“You can observe them during your classes. The less you interact with these quilters, the less likely you’ll reveal the truth. The press releases for the film will promote you as an expert quilter. Do you want these old biddies running to the media with the real story?”
“I doubt the tabloids would be interested,” Julia retorted, scornful. “As secrets go, it’s not very sexy.”
“You can’t afford the risk. Maury didn’t want to tell you, but Deneford agreed to give you this part only because he thinks you already know how to quilt. If he discovers Maury misled him, you’re out of a job, and I don’t think I need to tell you how difficult it will be to find you another role this good.”
“I appreciate your honesty,” she said crisply, though she would have preferred a bit more tact.
It was a relief when Ares finally left her to settle into her suite, although the room felt oddly still when she was alone, the silence broken only by the little noises she made unfastening her suitcases and opening and closing bureau drawers. From the hallway came the sounds of the other women talking and laughing, and of quick footsteps going from room to room. Why did all the other guests seem to know one another already, though quilt camp had barely begun?
Julia had just finished unpacking when she was startled by a knock on her own door. When she answered, a young woman with shoulder-length reddish-brown hair smiled tentatively and introduced herself as Sarah McClure, one of the founding Elm Creek Quilters. “The Welcome Banquet will begin in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I understand you’d prefer your meal to be brought to your room?”
It was Ares’s preference, not hers, but Julia nodded anyway. “Yes, please.”
“Are you sure? The Welcome Banquet is one of our most beloved traditions. Aside from the delicious food and beautiful ambiance, it’s also a chance to get to know your fellow campers before classes begin. Our Candlelight welcome ceremony will take place afterward, outside on the cornerstone patio.” Sarah gestured to one of the windows. “It’s almost directly below your room. If you’ve looked outside, you may have noticed the gray flagstones surrounded by evergreens and lilac bushes. The lilacs aren’t blooming now, of course, but the late summer flowers are, and the weather this evening should be lovely.”
For a moment Julia was tempted, but then she remembered the other campers staring while Ares made a scene at registration. “Thanks, but it’s been a long day. I’d rather have dinner in my room and turn in early, if that won’t inconvenience anyone.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” Sarah assured her, but something in her voice made Julia suspect that no one in the history of Elm Creek Quilt Camp had ever willingly skipped the Welcome Banquet and Candlelight ceremony.
After asking if Julia had any dietary restrictions or preferences, Sarah left and returned about twenty minutes later with a sturdy wooden tray, which she placed on the small desk in the corner. “I’ll come back for the tray later,” she said, regarding Julia hopefully, “unless you’d like to bring it down on your way to the Candlelight ceremony?”
But Julia declined a second time, pleading fatigue. Sarah smiled understandingly and wished her a good evening.
Julia had expected a club sandwich on a paper plate, but she was pleasantly surprised to discover that the chicken piccata was perfectly seasoned, the rosemary roll flaky and warm, the mixed greens salad crisp and flavorful. The delicious food was enhanced by the elegant china, delicate antiques Julia wouldn’t have wanted to carry up that grand oak staircase. In the center of the plate was an emblem of a rearing horse, reminiscent of the fountain in front of the manor. Julia couldn’t help wondering what other unexpected pleasures she had missed by not attending the banquet.
When she finished eating, Julia set her tray in the hallway outside her door, freshened up, and changed into more comfortable clothing. Then she stretched out on the bed, idly paging through the issue ofVarietyshe had brought to read on the plane. It couldn’t hold her interest for long, so she soon tossed it aside and rummaged through her tote for the movie script and a notepad. Ares didn’t want her to waste time memorizing lines that would probably change in the rewrite, but that didn’t mean Julia couldn’t work ahead in other ways. Shereturned to the small desk in the corner and began reading through the script, noting each quilting technique that Sadie had used and that Julia would need to learn. By the time darkness fell, she had gone through the first four scenes and had listed several unfamiliar terms on her notepad: “basting,” “piecing,” “binding.” Pleased with herself, she stood up to stretch, but the distant murmur of voices broke her concentration.
Curiosity drew her to the window. On the gray stone patio below, the other campers were seated in a circle of chairs, their attentive gazes fixed on a red-haired woman whose cupped hands held a lit candle in a spherical crystal holder. “That’s when I realized that if I only ever attempted things I could do perfectly, I’d never experience anything new—and what a waste that would be of the life I’d reclaimed after my divorce,” she was saying, her voice low and solemn. “So, since I finally have a place of my own and no one to complain about how I spend my hours, I’ve decided to learn to quilt.”
A soft chorus of approval went up from the circle as she passed the candle to the woman on her left, who gazed at the dancing flame for a long moment in silence. She had luminous brown skin, strong cheekbones, and natural, black-and-gray hair worn in a crown of spiral curls. “I’m Grace Daniels, from San Francisco,” she said. “I’m an old friend of Sylvia’s. She’s been after me to visit her camp for years now, and I finally decided to indulge her.” She smiled at Sylvia as the others laughed softly. But then her smile faded. “What do I hope to gain this week? Some inspiration. I feel like I’ve run out of ideas, and... and I hope to discover some here.” With that, she handed the candle to the next woman in the circle, who cleared her throat nervously before introducing herself.
