The Quilt Before the Storm
THE QUILT
BEFORE
THE STORM
A Harriet Truman/Loose Threads Mystery
ARLENE SACHITANO
ZUMAYA ENIGMA
AUSTIN TX
2012
Writing my stories is a long arduous process that would not be possible without the support of friends, family and a host of others. To those who listen, comfort, badger, buy hot chocolate, and all the other activities that make my writing possible—Thank you all.
I’d like to say a special thanks to my family: Jack, Karen, Annie and Alex, David, Ken and Nikki. I am inspired on a daily basis by my grandchildren, Malakai, Amelia and Claire, as well as Kellen and Lucas. I learn things about innovative thinking every time I talk to them. Also, thanks to my sister Donna, a major influence on my early creativity.
Thanks to my sister-in-law Beth and her family for her unending support of my marketing endeavors and her persistent encouragement to write every day. Thanks also to Kay and Sally.
I’d like to acknowledge Susan and Susan for all the things they do, large and small, that make life flow more smoothly.
Special gratitude goes to Betty and Vern Swearingen of StoryQuilts for their help, support, encouragement and the great dinner adventures at Quilt Market.
Thanks also to Ruth Derksen for the fun times during the Northwest quilt shows.
Lastly, thanks to Liz at Zumaya Publications for making all this possible.
The wind threw rain laced with pine needles at the bow window, gusting and swirling before it moved on down her tree-lined driveway. Harriet Truman glanced out at the gathering storm.
“You know, I could just cook something for us to eat here so we don’t have to go out in the weather,” she said.
“About dinner.” Aiden Jalbert tipped his head downward and glanced up at her with his catlike white-blue eyes, a crooked half-smile on his lips. He was sitting in one of the two wing-backed chairs in the reception area of her long-arm quilting studio. Harriet sat opposite him in the other.
She hated the term “boyfriend”—it sounded so high school—but she had yet to find a better word to describe the relationship status of a woman twenty years
past
high school and a man not long out of veterinary school. If the truth were to be told,
boyfriend
is exactly how she thought of Aiden, and she was okay with that.
He reached out and took her hand, pulling her toward him. She stood and shifted over onto his lap.
“Please don’t tell me you have to work,” she said, studying his face. As the new guy at the clinic, he often got stuck with after-hour duties when problems arose.
“No, it’s not work.” He sighed.
“But you’re ditching me,” she prompted as she stroked a stray strand of silky black hair from his eyes.
“I’m not ditching you,” he protested. “Well, I am, I guess. But not because I want to. Believe me, I’d much rather be eating dinner with you than talking to my sister.” He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him. She leaned her head on his shoulder.
“Your sister? You’re ditching me for your sister?” she moaned into his fleece-covered shoulder. “You don’t even like your sister. She tried to sell your house out from under you, for crying out loud.”
“I know.” He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. “She said it was important.”
“And you believed her?” Harriet sat up straight. “How can you believe anything that comes out of that woman’s mouth?”
“I can’t. I don’t. But she’s my sister. I have to at least hear what she has to say.”
“You can’t do that over a quick cup of coffee? She has to ruin our dinner plans?”
Harriet knew she sounded like a spoiled child, but Michelle had made a bad situation much worse for Aiden when their mother was murdered earlier in the year. She had tried to steal his inheritance, and standing up to her, while necessary, had been very hard on Aiden.
He pulled her back to his chest.
“I think this is one of those times when being an only child has limited your perspective. No matter what Michelle has done in the past, or what else she’ll try in the future, she’s still my sister. I won’t let her get close enough to do any harm, but I at least have to hear her out.”
“I might not know anything about siblings, but I know greed when I see it, and your sister has ‘what’s in it for me’ written all over her face.”
“She can’t touch my money or property. The lawyers have made sure of that.”
“It’s not your things I’m worried about. It’s you,” she said, and poked her finger into his chest.
He leaned his face down and kissed her gently on her mouth.
“If it makes you feel any better, I told her to meet me at Jorge’s place,” he said referring to Tico’s Tacos, a Mexican restaurant run by Jorge Perez. Jorge was the father of Aiden’s best friend Julio, and he had stepped in to fill the role when Aiden’s own father passed away while the boys were still in grade school. “That way, she can’t even start the discussion about what’s in the house and how Mom meant for her to have it.”
“She’s done that in the past, I take it?”
Aiden sighed. “Once or twice.”
“Did you give her stuff?” Harriet asked, her voice louder than she’d intended.
His pained silence answered her question.
“What did you give her?” she pressed.
“Not much. A necklace. A couple of teacups. Nothing I couldn’t spare. My mom had a lot of stuff, you know.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know—you’re not the only one I’ve had this discussion with. Jorge told me the same thing. He says she’s toxic. And he said she’s probably selling whatever I give her online as soon as she gets home.”
Harriet brushed at the errant lock of hair again. He took her hand in his when she’d finished and brought it to his lips before setting it back in her lap.
“It’s just complicated,” he said in a quiet voice.
“I know. Just be careful,” she said and pressed her lips gently to his. He tightened his arms around her and deepened the kiss.
A loud whoosh of wind rattled the bow window again, causing them to separate as tree debris pinged against the window.
“Hard to believe this isn’t the worst part of the storm yet,” Harriet said as rain fell in sheets outside.
