Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery Page 14

  He again didn’t say anything and we stared at each other, seemingly at a stalemate. Although I couldn’t think what consensus or goal he hoped we’d reach. Watching him, I also couldn’t tell if he thought we’d made any progress toward it.

  “I’ll give you my phone number,” he finally said. “It’s a good idea for you to have it.”

  “Why?”

  “Ruth asked me to give it to you. You know, in case something happens. Blocked drain. Roof leak.” He took a pen from a pocket, reached across and jotted the number on my paper napkin. “Place is pretty solid, though,” he said, looking around. “I doubt you’ll have any trouble.”

  “What are we talking about now?”

  “Oh, sorry, I thought Ruth told you. She hired me today as a temp until they find someone permanent for Em’s place. Feeding the animals, mowing and whatnot. Lock up at the end of the day. General handyman. You know. Look after the place.”

  “You have keys?”

  “She handed me a whole raft of them, yeah.”

  “You have a key to this house?”

  “No doubt.”

  “You can let yourself in.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess…”

  “I think I need you to leave now.”

  Chapter 17

  He had keys to the cottage?

  I needed to think and I couldn’t do it with him and his bonny, burglarous eyes sitting there looking at me. Finishing my supper in peace, without feeling the need to clutch a poker, would be nice, too. Despite my request, he didn’t leave immediately, and that left me unsure of my next move. How did one eject a seemingly friendly burglar if one wasn’t entirely willing to connect a cast-iron poker with his flesh?

  “Um.” My new word for all occasions.

  “I’ll only be a tick.” He got up, no longer looking worried by me and my weapon. He tucked his chair under the table and took his dish to the sink, being, apparently, a neat and domestic burglar. Which was better than being a feral one, I guessed. I must have snorted. He caught my eye and smiled.

  “I’m not smiling.”

  “Sorry, my mistake.” He continued to smile, retrieving his jacket and hat from where he’d left them on the chair. He put the jacket on and glanced out the window over the sink. “Rain’s letting up. Downpour like that buggers up the fishing for a few days, though.”

  I wondered why it was buggered up, but didn’t ask. Under other circumstances it’s possible I would enjoy getting-to-know-you type small talk with a nonthreatening, passably good-looking, artistic, fishing burglar. But right now I was more interested in getting the burglar out of the house.

  He set his hat on his head, opened the door, and looked back at me. “Good night, Kath. Get some sleep. Get your mind wrapped around things. Then give me a call, okay? I’ll leave you to finish your supper in peace without the poker getting in your way.”

  I almost smiled again, almost nodded. He did nod, tugged his hat low on his forehead, and pulled the door shut behind him.

  And I immediately thought of twenty-five questions I should have asked and one I wanted answered then and there. I fumbled the door open, still holding both the poker and the phone.

  “Wait, er, Joe,” I called into the dark. Not loudly enough, though. Where had he gotten to so fast? I couldn’t see him or hear him. Then I heard a vehicle start at the side of the house. I hesitated, but stepped back inside and closed the door, watching around the edge of the curtain as he drove past in a pickup. “Why did Granny trust you?” I asked his taillights. Her trust said something important. Ardis trusted him, too. I’d seen that with my own eyes. And Ruth.

  Unless friendly Joe had bamboozled them all with those blue eyes. Because being blackmailed over secrets worth searching for, even after the blackmailer was murdered, was a better reason than a spot of burglary for fixing him as my number one suspect. And was brother Clod really unaware of all this or had he known who I surprised in the pantry? Was he covering for Joe? Or were they working together to pin Emmett’s murder on Granny? That couldn’t happen.

  I let the curtain fall and used my handy four-in-one poker to reach an itchy spot in the middle of my back. It probably left a streak of soot down the spine of my sweatshirt, but it felt good. It was also beginning to feel like an extension of my arm. I laid it and my phone on the counter, covered a yawn, then turned the dead bolt and slotted the security chain. The chain looked stout. No weak links. Firmly mounted to the doorframe and the frame looked solid. I tugged the chain. No give, no wiggle in the hardware. Good.

