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

  “Keep your phone with you, then, and keep it on,” she said, handing me her notebook. “Something’s afoot and I’m not sure it’s a game. Don’t be gone long. Oh my, I’ve just thought of something I’ve always wanted to do. Wait there.” She closed the passenger door and came around the front of the car. I lowered the window to ask what she was doing, but she answered before I got the words out.

  “Iconic cop show stuff,” she said. Then she squared her shoulders, saluted, and slapped the car top twice. When I looked in the rearview mirror, she was grinning like an electrified cat.

  The ghost flitted through my mind as I left town. Flitted, nothing. She swooped in and took over my latest attempt at rational thought. One minute I was making plans to uncover a blackmailer and the next I was wondering how she’d been spending her time since her audiobook ended. Waxing melancholic in the bedroom? Lying in wait for me behind the kitchen door? I made a quick mental list of things I’d rather avoid. Thinking about her went on it. Also sheriff’s deputies and herbal tea.

  My phone started ringing halfway to the cottage. I didn’t answer and added distracted driving to my avoidance list. It stopped ringing. Then started again. And after that, again. By the time I turned in at the Homeplace, an entire swarm of annoying phone tweedles had invaded the car, converting the space from compact to claustrophobic, and finding a new ringtone was more important to me than finding a new job.

  I parked, closed my eyes, and breathed slowly, practicing phone anger-management skills, glad I didn’t keep knitting needles in the car. Homer might see them as a symbol of tranquillity. I might stab the phone with them when it rang again. Which it did. I massaged the back of my neck, counted to ten. The phone quit. I looked at the display.

  All the missed calls were from a single number. A Blue Plum number. No surprise I didn’t recognize it. The phone rang again. Same number. I breathed out one more time and answered. The caller barged into my ear without waiting for a hello from my end. It was one of the Spiveys.

  “Thank God you finally answered. I told Shirley if we didn’t give up trying, you’d eventually give up and answer.”

  So it was Mercy. “Wha—,” I started to say.

  “Don’t interrupt. No time for chat. This is urgent. Max is dead.”

  “I heard. I’m sorry. Please tell Angie—”

  “What did you hear?”

  “He tripped and fell down the steps.”

  “Then it’s not the kind of dead you’re thinking.”

  “What other kind is there?” I asked.

  “He was pushed. He’s the murdered kind of dead.”

  “What?”

  “And we need your help. You’re our alibi.”

  Chapter 27

  Thank God I’d done my slow breathing before answering the phone. I wasn’t sure I had any breath left after Mercy’s call. They’d been busy.

  They’d taken it upon themselves to find out where I was staying, asking around town the day before until someone told them, as I hadn’t the good manners (Mercy’s words) to tell them myself. When I asked who told them, she said she didn’t remember. She didn’t lie any better than I ever did.

  Not wanting to miss any exciting developments in my life (my words), they drove out early that morning, parked at the Quickie Mart, and waited until I drove past on my way into town. Not being the suspicious sort, I didn’t notice them following. That’s how they knew I stopped at the house first, and why they were fighting over the binoculars while I ate breakfast at Mel’s.

  They also followed me when Homer and I, trailed by Clod, went to Homer’s office. When Clod left Homer’s they argued over whether to follow him or wait and see where I went. They stuck with me. They saw me speak to Aaron Carlin. They recognized him and were shocked (Mercy’s word) that I knew him.

  They broke off following me and rushed to Angie’s side when she heard Max was dead. Now they were panicking because Angie was told there were questions about how Max got that way.

  “It hasn’t been verified he was murdered?”

  “As good as,” Mercy said. “And we need you to back us up about where we were and what we were doing this morning.”

  There was the sound of a scuffle on the other end and errant beeps as of a misplaced hand pressing keys. Then Shirley came on.

  “We’ll be right up there on the list of suspects because we didn’t like him. Mercy especially didn’t like him.”

  There was a muffled “ouch” and Mercy came back on the line.

