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

  “Hey, it’s okay, really. I know she hasn’t been the first thing on anyone’s mind. I think I’m more worried about you, right now.”

  Ardis stopped fanning and waved my concern away.

  “I’m just glad to know where she is. She probably still doesn’t like me, though. Do you think, well, would you want to keep her?”

  “No, that’s just it.” It turned out she wasn’t waving my concern away. She was swatting at my words of relief so they’d sit, stay, and pay attention. “I don’t have Maggie. No one does. No one’s been able to find her. We think she disappeared the day Ivy died.”

  “She’s gone?” I said stupidly. True, she’d as soon bite me as look at me, but she was Granny’s delight. And now she was gone, too? With that news coming on top of every other jolt of the past days, I might have broken down and cried again. But I didn’t. I was beginning to feel empty. Like a husk. Like a ghost. And I might have laughed at that thought, but I couldn’t do that, either. Because if Maggie was never found, I was pretty sure I’d be haunted by her unfriendly little mew for the rest of my life.

  “Haunted.” That turned out to be an apropos word. The ghost came back that evening.

  Chapter 15

  After hearing about Maggie, I spent the rest of the day avoiding people, skipping lunch at Mel’s with Ardis and Joe Whatever-He-Was. What I really wanted to do was mothball myself in a pile of Granny’s wool in the house on Lavender Street. Homer didn’t call to say he’d learned the whole situation was a hilarious mix-up, though, or that Max Cobb had returned and turned over a set of keys.

  So I climbed the stairs to Granny’s study in the attic of the Weaver’s Cat and I spent the afternoon systematically sifting and sorting her decades of accumulated ephemera—her trove. The activity wasn’t exactly cathartic, but for a few hours it restored a sense of equilibrium. And somewhere up there in that comfortable room under the roof with its dormer windows and shelves and cupboards built into the eaves, she’d hidden her private dye journals. Where she recorded in detail the mumbo jumbo she’d worked out for putting the woo-woo in the wool. Dear God.

  I didn’t find her hiding place and couldn’t make up my mind if that was good or bad. Or if I couldn’t find it because it and the journals didn’t exist. Or if that was because I didn’t really want to find either of them.

  Granny was a journal keeper, though, and a documenter. She kept recipe notebooks of her batches of dyes and her experiments with materials, attaching samples of the dyestuff and fibers she used. As a child, I’d loved leafing through them, carefully touching the dried plants and bits of colored fleece or cotton or silk. She also jotted and sketched the ideas for needlework projects that burst into her head or popped in and grew there more slowly. I found several dashed-off sketches that might be details for her Blue Plum tapestry—a couple of almost bird’s-eye views of buildings, a few small figures, a repeating pattern that might become a border. The sketches could just as easily be the result of her hand and pencil occupying themselves while her mind thought about something else. She undoubtedly had a whole notebook devoted to the tapestry project. I didn’t find it, either, but it was probably at the house.

  In fact, although I found some of her project and dye notebooks, I didn’t find as many as I remembered seeing on other visits. But they were works in progress and reference tools. She used them, carrying them back and forth between this attic room and her dye pots in the kitchen downstairs and home to her own kitchen and back again to this study. She would have known where each notebook was, but would anyone else? Between what Deputy Dunbar called “clutter” in the Lavender Street house and her habit of moving things from place to place, would I know if the person who got into the house took any of them? But that was silly. The garden-variety burglar wouldn’t be interested in Granny’s notebooks with their bits of fiber and dye garden plants.

  I made a stack of the notebooks I did find, then a rough sort of other books and magazines into a satisfying mountain range of piles around me on the floor—a method of organization guaranteed to set Deputy Dunbar’s lips in a sneer. Some of the stacks were for Ardis or Nicki or Debbie, if they wanted them; others I would take with me. I tried very hard to avoid thinking about where I would take them. But there, beyond the book ridge I’d just capped with The Colour Cauldron: The History and Use of Natural Dyes in Scotland, Granny’s desk waited patiently for me, offering a good place to sit and make plans. Or at least a place to plan to make plans. I sighed, got up, and threaded my way between my lilliputian mountains and molehills.

