Priced to Kill Read online

  Laura purchased all the quilts in each estate batch because they went together as a “lot” from a particular estate and couldn’t be picked through singly. She had arranged for them to be cleaned and packaged. The whole bunch was now in the store’s back room ready for Laura to go through, price, and display, or throw out. The task ahead of her was to figure out how best to merchandise the ones she could sell against that amazing backdrop so they enticed everyone to want to wrap up in one.

  The quilts were individually wrapped in sealed, clear, plastic bags, and as Laura looked at each one, she noticed the cat had come downstairs and hopped onto the big work table and was watching the process with what looked to be great interest. Laura began sorting them by size and category, whether a child’s, a baby’s or an adult’s pattern. Then she put her first impression favorites at the top of each pile. There were a few in the lots that were not in good shape, with stains and tears, and she tossed those into a pile on the floor under the work table for the trash.

  She noticed the cat had decided to participate and pawed at one quilt that had a pretty log cabin pattern in its square, worked in rich brick and brown shades, the edging in deep forest green hues, patterning tree outlines, as if drawing someone into the cozy warmth of a little cottage in the middle of a fragrant forest. She could almost smell the pungent pines.

  Then she found another attractive one with light and medium logs of teal, one of her favorite colors. Its gently varying shades were peace-giving and relaxing. Gently shoving the cat away didn’t work, because the empress kept coming back to the same two quilts, relentlessly pawing at them, hissing and meowing loudly. Both quilts, from what Laura could see, were in great shape and would be an awesome attraction in the shop.

  She was surprised when the cat leaped onto the teal quilt’s plastic cover. “Stop, Isabella! You’ll damage it.”

  But the cat didn’t stop, and when Laura picked up the cat and moved it away and looked more closely, flipping the one with the teal shades over to the other side, her eye was caught by the stitching on this quilt. She stared through the plastic cover and saw that most of the quilt had fine, even stitching, but two of the patterned squares had longer and uneven stitches, as if the quilt had been repaired at some point by a lesser-skilled person. She turned to the cat.

  “Is that what you were trying to show me? That there’s a flaw in this quilt? Well, that’s okay; I just won’t be able to get as much money for it. Or maybe it’s something I can fix. You never know. It’s okay; we can still sell this one. Thanks for showing me, Isabella.”

  She brushed the cat aside thinking that’s what you got when you had to buy the whole lot of anything in an estate sale. In any event, she saw nothing else wrong with the beautiful teal-shaded quilt. Quilting was likely the only craft that her Aunt Rose didn’t have a friend to come teach her during her years in Maryland. Her summer days and after-school hours had been filled with one person after another teaching a piano lesson, sewing, yoga, art, ballet or judo with her, while Aunt Rose went from her counseling job at the high school to her second job at the medical center until dinner time. Laura was never alone.

  She continued to work around the imaginary feline as she organized all of the merchandise. If necessary, she could pay a friend in the Raging Ford crafting club to re-stitch the one quilt for her. The rest of the quilt was beautiful. Not a big concern at the moment.

  Putting away all thoughts of the flawed quilt, the colorful patterns of flower, log cabin, sunrise, star-cross and swamp angel jumped at her, and she marveled at the loving handiwork that must have gone into each one. Which of the quilt-makers had used scraps of left-over materials from clothing they’d made, and which had gone shopping for fresh fabrics? Or had it been a little bit of both? She figured it might be a good idea if she found out a little more about quilting so that she could be knowledgeable enough to market these to customers. She decided to hit the library as soon as possible or maybe check things out on the Internet.

  Knocking at the front door caught her attention, and she left the cat to its own devices as she peeked into the store to see who was at her shop while the Closed sign was turned outward. With delight she saw that her old friend and next-door retail neighbor Erica Rollins had brought over some fresh yellow roses for Laura’s shop.

  “I wanted you to have the best of the fresh batch that just came in,” Erica said, offering the roses to her friend. “I know you like them and want them fresh every third day and today’s your ‘third’ day. Thought I’d just pop in and save you a trip.”

  Erica made up part of the Fab Four or Group of Four or whatever the four girls had decided to call themselves in any one particular year of their childhood in Raging Ford. Erica, Laura, Kelly, and Jenna Buckley remained fast friends into high school and were regaining that sense of friendship following Laura’s return to Minnesota. Erica’s father owned the florist shop next door to Laura.

  Laura pulled cash from her purse in the back room and gave it to Erica for the flowers. She trimmed off the ends of the stems and placed the roses in a vase of lukewarm tap water. Then she made a new pot of coffee for them. She loved the roses, their scent and color brightening her day. They reminded her of her mother’s rosebushes in the backyard of their home where she had grown up about a half mile from the shop. The light, sweet fragrance lit the atmosphere in the shop. The pair sat in the kitchenette off the work room in the back of the store.

  “Thanks for bringing these over. I was so busy in the back, I forgot. Are you bringing news with the roses?” Laura asked, offering cream and sugar to her friend.

