Steps to the Altar by Earlene Fowler Page B

a real sweetie. Been working every weekend on the octagonal barn. Real talented carpenter, this boy.”
    “Trunks?” I said.
    She reached over and thumped the top of my head. “Anyone home? Remember yesterday? Maple Sullivan’s trunks. The murderess. You said you’d catalog the contents.”
    “Oh, those trunks,” I said, shaking my head. “I’d already forgotten about them.”
    “Like I said, we aren’t in any hurry, but the sooner you do them, the sooner I can mark them off my list.” She gave me an encouraging smile and rubbed vigorously at a stubborn spot on the counter. I felt sorry for the spot.
    “I’ll do my best,” I said, trying not to heave a big sigh. What difference did it make when this woman’s last effects got cataloged? She’d probably been dead for years. For a moment, I pondered on where she and her lover might have gone after she killed her husband and how she’d managed to stay uncaught all these years. The historian in me, the person who had irrationally decided to major in history in college and minor in agriculture rather than the other way around, couldn’t help wondering about her life before she came to San Celina, what drove her to murder her husband, a man, I assumed, she’d once loved.
    No time for speculation, I told myself, sticking the mail in my back pocket and saying over my shoulder to Edna, “Just have your talented carpenter boy put them in my office. No, have him check with me first. My office is pretty small. I’ll have to find someplace else to work on them.”
    “He said he can come by around noon. Is that okay?”
    “That’s fine. Just send him back to my office.”
    I walked through the current exhibits, both upstairs and down, making sure everything was in place and noting any repairs that I’d need to report to my very capable, senior citizen assistant, D-Daddy Boudreaux, a retired commercial fisherman from Louisiana. In theory and on paper, his work schedule was three days a week, two hours a day, because that was all the museum could afford. In reality, he worked many more hours than that and claimed he was paid in the joy of being needed.
    The current exhibits were of local wedding and anniversary quilts and samplers. The samplers were upstairs, the quilts downstairs. There were many traditional Double Wedding Ring patterns, most of them in the pastel prints popular in the thirties when that pattern was in its heyday, but there were other more unpredictable patterns like Alaska Territory made for a local woman’s grandmother who married a man from Alaska whom she met through the mail, Bachelor’s Puzzle for a woman who’d been engaged for ten years before marrying another man she’d known only three days, and Steps to the Altar done in gold and white made for a woman who married the Church by becoming a nun. That was the pattern Dove and I had decided to make for Elvia and Emory’s wedding quilt, though we chose dark green, maroon, and off-white, the colors of her bedroom.
    My favorite quilt was a story quilt made by a local artist who also taught women’s history at Cal Poly, our local university. In its colorful story squares it incorporated many of the folk sayings and superstitions about quilting:
If you’re the last to place a stitch in the quilt, you’ll have the next baby. Always make a deliberate error in your quilt to avoid bad luck. Don’t let your son or daughter sleep under a Drunkard’s Path quilt or they’ll turn to drink. The first person to sleep under a quilt just off the quilting frame will have their dreams come true. If you break a needle while quilting, you will have the next baby. If you begin a quilt on Friday, you will never live to finish it.

    That last one gave me pause. What day did Dove and I start Elvia’s quilt?
    All was well among the exhibits, which according to our daily head count, had been our most popular one so far, so I headed through the back, under the thick canopy of honeysuckle vines toward the old