Crewel and Unusual

  For the Clinton County Area Arts Council, the Johnson City Area Arts Council, and the Vault Art Gallery in Tuscola, Illinois. Your support and encouragement of local artists nourish and enrich our communities beyond measure.

  ONE

  Argyle came to greet me as I unlocked the front door of the Weaver’s Cat. He pounced on a couple of dry leaves that blew in with me on the morning breeze and then twined around my ankles, leaving a trace of tabby-yellow on my pants.

  “Just the accessory I needed,” I said, stooping to rub his chin. “Now we’ll both look good in the front window.”

  The Weaver’s Cat was a beautiful place to spend time in any season—surrounded by scads of skeins and colors and textures, in bins and on shelves and hanging throughout the yarn shop—but fall edged out spring and summer to be my favorite season for displays. We’d brought upper east Tennessee’s changing colors indoors with wools in goldenrod, pumpkin, bronze, and deep purple spilling out of baskets in the front window. Roving in russet, mahogany, chestnut, salmon, and tomato hung from pegs to tempt spinners and felters. We splashed every autumn color in the displays around the shop but the brightest reds. We’d quietly tucked the reds back in their bins, two weeks earlier, when Garland Brown died.

  My late grandmother, Ivy McClellan, had introduced me to Gar Brown during one of the summers I’d spent with her in Blue Plum when I was a kid. He’d been a contemporary of my grandparents, and he’d charmed me and made Granny laugh when he said I could be the “Honorary Illinois Belle of Blue Plum.” Gar had come to Granny’s funeral this past spring, and when I’d made the decision to stay in Blue Plum and step into her shoes at the Weaver’s Cat, he’d stopped by with flowers to welcome me and say it was Illinois’s loss.

  A banker, Gar had involved himself in the community throughout his career, and he’d been one of those people who grew busier and more involved after retirement. He sat on the Arts Council board, the library board, the mayor’s landscape advisory committee, and the sheriff’s task force on littering.

  We were all shocked when hikers found him dead beside his pickup truck in a trailhead parking area on nearby Grandmother Mountain. The police said he’d surprised the person or gang responsible for a series of smash-and-grab car burglaries over the past few months at trailheads up and down the mountain range. When we heard the gang smashed a rock into Gar’s head, Ardis, the longtime manager at the Cat, took the scarlets and crimsons out of our displays.

  Neither Argyle nor I dwelled on the tragedy that morning, though. He lifted his nose toward the bakery bag in my hand. “Mel’s mystery scones,” I said. I’d taken a detour on my way to work and picked up coffee at Mel’s on Main, the best café in Blue Plum. Along with the coffee, Mel had handed me the bag and asked me to critique her new recipe. She’d only told me the bag held scones but wouldn’t say what kind.

  “Classical music all right with you this morning, Argyle?”

  Argyle didn’t object, so I set the coffee and bag on the sales counter, turned on the radio, and switched it from Ardis’s bluegrass station. To something sonorous with strings, the cat and I performed a serpentine paw-de-deux down the hall toward his food dish in the kitchen.

  Argyle had hooked up with me after what must have been a fairly devil-may-care existence. I’d never found out where he came from, but he’d been happy to retire and become the next official cat of the Weaver’s Cat. He lived in the shop, and the shop lived in one of three connected houses that were part of a mid–nineteenth century row house on Main Street. If you faced the row, we had the house on the left. That put us on the corner of Main and Fox Streets, giving us light from three sides.

  Granny and Granddaddy moved into the house when they married. Granny, a weaver, spinner, and dyer, started the Weaver’s Cat in a corner of the living room. Over time, the shop grew until it filled most of the rooms, and after Granddaddy died, Granny let it take over completely. Then she’d bought the little yellow house on Lavender Street and walked home there each night. And now I did, too.

  In the kitchen, Argyle lifted his chin toward the top of the refrigerator and said, “Mrrph.”

  A damp sigh came in response, followed by, “So it took the cat to finally drag you in, did it?” Geneva shimmered into view on top of the fridge, looking as lively as a heap of forgotten dishrags and sounding like the ghost of . . . well, like a ghost.

