Spider Web Read online

  Spider Web

  Fowler, Earlene

  Penguin (2011)

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  SUMMARY:

  Benni Harper is back in an unforgettable new mystery from national bestselling author Earlene Fowler. The Memory Festival is a celebration of recollections and loved ones through crafts. But when a local cop is wounded by a mysterious sharpshooter who seems to have a vendetta against the police, Benni fears for her loved ones, especially her police chief husband. Benni is determined to make her hometown safe-before their peaceful street fair becomes a day to remember in the worst way.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  EPILOGUE

  Titles by Earlene Fowler

  THE SADDLEMAKER’S WIFE

  LOVE MERCY

  The Benni Harper Mysteries

  FOOL’S PUZZLE

  IRISH CHAIN

  KANSAS TROUBLES

  GOOSE IN THE POND

  DOVE IN THE WINDOW

  MARINER’S COMPASS

  SEVEN SISTERS

  ARKANSAS TRAVELER

  STEPS TO THE ALTAR

  SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

  BROKEN DISHES

  DELECTABLE MOUNTAINS

  TUMBLING BLOCKS

  STATE FAIR

  SPIDER WEB

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2011 by Earlene Fowler.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fowler, Earlene.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51468-9

  1. Harper, Benni (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women museum curators—Fiction. 3. Quiltmakers—Fiction. 4. Folk festivals—Fiction. 5. Police—Crimes against—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.O828S65 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2010047541

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Lela Satterfield and Laura Ross Wingfield,

  Beloved Sisters and

  Prayer Warriors of the highest order

  and

  To the brave and selfless men and women

  of our military

  Thank you for your loyalty,

  your devotion and your sacrifice

  Acknowledgments

  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

  Luke 6:36

  Thank you Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Please, help me to always err on the side of mercy.

  With a humble heart, I also thank:

  Steve Crawford—Deputy Coroner, San Luis Obispo County—for patiently helping me find the perfect gunshot wound.

  Ellen Geiger—friend, agent, advocate—I appreciate your hard work, your dedication and your unmatched sense of humor about life and this crazy publishing business.

  Karen Gray—Deputy District Attorney, San Luis Obispo County and part-time Red Cross nurse (you rock!)—for always being there to answer my questions and make introductions and for being my dear friend.

  Pam Munns—California Highway Patrol (retired) and dynamite quilter—girl, what can I say? You have helped me with your knowledge, your suggestions and by introducing me to other people who have helped me. I treasure your friendship.

  John O’Connell—Captain, LAPD (retired) and Marine Corps combat veteran—for openly sharing your knowledge and feelings about your time in Vietnam. Thank you for your help and your service to our country. Semper fi!

  Kate Seaver—my beloved editor—you are enthusiastic, dedicated and smart. I appreciate your insights and suggestions. Thanks for never being cranky (even when I am). The publishing world is a kinder, better place for your being in it.

  A special thanks to my friends, without whose support and love I fear I would perish in a cloud of despair—Charlotte “Bunny” Brown, Tina Davis, Janice Dischner, Jo Ellen Heil, Christine Hill, Jo-Ann Mapson, JoBeth McDaniel, Carolyn Miller, Sally Parker, Kathy Vieira.

  My husband, Allen, whom I love. Your resilience amazes me and your courage inspires me.

  A Note from the Author

  Spider Web takes place in March 1998. It has been a little over five years in Benni Harper’s life (Fool’s Puzzle took place in November 1992), but almost eighteen years in my life. I am doing my best to remember how things were back in the nineties, but even consulting books and the Internet, it’s difficult! So many changes have happened so fast in the last fifteen years. So, please, don’t be too hard on me if I miss a thing or two.

  There are readers who have expressed dismay with the fact that I showed readers what happened in Benni and Gabe’s life a decade in the future in the book Love Mercy. I did that for the simple reason that there is nothing certain in this world.

  I wanted to let my readers know (as with the prologue of Mariner’s Compass) that Benni and Gabe end up okay. That seems to be the biggest worry people express to me. There was a method to my madness. I hope the Benni Harper books go on forever, but I cannot promise they will because it is not totally in my control.

  I found this quote while doing research for this book and was amazed at how much it applied to all good novels.

  Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptibl
e.

