A Collage to Kill For 3

A China Bayles papercraft mystery: Floral Paper and Quilling

This is the third of four episodes in this papercraft mystery. Previously: China is saddened to discover her friend, Mattie Long, dead at the foot of the Craft Emporium stairs—and surprised to learn that Mattie’s sister, Caroline, suspects foul play. China and Ruby agree to investigate. You can read/review the previous two episodes here.

Quilling. Pendleton Center for the Arts

Ruby and I began our investigation with Mattie’s condo, which was located in an upscale neighborhood of Pecan Springs. It was new—less than a year old—and spacious and clearly more expensive than the small frame house where she’d previously lived. At a guess, I’d have to say that she’d had more resources than the usual doctor’s office manager. And what was more, she had quit that job several months before. She hadn’t made a move to get another job, either. She’d told Caroline that she was going to concentrate on her paper art. It was time, she said, to turn her art into a career.

Caroline had been right when she said her sister was neat. In fact, Mattie’s condo looked like something Martha Stewart would be proud of. Ruby took the kitchen, bathroom, and living room. I took the bedroom, dining room, and the little hallway.

Caroline had told us that she herself had already done a quick search, looking for letters, notes, or any communication between Mattie and someone else involving money. She had found nothing. Mattie’s computer was password-protected and Caroline had no idea how to get into it.

But as her sister’s executor, Caroline had gotten a look at her bank account, which revealed that revealed that Mattie had actually received several times more than the fifty thousand dollars she had handed over to Caroline. There was no indication where it came from, but it helped to account for the upmarket condo.

My search turned up nothing but a lot of unremarkable household stuff, no diaries or notes-to-self, not even a scrap of paper. Ruby had a little better luck—she found a phone number on the fridge. But when we checked, the number belonged to Dr. Weaver, the gynecologist Mattie had worked for.

“Probably something to do with the office,” Ruby said, and left the note where she’d found it. “No help to us.”

We did, however, find plenty of clues to Mattie’s artistic passion, neatly stacked and waiting for their move to the studio at the Emporium. There were boxes of art supplies and equipment, large portfolios of her hand-made papers, plastic bins full of dried herbs that she intended to incorporate into her work—hollyhock flowers, milkweed fibers, thistle, Joe-Pye weed—and other bins full of decorative paper, confetti, glitter, ribbon, as well as old photos and printed materials.

Like Caroline before us, Ruby and I finally had to throw in the towel. We had done a careful search, but as far as we could discover, Mattie had left no hidden diary, no calendar of clandestine meetings, no secret stash of letters, and not a single tell-tale clue to whatever monkey-business might have led to her death. Of course, it was possible that somebody had come in before Caroline and taken the incriminating evidence. But if that’s what happened, whoever-it-was must have had a key. There was no sign of a break-in, and no trace of a search.

Ruby was disappointed. “It looks like the place is clean,” she said in a resigned tone. “Not a trace of anything . . . well, crooked.”

I had to chuckle. “Ordinarily,” I said, “that would be a good thing. Just a quiet, clean, life, filled with Mattie’s art and—”

“In a condo that she couldn’t ordinarily afford,” Ruby interrupted pointedly. “And with enough money left over to pick up her brother-in-law’s medical bills and finance a new art career.”  She made a disappointed face. “Something weird is going on here, China. Let’s hope we have better luck at the studio.”

Caroline had guessed that Mattie’s studio had been searched, and she was right again. Things were disordered—not greatly so, but certainly in comparison to the careful order of Mattie’s condo. Supplies on the shelves were disarranged, tools and books had been pulled out of bins onto the floor, and framed collages and drawings hung crookedly on the wall.

But in spite of the disorder, the place was well-lit and cheerful, perfect for Maggie’s crafting. There was a long table in the center of the main room, where she’d apparently been working on several different quilling projects. One was a bracelet and matching earrings, the other a delicate, rainbow-hued sculptural fish, all of it intricately executed with narrow strips of paper.

Ruby was fascinated with the quilling. “What marvelous work,” she exclaimed, looking at the flamboyant fish. “Do you suppose I could do something like that?”

“I’m sure you could," I said, and I meant it. “You could probably find a tutorial or two online.”

“I’ll do just that,” Ruby said, studying the fish. “I love this!”

Quilling artist Yulia Brodskaya

The Craft Emporium had been converted into apartments at some earlier point in its checkered history, and what had been a small kitchen was now the work area where Mattie made her papers. This was where she kept her molds and deckles, felts, plastic buckets, scoops and strainers, and a kitchen scale. On the stove were several stainless steel pots where she could cook the plant fibers that would eventually became paper. There was a large commercial blender on the counter, and a plastic vat stood next to the sink. In one corner, I saw a large paper press, and a clothesline and boards for drying paper. If it hadn’t been for the class Mattie and I took together, I wouldn’t have known what all this equipment was used for. It was obvious that she planned to do some serious papermaking.

