Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (36 page)

Mix the first five ingredients in a large bowl and set aside.

In another large bowl, beat the eggs. Add the olive oil, milk, and rosemary and beat again.

Fold the wet ingredients into the dry, gently mixing until just combined. Stir in two thirds of the chopped chocolate, reserving the other third for the next step.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Sprinkle the remaining chocolate and the 1
¹
⁄
₂
tablespoons sugar over the top.

Bake 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. At this point the cake will be pale.

Run the cake, still in the pan, under the broiler to caramelize the sugar—browning the crown and giving the cake a nice top-crunch. Watch the cake carefully while it’s under the broiler.

Eat warm, cooled, or cold. The cake will keep—leftovers? Ha!—wrapped in plastic.

Thea’s Red and White Baby/Toddler Hat

Designed by Kate Winkler. Designs from Dove Cottage.

Designed for Molly MacRae’s Last Wool and Testament.

19” finished circumference at bottom

MATERIALS

Worsted-weight yarn, 100 yards each of two colors

16” circular and double-pointed needles, US 8 (5mm) or size needed for gauge

Stitch marker

Tapestry needle

Gauge: 20 st = 4 inches in stockinette.

Using circular needle and Color A, cast on 97 stitches. Being careful that the stitches are not twisting around the needle, knit the FIRST stitch you cast on, then pass the LAST stitch you cast on over it. Place marker on needle to mark the beginning of the round. You have 96 stitches.

Work K1 P1 ribbing for 1.5 inches.

Change to Color B.

Round 1: K

Round 2: K into the stitch of Color A below the first stitch on the needle
*
; K normally to end of round.

Rounds 3-8: K

*
This will make the stripe line up without a “jog.”

Change to Color A.

Round 9: K

Round 10: K into the stitch of Color B below the first stitch on the needle; K normally to end of round.

Rounds 11–16: K

Repeat these 16 rounds once more. Your hat should be about 5.5–6 inches from the cast on edge. Continuing with color stripes, shape top, changing to double-pointed needles when necessary.

Decrease Rounds:

Round 1: *K10, K2tog, repeat from * around—88 stitches.

Round 2: K around.

Round 3: *K9, K2tog, repeat from * around—80 stitches.

Round 4: K around.

Round 5: *K8, K2tog, repeat from * around—72 stitches.

Round 6: K around.

Round 7: *K7, K2tog, repeat from * around—64 stitches.

Round 8: K around.

CHANGE COLOR AS BEFORE

Round 9: *K6, K2tog, repeat from * around—56 stitches.

Round 10: K around.

Round 11: *K5, K2tog, repeat from * around—48 stitches.

Round 12: K around.

Round 13: *K4, K2tog, repeat from * around—40 stitches.

Round 14: K around.

Round 15: *K3, K2tog, repeat from * around—32 stitches.

Round 16: K around.

DO NOT CHANGE COLOR

Round 17: *K2, K2tog, repeat from * around—24 stitches.

Round 18: K around.

Round 19: *K1, K2tog, repeat from * around—16 stitches.

Round 20: *K2tog around—8 stitches.

Break yarn and thread through remaining stitches with tapestry needle. Draw up snugly and fasten off on inside. Weave in all ends.

If you like, top the hat with a pom-pom or tassel using either color or both.

Read on for a sneak peek of

Molly MacRae’s next
Haunted Yarn Shop mystery,

coming from Obsidian in summer 2013.

W
here are the lambs?” Ernestine asked when she and I caught up to the rest of the group at the pasture fence. “Did Kath and I dawdle too long? Have they already run off to play?”

“Oh, sorry, Ernestine,” I said. She was spry for being nearly round and almost eighty, but I’d been sure I was doing her a favor by walking slowly down the farm lane with her. As it turned out, she’d been the one waiting for me because I couldn’t help stopping to take pictures along the way. She kindly hadn’t complained, but now I felt bad because we’d expected to see Debbie’s new lambs frisking in the field. “Did we miss them?”

“No, they’re with their mamas,” Debbie said, “at the far end, over there under that beech tree.” She pointed across the hillocky field.

Not knowing much about lambs or their mamas, I wasn’t surprised they weren’t hanging around at the fence waiting for us. Debbie seemed puzzled though, and it was her farm and they were her sheep, so I mimicked her scrunched nose and stared across the field where she pointed. I could just make them out standing in a white huddle under a huge tree.

