Dyeing Wishes (27 page)

“Why on earth do you think Joe can find him if you can’t?” Ernestine asked.

Clod didn’t answer her. “Joe? Tomorrow morning?”

Joe’s smile was slight and possibly rueful, then gone. “There’s something going on at the Cat in the morning.”

Clod shot me a look. “Tomorrow afternoon, then.”

“Sorry, fishing.”

Clod said something that made Ernestine say “Oh my” again. And then I heard those words I’d grown to despise, and they were definitely directed at me.

“I’ve been looking for you, Kath Rutledge.” It was Carolyn Proffitt sounding in full snit. She wore heels again, but this time with skinny jeans and a faux peasant blouse. Joe was right. Not the outdoorsy type. But the heels and her tone of voice and the perfectly sprayed hair were all at odds with her hesitant step and the way her shoulders drew in as she approached the table. Then, when she saw Joe sitting across from me, she stopped and she actually pouted. “I thought you said you didn’t know where she was sitting.”

“Then I didn’t. Now I do. Time passed.”

That Zen-ish statement didn’t put her any more at ease. Neither did realizing the man sitting next to me, the one who’d had his back to her as she’d approached, was Deputy Cole Dunbar. She acknowledged his greeting by backing up a step.

“Why were you looking for me?” I asked.

Her eyes flicked to me, then back to Clod. As I watched, his relaxed-brother persona disappeared and his chest-puffing, “well, little missy” cop took over. He sat up and plunked his feet flat on the floor and all but stuck his hands on his hips.

“Ms. Proffitt?” he said. “Is there something you want to share with Ms. Rutledge that you can’t share with all of us?”

And that brought the snit she’d arrived in back in full force. “No,” she said. She looked over at me. “Only that I stand by what I said Tuesday morning. I had you figured wrong.”

“What?” That couldn’t be it. That was a ridiculous reason to come looking for me.

Clod snorted and looked away.

“Wait.”

But she’d turned her eyes to the side door that Ardis had taken Bonny through and she was already squeezing behind me and Ernestine to get to it. I reached to stop her. I barely caught her sleeve before she pulled away. My fingers didn’t feel anything more than skin-crawling polyester slipping through them, and then she was gone.

“Do you think I should I go after her?” I asked.

“Why?” Clod snorted again. “She just insulted you.”

I wasn’t sure she had. There was something in her eyes when she said it. And if Clod hadn’t been there, or if he hadn’t played his cloddish-cop card…but she was long gone. Besides, if she was really so all-fired keen on talking to me, she
did
know where to find me.

By then the others were on their feet, making leave-taking noises, and I got up, too. John said something about this potluck ranking right up there with the year of the Cola War. Ernestine shushed him. Joe, hands in his pockets, was ready to amble. Clod, into nonverbal
vocalizing that evening, blew noisily through his lips, not directing the commentary at anything in particular. It sounded more like a general summary of his day.

I looked toward the side door one more time and was thinking I might collect my salad bowl and leave that way when I felt a chill at the back of my neck and Geneva trickled into view.

“Have you been looking for me?” she asked.

“Y
ou see? I did understand you perfectly,” Geneva said.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. I was trying to ignore her and act normal while saying good-bye to the others. It wasn’t easy. She was keyed up and going on about her “latest genius invention.” She made it hard to think, much less keep my eyes focused. John and Ernestine waved and headed across the gym for the main doors, but they kept turning and looking back, as though they sensed something more than my distraction. And Joe didn’t help, because he didn’t amble off after all. He hung back. Waiting? To talk? I didn’t know, but Clod noticed, too.

“You two have plans?” Clod asked.

I missed Joe’s answer. Geneva had finally said something that caught my whole attention.

“So, on your instructions, I infiltrated the potluck. Get it? While you and the rest of the posse took care of the gossip and the research, the G and R, I did the I at the P. I got a grip! Just like you! Only my grip was much more useful to the investigation than the way you do it with your eyes squeezed so tightly shut. I overheard quite a few conversations and picked up a piece of information we should label Key Information. Isn’t that wonderful news? And none of this would have happened if you
hadn’t told me
not to come with you
.” She might as well have added
wink, wink, nudge, nudge
.

I couldn’t help it. I closed my eyes.

“Do you see what I mean?” She sighed. “That doesn’t look productive. It just looks painful.”

O
ur dye workshop once again didn’t materialize. Debbie called me early Sunday morning and said only that she couldn’t. I didn’t press for an explanation beyond “couldn’t” and told her not to worry about it. As if telling her that would ease her mind. But I said I’d call the others and she should take care of herself. I forgot to ask her about the notes she’d made for me the day before on her impressions of Will and Shannon and the other people she knew who were involved in the case, but I didn’t call her back. Maybe she’d left the notes at the Cat. Maybe Ardis knew where they were.

When I called Ardis, she said she didn’t care about canceling the workshop. “The potluck ended before we completed the Triple Blind,” she said. “We gathered no gossip. We reaped no tidbits for further research.”

“You didn’t get anything else out of Bonny when you walked her out of the gym?”

“Nothing but tears, hon. She’s a shattered woman. And I am a woman wakened too early on a Sunday morning. My mind will think more clearly in an hour or three. In the meantime, I am rolling over and going back to sleep.”

