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  “In Indy?” asked Lizzie. Her son Josh went to school there.

  “Yes. A visiting professorship.”

  “Will you introduce us?” asked Maddy. “We could drive down for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Hold on and I’ll phone him right now.”

  “Oh boy, a trip to Indianapolis,” said Aggie.

  “You’ll have to ask your mother,” her grandmother warned.

  “What about N’yen? Can he come along? He’s feeling left out.”

  Maddy was about to say he’d have to ask his mother, but caught herself. Kathy was still in the hospital – in traction, for goodness sake. N’yen was her responsibility for the next two weeks. “Alright, the two of you can come along,” she acceded.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Mayor Beauregard Hollingsworth Madison IV was unhappy about the meeting he’d had that morning with that pushy SBI agent. Lt. Neil Wannamaker was much too aggressive for Beau’s taste. How dare he insinuate that one of Beau’s office visitors might be a cat burglar capable of stealing the Wilkins Witch Quilt. All 13 names in his appointment book were leading citizens, the crème de la crème of Caruthers Corners society you might say. Not a shady character among them.

  “Becky,” he called to his secretary, “cancel my afternoon appointments. I’m going home. My stomach’s acting up.” In a small town like this, the term “administrative assistant” had not yet caught on.

  “Okeydokey,” she replied. All but snapping her chewing gun. Becky Marsch was fresh out of high school. This was her first job, according to the application. Beau wasn’t sure she was going to work out. The girl daydreamed too much.

  He wandered across the town square, pausing to watch the Poindexter twins play catch. Looked like Larry had a new catcher’s mitt, while Lonny seemed content with his old glove.

  As he turned onto Melon Pickers Row, the sidewalk got wider. One of the perks of having Public Works report to him. The street was lined with maple trees, tall and leafy. In autumn it looked as if the entire block was ablaze.

  He noticed a black SUV, a Toyota, parked in his driveway. That was strange. Maddy was off with her Quilters Club cronies, so who would be at his house. Burglars didn’t usually operate in broad daylight, he assured himself.

  “Hello!” a tall man in a loose-fitting dark suit hailed Beau as he approached. The man had been standing behind the big leafy witch-hazel in the yard, having himself a smoke.

  “Can I help you?”

  “My card,” the man brandished a sliver of paper that announced: Maury Seiderman, Field Investigator, G.M.O.P.A.

  Beau stared at the card. “What’s G.M.O.P.A.?” he said.

  The man gave him a crooked smile. His face was thin, his eyebrows hooding purplish eyes (color contacts?), and he sported a pencil-thin moustache like a Lounge Lizard or silent movie star. “Greater Midwest Occult Phenomena Association. We’re a non-profit organization out of Chicago.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “We’re an under-the-radar organization. Not seeking publicity.”

  Beau sized up the visitor. A beanpole, kids might’ve called him. Over 6’ 5” but barely breaking 120 pounds. “Tell me how I can help you. We’ve got all the magazine subscriptions we need.”

  “Oh, we only publish a newsletter. And it’s free to members.”

  “Well, my wife and me, we’re not the joining type either.”

  The weird smile flickered, and then became fixed, like the face on a wax mannequin. “We’re not recruiting right now.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I’m here on official G.M.O.P.A. business. It has to do with that witch’s quilt you lost.”

  Chapter Seven

  Worrying About a Witch

  Maddy Madison prepared duck a la orange with dirty mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and an arugula salad with watermelon dressing for dinner. N’yen’s favorite. She was making up to the boy for leaving him in the care of Aggie’s mother today. He was still pouty.

  Beau piled a mound of potatoes onto N’yen’s plate. The two had grown close. “Eat up, young man. You want to grow as tall as Grampy, don’t you?”

  Beau Madison was well over 6’, a James Cromwell type. N’yen looked up at his grandfather with a twinkle in his brown eyes. “Not likely. We Kinh are usually short.”

  Aggie looked up. “What’s a Kinh?”

  “That’s the kind of Vietnamese I am. I was born in Chicago, but my first parents came from the người Kinh.”

