Murders on Elderberry Road: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery (3 page)

Kate Simpson had been back in Crestwood for 18 months — and a member of the Queen Bee quilters for nearly half that time. And in all those months, she had never been on time for a single Saturday quilting session. Today, unfortunately, would be no exception.

Kate ran down the back steps of her childhood home on Evergreen Street, slung a worn backpack over one shoulder, and jumped on her bike. “Mama Mia,” she murmured as she pedaled down the drive, spewing gravel in all directions. A tangled mass of hair fanned out behind her — thick bronze and reddish brown streaks.

“You’re late, little Katie,” old Danny Halloran shouted. He was ambling up the long driveway next door, his fat Saturday
Kansas City Star
tucked firmly between his arm and a plaid bathrobe flapping open and shut against his knobby knees.

Nearly five foot eight in her stocking feet — and at least three inches taller than her elderly neighbor — Kate wasn’t called
little
by many people. Danny could get away with it because he’d lived next door to the Simpsons since before Kate was born. “I’d be even later, Danny,” she called back, “if those blasted sirens hadn’t knocked me straight out of bed. What the heck is going on?” She knew that Danny was always up at dawn, and at the first sound of the sirens, he’d have headed straight for his police scanner.

“Don’t know, little one. Doggone scanner wasn’t working this morning — darn thing isn’t worth a tinker’s dam. But even with this confounded hearing aid —” he pointed with his free hand to his ear, “I sure heard ‘em. Must be a fire over near the college. Or maybe one of those crazy fraternity parties tearing the town apart.” He shook his round, bare head. “Damn crazy kids. What’s the world coming to?”

“Hard to say, Danny,” Kate said. “But I know you’re heading for a case of pneumonia if you don’t get on in that house. You’ll catch your death of cold. Besides, you’re indecent.”

“Bossy as my Ella,” he shot back to her. “Get on with you now. And let me know what all that racket’s about, you hear?” He swatted the air with the rolled up newspaper and struggled up the steps to his door.

Kate waited to be sure he made it safely inside, then pedaled quickly down the quiet street and around the corner toward the Elderberry shops. She’d promised dear Po she’d at least try to be on time this week, though she suspected her godmother was happy enough if she just showed up.

The weekly meetings made it easier for Po to honor the request Kate’s mom had made to Po before she died last year — “Keep an eye on Kate, Po … keep her safe.” That’s probably what she’d said to her closest, life-long friend — that, or something to that effect. Kate knew that her mom had also told Po to encourage Kate to go back to Boston if she wanted to, back to the life she had abandoned in the blink of an eye when her mother got sick. “Send her back, then call her often,” her mother would have said.

But for reasons that even Kate herself didn’t completely understand, she’d decided not to go back to her cozy Brookline apartment after her mother died. “Not yet,” she had told Po, “but soon” — whatever the heck that meant. And here she was, all these months later, still in Crestwood, still living in the three-bedroom house her mom had left her. And if that weren’t enough to make her mom smile from her “new place,” she was spending every Saturday morning at her mother’s old quilting bee, of all the crazy things.

Joining the Queen Bees quilting group was not something Kate had planned. But Po had been pushy about it, and it was hard — no, make that impossible — to say no to that woman, even if you had two left thumbs and knew diddlysquat about quilting.

Kate had found most of the quilting supplies that she needed in a black trunk, pushed to the back of her mother’s closet after she got sick. Kate savored the time she spent going through the neat stacks of bright, lovely fabrics that her mother had separated by color and pattern and intensity — calico from stripes, mini from large prints. And beneath all her grumbling about joining the Queen Bees, Kate suspected that was exactly why Po had insisted she try her hand at quilting — because fingering the washed colorful fabrics and breathing in the smell of lilac that permeated everything her mother had touched, brought a bit of Meg Simpson right smack back into Kate’s life.

The scream of a second siren broke into Kate’s thoughts just as she turned onto Elderberry Road. She braked to a stop directly in front of Marla’s Bakery and Café and watched the police car speed by. Its spinning light splashed red shadows across the front of Flowers by Daisy, the Elderberry Bookstore, and on down the block of uneven brick stores until it screeched to a stop — directly in front of Selma Parker’s quilt shop.

