Stitches in Time, page 27
“Who died—as a result of the curse?” Kara laughed shortly. “Her descendants neglected to mention that Mary Elizabeth included black magic among her other talents. I guess I will have a drink. This is crazy.”
“No crazier than the other things we’ve been thinking,” Rachel pointed out. “Curses can kill, you know, if the intended victim believes in them.”
Kara stepped carefully over the snoring bundle at her feet. Selecting a bottle from the shelf, she splashed liquid into a glass and turned to look at Rachel with new respect. “By George, you’re right. I’ve heard of cases like that. Want some?” She held up her glass.
“No, thanks.” Rachel was intent on her theory. “The literature of folklore is full of such cases; there was one in the United States less than fifty years ago, and I’ll bet it still happens in some areas and subcultures, even in so-called civilized countries. People just don’t talk about it or report it, for fear of being jeered at.
“We have to start with the assumption that Mary Elizabeth was the maker of the quilt. She sure as hell didn’t make it for herself, it was designed to cause harm. If the recipient realized what it meant—if Mary Elizabeth told her—if she believed—”
“And Mary Elizabeth took the quilt back, or was given it back by the grieving family, after the girl died?”
“The girl may not have lived long enough to receive it. Knowledge of Mary Elizabeth’s intent could be enough. If she believed.”
Kara came back to her chair. “I can’t think offhand of any other explanation that fits the facts,” she admitted. “But if it’s true, we’re in deep trouble. It’s going to be difficult enough learning more about Mary Elizabeth. Locating an unknown, hypothetical friend—”
“But that’s not the point,” Rachel said eagerly. “Don’t you see—”
The incarcerated dogs interrupted her, hurling themselves against the closed door and howling in a dismally muffled fashion that sounded like wolves on the tundras. Alexander got up and creaked toward the door. Rachel couldn’t decide whether the sound came from his joints or his mouth.
Adam came in, accompanied by a blast of icy air. “Close the door,” Kara ordered.
Adam glanced down at the unseemly object wrapped around his right ankle. “You’ll have to call off your dog first. He’s slobbering all over my sock and I can’t move without stepping on him.”
Kara detached Alexander and put him down on the floor. His carnivorous instincts satisfied, he wandered off, grumbling happily to himself and running into pieces of furniture. Adam kicked the door shut and deposited two brown paper bags on the table. “I got Chinese. Figured you’d be too busy to cook.”
“It was a kindly thought,” Kara said. “Have I mentioned you look much better without the beard?”
“I thought you hadn’t noticed,” Adam said shyly. “Thank you. I appreciate the comment all the more because nobody else has bothered to compliment me on my good looks or acknowledged my noble sacrifice. I could have used some protection tonight. My face is a solid block of ice.”
It looked like a solid block of cherry ice cream. Only prolonged exposure to the cold could have produced such a shade. “Where have you been?” Rachel asked curiously.
Adam shed a couple of sweaters and began unloading white cartons. “Around and about, hither and yon, to and fro, up and down the town.”
“Are we going to tell him?” Kara asked.
“If he’s going to be mysterious, I don’t see why we should confide in him.”
Adam added plates and silverware to the accumulation on the table and gestured hospitably. “Pull up your chairs, ladies. Dinner is served. I’m not being mysterious, only modest. I’m sure your accomplishments far exceed mine and that you will be kind enough to share them with me.”
“We may as well,” Rachel said. “Unlikely though it seems, he may have something to contribute.”
Adam gave her an amiable grin and helped himself to chow mein.
He was sufficiently intrigued by their theory to stop eating for a full thirty seconds. “That’s very ingenious. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. Well, yes, I do know why I didn’t think of it. Maybe Pat can dig up some more information in Charlottesville. He said he’d probably have to stay overnight, that he’d call tonight if—”
“He’s wasting his time,” Rachel said flatly. “That’s what I was about to say to Kara just before you got here, Adam. This genealogical and historical research is all very well, but it takes forever and there’s no guarantee that it will turn up anything useful, especially when there’s so little to go on. We have to try another method.”
