Cheryl sat back on her heels. “What’s the matter with you two? It’s just old linens.” Before Rachel could stop her, she pulled a crumpled bundle out of the bag.

  “People bring things like this in all the time,” she went on cheerfully. “Usually it’s junk when it arrives in a trash bag, but you never know…Good gosh. Look at this.”

  The fabric she lifted between her hands was yellowed with age and badly wrinkled, but now Rachel saw the pattern Cheryl’s better-educated eye had spotted. Delicate precise stitches shaped an elaborate tracery of intertwined scrolls.

  “It’s a quilt.” Cheryl laid the fabric carefully out on the floor, smoothing the crumpled folds. “White work, trapunto, hand-stitched—though the stitching is so fine it looks machine-made. Look at the detail!”

  The pattern covered the entire surface of the quilt, which was large enough for a double bed, in an intricate design of formalized flower and leaf shapes, scrolls and overlapping feathers. Certain elements had been raised by inserting cord or bits of cotton under the fabric of the top—the process called trapunto—so that it resembled low bas-relief. It was an astonishing piece of work and ordinarily Rachel would have been as rapt with admiration as Cheryl. But her irrational sense of something wrong had not diminished. If anything, it had grown stronger.

  “Who brought this?” Cheryl demanded.

  “Somebody you wouldn’t want to meet,” Tony said. His hands were clenched on the arms of the chair and Rachel sensed the frustration that filled him. If he had been able to move easily he’d have pushed his wife away and investigated the bag himself. “Hold it a minute, Cheryl,” he continued. “It’s probably all right. But Rachel just had a nasty encounter with the guy who left this—at least I assume it was he who left it—and I’d just as soon make sure there’s nothing but old clothes inside.”

  He described the incident, making light of it and without mentioning his disastrous attempt at pursuit.

  Cheryl jumped up, her eyes fixed on Jerry. “Oh, my God. A bomb?”

  Tony laughed. “Nothing like that, honey. I was thinking more along the lines of something harmless but unpleasant, like the donor. I wonder…Is that old quilt worth money?”

  “Once it’s been cleaned, several thousand dollars.”

  “That much?”

  “Maybe more.” Torn between caution and fascination, Cheryl leaned closer to the quilt. “It’s over a hundred years old and in excellent condition. The fabric is cotton and I don’t see any bad stains. With careful cleaning it will be as good as new. Actually, I couldn’t begin to put a price on it. We’ve only had one other of this type and it wasn’t nearly as fine. Mid-nineteenth century at a guess.”

  “Hmmm.” Tony stroked the piratical mustache framing his mouth.

  “You think he stole it?” Rachel asked.

  “The circumstances are suspicious, wouldn’t you say? Trash bags have been a blessing to modern thieves. They’re strong, you can cram a lot of stuff into them, and they are a lot less conspicuous than boxes or cartons. He had something on his shabby little conscience or he wouldn’t have bolted when he recognized a cop. Let’s see what else is in there. Carefully, babe; take hold of the bottom and spill it out.”

  Rachel’s skin prickled as she watched Cheryl move slowly backward, tipping the contents of the bag out onto the floor. When it was empty she tossed it aside and straightened with a long breath of relief.

  “No bomb. That was silly of me, wasn’t it?”

  “Not these days,” Tony said. “You never know what people will think up next. So what have you got?”

  There were two more bundles. At first glance they appeared to be the same white on white, but when Cheryl unfolded one of them a pattern of colored shapes was visible on the inner surface.

  “Carolina Rose.” Now relieved of her apprehension, Cheryl knelt to squint at the quilt. “At least I think that’s what it is; I’ve never seen this particular variation. Patchwork, with some appliqué and the same exquisite quilting. Look at the way she uses color! Every flower is a different shade, but they blend perfectly.”

  Jerry came over to see what was going on and Rachel picked him up in time to keep him from walking across the quilt. He wriggled, trying to free himself.

  “He’s too heavy for you,” Tony said. “Put him down before he kicks you—quite unintentionally. Jerry, how about another cookie?”

