The Silent Auction Quilt

By seven o'clock, the quilt has been outbid fourteen times, and every raise is exactly one dollar. Caspian, who is running the auction for the community hall's roof fund, stands behind the coffee urn and studies the bid sheet. Fifty-two dollars. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.

The quilt is the star of the evening. It has a hundred small squares, each cut from a different shirt, stitched in a spiral that makes the eye go round and round. Three people have been hovering around it all night. None of them seems to be the kind of person who bids a dollar at a time.

"Somebody is playing games," says the woman who sells the raffle tickets. "If I wanted to win something, I would put down a big number and go home."

Caspian agrees. A big number would end the matter. Instead, someone keeps appearing the moment the sheet is raised, writes a single digit higher, and vanishes again. The handwriting is small and careful, and it is always in pencil. The bidder number is 112.

He checks the registration list. Number 112 belongs to a man called Jarek, and beside his name someone has written: guest of the quilter. Caspian reads it twice and laughs out loud. A donor's husband bidding on a donor's quilt breaks no rule in particular, but it is certainly not what the rules had in mind.

He finds Jarek by the cake table, a tall man in a brown cardigan, holding a paper plate with a single biscuit on it. He hasn't eaten it. His eyes keep drifting toward the bid table.

"Number 112," Caspian says quietly. "You've been busy."

Jarek goes pink to the ears. He explains that his wife, Josefine, has been working on the quilt every evening since January, in the chair by the window. He has been listening to her sewing machine the whole time. "I thought it would go for thirty dollars to someone who would put it on a sofa for the dog," he says. "Then people started bidding, and I couldn't stand any of them."

"So you outbid them by one dollar."

"One dollar felt polite," Jarek says. "Also, I didn't know how much I was allowed to spend."

Caspian considers the situation. If he disqualified Jarek, the roof fund would lose the quickest-rising bids of the night. Despite the rules, the sensible answer is obvious. "You can keep bidding," he says, "but in real numbers, please. At one dollar a time we would still be here at midnight."

Jarek stares at him, then nods and walks to the bid table. When he comes back, the sheet says two hundred. Meanwhile, a stranger in a blue scarf has written two hundred and ten, and the evening has become much more interesting.

At eight o'clock, Caspian rings the little brass bell and reads out the result. The quilt goes to number 112, for four hundred and eighty dollars, the highest sum of the night.

Josefine is standing behind her husband when it is announced. She must have been there for some time. "You could have just asked me," she says. "I would have made you one for free."

Jarek folds the receipt into his cardigan pocket. "Not this one," he says.