The Second Sister Read online

  “Oh, Lord, but Alice could talk,” Rinda interrupted. “She could just go on and on when she took a mind to. I met her in the quilt shop over near Fish Creek about a week after we moved here. I was buying fabric for a new project and Alice just came over and started talking my ear off, asking what I was planning to make and where I lived and the names of my children and if I had any pets and I don’t know what all. At first I just thought she might be the local crazy lady. Then I saw that the clerks in the shop really liked her and talked to her kindly and just a little slowly, like you might speak to a child, so I realized she must have some kind of disability, you know. I thought she must be slow, but then she pulled out this quilt she was working on, this very complicated appliqué block with a basket of flowers, and I didn’t know what to think. Anyway, Alice just kept following me around the shop, talking a blue streak while I shopped.”

  Rinda paused for a moment and smiled, wide and bright and real, the first time I’d seen her smile like that. “We’d just moved to town and I didn’t have a job yet, so I was trying to be careful about money. I went over to check out the sale rack and I pulled this yellowy-green bolt off the shelf that I thought might be okay for a backing. So Alice sees this stuff and says, ‘That’s the ugliest fabric I ever saw in my life. Why would you buy that?’ I told her it might be ugly, but it was only two dollars a yard.”

  Rinda’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “And then Alice puts her hand on my arm and looks at me all serious and says, ‘Rinda, it is possible to pay too little for fabric.’ ”

  Rinda started to laugh and the others laughed with her. So did I. That was Alice, we all agreed. Honest to a fault, completely open with her thoughts and feelings.

  “Except when she wasn’t,” Daphne said, picking up her comments where she’d left them before Rinda’s interruption. “Every now and then, she’d suddenly get very quiet. Right in the middle of a sentence, she’d just clam up and stare off into space. I’d ask her if something was bothering her, but she always said no. You know what people in town call the three of us, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “The FOA—Friends of Alice. Because you never saw one without the other three.”

  “That’s kind of an exaggeration,” Daphne said. “I mean, we weren’t together all the time. We all had lives to lead, but we were pretty close to her.”

  Celia tipped her head to one side, as if some new thought had just occurred to her. “Which is kind of strange when you think about it. I mean, Alice lived here her whole life, knew everybody in town from the time she was a little girl, but the three people she picked as friends were three people who had just moved here.”

  “That was just Alice’s way,” Rinda said. “She never could resist a stray. I think that’s how she saw us, as three strays who needed rescuing.”

  “And yet,” Daphne said, “for all that we knew Alice as well as anybody in town did, there were times when I felt like I didn’t know her at all.”

  I knew exactly what she meant.

  After I folded the quilts and put them back into the trunk, Daphne insisted that I show them the quilt I’d been planning to make when I sliced up my hand. I pulled out the bag where I’d stowed the fabric and pattern book upon my return from the ER and laid everything out on the table.

  I could tell they weren’t as excited about my choices as I’d been, and I had to admit, after looking through all of Alice’s pretty, vibrant quilts, it did seem a little on the dull side.

  After a moment, Celia, who was always very encouraging—I guess you have to be if you’re going to teach art to middle schoolers—said, “Well . . . it’s definitely a good pattern for a beginner. And that’s a nice blue.”

  “It’s a boring pattern,” Rinda countered. “And a namby-pamby blue.”

  Boring? Namby-pamby? And she was the one who’d been telling stories about how overly frank Alice could be? But . . . it was hard to argue with her observations.

  “I was worried about making something too busy or complicated, you know? The first time out, I figured I wanted to play it safe.”

  “Yeah, well. You succeeded,” Rinda said. “That quilt is safe as a bowl of oatmeal and just as bland. Or it will be, when you finish it. Except I don’t think you will ever finish it. You’ll get sick of it halfway through, put it aside, and then never quilt again because you’ll have convinced yourself that quilting is boring.”