  Of course, anyone really wanting to get in could break the window, reach inside, slide the chain, turn the bolt, and twist the knob. Or heave an object through any window and climb in. Or let himself in with his officially sanctioned keys whenever I wasn’t home.

  Not that I had anything with me worth burgling. My laptop. That was easily fixed; I’d carry it with me. With the laptop for a shield and the poker as my sword, I’d be the model for a modern heraldry poster—Kath Rutledge rampant, ready to repel all boarders, including burglars and their brothers. But it wasn’t my stuff Joe wanted to snoop through.

  I glanced around the kitchen. What did he think he’d find here to prove that Emmett was a blackmailer? Max would have taken all the personal property, including papers and records. Obvious records, anyway, even if they weren’t labeled OTHER PEOPLE’S SECRETS OR INCRIMINATING INCOME—IRS, KEEP OUT.

  Or was Max pleasantly surprised to discover the business he’d inherited? Had that occurred to Joe? The thought of Max improving or expanding Emmett’s empire sent a chill down my spine. I was glad—questions were paralyzing me and the shiver got me moving again.

  The most urgent question: Where was Granny’s letter? What did I do with it when the ghos…when things got weird the night before? I was reading it in the sitting room and left it—dropped it?—when the boohooing began. If Joe let himself in he wouldn’t find anything more interesting in my suitcase than my plaid bikini. But Granny’s letter was not for snooping eyes. Whether or not Emmett Cobb was holding her eccentric being-somewhat-of-a-witch idea ransom, Granny trusted me to keep it a secret, even from trusted friends. I ran to the sitting room.

  It was there, on the seat of the recliner, where I’d left it when I grabbed my fireplace weaponry. I picked it up, trying to remember more deliberate movements than letting the pages fall from my hands.

  “Did I refold it?” Asking the question out loud didn’t jar the memory loose.

  “Does it even matter?” A familiar heavy sigh gusted from the kitchen, followed by a muttered “Of course it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  I moved back toward the kitchen, wary but not bothering to arm myself this time.

  “Creeping around isn’t necessary. Lord knows, you can’t scare me. Though I’d appreciate it if next time your gentleman caller didn’t hang his jacket on me.”

  I pictured Joe’s rain-soaked jacket dropping over the poor gray cloud. Surely it hadn’t made her any wetter. I apologized anyway. “I’m so sorry. Were you sitting here the whole time?”

  “I only wish I could say I had somewhere else to be.”

  “Oh…” I closed my mouth before another “um” escaped. Groping for conversation with a ghost was so new to me. I turned the letter over in my hands, trying to think, my fingertips following the strands of fiber in the paper, a familiar and soothing action. “Um.” Rats. I tried again. “Did—did you refold this letter?”

  “As I say, I only wish.”

  She grew taller in the chair, expanding, unfurling. I stepped back, alarmed. Then I realized she’d been sitting hunched, with her arms wrapped around herself. She straightened one arm and swept it across the table, through the water glasses and Ruth’s casserole. I cringed, but everything remained upright and in place. She demonstrated again, this time with both arms, moving them faster over the table until they were a blur. Nothing quivered. She slumped.

  “Who are you?” I felt blindly for the chair opposite her and sat do
wn as heavily as she sighed.

  “So you finally admit I exist.”

  I did, but still fell short of saying so out loud. “Why didn’t I see you when Joe was here?” I waved a shaky hand at her and the chair. “With the jacket and the hat, I mean. Oh, wait, gosh, that didn’t hurt you, did it?”

  “Nothing can hurt me now.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was only having fun with you when I said that, though. He didn’t hang his jacket on me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I might be dead, but I mind my manners. I wouldn’t dream of eavesdropping when you’re entertaining a gentleman caller.”

