Buried in Quilts Read online

  Buried in Quilts

  Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  Buried in Quilts

  Copyright © 1994 by Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  First Smashwords edition

  Initially published by St. Martin's Press

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  Dedication

  This one’s for Marni

  Author’s Note

  Of course this is a work of fiction. Even the place is imaginary—before naming Oliver in my first novel, Murder in C Major, I pored over Rand McNally maps for Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, to be sure there was no such place.

  “That’s never Oliver, Indiana!” my mother’s old friend Fannybelle wrote to her when the book came out.

  “There isn’t any Oliver in Indiana,” I objected, sure of myself.

  “Oh, yes, there is,” Mom told me. “It’s just a few miles from Wadesville.” So much for research.

  Fannybelle was right—my Oliver isn’t the real Oliver, which is a tiny spot on the map published by the state. My Oliver is in Alcorn County—try finding that on a state map. But Indianapolis, Martinsville, and Gnaw Bone are real.

  Just as real are the traditional quilt names that head the chapters. There’s only one exception: Rebecca’s quilt, “After the Fall,” is anything but traditional.

  I’ve done my research this time, too, and other quilters and quilt lovers have been extraordinarily helpful. But they couldn’t know what I would do with what they told me. The errors are all mine.

  —Sara Hoskinson Frommer

  Coffin Star

  There was no getting around it. Edna Ellett had picked an impossible week to die.

  “Not that there’d ever be a good one,” Mary Sue Ellett told Joan Spencer at Snarr’s Funeral Home. “For months we’ve been expecting Mother to go just any minute. But right before the quilt show—it couldn’t be worse.”

  Joan knew too much about grief to be shocked. But watching Mary Sue sneak a quick look at her wrist, she wondered why the Elletts were bothering with calling hours at all. Surely Mary Sue didn’t lack the courage to fly in the face of local convention. She generally set her own rules—and she wasn’t shy about setting them for other people. From all reports, she was running the twelfth annual Alcorn County Quilt Show with an iron fist.

  Joan had heard plenty. She herself had no great interest in the show. People who stroked fabric on the bolt mystified her. Needles closed their eyes to her wobbling thread, and she had never succeeded in wearing a thimble. The thought of cutting cloth into little pieces only to spend tedious hours reassembling them into one large piece, however attractive, made her want to run the other way.

  So did the open coffin she faced now. Gladiolus spikes stood watch in cardboard vases. Roses and carnations reeked of death. Piped-in vox humana warbled it. And the silent figure cushioned on puffy rayon in the cloth-covered box was a poor imitation of the wiry little woman whose fingers never had been still.

  “Doesn’t Edna look wonderful?” Joan heard, and “There’s something not quite right around the mouth.”

  How could Mary Sue bear to greet friends and strangers with the shell of her mother so close by and, worse yet, listen to them discuss Bud Snarr’s embalming? Joan wanted to scream at them.

  Cremation was bad enough, she thought, remembering the memorial services she’d lived through—first for her mother and father and finally for her husband, who had planned his own as if he’d known all along he wouldn’t reach forty.

  Ken, a minister, had hated funerals. One bad night, after burying an old friend, he’d made Joan promise not to put herself through such an ordeal if she outlived him. “Wait a week or two,” he’d said. “Keep it simple. And none of those awful flowers!” It had been easy to promise—death was something far away. But then he’d collapsed, leaving Joan with two children to bring up alone.

  When the floral tributes had arrived by the carload, she had sent them to nursing homes and carried armloads of crisp lilacs from her own yard to the church. She wondered now where she’d be able to find lilacs in Oliver—and when they’d bloom in southern Indiana. But this was hardly the time to ask.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said instead, and meant it. Would Mary Sue hear sympathy for the loss of her mother, or only commiseration for this awkward interruption to her busy week?

  “Oh, we’ll manage somehow.” Mary Sue looked over Joan’s shoulder to the gathering clan.