Ardis really must have needed a few more hours’ sleep if she didn’t realize that we’d gleaned at least a few tidbits from our efforts at the potluck. We’d learned that
Shannon was engaged to Eric Lyle. According to Bonny, anyway, and that the baby was his. Again, according to Bonny. Those tidbits added something to our swirl of data. I didn’t know how, or if, they changed anything, or if they just added a different color, but that was why we were investigating—to find out how things sorted out and added up. Of course, Ardis had missed Carolyn Proffitt’s appearance and cryptic insult. And she’d missed Clod’s admission that the authorities needed help looking for Eric Lyle. But none of those tidbits needed to keep Ardis from rolling over and going back to sleep. Before she did roll, I asked her about Debbie’s notes. She said I’d find them on the desk in the little office behind the counter at the Cat.

“Debbie looked like she was pouring her heart into writing them, hon, so I let them take the place of that heart-to-heart. Good night.”

Thea apologized for not giving me the dossiers that she’d compiled on all the players at the potluck, but with one thing and another…She said she wasn’t sure they amounted to much but hoped they’d fill in some gaps or spark more questions. “I’ll put them in an envelope and slip it through the mail slot at the Cat on my way past.”

Everyone else was fine with canceling the workshop, too. Everyone was feeling subdued. No one asked if we planned to re-reschedule. I decided we probably should, though. We needed something creative and colorful and fun to look forward to. I hoped the others would agree.

Without the workshop, I had the morning to stew over Geneva’s Key Information and time to wonder if Joe’s casual, not quite an invitation to go fishing with him that afternoon constituted going on a date. That was why he’d hung around the night before, eventually outwaiting Clod, who’d snorted one more time, then taken off in a huff.

“Two o’clock sound good to you?” he’d asked. “We can take my canoe.”

Geneva thought the invitation
was
a date. “I will act as chaperone if it will make you feel more comfortable,” she’d said as I drove her back to the Cat, “because he might be planning more on canoodling in that canoe than fishing. Although you should be aware that the effect of my presence on the worms and fish might put a damper on fishing, should that really be what’s on his mind.”

“That’s a kind offer,” I said, “but you make a good point about scaring the fish, and I’m sure Joe will appreciate it if you stay home.”

“Just so I’m clear, are you saying you want me to come with you or you want me to stay home?”

“I tell you what—let’s make a deal. Let’s not use backward or reverse instructions anymore.”

“I do miss that television show, and I wish you hadn’t brought it up. Missing Monty makes me melancholy. But do you mean that you will use backward or reverse instructions or you won’t?”

We got that straightened out, I hoped, and I even extended one of my every-so-often invitations to come home with me rather than go back to the Cat for the night. She never accepted and didn’t this time, either, saying she liked the comforts of her own room.

“Besides,” she said, “Kojak would miss me.”

There really wasn’t much to stew over in Geneva’s Key Information. She’d heard the Spivey twins tell Angela they were close to cracking the case, thanks to information received, and that they intended to come find me after cooking Sunday dinner for their aged mother and rub it in my face. That excited Geneva until I told her it was the cracked case they meant to rub, not chicken,
mashed potatoes, and gravy. I thanked her for telling me, though. Knowing they were going to come looking for me was definitely Key Information. Knowing that gave me time and extra incentive to disappear up a creek with Joe the Unfindable Fisherman.

I did wonder from where or from whom they’d received case-cracking information, and I still wanted to hear what they knew about the wannabe journalists, but on my own terms and not in a Spivey ambush. And, I assured Geneva, not for one minute did I believe Shirley and Mercy had really done anything to even come close to cracking the case.

My memories from that afternoon were stored as a series of impressions—the creaking of Joe’s car as we lurched slowly along a nearly invisible, almost impassable Forest Service road down to the river, me laughing as I stretched up trying to help Joe lift the canoe off the car, the touch of gray at his temple that I hadn’t noticed before, birdsong, pines, leaf mold, moss, and the liquid soundtrack the river gave to our lazy fishing as we drifted downstream.

Woven through the impressions were the colors of east Tennessee: cathedral wood green, leaf-filtered sky blue, river-polished speckled gray gravel, and water—water rippling, smooth, and clear—dappled yellow, olive, and brown by the sun and darkening from emerald to black in the shade of overhanging trees.

The impressions were only dashed-off sketches, though. Incomplete. They were scraps of watercolors, a snippet of embroidered cutwork, as slippery to describe or bring wholly to mind as the wash of blues and greens in the beautiful silk scarf Sylvia wore the day she and Pen came into the Cat. The impressions were all those fragmented things with the addition of a single splash of red for accent.

Everything else beyond those impressions I would as soon have forgotten. It would have been fine to forget the red, too.

We didn’t catch many fish and released the ones we did. We hadn’t started too far upriver, not as far as Cloud Hollow, and Joe took us along slowly, mindful that we’d have to paddle harder to get back upstream. There were any number of questions we could have asked each other, but we didn’t say much, either, letting the river and the birds do the talking. But at one point I made a joke when I caught sight of something under the trailing willows in the still water lapping an undercut bank.

“I didn’t know there were alligators around here.”

And of course there weren’t and it wasn’t.