Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (15 page)

“Maybe not so silly,” I said. “According to Shirley and Mercy…”

“Those two!”

“Not just them. Max Cobb, too.”

“And he’s not much better.”

“But he’s got the keys and I can’t get in.”

Ardis stewed on that news, one eye narrowed, lips thinned to an angry slash. “So why didn’t you call me?”

Without going into details, I told her that Ruth rescued me. She accepted that with a nod.

“I’m going to tell you a story. One Ivy most likely didn’t because it was over and done with and it wasn’t her way to carry a grudge. I’m not so good that way. Those two Spiveys came to the first day of a Fair Isle class. This was twelve, fifteen years ago. They sat down in this kitchen with their smiles and their ‘heys’ and ‘you all rights’ and they asked who all had heard about Ivy’s affair with Homer Wood.”

“What?”

“Wasn’t true. Wasn’t anything more than ridiculous.”

“The age difference alone makes it unlikely,” I said.

“Ridiculous or unlikely or utter baloney, the moral of the story is the Spiveys are positively poisonous.”

“But fascinating, somehow. Like snakes.”

“If you say so.” She flicked a crumb from her sleeve. “Ivy defanged them properly, anyway. She had a way with people like no one else I’ve ever known. She got the twins to apologize, in front of the class, and then drop the class. They never did learn to knit Fair Isle.” Animated while recounting the Spiveys’ comeuppance, Ardis drew
in again, looking thoughtful. “That’s something I worry about,” she said, not looking at me, possibly not talking to me, either. “Ivy’s magic.”

“Magic?”
The word burst out of me, making us both jump. “Sorry, Ardis. I didn’t mean to scare you.” She’d given
me
a heart attack, though. “What was that you said about Ivy’s magic?”

“What we were just talking about, her way with people. Everything she did. I can’t help but wonder how much of the Cat’s success is because of her and her alone. Look around you. Ivy is everywhere. And now that she’s gone?”

“We’ll carry on exactly where she left off. It’ll be like she never left at all. Hey, Kath. Good to see you again.” Nicki bounced through the doorway looking adorable in black leggings and a white and black crocheted granny square tunic. On a larger woman the outfit would invite comparisons to purebred Holsteins. On petite Nicki, with her hair pulled back in a springy ponytail, it made me think of a happy Jack Russell terrier. “Did Ardis tell you our plan?” she asked. “Isn’t it exciting? I am so psyched. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but Thea’s here for the Beatrix Potter needlepoint book you found for her, Ardis.”

“Oh, land, and where did I put that? It came in the day Ivy…It’s not behind the counter?”

“Sure didn’t see it.”

“Think,” Ardis muttered. “Where did I…”

“That’s okay. You know Thea. She won’t mind coming back,” Nicki said.

“No, I know where it is. Upstairs. A few of the patterns call for Paterna tapestry wool and I was checking if we had the colors she might want. I had it with me and must have left it up there.” Ardis sighed and pushed her chair back.

“Don’t get up. I’ll run get it,” Nicki said. “Better yet, I’ll take Thea with me and park her next to the Paterna. Let her do a little dreaming and shopping at the same
time.” She dashed out and I half expected to hear her yip with delight over her ploy.

Which reminded me. “Ardis, do you have Maggie?”

“Didn’t anyone tell you?” She started fanning herself again. “You must have been worried sick about her all this time.”

“Hey, it’s okay, really. I know she hasn’t been the first thing on anyone’s mind. I think I’m more worried about you, right now.”

Ardis stopped fanning and waved my concern away.

“I’m just glad to know where she is. She probably still doesn’t like me, though. Do you think, well, would you want to keep her?”

“No, that’s just it.” It turned out she wasn’t waving my concern away. She was swatting at my words of relief so they’d sit, stay, and pay attention. “I don’t have Maggie. No one does. No one’s been able to find her. We think she disappeared the day Ivy died.”

“She’s gone?” I said stupidly. True, she’d as soon bite me as look at me, but she was Granny’s delight. And now she was gone, too? With that news coming on top of every other jolt of the past days, I might have broken down and cried again. But I didn’t. I was beginning to feel empty. Like a husk. Like a ghost. And I might have laughed at that thought, but I couldn’t do that, either. Because if Maggie was never found, I was pretty sure I’d be haunted by her unfriendly little mew for the rest of my life.