  Give her the benefit of the doubt, Joan told herself. You don’t know what she’s been through, or how she handles pain. She’s more a pacer than a weeper, anyway. Sure enough, gripping Joan’s arm and talking as she went, Mary Sue steered her toward the far end of the room.

  “You’ll want to meet the family.”

  Not really, Joan thought, but she let herself be swept along. She’d made herself call because Edna Ellett had been a bright spot in her work at the Senior Citizens’ Center. And Mary Sue worked tirelessly on the Oliver Civic Symphony’s board of directors and had a finger in who knew how many community pies. Joan was sure it was no accident that the orchestra guild had decided on a quilt raffle as one of its major fund-raising projects this year.

  “My sister, Alice Franklin,” Mary Sue was saying. “This is Joan Spencer, Alice. Joan works down at the old folks’ center, and for the orchestra, too. She even plays—violin, isn’t it?”

  “Viola,” Joan said automatically, recognizing in Alice a missing link between Mary Sue and their mother. A square jaw and heavy eyebrows were Edna’s legacy to both her daughters, but Mary Sue, broad-shouldered and taller than Joan, would have made two of either Edna or Alice. Alice was tiny and dark. With her crowning glory coiled high on her head, she looked almost top-heavy. Her mother, too, had worn her hair in that elaborate do of women who didn’t believe in cutting it—maybe they were Pentecostals. It was short now, though. Probably too hard to manage in a sickbed.

  Joan marveled at hair that stayed where it was put—her own constantly threatened to escape its loose twist. Mary Sue’s style was entirely different. Joan had seldom seen her in anything but polyester knit pants, with blond, frizzled permanents and overgenerous applications of eye shadow and mascara. Alice’s plain gray suit, buffed nails, and sensible shoes were only to be expected in a funeral parlor, and even Mary Sue had toned down her excesses today.

  “I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” Joan said. “She was good to me.”

  “Thank you.” Alice dabbed at her eyes. “It’s still hard for me to believe. It all happened so fast.”

  “Oh? Hasn’t she been sick since Christmas?”

  Her diabetes had flared up then, and she’d never come back to the senior center. Joan had sent a couple of cards and phoned occasionally, but Edna hadn’t always seemed sure who she was.

  “Alice hasn’t been home for almost two years.” Mary Sue displayed her teeth. Joan knew that smile.

  So, apparently, did Alice. Her eyes flashed.

  “Mary Sue, I couldn’t come all the way from California as often as I came up from Kentucky. Harold’s just getting started out there, and everything’s so expensive I can’t even afford phone calls. I had no idea Mother was so bad. You didn’t even tell me when she came down with the flu—I would have been here in a minute, and you knew it. It’s bad enough I couldn’t tell her
good-bye. You make it sound as if I didn’t care!”

  “Now, Alice, did I say that?”

  Alice didn’t answer. Joan knew how she felt. Mary Sue Ellett could twist a telephone number into a personal indictment.

  “Are there just the two of you?” she asked, searching for neutral ground. Edna had never mentioned a second daughter in the months before she became housebound.

  “No, Alice’s husband is outside, and our brother should be arriving anytime now to spell us for supper.” Again Mary Sue checked her watch. “It’s just like Leon to be late. We’ve been here since three o’clock, and my feet are killing me.” She eased out of one three-inch slingback pump. Joan felt for her.

  “You go ahead,” Alice said. “Kitty will get me back to the house.”

  “I doubt it. You won’t be able to pry her away from here until they lock the door tonight.”

  “Is Kitty another sister?” Joan asked.

  “No, just a kind of shirttail cousin. Come meet her.”

  Mary Sue led Joan over to a slight, sad-faced woman with dark brown curls and dark circles under her eyes, drooping in one of Snarr’s three wing chairs. Her head didn’t reach the top of the back.

  “Kitty, meet Joan Spencer,” Mary Sue said. “Our cousin, Kitty Graf.”

  “How do you do,” Joan said.