  “Do you remember your … first parents?” Maddy asked.

  “No, I was little when they died in a car crash. Now my new family has been in a car crash too.”

  “Your mommy and daddy are going to be all right. They broke some bones, but those will mend.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. I like my new family.”

  “That’s my boy,” said Beau. A Viet Nam vet, he’d been reluctant to accept the boy at first. But that went out the window once the two met. Now they were fishing buddies, often accompanying Lizzie Ridenour’s husband Edgar on hook-and-line forays along the Wabash.

  “Want to go to Indianapolis tomorrow?” asked Maddy. “The Quilters Club is going to meet a man who might be able to read that writing on the quilt. You and Aggie can come along for the ride, if you like.”

  “Oh boy, we’re going to play detective!”

  Beau shook his head, the wispy white hair stirring with the effort. “Don’t encourage this fantasy that you’re the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because you’re not. You’re a quilting society with nosey members.”

  “Same thing,” said Maddy, nose in the air.

  Beau rolled his blue eyes. “Heaven help me,” he sighed.

  About then, their son Freddie and his wife Amanda dropped by. “Is it too late for desert?” grinned Freddie. He was very fond of watermelon pie.

  “Pull up a chair,” said Maddy. “We are just about to cut the pie. But this is your sister Tilly’s recipe, so it has strawberries mixed in.”

  “Strawberry-watermelon pie?” said Amanda. “That sounds interesting.” She was followed into the dining room by their adopted daughter Donna Ann, the latest addition to the Madison clan (not counting Tilly’s newest baby).

  “I did say it was Tilly’s recipe, didn’t I?” Maddy grinned. Tilly was not known as a cook. “But I promise you’ll like it.”

  “Whose black Toyota was parked in the driveway this afternoon?” asked Freddie. “I drove by on my way to clown practice.” After being horribly scarred in an Atlanta fire, he’d returned to Caruthers Corners with his family to become a clown who entertained children at the Haney Bros. Zoo and Exotic Animal Refuge on the outskirts of town. The greasepaint may have covered his disfigured face, but it didn’t disguise his pleasure in entertaining the local kids.

  “A car in our driveway?” repeated Maddy.

  “Well, I was going to mention that,” said Beauregard Madison. “Just hadn’t got around to it.”

  “Was it anybody we know, dad?” pressed Freddie. “I didn’t recognize the car.”

  “No, no. It was just some quack. A field investigator for some witch-hunters organization. A real kook.”

  “Witch hunters?” said Aggie. “Is he hunting for Mad Matilda?”

  “H-has she come back to haunt people?” stuttered N’yen. The Vietnamese boy fervently believed in witches and spirits of the dead. In Asia they were known as vong hồn, oan hồn, or bách linh.

  “Beau, you’re frightening the children,” chastised his wife.

  “No, he’s not,” protested Aggie.

  “I’m not afraid of no ghosts,” parroted N’yen. But there was a quaver in his voice. He still thought Ghost Busters was a horror film.

  Beau Madison motioned everyone to calm down. “Take it easy,” he said. “There’s no ghost of Mad Matilda running around Caruthers Corners. Just this guy from the Greater Midwest
Occult Phenomena Association looking for information about the missing quilt.”

  “What kind of information?” Maddy wanted to know. Her suspicions were easily aroused.

  “Something about those symbols around the border of the quilt being a prophecy. Or a curse. Or something like that.”

  “A prophecy?” said Aggie. “What’s that?”

  “A prediction of the future,” her Aunt Amanda offered. “But nobody can really predict the future.”

  Freddie laughed. “What about your Uncle Bernie? He’s correctly predicted the Super Bowl winner for the last ten years.”

  “We don’t talk about Uncle Bernie – he’s a bookie. He handicaps sporting events based on stats and such. Nothing occult about that.”

  Maddy sliced the pie and served it on her special Blue Willow desert plates. She added a scoop of vanilla ice cream as she passed the pie around the table. “What kind of prophecy” she asked her husband.

  “Didn’t say. The guy was nuts. You could tell that just by looking at him. He could’ve been a character out of Plan 9 From Outer Space.”

