Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel Read online

  Ripping

  Abigail

  a Quilted Mystery novel

  “Though youth must only wait,

  While age can only fear,

  Love at first a fate

  Is last a feeble tear.

  Oh love, my heart is yours

  From youth’s deflowered field

  O’re life’s imperiled moors

  My heart will never yield.

  And now I ever cry.”

  From the Latter-day Poems of Ruth McMichaels, 1934-

  PROLOGUE

  The twitter.com entries of John Shaw, Pinto Springs High School graduate, allegedly transcribing the last words of his six classmates. Timestamps and content captured by a following dorm friend Wednesday, Oct. 22, 8:15 a.m. and later reposted on the friend’s blog. The entries are reversed in order for clarity.

  They left the phone on cause I was sic and couldn’t go. I listened all nite. Was supposed to be a punishment. Was the worst.

  2 hours ago

  Fell asleep once or twice, so began recording. We were best buds. We were the Magnificent PS7. Here are the last words of the other 6.

  2 hours ago

  It’s the whole horse thing of Pinto Springs. That’s why we were the Magnificent Pinto Springs 7

  2 hours ago

  I begin their words: Jimmy Winters says, “Hey, Ratface, wake up. Wake up man. Hey, Rats, we’re lost.”

  1 hour ago

  Rashaad (Ratface) Maloof says, “What? How?”

  1 hour ago

  Ricardo (Ricky) Rodriguez says, “What’s happening Bro? Where the freak are we?”

  1 hour ago

  Winters: “I don’t know, Ricky. Rats was supposed to keep me on track, but he fell asleep an hour ago. I must have…I don’t know, taken a wrong turn.”

  1 hour ago

  Maloof: “Don’t blame me.”

  1 hour ago

  Leopold Cooke says, “Okay, calm down. How lost can we get on the California interstate system, people?”

  1 hour ago

  Cooke: “What is this, 5, 8? James my boy, how can you not know which freeway you’re on?”

  1 hour ago

  Winters “If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you, Leopold my boy, would I?”

  1 hour ago

  Cooke “My pins are falling asleep, my boy, sit on Baker for awhile. I’m going crippled.”

  1 hour ago

  Rodriguez: “Okay, okay. You know, this looks like 8, out by freaking Chula Vista. Maybe we missed the turnoff to school.”

  1 hour ago

  George Baker says, “Hey man! What the hell?

  1 hour ago

  Rodriguez: “Your turn to carry my sweet-ass load, Baker baby.”

  1 hour ago

  Winters: “No. We’re not on 8. We’re not on 5. I don’t know where the crap we are, guys.”

  1 hour ago

  Cooke: “Don’t panic, Jimmy my boy, Cooke to the rescue. A sign will come up soon. Go back to sleep my people. Jimmy and I have got the helm.”

  1 hour ago

  Winters: “Not a good idea, Leo. This is like…. Sweet Jesus, my eyes won’t stay open.”

  1 hour ago

  Baker: “Ricky! Stop wiggling your butt. You’re making me hot.”

  1 hour ago

  Rodriguez: “Eew, you like my freakin’ brown ass, eh Black Boy?”

  1 hour ago

  Baker: “Keep wiggling, you’ll find out how much.”

  1 hour ago

  Have to break. Tears and tears.

  1 hour ago

  Rodriquez: “Hey, like maybe we’ve entered the freakin’ Twilight Zone. Doodoo-doodoo, doodoo…”

  48 minutes ago

  Kim Lee says, “Shut the f*ck up! I’m trying to get some shut-eye back here. Least I can do in this hole you call a third-row seat.”

  46 minutes ago

  Rodriquez: “Ratface, you’re the great navigator, where the freak are we?”

  45 minutes ago

  Maloof: “My name is Raashad, Ricky. You better start using your real names too guys, if you want to get anywhere in the biz world.”

  44 minutes ago

  Baker: “Let me see. Hmm. Trees and more trees. We’re in the woods.”

  44 minutes ago

  Cooke: “Helpful, my boy, very helpful.”

  43 minutes ago

  Lee: “Hey, Rats, you can’t rename yourself now. We been calling you Ratface since you were six years old. And you still look like a rat…”

  31 minutes ago

  Maloof: “Stay on the road, Jimmy!”

  29 minutes ago

  Winters: “What? Oh sh*t, I fell asleep again! My brain is mush. What the f*ck did they give us in TJ?”

  28 minutes ago

  Cooke: “You mean what the f*ck did you take in TJ? Nobody spoon fed you, Jimmy my boy.”

  26 minutes ago

  Lee: “Wait a minute. Woods? Do we know these trees? Like from three trips from Pinto Springs High to TJ last year? Is this..?”

