Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery Read online

  “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 Behind the Seams

  A FIBER FIB

  She struck a model’s pose, there in the doorway, showing off a jacket made from indigo fabric as dark and lucent as a midnight sky—Granny’s signature dye color and one that’s very difficult to achieve consistently. The jacket narrowed slightly at Nicki’s waist, then flared with a short peplum. It was beautiful, though it would need taking in a bit to fit her perfectly…

  “Do you mind if I…”

  “Touch it? Of course not,” Nicki said. “Wipe your fingers first, though, would you?”

  “Nicki!” Debbie sounded scandalized. “Kath knows more about handling textiles than any of us. She’s a professional whatchamacallit.”

  Being a polite, as well as professional, textile preservationist, I didn’t laugh at Debbie’s flub of my credentials or bridle at Nicki’s precaution. I smiled at both, carefully wiped my hands on a clean napkin, and touched the jacket at the sleeve and shoulder. Granny’s dyed and woven raw silk. I felt like petting it. I must have sighed.

  “Oh, I know what you mean,” Nicki said. “I was so touched when Ivy gave it to me.”

  “She did?” For a second, everything in the room stopped. Sound ceased. Movements froze. There was nothing but my hands on the jacket and Nicki’s smile after telling me my grandmother had given it to her. I didn’t know what had happened. And I didn’t know how. But I knew, absolutely, that Nicki was lying…

  LAST WOOL

  and

  TESTAMENT

  Molly MacRae

  AN OBSIDIAN MYSTERY

  OBSIDIAN

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, September 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59952-5

  Copyright © Molly MacRae, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  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 publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Mom and Dad,

  who gave my life warp, weft, and words.

  Jane Canby MacRae

  James Lawrence Woodward MacRae

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book wouldn’t be here without the amazing kindness one finds in the mystery-writing community. Thanks especially to Linda Landrigan, Cynthia Manson, and Sandra Harding for opportunities and encouragement. Thanks to Janice Harrington, Betsy Hearne, and Sarah Wisseman. I’m grateful for your sharp eyes and good ears, but your friendship means even more. Thanks also to the people, buildings, streets, and history of Jonesborough and Johnson City, Tennessee. You’ve shaped my writing world and don’t seem to mind my detours and embellishments. Thank you to the members of the Champaign Urbana Spinners & Weavers Guild, who let me sit among them taking notes. And thank you to my friends at the Champaign Public Library, who will find themselves in these pages, some more blatantly than others. Your generosity exemplifies the beauty of those who work to put books in people’s hands. And thank you always to my Mike.

  LAST WOOL

  and

  TESTAMENT

  Table of Contents

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Rosemary Watermelon Lemonade

  Rosemary Olive Oil Cake with Dark Chocolate

  Thea’s Red and White Baby/Toddler Hat

  Haunted Yarn Shop mystery

  Chapter 1

  It wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my thirty-ninth birthday, driving like a crazed woman from Richmond, Virginia, to a cemetery in the mountains of east Tennessee. But I straightened the curves and flattened the verdant hills along I-81 through the Shenandoah Valley with sacrilegious fervor, willing both my car and myself not to break down. Tears and taking a hand off the wheel long enough to hunt for Kleenex at that speed would be disastrous.

  I stopped for gas outside Abingdon, not waiting for the receipt to print before burning back up the entrance ramp.

  Over the state line, a blur of miles into Tennessee and a few switchbacks from my destination, it looked as though I’d get there in time, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but flashing red lights in the rearview mirror? Then my ears caught the wailing siren that went with the lights and my record
of never in my life having received a speeding ticket was toast. I pulled over, shut the engine off, rested my forehead on the steering wheel, and waited.

  “Ma’am.”

  I tried to dredge up a calming image or some Zen-ish phrase that might help me get through the next however-many-minutes this was going to take and back on the road without falling apart. Nothing in particular came to mind.

  The officer knocked on the window. “Ma’am?”

  “Oh, sorry.” He couldn’t hear me. I lowered the window. “Sorry, sorry. I’ve never done this before. I’m so sorry.”

  “Well, ma’am, it looks to me like you’ve got the speeding part of it down as good as any expert. What I need for you to do now is hand me your license and then keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “It’s in my purse,” I said, pointing to my bag on the passenger seat. “In my wallet. May I get it out?”