  Gesturing to a wooden folding chair with “Snarr’s Funeral Home” stenciled on the back, Mary Sue perched on another and slid both shoes off. Her thighs strained the polyester pants, but her feet were as dainty as Kitty’s. Joan pulled the chair over and sat down. The wooden slats dug into her back.

  “Kitty lived with Mother,” Mary Sue was explaining.

  Right. Joan remembered the day at the center when Edna had resisted when the social worker promoted an emergency phone hookup for live-alones. “I don’t need that,” she’d said. “I’m not alone.” Joan wondered now whether Mary Sue had arranged for Kitty’s presence. Her sometimes maddening efficiency often had humane results.

  “That’s not her up there,” Kitty said flatly, ignoring Joan. “Doesn’t even look like her.”

  “Kitty—” Mary Sue began.

  “Don’t tell me she’s dead. I know she’s dead. I was there. She was so scared.” Her eyes half-closed, Kitty spoke to her own lap. “Now I’m scared.”

  “We’ll have to put a stop to that right now!”

  Joan jumped, and even Kitty looked up. The square-jawed, bushy-browed man whose voice boomed out into the room’s solemn murmuring had to be the delinquent Leon. He bent to kiss Mary Sue, took Kitty’s hand, and swung Alice off her feet in a bear hug.

  “How’re my best girls?” he asked, for all the world as if he had come to a party. “And who’s this?” He waggled his eyebrows at Joan. “Single, I hope.”

  “Leon Ellett, how could you?” Two red spots stood out on Alice’s scrubbed cheeks. She smoothed her skirt and looked down the long room toward the coffin.

  “Take it easy, Alice,” Mary Sue said. “Joan, my brother Leon. Leon, this is Joan Spencer from the Senior Citizens’ Center.”

  “Those old ladies get better-looking every year.” He ogled her. Joan squirmed—she hoped not visibly—and wished her brown jersey were less prone to static cling.

  Alice was fuming and Kitty had withdrawn again behind the wings of her chair.

  What was worrying Kitty? Her own mortality? She couldn’t be all that much older than Joan—maybe in her fifties. The prospect of loneliness? Real grief?

  Her swollen eyes met Joan’s.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said. “They’ll never let me stay.”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Leon boomed. “You took care of Mom, and we’ll take care of you. You’ll always have a home.”

  Joan thought she’d hate to be a shirttail cousin, whatever that was, dependent on the Elletts.

  “That old pile of stone?” Alice said, not missing a beat. “You don’t want to live there all by yourself.”

  “Of course she doesn’t.” Mary Sue took over. “She just wants to stay in Oliver, don’t you, Kitty? You’d rattle around in Mother’s big old house, anyway. Mother wouldn’t budge, but we’ll find you a nice little place of your own, without all those memories.”

  “Edna was right,” Kitty said, nodding. Her lips were tight. “She told me you’d try to push me out.”

  “Oh, no, Kitty,” Alice protested. “We only want what’s good for you.”

  “Well, I want the memories. I’m not moving.”

  Joan could have cheered. Leon did.

  “Atta girl! You tell ’em.”

  Alice shushed him.

  “For goodness’ sake, Leon. Remember where you are. People are staring.”

  It was true. Around the room, knots of people—women Edna’s age, mostly, and an occasional man—had fallen silent.

  “Remember!” Leon bellowed. “I remember that when you and I were too busy for our own mother, this sweet woman stayed with her day and night. If she wants to stay there now, she’s earned the right.”

  “Kitty, dear,” Mary Sue said, showing her teeth again. “Let’s talk when we’re all home together. Alice and I are going back to the house now. Will you come with us, or would you rather wait with Leon?”

  Joan wasn’t surprised that Kitty elected to wait. She herself escaped when the Ellett sisters left. With luck, she thought, she could still manage a piece of cold chicken before the regular Wednesday orchestra rehearsal.

