4 Plagued by Quilt (14 page)

“I
should’ve seen it sooner,” I said. “Why else would there be two skeletons in the dump? They were murdered. They were dumped. And we know there was a double murder back . . . sometime back then, and the bodies were never found. It has to be them. Mattie and Sam.”

Ardis and Ernestine exchanged looks.

“I didn’t know they’d found a second skeleton,” Ernestine said quietly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, Ernestine. They found it this morning. And the fact is, Cole Dunbar told me not to say anything.”

“Speaking of facts,” Ardis said, none too casually, “you never have told us how you know about this murder or know the victims’ names.”

“That’s not important right now.”

“It might be.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

“Would you look at the time?” Ernestine said. “I am so sorry, but I really should be going.”

She did, and I started to leave the room, too.

“Don’t do this to me, Kath,” Ardis said before I got away.

“Do what?”

“Shut me out. It’s what Ivy used to do sometimes. As though she didn’t trust me.”

“What are you talking about? Of course she trusted you.”

“Not always. And it hurt. But even after all the years we worked beside each other here at the Cat, after all we went through to make the place a success, there were times she hid things from me. Not often, and when she did I didn’t say anything. But do you know why I didn’t?”

I shook my head.

“Because what she hid were things that couldn’t quite be explained. They were the kind of things that prompted small-minded people to call her Crazy Ivy. And I saw how that hurt her, even though she put up a good front.”

“I’m sorry you felt shut out, Ardis.”

“Don’t you do it to me, too.”

“Ardis—”

“But you can’t help it, can you? I can see that in your eyes. They’re Ivy’s old blue eyes, and I can see Ivy looking out at me, not letting me in. No one your age should have such old eyes, Kath.”

“I’ll be right back, Ardis.”

*   *   *

Great. How had I managed to alienate my two best friends—Ardis, my rock, and Geneva, my flighty ghost—in one short afternoon? Upsetting Geneva didn’t take much skill, but this was the second time in not so many days I’d managed to do it, so my skills must be improving. Granny used to say the old adage about a thing worth doing being a thing worth doing well was nothing but a crock of codswallop.
Everything is worth doing well,
she’d said,
even if what you’re doing is making
a crock of codswallop.
I’d certainly made a crock of well-done codswallop that afternoon.

I would have stomped up to the study in the attic, but Ardis didn’t deserve my selfish tantrum. Neither did the customers. Once again, when I got to the study, I hoped to find Geneva. I didn’t, but I did find Argyle. He sat curled in the window seat and chirruped when he saw me, wrapping me around his little paw instantly.

“Hey, sweetie puss. Is our old girl here?”

Argyle stood and stretched, shivering his tail upright, then jumped to the floor. He didn’t gaze into a corner and chirrup again, and he didn’t walk over to sit in front of the hidden cupboard that was Geneva’s “room.”

“Ghost on the loose, Argyle. She’s a vigilante ghost and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

He leapt up on the desk and yawned.

“Really? You think not much?”

He looked around the desktop, found a pencil, and dribbled it with his paws to the edge. He gave the pencil one last swat and watched it hit the floor, then he flopped on his side and yawned again.

“A little excitement and then a nap? I hope you’re right. Would you mind napping on another pile of papers, though? I need these.”

He graciously let me tug the papers carefully out from under him. After I had them, he jumped down and headed for the door with a more demanding meow.

“Yeah, okay.”

I followed him down to the kitchen and tipped crunchy, fishy kibbles into his dish. Then I went back out front to face Ardis. She was with a customer, listening to an animated story about the woman’s first attempt to use circular needles. Ardis wiped tears from her eyes and
told the woman she was lucky not to have garroted herself. The woman agreed and left with a bag full of alpaca. When Ardis saw me watching from the hall doorway, the smile she’d had for the customer disappeared.

“I want you to see something, Ardis.”

“You don’t need to show me anything. I’ll keep my nose out of your business.” She turned her back to me.

I moved down the counter so I could see her face. “Did I say I wouldn’t tell you how I know about the double murders?”