  He gave a curt nod and I very slowly, very carefully reached over.

  He coughed and I jumped.

  “There’s a remarkable difference between sudden moves and glacial ones,” he offered.

  “Oh, right.” I handed over my wallet, then didn’t know what to do with my hands so he could see them and my license at the same time. I noticed my hands were shaking, though, and wished I could sit on them to still them. I tried to read the name over his pocket, but between his height and my jitters I wasn’t able to make it out.

  “Officer, I’m sorry…”

  “Deputy. It’s Deputy Cole Dunbar.” Deputy Dunbar would have been intimidating even without the height. There was a lot of muscle on his frame and nothing soft about him. Not the stereotypical paunch of a middle-aged lawman, no brush of a moustache to take the edge off the set lips. There might have been smile lines at the corners of his eyes, but his face appeared to be as starched as his khaki and brown uniform.

  “Deputy Dunbar, I’m very sorry I was driving over the speed limit…”

  “Twenty miles per hour over the speed limit.”

  “Oh my God. Really?” My God, I’d been driving like an idiot. “Um, Deputy Dunbar, I don’t know if it makes any difference, but I’m on my way to my grandmother’s funeral, and I’m running late and I really need to be there because she’s all I had left. Ivy McClellan. Did you know her?” Now I was babbling like an idiot but I couldn’t stop. “She owned the Weaver’s Cat, down on Main Street, in Blue Plum. The little shop at one end of the row house there, with the yarn and wool and weaving and all? Ivy McClellan. She was my grandmother.”

  Some of the starch left Dunbar’s face. I wasn’t sure the flash of recognition in his eyes improved anything, but maybe invoking Granny’s name had eased the situation. Maybe his wife or mother or a teenaged daughter was one of Granny’s devoted customers. Maybe he was. Maybe I’d be lucky and he’d tear up at her memory, then tear up the ticket he was scribbling and give me an escort to the cemetery.

  “You’re Crazy Ivy’s granddaughter?”

  “What?” Seems I was wrong about easing the situation.

  “If nothing else, by your size, I can see the resemblance. Little bitty red-haired thing like you shouldn’t be going so fast.” He glanced at my license again. “Ms. Rutledge, is it? You slow down, Ms. Rutledge, or you’ll end up in the cemetery sleeping next to Crazy Ivy. Hey, now, are you feeling all right?”

  Little bitty thing like me might have been growling and ready to bite. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Her name was Ivy McClellan. She was a kind, caring, generous woman and a wonderful human being.”

  “And some folks called her Crazy Ivy. Didn’t you know that? Well, you’re from way up north there in Illinois, so maybe you didn’t.”

  Actually, I did, but I didn’t think a sheriff’s deputy ought to be calling her that on the day we buried her. “I spent plenty of summers here with her and never saw or heard anything from anyone but love and respect for her.”

  “And I’m sure plenty of people will miss her and are sorry she’s passed on,” he said. “I just think it was mighty convenient for her that she did.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Her death. Convenient. As in good timing.”

  With those jaw-dropping statements, he handed me the ticket along with my license. Then he stood, chest puffed out, hands on hips, waiting for me to continue sedately on my way, duly chastised and contrite.

  Being pulled over by an insulting, insensitive oaf of a sheriff’s deputy wasn’t in my happy birthday plans, either. I sat for another moment, memorizing his face in my side mirror, promising myself that never would I or any of my children, should I have any, ever consider procreating with the likes of, or a close relative to, Cole Dunbar.

  I started the car, wishing it could backfire and belch black smoke on command. As Deputy Clod disappeared behind me, the fresh green Tennessee mountain air flowed through my open window, providing aromatherapy of the simplest kind. Grief washed over me again, replacing anger. I followed the road down through a wooded hollow, across the single-lane bridge over Little Buncombe Creek, and around the last bends of cracked and faded asphalt climbing Embree Hill. The final stretch passed in another blur, this one not due to excessive speed.

  Then there were the wrought-iron gates, standing open like welcoming arms. I hesitated, wiped my eyes. Now that I could make out the burial party in the distance, farther up the hill, urgency took over again. Not checking to see whether Clod loomed behind me, I scattered gravel with a final burst of speed up the cemetery’s winding drive.

