Invisible Prey

dangly earrings came to the door, said, “Yes?”
    Lucas identified himself and the woman pushed the door open and whispered, “Anything?”
    “No.”
    “Lucy is terrified,” she said.
    Lucas nodded. “I have to talk to her about her mother…”
     
    T HERE WERE THREE more unknown women in the kitchen with Coombs. Lucy Coombs saw him and shuffled forward, shoulders rounded, hands up in front of her as though she might punch him: “Where is she?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “We’re looking, I’ve got the St. Paul cops out looking around, we’re pushing every button we know.”
    She wanted to shout at him, and to cry; she was crippled with fear: “You’ve got to find her. I can’t stand this, you’ve got to find her.”
    Lucas said, “Please, please, talk to me about your mother.”
    “She was murdered, too, wasn’t she?” Coombs asked. “They killed her and came back and took my baby…”
    “Do you have any idea…who’re they ?”
    “I don’t know—the people who killed her.”
    Lucas said, intent on Coombs: “This thing is driving me crazy. We have three dead women, and one missing. Two of them were involved in antiques, but your mother wasn’t—but she had one antique that was taken, and then maybe returned, by somebody who may also have taken a quilting basket.”
    “And Gabriella,” Coombs blurted.
    Lucas nodded. “Maybe.”
    “It’s the Armstrong quilts,” one of the women said. “The curses.”
    Lucas looked at her: She was older, thin, with dry skin and a pencil-thin nose. “The curses…the ones sewn into the quilts? Gabriella told me…”
    The woman looked at the others and said, “It’s the curses working. Not only three women dead, but the son who committed suicide, the father dies in the insane asylum.”
    Another of the women shivered: “You’re scaring me.”
    “Did Bucher and Donaldson have something to do with the Armstrong quilts?” Lucas asked, impatient. He didn’t believe in witchcraft.
    Coombs said, “Yes. They both bought one from my mom, after Mom found them.”
    Lucas said, “There were what, five quilts? Six, I can’t remember…”
    “Six,” the thin-nosed woman said. “One went to Mrs. Bucher, one went to Mrs. Donaldson, the other four were sold at auction. Big money. I think two of them went to museums and two went to private collectors. I don’t know who…”
    “Who did the auction?”
    Coombs said, “One of the big auction houses in New York. Um, I don’t know how to pronounce it, Sotheby’s?”
    “Are there any here in Minneapolis?” Lucas asked.
    The dangly-earring woman said, “At the Walker Gallery. Mrs. Bucher donated it.”
    “Good. I’ll go look at it, if I have time,” Lucas said. “Have you ever heard the name Jacob Toms?”
    The women all looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Who’s he?”
     
    H E WAS on his way out the door, intent on tracing the Armstrong quilts, when he was struck by a thought and turned around, asked Coombs: “The music box. You don’t think Gabriella had it, do you? That she just used it to get an investigation going?”
    Coombs shook her head: “No. I found Mom, and called the police, and then called Gabriella. The police were already there when she came over. She was sad and mentioned the music box, and we went to look at it, and it wasn’t there.”
    “Okay. So somebody brought back the music box and took the sewing basket,” Lucas said. “Why did they do that? Why did they take the sewing basket? Was that part of the Armstrong quilt thing?”
    “No, she just bought that kind of thing when she was hunting for antiques—I don’t know where she got it.”
    “I remember her talking about it at quilt group,” said the big woman in the purple shift. “She said she might see if she could sell it to a museum, or somewhere that did restorations, because the thread was old and authentic. Nothing special, but you know—worth a few dollars and kinda interesting.”
    Coombs said, “There might be a…clue…wrapped up in the quilts. But that won’t save Gabriella, will it? If they took her? A clue like that would take forever to work out…” Tears started running down her face.
    Lucas lied again: “I still think it’s better than fifty-fifty that she went off someplace. She may have lost her keys in the dark, called somebody over to pick her up. She’s probably asleep somewhere…” He looked at his watch: she’d been gone for sixteen or eighteen hours. Too