  Grandfather had bought the old oak, two-pedestal teacher’s desk at a flea market. He’d refinished it for Granny and hauled it up the three steep flights to the study. It was a piece of furniture I definitely wanted to keep, if anyone dared carry it back down.

  I felt as though I was daring when I started sliding the desk drawers open. Granny hadn’t kept them or the study locked, so there wasn’t likely to be anything in the drawers or out in the open for her eyes only. And I’d played at the desk plenty of times as a child, using up her paper with my drawings or sticking my arm as far back as it would go in the kneehole drawer to see what treasures I’d discover at the dark, distant end of it. Even so, the desk struck me as more personal than the bookshelves I’d half emptied.

  Then it struck me that I was an idiot. I might find a note or document in a file giving me a clue about what happened with the house. Maybe if I disturbed the desk’s contents enough, the name Cobb would jump out at me like a spider and I could hold it up and look it over and then squish it. Or maybe I’d find something that proved Granny wasn’t a murderer. It was a good dream, anyway.

  What I found were a few more notebooks and her photo files. A quick flip through the photographs didn’t turn up a snapshot of someone who wasn’t Granny walking into Emmett’s cottage carrying a bottle with a skull and crossbones on the label. How disappointing.

  There was a rummage of stationery and pocket diaries from previous years in another drawer. My heart quickened at those. The current year was missing, though, probably in her purse at home. And it probably didn’t have an entry for the day Emmett died saying, “Did not poison E.C.,” anyway.

  The kneehole drawer held a nest of pens and colored pencils, a flashlight Granny could have attached to her key chain but hadn’t, a couple of small notepads (one with a grocery list that did not include poison), and a doodled-on envelope containing the past month’s receipts. The doodles were of the wool cards sitting on the desk, a swan with a nasty squint, and Maggie balancing a candle on her head. There were also a couple of unfiled receipts (neither for anything more dangerous to ingest than Chunky Monkey ice cream), odds and ends of loom hardware and gadgetry, a catnip mouse, and Maggie’s rabies tag and the collar she refused to wear. Nothing else, unless it had slid to the back.

  Rather than reach my hand all the way in to grope blindly, I pulled the drawer out of the desk. There wasn’t anything more to see except for an accumulation of thread tails and miniature dust bunnies. I sat with the drawer on my lap, thinking. This wasn’t the kind of desk that had hidden compartments. But Granny wasn’t supposed to be the kind of old lady who had hidden talents, either.

  I pulled all the drawers out and stacked them on the floor. Then I took the flashlight from the kneehole drawer, got down on the floor, and played the light around the inside surfaces of the desk, craning my neck. Expecting? Not really. Hoping? Only maybe, and hoping for what, I couldn’t say. Instructions for finding secret journals? A list of murder suspects jotted after a discussion at a TGIF meeting? A reason for selling the house? Of course I came up empty.

  Drat.

  So I sat on the floor, in the shadow of the desk and the wall of drawers, and hunted up my own list of suspects—the one I’d started in my crabbed spiral notebook and dropped back in my purse to simmer after my visit with Homer. It was a thin, unsatisfying list with only one name to it. Time to remedy that by giving Joe the burglar company, which I did by adding Ma
x Cobb the inheritor, Mercy and Shirley Spivey the irritating, and Deputy Clod Dunbar the dolt. The Spivey twins were purely gratuitous, but the deputy was looking better and better to me. He’d had access; he’d known Emmett’s habits. They gambled and he might have been into Emmett for more than his deputy’s salary could handle. And he had a burgling brother. I made my own doodle under the deputy’s name—a game of hangman with the words “why not” spelled under the gibbet.

  Why not. While I was still on the floor enjoying the idea of adopting those words as my personal philosophy, Nicki bounced up the stairs.

  “Are you all right up here, Kath?” she called as she came. “Ardis said you didn’t have lunch. Can I bring…oh, gee.” She stopped in the doorway. “You’ve sure made a mess. What are you doing down there? Are you looking for something? I can help. I’ve already been through most of it anyway.” She started into the room, friendly and eager.