  I left the car door hanging open and ran to join the others, knowing I was late, hoping they’d waited. I got there in time to see my grandmother’s ashes lowered into the grave. Pressing one hand to the stitch in my side, I held the other to my mouth and finally let the tears come.

  No, it wasn’t the way I’d planned to spend my thirty-ninth birthday. Then again, it wasn’t the way Granny had planned to spend it, either.

  Chapter 2

  Granny might not have planned when she’d go, which was a month after her own birthday. Eighty was a fine age, by any standard, to still be competently in charge of one’s own business and living alone, but it wasn’t the ninety or one hundred Granny had hoped to see. Nor had she anticipated how she would go—walloped to the floor by a massive heart attack. She’d been feeling puny, as she called it, and the doctors concluded she’d had a sneaky, silent heart attack that left her feeling out of sorts but otherwise unaware of the damage or danger.

  But Ivy McClellan was an organizer and she knew exactly what she wanted to happen after her death. She left instructions with her lawyer, the funeral home, her longtime store manager, and me, her only living close relative. The gist of those instructions: cremation, no funeral, minimal burial service, and no plastic flowers, ever, on her grave.

  Her plans were meticulous and complete, so when I was walloped to the floor myself, by the phone call telling me she was suddenly and unexpectedly gone, I was able to get my feet back under me by burying myself for a few more days in the textile evaluation I was doing for a small museum in Richmond before charging down to Blue Plum.

  I’d meant to be up by five thirty, on the road by six. That didn’t happen, and between the late start, construction delays, and the very annoying stop for speeding, I missed most of Granny’s minimal burial service. I heard the final words, spoken after the ashes were lowered, through sobs I muffled with a wad of Kleenex. After the conclusion, and after pulling myself mostly back together, I saw what a nice-size crowd had made the trip out from town to this pretty hillside to see Granny off.

  She’d told me she chose this cemetery, Oak Grove, because of the view. She hadn’t liked the cemetery closer to town. That one was convenient, but it ran along the highway like a bedraggled bit of rickrack, squeezed between the new jail and the county nursing home, neither one a joyful prospect for eternal contemplation. In Granny’s estimation, Oak Grove was more like it. From this hill, with its scattering of sheltering trees, you could see the class
ic setup of the mountains. Ridge behind ridge behind ridge, like an appliquéd quilt, each layer of hills a deeper color, from jade to emerald to cyan to amethyst, the last disappearing into an indigo so black you could imagine infinity.

  “Kath, honey, you held yourself together real well.” Ardis Buchanan brought me back from that infinity with her forgiving lie. Then she drew me into her honeysuckle embrace.

  I murmured something even I couldn’t quite hear. Ardis was a foot taller than I and her hugs were all-encompassing. She was Granny’s store manager and had worked at the Weaver’s Cat for as long as I could remember. Granny nimble and spry, Ardis solid, steady, and always smelling of honeysuckle.

  At the point where I might have had to gasp for air, Ardis let me go, then whispered, “I know she didn’t want any fuss, but some of us are having a little wake down at the shop after we leave here, and we need you there.”

  “Why the sotto voce?” I whispered back. “Are you afraid she’s listening and will find out you’re already bucking her instructions?”

  “I’m afraid the Spiveys will hear and crash the party.” Ardis tipped her head toward three women who had the funeral director cornered behind an ornate pink granite headstone. Neil Taylor nodded to whatever they were saying, his solemn face polite. Only his crossed arms hinted at impatience, or maybe resignation.

  “The twins and who else?” I recognized Shirley and Mercy. They were well past sixty, with married names decades old, but in Blue Plum they were still, and always would be, the Spivey twins. They were also Granny’s cousins, once or twice removed. Or, as Granny often said, the further removed, the better, bless their hearts.

  “The third one is Angela,” Ardis said. I must have looked blank. “Mercy’s daughter.”

  “Really?” Angela looked to be about my age, but she wasn’t familiar to me. “Did I know the twins had children?”

  “Possibly not,” Ardis said. “You know Ivy wasn’t one to spread bad news.”

  “Ardis.”

  “What? I’m not speaking ill of the dead. Actually, I think there might be hope for Angela. Used to be, you could call her Mercy Junior, but after she married she got herself a little tattoo. I don’t know if she’s ever officially told her mama, but if she bends over it’s hard to miss.”