  Virginia Woolf

  Spider Web

  The Spider Web quilt design, like many old patterns, probably originated with a quilter’s love for her flower or vegetable garden. Very similar to the Kaleidoscope pattern, it is often made up of a variety of symmetrical multicolored fabric pieces, triangular in shape, put together to resemble a spider’s web. Some variations of the pattern are made with only two colors of fabric. It is a great way to use up extra fabric, something that was important during the 1930s Depression when this pattern was popular. Like its real-life counterpart, the Spider Web pattern has innumerable variations. Unlike many patterns where there are many names for one pattern, with the Spider Web quilt pattern, there are dozens of patterns for one name. The pattern can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. The pattern has been found in the Kansas City Star patterns of 1929 as well as the quilts of the Hmong, an ancient tribe of mountain people who migrated from China in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the patterns called Spider Web do have other names such as Farmer’s Wife, Merry-Go-Round, Mystic Maze, Amazing Windmill, Autumn Leaves and Job’s Tears.

  CHAPTER 1

  MUSIC FLOWED OUT OF THE OLD RANCH HOUSE’S OPEN FRONT door like a wash of honey water—“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

  Elvis Presley’s unmistakable voice rose and surrounded me as I watched from a small rise a hundred yards away. The damp, drooping branches of a pepper-scented valley oak camouflaged me and my horse from whomever was inspecting my former home. Trixie, a new mare my father bought last week, shifted beneath me.

  The song’s melody was as familiar to me as the creak of saddle leather. It was a favorite tune of my gramma Dove, who often serenaded her fancy chickens. Dinner and a show, she would say, tossing handfuls of powdery feed. She claimed they favored Top 40 tunes, Tennessee Ernie Ford and on stormy days, the heartbreak songs of Patsy Cline.

  “Back in the twenties, Vaughn De Leath sang it,” she always told me. “Long before Elvis was a gleam in his daddy’s eyes. Henry Burr sang it too. And Al Jolson.” I loved knowing that little bit of trivia, though I’d never had a reason to use it.

  Air fluttered from Trixie’s nostrils and she tossed her head. She was not a horse, I was learning, who liked to wait. She preferred to keep moving.

  On the ground behind us, something rustled in the brush. Trixie tensed, mouthed her bit, teeth chinking against metal, then calmed herself. I stroked her warm neck and softly crooned, Good girl. Daddy would be pleased. Fortitude was important in a horse who worked cattle. Scout, my chocolate Lab–shepherd mix, sat a few feet away, his shiny eyes glued to my face, a foot soldier poised for instructions.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered.

  One brown ear was in radar position, the other floppy but alert. Still, his eyes watched me. He sensed my anxiety but trusted my words.

  Another fragment of song echoed up the hill. It sounded farther away, though Trixie and I hadn’t moved, keeping still as possible on the spongy new grass. Was the person inside carrying a radio, a tape player? Had they moved deeper into the empty house?

  I closed my eyes, recalling the house’s interior landscape. The living room walls were knotty pine, lacquered to the color of vanilla wafers. The red and white kitchen had a porcelain farmhouse sink, chipped in the top left corner, and a milk glass chandelier with six pebbled globes that had been a pain to keep clean hung over the small dining area. A scarred butcher block squatted slightly off center in the room. The strutting wallpaper roosters always seemed to be laughing, like Jack and I when we’d first moved into the house. Two bedrooms. The larger one faced east and had a padded window seat. That was the room where Jack and I had first made love.

  John Harper Jr. Jack. My first love, husband of my youth. A hundred years ago, it seemed. Another lifetime. The Harper ranch had gone into foreclosure not long after Jack was killed in an auto accident. Over six years ago now. His family—once mine—scurried back to their home state of Texas. I exchanged western-themed Christmas cards with Sandra, my former sister-in-law, wife of Jack’s only sibling, Wade. She was the one who told me a few years back that a group of Southern California investors bought the ranch with the intention of growing wine grapes, but the grapes were never planted. She thought that maybe they’d sold it, though she wasn’t sure. I possessed the ability and contacts to find out. But I never did.

  Early in my grief, I would ride the three or so miles from my family’s ranch weekly to check on our house, traveling the same cattle paths that Jack and I rode when we were teenagers, sneaking out at night to meet under the stars and kiss. Gradually the house checks became monthly. Then once every three or four months. Now I only occasionally made the long trek to this hill. I could take the Jeep, which would be faster, but I preferred to ride one of our ranch horses, who always needed exercise. It was what Jack would do. I would pause on the rise and observe the land he and I had worked together, loved together, the home where we’d once planned our lives.

