The Gift of the Magpie Page 15

  My mouth was hanging open in amazement, and I realized I coveted the quilt. It wasn’t even finished, and I coveted it. I wasn’t sure where I’d put it if I owned it—I’d probably ignore Gran’s wishes and hang it on a wall somewhere. A highly visible wall, one where I could see it daily and everyone who came to the house could admire it. If Gran were still alive, I’d be first in line to beg her to make me one just like it. She could name her price.

  I felt a brief stab of resentment at Mrs. Dinwiddie for owning the quilt. She almost certainly didn’t have a queen-sized bed to use it on. Did she even have a wall big enough to display it?

  Then my common sense returned. It was Mrs. Dinwiddie’s quilt. Made by her grandmother. If she was living in one of those miserable little efficiencies, who was I to begrudge her something that would make the place more beautiful and homey? Something that reminded her of absent loved ones.

  Of course, maybe the quilt wasn’t to her taste—maybe she preferred the kind of more traditional quilt I’d been expecting. Maybe once it was finished she’d want to sell it. I could keep my eyes open for an opportunity to find out.

  Worst case, I could take plenty of pictures of it—not only for selfish reasons, but also to document the Helping Hands project. I could—okay, not make my own quilt. I probably had the sewing chops, but I knew myself better than to imagine I’d find the time to do that much sewing anytime soon. But surely I could find a quilter who would make me one on commission? Better yet, I could ask Mother to find one.

  I reluctantly tore myself away from the quilt and went to see what else was going on.

  The Shiffley in charge of the lamp repair class looked up and I realized it was Beau—who would have been out driving his snowplow if we’d had any snow worth plowing. During winters like this one, with the summer’s dust and cobwebs still decorating both his plow and his snowmobile, he tended to brood and utter dire threats about packing it all in and moving to Fairbanks.

  But at the moment he seemed happy, putting his pupils through their paces. Six of them were high school kids, the rest in what Dad liked to call “late middle age”—which seemed to mean not yet in need of a walker. And more women than men in both age groups, which pleased me.

  “Hey, Meg,” Beau said, nodding. “Y’all created a monster with this Helping Hands thing. You wouldn’t believe how many people called in to ask for help with broken lamps and light fixtures. And a good half of the so-called broken stuff just needed someone to climb up on a ladder and put in a new bulb.”

  “And we’re installing LED bulbs,” one of the high school kids added. “Randall donated a couple of cases. Which means not only will the bulbs not need changing for, like, forever, people will save money on electricity.”

  “Yeah,” Beau said. “Don’t tell Randall, but for the seniors, if they want us to, we’re putting LEDs in anything they can’t easily reach.”

  “I doubt if he’d object.” Randall was savvy enough to realize that generosity in small things—providing lumber at cost for Helping Hands projects, or donating a few cases of LED bulbs for the local seniors—defused any resentment people might have over the Shiffleys’ near monopoly on construction and repairs in Caerphilly. “And if he does, just tell my mother. Or Robyn. I expect the Ladies’ Interfaith Council could find enough money for a few cases of lightbulbs.”

  “Good deal.” Beau nodded. “Anyway, we’re going great guns with the lightbulb changing, but we could use a few more people to help with the repairs. So I put out a call for volunteers who want to learn, and here they are. Okay, everybody—let’s get back to work.”

  I left them to it and went to the other far end of the hall—the part that was filled with dogs. At close range, I could also spot a few people. But mostly dogs. Dogs in crates. Dogs on leads. Dogs in portable pens. In the farthest corner a teenage girl was holding on to the collar of a large and rather shaggy dog while a woman with an elaborate head of frizzy curls brushed the dog’s coat and teased it into fluffy perfection with the aid of a handheld hair dryer.

  I recognized Ariel, proprietor of the Caerphilly Beauty Salon.

  Just then the door from the hallway opened, and Clarence Rutledge, our local veterinarian, strode in. He was carrying a towel from which a bedraggled dog head was protruding.

  “Don’t let that little beast shake himself in here,” Ariel warned. “I’ve just about got Miss Boom Boom Lady ready for her close-up.”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll keep him on this side of the room for now.”