Ernestine put her cheek to Debbie’s extended arm, using it and Debbie’s index finger as a sight and squinting toward the sheep, her thick lenses flashing in the sun. Her
head barely reached Debbie’s shoulder. Concentrating and leaning into her squint the way she did, and dressed in a gray sweater and slacks, she looked like an ancient mole trying to bring the world into better focus. She wasn’t as blind as a mole, but she probably didn’t see the tree, much less the sheep, at that distance.

Thea and Bonnie, the other two women with us, had already gotten tired of straining to see the sheep. Thea, in jeans and a Windbreaker, climbed up and sat on the fence. Bonnie was checking her phone for messages.

“I don’t get it,” Debbie said. “Usually they’ll come see if I’ve brought treats. And the lambs are always curious. But I don’t think they’ve even noticed us.”

The five of us, all members of the needle arts group Thank Goodness It’s Fiber (TGIF), had met up that morning at Debbie Keith’s farm, Cloud Hollow. Thea and Ernestine had been smart and carpooled with Bonnie, letting her navigate the half dozen winding miles up the Little Buck river valley from Blue Plum, our small town in east Tennessee. I’d driven out alone, arriving last and feeling as though I’d made it despite rather than because of Debbie’s directions, which included the near-fatal phrase “and you can’t miss it.”

We’d all been looking forward to spending the morning in Debbie’s studio. She was going to teach us her techniques for dyeing yarn and wool roving by “painting” them. Unfortunately, in her flurry of preparations, Debbie had locked the key to the studio inside it. She’d called her neighbor across the river, who kept an extra set of keys for her. The neighbor said she’d drop the keys off on her way to town, and we’d decided to make the most of our wait by walking down the farm lane to visit the new lambs. But, as we saw, the lambs and their mamas were otherwise occupied.

“Can’t you call them?” Thea asked. “Whistle for them or something?”

“Not at this distance,” Debbie said. “I’m not loud enough. And that’s not really how sheep work, anyway.”

“See, Bonnie?” Thea said. “I told you—that’s what Bill is for.”

“I know what a sheepdog is for,” Bonnie said. “But dogs in general don’t like me, except to bite, so I don’t like them back. And I make it a point to never give them the chance to bite in the first place. No offense intended, I hope you know, Debbie, but I am much obliged to you for putting what’s-his-name in the house.”

Debbie, still looking at the distant flock, waved off Bonnie’s thanks.

I was pretty sure I heard a muttered “Wuss” from Thea, but Bonnie, farther down the fence and engrossed in her phone again, didn’t catch it.

Bonnie pocketed her phone with a disgusted noise. “The morning’s turning out to be a complete bust, though,” she said. Ernestine tried to shush her but Bonnie continued grousing more loudly than seemed polite. “Driving the whole blessed way out here and trying to find this place was bad enough, but now we’re standing around in wet grass and accomplishing absolutely nothing.”

“But isn’t it a beautiful morning for getting nothing done?” Ernestine asked.

No one could argue with that. It was the kind of gorgeous spring day in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that looked like the inspiration for an Easter card. The world smelled of fresh breezes. Also of the wild onions I was standing on. I stepped back from the fence and took a picture of the grassy lane we were in and another where the lane disappeared around the next hill. Then I snapped a few candids of the other women.

Thea, sitting on the top fence rail, was a tempting target. Her orange Windbreaker was stretched across her broad back, making her look like a giant pumpkin perched on the fence, her brown head making the stem. I skipped
that picture, though. Thea was our town librarian and defied all stereotypes associated with that position except two—she was single and she had more than two cats. But she was far from being hushed and, in fact, called herself the “beautiful, black, loud librarian,” and I knew she’d be loudly unappreciative of a picture taken of the particular view I had in my lens.

Ernestine and Bonnie stood farther down along the fence, with Ernestine distracting Bonnie’s grumbles by asking about her winter in Florida. Ernestine’s white hair became a dandelion nimbus as she turned her wrinkled face toward the sun, eyes closed behind her thick glasses. She was retired after holding a number of jobs, most recently as receptionist for my late grandmother’s lawyer. She had a dry sense of humor and although her eyesight was failing, she saw the good in people and frequently apologized for their shortcomings.

