Crewel and Unusual Page 2

  TWO

  I exaggerated. It only felt like the Spiveys and I were face-to-face. They’d actually stopped six feet from the counter.

  Shirley and Mercy were Granny’s twin cousins. Cousins at some remove, but not so far removed they couldn’t occasionally find their way into the Weaver’s Cat. They were indistinguishable from their toes—this morning in matching pink walking shoes—to the tops of their permed gray heads. Today they also wore pink sweatshirts and leggings in eye-killing pink camouflage that would work only if they were stalking a flock of lawn flamingos. The sweatshirts came down to within a few inches of their almost seventy-year-old knees.

  Since moving to Blue Plum, I’d learned a couple of tricks to tell the twins apart. Mercy usually wore a dab too much of her unpleasant cologne, and Shirley wasn’t as likely to jab people with her elbow. Otherwise, in looks and peculiarities, they matched as completely as their outfits. Despite being Granny’s cousins, I hadn’t seen much of them during my childhood visits to Blue Plum. Maybe if I’d gotten to know them better, I’d find safer ways to tell them apart. But braver women than I, women who’d known the twins all their lives, shied away from scrutinizing them too closely. Not so, Geneva. The twins delighted her every time she saw them. She circled them now, much the way Argyle circled customers when he tried to beguile them.

  “Good morning, Shirley,” I said. “Good morning, Mercy. How’s Angie?”

  “Angie’s fine. Keeping busy,” said the twin on my left.

  “Too busy,” the twin on the right said. “Mel’s given her extra hours. She seems to be holding up, but we hardly see her.”

  The last time they’d been in the shop they’d just heard that Mercy’s daughter Angie was expecting, and they’d surprised us by binging on every shade of pink baby wool we had in stock. Angie was a bit younger than me and quite a bit more pleasant than her mother or aunt. Angie and I hadn’t known each other during my childhood visits from Illinois. The removed nature of Granny’s relationship with the twins kept us apart. Angie’s partner, Aaron, was an odd-jobs man. As he advertised, the odder the better. For instance, Aaron was the guy to call if you found rattlesnakes in your house, a skill that no doubt helped him cope with Angie’s mother and aunt.

  Geneva left off circling and came to sit on the counter next to the cash register. She pulled up her knees, resting her chin on them, and wrapped her arms around her legs. It was really too bad the twins couldn’t see her. Everyone should have an audience so rapt and adoring, hollow-eyed or not.

  “We came to put a couple of bugs in your ears,” said the right-hand twin.

  “What kind of bugs is she talking about?” Geneva asked. “That one is Mercy, by the way, but you should avoid looking at me out of the corners of your eyes like that. It screams ‘shifty shopkeeper.’ Like this.” She demonstrated. “Also,” she said, whispering again, “wincing, as you did just now, doesn’t inspire confidence.”

  “A couple of friendly news items,” Shirley continued, “looking out for family as we always do.” She said this with only the slightest hint of a simper.

  “We know you’re involved with those people in the Arts Council setting up shops in the old bank,” Mercy said.

  “Calling it the Blue Plum Vault,” Shirley said. “Artsy-fartsy Council.”

  “Artsy-fartsy except for Garland Brown, may he rest in peace,” Mercy said.

  “I helped Joe Dunbar with some of the work he did on the building, but I’m not really involved,” I said. And by helped, I mostly meant watched while Joe hammered and painted. Renaissance handyman-about-Blue Plum was my favorite way to describe Joe. He and I were a bit of a thing.

  “But Nervie Bales is involved,” Shirley said. “She still teaches a crewel class here, doesn’t she?”

  “On Friday afternoons,” I said. “She’s going to sell her embroidery patterns at the Vault.”

  “There’s some question about that,” said Shirley.

  “There shouldn’t be,” I said. “She’s a member of the Arts Council, and I’ve seen her over there. Her shop’s on the second floor.”

  “The shop might be hers,” Mercy said, “but the patterns—”

  “Are not.” Shirley got that in, then said oof after a jab from Mercy’s elbow.

