Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery Page 24

  “I’ll tell you about Em. He was darling, though he really wasn’t much to look at. He had ginger hair and it stuck up here and there in funny places because of cowlicks. And he had a bald spot right on top. And I imagine his breath was fairly awful on account of his teeth. But if you ignored his teeth, he had the sweetest smile, and he never said a harsh word to me.” She sighed at the happy memory of a rancid blackmailer who never knew she existed.

  “Where did you go this afternoon? How did you get home?”

  “I went to look for the horses in case you’d lied. But you were right and that made me sad, so I sat by myself in the backseat of your car. I didn’t feel like talking on the drive home. You’re not dying very fast, are you? How do you feel?”

  Not so bad. I opened my eyes a crack. I was huddled against the shelves just inside the pantry. Nicki lay beside me. I closed my eyes again. “Where are the snakes?”

  “The far corner. They’ll stay.”

  I gulped air and opened my eyes again, turning them and my hands, by slow degrees, to assess the damage to my hip where the snake had struck, peeling my jeans open, inching them down to investigate the horror, the swelling, the blackening flesh, the…lifesaving, snakebitten phone in my pocket? Surprisingly, it still worked.

  Both Dunbars arrived about six. Clod first, in response to my 911 call, looking wary and with a seriously overdone bandage on his nose. Then Joe, wild-eyed, with a spinach-mushroom pizza, seconds behind the ambulance.

  Nicki didn’t need the EMTs. Neither did I, but for a different reason. I had a bruise where the snake slammed into the phone, but that was all. There were a lot of questions. For Clod, the broken window in the pantry and the cloth bag under Nicki’s body answered two. I couldn’t help with many others and when I told him I didn’t agree with his answers, he turned my new philosophy against me.

  “Why not? Window’s broken, she’s here, snakes are here, cloth bag is an approved way to carry snakes, snakes bite. Simple.”

  Simple didn’t explain why. I didn’t have the energy to argue. Nobody was happy about the snakes.

  I closed my eyes when the EMTs pulled the zipper on the long black bag and carried the bag out. When I opened them again, Joe stood at the pantry door, eyeing the snakes.

  “You really think she brought them with her in that bag?” he asked. “Weird the way they stay in the corner. Maybe I can scoop them up with a shovel. Put them in a box or something.”

  “I can get them with my gun,” Clod said.

  “You are not shooting snakes in this house,” I said.

  “I know what we do,” said Joe. “Ruth told me Homer has one of the Smoky Carlins working for him. They’re snake handlers.”

  Clod’s answer was a sneer. Then he shrugged. “Sure. Better him than me. Hell of a thing to happen is all I can say.”

  Clod took the pizza, which neither Joe nor I had the stomach for, and he left to search Nicki’s apartment. Joe, one eye on the snakes still huddling in the far corner of the pantry, quietly cleaned the floor where Nicki had lain and I’d added my own contribution. I sat at the kitchen table, arms wrapped around my knees, which I’d pulled to my chest. No way were my feet touching the floor, ever, until Geneva could tell me all the snakes were gone. I wasn’t sure I trusted anyone else to know.

  “You all right?” Joe asked.

  I felt as though I’d been beaten by sticks for days on end. “I didn’t know there were snake handlers around here.”

  “A few congregations. Mostly in the mountains.” He came and sat opposite me, propping his forehead on the heels of his hands. “What was she doing? What in God’s name was she thinking?”

  “Was she searching for something Emmett left? That’s what you were going to do.”

  “With snakes? I don’t know. Doesn’t feel right.”

  Nothing about any of it felt right. “We need to call Ardis and Debbie and Mel and the rest. Call off the posse.”

  “Why?” His surprise surprised me.

  “Killer snakes? What if Nicki didn’t bring them? What if she just found them? Ruth warned us we might stir up a murderer. I can’t put anyone else’s life at risk. Who knows what might be next?”

  “Hold on,” he said. “Slow down. Nicki was dead at least an hour before you found her. The EMTs were talking about it. You didn’t hear that?”

  “I was trying not to and I’m not sure I want to hear it now, either.”