  “Don’t pay any attention to Shirley. I loved him like the son I never wished I had. So, what’ll it take?”

  “Take for what?”

  “To give us an alibi. Someone might have seen us at the house this morning and turned us in.”

  “But I didn’t see you,” I said. “How do I know you were there?”

  “How else did we know you were there?” Mercy asked.

  “Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Okay, put it this way. If we hadn’t followed you to the house, then followed you to Mel’s and seen you were staying for breakfast, and then if we hadn’t gone back to see if we could get in the back door of the house, you know, trying to help in case you hadn’t thought of that, if we hadn’t done that and found the broken window, then how could we report the break-in? And then if we hadn’t gone back to Mel’s and seen you were still eating your eggs and sausage, how could we know to call Cole Dunbar and tell them where to find you? It’s simple.”

  Sounds of renewed scuffling reached me from the Spivey end of the line.

  “She put that badly.” Shirley had the phone again. “What she meant to say was, basically, we were with you all morning, so we couldn’t have been with Max, killing him.”

  “What she said was, basically, you two reported the break-in and made it sound as though I did it and then told Deputy Dunbar where to come pick me up for questioning.”

  “I told her it would sound like that.”

  “I’m hanging up now.” And I did, to what sounded like wails and the gnashing of teeth, although that might be an exaggerated memory. I got out of the car and was about to turn the phone off, despite my promise to keep it on, when it rang again. I started to toss it in the lavender bush when I looked at the display and was glad I had at least a few anger-management skills under my belt. This call was from the Cat.

  “Kath?” Honeysuckle and good sense on the line.

  “What’s up, Ardis?”

  “I’ve been giving it some thought and I believe what you need is one of those people.”

  That was vague enough to sound either ominous or helpful.

  “Have you got a minute and I’ll explain?”

  “Oh, good, sure.” I unlocked and opened the kitchen door, peeking around it first, to see if the ghost was there. No shimmer met my eye. All was quiet. The slide show on the laptop continued flicking through its photos but the McCrumb novel was long over.

  “The way I see it,” Ardis was saying, “there are two kinds of detectives. There are the Columbos and Miss Marples, who are extremely competent and work solo, and there are the Sherlock Holmeses and Nero Wolfs, equally competent, but who have their Nigel Bruces and Archie Goodwins. Did I get that right?”

  “Right enough. I know what you mean.”

  “Hon, you need your Nigel. Someone to aid you in your investigation. Someone trustworthy who will stand guard when necessary. Who can keep you out of trouble or get you out of trouble. Preferably the former.”

  “That’s funny.” I put my purse down on the table, shut down the computer. “Ernestine said the same kind of thing earlier this morning.”

  “Ernestine’s blind but she’s not batty. She wouldn’t be any good to you, though. Not enough muscle to her. I’m solid enough and I’d do it like a shot, but with the Cat and Daddy, my discretionary time is limited. This morning was a hoot, and I can operate Brainstorm Central here at the shop for you. But you need one of those people.”

  “A sidekick?”
>
  “Bingo.”

  I went to the sink and got a glass of water.

  “And I know who it could be. What about Joe Dunbar?”

  Granny would have been appalled at the way I spit water all over the kitchen floor.

  “Kath? You all right?”

  “Sorry, I thought you said Shirley or Mercy.” Shirley or Mercy didn’t sound remotely like Joe Dunbar, but I was about as likely to ask the twins to tag along with me as the Fastidious Burglar of Blue Plum. “I’ll think about it, Ardis. Thanks.”

  I hung up and mopped up. I also turned the phone off. Homer or Ardis might not approve, but I’d be at the Cat soon enough and could turn it back on there. In the meantime I’d avoid something else on my list. Spiveys.

  A sidekick wasn’t a bad idea but it wasn’t going to work. Everyone I knew was too busy, too upright, not upright enough, or dead. I started humming “All by Myself,” but I couldn’t remember the tune beyond those three schmaltzy words so I quit and sniffled to myself instead.