  “In case you ever thought of selling her patterns here, we thought we’d warn you,” Mercy said

  “Because you can bet your eyeteeth,” Shirley said, “there’s going to be—”

  The elbow made sure Mercy got in the last word. “Trouble.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well now, we don’t like to spread gossip,” Mercy said.

  “But speaking of embroidery,” Shirley said, “do you know Belinda Moyer? She’s going to be selling vintage and antique linens at the Vault.”

  “I know who you’re talking about. We haven’t met yet.”

  That gave the twins an opening to gush back and forth.

  “You’ll like her.”

  “You’ll like her textiles.”

  “Handkerchiefs, pillowslips, tea towels.”

  “From the sixties and seventies. Considering your former profession, you might be interested.”

  I probably wouldn’t be. Run-of-the-mill linens from the sixties and seventies didn’t thrill me. The adjective former didn’t thrill me either. I was still a textile preservation specialist—highly trained, able to leap tall test tubes in a single bound, and ready to wipe out weevil infestations with a trusty fumigation hood. But right after I lost Granny, I also lost my job at the Illinois State Museum, thanks to an intractably terrible budget. I still mourned my job, and I could almost certainly find another, but Granny left me the wonderful safety net of the Weaver’s Cat and her little yellow house on Lavender Street. And Blue Plum felt very much like home.

  Still, linens from the sixties and seventies? Meh. The twins must have seen that in my face.

  “Belinda has older pieces, too, of course,” Mercy said.

  “Table runners,” Shirley added. “One table runner in particular.”

  “Embroidered with silk,” Mercy said. “The kind of thing our mama’s mama and her friends were so taken with and so good at.”

  That caught my attention. They saw that in my face, too.

  Shirley turned to Mercy. “Needle painting, don’t they call it?”

  “They do,” Mercy said, looking at me, not Shirley. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Or art embroidery,” I said. “Or Kensington embroidery or art needlework.”

  “You’re so knowledgeable. It’s a blessing, I’m sure,” Shirley said.

  “But it’s not often you see a genuine piece so large and in such good condition,” Mercy said. “You can almost smell the strawberries and the climbing roses. Stitched with single strands of silk thread—”

  Shirley shushed her. “No more spoilers, in case we get her hopes up and then it sells before she has a chance to see it. Wouldn’t that be a terrible shame?”

  I’d seen the kind of smile that broke onto her face then. I’d watched my good friend Joe land wily brook trout. Those trout never stood a chance. Neither did I. A familiar warmth grew in my chest as I listened to their back-and-forth about the beautiful piece of embroidery.

  “Belinda’s there today,” Mercy said, “arranging her wares. Displaying them to best advantage. You know how important that is.”

  “We told her that once you got wind of that table runner you’d want to see it,” Shirley said. “Easy enough to run over there on your lunch hour.”

  “See the rest of her stock, too,” Mercy said. “You won’t be sorry. The door will be locked to keep wandering riffraff out. Belinda will let you in if you knock.”

  “We might have said you’d offer your opinion.”

  “Offer authentication. It would be a little plus for her.”

  “Whoa, wait,” I said. “Doesn’t she have that information?”

  “She probably—” Shirley started to say.

  “Sh
e does,” Mercy and her elbow finished.

  “But this would be the icing on the cake,” Shirley said. “It’ll be the sheen, dare I say the glow, on the silk.”

  “Oh yes, the glow,” Mercy said. “And it isn’t just on the silk. The silk itself glows. Forty-eight inches long, eighteen wide, and the colors.” She put a hand to her heart. There was no questioning the sincerity of that gesture. I felt the echo of it in my own heart. “We’ll call and let her know you’re on your way.”

  “Think how nice it’ll be for you two to meet,” Shirley said, “with so much in common. Something positive to counteract whatever Nervie’s up to with her lying ways.”

  Bringing up Nervie again almost brought me out of my textile haze. But an Art Embroidery table runner that had the twins swooning? Their mama’s mama—my great-great-grandmother—had excelled at embroidery, and the twins did lovely work, too. So how could it hurt me to go take a look? How could I resist?