“Haunted.” That turned out to be an apropos word. The ghost came back that evening.

Chapter 15

A
fter hearing about Maggie, I spent the rest of the day avoiding people, skipping lunch at Mel’s with Ardis and Joe Whatever-He-Was. What I really wanted to do was mothball myself in a pile of Granny’s wool in the house on Lavender Street. Homer didn’t call to say he’d learned the whole situation was a hilarious mix-up, though, or that Max Cobb had returned and turned over a set of keys.

So I climbed the stairs to Granny’s study in the attic of the Weaver’s Cat and I spent the afternoon systematically sifting and sorting her decades of accumulated ephemera—her trove. The activity wasn’t exactly cathartic, but for a few hours it restored a sense of equilibrium. And somewhere up there in that comfortable room under the roof with its dormer windows and shelves and cupboards built into the eaves, she’d hidden her private dye journals. Where she recorded in detail the mumbo jumbo she’d worked out for putting the woo-woo in the wool. Dear God.

I didn’t find her hiding place and couldn’t make up my mind if that was good or bad. Or if I couldn’t find it because it and the journals didn’t exist. Or if that was because I didn’t really want to find either of them.

Granny was a journal keeper, though, and a documenter.
She kept recipe notebooks of her batches of dyes and her experiments with materials, attaching samples of the dyestuff and fibers she used. As a child, I’d loved leafing through them, carefully touching the dried plants and bits of colored fleece or cotton or silk. She also jotted and sketched the ideas for needlework projects that burst into her head or popped in and grew there more slowly. I found several dashed-off sketches that might be details for her Blue Plum tapestry—a couple of almost bird’s-eye views of buildings, a few small figures, a repeating pattern that might become a border. The sketches could just as easily be the result of her hand and pencil occupying themselves while her mind thought about something else. She undoubtedly had a whole notebook devoted to the tapestry project. I didn’t find it, either, but it was probably at the house.

In fact, although I found some of her project and dye notebooks, I didn’t find as many as I remembered seeing on other visits. But they were works in progress and reference tools. She used them, carrying them back and forth between this attic room and her dye pots in the kitchen downstairs and home to her own kitchen and back again to this study. She would have known where each notebook was, but would anyone else? Between what Deputy Dunbar called “clutter” in the Lavender Street house and her habit of moving things from place to place, would I know if the person who got into the house took any of them? But that was silly. The garden-variety burglar wouldn’t be interested in Granny’s notebooks with their bits of fiber and dye garden plants.

I made a stack of the notebooks I did find, then a rough sort of other books and magazines into a satisfying mountain range of piles around me on the floor—a method of organization guaranteed to set Deputy Dunbar’s lips in a sneer. Some of the stacks were for Ardis or Nicki or
Debbie, if they wanted them; others I would take with me. I tried very hard to avoid thinking about where I would take them. But there, beyond the book ridge I’d just capped with
The Colour Cauldron: The History and Use of Natural Dyes in Scotland
, Granny’s desk waited patiently for me, offering a good place to sit and make plans. Or at least a place to plan to make plans. I sighed, got up, and threaded my way between my lilliputian mountains and molehills.

Grandfather had bought the old oak, two-pedestal teacher’s desk at a flea market. He’d refinished it for Granny and hauled it up the three steep flights to the study. It was a piece of furniture I definitely wanted to keep, if anyone dared carry it back down.

I felt as though
I
was daring when I started sliding the desk drawers open. Granny hadn’t kept them or the study locked, so there wasn’t likely to be anything in the drawers or out in the open for her eyes only. And I’d played at the desk plenty of times as a child, using up her paper with my drawings or sticking my arm as far back as it would go in the kneehole drawer to see what treasures I’d discover at the dark, distant end of it. Even so, the desk struck me as more personal than the bookshelves I’d half emptied.

Then it struck me that I was an idiot. I might find a note or document in a file giving me a clue about what happened with the house. Maybe if I disturbed the desk’s contents enough, the name Cobb would jump out at me like a spider and I could hold it up and look it over and then squish it. Or maybe I’d find something that proved Granny wasn’t a murderer. It was a good dream, anyway.

