The Double Cross Page 3

  I could tell that George felt he’d given the right answer, but I knew it was only my grandmother’s desire to help Susanne that kept her from lecturing him on the history of quilting. There is nothing that a quilter hates more than to have a thriving art that has played an important role in women’s lives for centuries treated as if it were the quaint, outdated pursuit of dotty old women and lonely spinsters.

  “By the way, we don’t usually allow pets in the place.” He pointed toward Barney. “They tend to mess things up. But since you’re friends of Bernie’s, I’m sure I can get Rita to let him stay in your room.” He smiled at Eleanor. “I’ll just have to remember to add a ‘no pets’ rule to the brochure for the next group.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Well, I don’t care if he is Bernie’s first love; I don’t think I like that man,” Eleanor said as we settled into a small room at the top of the stairs. The room was much like the downstairs—tired looking and full of unfinished projects.

  “You’re just saying that because he made a joke about quilters,” I said.

  “I am not. I just . . .” She stopped. Rather than admit I was right, Eleanor’s way of conceding a point was to change the subject, so I took it as a victory when she looked around the room and grunted. “This place is a mess.”

  It wasn’t just a mess. There were cobwebs in the corners at the ceilings and dust on the dresser. “We’re not here for them. We’re here for Susanne,” I reminded her, and myself.

  “But I promised to help them set up their shop,” she continued, whispering as though she expected the place to be bugged. “And apparently they don’t know anything about quilting. How am I supposed to help when they don’t know a rotary cutter from a seam ripper?”

  “We’ll do our best.” I was feeling a little concerned myself. “I guess it takes the pressure off Susanne. I can’t imagine anyone coming here will expect Rose Hughes or Ricky Tims to be teaching the class.”

  “I suppose not.” Eleanor sighed. “But did you hear what he said about Barney? As if this run-down old shack were some kind of showplace.”

  We both looked toward Barney. He responded with a yawn and settled into his bed, completely oblivious to the fact that he was an unwelcome guest. Before she’d unpacked her own suitcase, Eleanor had set up a bed for him in the corner of the room. She’d brought several of the quilts she’d made especially for him and laid them one on top of another until she felt the bed was soft enough. Then she placed his two favorite chew toys, his bone, and a few of his favorite cookie treats nearby. After he settled in, Eleanor carefully unwrapped a dish of dog food and cut a vitamin into four parts, pressing them into the meat. She put the dish at Barney’s paws, and he sniffed for a moment, then ate the food, carefully leaving the four pieces of vitamin untouched.

  “Look at that.” Eleanor pointed to the vitamin pieces, a large smile on her face. “He smelled the vitamin. I think losing his hearing has heightened his other senses.”

  “Or he’s like every other dog and has a great sense of smell,” I pointed out.

  She frowned. “Not every dog. Just special dogs.” She pulled up a chair next to him and patted Barney’s head as and he rubbed his nose against her arm.

  “When did you get so soft?” I teased her. “I don’t remember you making a fuss over me like that.”

  “I have other grandchildren,” she said, “but I just have the one Barney.”

  I laughed and sat down on the floor beside Barney. The three of us played with Barney’s toys until we nearly forgot what we’d gotten ourselves into.

  I was reminded twenty minutes later, when Susanne came into the room.

  “We’re all settled. I’m going for takeout at a Chinese restaurant that George recommended.” She sounded apologetic. “It isn’t quite what we expected, is it?”

  “It’s lovely, dear,” Eleanor said, putting the best spin on it she could. “It reminds me of when I was starting the shop. It was a bit of a mess, too, but it turned out okay.”

  “But Barney,” Susanne said. “As if that dog ever caused a moment’s trouble in his life.”

  “Once they get to know him . . . ,” I offered.

  “I suppose.” Susanne stood at the door, dejected. I worried that she might decide to go home before she’d even taught the first class.

