Make Quilts Not War

chapter 29



“Jenny?” Harriet said at almost the same time. “What are you doing here? People are looking for you. And no, I didn’t follow you. I came here to talk to Marcel about Aiden.”

“I’m sorry.” Jenny’s shoulders sagged. “All this stuff the last few days has got me on edge.”

“Can you stay and have some coffee or tea?” Cookie asked. “Jenny was just telling me you were attacked with acid. Are you okay?”

“I need to get home. I’m supposed to be resting,” Harriet raised her bandaged arm. “I wanted to be sure Marcel knew that Michelle had been arrested.”

“What for?” Cookie leaned forward.

“She tried to stage a kidnapping of Carla Salter’s baby. She hid her in the house so she could be the hero and find the child when she’d gotten enough people involved.”

“That’s horrible.” Cookie looked at her husband.

“Wait a minute,” Jenny said. “Are you supposed to be driving yet? Aren’t you taking pain medication?”

“Only at night. I’m supposed to be home resting. Although, Detective Morse was at Aiden’s and did tell all of us we shouldn’t go anywhere alone, so I’m breaking that rule.”

“I don’t understand. What do the Loose Threads have to do with Michelle and her attempt on Wendy?”

“It was coincidental. Morse just took advantage of having us all there at the same time. She’s concerned that whoever shot Pamela and Bobby is going to keep trying until they get you, Jenny.” Harriet was trying to think of the right words to get through to her.

“Would you like Marcel to drive you home?” Cookie asked. “It sounds like you aren’t supposed to be driving or going anywhere alone.”

“I can take her,” Jenny said. “I need to go help tear down at the festival, so I’ll be going her direction.”

“Are you sure? I got here fine, and I’m sure I can get back fine, too. Besides, my car is already here.”

“Your aunt would never let me hear the end of it if she knew I could have taken you and didn’t. Just let me finish my tea, and we’ll be on our way. I’m sure Cookie and Marcel wouldn’t mind bringing your car home.”

“We’d be happy to,” Cookie agreed. “Do you have time?” she asked her husband.

“Sure, let me know when you’re ready to leave,” he said and headed back upstairs.

Cookie made Harriet a cup of tea and produced some double chocolate chip cookies, all the while chattering about the festival, her garden, the weather and whatever else popped into her head that wasn’t related to either Jenny or Harriet’s recent troubles. When everyone was finished, Cookie brought Harriet’s coat and helped her into one sleeve, draping the other one over her shoulder.

“Thanks for listening,” Jenny said to her as the two women hugged goodbye.

Harriet got in the passenger seat of Jenny’s silver Mercedes and waited while Jenny clipped the seatbelt around her bad arm.

“I guess you’re wondering what I was doing at Cookie’s house when everyone else was helping with Wendy’s disappearance,” Jenny started when they were underway.

“It did cross my mind. Everyone else heeded the call.”

“I knew everyone else would be there, and I needed advice. Cookie and I have been friends for years. We’ve served on several committees together. I needed to talk to someone who wouldn’t have the same emotional attachment to me and my issues, yet knew me well enough that I could trust her opinion.

“In addition, she’s a clinical psychologist—she worked fulltime until they had the kids, and she still works part-time. I feel like I can tell her anything, and she won’t be horrified or repulsed but will still be able to give me a considered opinion.”

“I wish you felt you could tell us anything and we wouldn’t judge you,” Harriet said softly.

“This is a very complicated situation.”

“It might be less so if you came clean and told the truth. Maybe we could help.”

“Believe it or not, that’s pretty much what Cookie said.”

“Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea at my house and try it out on me? Maybe that will be easier than talking to the whole group at once.”

“I suppose I’ve got to start somewhere.”

“In the interest of full disclosure, Lauren will be coming over to check on me pretty soon,” Harriet warned.

Jenny sighed as she turned into Harriet’s driveway.

“Everyone’s going to have to learn about this anyway, so I guess one more won’t hurt.”

“Just out of curiosity, if I hadn’t showed up, what would you have done?”

“Frankly, my first instinct was to just leave without a trace, but I can’t do that to my husband and son. I don’t want to be that kind of person. Heaven knows, I’m going to have some difficult explanations to them.”

“What about us? Were you going to tell anyone?”

“I was going to start with your aunt and Mavis and maybe Connie. No offense, but one of the keys to my story is the times we lived in when this started. I know the rest of you have read about it, but unless you lived it, you can’t really understand the emotion.”

“I promise not to pass judgment.”

“I know you won’t intend to, but let’s not make any promises until you hear my story.”