But that was just about all that was obvious. Ruby and I spent the next couple of hours going through everything—the supplies, equipment, and finished pieces of paper art. Not knowing what we were looking for certainly made the job harder, but we did our best. We searched the work table, the shelves, and all the flat drawers where Mattie had kept sheets of paper, pulled out now, and the contents disordered. On one wall hung a number of quilled wall art, attractively framed. On another wall hung half a dozen collages, creatively constructed of handmade papers and paper objects such as theater tickets, torn photos, torn pieces of maps, newspaper clippings, scraps of sheet music, calendars, bits of cloth, and the like. Each was organized around a theme, and titled: The Opening, Sisters, Landscapes, Feels Like Home.

We discovered our first clue on that wall. I had taken one of the framed collages off the wall and out of curiosity turned it over. On the back, to my surprise, I found another collage. Like the one on the front, it was also made up of artistically-arranged scraps of paper and was titled Fragments of a Life I, suggesting that it might be the first of a series. As I looked closer, I recognized a photo that had been torn out of the Pecan Springs newspaper, the Enterprise, and incorporated into the design. I blinked, and looked again.

 “Ruby,” I said. “Come here.”

 “What have you got?” she asked, shutting the drawer she had been rifling. “Something interesting?”

I pointed to the photograph in the collage. “Who’s this?”

Ruby peered at it. “Why, it’s Alice Mason,” she said in surprise. She looked closer. “And what’s that, China?  It looks like part of her obituary, torn out of the Enterprise.” She shook her head. “Isn’t that . . . well, a little ghoulish?”

It was. Alice Mason, an attractive, thirty-something librarian at the Pecan Springs Public Library, had been found dead the year before—strangled with her own panty-hose in a secluded area a few miles outside of town. The tragic event had rattled everybody, for Alice had been a quiet woman who loved her library work, lived alone with her cats, and enjoyed gardening on weekends. And her friends got another jolt when the autopsy report came back, for she was three months pregnant.

Alice’s murder had never been solved, which was one source of the city council’s current discontent with our chief of police. (But just one source. The council also complains about the overhead hours the PSPD bills.) In fact, Sheila and I had talked about the case just a couple of weeks before. She told me that she and her detectives had identified a person of interest, a prominent local man whom she refused to name. But because he was so well known in the community, the D.A. insisted on having more evidence before he would take the case to a grand jury. Sheila and her team were still pursuing the case but had turned up no usable evidence and had nothing more to go on.

 “There’s a piece of a handwritten letter in the corner,” I said, “Hand me that magnifying glass, Ruby.”

A moment later, Ruby and I were staring open-mouthed at one another. The handwritten scrap appeared to be part of a torn love letter, written in a delicate script on pale pink paper. All that was visible was part of the concluding sentence: . . . . love you with all my heart and long for you every moment. Yours until death, Alice.

“I don’t understand,” Ruby said, scowling. “What’s this supposed to mean, China?  Why would Mattie Long make a collage out of Alice Mason’s obituary? And what does this letter have to do with it?”

What, indeed?  Unless—

“Maybe we need to keep looking,” I said.

I took down the next collage and turned it around so we could see the back. Yep, there it was, Fragments of a Life II. It was made up of another photo of Alice—this one looking as if it had been clipped out of the high school yearbook—and an overdue slip from the library, with Alice’s initials and a stamped number. The borrower’s number, I guessed, in our library’s now-obsolete check-out system. There was another scrap of letter, this one in a firm, masculine hand: . . . will always remember last night, and your kisses and the warmth of your bare skin . . . .

And there was also something that looked like part of a prescription, written in those illegible squiggles that doctors use so you won’t know what they’re instructing the pharmacist to sell you. It bore Alice’s name.

“A prescription?” Ruby asked. “What in the world—?”

Yeah. What in the world? Was this real? If so, how did Mattie get it? What did it mean? What kind of story was she telling?

I reached for the third collage. This one was called Fragments of a Life III. It contained a casual snapshot of a smiling doctor, taken in his office, part of a torn copy of a patient’s medical record, with Alice’s name at the top. The record was pasted partly over another clipping of Alice’s obituary.

I stacked the three framed collages on the table and reached for my phone.

“Are you calling Caroline?” Ruby asked. “Do you think she might have some idea what this is all about?”

“She might,” I said. “But I’m calling Sheila. I think we’ve uncovered something she’s been looking for. A few pieces of evidence that might help her solve a murder mystery.”

“What?” Ruby’s eyes were wide. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“Hang on,” I said. “We’ve moved into Sheila’s territory now. She needs to look at this.”

Supporting subscribers have access to the premium extras for this episode: a few notes on the mystery-writing craft and the “fair-play” mystery, as well as links to posts on the crafts of floral paper-making and the fascinating art of quilling, and the usual Q&A.