  Ardis finally came back downstairs trailed by a young woman. They each carried two of our four-pound cones of rug wool nestled in the crooks of their arms.

  “Like babies. Like delightful twins,” Geneva said. She draped herself over the cash register. “Our twins left too soon, and I miss them terribly.”

  “I don’t,” Ardis said.

  “Pardon?” the customer buying the rug wool asked.

  Geneva snickered. “A rookie mistake for the newly haunted to make.”

  “Sorry,” Ardis said to the customer. “There’s a little glitch here with the register, and I didn’t finish that sentence. What I meant to say is that I don’t know what got into me, because I forgot to tell you it’s your lucky day. You get a ten percent discount when you buy four cones.”

  “That’s wonderful,” the woman said. “Thank you.”

  “You’ll bankrupt the business if you give a discount every time you forget that you look nutty when you talk to me in front of the hauntless,” Geneva said.

  “I don’t make that mistake often,” Ardis said, handing back the woman’s credit card but looking at Geneva. “And if I’d made it today, it would have haunted me all afternoon.”

  I bagged the cones, and Ardis went to hold the door for the woman. Geneva watched, silent. When Ardis came back to the counter, Geneva floated up to the ceiling fan and sat with her back to us.

  “Nice sale,” I said.

  “About the discount—”

  “No worries. It was a fine idea.”

  We heard a hmph from Geneva.

  “Speaking of which”—Ardis nodded toward the disgruntled glitch on the fan—“did I hear someone scream a while back?”

  “If you thought you did, then why didn’t you run back down the stairs as fast as you went up them when the twins arrived? You abandoned me.”

  She looked crushed. “I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry, hon, but you know how it is. With those two, sometimes I simply can’t.”

  “It boggles my mind, sometimes, how we can be related,” Geneva said over her shoulder.

  It was fair to say that fact boggled all our minds. We’d discovered that Geneva, who’d died in her early twenties, was Ardis’s great-great-aunt. We couldn’t tell if they looked anything alike. Geneva, indistinct at the best of times, wasn’t . . . it might be kindest to say she didn’t look herself. She’d watched, listened to, and sometimes mimicked Ardis since moving to the shop. But Ardis had only known about and “known” Geneva less than two months, and their similarities seemed to go deeper than acting skills or rubbing off on each other could account for.

  “What did the twins want?” Ardis asked.

  While I told her, she found the bakery bag under the counter. She ate the second scone without seeming to give it much thought. She licked her fingers without much thought, either. The scone tasted good enough that she licked each finger twice.

  “I’ve never heard that about Nervie,” she said. “It happens, of course, people calling someone else’s patterns their own. I know craftspeople at shows who don’t allow pictures of their work because they don’t want anyone going home to copy it and sell it themselves. Stealing.” She slapped the counter with the word. “If that’s what Nervie’s up to, that’s what it is.”

  “If,” I said.

  “Well, exactly,” Ardis said. “Did you ask the twins how they know?”

  “They said they don’t like to gossip.”

  “Absolute baloney,” Ardis said. “But, Kath?” She waited until I looked her squarely in the eyes. “Don’t let those two get you mixed up in any of their meddling. You have enough of Ivy in you that you could turn the twins into putty in your hands, if you want to. Ivy had her ways. Keep that in mind.” She touched the braided bracelet on her wrist. She’d never asked how it worked. I wasn’t sure myself, even though I’d made it for her. But I’d followed a recipe in one of Granny’s private dye journals, and that bracelet let Ardis see and hear Geneva. Granny did, indeed, have her ways.

  “You said you heard something about Nervie, too,” I said.

  “I nearly forgot. She’s going to teach embroidery classes at the Vault.”

  “There and here? If not, that could cut into our business.”

  “Will cut into it,” Ardis said. “She hasn’t said anything to you about it?”

  “No, and I haven’t heard anything about classes of any kind being offered there. Joe might have heard something, but he hasn’t said.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Handy-manning? Fishing? Thinking about fishing? I’m not sure.”

  “So call him,” Ardis said.