  The cool air felt good on her face. She was on foot. It was risky to leave the car at home on a rehearsal day—her high-sounding job as an orchestra manager had turned out to involve a lot of sudden jumping to other people’s beck and call. But walking was worth the risk. The mile between home and work started her blood flowing in the morning and gave her time to unwind in the evening. Besides, seven months of working among the calcium-leached bones of Oliver’s senior citizens had made it abundantly clear to her that she had reason to exercise beyond burning calories. Her own back still strong and straight, Joan swung along.

  She wished the distance from the funeral parlor to her little house were long enough to make the Elletts fade from her memory, as Edna seemed to have faded from theirs. Not from Kitty’s, though, and she wasn’t even really an Ellett. But she had lived through those final months with Edna.

  Joan thought suddenly of Rebecca and wondered with a pang how distant she and her own daughter would appear to an outsider after two long years apart.

  She’d have to invite Kitty to the senior center’s brief memorial for Edna. Her little brass nameplate would be ready by tomorrow—the day of her funeral.

  Cutting across the Oliver College campus, Joan inhaled the April dampness and concentrated on the new life vivid in the early evening light—daffodils nodding, redbud trees sprouting pink peppercorns on dark twigs, dogwood floating white against evergreens.

  As her breathing became regular, her mind ran over things left undone that she ought to have done.

  Practice, of course. Since she’d taken over the orchestra manager’s job, she’d hardly touched her viola except on Wednesday nights, and it wasn’t easy then, with all the interruptions. How had any one person ever done that whole job?

  And as the orchestra’s librarian, she needed to order the orchestra parts for the youth concerto competition winner’s piece on the spring concert. Jennifer Werner, daughter of the professor in whose laboratory Joan’s son, Andrew, worked several hours a week, had won it with a Vivaldi oboe concerto. Jennifer had flourished ever since she had been asked last fall to play as a regular member of the orchestra after the murder of the first oboist. Not many high school kids could have stepped in so quickly, but Jennifer had carried it off. Andrew had been right about her.

  He met Joan at the door, gnawing on a drumstick.

  “Mom, you just missed the phone.”

  Probably someone calling to beg off rehearsal. It happened every Wednesday.

  “Who’s not coming tonight?�
�� Joan dumped her shoulder bag on the sofa. Small as it was, she knew the Oliver Civic Symphony could rehearse minus a fiddle or two.

  Andrew followed her into the kitchen.

  “Mom, it was Rebecca.”

  “Is she all right? Andrew, what did she say?” Joan held her breath. Rebecca hadn’t called or written since last summer, before they had moved to Oliver. At Christmas, she had signed a store-bought card—Rebecca, who always took pride in making her own. At first, Joan had reassured herself that Rebecca was busy, if perhaps struggling. But the reassurance was long gone.

  “She didn’t say much,” Andrew answered. “I think she wants to come home.” He always had been able to read between his sister’s lines. He’d missed her since she’d left home at eighteen. Almost two years ago.

  “What did you tell her? Did you get her number?”

  “I asked, but she just said she’d call back. I didn’t know where you were.”

  “And I won’t be home again until after ten. Of course she can come. I just hope nothing’s happened.”

  “I promised Mr. Werner I’d work at the lab. You think I should stay home?”

  Joan hesitated only a moment.

  “No, you go ahead. Maybe she’ll call before I have to leave. Have you had supper?”

  “Yep.” Andrew flipped the clean bone into the garbage and licked his fingers.

  “Good. If I eat fast, I’ll just about make it.” She stuck her head into the refrigerator, trying to think about food. “Where’s the rest of the chicken?”

  “Um—” His eyes swung toward the garbage. “You had plans for it?”

  “Andrew Spencer! You didn’t eat that whole roaster!”

  “It wasn’t whole. More like half.”

  At seventeen, Andrew had already reached his father’s height, and he showed no sign of stopping. Some days she despaired of filling him.

  “Guess I’ll have to settle for yogurt.”

  “Sorry, Mom.” He wasn’t, really, and neither was she. “I’ll see you later, okay?” He reached for the doorknob.