I’d met Bonnie for the first time that morning. The only things I knew about her were what I’d just been hearing—she’d returned from Florida the week before, she was a gung ho spring, summer, and fall member of TGIF, and she didn’t like dogs. She also seemed to be expecting a phone call or expecting someone to answer a call she was trying to put through. And she wasn’t exactly patient. At a passing glance, she looked to be on the good side of fifty. But after studying her face and hair in my viewfinder, I suspected she was closer to the upper end of sixty and had a hairdresser and possibly a plastic surgeon under orders to fight for every year they could gain.

Debbie stood at the fence, a hand shading her eyes, staring across the field toward her sheep. With her blond braid down her back she could have been a Norse maiden scanning the horizon for sails. My grandmother liked to say Debbie looked as though she’d stepped out of one of Carl Larsson’s nineteenth-century Swedish watercolors.
Debbie worked part-time at the Weaver’s Cat, the yarn shop in Blue Plum that had been Granny’s pride and passion up until her death six weeks earlier. The shop was mine now, which made Debbie my employee but, truthfully, she and the shop’s longtime manager were still “teaching me the stitches” of owning and running the business, as they liked to say.

At the shop, Debbie tended toward long skirts and embroidered tops, hence Granny’s Carl Larsson comment, but that morning she was wearing farm-sensible jeans, a navy blue fisherman’s sweater that brought out the blue of her eyes, and a great pair of red tartan rubber boots that I coveted. She had four or five inches on me, though, and was strong enough, so I’d heard, to toss a bale of hay or hold a sheep between her knees for shearing, so I didn’t plan to try to wrestle the boots off her feet.

Framing each face in my camera, I realized we were a nice range of ages. Debbie was in her early thirties, I’d turned thirty-nine the month before, Thea was an honest mid-forties, Bonnie could cover both fifties and sixties for us, and Ernestine capped us out with her nearly eighty years. I snapped another picture of Ernestine smiling at Bonnie, who was showing her the size of something by holding her hands out and looking from one hand to the other, maybe telling Ernestine a Florida fish story. Thea turned and I was able to get a picture of her pretty face in profile.

“I know what the sheep are doing,” Thea said. “It’s Monday-morning book group. They’re reading
Three Bags Full
and making plans. You need a smart brown sheep out there to be the ringleader. I’ll let you name her Thea.”

“I’ve been thinking about trying a few Icelandic sheep,” Debbie said. “The color variations are really nice and they’re supposed to be unusually intelligent.”

“Well, there you go,” Thea said. “Get yourself a set of
twins and call the other one Queen Latifah. I’m sure we’ll both be fine with that.”

Debbie nodded and said, “Mm,” but didn’t look as though she’d really heard Thea. “Hey, Kath, have you got a zoom on that camera?”

“Oh, yeah, probably. Good idea.” The camera was new to me, one of several I’d inherited from Granny, and I hadn’t played around with all the features yet. I fiddled with the adjustments, held the camera up, and fiddled some more before finding the beech tree and the sheep in the lens. “Okay, got them.”

“What do you see?” Debbie asked.

“Sheep. And…something? Nope—they shifted for a second but now they’re not budging. They’re standing with their backs to us.”

“Well, I think I want to go out there and see what’s going on with those girls,” Debbie said, still staring across the field. “That’s so unlike them. Anyone want to come with me?”

“Sure.” I looked at the others. They might have come prepared for playing with pots of dye, but Debbie, Thea, and I were the only ones wearing anything on our feet suitable for crossing a wet pasture.

“Come on, Thea. We’ll go with her,” I said.

“Sorry, no.” Thea shook her head. “Mud, maybe, but these shoes don’t do ewe poo.”

“You two go on and round them up,” Bonnie said. “We’ll stay here holding up the fence and cheering you on.”

The others laughed and Debbie and I climbed over and started across the meadow. The sun felt as yellow as the patches of buttercups and warmed every delicate shade of green in the fields and woods around us. A flock of clouds meandered high above in the soft blue sky. The mud and the ewe poo were mostly avoidable. But through the camera’s zoom I’d caught a glimpse of
something under the beech tree that wasn’t right. From the behavior of the sheep, Debbie knew something was up, too, but from her own behavior I didn’t think she had any idea what. She was a fast walker, and I skipped to catch her.