretty well, too, until the alarm went off and she ran, leaving her screwdriver—actually Eleanor’s screwdriver—behind.

“Where could she be?” Jesse asked.

“Out trying to solve the case.”

“And maybe getting herself killed in the process.”

I grabbed his hand. “I never thought I’d say this, but amateur detectives really get in the way of an investigation.”

He laughed. “I don’t know. Sometimes they come in very handy.” “Chief?” Greg, one of Jesse’s detectives, approached cautiously. “I just got a call. There’s another problem.”

“Of course there is.”

“There’s a bomb threat at city hall. They’re clearing the building now, but someone has to go check it out.”

Jesse rested his head in his hands. “All right. Everyone stay away. Greg, call the state police and see if they can get a bomb squad here. I’ll talk to the mayor.”

“Let me go with you,” I said.

He shook his head. “Stay here, Nell.”

I waited by the bank for a few minutes, then made my way over to the shop. News of a bomb scare had gotten all over town in just the time it took me to make the walk. Carrie, Natalie, and several customers of both the quilt shop and the coffeehouse were outside on the sidewalk, though we were a block and a half from city hall and couldn’t see anything.

“There was a threat against city hall years ago,” Natalie said.

“Mary Shipman.” I took a few steps closer to the end of the block. As I did I saw Ed walking toward the theater.

“What’s the fuss?”

“Someone called in a bomb threat at city hall,” I told him.

“Good heavens. Who would do that?”

“Not sure. But it’s not the first time it’s ever happened.”

“No.” His voice was shaking.

I was about to tell him that Jesse had it under control, but he disappeared into the theater.