2 The Patchwork Puzzler by Marjory Sorrell Rockwell Page A

guess.”
    “Okay, if Holly is innocent, who could have pulled the old switcheroo?” Cookie posed the question. She was almost as compulsive about solving puzzles as Maddy Madison. Every day she tackled The New York Times crosswords, unable to go to bed at night until she’d completed every square.
    “Henry Caruthers,” said Aggie.
    “What makes you say that?” Lizzie played along, amused by the girl’s tenacity.
    “He took Mrs. Beanie’s keys, so he probably stole your quilt. And Holly Everlast – ”
    “Eberhard,” Cookie corrected.
    “ – Eberhard was his cousin, so he could have paid her a visit and switched the two.”
    “But Henry Caruthers left a note in your grandmother’s house claiming he didn’t steal the quilt,” Bootsie reminded the girl. Not that the police chief’s wife actually believed the former mayor to be innocent.
    “Maybe he was telling a fib,” offered eight-year-old N’yen. Maddy had both kids again today. “I sometimes tell fibs when I don’t wanna get caught.”
    “Now there’s a theory I can buy into,” said Lizzie. She’d never truly liked Lefty Caruthers. He’d acted like a total jerk back in high school, when they sat next to each other in English class. She remembered him passing her notes with obscene suggestions. Just because he was the hotshot pitcher on the baseball team, he thought he could get away with murder. The nerve of that guy!
    “Let’s think through this logically,” suggested Maddy. “We know Nan Beanie arranged for Henry Caruthers to take her office keys. She admitted as much. We know the beehive quilt disappeared from the locked conference room. There were only three sets of keys – Nan’s, Beau’s, and Jim’s. If we agree that neither my husband nor Bootsie’s stole the quilt, that leaves Henry because he had Nan’s keys.”
    “So Henry’s a crook. But what about Holly?” Liz was still having trouble believing her quilting idol could have been involved in a heist.
    “Holly was commissioned to sew three replica quilts. One of them – we can tell by the matching thread – was substituted for our quilt. Not just anyone would have known about her assignment to create duplicates or had access to them. But Henry Caruthers, who was Holly’s cousin, might have.”
    “So either she was in league with Mr. Caruthers or he stole her fake quilt on his own, then substituted the real one,” said Aggie. Seemed a simple one-or-the-other to her.
    “Where does this guy Kramer fit in?” asked Cookie. It was all so confusing.
    “We know about him because of that to-do list of Nan’s we found. He ran a quilting store in Indianapolis. Maybe he was going to help them sell the quilt or planned to buy it for himself.”
    “I figured Nan was going to run off with Henry,” said Bootsie. “She worked for him all those years, maybe fell for him. But it looks like she left the country with this Kramer guy instead.”
    “I don’t get that part either,” nodded Cookie.
    “If we found Henry, we could ask him,” said Maddy.

Chapter Twenty-One
     
     
     
Stakeout at the Rooming House
     
     
    C ookie checked the town’s property records. Henry Caruthers had owned a home on Field Hand Road for twenty-seven years. Never having married, he lived alone. The records showed he also owned a tract of farmland east of town that he leased to a farmer named Cassidy for growing corn. And he also had a part interest in a rooming house over on Fourth Street.
    “Jim has already checked out Henry’s house,” said Bootsie. “He’s definitely not there.”
    “I drove out to that big cornfield,” reported Lizzie. “There’s no house there, just stalks of corn.”
    “What about the rooming house?” asked Maddy.
    “He co-owns it with Holly’s mother.” Cookie held up a copy of the deed.
    “Must not be a very profitable operation,” mused Maddy. “Mrs. Lazynski doesn’t seem to have two nickels to rub together.”
    “Her daughter isn’t doing so bad,”