the quilt and she pointed out the stitches with the tip of the pencil. “This is an M. See it? You read this way around the edge of the piece, ‘Let the man who lies beneath this quilt…’”

Lucas followed the curse around the quilted pieces, the letters like hummingbird tracks across fallen autumn leaves. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “She was really pissed, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” Schirmer said. “We have documents from her life that indicate exactly why she was pissed. She had the right to be. Her husband was a maniac.”

“Huh.” A thread of scarlet caught Lucas’s eye. He got closer, his nose six inches from the quilt. “Huh.”

Had to be bullshit. Then he thought, no it doesn’t—as far as he could tell, the thread was exactly the same shade as the thread on the spool he’d found behind the stove at Marilyn Coombs’s. But that thread had come from Arkansas…

He said, “Huh,” a third time, and Schirmer asked, “What?”

Lucas stepped back: “How do you authenticate something like this?”

“Possession is a big part of it. We know where Mrs. Coombs bought them, and we confirmed that with the auctioneer,” she said. “A couple of Mrs. Armstrong’s friends verified that she’d once been a pretty busy quilter, and that she’d made these particular quilts. She signed them with a particular mark.” She pointed at the lower-left-hand corner of the quilt. “See this thing, it looks like a grapevine? It’s actually a script SA, for Sharon Armstrong. We know of several more of her quilts without the curses, but the same SA. She used to make them when she was working on the ore boats…You know about the ore boats?”

“Yeah, Gabriella…the missing woman…mentioned that Armstrong worked on the boats.”

“Yes. She apparently had a lot of free time, and not much to do, so she made more quilts. But that was after Frank was in the asylum, so there was no need for curses.”

“Huh.” Lucas poked a finger at the quilt. “Can you tell by the fabric, you know, that they’re right? For the time? Or the style, or the cloth, or something?”

“We could, if there was any doubt,” she said.

Lucas looked at her. “What would I have to do,” he asked, “to get a little teeny snip of this red thread, right here?”

AN ACT OF CONGRESS, it turned out, or at least of a judge from the Hennepin County district court.

Schirmer escorted him to the elevator that went down to the parking garage. “If it had been up to me, I’d let you have the snip. But Joe thinks there’s a principle involved.”

“Yeah, I know. The principle is, ‘Don’t help the cops,’” Lucas said.

He said it pleasantly and she smiled: “I’m sure it won’t be any trouble to get a piece of paper.”

“If I weren’t looking for Gabriella Coombs…”

“You think the snip of thread would make a difference?” she asked.

“Maybe…hell, probably not,” Lucas admitted. “But I’d like a snip. I’ll talk to a judge, send the paper.”

“Bring it yourself,” she said. “I’d be happy to show you around. I haven’t seen you here before…”

“When I was in uniform, with the Minneapolis cops, I’d go over to the spoon-and-cherry…” He was talking about the Claes Oldenburg spoon bridge in the sculpture garden across the street. He smiled reflexively, and then said, “Never mind.”

“You did not either!” she said, catching his sleeve. What she meant was, You did not either fuck in the spoon.

He shrugged, meaning to tell her that he’d chased people off the spoon a couple of times. Before he could, she leaned close and said, “So’d I.” She giggled in an uncuratorlike way. “If I’d been caught and fired, it still would have been worth it.”

“Jeez, you crazy art people,” Lucas said.

He said goodbye and went down to the car, rolled out of the ramp. A white van was just passing the exit; he cut after it, caught the Minnesota plates—wrong state—and then a sign on the side that said “DeWalt Tools.”

Getting psycho, he thought.

WITH NOBODY behind him, he paused at the intersection, fished through his notebook, and found a number for Landford and Margaret Booth, the Donaldson brother-in-law and sister. He dialed and got Margaret: “I need to know the details of how your sister acquired one of the Armstrong quilts, which she donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum.”

“Do you think it’s something?” she asked.

“It could be.”

“I bet Amity Anderson is involved,” she said.

“No, no,” Lucas said. “This thing is branching off in an odd direction. If you