  I had to smile at the curious sight of Clarence, who was almost as tall as Michael’s six feet four and considerably wider, dressed in his customary biker’s denim and leather, holding a dog so tiny he could almost have hidden it in one hand—all I could see was a ridge of spiky fur sticking straight up like a Mohawk. I wasn’t quite sure what kind of dog it could be—was there such a thing as a punk Pomeranian?

  “Something wrong with the bathing facilities down at the shelter?” I asked.

  “Full of geckos,” he said. “There’s not a square foot down at the shelter that isn’t full of something. Caroline did tell you that I asked the Helping Hands project to help me move some of these critters into good homes, didn’t she?”

  “She did indeed,” I said. “And I said that was a great idea, although you wouldn’t be in such a pickle if you learned to say no when other shelters ask you to take their overflow.”

  “I’m not turning down any chances to save animals from kill shelters,” he said.

  Okay, I could understand that. But they weren’t all kill shelters. And how was bringing the animals here for baths going to help with the overcrowding? And—wait. He hadn’t talked Robyn into using Trinity for his overflow, had he?

  “Your mother came up with a fabulous idea,” he was saying. “And she recruited Ariel to do the grooming, and your brother and Delaney are doing the glamour shots.”

  “Glamour shots?”

  “Check it out—they’re in the room next door.”

  I followed his directions and made my way to the room next door—a Sunday school classroom festooned with bright felt Christmas banners in blue and gold or red and green, and featuring a truly impressive Lego biblical diorama. It ranged from the serene (if somewhat knobbly) buildings of the village of Bethlehem through the green felt pastures on which the shepherds were abiding with a truly astonishing number of cotton-ball sheep, which were both fun and easy for the younger children to make, and ended with a towering re-creation of the palace of Herod.

  Normally I’d have spent several minutes appreciating the diorama. But now my eyes were drawn to the other end of the room, where Rob and Delaney were, indeed, taking glamour shots of the recently groomed shelter dogs.

  Technically, Delaney was doing the actual photography, which was a good thing, because Rob was notoriously inept with cameras. Give him a point-and-shoot camera and half the time he’d take a picture of his own eyeball, and we knew better than to let him get his hands on more sophisticated—and easily broken—photographic equipment.

  But Delaney, his fiancée, was already proving to be an asset at family gatherings. Not only was she a good photographer, she was fierce about deleting any shot whose subject found it less than flattering.

  Right now she had one of her fancier cameras mounted on a tripod and was staring through the viewfinder at a dog. Not the most prepossessing dog I’d ever seen. He started out looking a little like a beagle, but then you suddenly realized that his legs were about twice as long as any beagle legs you’d ever seen. Probably a trace of greyhound in his pedigree. Clarence had nicknamed him AT-AT, after the long-legged armored vehicles that were always lurching gracelessly across the landscape in Star Wars movies. The last time I’d visited Clarence at the shelter, I’d seen AT-AT cowering in his cage with a terrified expression on his face and all four legs splayed awkwardly around him. I’d felt sorry for the poor thing and wondered if he’d end up as one of the shelter’s semi-permanent residents.

&
nbsp; But now, washed and groomed, sitting on a red tufted-velvet love seat with a big gold bow around his neck, he actually looked rather handsome. It helped that he’d arranged his legs in an elegant pose. No, actually it helped that Rob had arranged his legs in an elegant pose. Rob was adjusting the angle of the hind legs slightly, and the dog simply wagged his tail and cooperated.

  “Great!” Delaney said. “That’s perfect! Now let’s get some shots. Work it!”

  Rob sprang into action.

  “Who’s a good boy?” he crooned. The dog’s long, skinny tail thumped against the upholstery. Rob continued crooning praise and bits of baby talk to the dog, who gazed back at him with utter adoration. Rob had that effect on dogs.

  Delaney clicked away like a paparazzo on speed, eventually abandoning the camera on the tripod and grabbing a smaller camera. She circled around, snapping shots from a variety of angles, while Rob coaxed and praised, and AT-AT lolled and grinned and wagged his tail with abandon.