  That I knew what a ghost looked and sounded like still blew my science- and reality-loving mind away. Eight months ago, I would have looked for the hidden camera. Now I could tell this ghost’s mood from her dismal sigh even before she delivered her snarky greeting. But to say that she looked like a heap of dishrags wasn’t really fair. She wasn’t as solid as a heap of anything. Looking at her made me want to blink or squint my eyes to bring her into better focus. Neither helped. Geneva looked no more substantial than gossamer-fine lace seen through a rain-washed window, and sometimes just as sad. I liked her, though, and gladly called her my friend.

  “Good morning. How are you?” I smiled, ignoring her doldrums. One of her favorite jokes started with the line, I’m not a morning person. Then, depending on her mood, she might laugh and say, That’s haunted humor, because I’m not much of a person at all. Or the joke might end with her impression of Greta Garbo and the line, I want to be alone. She did Elly May Clampett better than Garbo, but the Garbo meant that Geneva really was in a funk.

  “Have you noticed that I can’t count on you anymore?” she asked. “You’re so late this morning that you barely have time to feed Argyle and none at all to clean his litter box. He can’t count on you anymore, either.”

  “Sorry about the box, old man. I’ll do that as soon as Ardis gets here. There’s plenty of time for breakfast, though.” I tipped crunchy fish kibbles into his dish and gave him fresh water. He rubbed his chin against one of my shoes in thanks before digging in. “Look. I think he’s forgiven me.”

  Geneva hmphed but followed me to the front room. She floated to a favorite perch on the mannequin that stood near the sales counter. The mannequin wore a stylish knitted cape and hand-felted fedora, both in forest green. The fedora had a pheasant feather stuck in a deeper-green ribbon circling its crown. One of our customers had made the cape and hat. Geneva, drooping on the mannequin’s shoulder, might have brought the jauntiness of the ensemble down a peg or two, but instead, her misty translucence turned a lovely sage color. Together they looked not quite festive but certainly interesting.

  “You look nice on her shoulder this morning, Geneva.”

  She hmphed again but sat up straighter and rested an elbow on the fedora.

  I continued getting the cash register ready for the day, but when I looked up again, I saw Geneva leaning forward, her hollow eyes on the bakery bag. She took a few tentative sniffs, lifting her nose the way Argyle had. Then she left the mannequin and drifted over to the counter. She settled next to the bag, and that gave me the only hint I needed about one of the ingredients in the scones. I went to unlock the front door and flip the sign from “We’re home counting sheep” to “Come in and knit a spell.” When I returned to the counter, Geneva was obviously trying not to be obvious about her interest in the bag. I opened it, sniffed, and held it out to her.

  “Ginger.” It sounded like a prayer. She closed her eyes and hummed.

  As much as I wanted to eat one of the scones, I held off so she could enjoy her ginger meditation. She had a serious relationship with ginger and few enough other pleasures in life. In death, as she corrected me when I slipped. I still didn’t know much about ghosts. For that matter, neither did Geneva, except that she was one. Her memories of her life were as misty as she was, but she said the smell of ginger took her back to her mama’s warm kitchen.

  How
she could smell ginger, though, I didn’t know. She didn’t seem to notice other scents, good or bad. It was the sad truth of Geneva’s ghostly existence that she’d been dead for a hundred and forty years and hadn’t successfully haunted anyone until I came along. She couldn’t slam doors, drop vases, or do any of the other ghostly classics. She couldn’t manipulate anything at all. In all the time since she’d died, no one had heard her voice, and no one had seen her misty form appear at the end of their bed.

  Geneva and I hadn’t met at the Weaver’s Cat; we startled each other in an antebellum cottage, now a caretaker’s house, at a historic site on the edge of town. I’d stayed in the cottage for a few days in the spring, when I’d come for Granny’s funeral. I’d never believed in ghosts, and she’d spent those hundred and forty years undetected, watching the decades and the cottage’s occupants arrive and move on, or pass on, one by one. With the advent of television, she’d also watched countless hours of whatever happened to be on. She’d been the proverbial fly on the wall, not even able to annoy anyone by buzzing in their ears. She’d been a ghost of a ghost, and it was no wonder that she wasn’t always the most cheerful of souls.

