Murder on a Starry Night: A Queen Bees Quilt Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

then, she had the kind of shy face you could have passed dozens of times in Dillons or Marla’s bakery without really noticing. A nice face, nevertheless.
    The woman saw Joe Bates as he walked down the back stairs of the garage apartment. She paused on the path to wave at the gardener. Joe squinted, then smiled in recognition and called out a hello. Then he spotted Adele, and immediately turned and began the long trek back up the stairs.
    “We didn’t mean to interrupt,” Leah was saying to Adele.
    “You didn’t interrupt. We have an appointment, do we not?” Adele looked at Leah and lifted one brow. She made no reference to the unpleasant encounter they had just witnessed, and instead, waved them toward the house. “I want you to see the bedrooms, though they’re in a state of disrepair right now. But the colors are important, and I suspect you will be able to feel the warmth and ambience and plan your quilts accordingly.”
    As the women toured the magnificent second and third stories of the house—where guests would soon be catered to in the finest way—they were awed by the beauty of the old home. It had twelve bedrooms in all, Adele explained, and each would have its own bath. Some rooms boasted small sitting rooms off the bedroom and had balconies that looked out over the long expanse of backyard and gardens and the small pond. Although some rooms were now stripped of furniture and rugs, others, which Po suspected had been the family’s quarters, still had books on the shelves and personal items cluttering tall secretaries and dressers and walnut armoires.
    A closet door, slightly ajar, showed dresses and silk robes hanging on hangers as if waiting for someone to wear them. She imagined it must look exactly like it did when Adele was a girl living at 210 Kingfish Drive.
    As they wandered in and out of the rooms, Po wondered which one had been Oliver’s. It was on the backside of the house, she knew, because he often told her about standing at his window at night and seeing the stars reflected in the pond.
    “Oliver never wanted me to touch a thing after our parents died,” Adele said, as if reading Po’s thought. “As a result, the house is jammed packed with things. He never discarded anything. Every drawer is full. I am weeding away at it, little by little, but it will take years.” She moved down the hallway and ushered the women into a room at the very end. The room was smaller than the others, and simply adorned with a single bed between two large windows, a dresser, several bookcases, and a desk. A large telescope was positioned in front of one of the windows, pointing toward the sky.
    Po walked over and looked at the books on the shelves, mostly astronomy texts and readings about nature, all arranged alphabetically and their spines lined up perfectly on the shelf. “This must have been Oliver’s room,” she said aloud.
    “Yes. It was the only room in the house that he would sleep in from the time he got his own bed. Oliver was as bright as they come, but a few learning disabilities made some things hard for him. But you probably know that. I know you all knew Ollie somewhat,” Adele said. Her voice fell off then, and she looked around the room, memories weighing visibly on her shoulders. She picked up a book from the nightstand beside Ollie’s bed. “Loren Eiseley’s
Immense Journey,”
she read.
    “Ollie saw himself as a kind of Loren Eiseley, I think,” Po said. “Part philosopher, part scientist. He had such a lovely way of describing the most learned astrological things.” She looked at his desk, everything neat and orderly, a cup holding pencils on the side, a yellow pad of paper, and in the center of the desk, a book Po recognized:
A Plain Man’s Guide to a Starry Night
. She picked it up and leafed through it. Clearly Ollie had read it—the book was filled with underlined sentences and notes in the margins.
    Adele looked around the room, taking in the neatly made bed, the