  “Okay! Cut! Print!” Delaney said at last. “Good boy!” She let the camera dangle from its neck strap and went over to pat AT-AT and scratch behind his ears.

  “You think maybe AT-AT will have a better chance at getting adopted now?” Rob asked, looking up from his post by the love seat.

  “I’m almost ready to take him home myself,” I said. “But where are you going to put these glamour shots?”

  “Your nephew Kevin’s doing up a new website for the shelter,” Delaney said. “And once we get a bunch of these new pictures up, we’ve got a whole bunch of social media gurus ready to get it out there on the Internet.”

  “You won’t be able to turn around on the Internet without seeing some of our dogs,” Rob said. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, stuff I haven’t even heard of yet.”

  I worried, just for a moment, that all this virtuous animal welfare work would distract Kevin from the snooping I’d asked him to do. Then I reminded myself that Kevin was expert both at multitasking and at dragooning other people to help him with projects.

  “Can you get some physical prints ready by tonight?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Delaney said. “But what for?”

  “Michael’s one-man staged reading of A Christmas Carol,” I said. “This year the proceeds are going to the shelter. Why not put some photos up in the lobby of the theater?”

  “And donation boxes,” Rob said. “So anyone who doesn’t want to adopt a dog will feel guilty and throw in some cash.”

  “Great idea!” Delaney said. “When should I have them at the theater?”

  “The house opens at six,” I said.

  “You’ve got it. And here comes our next supermodel! Who’s this little lady?”

  Clarence had come in with the dog I’d seen Ariel working on.

  “Miss Boom Boom Lady,” Clarence said. “Not my idea,” he added, seeing Rob and Delaney’s expressions. “She came with that.”

  “There’s part of your problem.” Rob took the lead from Clarence and squatted down so he was at eye level with the dog. “That’s a terrible name. I think she should be Lady. Ye-e-e-es. La-dy!”

  As he crooned the name, the dog wagged her tail with such fervor that Delaney had to grab her tripod to keep it from tipping over.

  Clarence took AT-AT and led him away, tail still wagging. Rob gestured for the newly christened Lady to hop up on the love seat.

  I left them to it and went back to the parish hall.

  Ariel was working on yet another dog—a large brindle hound with a scarred face and a heavy jaw. I’d have described him as unappealing, but at the moment, with Ariel talking baby talk to him as she brushed his short fur to a glossy sheen, the dog had his eyes closed in what seemed like real enjoyment, and he suddenly looked quite adoptable. Just wait till Rob got hold of him.

  I headed for the other end of the hall. Beau’s students had made progress. Some of them had plugged in their lamps. One or two were still fiddling.

  Beau glanced at the window and sighed.

  “Raining again,” he said. “We’ve had three inches of rain in the last two weeks. Do you know how much snow that would be if the temperature was right?”

  “Um … a foot?” I guessed.

  “A foot if we were talking heavy, wet snow,” Beau said. “If it was average to light snow, more like thirty inches.”

  “Plenty more moisture where that came from,” I said. “Don’t despair.”

  I refrained from saying that I was just as happy we weren’t getting thirty inches of snow as we had this time last year. Beau would think I was a Grinch. For that matter, so would most of the town. Everybody had forgotten how hard it was to cope with more than two feet of snow. I’d decided to keep my curmudgeonly preference for a dry winter to myself.

  I went back to check on how the quilters were doing—pulling out my phone so I could get a few shots of the coveted quilt.

  Chapter 19

  “Beautiful, isn’t it.” I tore my eyes away from the quilt and saw that Judge Jane Shiffley, matriarch of the Shiffley clan, was among the workers. And beside her was Mrs. Diamandis.

  “It’s amazing,” I said. “I didn’t know either of you was a quilter.”

  “From way back,” Judge Jane said. “I took it up back when I was a brand-new lawyer and had to spend so much time cooling my heels in the back of a courtroom, waiting for my cases to be called. And Ida here used to win sewing prizes at the state fair.”