  His death was no longer a painful throb but more a soft pinch to my heart. Though you never believe it in those first horrific moments of loss, life does keep moving forward. My life today was full. Gabe Ortiz, my second love, proved to me that even in the darkest times, there was hope. Five years we’d been married. I glanced at the diamond ring he gave me last August. Even on this cloudy March day it sparkled on my blunt-nailed finger. My plain gold wedding band bought in a Las Vegas jewelry store had been enough for me, but he wanted to give me more. We were on top of a Ferris wheel at the county fair when he slipped the diamond on my finger. A Ferris wheel was an apt metaphor for our marriage—the second for both of us. Jack and I had been a merry-goround—steady, predictable, but beautiful with its detailed carving and rich, solid colors, but Gabe and I were definitely a Ferris wheel with brilliant neon lights and unpredictable seats.

  “. . . shall I come back again . . .” Elvis’s silky voice floated up and lost itself in the high branches of the oak tree. Trixie was quiet, trusting me to be in control, to let her know when it was time to move on.

  Elvis Presley. I’d been listening to his albums all my life. My mother played his music while she lay in bed dying and I scrambled over her rumpled bed quilts with my plastic Breyer horses pretending to be Annie Oakley or Roy Rogers. Dove played Elvis’s albums for years, keeping my mother’s memory alive for me. Right before Mama died, at my dad’s request, Dove had come from Arkansas to help raise me, her oldest son’s only child.

  Thinking of my mother caused a moment of sadness to envelop me, like misty fog floating over the hills. She was twenty-six years old when she passed. I was six. It could overwhelm me if I let myself dwell on it. We both seemed so impossibly young for something so tragic. I was now thirty-nine—forty this month—acutely aware I was entering the second half of my life. I’d already lived almost fourteen years longer than she had, a fact that felt odd and troubling.

  Here is a truth: Losing your mother when you are young changes you; the ground beneath your feet is never quite firm enough. You never completely trust happiness again.

  But I had learned to embrace what happiness was sent my way, to push the distrust into an attic corner of my brain. Despair rarely held me captive because I was surrounded by older women who tackled life as if it was the final quarter of a Super Bowl game. There was my steady yet dramatic gramma Dove, not contradictory adjectives when applied to her; my ever-surprising great-aunt Garnet, whom I grew closer to daily since she’d moved here from Arkansas with my uncle WW; the women in my quilt group at the Oak Terrace Retirement Home who, with wicked good humor, voted unanimously to name themselves the Coffin Star Quilt Guild; even Constance Sinclair, my cranky but dependably generous boss at the Josiah Sinclair Folk Art Museum where I was curator.

  The timorous sound of older women’s voices warmed me like a flannel quilt, softening the frantic edges of my life. These women I loved and respected had seen much in their years on earth, had experienced sorrows that would fell an ancient redwood. But they
endured. They prospered. Shoot, they laughed. They amazed and delighted me. And sometimes they drove me head-twisting crazy.

  My current project was recording their stories as part of an oral history project I’d undertaken with the celebrated photographer Isaac Lyons. The working title was “San Celina at Home.” He’d approached me with the idea a few months ago proposing a collaboration—he’d take the photos; I’d write their stories. It was an incredible opportunity that countless writers and historians would have killed to have been offered. Isaac was renowned for his insightful portraits, had photographed presidents and popes, movie stars and politicians. He’d studied with Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, argued form and composition with Dorothea Lange. His work hung in the Smithsonian.

  It was a position I did not deserve. My education was not impressive, nor was I even that talented. However, I did have an inside track. He was married to and loopy-in-love with my gramma Dove. And because he loved her and she loved me . . . well, I got the job.

  “Ask them what home means to them,” he’d instructed me when we first discussed it sitting on the front porch of the Ramsey Ranch, owned jointly by my dad and my gramma. “Ask them where they feel the most at home, anything you can come up with that encourages them to talk about home. I’ll take some of the photos while you’re interviewing them or later if they seem nervous. The best photos happen when people forget themselves.”

  Because Isaac was weary of traveling, and because San Celina was now his home, he decided to concentrate on the people in San Celina County, on the coast halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Our county actually provided him a wonderful cross section of people—Cal Poly, a state university that still held strong rural roots, a rich Hispanic population, a smattering of Chinese and Japanese, African Americans and Swiss Italians, Portuguese and Basques, artists and musicians, retirees and homeless, ridiculously wealthy and no-nonsense working class, the always struggling small business owners. We’d started the project a few months ago, and it was apparent already that we’d end up with more photos and interviews than we could fit in one book. Culling them would be a painful job.