  24 minutes ago

  Baker: “Sh*t! We’re on 13! You’ve got us heading back home, Jimmy. No can do, guys, my dad…”

  23 minutes ago

  Cooke: “The Reverend…”

  21 minutes ago

  Baker: “…will excoriate me if I show up stoned out of my mind…”

  19 minutes ago

  Rodriguez: “Smelling of Mexican pussy.”

  18 minutes ago

  Baker: “…he’ll drag my ass right off campus and back home…”

  18 minutes ago

  Maloof: “STAY ON THE ROAD, JIMMY”

  17 minutes ago

  Winters: “Huh? Crap, I’m really spacing here, guys. And it isn’t funny Ricky.”

  17 minutes ago

  Lee: “Maybe we can crash at somebody’s house. Maybe your house, Winters. Your old lady won’t mind.”

  16 minutes ago

  Maloof: “Jimmy! What are you doing? You can’t do a U-ie in the middle…”

  16 minutes ago

  Cooke: “WATCH OUT!”

  15 minutes ago

  I tuned in the news and heard the report. All dead. They’re all dead. A header with a sixteen wheeler. And now I join them.

  9 minutes ago

  PART ONE

  stitch in time

  Chapter 1

  Friday, October 24, 9:30 am

  My name is Rachel Lyons and my husband Matthew and I are private investigators working our late life second careers in and around San Diego, Cleveland and Imperial Counties. Our California company is called LIRI which stands for Lyons Investigations and Research, Incorporated. LIRI is currently housed in our home and Matt and I are the principal owners. We have two full-time apprentices helping us with the growing security and investigative needs of the area. We’ve been in business for three years now.

  Some of you like to see the characters you’re reading about, and you’ll be reading a lot about Matt and I, so I’ll describe us. Of course you must remember this is all from my point of view.

  Or POV as some of us writers like to say, although I’m really a journalist. That’s one of my duties with our company, keeping records of our day’s activities, often in the form of a journal, and also doing most of the research for our business.

  Okay, here goes the description part again. I’m in my early fifties, with an accent on the early, I color my hair mostly in shades of blond, and some people consider me pretty. I’m about average height and we aren’t discussing weight here. Or anywhere.

  Matthew Lyons is a hunk. He was born a hunk—I have his baby pictures to prove this. Dark brown hair, Paul Newman blue eyes, muscular, six two,
and the girls gasp when he enters the room. Even now that he’s in his mid fifties. And that’s all I’m going to tell you about my husband--except, he’s mine, so hands off.

  Matt takes care of all the dangerous stuff in our private investigating business, and he manages the two male apprentices currently associated with LIRI.

  At least he used to handle all the scary stuff. Last month I started redefining my job description, kind of by accident, as I found my way into a lot of bad scary stuff.

  But I’m convinced that was an aberration. More about this later, back to the here and now.

  I was cooling my heels outside Principal Edward J. Forsyth’s office at Pinto Springs High because I needed to speak to him about a recently enrolled student. That student was Abigail Pustovoytenko. I initially met Abigail three weeks ago at the first Quilted Secrets bee I attended. I met her mother Gloria doing some investigating I completed ten days ago. Gloria P. is head nurse of the Cleveland County Hospital Intensive Care Unit.

  At the moment, Principal Dr. Forsyth, as his nameplate on his door listed him, had more important things to attend to because the six boys in Wednesday’s horrendous early morning accident had been graduates of Pinto Springs, and a constant stream of worried parents, students and teachers were cycling in and out of his office.

  The school was planning a “Grieving Service”. The city of Pinto Springs, California was in collective mourning and the Grieving Service was to be one of the many opportunities the powers-that-be intended to offer the community for expressing their grief.

  The fatal accident had occurred only fifty-three hours ago. Five of the six CSUSD college freshman died within hours of the crash. The sixth, driver Jimmy Winters, was hanging on by a thread according to rumors. The car the boys had crammed themselves into for a night of heavy drinking in Tijuana was broadsided on the right by a heavyweight, refrigerated HappyFoods truck as Winters tried to do a u-turn in the middle of I-13.

  Interstate 13 is the main north south freeway feeding Cleveland County.

  The boys had been friends since early childhood, as well as being recent graduates of PSHS. Needless to say, the parents were devastated, and the community was distraught.

  The whole world now knows about this accident, thanks to a Twitter account of the conversation leading up to the accident posted by the seventh of the boys, one John Shaw. Shaw, also a freshman student at UCSD, had missed the trip to TJ due to a bout with the flu. I read his Twitter page yesterday, when all of this hit the regional news like an avalanche moving at warp speed. Chilling. Especially his opening line that he was preparing to join them.

  Fortunately, John Shaw’s parents were phoned by a dorm friend and warned. They retrieved him from the University of California, San Diego around ten that morning and sped him home just as an army of reporters were zeroing in for interviews. No one knows where his parents are hiding him at the moment.

  What a terrible thing, to lose five of your life-long friends all at once. Maybe six.