  Cheryl was too preoccupied to comment on this flagrant violation of her rules. “Gosh, this is gorgeous. I’ll bet it was made by the same woman. The pattern was popular during the mid-nineteenth century and the workmanship is almost as fine as the white quilt.”

  She went on crooning and commenting, but Rachel had stopped listening. There was one more bundle on the floor. The thief—the alleged thief—had crammed the quilts roughly into the bag. The third, on the bottom, had suffered most from careless handling and the weight of others on top of it. The fabric was filthy, covered with a peculiarly uniform grayish film. It didn’t appear to be the normal yellowing of old linen, or ordinary dirt, and it certainly couldn’t have been the original color of the cloth. No housewife would have chosen that nasty shade, even for backing.

  Rachel spread it out on the floor and turned it over. Under the blurring gray film she saw colors and shapes—not the repetitive geometric shapes of patchwork, something quite different. Something wrong…She started violently when she heard Cheryl’s voice.

  “It’s an album quilt, I guess. Each block has a different pattern—picture, rather, in appliqué. Is this a horse, with a rider and…a dog? It’s so filthy I can’t make out details. What a shame it’s in such poor condition. Those stains probably won’t come out.”

  Normally Rachel wouldn’t have ventured to disagree. “They aren’t stains. Look.” Delicately, with one fingernail, she scraped at the gray film. It dissolved into a flaky powder. Bending closer, she blew gently at the spot. “I can get it clean, I’m sure I can. I’ll try brushing it first, and then—”

  “The hand vacuum.” Cheryl peered at the area Rachel had cleaned. “Look at those minuscule stitches. I wonder how it got so dirty; the others aren’t like that. I’ve never seen anything quite—”

  She put out her hand, and then hesitated, her fingertip, like that of God in the Michelangelo painting, not quite touching the fabric. “I’ll leave it to you, then.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be careful, I promise. I know how to do it, you showed me.”

  “Just a minute,” Tony said. He had one arm around Jerry, who was dribbling crumbs all over his lap. “Aren’t you girls forgetting something? That may not be stolen property, but it certainly doesn’t belong to you.”

  A dimple appeared at the corner of Cheryl’s mouth. Rachel had seen this indentation before; it wasn’t produced by laughter but by tightening lips. “Flotsam,” she said. “Or is it jetsam?”

  “Neither,” said her husband. He was also familiar with that particular dimple.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I was kidding,” Cheryl snapped. “Although I’ll bet there’s some law that would support my argument. If unknown people dump things on other people’s front porches—”

  “We know who left it.”

  “No, we don’t. That’s just your guess.”

  “Not a guess. A reasonable hypothesis.”

  Rachel had never heard him raise his voice to anyone except his brother-in-law, in the course of one of their friendly arguments. But she knew the signs of rising temper—the way his eyebrows drew together, the soft, slightly rasping tone, the way his fingers tugged at the end of his mustache.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do with the stuff?” Cheryl demanded. “I’m not running a free storage locker.”

  “Would you buy it?”

  “If we could agree on a fair price. I’ve never cheated anybody in my life.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know.” Cheryl moderated her voice. Jerry was looking uneasily from her to his father. She smiled at him. “Daddy and I are joking, Jerry.”

  Jerry went straight to the point. “Daddy will find the bad guy,” he said confidently. “That’s what Daddy does.”

  Tony’s face relaxed. “Right, son. Daddy will find the bad guy and ask him very politely where he got the things.”

  “And then Mommy will buy them,” Cheryl added. “Jerry, what a good idea. You are a very smart young man.”

  “Then can I have another cookie?”

  Cheryl burst out laughing and hugged both of them.

  Slowly and carefully, eyes averted, Rachel folded the quilt.

  two

  The black plastic bag Rachel was carrying when she left the shop that afternoon wasn’t the trash bag. Tony had taken possession of that one after Rachel had folded the quilts neatly into a carton. From the careful way he handled it she assumed he meant to have it examined for fingerprints, though it didn’t seem likely an identifiable print could have survived Cheryl’s two-handed grip.