“I’ve got go,” Aiden said with a glance at his watch. “Michelle’s supposed to be here in an hour, and I have to go by the clinic to check on a dog.”
“I have fabric to cut anyway. Mavis says we need six more charity quilts for the homeless camp, and she wants them done before the storm hits.”
She stood up and waited while Aiden stood and put on his outer jacket and a baseball cap with the Main Street Veterinary Clinic logo on the front.
“Call me?” she said and gave him one last kiss.
“If it’s not too late,” he said. “Michelle tends to drag our discussions out. She likes to bring up sentimental stories from when we were young to try to soften me up.”
“Do they work?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “No one knows your life like the people who’ve lived it with you. Plus, there’s a part of me that really doesn’t care if she has all the stuff. I know it’s not what my mother wanted, and I know it only encourages her when I give in, but still—it’s just stuff.”
“Okay, go.” She pushed him toward the door.
She watched out the window until his car disappeared into the rainy gloom then turned back to her cutting table. She had cut four different colors of flannel before Aiden’s arrival and stacked them in piles; her gray cat Fred was batting at the stacks, trying out a new design.
“I don’t think this is what Mavis has in mind,” she scolded him as she organized the squares by color again.
“What didn’t Mavis have in mind?” the woman herself asked as she swept into the studio, her coat flapping in the breeze.
“I was just talking to Fred—he decided to rearrange our fabric. I’ve got one more color to cut if you have time to wait. Aiden came by for a few minutes, so I’m a little behind schedule.”
“I’ve got a few minutes,” Mavis said as she shrugged out of her coat. “I’m not due at Connie’s for another hour, so take your time. Did your aunt call you? And I could use a cup of tea.
“No, was she going to?”
“Well, after I give Connie her pieces, we’ll have three quilts left to go. Beth was thinking we could meet here, if it was okay with you.”
“Of course it’s okay—it’s her studio.”
“
Was
her studio,” Mavis corrected. “She gave it to you, and she’s trying to respect that.”
“It’s not like she gave it to me and I turned it into a beauty parlor or moved to Mars or something. I am part of the Loose Threads. At least, I was last time I checked.”
“Like I say, she’s trying to respect your autonomy.”
“Okay, whatever. The studio is free, and so am I. Aiden’s having dinner with his sister.”
“That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
“Everyone’s told him that, but he can’t say no to her. He says I’d understand if I wasn’t an only child.”
“Well, sister or not, that girl’s poison, if you ask me.”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Harriet said as she folded a piece of brown plaid flannel and spread it carefully on her cutting mat.
Mavis unplugged the electric kettle and carried it toward the kitchen.
“I’m going to get some fresh water, if you don’t mind,” she said as she went through the connecting door to Harriet’s kitchen. She returned a few minutes later and plugged in the now-f kettle. “Connie has another idea for us.” She pulled a stool to the opposite side of the cutting table and eased herself carefully onto it.
“You seem to be moving a little slow,” Harriet observed as she ran her rotary cutter along the long edge of her Plexiglas quilting ruler, slicing the edge off the piece of fabric.
“It’s nothing. I banged my hip on the square edge at the top of my bedpost yesterday. Curly was running around while I was making my bed, and I was afraid I was going to step on him. I was looking at my feet instead of where I was going, and now I’m sporting a big purple bruise.”
“You need to be careful. That little dog isn’t worth you breaking your hip.”
“Easy for you to say,” Mavis said with a laugh. “You don’t look at his sweet little face staring up at you every morning when you wake up. If he could talk, I know he’d be saying how happy he is that Aiden rescued him and brought him to live at my house.”
“Cute or not, he’s not worth breaking your hip, or worse, over.”
Mavis sighed and rolled her eyes skyward.
“You just wait until you get Scooter home,” she said, referring to the small, mostly hairless dog who was still living at the Main Street Veterinary Clinic, recovering from a series of skin grafts he’d needed after spending his short life living in squalor in the bottom cage of a tall stack in a dog-hoarding home.
The Loose Threads had all participated in a socialization program, holding the neglected dogs and getting them used to human contact so they could become eligible for adoption. So far, as each dog had graduated from the program, it had been adopted by the Loose Thread who had socialized it. They were now working on a second group of animals, hoping to release them to the public when they were ready.
“Who’s saying Scooter’s coming to live here?”
“Don’t even go there. We all see how you look at that little fellow.”
“Well, he’s still weeks away from being released medically. That urine burn on his back was so deep it has to heal more before they can get a permanent skin graft to take.”
“So, back to the quilts,” Mavis said. “Connie came up with an idea to solve our problem.”
“Our problem?” Harriet asked, looking up at her friend as she did.
“It’s not
our
problem, exactly, but Connie and I have been talking about how we’re making all these warm quilts for the people at the homeless camp, but we’re not addressing the wetness issue. We’re getting tons of rain, and the ground is so saturated that even if they’ve got a tarp or tent overhead, their quilt is going to get wet and we’ve accomplished nothing.”
“And the solution is?”
“Connie saw an article in the Seattle paper about a young University of Oregon college student who did a workshop project that involved making portable shelters from discarded materials. She won the competition with her tarp made from plastic grocery bags, which she then sent to Haiti after the earthquake there.