  My lips started to go round again, but I managed to keep them from opening. “Oh” would be my new “um” if I didn’t try harder. “That was nice of you. What were you doing, or, where were you if you weren’t…”

  “I was waxing melancholic. I do that. It’s one of the few things I can do. That and mind my manners.”

  I thought back over the evening. Had there been any hint of weeping or wailing? Joe hadn’t cocked an ear, and I didn’t remember any background noises. “Well, thank you, I guess, for being so polite. Were you doing your waxing in the sitting room?”

  “No.” She followed that with a tremulous whimper. “No. I was upstairs.” Her voice rose several notes, as though floating up those stairs again, and then she began shuddering and sobbing and I missed what she said next.

  She was so utterly pathetic and I’d known so much of that kind of sorrow over the past days that I wanted to comfort her. But how? Hugging wasn’t an option, so I went with the old standby.

  “There, there.”

  The crying did stop, but the look she gave me was scathing. “I confide intimate details of my evening, then weep with abandon, and ‘There, there’ is the best you can do?”

  She puffed in and out, looking more and more distressed. It was contagious, too. I felt as though my hands should be fluttering like large moths. Instead, I clasped them in front of me on the table, hoping my white knuckles didn’t give away my lack of composure. “Please, try telling me again. I couldn’t quite catch what you said through the tears.”

  “And I cry because it is so sad.” She shuddered and looked as though she was beginning to enjoy herself. “I’ll repeat what I said. Are you ready?”

  I nodded.

  She drew in her breath and started crying again but kept the tears to a minimum, so she was more or less intelligible. “I was lying on the bed I shared with my darling Em for the first and last time the night I killed him.”

  She sat back, flickering between looking tragic and artfully droopy, obviously eager for me to be appalled at great length. It was easy enough to stare, and not wanting to disappoint her again, I gasped. She seemed happy with the improved reaction, and that gave me time to think. This thing, this ghostly woman who couldn’t knock over a glass of water, couldn’t have spiked a glass with poison to kill Emmett Cobb. But she was so emotional that I approached the subject carefully.

  “That must have been awful…”

  “Seeing the horror on his face when he at last beheld my presence?”

  “Oh…”

  “Hearing his mortal scream? Seeing him clutch his heart in the throes of death before my very eyes?” She clutched the area where her own heart would be if she still had one and threw herself back in the chair.

  “Yes, well…”

  “Helplessly watching as he thrashed…”

  “Yes, thank you, I’m getting the picture very nicely,” I said over her, taking the chance that she’d accuse me of shouting at her again.

  “Are you squeamish?”

  “I guess I am. Sorry. Look, you seem to be okay talking about this, about Em’s death.”

  “Oh, I am. It’s very sad, isn’t it? My evenings are so empty now, the days so quiet without the constant muted murmur of his television.”

  “‘His television’?”

  “Television is a brilliant invention, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, brilliant, sure. Would you be willing to hear another theory about his death?”

  “Isn’t that a melancholy phrase, though?” She billowed in and out, ignoring my question. “It was a constant, muted murmur, but all is silent now. It’s sad, so sad, it’s a sad, sad situation.”

  “Wait, isn’t that last bit a line from a song by someone? By Elton John?”

  “Is it? I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

  “You might, though. Maybe it was one of your favorite songs when you were…”

  “When I wasn’t dead? I doubt it, and I don’t want to think about that. It makes me anxious. We were talking about my guilty role in killing Em. How I murdered my darling.”

  And that didn’t make her anxious? I wondered what it was about her previous life she didn’t want to think about. But maybe anxiety over their lost lives and being enthralled by other deaths was typical for ghosts. Having no experience believing in them, much less talking to them, I had no idea. This one was happily caught up in it, anyway, sitting across from me, rocking and moaning. The moaning sounded almost like humming, but if that’s what it was, I couldn’t identify the tune. Not Elton John, anyway.

  Rocking and humming seemed to relax her and I hesitated to interrupt. But she was also growing dimmer, the chair becoming more distinct through her.