In his haste to reply, Adam stopped chewing and swallowed too abruptly. His face turned purple. “No! Dammit, Rachel, if you’re considering hypnosis—”
“Why not?” Kara asked. “It worked before. Sara told me—”
“It’s too dangerous!” Adam got his breath under control. “Shut up, both of you, and listen to me. The popular belief that people can’t lie under hypnosis is wrong. They lie all the time. Have you ever heard of a process called confabulation?”
“Yes,” said Rachel.
“Oh.” Momentarily deflated, Adam rallied. “I’m not talking about the conventional meaning of the word—a cozy, informal chat. Like this one,” he added sarcastically.
“My goodness but you’re in a fierce mood,” Kara remarked. “You sound like Pat. If that’s not what it means, then I don’t know what you’re talking about. Show off to me.”
“It’s what happens when an imaginative, cooperative subject is questioned, under hypnosis or not. He invents answers—not consciously, he really believes what he’s saying, but the answers are tailored to fit his preconceptions or the expectations of the questioner, as he conceives them to be. We’re all biased, we’d feed her cues without meaning to, and we couldn’t trust any information we might get from her.”
“That’s right,” Rachel said quietly. “I have certain preconceptions of my own. They would undoubtedly color my responses to questions.”
“Not to mention the fact that she tends to go into fits whenever—” Adam broke off. “What preconceptions?”
“I don’t want to talk about them. They would prejudice you, and right now I don’t know whether my impressions are genuine or—or self-confabulation.” She planted both elbows on the table and leaned forward, intent on convincing them. “There’s another way of going at this, the same method Kara and I were using this evening. We don’t need to know names and dates. We know that the person for whom the quilt was made was a woman—a bride. We know the person who made it—another woman, obviously—wanted to hurt the first woman, who was almost certainly a close friend, or she wouldn’t have rated such an extravagant gift. Why did Woman A hate Woman B?”
Kara shrugged. “Jealousy, of course. A was in love with B’s fiancé. She wanted him, and she had lost him.”
“Oh, come on,” Adam exclaimed. “That’s the wildest leap of logic I have ever heard, and demeaning besides. I thought you two considered yourselves feminists.”
“There weren’t many feminists in the middle of the nineteenth century,” Rachel said dryly. “What else would two women of that period compete for, except a man and everything that went with him—love, security, marriage? You’re overlooking the most important confirmatory evidence, Adam. For the past week I’ve tried not once but several times to harm Cheryl. Lusting after her husband was my own fault…” She caught Kara’s watchful eye and smiled faintly. “My own idea. It wasn’t very nice but it was understandable; I didn’t need any encouragement from the World Beyond to develop a normal if rather silly crush. But to believe I could ‘get’ Tony by destroying his wife—a woman who’s been kind to me, whom I admire and respect—I’d have to be totally insane! Or…”
“Overshadowed.” Adam’s voice was carefully neutral.
“Influenced,” Rachel corrected. “The term overshadowed, and Pat’s theory, are based on his own preconceptions. Didn’t that woman Kara mentioned say she had sewed her soul into her quilt? Some psychics believe strong emotions survive the person who felt them, that they can permeate the very fabric of a house. Why not the fabric of a dress or a quilt? It might not have affected me if I hadn’t been in a similar if less violent emotional state.”
“Huh.” Adam pushed his plate away and pondered for a moment. Then he said in an aggrieved voice, “Women don’t think the way men do.”
“Don’t be a sore loser,” Kara said. “You know she’s right.”
“Another example of female logic,” Adam mumbled. “I wasn’t criticizing,” he added quickly. “I was just wishing there wasn’t this communication gap between the sexes. You two assumed from the first that sexual jealousy was the motive behind the creation of the quilt? Why didn’t you say so?”
Rachel shrugged. “It was so obvious. There was no reason to spell it out, it should have been equally obvious to you.”
