Knot the Usual Suspects Page 27

  “Of TGIF.”

  “And that’s what really gets me,” Thea said, “the betrayal. Because it had to be a member of TGIF.”

  I didn’t want to think the murderer was a member of TGIF, but knew I had to face that possibility and told Thea so.

  “Or not,” she said.

  “Wait. You just told me—”

  “My brain won’t turn off, so hear me out. It could’ve been loose lips. Bomb squad members were knitting and crocheting. Other members of TGIF were knitting and crocheting to help the cause. And we don’t know who or how many others were supplying us with strips, even though we asked everyone to keep quiet.”

  “True.”

  “Lots of strips, too many lips.”

  I sighed, thanked Thea for continuing her Internet search, and hung up. She was right; there were too many lips involved to lay blame anywhere in particular. And there could easily have been several loose pairs. But that didn’t stop me from sifting through my favorite candidates for the role of Loose Lip Louse. I tried to be objective, weighing Tammie’s excitement and calling attention to herself in the middle of Main Street against Wanda, who took notes during meetings, disappeared during the bombing, and then reappeared, and weighing both of them against Rachel, who’d been married to Hugh and “twisted” her ankle. Objectivity wasn’t actually all that hard; any one of them could have told someone else about the yarn bomb project.

  Then Geneva shrieked into the room. “A spy!” she shouted. “Upstairs! She’s reading the whiteboard to someone over the phone, and spilling all our supersleuth secrets!”

  Chapter 31

  Geneva swirled up the stairs ahead of me, and I arrived, heart thumping, and clutched the doorframe of the TGIF workroom. Tammie, her back to me, stood in front of the whiteboard, phone to her ear, spilling our sleuth scribblings. She turned when she heard me gulping air at the door. Geneva went into the room and threw herself in front of the whiteboard, arms spread wide—protecting our data about as effectively as I had done. Tammie disconnected after a quick “see you later.”

  “The door was locked,” she said, “and you-all were busy. I didn’t like to be a bother, so I thought I’d try the key for the supply closet in the kitchen. You know—old doors, old keys, and there you go. Here’s the key back.”

  “You can put it on the table.” I stayed in the doorway. Call me overly cautious, but I didn’t like the idea of being in an enclosed space with Tammie Fain.

  “You don’t usually keep the door locked, do you? But I can see why you would now, with all that going on—” She waved at the whiteboard.

  “Did you need something in here?” I asked.

  “My snips. I couldn’t think where I’d left them, and then I realized it must have been here the last time I brought the grandbabies. Found them, though, and now I’d like you to move away from the door and let me out.”

  I stepped aside, and she moved past me. Not too close.

  At the top of the stairs she stopped and said, “You scare me.”

  “Who were you talking to?” I asked.

  But her phone rang and, rather than answer me, she answered it as she ran down the stairs.

  * * *

  “It might not be so bad,” Ardis said when I told her about Tammie breaching our limited security. “She could’ve been on the phone with someone in Alaska for all we know.”

  “Only if she’s going there. She said, ‘See you later,’ when she hung up.”

  “And Geneva didn’t hear a name?”

  “No.”

  “I hope she doesn’t feel too badly about that. She did us a great service by giving the alarm.” Ardis darted glances around the room. “Is she here?” she whispered.

  “She vowed to stay in the workroom and guard the whiteboard with her life.”

  “How worried do you think we need to be? Should we warn the posse to be vigilant?”

  “I think we should. But Tammie doesn’t know who all has been working on the board, and it only has my handwriting. So you’re right; it isn’t so bad.”

  “Except for you,” Ardis said. “I don’t like the sound of that. No walking home alone at night until this is over. In fact, I’ll worry about you being alone in the house.”

  “Well, you know, there is that guy named Joe who hangs around sometimes.”

  “And I’ve a mind to call him up and tell him to hang around more permanently.”

  “That’s kind of you, Ardis, but we can probably make our own arrangements.”