What I found were a few more notebooks and her photo files. A quick flip through the photographs didn’t turn up a snapshot of someone who wasn’t Granny
walking into Emmett’s cottage carrying a bottle with a skull and crossbones on the label. How disappointing.

There was a rummage of stationery and pocket diaries from previous years in another drawer. My heart quickened at those. The current year was missing, though, probably in her purse at home. And it probably didn’t have an entry for the day Emmett died saying, “Did not poison E.C.,” anyway.

The kneehole drawer held a nest of pens and colored pencils, a flashlight Granny could have attached to her key chain but hadn’t, a couple of small notepads (one with a grocery list that did not include poison), and a doodled-on envelope containing the past month’s receipts. The doodles were of the wool cards sitting on the desk, a swan with a nasty squint, and Maggie balancing a candle on her head. There were also a couple of unfiled receipts (neither for anything more dangerous to ingest than Chunky Monkey ice cream), odds and ends of loom hardware and gadgetry, a catnip mouse, and Maggie’s rabies tag and the collar she refused to wear. Nothing else, unless it had slid to the back.

Rather than reach my hand all the way in to grope blindly, I pulled the drawer out of the desk. There wasn’t anything more to see except for an accumulation of thread tails and miniature dust bunnies. I sat with the drawer on my lap, thinking. This wasn’t the kind of desk that had hidden compartments. But Granny wasn’t supposed to be the kind of old lady who had hidden talents, either.

I pulled all the drawers out and stacked them on the floor. Then I took the flashlight from the kneehole drawer, got down on the floor, and played the light around the inside surfaces of the desk, craning my neck. Expecting? Not really. Hoping? Only maybe, and hoping for what, I couldn’t say. Instructions for finding secret journals? A list of murder suspects jotted after a discussion at a TGIF
meeting? A reason for selling the house? Of course I came up empty.

Drat.

So I sat on the floor, in the shadow of the desk and the wall of drawers, and hunted up my own list of suspects—the one I’d started in my crabbed spiral notebook and dropped back in my purse to simmer after my visit with Homer. It was a thin, unsatisfying list with only one name to it. Time to remedy that by giving Joe the burglar company, which I did by adding Max Cobb the inheritor, Mercy and Shirley Spivey the irritating, and Deputy Clod Dunbar the dolt. The Spivey twins were purely gratuitous, but the deputy was looking better and better to me. He’d had access; he’d known Emmett’s habits. They gambled and he might have been into Emmett for more than his deputy’s salary could handle. And he had a burgling brother. I made my own doodle under the deputy’s name—a game of hangman with the words “why not” spelled under the gibbet.

Why not
. While I was still on the floor enjoying the idea of adopting those words as my personal philosophy, Nicki bounced up the stairs.

“Are you all right up here, Kath?” she called as she came. “Ardis said you didn’t have lunch. Can I bring…oh, gee.” She stopped in the doorway. “You’ve sure made a mess. What are you doing down there? Are you looking for something? I can help. I’ve already been through most of it anyway.” She started into the room, friendly and eager.

“No.”

She stopped short.

“Why were you in here?”

Now she looked as though I’d slapped her. Drat.

“Nicki, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…I’m sorry. I’m just tired and no, I don’t need any help.” It was an inadequate
apology. I stood up, started to do better, but she interrupted.

“I found her, you know. On the floor in her bedroom.”

“What?” Oh God, I’d forgotten. “Nicki, I’m so sorry.”

“I want you to know she meant a lot to me. I want so much to be like her.” She was working hard not to cry. Granny would have been proud of her. I knew I should tell her that.

“The blue jacket you were wearing yesterday—when did Granny give it to you?” Not the kind words I meant to say. My compassion-spreading skills needed help. On the upside, my question helped Nicki get past her crisis.

“Isn’t it a dream? I feel so fortunate to have it. It felt so right wearing it for Ivy yesterday. And you left the wake so soon after I got here we hardly had a chance to talk. But I guess you wanted to get away and be alone. And then the house. My gosh. Where did you end up staying?”

“How do you know about the house?” Again I was sharper than she deserved. Why was I angry? Because she babbled and didn’t answer my question about the jacket? Because she wanted the Cat?

“Ardis said something about it. About the Spiveys’ saying Ivy sold it. What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know. Granny’s lawyer is looking into it.”