“As good as.”

“What happened to the vow you made about henceforth trusting your friends?”

“A hasty decision if there’s no two-way street.”

“I said it wasn’t important how I know about them. And in the great scheme of things—”

“There
is
no great scheme. There’s only what we have right here, right now.” She shifted around the other way, so her back was to me again.

“Then let’s deal with what we have. What I
have
is not much information about the woman who told me about the double murder. I’ll tell you what I can.”

“What you
can
. Is the rest top secret?”

“
Ardis
. I honestly don’t know her very well. I don’t know her full name. I don’t even know how to get hold of her right now.”

“What part of her name
do
you know? I might know her.”

“She doesn’t live around here . . . anymore. She told me she doesn’t know anyone. I met her when I was staying in the cottage at the Homeplace in the spring, after Emmett Cobb died. She knew him.”

“Emmett was a first-class wretch. Was she a friend of his? I don’t know that we should trust her.”

“No, she just knew him. They weren’t friends.” How could they be? Emmett had lived in the cottage Geneva haunted, but he never saw her, heard her, or knew she existed.

“Hmph. Well, then.”

“And then, after Will Embree and Shannon Goforth were killed, I saw her again, and she was terribly upset. Reading about Will’s and Shannon’s murders triggered something, and she suddenly remembered seeing a photograph of two murder victims. This would’ve been years ago that she saw it. She remembers the picture showing two bodies, a young couple, lying faceup, head to head in a green field. She was so specific. She even described the woman’s dress. She said it was white lawn. And she remembered the color of blood.”

“I don’t want to hear about blood.”

“No. I know. But the picture must have shocked the poor thing horribly so that she repressed the memory. You believe that can happen, don’t you?”

Ardis shrugged one shoulder.

“And the article about Will and Shannon in the
Bugle
brought it all back. She described the scene in the photograph so vividly—it was horrible for her all over again.”

“Like post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“I guess so.”

Ardis twisted partway around, still not quite facing me. “No one around here talks of such a dreadful thing happening. I’ve never heard about it, anyway, and you know how much I manage to hear. When was this supposed to have happened? Did she tell you that much?”

“No. But from her description of the clothes, late eighteen hundreds.”

“Then a color photograph makes no sense whatsoever. How did she know about green grass and the color of blood? Are you sure this woman isn’t delusional?”

A color photograph
didn’t
make sense. That had been the problem with Geneva’s story about the double murder from the beginning. But when the memory had started coming back to her, she’d been looking at photographs of Will and Shannon in the
Bugle
. Maybe the memory came back to her as a photograph—because a photograph was safer than the real memory. Her trauma definitely
was
real. Somewhere, somehow, sometime she’d internalized a traumatic incident, and she absolutely believed she’d seen a couple she knew—Mattie and Sam—lying dead in a field in Blue Plum.

“She absolutely convinced me, Ardis.”

Ardis twisted the rest of the way around and faced me.

“I asked both Cole Dunbar and Thea to look for a record or mention of the murders,” I said. “Or a photograph.”

“I remember. Cole was more rude than usual about it.”

“But Thea found something.”

“Bless the Goddess of Information. What did she find?”

I handed Ardis the two pages I’d brought down from the study—photocopies of the
Blue Plum Bugle
, one page from the October 7, 1872 issue, and the second from the week following.

“This isn’t much.” Ardis turned the papers over. The backs were blank.

“I know.”

Both photocopies were of pages from the Personals
section of the
Bugle
’s classified ads. As Thea had explained it, the Personals were the social media of that time. If a person had no better way of communicating with someone, then paying for a message in the Personals was the way to go. The first ad read,
Mattie Severs, please forgive and contact the ones who will always love you.
The second was simpler and sadder, asking anyone who’d seen Mattie Severs or knew of her whereabouts to contact a post office box.

“There’s only the one name,” Ardis said. “This could be your Mattie, but where did the name Sam come from? How did your mystery woman know that name?”