  The string of camel bells at the door jingled, and the first customers of the day came in. They were a couple of women I didn’t recognize. Tourists, maybe. The mountains around Blue Plum were as pretty as a quilt, and Blue Plum’s red-brick storefronts and Victorian houses as charming as a tidily stitched sampler. Tourists loved the area, in any season, and the local economy loved them right back.

  Whether the women were tourists or not, they hadn’t been in the shop recently. They only made it to the middle of the room before they stopped. Then they turned in a slow circle, taking in the saturation of colors and textures around them, one of them with a breath I could hear at the counter. Granny had called that breath “the reverent respiration.”

  “Welcome to the Weaver’s Cat,” I said when she closed her mouth and smiled at me. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

  Looking dazed, as though they’d been hypnotized by a spindle whorl, the women shook their heads.

  “Then I’ll just give you a quick rundown of where things are and turn you loose. You’ll find roving, wool, cotton, bamboo, ramie, and other yarns in the rooms downstairs. Other knitting, felting, crochet, and embroidery supplies, too. Spinning, weaving, dyeing, and quilting supplies are upstairs. Let me know if I can help you with anything at all, and don’t mind the cat if you see him. He’s customer- and yarn-friendly.”

  “Don’t mind the ghost, either,” Geneva said.

  The women waved their thanks and started a more thorough tour of the front room, fondling and oohing and aahing as they went.

  “I don’t think I’ll be bothering them much, do you?” Geneva didn’t seem to expect an answer. She finished communing with the scones and floated back to the mannequin’s shoulder. She rested her elbow on the crown of the fedora again and sank her chin into the cup of her hand. There weren’t many sounds as mournful as the rhetorical question of a depressed ghost. Still haunt-challenged, only Argyle, Ardis, and I knew Geneva had followed me to the shop and now haunted it.

  Before folding down the top of the bakery bag, I took a napkin and one of the scones from it. The scone was gorgeous. It didn’t just have a bit of dry ginger in it; crystallized ginger studded the whole thing. Chunks of something else, too. Pear? To eat or not to eat; that was the eternal customer service etiquette question.

  Geneva looked over at the women. “The coast is clear. Take a bite. The suspense would be killing me if I wasn’t already dead.”

  I took a bite—tender, buttery, not too sweet. The chunks of pear hadn’t just been baked into it. They were tender, too, and hadn’t made the scone the least bit soggy. How had Mel done that? I kissed my fingertips and sighed for Geneva’s benefit. The crystallized ginger made the scone fabulous. Geneva’s shoulders rose and fell on an echoing sigh, and she smiled for the first time that morning. I wrapped the rest of the pastry in the napkin to finish later. Flaky, buttery, and the least bit sweet didn’t mix well with fibers and fabrics.

  “Why have you never named my friend, here?” Geneva asked.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “The mannequin. While it’s true she doesn’t say much, she does support me in my times of need.” She reached down and patted the mannequin’s cheek.

  I turned my hands palms upward and raised my shoulders a bit.

  Geneva didn’t mind carrying on conversations while other people were around. She wasn’t the one who looked like a loon as she talked into thin air. I could avoid the loon factor by pretending to take a call on my cell. I’d also thought about wearing a bluetooth device on my ear, so I could be “on the phone” without the phone in my hand. I didn’t much like that idea, though, and unless I wore my hair back, no one would see the device. But we’d developed a sort of sign language that worked, too, more or less.

  “Have you developed an unattractive twitch,” Geneva asked, “or was that meant to be a shrug?”

  I started to answer her with a look, but one of the customers glanced over. I took a cloth from the shelf behind me and pretended the counter needed cleaning.

  “I’ll think of a name,” Geneva said. “I’m good at names.”

  I continued wiping the counter but raised my eyebrows again.

  “Of course I am.” Geneva sounded indignant. “I named Argyle. It’s the perfect name for him, too. If you agree, take another bite.”