  She gave me a look of disdain. “Just because you’re making a beginner’s quilt doesn’t mean you have to play it safe. Look at Alice’s quilts; even her early work—not a dull one in the bunch. Alice was willing to take chances. A quilt is only as boring as the person—”

  “I think what Rinda means to say,” Daphne said, jumping in and shooting her friend a “Be nice!” look, “is that you might want to think about spicing this up a little. There’s nothing wrong with the fabrics you picked; I just think you might want to add a few more to the mix.”

  “And maybe find a pattern that’s a little more exciting,” Celia added. “The basic idea here isn’t bad, but let’s maybe just use this as a jumping-off place. Where did Alice keep her graph paper and drawing pencils?”

  “Ummm . . .” I turned in a circle, trying to remember where I might have seen drawing supplies.

  “Here they are,” Daphne said, bending down and opening the bottom drawer of the painted white dresser that stood on the far wall. She handed a pad of paper and box of pencils to Celia.

  “Thanks!” she said, and set to work.

  While Celia scribbled away, Daphne gave me a lesson on how to cut blocks using a rotary cutter and ruler without drawing blood and Rinda sat down at my sewing machine, trying to figure out why it was skipping stitches.

  “Here’s the problem!” she said triumphantly, holding something that looked like a big dust bunny between her fingers. “You could knit a sweater with the amount of lint in that bobbin case. Your tension was off too. Were you messing with those knobs?” she asked and then answered her own question. I guess the guilty look on my face must have given me away.

  “Well, don’t! Not for any reason! I’ve got them all set perfect now, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” I said, snapping my fingers to my forehead in mock salute. Daphne guffawed, nearly swallowing the piece of nicotine gum she’d been chewing. Rinda didn’t so much as crack a smile.

  A few minutes later, Celia finished sketching out a new, much more interesting design for my quilt project and held it up so we could all see.

  “Don’t worry,” she said when she saw the look of concern on my face, “it’s really not that much harder than the pattern you picked before.”

  She’d kept the blank blocks as they were in the original, saying this would give me a good place to do some quilting or even some free-motion embroidery.

  “Daphne can help you with that part,” she assured me. “She’s got a real feel for free-form quilting and embellishing.”

  I nodded, but honestly, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  The rest of it made more sense to me. Celia had traded out those big, boring four-patch blocks with smaller nine-patch checkerboard blocks, each six inches across. Using her pencils, she had colored in some of the little squares within the blocks and left others blank, creating a secondary crisscross pattern that would stretch from one corner of the quilt to the other.

  “See?” she said, looking up at me, her eyes bright. “Doesn’t that look more interesting?”

  It did. Even I could see that.

  “You know,” she said slowly, tapping her pencil thoughtfully against her lips and holding her sketch at arm’s length, “maybe we shouldn’t leave those crisscross blocks white. I feel like I’ve seen that so many times. You can use any color you want as long as it’s consistent through the pattern. Why not try something a little more daring? Is there a color you really like and think you look good in but are afraid might be too wild to wear to the office?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my en
tire work wardrobe consisted of navy blue suits and sensible shoes.

  “Orange?” I said uncertainly, because it was the first thing that came to mind.

  “Perfect!” Celia exclaimed. She grabbed a pencil from the box and started filling the previously blank squares in the blocks with bright orange. “See what it does to those blues? Not namby-pamby now!”

  She was right about that. My dull, safe quilt design was coming alive! I couldn’t wait to start sewing, but first I needed to find more and better—more exciting—fabrics to make it with.

  Everybody helped. For close to an hour, we sat cross-legged on the floor of the sewing room “auditioning” combinations of fabrics, surrounded by piles and piles of blue and orange yardage pulled from Alice’s stash.

  “Stash,” I was informed, is the name quilters use to refer to their fabric collection. Apparently, the bigger the better. I was starting to see why. I bet we had to consider fifty or sixty blues before finding just the right fabric to use in my quilt.