  “No.”

  She stopped short.

  “Why were you in here?”

  Now she looked as though I’d slapped her. Drat.

  “Nicki, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…I’m sorry. I’m just tired and no, I don’t need any help.” It was an inadequate apology. I stood up, started to do better, but she interrupted.

  “I found her, you know. On the floor in her bedroom.”

  “What?” Oh God, I’d forgotten. “Nicki, I’m so sorry.”

  “I want you to know she meant a lot to me. I want so much to be like her.” She was working hard not to cry. Granny would have been proud of her. I knew I should tell her that.

  “The blue jacket you were wearing yesterday—when did Granny give it to you?” Not the kind words I meant to say. My compassion-spreading skills needed help. On the upside, my question helped Nicki get past her crisis.

  “Isn’t it a dream? I feel so fortunate to have it. It felt so right wearing it for Ivy yesterday. And you left the wake so soon after I got here we hardly had a chance to talk. But I guess you wanted to get away and be alone. And then the house. My gosh. Where did you end up staying?”

  “How do you know about the house?” Again I was sharper than she deserved. Why was I angry? Because she babbled and didn’t answer my question about the jacket? Because she wanted the Cat?

  “Ardis said something about it. About the Spiveys’ saying Ivy sold it. What’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know. Granny’s lawyer is looking into it.”

  “Homer?”

  “You know him?”

  She smiled. “Ivy got a kick out of him. He’s been in a time or two looking for Ruth when she gets lost in here.”

  “She’s letting me stay in the caretaker’s cottage out at the Homeplace until things are straightened out.”

  “That’s real nice of her…Wait, isn’t that where that guy was mur—”

  “Yeah.” I interrupted her, not needing to hear that word again.

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “As long as I don’t think about it.”

  “Well, you’re a braver woman than I am. You know what you should do? Stop by Mel’s and get some of her potato soup—comfort food, you know? That’s what Ivy would tell you. And maybe get one of Mel’s killer brownies, too.” She stopped, mouth open. “Eew, I can’t believe I said that. Anyway, treat yourself to something decadent and then get a good night’s sleep. If you can.”

  Ardis was in the front room when I trailed down the stairs shortly after Nicki left. She was listening patiently to a woman who was trying to decide between brightly hued, hand-painted yarn and undyed natural brown wool. When the woman phoned her neighbor for her opinion, Ardis stepped away. I thanked her for the time alone and told her not to worry, which didn’t ease the pinched lines around her eyes. I tried to save her a few more pinches by not filling in the details of where I was staying. She’d find out soon enough from Nicki. We didn’t mention the offer she’d made for the business. I told her I’d be back in the morning, but didn’t give her an opening for hugs. My resolve not to cry was reaching its limit.

  I checked my phone. No missed calls. No messages. No getting into the house tonight. I thought about driving to one of the hotels out on the highway instead of going back to the cottage. A sterile room, an anonymous bed—they were powerfully tempting. But even though I’d spent the day not putting words to the questions slinking between my more rational thoughts, I didn’t think the answers included the words “sterility” and “anonymity.” Despite my weird evening and weirder guests, imaginary or not, the cottage was warm and welcoming. Besides, all my stuff was there and by then I didn’t have the energy to pack it up and move. And, really, how likely was it for the place to be burgled two nights in a row?

  Visiting hours were over when I got back to the Homeplace. The gate was locked. And it was starting to rain. As I fumbled the lock open it started to pour. By the time I swung the gate wide enough to inch the car past, I was drenched. I drove through, slithered back out into the torrent to close and relock the gate, sloshed one more time into the equally drenched driver’s seat, and made a note to buy a wetsuit and swim fins in case another deluge like that came through while I remained exiled at the blinkety-blank cottage.

  It wasn’t until I squelched into the kitchen and stood watching muddy rivulets from my ruined shoes run across the floor that I remembered I hadn’t stopped at Mel’s to pick up supper. A sound escaped me, something between a strangled mew and a pitiful oath.