  By the way, Pinto Springs High is centrally located on the mile high Cleveland County plateau, situated east of our home in Escondido.

  Which brings me back to why I was cooling my heels.

  Chapter 2

  As I’ve said, my mission this sad morning concerned one Abigail Pustovoytenko Beardsley and her recent enrollment at the high school. Thirteen year old Abby was one of the Quilted Secrets gals I sewed with last month at my first ever hand quilting bee.

  Beardsley is Abigail’s father’s last name. She elected to drop it when he and her mother separated. I don’t know when this separation occurred.

  Her mother and primary guardian, Gloria Pustovoytenko hired me early this morning to retrieve Abigail from the school and bring her home. Early this morning was when Gloria first got wind of the fact that Abigail had been attending classes at PSHS. A remarkable fact given this was her third day.

  According to her mother, the girl was illegally enrolled at PSHS. Gloria’s reasoning was that the homeschooled Abigail is enrolled in a charter school already, the Stowall Academy of the Arts.

  Don’t bother looking it up on your Blackberry. It isn’t listed anywhere. I’ve searched. In simple English, Gloria is fighting Abigail’s desire to attend public school.

  Nothing is simple or we’d skip this existence altogether and move straight into heaven, as my mother used to say and I often repeat to myself.

  So here I sat, wondering how I would bring this retrieval thing off. Public school systems aren’t happy about homeschooling to begin with, so when a homeschooled child decides to up and enroll herself in a public school—with or without her legal guardian’s permission--I suspected that said public school would fight like crazy to keep the student on their rolls.

  Abigail P. was sitting in a classroom somewhere on campus at this very moment. I wished she wasn’t. I wished I wasn’t here to do what I suspected could well be illegal.

  I wasn’t unaware of Abigail’s feelings in the matter. She’d complained about being homeschooled all through October’s bee. However, the general consensus of the other women in attendance--those who had known Abigail for far longer than I--was that she was better off staying home. According to them, Abigail was a very special student and a brilliant artist.

  And Gloria had assured me that Abigail’s education was above par, with input from tutors and a variety of field activities with other homeschooling parents.

  California law has been fairly supportive of homeschooling. I say fairly, because up until recently there was no actual law allowing homeschooling. But there has never been one against it either.

  But to make the issue even more secure, a recent ruling by the California Court of Appeals Second Appellate District has declared that “California statues permit homeschooling as a species of private school education.” It currently appears there is no further appeal expected.

  In the wake of this decision, and perhaps because Abigail was becoming increasingly rebellious about the issue, Gloria and many of her fellow homeschooling parents quickly formed and registered a PSP, or Private School Program. This was done on October first--the first day authorized by this new ruling. (This would be the illusive Academy of the Fine Arts already mentioned.)

  The supportive part also comes from the fact that as of this date none of the “teachers” registered as “working” in this “private school” need be certified by the state as such. This may change. Also, the instruction, though necessarily in English, and necessarily covering several branches of study required in all public schools, could be fulfilled in large groups or small, at any locale, and with no defined curriculum as long as a record of “attendance” was kept.

  A trip to the zoo with mom or dad therefore could constitute a biology lesson, as long as mom or dad wrote the date and time down in a log.

  Consequently, Gloria believed her grounds for sending me to the school to retrieve her daughter rested with the truancy laws of the state, and that in effect by not “attending” the homeschool classes she’d been scheduled to attend this week she was skipping school. Truant.

  AWOL.

  I hoped because the school was so involved with the deaths of the five recent graduates from PSHS I might just pull this off…at least for today. This would give Gloria P. time to get her act together and hash things out with her daughter.

  She needed to start talking with her daughter and meeting her personal needs—instead of talking at her daughter which I suspected she was doing. I suspect this because I have in my fairly long time on this planet observed this behavior in relatives, friends and yes, even in our own efforts at parenting.

  And Gloria needed to keep in mind that it might not be long before the Forces to Liberate Kids from the Tyranny of Their Parents would gather themselves around Abigail’s cause. Reminding her of this probable complication was to be my second task for the day.

  Maybe she already knew it.

  The principal whizzed by me for a third straight time. I almost reached
out and grabbed his pant leg in a desperate effort to grab a few seconds of his time. Instead I smiled a weary smile at the secretary whose hawk eyes were drilling into my own disapprovingly. Public schools were very protective of their territory, which included every living child on U.S. soil between the ages of five and eighteen.

  Secretary Chrissy Prichard, with her own nameplate, clearly didn’t side with me on the homeschooling issue. Either that or she was a naturally disagreeable person.

  The principal whizzed back into his office and growled over his shoulder, “Show Ms. Lyons in.”

  I stood and whizzed right in after him—not waiting for Ms. Prichard to introduce me.

  “Dr. Forsyth, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me….”