  For some reason I didn’t want to fathom, I was stuck with a ghost. And for some other reason I couldn’t possibly fathom, it couldn’t be the ghost who would make this mess bearable. If I had the ghost of my choice, it would be Granny. Her ghost could probably even make all this entertaining. But the ghost I got stuck with was a depressed ditz. I didn’t even know who she was. Or who she’d been. Poor thing. And she was erratic. Where the heck had she disappeared to?

  I looked around, blinking, as if the problem was only that she was more out of focus than usual. It wasn’t. She wasn’t there. I sighed, packed up the laptop, picked up my purse, and let myself out again.

  I caught sight of Ruth in the distance, surrounded by a group of schoolkids. Small rivulets of children were dribbling away in other directions, as though the group had sprung a leak. Ruth raised something over her head—a pitchfork—and waved it. Like magic, the group coalesced and followed her toward a log barn. I should ask her to show me around the farm sometime. As a professional courtesy, she’d probably show me behind the scenes, too. Who knew, maybe she had spare payroll idling in a corner of the coffers and needed a full-time textile preservationist on staff. Ha. Ha.

  As I passed the Quickie Mart on my way back to town, I checked for spying Spiveys. Unless they’d traded the Buick for a Farmers’ Co-op truck, they weren’t in sight. I turned the radio on, not sure what it was tuned to. Nerve-grating static. I started to reach for the tuner but put both hands back on the wheel for a tricky couple of curves, glad I was paying attention when a pickup coming toward me swung wide. Then the radio caught a signal from a talk show.

  “Have you seen the movie Blithe Spirit?” the radio personality asked.

  Except the voice was coming from somewhere behind my right ear instead of the car’s speaker.

  “Oh my God.” I swung wide in the next curve.

  “I only ask because the characters in the movie, one of whom is a ghost, also take a drive into town. Is that what we’re doing? Driving into town? Watch out for that squirrel. Oh dear, too late, and not enough left for stew.”

  Considering the poor squirrel’s fate, I took a chance I shouldn’t have and shot a look over my shoulder. Her watery, unblinking face was right there, hovering inches behind me, watching the road ahead. “You’re haunting my car? You can’t do that. This is a rental!” I slowed and looked for the first good place to pull over. A driver coming up from behind honked and whipped around us. “What are you doing here?”

  “I overheard you on the phone with someone named Ardis. I’ve never heard that name. It sounds like a bad perfume.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her.”

  “How rude. Please don’t. Do you always hold the wheel so tightly that your hands shake?”

  A clapboard church came up on the right. I slowed even further, pulled into its parking lot, and stopped.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  I could see her in the rearview mirror moving between the two side windows in the backseat. Her motion reminded me of a seal shooting from one side of a water tank to the other, back and forth, back and forth, around and around. She was making me seasick. “Could you please move up here into the passenger seat and be still?”

  “But you’re the driver.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I don’t know. As far as I know, this is my first ride in a car.” She shimmered into the front seat, taking up less room than I’d expected.

  “As far as you know?”

  “And that isn’t very far. It’s sad, but my memories are as slippery as grease on a griddle.”

  I was afraid she’d start crying again, as she seemed so fond of doing. Then I wondered if that would fog up the inside of the windows. I lowered mine partway in case. There were no sniffles or sobs, though. She continued staring all around—at the trees, the grass, the sky—and turning to watch when vehicles whisked past us and disappeared around the next bend.

  “Who are you?” I’d asked her that the day before, but we’d gotten sidetracked into her graphic rendition of Emmett’s death and she hadn’t answered. She didn’t answer this time, either. She was too caught up in everything she saw out the window. She drank it all in as though her senses were starved. And they would be, I guessed. She was, after all, dead. But had she also been asleep?

  “When was the last time you were out of the house?” I asked.

