Threads of Evidence by Lea Wait Page B

feeling wild, sipping a beer, even though the legal age to drink in Maine had been lowered from twenty-one to twenty the year before. Some people were smoking pot. This was 1970, after all. It was all very relaxed. Then the fireworks ended, and everyone picked up their blankets and headed back to their cars. Mothers and fathers were calling to their children, gathering everyone to leave. A few people had had a little too much to drink, and the local cop—I can’t remember his name—rounded them up. The police sometimes drove home people who needed help after the Gardeners’ party.
    â€œHenry and I had just started toward our car when we heard screams. At first, we thought it was teenagers being rowdy. But then the screams got louder, and people started to run toward the front of the house.”
    â€œDid you see her?”
    â€œNo. We were in the back of the crowd. We’d wanted the night to last as long as it could. By the time we got close, everyone was saying it was Jasmine, and that she’d been in the fountain. Someone had pulled her out. The police held everyone back and an ambulance came. Then we all went home. The next morning we heard she’d died.”
    â€œWhat do you think happened?”
    â€œAt first, everyone said she’d fallen and hit her head on the fountain. Then some people said she’d drowned.” Gram shook her head. “It was so sad. She wasn’t perfect—no seventeen-year-old is—but she was so full of life.” Gram looked at me. “It doesn’t matter how she died. What’s important is that her life was ended so early. And her mother’s life ended that night, too.”
    â€œHer mother?” Mrs. Gardener had lived years after her daughter died.
    â€œOh, Mrs. Gardener didn’t die, but she stopped living. She hardly left her house after that. I heard she’d convinced herself Jasmine had been murdered. She spent the rest of her life trying to prove it.” Gram paused. “She didn’t go back to her husband, or to whatever life she’d had in New York. And she was never really a part of Haven Harbor, either—even though everyone knew she was there, at Aurora, by herself, all those years. However Jasmine died, her death was the end of her mother’s life, too.”

Chapter 8
    From Rocks, Shoals and Stormy Weather
A Rainbow At Night
O God Protect the Potosi ever. Is a Sailors delight.
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    â€”Sampler, including ship Potosi, stitched by Susan Munson, 1824
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    â€œI almost forgot,” I said. “Ten needlepoint panels are in my car. They’re scenes of Aurora and Haven Harbor that Mrs. Gardener stitched. Skye West wants them preserved, restored, and reframed.”
    â€œBring them in and let me look at them,” said Gram. “I’d love to see what she did.”
    It took me three trips to bring all the framed stitchery into the house. Each panel was fourteen by twenty inches, matted, and then framed in heavy mahogany, probably to match the dining-room table.
    Years of work.
    I leaned them against pieces of living-room furniture so we could both see the series. Gram stopped at the picture of the fountain. “That’s just the way it looked,” she said. “Water flying up and catching the sunlight. I’m sorry Mrs. Gardener had it destroyed, but I understand why she did.”
    â€œBut then she took the time to design a needlepoint picture of it, and work the picture,” I said. “I wonder what she was thinking when she was doing it.”
    Gram shrugged. “One of those things we’ll never know.” She moved on, looking at the other embroideries. “I love her moose. I think he’s in the back meadow at Aurora, where we sat to watch the fireworks over the harbor. And she’s pictured the yacht club. And the church.”
    She turned to me. “Did you know Jasmine’s funeral was there, right here in Haven