  I unwrapped the scone, toasted her naming acumen with it, and took a bite. Mid-chew, the women came to the counter. I swallowed and rewrapped the scone, making sheepish eyes.

  Geneva baaed loudly.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “A scone from Mel’s on Main, just down the street. Irresistible.”

  “You’ve given it an excellent recommendation, then,” one of the women said. “We’re meeting friends there for lunch.”

  “And one of them told us you have vintage patterns,” the other woman said.

  “We do,” I said. Granny had never considered anything out of date. I once overheard her as she filed away a pattern for a prom dress dating from the late ’50s, telling it, Someday your customer will come, and she’ll be better than any prince. “What are you interested in? Sewing, knitting, crochet, embroidery—”

  “All of the above,” the second woman said, the look of pattern lust in her eyes.

  “You’ll find a few of each with the new patterns, but most of them are in files in the dressing room off the front bedroom upstairs. I can show you—”

  “No need. We’ll explore along the way. You carry on with your scone.”

  Lovely customers. They browsed their way into the next room and I heard the electronic sheep at the back door say baa, letting me know someone had come in through the kitchen—Ardis. She came down the hall singing “We Are the Champions” loudly but in tune. Her decibel level and attention to key and notes tended to mirror the trouble she’d had getting her ancient daddy up and out the door. On weekdays, she took him to what she called geezergarten. The good people who staffed the place called it adult daycare. The windows weren’t rattling this morning, and her choice of song made it sound like they’d had a good start to the day.

  At sixty-three, and six feet tall in flats, Ardis wasn’t a woman who bustled. She was more a force of nature. Sometimes a rock, sometimes a wave, and either one made up of strong will, loyalty, and a love for amateur theater. Also a hovering suggestion of honeysuckle, which managed to be pleasant and not cloying.

  As a rock, Ardis provided stability (and sometimes proved immobile). As a wave, she might dance, she might buoy those around her and carry them along, or she might well up and wash right over anyone in her way. She’d retired from her first love, “bringing order and enlightenment” to the third and fourth grades at Blue Plum Elementary. In the years since she’d hung up her chalk and ruler, she hadn’t lost sight of her calling to correct anyone who needed it. That stro
ng-willed honeysuckle still rapped knuckles or, just as likely, smacked transgressors upside the head. She’d worked alongside Granny for as long as I could remember, first part-time, and then full-time as manager when she retired from teaching. I’d felt lucky when she agreed to continue at the Cat after I took Granny’s place.

  “Good morning,” Ardis sang. She twiddled her fingers at Geneva and then moved past me at a bit of a slant, her nose leading the way. “Mmm, something in a bakery bag? But oh!” She spun around to me again. “First I need to tell you what I heard about Nervie.”

  Her news about Nervie had to wait, though, as the camel bells announced more customers. Ardis went to help a young woman pick out enough of our ever-popular self-striping sock yarn for half a dozen pairs. I rang up a generous gift certificate a man bought as a seventh-anniversary gift for his wife. Then the women who’d first come in the shop browsed their way back from looking through vintage patterns. They’d found issues of Popular Needlework from the 1960s, and I went to help them choose threads and materials for some of the projects. When we returned to the sales counter, Ardis was wiping her fingers and dabbing her lips. While she rang up the sale, I noticed it was the rest of my scone she’d eaten.

  “Sorry, hon,” she said when I mentioned it. “You know I eat when my nerves are on edge, and what I heard about Nervie—but here.” She held out the bakery bag. “Put it under the counter. Keep it safe for later.” She glanced toward the front door. “In fact, I’ll remove myself from further temptation. I’ll nip upstairs and get—”

  She’d already turned her back and started for the stairs, so I missed what she said she’d get. But if Ardis thought we needed it, we probably did. I put the bakery bag on a shelf and then bent to tidy the bottom shelf where several scraps of paper had missed the recycling box. The door jingled, and I missed something else Ardis said as she took the stairs at an unusually aerobic clip.

  When I straightened, I stood face-to-face with Shirley and Mercy Spivey.