  “Permanent ones, hon? Am I the first to hear the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Never mind. Joe’s tied up with Handmade this evening, though, isn’t he?”

  “Until the last booth is taken down and taken away.”

  “Then I want you to come eat supper with Daddy and me tonight. And if we can get him in his chair, we can take him for a tour of the yarn bombing.”

  “Not the footbridge.”

  “No, I suppose not. We’ll skip that part, and we’ll let Joe know he can pick you up at my place when he’s finished.”

  So much for letting us make our own arrangements, but it sounded like a nice way to spend the evening. So after a day of normal yarn shop activity, tinged with abnormal worries about a murderer loose in our fair town, Ardis and I walked up the hill to her house. At the last minute, before leaving the shop, I’d run up to the workroom and invited Geneva to come with us. She declined, saying her new catchphrase was “vigilance is vital.” It wasn’t easy to read subtle expressions on her face, but at a guess, her vigilance was slightly wistful.

  In Ardis’ big, homey kitchen, she whisked eggs for an omelet. I tossed a salad and made toast. And in the den, her daddy caught the tail end of Top Hat, and got the itch to go dancing.

  * * *

  “Come on, Fred,” Ardis said to her daddy after supper. “If you’ll hop in your carriage, we’ll go downtown and cut a rug.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” her daddy said. “Let’s go to Pokey’s.”

  “Does Pokey’s sound okay to you, Kath?” Ardis asked.

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Me, neither,” her daddy said. “Oh my, oh my.”

  Ardis got Hank in his wheelchair and we strolled and rolled down to Main Street. Hank sang snatches of songs and we showed him the striped signposts, the giant trout flies, and the new beanie on the fire hydrant. It had only been a few days, but we were happy to see that most of the yarn bombs were still intact, including the Groucho glasses and pouting lips on the courthouse columns, despite Olive’s assertion that they were ridiculous.

  It was another evening that smelled of woodsmoke and early frost. Not many people were out. Ardis asked her daddy if he was warm enough. He said he felt fine and dandy, oh my, oh my.

  The moray eel had disappeared from the electric company, and that was disappointing, but we hoped someone had loved it so much that it now swam in a bedroom somewhere. Ardis hadn’t seen the lion’s mane, so we headed down the street to the Extension office. My phone rang. It was Thea.

  “I saw you three out walking as I was on my way home,” she said, “and I thought you’d get a kick out of this. I looked up Pokey’s roadhouse of thirty years ago—for grins, but the trivia might help Ardis and John with those old boys. You never know. Anyway, the live music Hank remembers? None other than Ms. Oh My. And I think you have to say it like that to get the flavor of it—Oh My. Ever heard of her?”

  “No.” I slowed as I listened to Thea, and Ardis and Hank got to the Extension office ahead of me. Ardis lifted part of the lion’s mane and waved it at Hank.

  “‘My’ is short for Myers,” Thea said. “‘Oh’ is a cute way of designating the first initial. Ms. O. Myers. O for Olive. Olive Myers, who became Mrs. Pokey Weems. She was a roadhouse singer, Kath, and pretty hot.”

  “Interest
ing.” Interesting, too, that Mrs. Pokey Weems, taking her Boston terrier for a walk, was up ahead there and talking to Ardis’ daddy. As I closed the distance between us, I heard Hank swearing on his life that he’d seen her in the park Thursday night.

  “Oh my, yes,” he said. “I’d know you anywhere.”

  “You still there, Kath?” Thea asked.

  “Oh my,” I said faintly.

  “That sounded completely lifeless,” said Thea. “Try it like this: Oh My.”

  “It is Oh My, Thea. Olive’s here.” But I wasn’t sure Thea heard me, because Olive had grabbed my phone and smashed it.

  Chapter 32

  “Oh my! She still has the moves,” Hank said. He clapped as Olive did the two-stomp on the remains of my phone.

  “What good did that do?” I asked her. “This is downtown Blue Plum. There are three us. And your dog just jumped into Hank’s lap.” I was surprised to hear how calm my voice sounded. “If you’re trying to get away with murder, you’re doing it wrong.”