  Amanda looked up from her strawberry-watermelon pie. “Isn’t that supposed to be one of the worst movies ever made?”

  “My point exactly,” said Beau. “The guy was downright creepy.”

  “I’ve seen that movie,” grinned N’yen. “There’s a zombie and a vampire and invaders from another planet.”

  “Thank goodness we only have a witch to worry about,” said Maddy, giving the boy another slice of pie.

  Chapter Eight

  The Visiting Professor of Runology

  The drive to Indianapolis was uneventful. They only had to stop twice for N’yen to pee. Once at a service station, another time at a McDonald’s. Ronald was still serving breakfast, so everybody but Bootsie had an Egg McMuffin; she ordered the oatmeal. This week she was dieting.

  Visiting professor Ezra Pudhomme, the expert on Runology, met them at his on-campus office. He was a fat man, a human Jabba the Hutt. At a quick guess, he probably weighed in at 400 pounds. Two metal canes helped him waddle to his desk, where he deposited his bulk onto a couch that served as his office chair. “What’s this question you have about runes?” he wheezed. “Dan Sokolowski didn’t give me many details.”

  Cookie Bentley laid the color photograph of the Wilkins Witch Quilt onto the professor’s desk blotter. “Are the symbols around the quilt’s border runes or some other half-forgotten language?” she got straight to the point.

  “Ahem, runes are not a language per se. They are a form of writing developed by Germanic people before the adoption of the Latin alphabet.” You’d think he was teaching Communications History 101, one of his more popular freshman courses. “These are indeed runes, the Scandinavian variant known as Futhark. The name comes from the first six letters in that alphabet – Fehu, Uruz, Thurs, Ansuz, Ræið, and Kaun. The symbols originally meant wealth, water, giant, god, journey, and fatal disease.”

  “That’s fascinating,” said Bootsie, barely able to hide her sarcasm. “But what has that to do with the price of ice in Iceland?”

  Ezra Pudhomme sniffed haughtily, but refused to acknowledge her snide remark. “If you look at the photograph of your quilt, you will see some of those same runes. I’d say a loose translation might go like this –” He squinted over the image, using a magnifying glass because the inscriptions were small, even in this 8” x 10” color print. “‘After a long journey, we are befallen by a fatal disease, so we hide our wealth in this deep water.’”

  “Wealth?”

  “The rune also means cattle, that being a common source of wealth. But here I’d say it refers to some kind of money or treasure.”

  “Viking money?”

  “Vikings did use this form of writing, so possibly.”

  “What kind of money did the Vikings use?” asked Liz Ridenour, ever the banker’s wife. “Paper currency, metal coins, what exactly?”

  “The Vikings did sometimes strike coins, but their basic exchange was what we call ‘hack silver,’ small bars that could be carried and easily cut – or hacked – to the size needed. The Norse did not place a face value on coins. Value was based entirely on the weight of the silver.”

  Maddy tried to pin the professor down. “So you think this writing around the edge of the quilt is talking about silver bars?”

  “Well, yes. But of course, it’s meaningless here.”

  “Meaningless?” huffed Cookie. She would not allow the quilt’s authenticity to be challenged. There was an established chain of ownership – provenance, it’s called – from Matilda Wilkins to her relative to the Historical Society.

  “What I’m saying, the runes on this quilt are likely decorative, taken from somewhere else. Vikings never would’ve left a message on a flimsy quilt. They carved their messages onto runestones and other solid structures. Bells, bracelets, horns, buildings.”

  “This quilt was stitched in 1897,” said Cookie. “Where would a turn-of-the-century witch woman learn how to write in – what did you call it? – Futhark?”

  Pudhomme sat up, his body moving like a geological upheaval. “Witch, you say? That changes things. Perhaps the rune symbols were handed down as an occult tradition. Some people believed runes were not simply letters to spell words, that they also had deeper meanings ... magical or divinatory uses. The word rune itself means ‘secret, something hidden.’ Prior to their use as an alphabet, runes were used for different magical purposes, such as casting lots or casting spells.”

