Threads of Deceit (Vineyard Quilt Mysteries Book 1) (9 page)

The farmer looked curiously at George’s equipment. “Found anything yet?”

George shook his head. “But I still have a fair bit of the grid to cover.”

Joseph nodded. “I should get back to the farm stand and help Maddie.” He didn’t move toward the truck but watched as George continued with his readings.

Suddenly, George let out a whoop. “I think I’ve got a live one!”

Daniel and Joseph crowded around him immediately. Julie hurried to join them. The numbers George rattled off didn’t mean much to her.

“I don’t really speak math,” Julie said. “Did you find the ship?”

“Well, the readings aren’t proof,” George said. “But there’s something big down there, and it’s not natural.”

Daniel bounced on his toes, grinning widely. “That’s step one. We’ll start drilling tests to map out the exact location of the hull, then we can start in earnest. We’re on our way.” He turned his grin toward the reporter, who was picking her way across the uneven ground. “So what do you think now?”

She shrugged and nodded toward George. “This guy is a friend of yours. This could all be something you made up to entice investors. Then you pocket the money and run.”

“Pocket the money!” Daniel’s voice rose. “I’m a respected historian, not a con man. I would never risk my professional reputation on a hoax.”

The woman’s smile was tight and cold. “That’s not what I heard.”

“Heard from whom?” Daniel stormed toward the reporter. She backed away. Julie was impressed to see the woman at least had some survival instinct.

“I don’t reveal my sources,” the woman snapped, though she kept backing up.

Daniel continued to follow her, shouting. “You need to be surer of your facts before you start spouting slander!”

The reporter tripped on something on the rough ground and fell onto her back. Julie smiled as she realized the woman seemed to have found a nice muddy spot to land.

Daniel held out a hand to help her up. “Are you all right?”

The reporter’s voice rose to a howl as she ignored Daniel’s hand and scrambled to her feet. “My clothes are ruined! Your aggressive behavior made me fall. You
are
crazy.”

Julie shook her head as she walked closer. “Don’t be absurd. The combination of inappropriate shoes and rough terrain made you fall.” Then she stopped. Something was protruding sharply from the ground, and it didn’t look like a rock. She knelt and touched the object. “Daniel, what’s this?”

He dropped to his knees, ignoring the still-sputtering reporter. He dug into the damp ground, slowly scraping away enough mud to make one thing very clear. It wasn’t a rock.

It was a bone.

“A bone!” the reporter shrieked. “This is a body dump site?”

“It’s a little soon to jump to conclusions,” Daniel said, still digging. George and Joseph quickly joined him, scraping away mud from the bone to reveal more and more of it.

“It looks like a thigh bone,” Joseph said.

“Look at the size of that thing,” the reporter said, her voice breathy with excitement as she snapped photos with her phone. “The man buried there must have been a giant!” She glanced at her watch, squealed, and ran for her car.

Daniel groaned. “Please tell me this isn’t human remains. If we have to call in the authorities, I’ll never get this dig going.”

“I don’t think it is,” Joseph said. “As the lady pointed out, it’s awfully long. I’m thinking horse or maybe a mule. I could call the vet who takes care of our cows. I bet he could tell you what animal it is.”

“That would be fantastic. Thanks.”

They finished uncovering the bone as they waited for the vet. When it was finally free, Julie had to admit, it looked like a leg bone to her. Not that she saw a lot of bones. The antiquities recovery profession wasn’t
that
exciting. No one had ever hired her to recover human remains.

One thing she did notice in all the excitement: The mysterious offer on the farm was totally forgotten. But Julie suspected the offer might only be the first event. She looked across the wide farmland. Anyone who could throw around enough money to buy this place probably had other options
for disrupting Daniel’s work. The question that nagged at Julie was … why? Why would anyone care about an old steamboat? She didn’t have an answer, but she had a bad feeling about it. And her bad feelings were rarely wrong.

T
he Winkler farm quickly became the most talked-about piece of land in Straussberg, Missouri. Although the veterinarian declared that the bone came from a mule, the story about a “giant” buried on the Winkler farm had gone viral, along with the photo of the men digging it out of the mud. The photo could only have been taken by the reporter, but somehow she managed not to be linked to the bogus story online.

Every night when Julie finished handling the day’s quota of crises, she climbed the stairs to her room, settled down with a cup of herbal tea that she made with an electric kettle, and waited. Sometimes she didn’t even get through brewing the tea before the knock came at the door and a disheveled Daniel brought her stories of the treasure hunt.

One night about a week after finding the bone, Daniel accepted his own cup of herbal tea and sank into one of the chairs next to the small fireplace. He stretched out his long legs and tapped his toe against the fireplace tools, making them jangle lightly on their rack. “We finished mapping out the hull today,” he said. “But we had to start digging a kind of well.”

“A well?”

He nodded, then sipped at the tea, wincing slightly. Julie suspected Daniel didn’t actually like herbal tea and drank it only to be companionable. “I ordered some big pumps. They should be in by the end of the week. We’ll need to run them twenty-four hours a day to keep water out of the excavation once we really get started. We’ll
pump from the hole we dug today, like draining a well.”

“Are you doing all right on money?” she asked as she settled into her own chair across from him.

He nodded. “My family was old money, and I’m the last in the line, so no one’s around to complain about how I’m spending the family fortune. We’ll make it. Though it would help if people lost interest in this whole ‘giant bones’ story.”