  Susanne had been a beauty queen in her younger days, and though now a grandmother in her fifties, she was still one of the most beautiful women I knew. Tall, blonde, slim, and elegant, she turned heads when she entered a room. And as a quilter she was talented and versatile. But she could also be shy, nervous, and even insecure.

  “How’s Bernie?” I hoped a change in subject would lighten the mood. I was wrong.

  Susanne sighed. “I knocked on her door and told her about the food, but she said she wasn’t hungry.”

  “You ordered her something anyway, I hope,” Eleanor said.

  “Of course. Broken hearts need fattening foods.”

  “What is the story with that anyway?” I asked.

  “High school sweethearts, broken promises. He married the best friend,” Eleanor said. “At least as far as I know.”

  “I don’t mean to be . . .” I tried to think of the right way to say it without sounding like a bratty kid who thinks her generation invented love. “It’s just that it’s been such a long time . . .”

  “Why is a sixtysomething-year-old woman still carrying a torch for her high school sweetheart?” Eleanor finished my thought. “I don’t think it’s the man. It’s the life that could have been.”

  “But she’s had a good life, hasn’t she?” I asked. “Why have any regrets about the road not taken?”

  “Oh, I hate that,” Eleanor said. “That idea that we can’t have any regrets because our experiences make us who we are. That’s greeting-card psychology. We all have regrets. The people we’ve hurt, the times fear held us back from exciting possibilities . . .”

  “The weird fabric we bought and could never find a use for,” I added.

  Eleanor and Susanne laughed.

  “Not fabric,” Susanne said. “You never regret a fabric purchase, no matter how weird.”

  After Susanne left to get the Chinese food, I settled back on the floor, laid my head on Barney’s back, and let him lick my hand. I envied his uncomplicated life of dog treats and unending love. “If she’s going to have regrets anyway, what good does coming here do her?” I finally asked my grandmother.

  “She needs to make her peace with them,” Eleanor said. “Bernie is wondering what might have been, and she can’t shake herself out of it. People get stuck like that sometimes.”

  She reached out and brushed a few stray hairs off my forehead, stroking my head gently. “It’s like when you make a quilt,” she said. “You see a pattern you like and you think you want to make something just like it for yourself. But as you find fabrics, and cut and sew, the idea becomes something else. Something real, but something different from that pattern. If you measure the success of your quilt, or your life, by what you started out to do, more often than not you will decide you’ve failed. But if you realize that the pattern you followed is the one you created for yourself, you will love the quilt you made, and the life you made, more than the one you thought you were supposed to make.”

  Twenty minutes later while I was still thinking over my grandmother’s words, Susanne opened the door to the room, her hands filled with plastic bags. “This place is spooky. When I drove up, I thought I saw a light coming from the woods. Then I swear I saw something run from the back of the house.”

  “Probably a deer,” I suggested.

  “Maybe, but it didn’t run like a deer. It sort of floated. I couldn’t see what it was because the porch light was out. It must have burned out when I was gone.”

  The thought of something out there, in the dark, hovering around this broken-down inn, made me shiver, but I put it out of my mind. It was going to be a long week if I succumbed to my imagination.

  “Wha
tever it was, it’s gone,” I said. “And tomorrow we’ll be quilting. Nothing’s going to spoil that.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Quilt retreats are usually weekend or weeklong quilting classes where experts, often nationally known teachers, give participants a chance to immerse themselves in a new technique or pattern. During the day, the teacher instructs the class, and in the evening the students are welcome to sew on their own or wander into town. The retreats are often set in the country, so there’s little to do but quilt, talk about quilting, and look at quilts. And that’s just what most of us want to do anyway.

  It was going to be the first retreat for the Patchwork Bed-and-Breakfast, but, instead of comforting her, this seemed to make Susanne nervous. She had piled every possible tool, book, fabric scrap, and finished and half-finished quilt she could find into her car.