  “My fingers are a little stiffer than they were,” Mrs. Diamandis said. “But I can still make myself useful.”

  “I gather the crew had to quit before they finished all your mulching,” I said. “Sorry about that, but they’ll come back as soon as the rain lets up.”

  “That’s fine.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss the need for any apology. “I don’t want anyone to catch pneumonia on account of my roses. They’ve survived without manure for nearly ten years now—I think they can cope a few days longer. I just hope the weather isn’t going to complicate Chief Burke’s murder investigation. Any idea how that’s going?”

  I had to admire how smoothly she’d turned the conversation to what was clearly the town’s hottest topic of conversation. Around the tables, conversations died and people feigned the kind of close attention to their stitching that would make eavesdropping easier.

  “You know the chief,” I said. “He keeps everything pretty close to his vest. But he’s interviewing a bunch of people, and Horace is still hard at work at the crime scene.”

  “And have they been able to notify poor Mr. Dunlop’s family?” Mrs. Diamandis asked.

  “I didn’t know he had any family to speak of,” Judge Jane said.

  “Only a few cousins that we know of,” I said. “Second cousins on his father’s side. And all the cousins were here yesterday, busily reporting him to Adult Protective Services and the building inspector, so I suspect the chief called one of them—probably Morris, since he’s the one who showed up here—and left it to him to notify anyone else who needs to know.”

  “Still, family.” Judge Jane frowned. “How’s he taking it, this cousin?”

  “If you ask me, any tears he sheds would be crocodile tears. I expect as long as his alibi checks out and the chief’s not looking at him as a suspect, he’ll be relieved that Mr. Dunlop’s death solves a longstanding family problem.”

  “Poor man,” Mrs. Diamandis said. “But maybe it’s no surprise someone killed him. I guess his family history came back to haunt him.”

  “His family history?” The idea took me by surprise—and then it occurred to me that Mrs. Diamandis, at ninety-seven, probably knew more about Caerphilly’s history than most people in town. Possibly even more than Judge Jane, in spite of the legendary Shiffley family grapevine. And Mrs. Diamandis was still sharp as the proverbial tack. “What do you know about his family history?” I asked. “All I know is that his family once owned a bank.”

  “The Farmers and Mechanics Bank.” Mrs. Diamandis nodded sagely and pursed her lips.
Her disapproving tone made me wonder what could possibly be so disreputable about a bank.

  “He’s one of those Dunlops, then?” Judge Jane asked. “I didn’t know any of them were still in town.”

  “Yes, he is,” Mrs. Diamandis said. “He was the last one left.”

  “What Dunlops?” I asked. “Enlighten me—what’s so bad about having once owned a bank? Why would that inspire anyone to kill someone else?”

  “The Dunlops owned the Farmers and Mechanics Bank,” Judge Jane said. “Founded in the late 1800s. Not sure exactly when—the 1870s, maybe?”

  “More like the 1880s, I should think,” Mrs. Diamandis said.

  “But still—shortly after the Pruitts took over the town,” Judge Jane said. “And definitely as a reaction against them.”

  Mrs. Diamandis nodded in assent.

  I knew about the Pruitts, a family of carpetbaggers who’d founded a textile mill in Caerphilly during the Reconstruction and ruled the town like a private fiefdom for more than a century. I liked to think I’d played no small part in breaking their stranglehold on the town a few years back. But as far as I knew, the Pruitts were long gone. Was she suggesting that they were back, and had done in the last survivor of their former rival banking family?

  “If you want to know when it opened, we’d have to look it up,” Judge Jane said. “But I know when it closed—March 6, 1933.”

  “Mr. Roosevelt’s bank holiday. I remember it.” Mrs. Diamandis nodded. And then seeing my puzzled look, she added. “As soon as Mr. Roosevelt was inaugurated, which happened in March back in those days—and we’re talking FDR, not Teddy; I’m not that old—he declared a bank holiday. Shut down every bank in the country until the government could figure out which ones were strong enough to be allowed to reopen, and how they could make sure they didn’t fail after they reopened.”