Invisible Prey

didn’t recognize, but that he thought might be some kind of pattern-drawing gear.
    The thread was sorted by hue, except for the stuff in two sewing containers. Containers, because only one of them was the traditional woven-wicker sewing basket; the other was a semitransparent blue tackle box. All the plastic boxes had been labeled with a black Sharpie, in a neat school script: “Threads, red.” “Threads, blue.”
    “A lot of stuff,” Lucas said. He put a finger in the wicker sewing basket, pulled it out an inch. More spools, and the spools looked old to him. Collector spools? Which tripped off a thought. “Do you think these Armstrongs, would they have been classified as antiques?”
    “No, not really,” Coombs said. “They were made in what, the 1930s? I don’t think that’s old enough to be an antique, but I really don’t know. I don’t know that much about the whole deal, except that Grandma got a lot of money from them, because of the curse thing.”
    “The curse thing.”
    “Yes. The quilts had curses sewn into them. They became…what?” She had to think about it for a second, then said, “I suppose they became feminist icons.”
     
    L IKE THIS, SHE SAID:
    Grandma Coombs had once lived in a tiny house on Snelling Avenue. Her husband had died in the ’70s, and she was living on half of a postal pension, the income from a modest IRA, and Social Security. She haunted estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales all over the Upper Midwest, buying cheap, reselling to antique stores in the Cities.
    “She probably didn’t make ten thousand dollars a year, after expenses, but she enjoyed it, and it helped,” Coombs said. Then she found the Armstrong quilts at an estate sale in northern Wisconsin. The quilts were brilliantly colored and well made. Two were crazy quilts, two were stars, one was a log-cabin, and the other was unique, now called “Canada Geese.”
    None of that made them famous. They were famous, Coombs said, because the woman who made them, Sharon Armstrong, had been married to a drunken sex freak named Frank Armstrong who beat her, raped her, and abused the two children, one boy and one girl, all in the small and oblivious town of Carton, Wisconsin.
    Frank Armstrong was eventually shot by his son, Bill, who then shot himself. Frank didn’t die from the gunshot, although Bill did. The shootings brought out all the abuse stories, which were horrific, and after a trial, Frank was locked up in a state psychiatric hospital and died there twenty years later.
    Sharon Armstrong and her daughter moved to Superior, where first the mother and then the daughter got jobs as cooks on the big interlake ore ships. Sharon died shortly after World War II. The daughter, Annabelle, lived, unmarried and childless, until 1995. When she died, her possessions were sold off to pay her credit-card debts.
    “There were six quilts. I was in Germany when Grandma found them, and I only saw them a couple of times, because I was moving around a lot, but they were beautiful. The thing is, when Grandma bought them, she also bought a scrapbook that had clippings about Frank Armstrong, and Sharon Armstrong, and what happened to them.
    “When Grandma got home, she put the quilts away for a while. She was going to build racks, to stretch them, and then sell them at an art fair. She used to do that with old quilts and Red Wing pottery.
    “When she got them out, she was stretching one, and she noticed that the stitching looked funny. When she looked really close, she saw that the stitches were letters, and when you figured them out, they were curses.”
    “Curses,” Lucas said.
    “Curses against Frank. They were harsh: they said stuff like ‘Goddamn the man who sleeps beneath this quilt, may the devils pull out his bowels and burn them in front of his eyes; may they pour boiling lead in his ears for all eternity’…They went on, and on, and on, for like…hours. But they were also, kind of, poetic, in an ugly way.”
    “Hmmm.” Lucas said. “Grandma sold them for what?”
    “I don’t know, exactly. Mom might. But enough that she could sell her old house and buy this one.”
    “All this quilt stuff ties to Connie Bucher.”
    “Yeah. There are thousands of quilt groups all over the country. They’re like rings, and a lot of the women belong to two rings. Or even three. So there are all these connections. You can be a quilter on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and you need to go to Los Angeles for something,