  Ardis’ daddy was delighted by the happy dog licking his face. “A lap dancer!” he cried, and started the wheelchair moving in a slow spin. “Oh my, oh my, she makes me sigh!”

  “Stop that, you old fool,” Olive said. She kicked pieces of the phone into the gutter and tried to grab the handles of the wheelchair without letting go of the dog’s leash.

  “I’m either dazed or confused,” Ardis said. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. Daddy, in a moment of clarity, aided by a somewhat risqué long-term memory, just ID’d Olive and placed her in the park Thursday at the crucial time. And Olive, through her panicked reaction and lack of denial, as much as confessed to Gladys’ murder.”

  “And your daddy is wrapping up the case, but could use some help.”

  Her daddy had gotten the hang of spinning the wheelchair, tangling the leash around Olive’s legs in the process. Before Olive could free herself, Ardis and I grabbed Ernestine’s giant lion’s-mane jellyfish from the bushes. In a pincer move so smooth we might have been practicing it for months, and accompanied by her daddy’s cackling and the dog’s yips, we wrapped the piece of knitting around Olive like a straitjacket, pinning her arms. Ardis tied the package tightly with the tentacles.

  “Olive-stuffed jellyfish,” she said with satisfaction, and added another knot for safekeeping. “A Blue Plum yarn bomb specialty. Oh my.”

  * * *

  Between Ardis’ daddy singing a rousing rendition of something about a girl from Ypsilanti whose dress was red and scanty, and Olive’s dog encouraging him with more licks and yips, our strange party attracted the attention of several other folks abroad in Blue Plum that evening. Clod and Darla had just left Mel’s and they advanced on us in a synchronized quickstep. Darla had the pleasure of reading Olive her rights and making the arrest. Clod seemed happy to stand back and watch. More than happy, as Ardis noticed.

  “There is a look of extreme satisfaction on your face, Coleridge,” she said. “Why?”

  Her “Why?” was more of a demand than a request, and Clod didn’t always react well to demands. But Ardis was right; his extreme satisfaction led him to give us an answer that satisfied us, too.

  “Because Ms. Weems made anonymous complaints about stolen ducks,” he said, “and then claimed that I mishandled the complaints. To my mind, murdering two people trumps mishandled duck complaints, and Olive Weems doesn’t have a duck leg to stand on.”

  “And that is why I reported you,” Olive sputtered. “Your jokes at my expense are inappropriate and unprofessional.”

  “She has a point,” Ardis said, “but I will gladly be a character witness on your behalf if it’s necessary. She didn’t inherit her granddaddy’s house, but she sure did inherit his sense of humor.”

  “He had no sense of humor,” Olive snapped.

  “Exactly what I meant,” said Ardis.

  “No sense of humor,” Olive repeated, “and he was a fossil. I had as much right to that house, but that idiotic, patriarchal old man favored his son’s son over his daughter’s daughter. I’m the one who loved the house. It should have been mine.”

  Darla repeated her warning about speaking without an attorney present.

  “Oh, do let her sing,” Ardis’ daddy said.

  And Olive did. “I’m the one who would’ve taken care of the house properly. I would’ve made it a showplace. It would’ve been the perfect home for a rising political career. An estate. But would he give it to the granddaughter who loved it and loves this town? No, the grandson got it. Cousin Hugh, who never cared. Never cared and never came back.”

  “So why didn’t you offer to buy it from Hugh?” Clod asked.

  “Because I thought he’d already sold it,” Olive said. “How was I supposed to know he’d been renting it out all these years? No one knew that but Al Rogalla, and he acted as if he owned the place. And when I offered to buy it from him, he laughed.”

  “You would’ve known all that if you’d talked to Hugh,” Ardis said.

  “I hadn’t heard from him since he left, and I had no idea where he was. I thought he was lost or gone for good.”

  “You never thought to look for him?” Clod asked.