  That potato soup Nicki recommended would have gone a long way toward warming me and smoothing over being half-drowned. The killer brownie, too, even with its creepy connotations and despite the fact that I’d pretty much eaten nothing but sugary baked goods since arriving in Blue Plum. So, there was no supper. And I’d skipped lunch. I dropped my wet purse on the table. The purse, at least, didn’t splash in a puddle of its own. That wasn’t consolation enough.

  Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten any wetter slogging back to the car, repeating the rigmarole with the gate, and driving back to Mel’s. Or just to the Quickie Mart. Going back out wasn’t appealing, though. I could order pizza and change into dry clothes while I waited for it to show up. Except pizza could come only as far as the locked gate and I’d have to swim out to meet it. There was another option: I could stand there and cry.

  It wasn’t the rational choice, but crying was the only immediately gratifying one, so I went with that. But I didn’t just stand there. I threw myself into a chair at the kitchen table and cried like a great big baby, making a thorough job of it because that’s what Granny taught me to do.

  If you’re going to do a thing, Kath, even if it’s awkward or a mistake, do it up right and get the job done properly.

  So I did. I buried my sopping head in my sopping sleeves and wept. I mourned for Granny, my job, the house, the shop, the cat—basically the whole foundation of my life and my sanity. I cried until I ran out of tears and sat there snuffling and thinking how stupid it was to run out of them when I needed them most. And that’s when I heard the voice.

  “Why such a weepy weed tonight?” It was tentative, soft.

  I snuffled to myself a few more times, hoping I wouldn’t hear it again.

  “You should change out of those wet things or you’ll catch your death.” That suggestion was followed by a sigh.

  I sat still, telling myself that I’d sunk so far into misery and was hearing things from so deep inside my myself that I didn’t recognize my own inner voice.

  “I think you’ll have to agree I know what I’m talking about,” the voice said. “About death.”

  No, I was pretty sure that wasn’t me. Even in the murkiest depths of my mind, my inner voice was more likely to have a Midwestern twang. This voice had a mountain lilt. So, if the voice wasn’t in my mind, then I was obviously out of my mind. That thought brought a fresh bout of tears. It was pathetic and I knew it, but I couldn’t help it and didn’t care, and I melted into another puddle of grief for my lost mind.

  “Go ahead
and cry, then. I’ll wait. Lord knows, I have time to wait.” Another sigh. “I do wonder why you don’t have a television, though.”

  The non sequitur stopped me. I held my breath, listened more carefully, and heard a muttered “Even a rerun of Bonanza would do.”

  If the voice existed, it was sitting opposite me. I snuffed a last snuffle and picked my head up enough to squint across the table.

  It, she, looked back.

  “Last night, when you acted like a scared rabbit,” she said, “you ran upstairs and grabbed your things and that pretty coverlet. It wasn’t until you threw the coverlet around your shoulders that you started acting sensible. Why don’t you try that again?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “At least get out of those wet things. Get into something warm and dry. But why not wrap yourself in the coverlet and see what happens?”

  It was a reasonable enough suggestion. But I didn’t move except to blink hard several times. As last night, though, nothing changed. She was still there, sitting across from me, watery, gray, and slightly out of focus.

  “Um…”

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Um…”

  “You’re repeating yourself. You should learn to be more articulate.”

  I cleared my throat. “Last night, that was you sitting here crying?”

  “Yes. I do that a lot.” She blew out another sigh. “Depression is my lot in death. I suffer from it dreadfully. Apparently you’re a kindred spirit.”

  “No! No, I’m not. Not ordinarily.” I sat up straight to prove it. Prove it to what or to whom, I wasn’t sure, but I squared my shoulders and wiped a string of wet hair off my forehead in an effort to look less downtrodden and a believable bit livelier.

  “Oh, too bad. I thought you were.” She slumped dejectedly in her chair.

  “You looked like a worried wet rabbit,” I said. She turned her bleak eyes on me and I tripped over my tongue to explain. “Last night. You were crying and hunched over.”