  Rachel’s bag held less intriguing items—a motley collection of linens from box-lots bought at auctions and yard sales that had failed to meet Cheryl’s high standards. Kara had superb taste, but she was an auction freak and couldn’t resist a bargain. Usually there would be one or two items in the collection that justified the price she had paid; she and Cheryl sold the rest to other dealers. Vintage fabrics, even fragments, were in demand by quilt makers, doll collectors and craftspeople.

  Joe, the eldest of Cheryl’s three children, arrived home from school in time to help Rachel carry the bag to her car. He wasn’t Tony’s son—Cheryl’s first husband had died when Joe was four—but Tony treated him like his own, and Joe adored his stepfather, though of course he would never have been unmanly enough to say so. He was twelve, a skinny towhead with an enormous appetite and a serious view of the world. As he polished off two sandwiches and a glass of milk, he lectured Rachel and his mother about recycling and the wickedness of using plastic trash bags.

  Cheryl had obviously heard it before. Her response was automatic. “I only use the biodegradable kind, honey, you know that. Rachel, don’t bother dropping those scraps off tonight. Georgetown is so far out of your way, and it’s later than I thought; the traffic will be terrible. Kara doesn’t need the things right away.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “It will be dark by the time you get home,” Cheryl persisted. “If you get home. Did you buy a new tire like I told you to? There wasn’t a speck of tread on—”

  “For gosh sakes, Mom!” Joe rolled his eyes. “She’ll be even later if you don’t shut…if you don’t stop talking.”

  “Just promise you’ll go straight home,” Cheryl said anxiously. “Maybe you should spend the night. It looks like snow.”

  “Mo-om!”

  “I’ll take it to Kara tomorrow morning,” Rachel said, seeing that Joe was about to violate the rules about being rude to his mother and/or using profanity in the presence of “ladies.” Tony was strict about such things, and Joe tried to conform. He did pretty well; if Rachel hadn’t happened to overhear him talking to a buddy on the telephone, she’d have feared he was being repressed.

  “Drive carefully,” Cheryl called after them.

  “She always says that,” Joe muttered. “Even to Dad. Like, he doesn’t know how to drive?”

  Rachel laughed and gave him a man-to-man slap on the back. “Thanks, Joe. Take care…I mean, so long.”

  It was later than Rachel had realized, and traffic was already heavy. Washington’s rush hour starts at four P.M.; the suburban areas between Leesburg and the Capital Beltway had grown too fast for the roads that serviced them, and the Beltway itself was rapidly becoming notorious. Nervous drivers would go miles out of their way to avoid it, and there were legends about hapless tourists who had circled the city for days before they were able to exit. Traffic was no worse than usual that evening; it was about the same, bumper-to-bumper, and moving in fits and starts.

  Rachel was used to it, but for some reason it got on her nerves that evening. She knew the reason, though. That incident had unnerved her, not only because encounters with slimy people are unpleasant, but because the scenario had all the elements of a banal romance novel: the leering villain, the wounded hero coming to the rescue.

  The flare of brightening lights caught her eye, and she slammed on her brakes. An accident ahead? No; just the usual mess at the 270 interchange. Her neck muscles ached with tension. Spots of moisture appeared on the windshield. Great, she thought sourly. Washington drivers go completely to pieces when it rains. At least she wouldn’t have to drive all the way through the city into Georgetown and all the way back to College Park. At that time of day it would have added an additional two hours to the trip. Cheryl was so considerate, always thinking of other people, offering help without having to be asked. Not that her mothering instincts couldn’t drive a person crazy sometimes…

  “Bitch,” Rachel said, softly and savagely. She was referring to herself, not to Cheryl, and she sometimes wished she could cultivate the self-deception that allows many people to delude themselves about their real motives. No such comfort was available to her; she was clearly, painfully aware of how indefensible her feelings were. She couldn’t conquer them, they were as basic and ungovernable as hunger, but at least she had had the decency to conceal them.

