Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (35 page)

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Authors: Molly MacRae

BOOK: Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery

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“Kath, honey?” Ardis called.

“It’s nothing,” I said, going back down. “I thought I heard something.” I hadn’t. I just wanted to. “Let’s burn the envelopes. Then I’m going to bed.” I took the shovel back from Joe, pried the cap off the newel, and pulled out the envelopes. “Would you like this one?” I held out the envelope with his name. He didn’t move to take it. “We didn’t open it.”

“Burn them all,” he said.

Envelopes full of papers, like books, take longer to burn than people tend to imagine. But I made myself be patient as we fed them, one at a time, into the flames. Ardis pulled a chair over. Joe and I sat on the floor. We were silent at first, staring into the flames. Then the steady rain and the crackling fire worked their magic, lighting our dark spaces, drawing us in.

“I thought you might join us this afternoon, Ten,” Ardis said.

“Sorry to miss the excitement. I was curious about Carlin and the snakes and I went to find him. Wasn’t easy. Carlins know how to disappear.”

“Curious about what?” I asked.

“Turns out the snakes were his. Carlin’s been working off his debt to Homer and Homer said the snakes would make them even. Carlin swears he had no idea what Homer planned. He seemed awfully friendly with them last night, though, and that got me wondering. After he left here he took off for some land he’s got down by Newport. Says his dream is to be a forest ranger. I don’t know if there’s much chance of that.”

I fed another envelope into the fire, thought about dreams and lives going up in smoke. “Do you think Ruth had any idea about Homer?”

“I don’t see how,” Ardis said.

“I can’t imagine what she’s going through right now,” I said.

“She’s going to need good friends to stick by her.”

“We can do that,” Joe said.

“What are we going to do with the Cat, now, Kath?” Ardis asked. “It’s not really we, though, is it? I’ve been putting off thinking about it, but the reality is I can’t swing a loan by myself. So what are
you
going to do with the Cat?”

“Be a shame to lose it,” Joe said.

“It’s a shame to put her on the spot like this, too.” Ardis stood up, breaking the spell of the flames. “Forget I asked, honey. It’s getting late and we’re all tired. We’ll both have time to think and talk before you go back to Illinois.”

Joe waited until I put the last envelope on the fire, and then he got up, too. I was glad Ardis had saved me from laying my own dream out in front of them. She hadn’t wanted me as an absentee owner of the Cat. I wasn’t sure yet if she would accept the idea of me as owner in residence.

“What are you looking at, Ten? Did we leave one behind?” she asked.

I spread the last of the fire out with the poker, then looked around. Joe was peering into the newel post.

“It’s not an envelope, but something’s still down there at the bottom. The bullet hole’s letting in a smidge of light.” He reached his long arm in, looking up at the ceiling as he fished. For a second, it looked as though something up in the corner of the room caught his eye, but when I turned to see what, nothing was there. He brought his arm out and handed me a folded square of paper. “Maybe it fell out of one of the envelopes?”

“Maybe.” But it looked older. It was a heavyweight paper and not brittle. I unfolded it and read aloud:

Finished this house this day for this family

My dear wife and our dear children

Elihu Bowman

29th April 1853

“Cool,” Joe said. “May I?”

I hardly noticed him take the paper from my fingers. “Bowman?” I said, and listened. Then I turned around and listened again. “Geneva Bowman?”

“No, it says Elihu,” Joe said. “And where do you suppose he came from? I thought all this property was owned by Holstons. Since time immemorial. What do you think Ruth will make of this?”

“Tell you what,” Ardis said. “Let’s not shake her or anyone else up too much more right now, especially not tonight. Sound good?” She was looking at me. That might have been mild concern drawing her eyebrows together.

“Sounds good,” I said. “Joe, you’re the new caretaker. Do you want to hold on to the note or put it back in the newel?”

“I’m only here temporarily. The newel’s done it well enough for the last hundred and sixty years.”

He refolded the paper, laid it back in the bottom of the post, and put the cap back on. I followed them to the door, thinking about hiding places. There was a hiding place at the Weaver’s Cat I still needed to find.

“You open at one tomorrow, Ardis?” I asked. “I’ll be in and we’ll talk.”

“Kath, oh, Kath,” she said, swallowing me in a honeysuckle hug, then letting me go. “Good Lord, we’ve had a few of them, but tomorrow is another day.”

“Yep,” Joe said, “and probably a good one to go fishing.”

“This rain won’t bugger it up?” I asked. We listened to more thunder moving in.

“It’s always buggered up somewhere,” he said. “Then you just go somewhere else.”

He opened the door to another flurry of wind. As they dashed out, heads lowered against the pelting rain, a blur of half-drowned fur streaked in.

“Gah!”

The blur skittered across the kitchen and disappeared around the corner. I looked after Ardis and Joe. Gone. I looked toward the living room. Only a muddy streak across the floor proved what I’d seen. Rain was blowing in, but I left the door open. One or the other of us was going to need an escape hatch. Ready to scream again, I followed the muddy trail, sorry the poker was once again holstered with the other fireplace tools.

In the chair Ardis had left near the fireplace, sat a bedraggled, mud-spattered ginger cat, fastidiously licking a front paw as though that simple act was the obvious and complete solution to everything that troubled the world. The cat looked up when a floorboard under my foot squeaked.