The tea water hadn’t even boiled when Lauren came into the kitchen through the studio. Harriet had given her a key so she didn’t have to keep digging the hidden one out of the flower box.

“I see you’re resting like you’re supposed to be,” she said as she took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair.

Before Harriet could warn her, Jenny came out of the downstairs bathroom.

“Okay,” Lauren said so only Harriet could hear.

“Fix yourself a drink and then, when we get comfortable, Jenny has some things to explain to us.”

Lauren pulled a bag of ginger snaps from her messenger bag and poured some onto a plate from Harriet’s cupboard then poured herself a cup of tea.

“Can we do this in your TV room so we can at least pretend you’re resting so your aunt won’t bust my chops for not making you rest?”

Harriet looked at Jenny, who gave a small nod.



“If I’m going to tell you this,” Jenny began when she and Lauren were seated in upholstered chairs and Harriet was reclining on the sofa, “I need to do it my way in my time. Please don’t interrupt until the end unless you need clarification on a particular point.”

Lauren looked at Harriet and then they both agreed. Harriet had turned on a table lamp, but the light was dim, providing Jenny some feeling of privacy.

“I know you were taught about the war in Vietnam in history class, but that period of time was so much more intense than the pages of a book can convey. In January of nineteen sixty-eight, five thousand woman marched for peace and confronted Congress on its opening day. Jeannette Rankin led the march.”

“Excuse me,” Lauren said. “Remind us who Jeannette Rankin is.”

“She was the first woman to serve in Congress and was instrumental in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, allowing women to vote. Let me remind you, that amendment, was ratified in nineteen-twenty. She was in her eighties when she led the march.

“An actress named Eartha Kitt denounced the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon with the First Lady. Boys had to sign up for the draft. In past wars and conflicts, journalists were supposed to downplay any losses and keep the masses uplifted about our efforts.

“But Vietnam represented a change. It was the first time a war was televised on the nightly news. Newsmen were reporting the horrors of war along with a true accounting of the losses we were suffering. The Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times, exposing the differences between what we were being told by the government and what was really happening.

“Martin Luther King was assassinated, then Bobby Kennedy. The Chicago Eight, later seven, at first including the National Chairman of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, were charged with conspiracy to incite rioting. Later, Bobby’s case was severed, and he was given a four-year prison sentence for contempt of court. That length of sentence for contempt was unheard-of prior to his sentencing.”

Jenny stopped to sip her tea, and Lauren looked at Harriet and made a slight rolling gesture with her finger, which Harriet took to mean she, too, was anxious for Jenny to get to the point.

“I’m not doing this well,” Jenny said. “But what I’m trying to tell you is that these were highly charged times. Things were changing. People were protesting everything. Everyone knew someone who had been killed in Vietnam. When you protested, the police were the enemy, using tear gas and rubber bullets. Even the movies of the times were important statements. There was no such thing as pure entertainment.”

Harriet reached across Lauren and pointed at the cookie plate. Lauren scooped a couple into her lap then passed the plate. Jenny waited until Harriet was settled again.

“This is the hard part. I know I told you I’d grown up in a commune and I did—part of the time, after what went down.” Jenny sipped her tea again. It was obvious she was stalling.

“My brother was, indeed, a drug dealer, but he was smalltime. He sold small quantities of marijuana to his self-important friends. We lived in Lynnwood, and they acted like we lived in Berkeley. We were a blue-collar working-class town where most of the adults we knew were just trying to get by.

“Every town had a Selective Service office, and Lynnwood was no exception. Prior to Vietnam, a large percentage of the town’s young men signed up to go in the army as a way of getting out and seeing the world. But now they were scared. The army might actually expect them to fight.

“Bobby hung out with a group of stoned underachievers with high ideals and low ambition. They were very full of themselves back then. Everyone had a guitar or drum and thought they were going to be the next John Lennon or Ringo Starr. They went through a phase where they were going to be artists and craftsmen.

“Back then, the nerds had slide rules and graph paper and were always working on some problem, the solution to which would end world hunger or create a renewable source of clean energy. The only trouble was, none of them was good at anything. And of course, they all grew their hair out and stopped washing it.

“I don’t even remember which one of them thought up the idea of breaking into the Selective Service office and stealing the punch cards with the names of registered eighteen-year-olds. Left to their own devices, nothing would have come of the scheme except a lot of hot air.”

“How many people are we talking?” Lauren asked.

“There were a dozen, not counting Bobby, but the core group was maybe half that. Then Cosmic started hanging out with them, and that’s where the trouble started. What I told you about that part was true. Cosmic had an uncle who was an ex-con, he brought in another ex-con friend, and they decided to rob the bank next door.”