  I’d volunteered to work as Susanne’s assistant. I wasn’t sure what that would involve beyond helping set up the classroom, but it seemed to provide Susanne with some relief to know that there would be a friendly face in the room. In her mind, the class would be filled with quilters as expert as herself, and I tried to reassure her that, regardless of their skill level, every student would learn something because Susanne wasn’t teaching a pattern or a technique that someone might have picked up elsewhere. She was teaching a class on how to express oneself in fabric.

  Journal quilts have become popular among quilters. Generally eight inches by ten inches or smaller, they serve as a way for quilters to document their experiences, much like a page in a diary. But journal quilts use visual images as well as words and reach beyond fabrics to include found objects, paint, paper, and lots of nontraditional methods. I’d never made a journal quilt and I couldn’t think of any experience important enough to document, but I was looking forward to the class anyway.

  Though Susanne, like most of us, had started as a traditional quilter, she had moved toward making art quilts—a large and sometimes difficult-to-define category that my grandmother described as quilts made, not for use, but solely for visual effect. And Susanne’s quilts certainly had visual effect. She made landscapes, variations on traditional patterns, pictorial quilts of her grandson, and vibrant abstract quilts. Every quilt was free and open, and unconcerned with what quilters laughingly call “the quilt police”—the rules or rule enforcers that insist a quilt should have matching seams and perfect corners and the like. Every time I looked at a quilt of Susanne’s, I sensed the rebel in her that I rarely saw in real life.

  I knew there was a lot I could learn from her. And that, as much as a friend’s desire to show support, was why I had offered my services.

  “I’m Susanne Hendrick. And I’m very excited to be sharing the art of quilting with all of you.” Susanne smiled nervously at the start of class. “Journal quilts, like a written journal, are private expressions. You shouldn’t worry about what others will think, only what you wish to say. Use symbols, images, and objects that matter to you, even if they mean nothing to the rest of us. In my own quilts, I have found that I sometimes express quite private thoughts without meaning to, and I am always glad I did. I hope you’ll get caught up enough in your work that you’ll do the same. We will be making several small quilts this week. We’ll start with a quilt that expresses your view of what’s around you. To do this, you’ll go into the woods around the inn and look for inspiration. The second quilt will show something of your life now. And finally you’ll make a quilt that tells us a dream, a goal, or even a fantasy you have for your future.”

  When she stopped talking, I waited for the class to show some excitement, but there was only silence. Susanne looked at me, concerned. I nodded to her to continue, looking as encouraging as I could.

  “Each quilt will focus on a different technique,” she said, “but each will build on what we’ve learned. The point is to experiment and have fun. And by the end of the week, you will have not only a few quilts, but a whole new way of looking at quilting. Is everyone ready to get started?”

  I looked out at the group of students that had been assembled. It wasn’t promising. Susanne seemed frozen by their lack of enthusiasm.

  “Why don’t you introduce yourselves?” I suggested.

  “I’m Helen,” a dark-haired woman of about fifty said. “I’ve tried my hand at quilting a few times but I don’t like to follow patterns.”

  “You won’t have to follow them here,” Susanne said hopefully.

  “Well, I like to buy crafts more than to make them, but I’ll try. George and Rita spoke very highly of you, and it would be nice to know if all those quilts I see at art fairs are really worth the price they charge for them.”

  “And hopefully you’ll enjoy yourself,” Susanne said meekly. “And you are?” She turned to the attractive, middle-aged man sitting next to Helen.

  “Frank Ackerman. Helen’s husband. I’m semiretired. I was the town druggist before that big-box store opened ten miles from here and stole my business,” he said. “George and I played poker last week and I lost. Said if I came to the class, I wouldn’t have to pay my debt.”

  “Oh good God!” Susanne blurted out and turned to the two women at the next table.

  “We’re Alysse and Alice,” one fortysomething, brown-haired woman said as she pointed to the identical woman standing next to her, identically dressed in blue jeans and a yellow shirt. “We’re twins. Both quilters.”

