4 Plagued by Quilt
PRAISE FOR
THE HAUNTED YARN SHOP MYSTERIES
Spinning in Her Grave
“MacRae does a superb job of coordinating her amateur sleuth ensemble cast . . . set in Tennessee. Snappy repartee and genuine warmth are both conducive to the best sort of cozy.”
—Library Journal
“A fun series and the latest book is a fantastic whodunit.”
—Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
“The mystery pleases with its plot and character development.”
—Romantic Times
Dyeing Wishes
“A light paranormal cozy that will draw readers in with its small-town charm and hidden secrets.”
—Debbie’s Book Bag
“[An] enjoyable mystery . . . filled with a cast of charming characters.”
—Lesa’s Book Critiques
“[This] series is one that I’ve fast learned to enjoy for its cast of characters, its humor, and its primary setting of a yarn shop. . . . Oh, how MacRae’s characters shine!”
—Kittling: Books
“Molly MacRae writes with a wry wit.”
—MyShelf.com
Last Wool and Testament
Winner of the 2013 Lovey Award for
Best Paranormal/Sci-fi Novel
Suspense Magazine’s Best of 2012
“A great start to a new series! By weaving together quirky characters, an interesting small-town setting, and a ghost with a mind of her own, Molly MacRae has created a clever yarn you don’t want to end.”
—Betty Hechtman, national bestselling author of Knot Guilty
“A delightful paranormal regional whodunit that . . . accelerates into an enjoyable investigation. Kath is a fascinating lead character.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“A gem.”
—TwoLips Reviews
“A delightful and warm mystery . . . with a strong, twisting finish.”
—Gumshoe
“Suspense and much page flipping! . . . I loved the characters, the mystery; everything about it was pitch-perfect!”
—Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
“The paranormal elements are light, and the haunted yarn shop premise is fresh and amusing.”
—RT Book Reviews
“MacRae has the perfect setting and a wonderful cast for her new series . . . good setting, good characters, good food . . . and fiber and fabric, too. Last Wool and Testament is a wonderful beginning to a new series.”
—Kittling: Books
PRAISE FOR OTHER
MYSTERIES BY MOLLY MACRAE
“MacRae writes with familiarity, wit, and charm.”
—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
“An intriguing debut that holds the reader’s interest from start to finish.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Witty . . . keeps the reader guessing.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Engaging characters, fine local color, and good writing make Wilder Rumors a winner.”
—Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries
“Murder with a dose of drollery . . . entertaining and suspenseful.”
—The Boston Globe
Also by Molly MacRae
The Haunted Yarn Shop Series
Book 1: Last Wool and Testament
Book 2: Dyeing Wishes
Book 3: Spinning in Her Grave
OBSIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
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penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Copyright © Molly MacRae, 2014
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OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
ISBN 978-0-698-16821-3
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
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Contents
Praise
Also by Molly MacRae
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Recipes
Knitting Pattern
Excerpt from KNIT THE USUAL SUSPECTS
For Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site
and Rocky Mount Living History Museum.
You make history and stories come alive.
Acknowledgments
For tips on excavating nineteenth-century garbage dumps, thank you, Kristin Hedman and Sarah Wisseman. Any mistakes in technique, terminology, or condition of materials recovered are mine. For sharp ears and eyes and valuable editing pencils, thank you, Janice Harrington, Betsy Hearne, David Ingram, and again, Sarah Wisseman. Thank you to Libit Woodington for introducing me to fat quarters. For another charming pattern, thank you, Kate Winkler. For this opportunity, thank you, Cynthia Manson and Sandy Harding. More than anything, as always, thank you, Mike, Ross, Gordon, and Milka.
Chapter 1
“But where will we find the real story? Where will we find the dirt? Where . . .” The end of Phillip Bell’s question disappeared as he paced the stage in the small auditorium at the Holston Homeplace Living History Farm, hands behind his back. The two dozen high school students in the audience tracked his movements like metronomes. I watched from the door, where I could see their faces.
Phillip, who couldn’t have been ten years older than the youngest student, screwed his face into a puzzle of concentration as he continued pacing. He brought one hand from behind his back to strok
e the neat line of beard along his chin. If he hadn’t been dressed in a mid-nineteenth-century farmer’s heavy brogues, brown cotton trousers, linen shirt, and wide-brimmed felt hat, he would have looked like a freshly minted junior professor. The students’ reactions to him were as entertaining as Phillip himself.