  Cheryl didn’t know—thank God she didn’t know—why the idea of staying overnight was so distasteful. Rachel had spent the night a few times before Tony came home, babysitting (though that word was never used in Joe’s hearing) so Cheryl could stay late at the hospital. She hadn’t done it since, despite Cheryl’s frequent offers. Imagining them together was bad enough without actually seeing it.

  When had it happened? The time she had tripped over a teddy bear callously abandoned on the steps, and toppled into his arms? He had only held her for a moment before setting her on her feet and remarking, with a rueful grin, “If I’ve told Jerry once I’ve told him a hundred times not to leave his toys lying around. Lucky for Cheryl I arrived at the stragetic moment; you could have sued her for a hefty sum.”

  Or the time her car wouldn’t start and he had insisted on driving her to the mall to buy a new battery after he had diagnosed the old one as beyond repair. He had helped her install it too. Cheryl must have told him she didn’t have much money.

  Or just the first time she had set eyes on him, arriving home in mid-morning after a long and obviously unpleasant night on the job. Despite the fatigue that lined his face, he was certainly the handsomest man she had ever seen—fifties’ film-star handsome, the classic stereotype of the Latin lover of the old movies. But it hadn’t been his looks, it had been his manner, the way he smiled at Cheryl, the tenderness with which he held his little boy…

  And then there was Phil. Their relationship had gone sour so fast that its abrupt, ugly ending had left her groping for someone, something, to take…not Phil’s place but the place she had hoped he would occupy. She had been trying to fill that place for several years, but in the other cases she had had sense enough to realize it wasn’t going to work before she became intimately involved.

  She had thought Phil would be different, but in the end it had been she who told him it was over. That was when things got ugly. His reaction had dealt the final blow to her infatuation. He wasn’t hurt, he was furious—that she had dismissed him before he could walk out on her.

  Tony was all the things she had wanted Phil to be, all the things she had deluded herself into believing that he was. Only one little problem there. Tony wasn’t available.

  When she got home the house was dark, not a light showing. She had shared the house with three other graduate students. Now that Phil had moved out there were only two, and both of them had gone home for the holidays. Rachel wasn’t worried about being alone, but she could have kicked herself for failing to leave a few lights burning. It got dark so early these winter days and the house was on a side street, several blocks from the commercial strip of Route 1.

  She opened the door and turned on the lights, including the one on the porch, and trudged wearily back to the car to get the bag of linens. This wasn’t a particularly bad neighborhood, but no neighborhoods in and around big cities were free of crime and she didn’t want to risk losing something that wasn’t hers. The bag weighed a ton. Or maybe she was just tired.

  Too tired, at any rate, to tackle the pile of reference books and notes on her desk. She hadn’t made much progress on the dissertation these past weeks; she’d been too busy and too preoccupied to concentrate. Too tired to cook, too. Not that she needed to; Cheryl forced enough food on her during working hours to make a healthy dinner unnecessary. Nibbling on crackers and cheese, she decided to have a look at the discarded linens. That was research, of a sort.

  There wasn’t much of interest in the bag, though. The quilts were late in date, probably from the 1920s; Rachel had learned to recognize the cheap but cheerful cotton prints of that era. They would not rate as vintage classics even if they hadn’t been torn and stained. She scraped at one spot with her fingernail. This time the only thing that flaked was the fabric itself; the disfiguring substance appeared to be rust, and it couldn’t be removed without destroying the cloth. Perhaps one of the crafty types, as Kara called them, could recycle the unstained portions into a pillow or a stuffed toy.

  Seeing the rich shine of black satin in the pile, she pulled it out. Her eye for vintage fabric had improved; this was heavy silk, the genuine article, not a modern synthetic, and it appeared to be a blouse—a waist, she corrected herself—with the leg-o’-mutton sleeves and high netted collar of the past century. When she held it up she understood why Cheryl had discarded it. The lace, fine as cobwebs, that cascaded down the front had turned brown and brittle and the underarm portions had rotted out—no way of repairing that damage, the armholes were usually too tight anyway—and all down the back…The stain appeared to be the same color as the black fabric, but it was stiff and hard. Higher up, just below the shoulder, gaped a gash that might have been made by a sharp knife.

 

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