Seven Sisters - Earlene Fowler [98]
“Oh, my,” Martha Pickering said, her hand digging in her sweatshirt sleeve for a violet-embroidered handkerchief. She dabbed at her white powdered temple. “That’s more than a month of stories on All My Children.” The others nodded in agreement, their fingers still quilting on the Tumbling Blocks quilt in the frame.
“That Brown family,” Juby Daniels said, shaking her head. “They’ve certainly had their share of baby troubles through the years.”
“Starting with Rose herself,” Leona Shelton said. Leona was turning ninety-two this year and was our oldest guild member. Though I had to thread her needles for her, she still sewed a straighter, truer quilt stitch than I ever would, using her experienced fingers to guide her as much as her washed-out-denim blue eyes. She’d been San Celina’s seamstress of choice for years and years. Her tiny shop downtown across from the courthouse had been the premier place among the rich and powerful for hearing about who was cheating on who, who was having a baby, and often whose baby it really was. She still remained a virtual encyclopedia of information of San Celina’s citizenry. If you’d put her and Mr. Foglino together, they could have probably blackmailed the whole town.
“Do you remember when her babies died?” I asked casually.
Her pencilled eyebrows moved a notch upwards. “You know about them?”
I stopped stitching and sat back in my chair. “One of her great-granddaughters, JJ, is a quilt artist at the co-op. She told me how the Seven Sisters ranch got its name.”
“I surely do remember,” Leona said, turning her eyes back to the red and brown quilt. “Rose Brown about went crazy. All them funerals so close together. I made the christening gowns for every one of them babies. Hand-stitched lilies of the valley around the hems. Three hundred-count imported Egyptian cotton with Belgian lace trim. Some nun went blind making that lace, mark my words. Each of those babies was buried in them. I think about that sometimes, my beautiful stitches, that lovely lace, being eaten by worms.”
The others nodded, murmuring at the waste. I flinched inwardly at the graphic scene it painted in my imagination. “So, how did they die? JJ didn’t know.” I looked back down at the quilt. It wasn’t exactly a lie. JJ hadn’t known how they died.
“Oh, they say it was just natural causes,” Leona said, pushing her needle in and out, in and out. “But there was rumors.”
“Really?” Martha said. “I was only fifteen at the time, but I don’t remember people talking.”
“It was kept pretty quiet. Those Browns were prominent folks even back then,” Leona said, stopping to cough into a crumpled tissue. She wiped her mouth delicately and continued. “He was a judge, you know. Quite the ladies’ man, let me tell you. Good-looking as that husband of yours, Benni, and with none of Gabe’s scruples. Rumors were he could have any woman he wanted in their crowd and heard tell he practically did.”
“What were the rumors about the babies?” I prompted.
“That somebody killed them, plain and simple,” Leona said with a quick nod.
“Oh, my . . . oh, dear . . . oh, Leona, really,” the women around the quilt exclaimed.
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Leona said, sniffing. “That’s what they were saying behind closed doors.”
“But who would kill four innocent babies?” asked Mattie Lee Jones, who was the progeny winner of the group with 27 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren to her credit. She took great pride in constantly reminding the group of her huge, supposedly close-knit family.
“Mattie Lee,” Leona said, “get your head out of that sandbox you call a life. Not many families qualify as the Waltons. Not even your messy group of misfits. Every day of this old world babies are hurt and sometimes killed by their own parents, sisters, brothers, and who knows who else. Why do you think we’re makin’ these quilts for the police department? And it’ll be that way till Jesus comes back.”
“Well, I just can’t imagine it,” Mattie Lee said, her pointy chin jerking up, insulted. “I think you’re just spreading vicious