Jenny rubbed her hands together and then rubbed them on her upper arms.

“Are you cold?” Harriet asked and started to get up.

“Sit,” Lauren commanded. “I’ll get one of the fleece throws from the closet.”

She opened the closet door behind her chair and pulled out an assortment of afghans and throws from a box. She gave Jenny the fleece one and tossed a ragged knitted afghan onto Harriet’s lap, keeping a lap-sized flannel rag throw for herself.

Jenny wrapped the throw around her shoulders and continued her narrative.

“What I didn’t tell you the first time was what my role was.”

Harriet looked at Lauren, and they both looked at Jenny, but she was lost in her recollection.

“I was fifteen, and my parents were always working, so I tagged along with Bobby wherever he went. My parents had been making him babysit me after school from the time I was nine and he was twelve. He was flat-footed, and in those days that was enough to get you a one-F draft rating, which meant you weren’t prime and would be given a noncombat job to free up more qualified soldiers, but they would only do that if they ran out of one-As, which wasn’t likely.”

Jenny was clearly pained having to tell her story and was dragging it out as if rescue were coming, which they all knew wasn’t the case. Harriet’s arm was starting to hurt, but she didn’t want to distract Jenny by asking Lauren to get her pain medication.

“Bobby was lacking in ambition, beyond his small drug operation, so whenever he could make me do his chores or run errands for the group, he would. At that time, I was in awe of the older kids. They used new names, like Cosmic and Paisley and Tranquillity. They called me Jonquil. It was all very glamorous, in a hippie sort of way.” Her voice took on a faraway quality.

“As I was saying, Bobby made me run errands for him, and he’d started having me fetch drugs from his stash when the group ran out. A few weeks before the planned robbery, I was walking the two-mile route along a dirt road, having just made a run to Bobby’s stash, on my way back to the ‘clubhouse,’ which was an abandoned tin hay shed on a piece of property Tranquillity’s dad owned. I was stopped by a police car.

“The police took me in for possession of drugs—I later learned they’d had Bobby and his friends under surveillance for weeks. Someone had tipped them off about the planned break-in at the Selective Service office. I have no idea who. Somebody trusted someone outside the group and that person tipped off the police. Like I said, there were always a few hangers-on at the fringe of the group.

“I was a minor, and they’d watched us enough to know I was doing errands for my brother and was not part of the planned crime, but they scared me into believing I was going to jail for ten years on the drug possession charge. They let me suffer for an hour or so, and then Officer James Sullivan came in and offered me a way out. If I would become a confidential informant there would be no charges. It would be like I’d never been stopped, and as a bonus, they would pay me when I told them anything useful. He was very convincing—he even tore up the reports with my name on them right in front of me.

“My life went from the ruin of jail time to the righteousness of being a crime fighter in a few moments time. Until that point, I hadn’t really thought of the break-in as a criminal event. It was a political protest—that couldn’t be a crime, could it?

“Of course, once I talked to James, it became crystal-clear. Bobby and his friends weren’t the new guard that was going to change our country. They were a bunch of deluded dopers. And my brother was worse. He didn’t believe in their ideals, he only believed that as long as they were excited about the ‘plan’ they would meet more often and need more of his product.”

“Where were your parents during all this?” Harriet asked.

“James told me we didn’t need to worry them with all this. They were at their jobs all the time and were distant, at best. They didn’t even notice that my brother had a marijuana patch growing in the woods behind our house.

“I was young and confused. My brother had played the parental role in my life for years, and now the police had me spying on him and his friends. It never occurred to me to talk to my parents about it.

“Everyone was too stoned by the time I got back to notice I was gone longer than usual. Over the next weeks, I listened, which was pretty easy, given their drug use. I dutifully told about Cosmic’s uncle coming with his friend to teach them how to execute the break-in. Those two were more savvy, never mentioning word one about the bank or their plan to rob it. James was paying me, and I was starting to think of a career in law enforcement.

“Break-in day arrived, and based on my information, James and his team were ready to step in when the job was in process. Bobby and his group had given me the role of bagman. I would be the one to take the bag filled with the punch cards to the car parked in a nearby alley.

“Of course, when the time came, the whole thing went sideways. Cosmic’s uncle and his friend got us inside, and then they blew a hole in the wall between the office and the bank, and the next time I looked, they were stuffing money into one of the duffel bags we’d brought for the cards.

“All of a sudden, the police started screaming over loudspeakers for everyone to come out with their hands up, which hadn’t been the plan James had explained to me. But then again, neither of us had expected the robbers to blow a hole in the bank wall.

