“A lot of stuff,” Lucas said. He put a finger in the wicker sewing basket, pulled it out an inch. More spools, and the spools looked old to him. Collector spools? Which tripped off a thought. “Do you think these Armstrongs, would they have been classified as antiques?”
“No, not really,” Coombs said. “They were made in what, the 1930s? I don't think that's old enough to be an antique, but I really don't know. I don't know that much about the whole deal, except that Grandma got a lot of money from them, because of the curse thing.”
“The curse thing.”
“Yes. The quilts had curses sewn into them. They became… what?” She had to think about it for a second, then said, “I suppose they became feminist icons.”
Like this, she said: Grandma Coombs had once lived in a tiny house on Snelling Avenue. Her husband had died in the '70s, and she was living on half of a postal pension, the income from a modest IRA, and Social Security. She haunted estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales all over the Upper Midwest, buying cheap, reselling to antique stores in the Cities.
“She probably didn't make ten thousand dollars a year, after expenses, but she enjoyed it, and it helped,” Coombs said. Then she found the Armstrong quilts at an estate sale in northern Wisconsin. The quilts were brilliantly colored and well made. Two were crazy quilts, two were stars, one was a log-cabin, and the other was unique, now called “Canada Geese.”
None of that made them famous. They were famous, Coombs said, because the woman who made them, Sharon Armstrong, had been married to a drunken sex freak named Frank Armstrong who beat her, raped her, and abused the two children, one boy and one girl, all in the small and oblivious town of Carton, Wisconsin.
Frank Armstrong was eventually shot by his son, Bill, who then shot himself. Frank didn't die from the gunshot, although Bill did. The shootings brought out all the abuse stories, which were horrific, and after a trial, Frank was locked up in a state psychiatric hospital and died there twenty years later.
Sharon Armstrong and her daughter moved to Superior, where first the mother and then the daughter got jobs as cooks on the big interlake ore ships. Sharon died shortly after World War II. The daughter, Annabelle, lived, unmarried and childless, until 1995. When she died, her possessions were sold off to pay her credit-card debts.
“There were six quilts. I was in Germany when Grandma found them, and I only saw them a couple of times, because I was moving around a lot, but they were beautiful.
The thing is, when Grandma bought them, she also bought a scrapbook that had clippings about Frank Armstrong, and Sharon Armstrong, and what happened to them.
“When Grandma got home, she put the quilts away for a while. She was going to build racks, to stretch them, and then sell them at an art fair. She used to do that with old quilts and Red Wing pottery.
“When she got them out, she was stretching one, and she noticed that the stitching looked funny. When she looked really close, she saw that the stitches were letters, and when you figured them out, they were curses.”
“Curses,” Lucas said.
“Curses against Frank. They were harsh: they said stuff like 'Goddamn the man who sleeps beneath this quilt, may the devils pull out his bowels and burn them in front of his eyes; may they pour boiling lead in his ears for all eternity'… They went on, and on, and on, for like… hours. But they were also, kind of, poetic, in an ugly way.”
“Hmmm.” Lucas said. “Grandma sold them for what?”
“I don't know, exactly. Mom might. But enough that she could sell her old house and buy this one.”
“All this quilt stuff ties to Connie Bucher.”
“Yeah. There are thousands of quilt groups all over the country. They're like rings, and a lot of the women belong to two rings. Or even three. So there are all these connections. You can be a quilter on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and you need to go to Los Angeles for something, so you call a friend, and the friend calls a friend, and the next thing you know, somebody's calling you from Los Angeles, ready to help out. The connections are really amazing.”
“They wouldn't be mostly Democrats, would they?” Lucas asked.
“Well… I suppose. Why?”
“Nothing. But: your grandma was connected to Bucher. And there was another woman killed. Do you have a name?”
“Better than that. I have a newspaper story.”
Lucas didn't want to sit anywhere in the room where the elderly Coombs had died, in case it became necessary to tear it apart. He took Gabriella Coombs and the clipping into the kitchen, turned on the light.
“Ah, God,” Coombs stepped back, clutched at his arm.
“What?” Then he saw the cockroaches scuttling for cover. A half dozen of them had been perched on a cookie sheet on the stove. He could still see faint grease rings from a dozen or so cookies, and the grease had brought out the bugs.
“I've gotta get my mom and clean this place up,” Gabriella said. “Once you get the bugs established, they're impossible to get rid of. We should call an exterminator.
How long does it take the crime-scene people to finish?”
“Depends on the house and what they're looking for,” Lucas said.
“I think they're pretty much done here, but they'll probably wait until there's a ruling on the death.”
“You think I could wash the dishes?” she asked.
“You could call and ask. Tell them about the bugs.”
They sat at the kitchen table, and Lucas took the newspaper clip. It was printed on standard typing paper, taken from a website. The clip was the top half of the front page in the Chippewa Falls Post, the text running under a large headline, Chippewa Heiress Murdered.
A noted Chippewa Falls art collector and heir to the Thune brewing fortune was found shot to death in her home Wednesday morning by relatives, a Chippewa Falls police spokesman said Wednesday afternoon.
The body of Claire Donaldson, 72, was discovered in the kitchen of her West Hill mansion by her sister, Margaret Donaldson Booth, and Mrs. Booth's husband, Landford Booth, of Eau Claire.
Mrs. Donaldson's secretary, Amity Anderson, who lives in an apartment in Mrs. Donaldson's home, was in Chicago on business for Mrs. Donaldson, police said. When she was unable to reach Mrs. Donaldson by telephone on Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning, Anderson called the Booths, who went to Donaldson's home and found her body.
Police said they have several leads in the case.
“Claire Donaldson was brilliant and kind, and that this should happen to her is a tragedy for all of Chippewa Falls,” said the Rev. Carl Hoffer, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Chippewa Falls, and a longtime friend of Mrs. Donaldson…
Lucas read through the clip, which was long on history and short on crime detail; no matter, he could get the details from the Chippewa cops. But, he thought, if you changed the name and the murder weapon, the news story of Claire Donaldson's death could just as easily have been the story of Constance Bucher's murder.
“ When we get back to the office, I'll want a complete statement,” he told Coombs.
“I'll get a guy to take it from you. We'll need a detailed description of that music box. This could get complicated.”
“God. I wasn't sure you were going to believe me,”Coombs said. “About Grandma being murdered.”
“She probably wasn't-but there's a chance that she was,” Lucas said. “The idea that somebody hit her with that ball… That would take some thought, some knowledge of the house.”
“And a serious psychosis,” Coombs said.
“And that. But it's possible.”
“On the TV shows, the cops never believe the edgy counterculture person the first time she tells them something,” Coombs said. “Two or three people usually have to get killed first.”
“That's TV,” Lucas said.
“But you have to admit that cops are prejudiced against us,” she said.
“Hey” Lucas said. “I know a guy who walks around in hundred-degree heat in a black hoodie because he's always freezing because he smokes crack all day, supports himself with burglary, and at night he spray-paints glow-in-the-dark archangels on boxcars so he can send Christ's good news to the world. He's an edgy counterculture person.