For more than an hour, Julia sat at her window, spellbound, listening as one by one the women shared the deepest secrets of their hearts with perfect strangers. If she were seated among them, what would she have shared when it was her turn to hold the candle? She had come to Elm Creek Manor to learn how to quilt so that shecould keep a movie role. She had to keep the movie role to breathe life into a stalled career. She had to revitalize her career or fade away into obscurity before she had ever truly made a difference, before she had ever participated in something worthwhile, something worth remembering.
If only she could be as open and trusting as the women gathered in the circle beneath her window. But none of them feared that someone would race to the tabloids with her deepest secrets. None of them worried that her failures would become fodder for late-night talk-show comedians. They could afford to trust one another.
Suddenly aware that she was intruding on an intimacy she did not deserve, she let the curtain fall back and withdrew from the window.
On the first full day of quilt camp, Julia overslept.
She had forgotten to set the alarm clock and woke with a start, groggy from jet lag, at the sound of a knock on her door. “Miss Merchaud?” a woman called. “Breakfast.”
Julia scrambled out of bed and snatched up her robe. “Just a minute.” Hastily she finger-combed her hair as she went to the door, hoping the woman in the hallway didn’t have a camera. The tabloids would pay big for a shot of her with bedhead and no makeup. Drawing her robe closed at the neck, she opened the door a crack, enough to glimpse Sarah holding a covered tray and peering back at her inquisitively.
Julia invited the younger woman to place the tray on the desk and ushered her out again as quickly as possible. She wasn’t hungry, but she nibbled on an English muffin and ate most of the fruit, leaving the omelet untouched. The coffee was suitably strong, though she missed her cinnamon cappuccino.
She showered quickly, got dressed, put her long blond hair up in a French twist, and applied her makeup with care. In the hallway, the muffled sounds of other campers making their way downstairs had faded, and a glance at the clock told her she would have to hurry. She grabbed a pen, the script notes she had compiled the previous night,and the papers she had received at registration, which included a map of the manor. She quickly followed the directions downstairs to the ballroom, which had been partitioned into classrooms with folding screens decorated in patchwork. She found Quick Piecing with barely a moment to spare, the last of eleven students to arrive.
The instructor—Sarah, who was proving to be remarkably versatile and never idle—had already begun class when Julia slipped into a seat at the back of the room, grateful that she had a table to herself. She would have been mortified if another camper were asked to trade places to accommodate Ares’s demands.
When Sarah passed out the first lesson, Julia scanned the title and discovered that they would be learning how to quick-piece quarter-square triangles that morning, whatever that meant. “First, you’ll need to pick a light fabric and a medium or dark,” Sarah said. “Cut a six-inch-by-twelve-inch rectangle from each fabric using your rotary cutter, and then lay the two fabrics with right sides facing, the light piece on top.”
Julia watched with alarm as the other ten students reached into their bags and brought out folded bundles of fabric, plastic rulers, and odd-shaped tools that resembled pizza cutters. Should she have brought her own fabric? She glanced around her workstation—a sewing machine, a gridded plastic mat, no fabric—and felt heat rise in her face. Everyone else had come prepared with fabric and other supplies, so apparently she alone hadn’t received the memo. Dismayed, she looked to the front of the classroom for help, but Sarah was already walking around the room observing her students as they layered fabric on their mats and happily sliced away at it with the pizza cutters.
“Is everyone ready to go on?” Sarah called out. Julia’s meek no was lost in the chorus of affirmatives. “Okay, then next, I want you to take your pencil and, using your ruler, draw a grid of two-inch squares on the back of your light fabric.”
A ruler. Julia snatched up her notebook and quickly tore out a sheet of paper. The pages were eight and a half by eleven inches; shecould fold it into sections and estimate an inch. Then she remembered the gridded plastic mat and scooted her chair closer to it. To her relief, she saw that the grid was marked in eighth-inch increments along two edges. Folding her paper to strengthen it, she lined it up against the edge of the mat and began marking off inches. By the time her makeshift ruler was completed, the rest of the class had already proceeded to the next step. Racing to catch up, Julia tore two more sheets of paper from her notebook and wrote “Dark” on one and “Light” on the other. She drew a wobbly edged grid as the other students moved on to their sewing machines. She was too far behind to ever catch up, but she persevered grimly. Ares had shipped her off to camp with none of the proper materials, but she needed that role and she was going to learn to quilt if it killed her. When she thought of the many, many times her mother had wanted to teach her when she was a girl, and how vehemently she had refused—
A shadow fell over her table. “Is everything okay back here?”