“Huh. Well, you may be right at that. In fact, you have opened up a new and fascinating avenue of speculative thought. Why should Western rationalism be the best method of approaching a problem? We need fresh insights, different approaches, from women and other minority—”
He flinched back as a heavy object landed on the table, spilling cartons right and left and spraying him with soy sauce. “So I apologize. You didn’t have to throw the cat at me.”
Figgin had leaped from the top of the refrigerator, cannily avoiding Alexander, who was still looking for something to bite. One foot planted in a bowl of rice, he began gobbling sweet and sour pork, including the peppers.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kara said. “It’s impossible to carry on a sane conversation in this house! Get him off the table, Adam.”
The removal was not accomplished without more spillage and considerable complaint from Figgin. Mumbling angrily, he retreated to the refrigerator and began licking his paws while Adam dealt with the mess on the table.
“We were through eating anyway,” he said. “Not that I have anything against your dog, Kara, but maybe you ought to put him to bed. I can’t think with cats flying around the room and dogs having hysterics in the pantry.”
Kara graciously admitted that the suggestion had some merit. She carried Alexander off. After order had been restored and the dogs released from the pantry, Adam said, “I see where you guys are heading, and I think you may be on the right track.”
“You still don’t get it,” Rachel informed him. “There is no right track. That’s the trouble with Western rational thought—which was, let me point out, defined by men. You assume there’s only one way of proceeding and that all other ways are wrong. And you call yourself an anthropologist! Other cultures do things differently, and who are you to say they are mistaken?”
Adam grinned at her. “You ought to write a book. Or possibly a dissertation. Let’s get down to specifics. You’ve found a motive and an explanation for the phenomenon, or at least a working hypothesis that makes as much sense as Pat’s. So what do you propose to do about it?”
Kara’s lips parted. Before she could speak, Rachel said, “He’s catching on. That’s the point, Adam. We may never know the name or the life story of the woman who began this—this disaster. We may not need that information. There are other, more direct ways of counteracting the effect. And I’m not talking about hypnosis.”
“No,” Adam said, no longer amused. “You’re talking about black magic.”
twelve
Adam was trying hard, but old ingrained habits weren’t easy to overcome. He continued to argue, with himself as much as with Rachel, as they wended their way to the workroom.
“Witchcraft. The Old Religion. Curses and spells and…All right, okay, I don’t know as much about the subject as you and Pat do, but…What’s that?”
“A mask,” Kara said. “Put it on. And these gloves.”
“And,” Rachel added, “don’t bother pointing out that she is using modern rational methods of dealing with an irrational theory. The contamination may be purely mental—psychic, rather—but there could be a physical source. I think there is. That’s why I want to have a closer look at the quilt—not the patterns but the actual physical fabric of it.”
The fabric had stopped dripping, but it was still waterlogged and heavy. Rachel bent over to examine one of the corner squares. Then she took a firm grip on the edges and looked at Kara.
“I’m going to tear it,” she said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Ten bucks?” Kara smiled wryly. “Do what you have to do.”
Rachel gave the fabric a sharp yank. Transferring her grip to other parts of the cloth, she pulled and tugged and pressed until the corner section was almost as flat as it had been before Mrs. Wilson’s disastrous attempt at cleaning. Heat had shrunk not the fabric but the threads that held it together. Already weakened, they snapped instead of stretching, leaving gaps in the even lines of quilting and freeing the shaped pieces of the appliquéd picture from the backing. An involuntary groan came from Kara.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel murmured.
“It was ruined anyway. What are you looking for?” Kara asked, watching Rachel insert a finger under a loosened piece of fabric.
“Confirming a hypothesis.” Before Kara could protest, Rachel stripped off the rubber glove. “Don’t worry, I’ve already caught it—whatever it is—and I need bare hands for this. If what I expect to find is here, it is very small.”