  “Hey, shhh, now, shhh. It’s going to be okay. Carlin will be here soon. He’ll catch the snakes. I’ll get that window boarded up. It’s going to be okay. But I need to tell you what the EMTs said. It isn’t nice to hear, but it’s important. She didn’t die right away. And probably not from the bite. Not from the venom in the way you’d think. Although a bite in the face like that…anyway, they think she had an allergic reaction. That she died of anaphylactic shock. And if she hadn’t been alone and hadn’t panicked, she might’ve survived that, too, because most people do survive snakebites. But what all this means is that she was bitten and in extremis at least an hour before you talked to anybody at the meeting. She probably came here soon after she left the Cat. So this has nothing to do with the posse. Nothing to do with Em’s blackmail.”

  “But then what does it have anything to do with? What was she doing?”

  “Scaring you? Warning you? She knew you were over at the house this morning with Ardis and Cole.”

  “But why? Nicki and snakes? They don’t go together. And warning me about what?”

  “That would be the danger in unfinished or cryptic messages,” he said.

  “That and innocent bystanders ending up dead.”

  “But was Nicki either innocent or a bystander?”

  Clod had the answer to that when he called from her apartment.

  Chapter 32

  “Ibelieve we’ve solved ourselves a crime wave.” That drawled gloat was Clod’s way of saying hello on the phone. “Your Ms. Keplinger’s been a busy little body,” he said, being his usual offensive self. He also didn’t bother to listen for reactions or questions that might come from my end. “As soon as Carlin’s been by for the snakes, I’d like you to come on over here and take a look. I just might have found your tapestry for you. Oh, and hey, ask Carlin if he wrangles cats in his spare time. She’s got a mean one. I’d like to shoot it.”

  When Carlin did show, I was disappointed. He brought more cloth bags. I wanted something made out of six-inch steel with an industrial padlock.

  “Don’t that beat all,” he said when he saw the snakes behaving themselves in the corner of the pantry. “Next time take a broom and sweep them into something like a garbage can. That’s all you need.”

  “I thought about scooping them with a shovel,” Joe said.

  “That would work, too. No need to call me, really. Look at them sitting there so meek and mild. What’s the matter, fellers?” he crooned to the snakes. “Did you get yourselves spooked by all the big bad commotion? Look at you. I can just come on in there and pick you up.”

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  “I’ll go get the catching stick, then,” he said.

  “Why didn’t he bring that in to begin with?” I whispered to Joe when Carlin went back to his truck.

  “Because I think he can just pick them up,” Joe said.

  Even with the stick, I couldn’t bear to watch and went into the parlor. Geneva, relieved of her guard duty, floated in after me.

  “There were only three snakes, not four,” she said, “and that man stroked the biggest one on the back of its head. I would rather have a kitten. Did you know your life is almost as exciting as reruns of Hawaii Five-0? What shall we do next?”

  “I have to go to Nicki’s. Can you stay here, keep an eye on the place?”

  “Shhh,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Shhh. Your gentleman friend is standing behind you wondering to whom you are speaking.”

  I turned around, no doubt looking as off-kilter as I’d soun
ded, but figuring it didn’t matter. It was that kind of evening.

  “Carlin’s gone,” Joe said. “Strange guy. Put the snakes in the bags, put the bags in a foam cooler, and carried them out like he’d stopped by the Quickie Mart for a twelve-pack and ice.”

  I wondered how long it would be before the idea of setting foot inside the Quickie Mart quit giving me the yips.

  “I called Ardis,” he said.

  “Oh God. Thank you. Poor Ardis.”

  “Yeah. There wasn’t any easy way to put it. Um, did you want me to stay here while you go to Nicki’s?”

  “Hm? Oh. No.” I didn’t explain, but when he said maybe he should drive, I let him.

  Nicki lived in a nondescript block of apartments set down in a vacant lot between two graceful Victorian houses. Her unit was on the first floor, on the back side, looking out on a gravel parking lot edged in weeds.

  “Did you know she had a cat?” I asked as we got out of the truck.

  “No.”