  “No idea. Look, a redbird.” There was nothing wrong with her distance or color vision. She pointed out a male cardinal calling from one of the oaks in the churchyard, then followed its bobbing flight as it flew to another tree.

  “How long have you been in the house?”

  She snorted.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You might as well ask a dust mote your questions.”

  “You really don’t know? Have you ever left it since you, um, arrived?” Arrived? There was a good euphemism. Why hadn’t it occurred to me before that she must have died in the cottage? But did ghosts only haunt the places where they died? Obviously not, because here she was in the car, glued to the window, fascinated by a grackle strutting across the grass, as though she’d been locked away in solitary confinement for decades. Or dead to the world. “Don’t you ever look out the windows at the cottage?”

  “Emmett mostly kept the curtains drawn. Besides, he had his television. Your setup back there on the kitchen table was clever, with the screen and the pretty pictures and the woman telling the story, but television is so much more. It can go all day and all night. It’s practically eternal. At least, it was until Em died and strangers took his things away and left me alone as if I’d died all over again. But you’re still asking me silly questions. You’re also staring at me. You’re tactless.”

  “How do you know I’m staring? You have your back to me.” She was right, though. I was staring. As for my questions, I decided to keep going. “You said Em saw you the night he died.”

  “And you said I only scared the bloody blue bejeebers out of him but I didn’t scare him to death.”

  “I didn’t put it quite like that but, yes, someone else killed him. Did he ever see you before that night? Did he know you were in the house?” She turned her hollow eyes on me and I started to flounder. “I don’t mean to be rude, it’s just…” She didn’t billow or turn grayer or groan so I barged ahead. “It’s just I’m trying to figure a few things out and I’d like you to help me.”

  She shifted around so that her whole foggy shape faced me and then she wriggled as though getting more comfortable in the seat. Once settled, she closed her eyes slowly and opened them again the way a cat does. “I think I’ll make a good detective, if I do say so myself.”

  It wasn’t exactly a sequitur sort of remark, but the whole situation—me, in a rental car, in the parking lot of Plum Valley Baptist Church, chatting with a smug-looking ghost—was so far beyond odd that I let the remark pass. “So, may I ask you a few mor
e questions?”

  “Only if you promise to play the good cop.”

  That remark really should have given me pause. I should have asked for an explanation. But I was being mindful of her feelings, and her tendency to moan and billow, so I didn’t. “I’ll try to be considerate.”

  “Then I’ll try to answer,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We were being so civilized, the ghost and I. I pinched myself. We were both still there in the car.

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  I repeated my earlier question. “Did Em know you were there?”

  “Until the night he died, he was oblivious.” She shrugged. “Men.”

  “Why do you think he saw you that night?”

  “There’s juniper in gin, isn’t there?” she asked. “I think it had something to do with that.”

  “He drank gin that night?”

  “He drank a lot of gin that night. I never knew him to touch a drop of alcohol before then.”

  “Never?”

  “My dear old mother used to rant about the evils of demon rum. I only wish she could have warned darling Em about the devil in a fifth of gin.”

  “But isn’t gin an acquired taste?”

  “Now that I think back,” she said, “from the way he tipped the bottle, Em and that taste were more like long-lost friends and they were mighty happy getting reacquainted.”

  “So I wonder what prompted the binge.”

  “Finding the bottle in the middle of the kitchen table might’ve done it,” she said. “It was there when he got home and he looked at it the way I wished he’d look at me. And then he said to it, in his manly, gruff way, ‘Well, aren’t you a pretty thing,’ and down the hatch it went. Men are such weak creatures.”

  Alcoholic men, anyway. While she sniffled, I wondered who knew that Emmett fell into that sad category. And if the police found the bottle and had it tested for poison. Or if they hadn’t because the person who left it came and took it away again. Too bad Clod was off-limits. He might know, although he might not give me a straight answer. Did I dare ask Homer to find out for me? But how would I explain where the questions or information came from? Left field? Elysian Fields?