  “Wouldn’t it make you feel better to know you didn’t kill Em?”

  “Better?” Still rocking, she considered that. “Feel better? But that isn’t the real question, is it? The real question is can I feel anything at all?”

  “You just said you feel sad.”

  “Oh, I do, I do. And I feel cold.”

  She stretched a wisp of gray arm across the table toward me. I pulled back, but she was faster and as her hand passed over (through?) mine I felt a bone-deep chill. I rubbed my hands together and blew on them and suddenly couldn’t think of anything else but how nice it would be to warm them around a mug of something. Without thinking, I hopped up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To make cocoa. Would you like some?” It slipped out without thinking. The curse of being brought up to be polite. “Sorry. That was probably insensitive, wasn’t it?”

  “Why? Because it’s agony to watch you enjoy swallowing and know I’ll never again taste the sweetness of food or drink? First you torture me with a plate of tuna casserole and now a cup of cocoa?”

  I sat back down and warmed my hands in my armpits.

  She smiled, enjoying herself again. “Now, let’s get back to your original question.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten what that is by now.” I was also getting annoyed with her, but made an effort to stifle that uncharitable sentiment. Maybe she couldn’t help being irritating. She certainly couldn’t help being dead.

  “I was bemoaning the fact that I killed my darling Em and you were entertaining the notion that I might feel better if I didn’t think myself responsible. But I don’t think I could possibly believe I wasn’t.”

  “Will you listen to an alternate theory, anyway?”

  “If you must, but please understand that Em’s death was tragic. Tragic. I doubt I shall ever get over it. But, please, do go ahead. Don’t let my feelings stop you.”

  It was my turn to sigh. I tried to keep it low-key, though. “The police say he was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned by my sudden appearance.”

  “No, poisoned by real, tangible poison.”

  “Poisoned by my too ghastly appearance as I cuddled up to him in our love nest.”

  “No, really, you’re getting carried away with that idea. I don’t know what kind of poison it was, but it was in something he ate or drank. Actual poison was put into something someone gave him and that’s not something you could have done, is it? Not unless you really can move objects.”

  She stopped rocking and wavering and became more opaque. Her hollow eyes stared at me and I had to look at the table to steady my nerves.

 
“Is this true?” she asked, her voice low now, and without a single pneumatic breath or tremble.

  “According to the police, yes.”

  “I didn’t kill darling Em?”

  “I don’t see how you could have.”

  “Prove it.”

  “What?”

  “Prove it wasn’t me.”

  “I just did. Think it through logically. If someone put the poison into something Em swallowed and if you can’t move anything, if you can’t physically pick something up and put it into something else, then you couldn’t have poisoned him.”

  She swelled. “Then who did?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said, edging my chair back.

  “You should find out.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “How can I rest peacefully until you find out? How can I possibly believe I had no hand in Em’s death if you don’t hunt down his murderer and deliver him to justice?”

  “I don’t think it’s really that easy—”

  “Must I moan and wail through all the days and nights to come, down through the ages?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Must you?”

  “I might.” She swelled and billowed, growing grayer and more alarming.

  “And I can just as easily pack up and move to a motel,” I said, scrambling to stand behind my chair, as if standing made me that much bigger and braver and would save me.

  “You’d abandon me?”

  “I don’t know how to look for a murderer.”

  “You’d run out on me in my hour of need?”

  “Your hour of need? For a skunk of an old man who blackmailed a sweet little old lady?”

  “Love is never simple, is it? I’ve watched enough hours of Dr. Phil and Dr. Ruth to know that much. And I never miss Oprah. She’s almost a doctor, too.” She sat up straighter and began to sound more alive. “This is rather exciting now that I think about it.” Her wispy hands came together in a soundless clap. “I also adore Law & Order and CSI and Andy Griffith, all those cop shows, so I know exactly how you need to go about this. Start by investigating that little old lady you mentioned. It should be dead easy to prove she killed darling Em.”