Dyeing Wishes (15 page)

Did they arrive together?

When?

How?

Did Will kill Shannon?

Did he kill himself?

If he “could never kill anyone,” then how could he kill himself?

“Those are tip-of-the-iceberg stuff,” I said, “or they’re—”

“The starter end of a ball of yarn,” said Thea.

“Yeah, that’s what they are. And you know how sometimes when you pull on the starter end and hope it’ll all unwind beautifully from the center, but instead you get yarn barf? Well, stand back, because here it comes. I’ve heard from two sources, the Spivey twins and a woman named Carolyn Proffitt, who says she was Shannon’s assistant at Victory Paper, that someone was stalking Shannon. Carolyn Proffitt says it was Will. The Spiveys say it was someone else.” I wrote
Was someone stalking Shannon?
on the board and below it
Was it Will?
“But if it was Will, how did he manage to do that while supposedly hiding out in the national forest? And how about all these questions?” I wrote:

Eric Lyle—where the heck does he fit in?

Where is he?

Why is he missing but not his gun?

“Wait, go back,” Thea said. “You didn’t write down the one about how Will Embree could stalk and hide at the same time. But if he was good at hiding, he was probably good at stalking, too.”

“But if more than a few people knew he was stalking, then how much hiding was he doing?” I wrote all that down and discovered I’d gotten carried away. Ernestine was probably happy, but I’d written my questions too big and was almost out of room. I felt as though I was percolating, and I must have looked like it, too.

“Keep it together,” Mel said. “I’ve got pen and paper here somewhere.”

While she dug madly through her knitting bag, I dug back through my memory for something I’d heard about Debbie…something—Geneva had said it. She asked if I knew that Debbie used to entertain Will out at her place. I hesitated, then squeezed two more questions into the space at the top of the board:

How much does Debbie know about Will’s recent movements?

How recently was Debbie in contact with Will?

I looked the board over. I’d been right. Yarn barf. We needed organization. We needed a bigger board.
What time was Shannon killed? What was Will doing from the time she died until he did? Did anyone see either of them or talk to them earlier that morning? Did anyone hear the shots? Whose baby was Shannon having? Who is the Spiveys’ source?
I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling my brains doing the bossa nova at double time.

As I turned around to see if Mel had found her pen and paper, the door flew open. Foiled by my own cleverness—I hadn’t heard Debbie’s light feet running down the stairs over the jazzy music I’d turned up. She was clearly upset—probably over something cloddish Clod had said or asked—and she’d flown back down the stairs looking for refuge or understanding. Looking for friends. She pulled to a stop when she realized we were all staring at her. Then I, slick operator that I was, telegraphed what we were doing and my guilty conscience by looking from her to the whiteboard and back. And then Clod arrived and I should have flipped the board and closed the scene with crossed arms or a challenge. But I needed lessons in that kind of quick, confrontational thinking.

Clod stared at me. That was uncomfortable enough. Debbie’s eyes were now focused on the whiteboard. On the two questions sailing across the top of it above all the others.
How much does Debbie know about Will’s recent movements? How recently was Debbie in contact with Will?
From the look on her face, the headline for the whole board might as well read,
Is Debbie
Involved in Murder?

“Debbie, I…”

She made a sobbing noise—sounding less human even than Geneva—turned, and ran. I would have gone after her, but Clod slid over to fill the doorway.

“I expected more of the knit-one, knot-two, yank-it-out going on in here,” he said. “I take it you’re the ringleader of this cabal?” He nodded his chin at me.

I didn’t say anything and didn’t ask him where he’d
learned the word “cabal.” Probably in third or fourth grade. He wasn’t listening for an answer, anyway. He was finally enjoying himself.

“Next time you’ll want to put your board
here
, on this side of the room.” He used the sort of large, repetitive gestures airport personnel perform when directing jumbo jets to their docking gates. “And facing
that
side of the room.” Again with the repeating gestures, this time with both hands directing all eyes to me. “Oriented that way,” he said, “so the casual passerby won’t be upset by the unexpected and inane.” He smiled, gave a sarcastic salute, and strolled away.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I muttered at myself.