“Chaos erupted. Everyone had been given a job to do, be it lookout, bag packer, driver, whatever. They all abandoned their posts and went into the bank, where the robbers had poked a hole through the lobby wall with a pry bar and let them into the hair salon on the other side of the bank. They were able to break the glass out of the salon’s back door, and Bobby’s people were crawling one by one through the hole, scattering as they got out. I saw the bag I’d brought in and grabbed it before following the crowd.

“It turned out there was one more thing Bobby’s group didn’t know about Cosmic’s uncle. He and his friend were both armed. The police breached the bank before everyone got out of the salon and a shootout ensued.”

“James was the acid thrower’s father, I take it?” Harriet asked.

“I guess so. We never talked about his family. I mean, why would he talk to a fifteen-year-old about his personal life?

“Like I told you before, some people, my brother included, were captured and did jail time. Without James to identify the players, they weren’t able to arrest some of the people. A few were wounded, but James was the only fatality.

“As for me, I hid in the woods with Paisley. We climbed way up into a tree, and they never saw us.

“I’m not sure who, if anyone, else in the police knew my true identity. James always just called me Jonquil. Without him to back up my story, I was sure I would be arrested along with everyone else, especially since what I had told him wasn’t what had actually happened. I mean, if he’d lived, he could have arrested me for obstruction or something.

“In any case, Paisley and I hid in the woods until dark and then hitchhiked out of town. We drifted around, doing odd jobs and panhandling for six months, before we ended up in Georgeville at the commune. It was days before I opened the duffel bag—I took it with us assuming it was evidence that could be used against us and our friends.

“When we did open it, and saw all that money, we figured they could trace us through the serial numbers if we spent any of it. When we got settled in the commune, I hid it, and then when they taught me how to quilt, I put it in the batting. The center square of the quilt was made from the shirt I was wearing.

“Before we’d left town, I’d gone back to the car, which was still hidden in the alley. I grabbed somebody’s shirt, and Paisley took a jacket and some shorts. We wore the same clothes until we reached the commune. A lot of people were hitchhiking around the country in those days, so we didn’t have any trouble finding rides and places to sleep and things to eat.”

“The commune had a midwife, and she had a subspecialty of creating new identities. She was older and apparently had been doing this her whole career. Every month or two, she would file a birth certificate using names of people she knew, or sometimes she made names up for the parents. Later, she’d apply for a Social Security card, and even take out a modest insurance policy of the sort grandparents would buy for a grandchild. By the time we arrived, she had a fat file of valid identities just waiting for bodies to bring them to life. I became Jenny and Paisley became Donna.

“I was immersed in the commune for six years. The war in Vietnam wound down, and the commune’s truck farm became successful—they were on the leading edge of the organic food movement. I realized I wanted more out of life than growing bigger radishes. They were very supportive when I wanted to get my GED and go on to junior college. When I got my associate’s degree, I got a job and an apartment.”

“So, how did you end up back on the West Coast?” Lauren asked.

“That was a horrifying coincidence,” Jenny said. “I met my husband in Minnesota. He was in graduate school, and I worked in the registrar’s office. We got married after he graduated, and his first job was in Texas. His company eventually bought a small company in Foggy Point, and he was transferred here. It was a promotion, and how could I possibly argue that?

“He had no idea I had any connection here. We moved here, and I hoped Lynnwood was far enough away from Foggy Point, and that enough time had passed, that I wouldn’t run into anyone I’d known before. And until now, that’s been the case. Of course, that’s assuming that whoever is causing the problems now is one of the people from my old life.”

“I’d say that’s a pretty safe assumption,” Lauren said.

“So, all that stuff you told us about your dad leaving and your mother being in a commune was all a lie?” Harriet asked. “You really had two parents who lost their daughter at the age of fifteen?”

“I know it sounds awful, but believe me, Bobby was the only one who would have cared, and he had his own problems. If they’d paid any attention to us at all, Bobby wouldn’t have been growing and selling drugs, and I wouldn’t have been his drug mule.”

“Before, you said the robbers told Bobby’s group about the bank robbery. Now you say he didn’t know,” Lauren said thoughtfully. “Which story are we supposed to believe?”

“You were all pressuring me, and I was trying to rewrite history on the fly so that my part of it didn’t exist. Cosmic might have known, but believe me, his uncle would never have trusted the rest of the group with that.”

“And you’ve never told anyone?” Harriet asked.

“Not a soul,” Jenny said, and for once, Harriet believed her.