  “I’ve been quilting since I was a little girl,” Rinda said, “and I’m still trying to build up my stash. Won’t be satisfied until I have achieved SABLE. I think I’m just about there.”

  “SABLE?” I asked.

  “Stash Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy,” Rinda said with a grin.

  Celia looked around at the piles of blue, orange, and white fabric heaped on the floor and her smile faded. “I guess Alice achieved SABLE,” she said softly, and her eyes began to well.

  Rinda put an arm around Celia’s shoulders. “Yes, she did, sweetheart. I know you miss her. We all do. But isn’t it wonderful that Alice’s stash is getting a new life?”

  Celia blinked a few times and tried to smile through her tears. “It is,” she said. “I’m glad Lucy’s here.”

  Rinda squeezed Celia’s shoulder and then looked up at me.

  “So am I,” she said.

  Chapter 28

  When the phone rang a week later, I thought it might be Daphne answering the message I’d left asking what kind of batting I should buy for my quilt. But it was Joe Feeney, calling from Washington. When I told him why I didn’t have much time to talk, he started to laugh.

  “High school kids? You’re giving a speech to a bunch of high school kids?”

  “It’s not exactly a speech,” I said, shifting the phone from one hand to the other and reaching out to pet Dave, who jumped onto the sofa and started head-butting me. Now that he’d gotten used to me, he was getting to be an attention hog.

  “It’s more of a question-and-answer session about the American political landscape. Why are you laughing?” I asked, grinning. “I’ve been grilled by the hard-boiled members of the national press corps. You don’t think I’m up to the task of taking questions from a bunch of teenagers?”

  “It’s just hard to picture you talking to a bunch of kids. I never thought you liked them.”

  “What do you mean? Of course I like kids. And anyway, I’m doing it as a favor for my old high school civics teacher.”

  “Well, that’s commendable,” he said. “Molding the minds of the next generation and all; I’ve met some of them and they could use some molding. It’s a nice thing. Very patriotic. I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah, I can tell,” I said, scratching Dave under the chin, then reaching over and doing the same for Freckles, who had hopped up onto the sofa to make sure Dave wasn’t getting all the attention.

  “But you’re feeling more settled in now, right? You sound a lot better.”

  “I am. But it’s still hard to make myself believe that Alice is gone forever, especially being here. Sometimes,” I said, almost to myself, “it feels like she’s still here, standing in a corner or watching me through a window.”

  “She’s haunting you? That must be unsettling.”

  “No,” I said, annoyed because of the skepticism I heard in his tone, but more annoyed with myself for being unable to explain what I meant. “It’s not like that. It’s more like she left some of herself behind in the walls and the floors and the books, like there’s something she wants to tell me.”

  “And she left behind clues?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “Not exactly.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Did you ever find out who she made all those quilts for?”

  I shook my head. “No. I asked her friends, but they’d never heard her mention anyone named Maeve. They’d never seen the quilts before either, which is really strange because Alice always showed them her projects. I asked a few people around town, too, and even did an online search and spent a day combing through records at the library. Came up empty-handed. There isn’t anyone with a first name of Maeve in the whole county.”

  After studying both the quilts and the multi-aged sketches of the anonymous girl, I’d decided that Maeve must have been a sort of imaginary friend for Alice. But I didn’t say anything about that to Joe. I felt guilty enough, thinking my sister had needed to invent a friend to fill the void left by our parents’ deaths and my absence. I didn’t want Joe turning it into some kind of joke. I don’t mind him teasing me, but I didn’t want him teasing me about Alice.

  “Gosh, Nancy Drew! Sounds like you’ve got a mystery to solve! Good thing. You must be bored out of your mind up there. You need a project.”

  “Actually, I’m pretty busy. Not crazy busy, just busy enough. Which is good. Speaking of busy,” I said, looking up at the kitchen wall clock, “I’m supposed to be at the high school by eleven and I haven’t shoveled the driveway yet.”