  Clod opened the front door before we knocked and it was obvious as soon as we stepped inside that we didn’t know much about Nicki at all. The door opened directly into the living room. It took a gentle prod from Joe to make my feet carry me beyond the sill. It took another gloat from Clod before I quit gaping.

  “Case closed and tied with a bow,” he said.

  Every inch of the room was dedicated to the art and life of Ivy McClellan. Every item in it. Photographs of Granny papered the walls. Granny at the Cat, at the grocery store, weeding the garden, drinking coffee and laughing at Mel’s. Shots that could only have been taken without Granny’s knowledge through her own windows. There were a tapestry loom, dyestuff, wool, yarns. Spare loom parts and bundles of goldenrod hanging from the ceiling. A cheap, machine-manufactured kilim on the floor. Shelves of books. And notebooks. It wasn’t a mirror image of Granny’s weaving room. More like a distillation of its essence.

  “Freaking obsessed,” Clod said.

  “Obsessed, maybe,” I said, “but it looks like more than that, too. Like infatuation. Adoration, even.”

  “Even beyond that,” Joe said. He was flipping through a couple of the notebooks, comparing entries between them. “I think she was trying to be Ivy.”

  “And that, Ms. Rutledge,” Clod said, “even you have to admit is plain crazy.”

  I didn’t argue.

  Many of the notebooks were Granny’s, taken from the house, maybe from the attic study at the Cat, as well. I took the two Joe had, under the pretense of comparing them myself, and then gathered the rest. The secret dye journals were almost certainly still safely hidden at the Cat. Granny was careful and cagey and Nicki probably hadn’t looked for them because she hadn’t known they existed. But she’d been looking for some part of Granny. Piecing her together. Did she think by taking, absorbing, re-creating, she could become Granny? Was she collecting mementos or was she collecting talismans because she was aware of “inklings and quiet understandings”? Where had her obsession come from? And was it horrible of me to be relieved that she was gone?

  “Deputy Dunbar, may I take my grandmother’s notebooks with me?”

  He agreed and also let me roll the tapestry and the cartoon. I wanted to pore over every detail of her painting, to see Blue Plum as she loved it and planned to weave it, but I needed to do it in privacy. In that quick search, I didn’t find the memory cards or flash drive. But Joe found Granny’s birthday card to me. I turned it over and found her sketch of Maggie balancing a birthday candle on her head.

  “I wonder what the present was. She said she was sending it, but then…I thought I’d find it at the house.”

  “A blue jacket she made to match your eyes,” Joe said. “Sorry, I read the card before I realized it was yours. Do you think Nicki took the jacket, too?”

  I knew she had and I meant to get it back. But I also suddenly knew she’d taken something else. “Where’s the cat?”

  Maggie, Granny’s sweet kitty, took a swipe at Clod, either because he’d locked her in the bathroom or on general principle. She purred and rubbed against Joe’s legs. We took her back to the cottage, along with the missing lint brush, the cat food, and the cat pan that usually sat beside the utility sink in Granny’s basement. Maggie tolerated the drive, curled on the seat next to Joe. But after he boarded up the window in the pantry, rubbed her white chin one more time, and left, she was one unhappy cat. She vocalized every nuance of her opinion of me, letting me know it hadn’t changed, wasn’t likely to, and that she thought even less of Geneva.

  “I thought I wanted a kitten, but that cat isn’t any friendlier than the snakes,” Geneva said, as Maggie yowled. “Did it belong to the tetchy old lady who killed my darling Em?”

  “Yes, and please don’t say that again. That tetchy old lady was my grandmother and she did not kill Em, who may have been yours, but who was not darling.”

  “Then who did?”

  Good question. Unfortunately, the threads of it were so tangled in my head by then I couldn’t think them straight. Nicki pretty obviously broke into Granny’s house and had no qualms about helping herself to memories, literally and figuratively. But murder? Would she kill? Maybe Joe was wrong and Emmett had blackmailed her. But Max? Had he surprised her at the house, so she killed him? Or did he try his inherited blackmail on her and she hit back? But why break in here? To take whatever I had of Granny’s in my suitcase? After seeing her apartment, maybe I could believe that, but snakes? Where would she get snakes like that? And why? But, if she didn’t bring them, who did?