Turning to Adam, who was watching in open-mouthed fascination, she explained, “See the way the front columns of the little temple are raised, so that they look three dimensional, closer to the viewer than the columns in back? That’s what they call trapunto—inserting cord or cotton under the fabric. Like this.” Ruthlessly she ripped out the remaining threads and extracted the stuffing material. It retained its columnar shape, approximately two inches long and half an inch wide, until Rachel pulled it apart.
“Cotton,” Kara said. “Raw cotton, straight from the fields. Typical of southern quilts of that period. Stained, like the quilt. What are you looking for?”
“I’m beginning to get an idea,” Adam said in a stifled voice. “You won’t find it in an architectural element, Rachel. Try this.”
His gloved finger jabbed at the figure of the veiled rider.
Rachel turned to look at him. He had combed his hair back from his forehead, and his eyes, wide-set under curving dark brows, looked larger, the pupils bright greenish-brown against the clear white around them. His nose was wrinkled, as if he had smelled something unpleasant.
“You’re right,” she said. Picking up a pair of sharp scissors, she clipped the threads that held the rider’s bodice to the cloth.
The three-dimensional effect was modest and subtle; only a small amount of stuffing had been used. It was not cotton. With a cry Rachel dropped the bundle of crushed threads.
“Hair!”
“Human hair,” Adam corrected. Gloved fingers clumsy, he plucked at the intertwined mass until he separated a single strand. “It’s too fine to be horsehair. And it is—was—blond.”
White-faced, Rachel wiped her fingers on her shirt. She had expected something of the sort, but had not anticipated it would take this precise form. Hair as brittle and dead as the bones of the woman from whose head it had come, hair that had once been sleek and shining, springing back under the strokes of the brush, clinging to the fingers…
She’d brush and play with it, curling the ends around her fingers, drawing it over her shoulders and then throwing it back, turning in front of the mirror so she could see it hanging down her back, clear to the waist. Fine hairs caught in the brush like a golden net, a net to bind her soul…
“…Classic sympathetic magic,” Adam said. “Hair and other body parts retain the identity, the soul imprint, of the person to whom they belonged. Strange, isn’t it, that modern science has arrived at a similar conclusion? DNA—those tiny scraps of genetic material, unique to each individual, complete in each strand of hair and drop of blood…”
“Don’t get philosophical on me,” Kara said sharply. “Do you mean this was her hair—the woman for whom the quilt was made?”
“I’d bet money on it,” Adam said. “And I’m not a betting man. You’ve heard about the dolls made by magicians for the purpose of injuring the person they represented? They would put hair, fingernail clippings, any body parts they could get, into the doll in order to make the connection stronger. Stick a pin in the doll and the person feels pain in the corresponding area of his body. Burn or bury or destroy the doll…Well, you get the idea. She didn’t make a doll. She made this.”
“The woman on the horse represents the recipient?”
“In the magical sense, the pictured rider was the woman. Blinded and under attack.” Adam’s eyes shone. He had forgotten his disgust in fascination. “I’ve read about it, but this is the first time I’ve seen an actual example. Can I borrow the scissors?”
He took them from Rachel’s unresisting hand. “What do you think? The bleeding hearts? Symbolic, but then the whole thing is a matter of symbols.”
“They aren’t raised,” Rachel murmured. “Try the bluebirds’ wings.”
Each wing contained, amid the cotton, a tiny scrap of translucent hornlike substance. “There are your fingernail clippings,” Adam breathed. “Let’s see what else we’ve got.”
Some of the raised sections held nothing, at least nothing they could identify. The cord under a depiction of a golden ring—the break in its surface so small it could only be seen with a magnifying glass—proved to be a fine strand of braided hair. The shaped trunk of a stately oak tree, around which a rose twined coyly, yielded a tiny scrap of cloth bearing a dark stain, and the dried, flaking body of some sort of insect.
“Pricked herself with a needle, maybe?” Adam inquired, putting the scrap carefully into an envelope Kara had provided. “Can’t identify the bug; I guess it was supposed to multiply and chew out the innards of the tree.”
“That’s enough,” Kara said. She looked sick.
