Barbara Graham - Quilted 04 - Murder by Vegetable Read Online Free Page A

couldn't hear them. Four-month-old twins, plus two boys in elementary school, a shop to run, and a house and a husband sucked up every last second of each twenty-four-hour period. Wasn't working at the entrance table enough? Especially since she was sure her duty there would include dealing with people who didn't want to pay the fee. All that whining and complaining would wear down a saint. When would she have time to set up a demonstration? Where did Jane get these ideas?
    “I really can't.” Theo tried shoving the words out of her throat. They eventually came out, but sounded like “all right, if you need me” even to her own ears. She was sunk. Jane was ecstatic. How could she retract her words now?
    Theo stared at the window, her thoughts immediately turned to what kind of quilting project she could demonstrate. She certainly didn't want to use any of her good fabric, especially since whatever she took would stink by the end of the day and need immediate washing or throwing away.
    Ramps were intensely smelly wild members of the onion and garlic family. Whatever possessed Jane and her sister Martha to celebrate the coming of spring at their folk museum by having a Ramp Festival? They planned food booths involving the odoriferous vegetables. Soups, pies, snacks, everything would contain ramps. Everything would smell vile. Theo imagined even the food not containing ramps—the hamburgers, hot dogs and desserts—would end up with a vaguely garlicky onion aftertaste. Guilt by association.
    Wasn't having the food enough? No. Not for those ladies. There was to be music all day, everything from bluegrass to rock and roll. Once they came up with the initial idea, they couldn't seem to stop. A quilt show, of course, and now a demonstration featuring Theo. Other demonstrations planned involved weaving, dyeing yarn with roadside plants, and making birdhouses out of gourds. Rumors Theo had heard suggested the ladies planned games, storytellers, a horseshoe toss, pony rides and, for something even more exciting, a display of vegetables as projectiles. Earlier in the morning she hadn't connected Quentin's practice blasting potatoes through a cannon with the full event schedule. Now she recalled others planned to celebrate with more ancient forms of weapons to attack the designated target with vegetables, even a catapult.
    Jane and Martha's minimally paid assistant and newlywed, Celeste, looked like she'd aged twenty years the last time Theo had seen her. As Celeste had hurried past, she'd murmured, “You did warn me. Help.”
    The two women planned to import volunteer workers from all parts of their tiny county. The ladies fully intended to have as close to the total county population in attendance as they could. The senior citizens weren't immune to their recruiting plan either. Unable to outrun the sisters, seniors had been drafted as food server assistants; even the frail elderly like the Bainbridge sisters, Portia Osgood, and Caro, had been given jobs. Maybe they couldn't hoist a plate filled with a slab of pie, but they could hand out napkins and plastic cutlery. Poor blind Betty would probably be sitting in a corner telling stories to children or being the designated toothpick holder.
    Theo moaned again. Trapped.
    In the portable crib set up in the family corner of her office, Kara and Lizzie chortled and waved their hands and feet in the air. Pretty sad; it looked like even the infants thought their mother screwed up this time and were laughing about it.
    It wasn't much past ten o'clock in the morning, and Tony felt ready to go home for the day. He hated the senselessness of traffic accidents. Slowing down by five miles an hour around Dead Man's Curve would not make a huge impact on anyone's timetable, certainly not near the delay being in an accident added.
    He served his county's residents to the best of his ability. Today, he felt torn between the laws concerned with crimes involving guns and the sheer misfortune of Slow