Without warning, Phillip jerked to a stop, swiveled to face the students, and flung his arms wide. “Where?” he asked. “Where are the bodies buried?”
Startled, the teens in the front row jumped back in their seats. The boy nearest me recovered first. He slouched down again, stretching his long legs out so his feet rested against the edge of the stage. He smirked at his neighbor, then turned the smirk to Phillip.
“In the cemet—” the boy started to say.
Phillip flicked the answer away. “No, no, no. Not the cemetery. Boring places. Completely predictable.”
“Unlike Phillip Bell,” a woman’s voice said behind my left ear. “Full of himself, isn’t he? What a showman.”
I glanced over my shoulder to smile at Nadine Solberg. She’d crossed the carpeted hall from her office without my noticing. She didn’t return my smile. She was watching Phillip as raptly as the students and gave no indication that she expected an answer to her comment. I turned back to watch, too.
“No,” Phillip said to the students, “there’s someplace better than cemeteries. That’s besides the fact that no living Holston—or anyone else—is going to let us dig up his sainted Uncle Bob Holston or Aunt Millie Holston from the family plot. And you can bet that is chiseled in stone. Not chiseled on a gravestone, though.” The students laughed until they realized Phillip wasn’t laughing with them. When their laughter died, he turned and stared at the boy who’d brought up cemeteries. “You aren’t a Holston, are you?”
The boy started to open his mouth, then opted for a head shake. Under Phillip’s continued stare, the long legs retracted and the boy dropped his gaze to the open notebook in his lap.
Phillip looked around the room. “Are any of you Holstons? Last name? Unfortunate first name? Anyone with a suspicious H for a middle initial?”
Students shook their heads, looked at one another.
“Just as well,” Phillip said. “The Holston clan might not like what I’m about to tell you. Have you got your pencils ready? Take this down. Two words. Two beautiful words describing some of the most interesting places on earth. Some of my favorite places. Much less predictable than cemeteries.” He turned a pitying look on the formerly smirking boy. “And that makes them so much better than cemeteries. Where are we going to find the real stories? Two words. ‘Garbage dump.’ Yes sir, I love a good old garbage dump. ‘Old’ being the operative word.”
“Will your ladies and a crazy quilt be able to compete with Phillip and his garbage dump?” Nadine asked in my ear.
“I think we can hold our own, although ‘crazy’ might be the operative word in our case. Is Phillip always ‘on’ like this?” We watched as he described the contents of a nineteenth-century household dump in loving detail.
“You should have seen him when he interviewed for the assistant director position,” Nadine said. “He wore a purple frock coat. He looked like the Gene Wilder version of Willy Wonka, and he gave the search committee a tour of the Homeplace like they’d never heard before. As I said, quite the showman.”
“And it worked. You hired him.”
“Yes, I did.”
There was something in her voice that made me turn my back on Phillip Bell’s theatrics and look at her more closely. What I saw was the usual impeccable Nadine Solberg, director of the state-owned historic farm—a site people in Blue Plum liked to describe as Colonial Williamsburg on a personal scale, ignoring the fact that it was a nineteenth-century farm instead of an eighteenth-century town. Slim, silver, successful, and sixty, is how my friend Ardis Buchanan described Nadine. Sparkling would usually suit Nadine, too, but the sparkle was missing today.
“How’s he working out?” I asked. “Are you happy with him?”
“I am,” she said. “He’s only been here six weeks, though, and the Holston jury is still out.”
“Ah.”
Nadine’s unease was easy to understand. She was new at the site, too, though not as new as Phillip. She’d been the state’s solution—plucked from a position with the Historical Commission in Nashville and dropped into this job in tiny Blue Plum—when the former director had resigned without notice four months earlier. Not only had Nadine taken over without benefit of a transition period, but she’d inherited a search already in progress for the site’s first full-time professionally qualified assistant director. It was a search fueled by private money raised by well-heeled Holstons from Houston, Texas, who knew how to make things happen.
“They’ve been miracle workers,” Nadine said. “They’re kind and generous people.”
“But that generosity comes with hidden costs?” I asked, thinking of the strings a powerful family might attach to the money they donated.