  Joe and I might be a thing, but lean, loping Joe’s employment was casual and his whereabouts often hard to pin down. Ardis liked Joe, though she more often called him Ten, short for Tennyson. Tennyson Yeats Dunbar. He’d rechristened himself Joe before he hit high school. He’d been one of her favorite students at Blue Plum Elementary. But it irritated her that she couldn’t pin down the nature of our “thingness” any more easily than she’d ever been able to pin down Joe.

  I tapped in Joe’s number, but the call went to voice mail. I left a message saying only that I’d see him later, eliciting further irritation from Ardis. “Well, it isn’t like we have a monopoly on classes,” I said. “I don’t know where they’d have them, anyway. The old boardroom upstairs was the only space big enough, but they took down the walls and opened it for a gallery.”

  “Maybe they’ll have them in the gallery,” Ardis said. “Creative use of space in a place devoted to the creative arts. I should write ad copy for them. I should ask Nervie about the classes, too, but she beetles in and out of here so fast she’s hard to catch.”

  “So call her,” I said.

  “Better in person.”

  “Take a lesson from Argyle,” Geneva said. “Lie in wait and pounce on her. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I like it,” Ardis said. “As simple as having another scone, too.” She picked up the bakery bag, then seemed surprised it was empty. “Well, they were delicious. Be sure to tell Mel. As for Nervie, I’ll pounce carefully. She’s been known to have a temper.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Old stories, anyway,” Ardis said. “Did the twins tell you why they thought you needed to know about Nervie’s patterns? What do you suppose they’re up to?”

  “What makes you think the darling twins are up to something?” Geneva asked.

  “Because they’re Spiveys,” Ardis said. “It’s what they do. Kath?”

  “I didn’t ask them why,” I said, “and they didn’t tell.”

  Ardis pointed her finger at me. “I repeat: do not let them get you tangled up in . . . in . . . I don’t know what.”

  “I won’t.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “Simple as that.”

  “Good. I see Ivy shining in your eyes when you say that.”

  “It’s nice to know I’ve got her with me when I need her. Do you mind if I run over to the Vault at lunch?”

  “Say
hi to Joe for me.”

  “If he’s there. To see a table runner, too. Do you know Belinda Moyer?”

  “I’ve known a few Moyers. I don’t remember a Belinda.” Ardis leaned closer, squinting at my face. “I know Ivy’s still in there, but now your eyes have a look I haven’t seen much of lately. This table runner—is it the call of the wild textile?”

  “Howling like a wolf under the full moon, luring me away?”

  “Away?” Geneva flapped down from the fan and threw her arms around the mannequin to gape at me over its shoulder. “Away where?”

  “From all this.” They followed my hand as I waved it vaguely at the displays.

  Geneva had told me that watching life in the shop was better than most of the TV shows she’d been glued to in the decades before we met. Most of the shows, anyway; knitting needles and crochet hooks could never replace cop shows or her beloved Marshal Dillon and his six-guns and horses. But in the raspberries, oranges, and burgundies of the wool, I saw responsibilities, obligations, and bills. Knowing Ardis, she saw those, too. And judging by the pinched lines between her eyebrows, I guessed she also saw the Cat’s sturdy old walls and wondered if or when I’d wake up and want to escape them, or the Cat, or Blue Plum. Time for reassurances.

  “Ardis?”

  “Hm?”

  “See the roving hanging on the wall? On the right, there. Do you know what I see in that splash of fuchsia? Security and friendship.”

  Geneva floated over to the roving and leaned her cheek against it.

  “I’ve always loved that color,” Ardis said.

  “Me, too.” Even through the gray filter of a ghost. “My life is full. I have things to do and people I care about. Right here. It’s still full of textiles, too. They’re just mostly in a pre-woven, pre-knitted, pre-crocheted state.”

  “They’re in a state of limbo,” Geneva said, “like your favorite GFF.”

  “Ivy would be proud of you,” Ardis said. “She was proud of your career, too, though, and no one would blame you for missing it. You had a good thing going.”

  “Now I have this.”

  “It doesn’t have to be gone for good.”