  “I heard Jenna’s been having a really hard time since her boyfriend dumped her,” Erica commented, recalling the recent disappearance of their mutual friend’s mysterious and secretive fiancé. “I tried to get her to go to the movies with me, but she just wanted to sit at home in that big, empty house.”

  “She’ll come around. Personally, I’m glad he left,” Laura said. “I’m not glad for Jenna’s heartbreak, but that guy was really shady. He had a dark past that he hid from her. What a good liar he was about it. He would have messed up her life. And what if they’d had kids?”

  “I know. You and a lot of people here think that. I hope she realizes it’s good that he’s gone and gets over him quickly. So show me the new quilts you and Kelly have been talking about.”

  Laura pointed them out in the work room outside the doorway of the kitchenette, and Erica oohed and ahhed over them.

  “It’s amazing what skill sets some people have. The things they can do! Well, I’m blown away. Machines can do similar but nothing looks this good. Arranging flowers can’t compare with this type of stuff.”

  “What you and your dad do with flowers is magical. But I’m not sure there’s anything at all that I can do that could compete with this stuff. They are not items that will go fast like the tea cups, so I think I’ll leave the plastic bags over them in the shop,” Laura commented.

  “Good idea. Then little kids with sticky fingers won’t ruin them,” Erica added with a twinkle. “But it’s the right time of year to try and sell them. Brrr! Feel the frost in the air!”

  There was a moment of friendly silence while the ladies returned to the kitchenette and finished their coffee.

  “Okay, Erica, what’s up?” Laura suspected another reason for the visit. “I know you didn’t come over just to bring me flowers and see my quilts, did you?”

  “Well, I met someone and I had to tell you. I needed an excuse to come over besides that.”

  Laura smiled at her friend. She also hoped Erica had met someone better than Jenna’s last choice.

  “His name is Torrey Culver and he’s working on his Ph.D. at U Minn. Don’t worry – I didn’t meet him on the Internet like Jenna did with her friend. I met him at a party and actually have had a lot of quality time talking with him. We’ve been out several times for dinner and movies.”


  “What’s his field?”

  “International economics, like Connor Fitzpatrick.”

  “Does he also have plans to join the police force like Connor did when he couldn’t find a job in that field?”

  Erica laughed, her bright blue eyes sparkling.

  “He’s about as far from a police type as I am. He wants to help me get my hair salon off the ground. Says he knows lots of marketing tricks and financial stuff that I have no idea about. If we do need help figuring out his investment amount and how to set up that partnership, you will be my first call.”

  After Erica left, Laura thought about the quilts and all their handiwork, the stories they told. She wondered how many people still made things like that…or had time to do so, as well as what stories they told, whether histories of an individual or a family, or a cause, or just a pretty design.

  She admired people who could create such works of art. Would a capsule from Raging Ford right now have the same types of art work… or secrets from the past, secrets that Laura was still trying to uncover?

  three

  One of the piles of hand-made quilts was in disarray in the back room and not as Laura had left it before Erica’s visit. She’d only been gone about fifteen minutes, walking her friend to the door, chatting. The stack also looked flatter, and she sifted through the bags, not finding the teal one over which Empress Isabella had been fussing earlier, the one with the flawed stitching. She glanced around the room and spotted it on the floor where the cat sat proudly on it, having dragged it off the edge of the work table, waving her tail back and forth. Laura shooed the cat away and pulled the quilt back to the pile on the tabletop.

  Silly cat, she thought, but hesitated as her history with Isabella which had always proven helpful came to mind. At this point, however, she had no clue as to the reason to exclude this quilt even with its flawed stitching, and until that showed up on her radar, the quilt would stay in the pack. A little preliminary research on the Internet told her what prices she could expect to get for these quilts, and that was all she could do at this point.

  As she arranged the quilts with sticky notes of estimated prices on them, she decided she would definitely have to get some sort of professional advice on quilt-making pretty quickly. Maybe someone from the Raging Ford craft club could help her. A quick call to her friend Mary Donegan, who was the leader of the club, told her it was a good idea to bring either pictures of some of the quilts or the quilts themselves for the club members to see. That way they could help her understand how each of the different patterns worked and she could sound knowledgeable to her customers. Mary also gave Laura the date for the next crafting club meeting. It wasn’t far off, and she advised Laura to wait so the whole group could weigh in on their experience with quilts and quilting.

  Hanging up the phone reminded her that it wasn’t just old cultures that were on her mind but also the history of the town of Raging Ford. Had they had a crafting club back in Samuel’s day?

  Samuel Rage. Aldous Munley. Cuinn Dowell. Three men with a vision and a plan to make that vision come true. They built a beautiful town, laid out in logical order, with artistic schools and an amazing library on the country road going out of the town proper, given droves of folks jobs and livelihoods in building a small hotel, restaurants, services such as plumbing and construction, and shops. Even the police station boasted attractive handiwork, with stone steps and decorative brass handrails.

  But it was one thing to think something happened and quite another to figure out the whole design of what really happened—and then prove it. The whole conspiracy could’ve just been in her head.