“You will never hear those words from my lips,” she said.
“Ms. Solberg?” Phillip called. “Ms. Rutledge? Coming on the tour?”
Nadine stepped past me into the room. “Unfortunately for me, there’s a meeting I can’t miss. But I’ll see you all back here in an hour or so. We’ll have snacks and cold drinks in the education room, and then we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty of Hands on History.” She paused. “Unless by then you’ve buried yourselves in Mr. Bell’s garbage dump and can’t pull yourselves out.”
The students laughed. Phillip didn’t ask again if I planned to join the tour and didn’t wait to see if I tagged along. Without looking back, he led the students out the door on the opposite side of the room. I turned to Nadine, but she’d already disappeared across the hall into her office and shut that door. I turned back to the auditorium in time to see the door closing there, too.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, feeling grumpy, “I’d love to take your tour.”
“That’s not what I was going to ask you,” a voice said from the stage. “But I’ll be happy to show you around if you want.”
I looked and saw a young woman standing in the middle of the stage, hands in the back pockets of her jeans, short dark hair pushed behind her ears.
“Are you one of the students with . . .” I pointed to the door Phillip and the students had gone through. But the room had been empty. I’d watched them leave.
“I’m a volunteer,” the woman said. “You’re Kath Rutledge, aren’t you? I recognize you from your shop. I’ve been in a few times. I love the Weaver’s Cat.” She looked down at the front of her T-shirt. “And I forgot my name badge again. I’m Grace Estes.”
“Where did you just come from?” I asked, ignoring her pleasant greeting and proving to myself, once again, how graceless my manners could be when something puzzled me.
Grace didn’t seem to mind. She looked over her shoulder at the wall behind the stage, hands still in her back pockets. I followed her gaze. Of course. There was a discreet door in the wall for back-of-stage entrances and exits.
“The education room’s through there,” she said. “I was setting out the refreshments.”
She hopped off the stage, and I made my way along a row of seats to meet her at the side door.
“Someday,” she said, “if Nadine gets money for renovations, it would be great to bump this wall out, add seats, and improve the traffic flow in here.” She grinned. “Do I sound like I’m doing a building usability study?”
“Are you?”
“Practicing, anyway. I took a class in building and design for historic sites last semester and I’m still psyched. Were you serious about taking a tour?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve never taken the official tour.”
“Come on, then. We’ll catch up with Phil.”
She opened the door and we started through at t
he same time, shoulders and hips colliding. I reached out to steady her. Grace laughed, then caught at my elbow when she heard my sharp intake of breath.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” I put a few steps between us. And tried to ignore the feeling of her shirtsleeve on my fingertips. Only a spark of emotion had passed through me—Longing? Loss? A stab of love and pain—it had been enough to startle me, not enough to make me stagger. Not enough to look her in the eye and know more about her than I should. I still didn’t understand these occasional odd flashes. How was it possible that I could brush up against someone else’s emotional state merely by brushing against a fabric they wore? I didn’t like it, and I didn’t know why it had been happening since Granny died and I’d moved here to run the Weaver’s Cat—her shop that was now mine. It was crazy. No, not crazy; I was no crazier than Granny had been. And even if I didn’t like the flashes, maybe I was getting used to them.
Grace still looked concerned.
“Really, I’m fine.” I held out my hand and made myself smile. “It’s nice to meet you, too, by the way.”
Up close it was easy to see she was closer in age to Phillip than one of the high school students I’d mistaken her for. Her warm smile and the hands slipping into her back pockets again made her look confident and comfortable. I liked her. I liked the humor in her eyes.
We followed a brick path across an expanse of lawn toward the site’s dozen or so historic buildings. The two-story antebellum clapboard house—the centerpiece of the Homeplace—sat on a rise to our left. I spotted Phillip and the students straight ahead of us, leaving the log corncrib and heading for the barn.
“So you’re studying site management?”
“On again, off again,” she said. “Small problem with cash flow, but I’ll get there eventually.”
“Stick with it. Of course, the cash-flow problems will stick with you, too, if you stay with the public-servant side of sites and preservation.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’ve got firsthand experience with that. I worked part-time for a couple of years at a site in West Virginia. So, yeah, I’ve been there, but it’s what I love, so I plan to keep doing it.”