  “It wouldn’t have been that hard to find him on the Internet,” I said.

  “Why should I?” she asked.

  “Joe says she’s a technophobe,” I told the others.

  “If he didn’t have the house, then he didn’t have anything I wanted,” Olive snapped. “And I had more important things to do than look for him. But when I heard he’d only just sold the house Tuesday afternoon—when I knew that it could have been mine all these years—” Her voice rose higher with each word. “I want you to know that Hugh took something away from me. His existence took something away from me.” At that point she howled unintelligibly.

  Ardis’ daddy rolled himself backward several feet. “I believe I’d like to go home now, Ardie,” he said.

  Shorty and another deputy had arrived by then. So had Al Rogalla. He stood several yards away, a brindled Scottie at his heel. We all watched as Shorty, the other deputy, and Darla extricated Olive from the lion’s mane. Shorty put Olive in the car, and Darla handed the giant jellyfish to Clod. Then she took Olive’s dog from Hank and climbed into the backseat beside Olive.

  “Nice use of knitting,” Al said as the car pulled away. “You make that . . . thing yourself, Dunbar?”

  “Since when do you have a dog, Rogalla?” Clod asked.

  “Bruce belonged to Hugh, Dunbar. Sheriff Haynes gave me permission and his blessing to take him. Bruce seems to be a serious dog, though, with a law-and-order take on life, so I thought I’d improve his name. I toyed with the idea of calling him Deputy Bruce, but then I realized he’s better than that. Classier, too. So I’d like you to meet Inspector Bruce of Scotland Yard.”

  Clod shoved the wadded-up lion’s mane at me and stalked off into the night.

  Ardis and I relaid the jellyfish on the bushes in front of the Extension office, and then we took her daddy home.

  * * *

  In the days after Olive’s arrest, pictures of her and Hugh as children and young adults emerged, taking shape from the snippets and pieces of gossip popping up around town. Hugh never had cared for glory. Olive craved it. His status as a sports hero never meant anything much to him. He accepted the talents and gifts he was given as though they were nothing or simply expected. Olive worked for everything her whole life, and everything was hard. Darla told us that when they asked Olive why she killed Gladys, she confirmed that Gladys had seen her.

  “She told us that Gladys was out there catching ducks again,” Darla said, “and she blamed Cole. She said if he’d followed up on her complaint and stopped Gladys, then she wouldn’t have had to—but then she started howling and we didn’t get much more sense out of her.”

  Thea told us more of the duck story. I
n her search for the anonymous complaint about stolen ducks, she came across half a dozen complaints made by Gladys Weems against the ducks.

  “She hated them,” Thea said. “And I don’t blame her. Look what they did to my shoes. She complained they were too messy, too noisy, and there were too many of them. She was fed up and wanted the town to get rid of them or at least thin the flocks.”

  Joe filled in the final pieces of the duck story. Aaron Carlin gave them to him in exchange for Joe’s first attempt at making a sporran with a piece of deer hide.

  “Gladys really was a pistol,” Joe said. “She started her own duck abatement program. She caught them at night, because they don’t see well in the dark, sold them to Aaron, and then he turned around and sold them at the flea market. He says he didn’t ask where she got them.”

  “Do you believe that?” I asked.

  Joe rubbed his nose. “That he didn’t ask? Sure. But he knew what nights to park his truck on Fox Street for a few hours, leave it unlocked, and go for a stroll. He said it backfired Tuesday night when he drove back to the campground. He and Angie are living in an RV out there. Hugh was staying there for the few nights he was in town, too. I saw his truck Friday morning when I went out to see Aaron. Hugh must’ve walked to town with his pipes that night. It isn’t much of a hike.”

  * * *

  Rachel came into the Weaver’s Cat a few days later to thank me. Darla had asked permission to open the monkey’s fist from Hugh’s sporran. Inside was Rachel’s wedding ring. She said that when she’d left him, she threw the ring at him. Later she’d regretted that, because she’d liked the ring, if not him, but he’d never returned it.