“It’s from somewhere in her memories. Ardis, I wish I knew the whole story. I
want
to know it. That’s why I’ve been trying to find out. If I ever see her again, I’d like to be able to tell that woman whatever I do find out. Knowing the rest, or knowing more, might help her.”

“But if she doesn’t live here, how do you know you’ll ever see her again?”

“I hope I do. I have to believe it’s a possibility.”

“Ivy believed in all kinds of possibilities,” Ardis said. She laid the photocopies of the
Bugle
on the counter and looked at me with an interesting, assessing sort of glint in her eye. The kind of look that made me nervous. “And you certainly are your granny’s granddaughter. In so many ways.”

“Well, so”—I picked up the photocopies and tapped their edges on the counter—“that’s what I know about the double murder. And this is what I think. Unless Jerry Hicks uncovers a bunch more skeletons, or unless there have been an unusual number of double homicides in and around Blue Plum that nobody knows anything about, then I think we’ve found Mattie and Sam.”

“What’s the
possibility
of positively identifying them?”

“I’m not sure.” I was beginning to think I liked it better when she’d kept her back to me. There’d been a few times, over the past months, when Ardis seemed to be skirting a suspicion or on the verge of voicing one. She might not be able to see or hear Geneva, but, as careful as I tried to be, she couldn’t help seeing and hearing me reacting to Geneva.

And then there was the Crazy Ivy thing that Ardis mentioned. I’d been aware of the nickname, mostly whispered. Granny had always brushed it aside, but then she’d left a letter for me to read when she died that gave me reason to wonder.
I’m a bit of what some people might call a witch,
she’d said, although apparently she hadn’t liked the word “witch.”
I prefer to think of the situation more in terms of having a talent. I have a talent which allows me to help my neighbors out of certain pickles from time to time.
That sounded so friendly, so gentle. Innocuous and something to smile at. I could almost have brushed it aside, as she had the name Crazy Ivy, but she’d also left me her secret dye journal—a notebook with her recipes for natural dyes that would let me continue her good work—and then she told me I was a bit of a witch, too.

Was it all just so much codswallop? My science-trained brain had been sure it was. Then I’d met Geneva . . . and started feeling the occasional jolt of emotion from a piece of clothing . . . and couldn’t keep myself from trying a few of Granny’s dye recipes. And started catching Ardis eyeing me with “interest.”

Talk about being in a pickle. Maybe I could find a recipe in Granny’s dye journal for laying aside
suspicions. And if I didn’t watch out, Ardis and everyone else would start calling me Crazy Kath.

“Here’s another
possibility
,” Ardis said.

“What?” That came out squeakier than I’d wanted. Darn tight throat muscles.

“When you’re out at the Homeplace in the morning, why don’t you look through the guest register for those few weeks you stayed in the cottage. You might find your mystery woman’s name. Her address, too.”

“Oh. Yes. Good idea. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“That way you can contact her. For further information. Or to pass it along.”

The three young women who’d been knitting upstairs came down at that point and I practically leapt across the room to see if they needed any help. No, they didn’t; the front door hadn’t moved since they’d arrived, and it looked as though they hadn’t forgotten where to find it. I thought about following them out onto the porch, in a further show of friendly customer service. But I was saved from going overboard by the arrival of a tour bus of senior citizens, many of them bent on spending time and, better yet, money in the Weaver’s Cat. They kept us busy and let me avoid Ardis’ scrutiny for the rest of the afternoon.

There were still a few straggling shoppers at closing. I magnanimously told Ardis I would stay to balance the register, lock up, and say good night to Argyle so that she could go home and her daddy’s supper wouldn’t be late.

*   *   *

When I got home myself, I dropped my purse and sprawled in one of Granny’s faded blue comfy chairs in the living room. My head nestled where her head and gray braid had.
It’s a good thinking position,
she’d said,
because your head and back are supported and all the thoughts or pictures running through your brain won’t unbalance you.
I wanted to feel myself relax. I wanted to feel answers to my questions bubbling to the surface. Neither my muscles nor the answers cooperated, though. I sprawled harder, but there was no noticeable improvement.