  “It snowed again?”

  “Uh-huh. Another five inches last night.”

  Joe made a groaning noise. “How can you stand it? I hate snow. Every inch adds a half an hour to my commute.”

  “But there’s no traffic here,” I explained. “And people know how to drive in snow without crashing into each other. It’s actually kind of exciting when a big storm comes through. The wind howls and blows so hard that the windows rattle and the chimney whistles, but the whole world has been transformed. Everything is perfectly quiet, still, and wrapped in white.”

  “Very poetic, I’m sure.”

  “It is.” I laughed. “Stop being so cynical. I’ve even been thinking about getting some snowshoes.”

  “Snowshoes? What are you, an Eskimo?”

  “I like getting out into nature.”

  “Since when?”

  “Joe,” I said flatly, “can I help you with something? Or did you just call to make fun of me?”

  “As it turns out, I do need your help,” he said. “Making fun of you is just an added bonus. Would you be interested in taking on a short-term consulting project while you’re up there? We just took on a new client, a developer out in California who’s putting in two big new subdivisions out in Orange County; fifty-five and up communities. It’s not the kind of project we usually handle, but this guy has deep pockets and wants to hire the best.

  “There are some issues with land use and water rights ordinances,” he continued. “Our West Coast office is handling the lobbying effort with local officials and the state legislature. We’re going to need a marketing campaign to sell the citizens on the idea. Or at least keep them from fighting it. It has to look like a movement that sprung from within the community; you know what I mean. Very grassroots. We’ll need a name that people won’t associate with the developer or his money, call it the Committee for Affordable Senior Housing. Something like that.”

  “Joe, I can’t go to California right now. I’ve got to rack up as much residency time here as I can before I leave for DC, remember?”

  “I don’t need you to actually implement the campaign. Just craft the concept and message, work out the timelines, budgets, lists of key contacts and target audience, draft some language for editorials and letter-writing campaigns, that kind of thing. I just need a blueprint that my people can work from, Lucy. It’s right up your alley and it’ll give you something to do during your exile in the wilderness. And it pays ten thousand dol
lars,” he said. “No need to thank me. Think of it as my Christmas present to you.”

  Ten thousand dollars? Lobbying definitely paid better than government work. But there was a reason for that. People who can afford to hire big lobbying firms have the money to buy the access and influence to change the rules and stack the deck. I didn’t like the sound of what Joe was describing, a dummy committee and a high-dollar campaign that looked like a grassroots community movement but was really just a cleverly disguised marketing campaign, designed to help one very wealthy individual mold public opinion and reshape the law so he could become still wealthier.

  Still, I thought as I pushed Freckles off my lap and carried my empty coffee cup into the kitchen, whether I helped out with this effort or not, the campaign would undoubtedly go forward and the subdivisions would be built. And the money would sure come in handy. My paychecks had stopped when the campaign ended. It would be nice not to keep dipping into my savings, not to mention earning some extra cash to buy furniture for a new place in DC.

  I wanted a condo or town house that was no more than five metro stops from the White House and that also had outdoor space—real outdoor space, not one of those sad little balconies that make you feel like you’re about to fall off the edge of the building as soon as you step out onto them. Getting what I wanted was going to take every dime of what Mr. Glazier was willing to pay me, plus a good bit more. Real estate in DC was incredibly expensive. I’d spent a lot of time on sites that sold patio furniture and had my eye on a kind of outdoor living room suite with a sofa, two side chairs, a coffee table, and blue-striped, all-weather cushions and a matching umbrella. It cost forty-six hundred dollars, but came with a lifetime warranty.

  Joe could make fun if he wanted, but the last four weeks had taught me that I really was an outdoor person, that access to nature was central to my happiness. I wouldn’t have an incredible lake view or a big yard with hundred-year-old trees when I moved to Washington, but with an extra ten grand in my pocket, I could create a beautiful outdoor oasis or pocket garden.