Chapter 19 of 19A Place Kept Open

Friday's inventory deadline was the whole of it now. If Genevieve Martel signed the estate papers as they stood, the quilt in Elspeth's studio in Seneca Quay became one more asset on a list, and Beatrice Cole's offer for the studio contents was sitting on Arthur Vance's desk. Genna had spent Wednesday evening at the village hall watching Mayor Franklin Croft fasten his nephew's name to a scholarship plaque. Thursday morning she woke with nothing new to read and a growing suspicion that she had been reading the wrong thing.

She carried her coffee into the studio at 12 Elm Street, took the story quilt off its rod, and laid it along the maple table where Elspeth had done her basting. The furnace ticked in the basement. Outside, lake fog pressed the glass and the last maples on Elm Street had gone to rust. Genna pulled on her cotton gloves and swung the work lamp over the quilt.

Mabel Henderson knocked at the kitchen door at nine with the mail in one hand and a coffee cake in the other.

"You look like you slept in your clothes," Mabel said.

"I slept on the couch. There's a difference."

"There isn't." Mabel set the tin on the counter and peeled back the foil. "Bills and a seed catalog. Spring bulbs, already. Somebody at that company is an optimist."

"Leave them on the counter."

"Have you signed Arthur's inventory yet?"

"It's due Friday."

"And Beatrice Cole's offer sits on his desk while you sort thread." Mabel looked past her into the studio.

"You're back at that hole," she said.

"It isn't a hole." Genna turned the quilt face down on the maple table. "Come here and look at the back of it a minute."

Mabel came as far as the doorway. "I see cloth. I see stitches. I see a woman with better things to do before noon."

"Look at the edge of the blank panel. Every seam in this quilt is single thread. That one is doubled, and it's stitched down twice."

"So she reinforced it. It's the part she never got to. Half the town has stood in that doorway and said so." Mabel pulled her collar up against the draft. "Louise Brennan asked me whether you'd let the historical society hang it for Founder's Day. I told her I'd ask you."

"Tell her not yet."

"I'll tell her no," Mabel said, and let the storm door close on the sentence.

The habit of her trade was to read a quilt from the back first: the front is what the maker wanted the world to see, and the back is where she left the evidence of her hands. Genna started at the lower left corner and walked her fingertips along the seam allowances, reading how the fabric had been pressed, how the edges had been turned, how the thread ends had been buried instead of left to dangle.

Every block was neat and finished. The diner, the bandstand, the marina, the crossing at the stone bridge — all appliquéd and whipped down, and the quilting that held top, batting, and backing together ran in rows as even as ruled lines.

Then she reached the empty panel, and stopped.

From the front, the blank space ran low and left of center, roughly the size of a folded newspaper. From the back it read differently. She slid a strip of white card behind the panel and carried the quilt to the window. Light came through the rest of the top in an even pink, the batting pressed flat by a lifetime of stitches, and through the open panel it came brighter, because no needle had ever crossed it.

Genna sat down on the stool.

A maker who dies mid-project leaves debris, and Genna had opened boxes of it in Philadelphia. Elspeth had left none of it here.

She fetched the Grammar of Stitches down from the shelf and turned to the page for the stitch Elspeth had worked around the corners of that panel. Elspeth had given it a name in her schoolteacher's hand: a place kept open. Under the diagram Elspeth had listed where she had used it before — the library quilt, a wedding gift, and one more entry with no name at all.

Genna picked up her phone and called Chen's Hardware.

"Chen's."

"It's Genna. Are you free for a question?"

"I've got a ladder and a hinge in my hands, but go ahead."

"I'm going to ask you about people, not hardware."

"Then I'm listening."

She propped the phone against the lamp base. "It's a signature quilt. The frame goes up first in plain blocks, and then the ground is basted true behind it. The center stays open on purpose. The maker holds it open for whoever comes next."

"So the quilt's done. She finished it and left a window in the middle."

"A frame, not a window. The border is pieced, the corners are mitered, the binding is whipped down along the back, and there's a sleeve sewn on for hanging. A quilt gets bound last."

"Thing is, she was eighty-two and she was dying. People get tired. They tidy up and quit."

"Tired makers leave a needle in the cloth. They leave tails hanging."

Genna ran a fingertip along the seam. "She buried every thread end in this piece and then went to the trouble of reinforcing an opening nobody was going to use."

"Or," David said, "she reinforced it because she knew somebody was."

"Which means she meant the last part to be made by a hand that wasn't hers."

A hinge tipped over at his end. "Any idea whose?"

"That's why I called."

"Genna, I sell paint and hinges for a living."

"You also know this town. Who would Elspeth have trusted to put the last stitch into a story about the Crofts?"

"Not many. And none of them are talking to you."

He set the phone down against the register and picked it back up.

"Then there's Arthur's deadline," she said. "He wants the inventory signed Friday."

"He mentioned it. What are you going to do?"

"Not sign it."

"I'd want a better answer than that by Friday morning."

"I'll have one."

She hung up and dialed Arthur Vance's office on Main Street.

"Vance, here."

"Mr. Vance, it's Genevieve Martel."

"Ms. Martel. Have you decided about the inventory?"

"I'm not signing it tomorrow as it stands."

"Be that as it may, the deadline came from the surrogate's court, not from me."

Genna carried the phone to the window. "The quilt goes on the inventory as one item, with the journal, and it comes out of any sale of the studio contents."

"On what grounds?"

"It isn't unfinished. It's a signature quilt with the center held open, and the maker reinforced the opening so a hand could work against it. That's a request, not a leftover."

Arthur cleared his throat before he went on.

"Elspeth told me the quilt was the key. She never told me what it opened."

"Maybe it doesn't open anything. Maybe it's already open, and she wanted a name written in the middle of it."

"Whose name?"

"I don't know yet."

Arthur let out a breath. "Then find out before Friday. I can ask the court for time on a good reason. I can't ask it on a feeling."

"Then I'll bring you something better than a feeling."

She stood over the quilt with her gloves still on. Everything Elspeth had stitched around that opening pointed inward — the diner, the bandstand, the marina, the bridge — and every thread in the piece arrived at the blank square and waited.

She picked up the estate inventory and wrote beneath the last entry, in her small precise hand: Story quilt with open signature panel. Complete as made. Not offered with the studio contents.

Then she added a second line and left it there: Last panel to be completed by the next hand.

She still had to learn what act Elspeth had left undone, and whether the hand was meant to be hers.