  “Who killed him?” Geneva asked again.

  I didn’t know. Didn’t know if I could, in good conscience, ask the posse for help sorting out this mess or if I should disband it.

  “Who murdered my darling?”

  “I don’t know,” I snapped.

  “You’re as tetchy as an old lady yourself.”

  “And you’re a tetchy ghost. Would you like to look at this with me?” I unrolled the tapestry cartoon and laid it on the kitchen table.

  “Not if you’re going to be that way.”

  “What way?” I looked up, looked around, didn’t see her. “Oh, fine. Go off and pout or wax or whatever. That only proves my point.” I smoothed the canvas, traced a line along the edges of the triangles making up the border. “You should come see this, though. It’s something beautiful and good to counteract all the horrors.” But she didn’t answer and I had the painting to myself. That suited me and I stood at the table, head bowed, in communion with Granny’s memory and her vision of Blue Plum.

  The triangles of the border were mountain ridges, shading from green to blue to deep purple and back again. And within that sheltering border of mountains, Blue Plum lay before me, spread out like a picture map, with Main Street running through the center from side to side and tree-lined secondary streets carrying me the rest of the way around town. Individual buildings were recognizable and I felt I could walk past the library and post office. I stopped to look at the courthouse. A train chugged down the tracks a few blocks beyond Main. I wandered into the town park and along the creek and then I realized there was another whole level of detail to peer at. It was ten thirty by the courthouse clock. The door of the Weaver’s Cat stood open. And there were tiny vehicles and people. A fisherman in the creek. A woman walking a dog past the bank. A tourist in the pillory on the courthouse lawn. A woman handing something to a thin splinter of a man in front of Granny’s house.

  If I’d had a magnifying glass, if I could have tumbled straight into that picture to see for myself, I knew that man’s ginger hair would be standing up in funny tufts because of cowlicks and that he had a bald spot. And the paper Granny was handing him would have one word written on it. “Deed.”

  Chapter 33

  On some level of sleep-deprived consciousness, I knew it was ironic that I was being haunted that night, but not by the ghost. By Granny’s tapestry. By the tapestry I’d thought would bring me a sense of peace, would fill the hole in m
y heart. But the tiny figures in the cartoon wove their way through my troubled sleep. One figure in particular insinuated himself into every fitful and waking moment. That thin splinter of a man taking something from Granny. Not that there would have been much sleep, anyway. Maggie yowled the whole night long. When I finally did fall into an exhausted sleep, she bit my toes.

  I called Joe in the morning and he came to take Maggie home with him. She leapt into his arms, purring. He rubbed her ears and glanced at the rerolled canvas on the kitchen table. When I didn’t offer to show it to him, his eyebrows rose slightly but he didn’t say anything. I told him I was calling the posse together for a meeting at the Cat at two for those who could make it. He said he might or might not, but he’d like to stop back by the cottage later for the search we’d never gotten around to. I agreed. Why not? How could it hurt, at this point? Maggie looked at me over his shoulder as he carried her to his truck. Thumbing her nose, I was pretty sure.

  It turned into a morning of phone calls. Not surprising. And not surprising that Ardis was first.

  “I am opening the shop this morning, like a normal day,” she said, as though reciting a declaration. “And I am going to get through it. If I have to do it sleepwalking or with strong drink or with a stick of dynamite tied to my tail.” She could have added that she would not falter and would not fail, but she was beginning to tear up. Before she fell apart or disconnected, I told her I’d be in to help.

  After her call I made a pot of coffee to bolster my stamina. The Spiveys checked in before the first cup took effect.

  “Terrible shame about Nicki,” the Spivey on the line said. “We were glad to hear you weren’t bit, too.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “Shocking.”

  “It was horrible.”

  “Mm. Shocking,” the Spivey repeated.

  I nodded, which of course she couldn’t hear.

  “Thought you’d like to know we’ve found a few things in Emmett’s boxes.”