Phoebe Mellon had been up for nearly two hours. Not by choice, lord knows, but neither God nor man could keep Jude and Emma, her eleventh-month-old twins, asleep past 6 o’clock. And then those blasted sirens scared little Emma half to death and Phoebe had her hands full with diapers and nursing and crying babies. Finally she settled them both in the playpen, diapered and happy with dribbles of mother’s milk collecting in the corner of their mouths, and she shook her sleeping husband awake.

“It’s Saturday, Jimmy dear,” she said sweetly, planting a kiss on his forehead. “And I’m off to my quilting bee.”

James Burgess Mellon III groaned. He pulled one eye open and watched his bride of not quite two years slip out of her robe and into a pair of jeans and tee shirt. Even in jeans, no make-up, and her hair a floppy mess of white-gold waves, Phoebe excited him. He’d fallen in love with all five feet of her the first night he laid eyes on her. He was standing alone at the bar at Nick’s — a law student hangout — and there she was, bulldozing her way through that mass of inflated egos and legal brawn, a loaded platter of beers hoisted high above her head. And he’d fallen for her hook, line and sinker. They were married the day after his law school graduation, and barely nine months later, Jude and Emma burst into their small world and filled it to the brim.

“Well?” Phoebe said now, grinning down at him. Sunlight from the bedroom window lit her from behind and her hair frizzed up around her head like a halo. “Better get yourself out of that bed right now or I’ll be tempted to do evil things.”

“Hmmmmm,” Jim murmured.

Phoebe pulled the covers up over his head. “Later, love. You need to earn your keep. Our beautiful babes are in the playpen. I’m outta here.”

Phoebe blew him another kiss, spun around and headed toward the back door of the house that her in-laws had given them for a wedding present. Phoebe knew the Mellons didn’t like her much, and the house was an attempt to disguise the fact that she had been a barmaid and pierced her ears far more than was socially acceptable at the Crestwood Country Club. The fact that she worked in a bar to pay her way through college because her family didn’t have a dime, didn’t seem to alter the Mellons’ opinion. So they tried to make her more to their liking by wrapping her up in a lovely home and a membership to their club. “It’s the ‘My Fair Lady’ approach,” Phoebe explained to the Queen Bees in her best Eliza Dolittle imitation: ‘I’ll be a proper wife in a proper house, I will.’ And then she’d giggled — that Goldie Hawn ripple that soon had them all pushing their quilting squares aside and reaching for tissues to dab the laughter from the corners of their eyes.

The house was nice, Phoebe admitted, although she still wasn’t used to it — who needed three bathrooms? But the yard would be great for the kids, and Jim seemed to like the place, so she’d moved on in and even tried her best to keep it looking decent.

Phoebe checked the twins one final time, planting kisses on their sweet-smelling heads. What absolutely wondrous little people they are, she thought. Then she grabbed a jacket off the brass hook in the back hallway and flew out the door, bounding across the street and down the few short blocks to the Elderberry shops.

For the fourth time in as many days, Maggie Helmers couldn’t get her truck started. A brief trip under the hood with pliers seemed to do the trick. “Soon, dear truck,” she said out loud, patting the hood affectionately, “I may have to put you out to pasture.”

A glance at her oversized wristwatch convinced her to let the grease smudges remain on her nose and cheeks until she got to Selma’s. She climbed into the pickup and sped off across town toward the Elderberry shops.

It took fifteen minutes for Maggie to drive from her veterinary clinic at the edge of Crestwood to Elderberry Road. These Saturday mornings at Selma’s were darn near sacred to her — she wouldn’t miss them for anything, even though it didn’t make practical sense to close her veterinary clinic for those three or four prime Saturday hours. Her ex-husband told her she was crazy to forgo that extra revenue, but Maggie had laughed at that. She figured that anyone who had lost thousands of dollars at Kansas City’s gambling boats and then tried to sue them for encouraging the addiction didn’t have much right to judge other people’s sanity.

Quilting was her therapy, and Maggie savored every single minute of it — from picking the colors and choosing the fabrics, to cutting shapes and pinning it all together in a marvelous, intricate pattern. And she loved the circle of women whose company she shared every Saturday morning. The group was an odd hodgepodge who might not have found each other in ordinary life, but the quilting gathered them together, and they opened their lives to each other. They even shared Maggie’s passion for “fat-lady” art, finding pieces to add to her collection at art fairs and small galleries.

