Tree of Life and Death Read Online Free Page B

morning at my gallery catching up on paperwork myself, but Sunny thought I should be here with her. It's her first community event since opening the quilt shop, so she was a little nervous. She shouldn't have been. Everyone loves her. She donated a lot of the tools for today's use, you know." Stefan pointed at the cutting tables. "The mats and rulers and rotary cutters are all on loan from the shop. The scissors too. They're sort of her trademark. She had them made specially with the sunny-yellow handles."
    "Donating all those supplies was very kind of her."
    "Smart too. She's getting some good publicity for the shop, narrowly directed to her target audience of quilters, and it doesn't really cost her anything except a few replacement blades for the cutters." Stefan glanced at the ironing board where he'd been stationed earlier. "I'd better get back to work. The blocks are piling up."
    I went with him, since it was on the way to the refreshment table. I didn't have time for any real sustenance, but I needed something to get me through the last twenty minutes of appraisal work before my part in today's event was done.
    As we reached the ironing board, the quilt teacher in the Santa hat beckoned for a woman, who was apparently her assistant for the day, to come over to take her place with Matt. As the teacher headed for the exit at top speed, she muttered, "'Scuse me. 'Scuse me. 'Scuse me. Stupid overactive bladder. 'Scuse me. 'Scuse me. 'Scuse me."
    "Meg's been running to the ladies' room every two minutes," Stefan said. "Don't they have treatments for that?"
    I had known Stefan long enough to know that he wasn't being as judgmental as it sounded. He was honestly perplexed whenever people failed to take whatever steps he thought would help them live up to their full potential. He worked very hard at being the best folk art dealer in the county, possibly the entire state, and he expected everyone else to know what their goals were and then to go after them with all their energy and passion. It was why he tended to bristle around his childhood friend, Matt Viera, accusing Matt of frittering away all of his considerable talents. Matt had once been a highly sought-after fashion model and had quit at the peak of his popularity to become an underpaid and underappreciated arts reporter.
    As if Stefan could read my mind, he said, "Have you talked to Matt today? He was supposed to be here early to do a story on the event. We were hoping he'd mention Sunny and the Sunny Patches Quilt Shop."
    "I didn't even know he was going to be here." I hadn't talked to Matt Viera since the opening luncheon for the Danger Cove Quilt Show in August, when I'd given the keynote speech, and he'd been in the audience. Before that, we'd worked together to find a killer, so he'd been at my home—an abandoned bank branch that had been converted into a residence and home office—and had been fascinated by the idea of the bank vault that I'd kept during the renovation. I'd promised to give him a tour, and he'd said he'd call. Over the course of the next three months of silence though, I'd come to accept that his flirting during the investigation had just been part of his job as a reporter, nothing personal. Once he'd had his scoop for the Cove Chronicles , he'd completely lost interest in the bank vault and me. It had hurt, but it wasn't like he'd ended a real relationship. We'd barely gotten to know each other, after all, even if it had felt like more than a brief acquaintance, because of the highly emotional experiences we'd shared while finding a dead body and then working together to exonerate a wrongly accused suspect in the murder.
    "I talked to Matt last night, and he said he'd be here first thing this morning," Stefan said. "He sounded a little tired. Sunny thought I'd woken him up. It was only 9:00, but he might have been jet-lagged and trying to adjust to local time."
    The airports would have been clogged this week with people traveling for