  “Quilters for years. Traditional Quilts,” said her twin.

  “We don’t much like the arty stuff but we’ll try it,” said the first.

  I could see panic creep into Susanne’s eyes. She said nothing though. She just turned up the corners of her mouth in what, I assumed, she hoped would look like a smile. I waited for a moment, but when it was clear that Susanne was going to remain silent, I jumped in.

  “What’s your favorite quilt pattern?” I asked.

  The first twin shrugged. “All of them. All the normal ones that you see.”

  I nodded. This was going to be a lot more work than I had imagined. “The great thing about Susanne’s techniques is you can take something traditional and add your own spin to it,” I said.

  I pulled out a couple of Susanne’s sample quilts. One was a six-foot-square double cross—a seemingly complicated quilt pattern made up of squares and half-square triangles. The quilt, made in a variety of reds and whites, was actually Bernie’s, but Susanne had borrowed it to explain how it could be used as inspiration for an art piece. The second double cross was a variation Susanne had made, which included batik fabrics and was equally beautiful.

  “See,” I said. “Tradition meets art quilt.”

  “We have a quilt just like that.”

  I turned to see George at the back of the room.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your class, but I wanted to stop in and see if anyone needed anything,” he said.

  “You have quilts?” I asked. “Where did you get them?”

  “I found them,” he said. “They were up in the attic. One is just like that red one you have there, only it’s mostly greens and blues. A bit stained but a nice quilt.”

  “I’d love to see them sometime,” Susanne said.

  “What are they worth?” one of the twins asked. “They are so lovely. They must be expensive.”

  “Quilts sell for as little as fifty dollars and as much as five hundred thousand,” Susanne explained. “It depends on their age, the workmanship, the condition. But that’s really not what this class is about.”

  “What about a quilt like that double cross?” one of the twins asked.

  Susanne shrugged. “I don’t know. I made it a couple of years ago. Maybe a couple of hundred. If I were selling it.” Susanne turned back to George. “Did you remember to bring the collage from the entryway? I was going to show it to the students.”

  George looked around. “I brought it here last night,” he said. “Left it right on your table.”

  Susanne and I searched her table, at the front of the room
, and the other students did the same at theirs, but nothing was found.

  “Raccoons must have taken it. They’ll take anything, the little bandits.” George smiled. “Lot of them around here. Sorry about that.” He took a seat behind Helen and Frank. “I’m just going to watch, if that’s okay.”

  Susanne nodded, then turned to the last person in the class, a man of about sixty. “Are you a quilter?”

  “No, ma’am. But I’m a carpenter, so I am good with my hands. And I live next door, so I’ll be in class on time,” he said. He was sandy haired with a strong jaw and the look of a man who worked outdoors. “I’m Pete. I’ll probably be very bad at this, but I’ll do my best if you’re patient with me.”

  “You’ll be fine, Pete,” George chimed in.

  Pete laughed. “If it’s so easy, you join the class.”

  The two men made a few jokes at each other’s expense, which Susanne and I enjoyed, but the twins sat stiff, Helen sighed, and, instead of joining in, Frank just seemed annoyed.

  Susanne waited for them to stop joking, then smiled, quietly taking back control of the class. “The wonderful thing about this process is that there is no right or wrong. We’re just playing. All I ask is that you don’t focus on creating a masterpiece but instead focus on learning something new. There are many wonderful patterns out there, traditional patterns,” she nodded toward the twins, “but too often we rely on the patterns that others have made. They are tested. We know they will work. So I understand why it’s easy to want to follow them. What we neglect when we do, though, are the patterns we can create for ourselves. This class is a chance to do, not what we know we’re good at, but what we don’t know. It might be a bit scary, but I promise it’s a lot more fun.”

  I looked around the room. I could see that the twins, Helen, Pete, and even George were all nodding their heads in agreement. Only Frank seemed unswayed. He checked his watch.