Maggie had started her art collection for fun — a grand celebration of grande women. But with the help of friends and family, it was growing into an amazing collection that included a Mexican collage of old women praying at the sea, smooth voluptuous soapstone statues, and a lovely carving. The Queen Bees encouraged her, and rejoiced over each new find, and they always knew just what to get her for her birthday.

Having Kate come back to town was a special bonus in Maggie’s life, too, even better than the collection of beautiful fat-lady art that filled her small home. Though Kate was a half-dozen years younger than she, Maggie had known her all her life. They’d grown up in the same neighborhood, practically sisters, and to have Kate stay on after Meg Simpson passed was a gift Maggie relished.

Maggie crossed the Emerald River separating the two sides of town, cut through a narrow one-way street that wound through the edge of Canterbury College (an illegal shortcut, but not patrolled on Saturdays), and spun around the corner onto Elderberry Road, her spare tire and toolbox sliding noisily across the flat bed of her truck. Ahead, toward the end of the block, she spotted a crowd of people, an unusual sight at this hour on a Saturday morning. Only Marla’s opened this early, and the street was usually quiet. Not today. Maggie pulled over to the curb, jammed the gearshift into first, set the brake, and jumped out of the cab.

Canterbury College was small in size and big in reputation. The large stone buildings, complete with ivy-covered walls, were nearly picture perfect — a fact several Hollywood producers had discovered and used to their advantage in filming movies on location in Crestwood. Cheap, picturesque, and full of friendly people everywhere, that was the word that got out.

Leah Sarandon remembered seeing one of those movies back east and wondering where its lovely location was — Connecticut? New Hampshire? Kansas, of course, would not have entered her mind, yet here she was, all these years later, a tenured Canterbury professor, walking across a movie-set campus that had become a cherished home to her.

Leah picked up her pace and breathed in the crisp autumn air. Her long denim skirt brushed lightly against her ankles. People thought of Kansas and imagined tornadoes — not autumn days that touched on sheer perfection — with gentle breezes shaking crimson leaves from their branches — or unimaginable spring weeks with a startling profusion of pink and white dogwoods, deep red crabapple trees — tulips and daffodils and pansies spilling from yards and flower boxes. Leah loved the raw energy that the seasons poured into her soul.

And she loved this Saturday morning quiet, too, the lovely lazy lull that allowed the whole campus to gear up for another week of learning. She had the small campus almost to herself, with just an occasional student or teacher headed toward the library for research or to the commons for coffee and maybe an early study session. She waved at a student, shifted her tote bag on her shoulder and headed toward the far corner of campus and a large fenced-in home that anchored the school on the west side.

Canterbury House, it was called, the place where Elliott Canterbury settled his family more than a century ago so he could build a thriving fur trading business along the banks of the Emerald River. (Local lore had it that whoever coined the name Emerald for this muddy river was thinking green for money.) Once done, he decided the town folks needed a college, and so he built them one in his backyard. It was separated from his large three-story home by a wrought iron fence and an iron-tight will that made sure the college could never force family out of Canterbury House, or worse, tear it down. As long as there were Canterburys that wanted to live in the house, the house would be theirs.

Leah’s dear friend Eleanor was the sole current resident — the eighty-two-year-old great-granddaughter of the college founder. Leah spotted her ahead, her hand resting on a wrought iron fence finial, and quickened her pace.

“Hurry up, Leah,” Eleanor yelled out. “You’re poking along like an old lady.” She followed up with a strong, soaring laugh that spun on the quiet air. Eleanor was as unpredictable as Kansas weather — and Leah never tired of her. The college students didn’t know what to think of her, and rumors percolated each fall with the new crop of freshmen. Tales of ghosts and spirits seen late at night in Canterbury House windows punctuated cafeteria gossip — and Eleanor loved every minute of it.

“What’s that racket, Leah?” she asked now, her clear blue eyes looking into the distance.

“Sounds like sirens to me,” Leah said, picking up Eleanor’s quilting bag and lifting it over her shoulder. “There’s probably a cat stuck up in a tree somewhere.”