“Meow,” it said calmly, clearly meaning, “Oh, hey, how are you?”

“Do you think it’s a good idea for you to be in here?”

It did.

Chapter 40

I
still didn’t know who he was, but he was curled up beside me in bed the next morning. Purring. He was purring, that is. I was lying there listening to him, amazed, and dozily following the threads dangling in my head. I wondered how Ruth was holding up…if I wanted to make the huge transition and move to Blue Plum…if I could sit down at Granny’s tapestry loom and weave her Blue Plum tapestry myself…if Angie would be gracious about losing the house…what Shirley and Mercy would say when they found out I didn’t need whatever they’d found…if Ernestine needed a new job and if she’d like to work at the Weaver’s Cat…how Maggie was getting along with Joe…who this cat belonged to…why it liked me…if it had fleas…if Geneva’s last name was Bowman and where she was. She hadn’t come back. I didn’t wonder how Homer was because I didn’t care.

“Meow?”

“There isn’t much. Do you like tuna noodle casserole for breakfast?”

It turned out we both did.

“Who’s this?” Ardis unlocked the door for us before the Weaver’s Cat opened.

“Meow.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s all he’ll tell me. He’s kind of like a dog, though. He follows me everywhere.”

“He’s got a bald patch. Does he have mange? And why does some of his fur stick up like that?”

“Cowlicks?”

The cat jumped up on the counter and purred for Ardis.

“Where did he come from?”

“Out of the storm. Joe says there aren’t any ginger cats at the Homeplace.”

“Oh, you talked to Joe, did you?” She had a glint of speculation in her eye.

I scritched the cat’s head and ignored the glint. “I’ll ask around, take him to the vet, see if he’s microchipped.”

“Will you take him back to Illinois?” Her voice was even and her face impassive, but the effort it was taking for her to appear calm, while only just approaching the subject of the shop’s future, was obvious in her rigid hands.

I brushed a bit of orange fur from the sleeve of my beautiful indigo jacket, put my hands over hers, took a deep breath, and leapt. “Ardis, I lost my job and I want to move here and run the Cat with you. Do you think that will work? Will you teach me what I need to know? Do you think we should offer Ernestine a job because she won’t be working for Homer anymore? If the cat behaves, can it come to work with me the way some of Granny’s used to?”

She answered yes to all my questions with tears running down her face. The cat and I left her alone to pull herself together before it was time to open the doors to customers, and we climbed the stairs to Granny’s space under the eaves.

“Are you any good at finding hiding places?” I asked. “By the way, what’s your name?”

“Meow.”

“That answer is no help. What are you looking at?”

The cat jumped onto the window seat and sat as though facing someone who might offer to rub his chin.

“He is an unusual cat, so he needs an unusual name,” a voice said. And as I watched, Geneva appeared.

“I was afraid you were gone. Are you okay?”

“Why? What did you imagine could happen to me beyond being dead?” she asked.

“Um, I’m not sure. But I wanted to thank you. You saved our lives.”

“I’m glad being dead is good for something.”

“Where were you?”

“Around. I needed to be alone,” she said.

“Mourning Em?”

“Mourning my idea of Em. He wasn’t a good man, was he?” She sniffled.

“He didn’t kill anyone, though.”

“No. But I’m glad I have someplace else to go because I cannot bear to stay in that tainted house any longer.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I could hardly bear waiting until we got in your rental car and came back here.”

“Here?”

“Yes. Larry and I will be very happy here.”

“Larry?”

“I named the cat Larry,” she said.

“And who says you get to name him and since when is Larry an unusual enough name for an unusual cat?”

“Do you know any other cats named Larry?”

“I’m not calling him Larry.”

“You could try.”

“No.”

“Once?” she coaxed.

“No.”

“But, still, I can stay here, can’t I?”

I looked at her, nestled comfortably in the window
seat next to the unusual cat who tolerated both of us. The cat made happy eyes as it watched us arguing. I sat down in Granny’s chair and put my feet up on her desk, as she’d done so many times. I looked around the snug room, wondering where I’d look first for her private dye journals and what I’d do with them if I found them and what Ardis would say if she heard the question I was about to answer.

“Geneva, we can all stay.”

Rosemary Watermelon Lemonade

This lemonade is gorgeous and absolutely delicious!

INGREDIENTS

2 cups water

³⁄
₄cup white sugar

1 sprig rosemary leaves, chopped

2 cups lemon juice

12 cups cubed, seeded watermelon

Bring the water and sugar to a boil in a small saucepan over high heat. Stir in the rosemary and set aside to steep for 1 hour.

Strain the rosemary syrup into a blender. Add a third of the lemon juice and a third of the watermelon. Cover, and puree until smooth. Pour into a pitcher.

Puree another third of the lemon juice and watermelon. Add to the pitcher and repeat with the last of the lemon juice and watermelon.

Stir the lemonade before serving. Hold your glass to the light and marvel at the beautiful color.

Rosemary Olive Oil Cake with Dark Chocolate

Preheat oven to 350º F.

Line a 9
¹⁄
₂-inch springform pan with parchment paper.

INGREDIENTS