  Bootsie crossed herself. More out of superstition, for she wasn’t even a Catholic. “Heaven help us,” she said. “To think this witch’s quilt has hung in our Town Hall for over a hundred years.”

  “Don’t be silly,” snapped Cookie Bentley. “We don’t believe in witches. Matilda Wilkins was just a crazy old woman who made money selling love potions to hapless farmers – a snake oil salesman at best, a mad hatter at worst, but certainly not a woman with supernatural powers.”

  “Yes, I guess you’re right,” Bootsie acquiesced. “But it’s downright spooky. We never suspected that those decorative symbols on the quilt contained a secret message.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The Indiana State Police’s lead investigator Neil Wannamaker had determined that the quilt theft had been pulled off by someone who knew the building’s security code, allowing the burglar to escape by resetting it from the inside of the Town Hall after hours. An examination by the alarm company confirmed that someone reset the code at 1:03 a.m.

  That hick police chief had pretty much exonerated all the city officials, Wannamaker told himself, but the janitor remained a loose end. Maybe Jasper Beanie didn’t do the job himself, but he could have passed the alarm code on to a confederate. After all, Beanie was dirt poor, living in a shabby cottage provided by the Pleasant Glade Cemetery for its caretaker. And he had a history of drunkenness, often spending the night in jail in Burpyville. He drank over there because Caruthers Corners didn’t have any bars.

  Jasper Beanie was a weak man with financial needs. The perfect motivation for a crime.

  Lt. Wannamaker crosschecked Jasper Beanie’s telephone records against a list of his former cellmates, looking for any connection with a known criminal. Turns out, Beanie had been in regular contact with a petty shoplifter named Sam Stickley, A/K/A Sam Stickyfingers.

  Aha!

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Liz Ridenour’s husband had retired a couple of years ago as bank president. These days, he spent much of his time fishing. His scraggly hair, bushy gray beard, and grubby clothes belied his one-time executive appearance. Gone was the pinstriped suit and power tie, the wing-tipped shoes and $40 haircut. He could have easily passed as a hobo, a man without a penny in his pocket or a care in the world.

  Edgar Ridenour was letting his aluminum flatboat drift with the current, his fishing line trolling behind. Fact was, he was snoozing in the afternoon sun, unconcerned that his boat was ten miles downstream from where it was suppo
sed to be. He didn’t have any board meetings or bank examiners to worry about. His pension was fully funded, more than enough for an ongoing life of leisure. And fishing.

  Edgar came awake when he heard voices above his head. Opening one eye, he noted that he was under a bridge, caught up in a little eddy that kept his boat in place. Maybe it was the word he’d just overheard that caught his attention: Witch!

  He’d heard enough at home about the Quilters Club looking into the disappearance of that old quilt from the Town Hall. The one supposedly sewn by a witch. So what was this conversation coming from the bridge all about?

  “Everybody thought those were some kinda magic symbols on that patchwork monstrosity. Little did they know it was a secret message.”

  “Secret message?”

  “Yeah, like a treasure map. Giving the key to a hidden treasure.”

  “Ah, c’mon. That old rag has been on display forever. How come nobody ever figured out it was a secret message?”

  “Beats me. Guess it was hidden in plain sight. A message in some kinda foreign language nobody here spoke.”

  “How do you know about it then?”

  “Some kid figured it out. A Lord of the Rings geek. He was visiting the Town Hall with his mama to pay her property taxes when he spotted it.”

  “Lord of the Rings, huh?”

  “Yeah, there’s been three or four movies, so it has a big following. Like Trekkies with Star Trek.”

  “So the message is like written in Klingon?”

  “No, you idiot. Klingon’s a made-up language. This is a real language that elves speak.”

  “Elves. Now I know you’re bonkers. Ain’t no such thing as elves and fairies and pixies.”

  “Well, there’s Hobbits. That’s a known fact. And they write in this secret language called runes.”

  “But how did you hear about this secret message?”

  “My buddy’s connected with the boy’s mom. The kid told him. That gave my buddy the idea to steal the quilt.”