“You’re still getting giant hunters?”

He groaned. “Not as many, but the new batch is inventive. Some of them have been sneaking onto the site at night and doing their own digging. I’ve got stray holes all over, and now our machinery keeps breaking down. I suspect the giant hunters are messing with it at night. That’s got to stop before my insurance carrier finds out and pulls the insurance for this little job.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

He smiled. “George and I flipped a coin. He lost. So he’ll be sleeping out at the site. We bought him a little pup tent and everything. You should have heard him complain.”

“I’m surprised you’re not taking turns.”

He took another sip of tea, wincing again. “We will, but I won the toss, so I’m enjoying letting him worry about a long few months on a cot.”

Julie looked pointedly at his mug. “You know, if you don’t actually like herbal tea, you don’t have to drink it on my account.”

“It’s growing on me,” he said, taking another sip and smacking his lips. He pushed aside the paperback Julie had left on the small side table and set down the cup. Then he picked at a piece of cloth sticking out from under the book, finally pulling out the embroidered threat that Julie had completely forgotten about in the swirl of giant mania.

“What’s this?” Daniel asked, holding up the scrap with a frown. “If you don’t like my treasure hunt, you could have just told me. You didn’t have to immortalize it in stitchery.”

“Not my work,” Julie said. “Our housekeeper found it shoved in a crack on the porch. I’d actually forgotten about it.”

Daniel laid the scrap of cloth on his knee and studied it. “Nice work. Whoever did this is skilled.”

“We
are
a quilter’s inn. Many of the people here are skilled at that sort of thing.”

“But why embroidery? I could think of much more threatening message forms, like blood on a wall or carving the words into an unfortunate murder victim.”

Julie wrinkled her nose. “Aren’t you gruesome!”

He grinned sheepishly. “I watched a lot of horror movies during my youth.” He held up the cloth. “Do you mind if I keep this? I’d like to give it some more thought.”

Julie wasn’t enthusiastic about him keeping the note, considering she still wasn’t certain it was for him. But she had no idea how to turn him down without spilling her own secrets. “Sure. It’ll keep me from accidentally using it for a coaster. Don’t lose it though, OK?”

He tucked it into the pocket of his worn flannel shirt, then patted it. “Safe and sound.”

The next day, Julie turned down two different groups looking for a room. They clearly weren’t quilters or stitchers, or people with any interest in crafting. She’d begun giving little stitching quizzes after she’d accidentally rented a room to one woman who came down to breakfast each morning
wearing a UFO T-shirt and bothering the other guests with questions about local genetic anomalies and lights in the sky. Daniel wasn’t the only one who would be glad when the giant craze died down.

After polishing off a dinner of apple-and-butternut-squash soup and fresh bread, Hannah and Julie wandered into the formal dining room, where Shirley was hosting her weekly Stitches and Stories event. Every chair in the room was taken. A few people leaned against the walls, listening avidly. To Julie’s surprise, she realized one of the people was Inga Mehl. Her housekeeper’s dark clothes lent her a chameleon air in the corner near the narrow servant’s door. Inga was listening intently to Shirley, but the look on her face said she didn’t like anything she heard.

Julie never screened Shirley’s stories. Millie had told her to simply let Shirley “do her thing.” The ones she’d listened to mostly wove together sketchy local history, ancient scandals, and quilting or other traditional crafts.

At the end of the long dining table, Shirley stood waving her arms dramatically as she spoke. Her hair clearly had been recently touched up, as the red almost seemed to glow. It surrounded her head like a corona, making her small round face seem like the smiling center of a child’s drawing of the sun. Shirley’s black quilted jacket was spotted with appliqués of the moon and sun and stars in various bright colors. She’d coupled the jacket with a sweeping broomstick skirt that gave her a faintly gypsy air.

Julie leaned against the doorway and listened. Shirley regaled the group with stories of unusual “goings on” around the area during the pre–Civil War era. Goings on that might be linked to “the Straussberg Giant.” Julie noticed the ties to historical fact were looser than usual.

“Fur trapping was an essential part of Missouri history,” Shirley said. “But the trappers weren’t always too particular about what kind of critter they skinned. Some may have been cousin to Bigfoot. Bigfoot would certainly have giant bones.”

No wonder interest in the giant bone wasn’t dying down—there were too many people keeping it stirred up. She looked around the room. Most of the listeners were so caught up in Shirley’s storytelling that they forgot to work on the quilting projects in front of them. One woman held her needle suspended in the air the whole time Julie watched her.

Julie switched her focus to the other guests. Some of them she didn’t recognize at all, and she’d registered every guest at the inn. She did a quick head count. Not counting Inga, there were two more heads than there were guests. Plus, she didn’t see Mrs. Eddings at all, so that meant there were at least three people in the audience who weren’t guests.

One of the strangers held up her hand, then spoke. “What about the UFO sightings all over the state? I heard one pastor was called to pray over bodies in a UFO crash. Maybe that bone came from that crash.”

Julie stepped into the room and edged around to see the speaker. It was the genetic anomalies woman. She was sporting a bright green T-shirt with “MUFON” printed on the front. The green wasn’t a good choice with the woman’s yellow-gray hair.

“There are simply more questions than answers,” Shirley said, in a conspiratorial tone.