  It bothered her throughout the day, between customers, as she cleared the area in the shop for the quilts and then mounted the burning fireplace canvas behind where they would be, on a huge curved fireplace screen she had picked up at a flea market. She’d spray-painted the screen a glossy black so it would reflect light. From here, everyone in the store, regardless of where they stood, would be drawn to the fireplace and the quilts artfully arranged around it.

  Three tiny pot lights strategically placed accented the brightest looking of the flames. The lights were on a specially designed flicker unit, costing her half what she paid Harry Kovacs for a month’s rent, but the effect was startling and worth every penny. Plus, it could be used for a lot of different things, as holidays progressed throughout the year. As she worked and re-arranged her other stock, she realized that the three partners had each drawn a more than sufficient salary, according to town records. Everyone had benefited. How could anyone have been upset about that? There had to be much more to it than just not getting as much money as they wanted.

  And without a strong motive, how could it have led to such a cold-blooded plan of killing off Samuel Rage’s descendants as she suspected had happened? And if that wasn’t what happened, then what really happened to make the Rages vanish?

  Maybe there was no connection. Perhaps the clue was with Samuel. Had he made other, unknown enemies? Why? He had done so many selfless and awe-inspiring things for the town; it just didn’t make any sense. Or maybe she was all wrong and everything that had happened to the Rages was just bad luck or coincidence.

  Unfortunately, like her father, she didn’t believe in coincidences like that. Maybe that was why he had been putting together things he had discovered or thought about in that box.

  She realized she needed to go through her father’s notes again and she had to figure out what those items in the envelope meant.

  four

  A police vehicle drove past the shop drawing Laura’s eyes momentarily away from her customer the next morning. She hadn’t seen who was driving, but it made her think of Sergeant Connor Fitzpatrick. She finished the sale and thought about him some more, pulling her sweater more tightly. A chill wind swept through the shop as the door closed; perhaps more snow was on the way. Certainly she could smell the snow whenever she had been outside today. Those fresh clouds—that snowy air—wow! She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it.

  Connor had grown up next door to Laura, and the two of them had been inseparable partners in various antics until high school when Connor shifted his focus to football. He became a star tight end on the team with great promise of at least a college career in the sport, and Laura had spent her spare time trying to get his attention away from football. Nothing seemed to work and she had almost given up, when her biggest nightmare came with the murder of her parents.

  Then Great-aunt Rose swept her away to live in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., where Laura spent the next eleven years of her life, away from Connor and the life and friends she knew so well. Laura remembered the anguish of it all, a pain that never seemed to go away, just hit hard once in a while then got tucked back into the drawer in which she had learned to shove it so many times.

  Laura and Connor had decided they needed to spend more time catching up on the eleven years they’d been apart, discovering all the things they hadn’t shared. Thus far, in the past three months since her return, however, they hadn’t made much progress between Connor’s odd hours and Laura’s after-hours trips to flea markets and estate sales hunting for treasures she could sell in her shop for a fraction of their original value.

  She now dragged an antique, solid mahogany highboy next to the fire but away from its pretend flames. The highboy was a rare and valuable piece of solid mahogany furniture and something not often found these days; she was lucky to pick it up at an estate sale where everything had to go quickly as the relatives of the deceased owner either wanted to get rid of memories or what they mistakenly considered junk. She figured they also wanted their money quickly. She had only to polish it up a bit to bring out its beauty.

  On the other side of the artwork and filling in the rest of the space below the flames, she placed an overstuffed brocade armchair. Then she began arranging a couple of the best quilt
s in the drawers of the highboy, heaped and falling out, and several more on the armchair, all still in their plastic sheeting.

  On a nearby rack, she hung several of the others, leaving most of them, including the teal quilt, in the back room. She stood back to admire the work, then made some adjustments. Yeah, she needed something besides the armchair there. She’d have to keep her eyes open for something wider, perhaps a loveseat. The last one she had was sold right after Christmas, but there was no need to wait until the crafting club meeting to get some of the quilts out there.

  As she next straightened up the racks of clothing, the jangling doorbells caught her attention. Another customer? Nope. Harry Kovacs, self-proclaimed town leader, and inventor of Harry’s Rules, which had allowed Laura to ease back into her hometown, meeting old friends and neighbors a little at a time. It had worked. She hadn’t been grateful upon her arrival last fall, but she was now. She gave him a big smile; the yummy odors of hot, fresh pastries from his brother’s bakery came in the door with him.

  Harry set the box on the counter by the register.

  Laura opened it and gazed inside.

  “Want some coffee?” she asked. “I have a fresh pot.”

  “I was hoping you’d ask. I’ve got about thirty minutes to kill.”

  She dashed to the front door, locked it and turned the Closed sign outward, then turned to rejoin Harry at the counter, but he had already headed into the back room toward the kitchenette taking the box of bakery delights with him.

  Harry ran the barber shop next door, along with his wife, Beth, of forty-some years. Harry also owned the building in which Laura leased her shop and the apartment above. He and his brothers made up the Kovacs triplets and were considered by nearly everyone as the unofficial town council in Raging Ford.