Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (31 page)

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

O
n 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 my 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.”

“You have? Anything we can use?”

“Oh, wait, there’s Shirley yelling something. I better see what. I’ll get back to you.”

For a Spivey interaction, the call was oddly encouraging, if for no other reason than because it was so short. Ruth didn’t call and I pictured her avoiding the phone so she wouldn’t have to say she told me so. Homer did call.

“Kath, I am so sorry for all you went through yesterday. I’ve communicated with Deputy Dunbar and I agree with him that we need to look at recent events philosophically.”

“Really? He said that?”

Homer coughed discreetly, no doubt communicating to me something about slander or manners. “The human
condition is such that we crave answers, Kath. You hear in the news every day about people yearning for closure. But I don’t think we need to spend time searching for the reasons this sad woman’s life derailed so disastrously. There won’t be a trial for her in a court of law, so we will let the dead bury the dead. It’s enough to know she was responsible.”

“Wait, for all of it? They say she killed Emmett and Max?”

“The authorities are satisfied she did.”

“On the basis of what?” The tangled threads I’d tried to follow the night before weren’t any less confusing this morning, but that only made me more certain that
no one
could be sure Nicki had killed anyone. “Homer, there are too many questions left. Surely you see that.”

I heard the click of his pen. “I’m listening.”

“The burglaries, yes. She derailed, sure. But not snakes. Not poison. Not killing. If you want to look at this philosophically, Nicki was obsessed with Granny, with creating something. Except for a couple of broken windows, she wasn’t out to destroy anything.”

“Go on.”

“Okay, something more tangible? Less philosophical? The broken window at Granny’s. That happened before the rain. You know that; you mopped up the water. But you also talked to Max in the morning, after the rain. Nicki must have been long gone before Max showed up at Granny’s. And then the snakes. Where would she even get great huge rattlesnakes?” I shuddered. “And why?”

“So you think someone else brought the snakes? That still leaves us with why.”

“Um.” I’d been pacing. Now I sat. All this talk of snakes made me bring my feet up in the chair with me. “And with who. What if it was the guy who came and got them? Aaron Carlin. He made those snakes seem like pets.”

“You saw him?”

“Yeah, and apparently his people are snake handlers, so he’d know where to get snakes. Plus, he’s got some kind of record, right? But that still leaves us with why.”

“It does and I’m going to suggest an answer. You might not like it but, as your lawyer, as your friend, I need to impress this upon you. I think the snakes were a warning that you should forget blackmail, forget murder, stop asking questions.”

“But…”

“Kath, you’ve raised legitimate questions and I think you might be right. This isn’t over. I want you to take the warning seriously and I’ll speak to Deputy Dunbar.’

“No! No, Homer—what if he’s involved?”

For several seconds all I heard was the clicking of his pen. “Well, I can’t fault you now for not taking this seriously. All right, I’ll go directly to Sheriff Haynes.”

I didn’t feel a whole lot better after hanging up.

“Why are you so glum? I’m the one who’s dead.” Geneva coalesced across from me at the kitchen table, damp and depleted.

“I’m arguing with my better judgment, trying to convince it I can’t let a slithery warning keep me from finding out what happened. What about you? I thought you had some fun yesterday. You went to town. You enjoyed the shop. If I’d really been bitten by that snake, you would have saved my life by keeping me calm. And you almost got your wish to have a cat.”

“My existence is a dreary pattern of yesterdays and that cat was a banshee.”

“Well, the banshee’s been banished and patterns can be altered.”

“You have a pattern. You are up, then you are down, then you are up, and then you go down. Your dramas are exhausting.” Said the Sarah Bernhardt of the spirit world.

“That’s just my yo-yo life right now. I’m usually fairly content.” It was nice to stop and remember that was true. Or it had been. When I had the job I loved. When I had the grandmother I loved. “Okay,” I said, standing up and hoping that would reverse the downward yo the morning was traveling. “Phooey to better judgment. We’ve got patterns to explore and new pieces to examine. I’m spending the day at the Weaver’s Cat. You, Ms. Sidekick, are welcome to come with me. Or mope here if you’re too exhausted to help with the investigation.”

“What’s the point? Em is dead. I heard you say the police think Nicki poisoned him. I am in mourning.” She put her head down on her wispy arms.