Thea, subdued, took the eraser and started to clean the board.

“No!” I grabbed the eraser from her. “No. We can’t quit.”

Neither Ernestine nor Mel said anything. Thea didn’t offer arguments. They all waited while I studied the floor, my fingertips and the eraser bouncing off my lips.

“Debbie’s reaction,” I said, thinking it through and still looking at the sturdy, wide planks of the floor. “We don’t know for sure what her reaction was about, which questions she was reacting to. We can guess, but her reaction is another reason we need to investigate. It indicates something. And that damage is already done. We can’t go back.” I started rewriting what Thea had wiped away. “We can’t quit. Debbie will see that. We’ll make her see that. And phooey on whatever Dunbar thinks of us. And really, at this point, how can it hurt to go on?”

“All righty, then,” Mel said. “I’ll go make the tunnel of fudge. Bribe or peace offering—either way, it works.”

Ardis agreed to drive with me to Cloud Hollow to make amends to Debbie. We knew we couldn’t afford to lose
her as an employee. More important, we couldn’t afford to lose her as a friend. It was close to eight when Mel called to say the cake was cool enough to transport. She met us at the door of the café.

“Want to come with us?” I asked.

“Sorry. Early to bed for me in order to make tomorrow’s sweet rolls rise.” She handed the cake to Ardis. “And this,” she said, handing me a bag. “Cinnamon raisin bagels. Fresh. Her favorite.”

My nondescript Honda had never smelled so good. The concentration of warm chocolate and cinnamon aromas did wonders for my own concentration, too. Despite the dark and the twists and turns through woods and around hills, we went wrong only twice. Ardis was kind and didn’t blame me for that or for the reason we were heading out there.

“Investigations turn a harsh light on everyone involved,” she said. “I think I read that somewhere. And every question on the board was legitimate. After she’s thought about it, Debbie will see that. And we need her to see that because we can’t do without her at the store.”

“Dunbar was right, though. I should have been more careful about where I put the board.”

“But Debbie asked you to reinstate the posse and investigate, didn’t she?”

“Before we left the farm Monday morning. She and Bonny both did.”

“Then she’ll understand. Besides, Cole must have said something or asked her something that upset her. Something happened that made her run out of the study and barge into the workroom like that. Do you suppose he upset her on purpose? So she would run down the stairs and he’d have a chance to sneak up on you?”

That was far-fetched, but Ardis was stirred up.

“Doggone it. I think he did upset her on purpose,” she
said. “And I’ve a mind to speak to him about that kind of behavior in a law-abiding business the next time I see him. Good Lord! Did you see that car on the side of the road?” She twisted in her seat, a hand to her heart, but we’d already gone around another curve.

“Barely.”

“I’ve a mind to speak to Cole about that, too. Overnight parking shouldn’t be allowed on these narrow roads. It’s a hazard after dark.”

We found Debbie’s drive soon after, and I turned in, thinking of her alone out here with her sheep and Bill the dog. She’d told me on the morning of the dye workshop that she grew up on Cloud Hollow farm. She was proud of its being one of Tennessee’s recognized Century Farms—land owned and worked by the same family for at least a hundred years, and in her family’s case almost two hundred. She meant to keep hold of the farm, keep it going, and hand it down to the next generation. I supposed I could understand that fierce loyalty and the hold the land had on her. But with no near neighbor’s lights winking in the dark as we crunched down her long gravel drive, I was glad the place I felt most attached to had streetlights and sidewalks and friends next door.

We pulled in behind Debbie’s pickup in a widened area between the house and the outbuilding she and her late husband had built to be her dye studio. We hadn’t gone inside the house or the dye studio on that interrupted workshop morning, but I’d admired the lines of each. The studio was a single-story frame structure that could easily be mistaken for a cute guest cottage. Its steeply pitched roof gave it the look of a small saltbox out of New England more than something belonging on an east Tennessee farm.

The two-story house was the original farmhouse, built by Debbie’s some-number-of-greats-grandfather in 1832.
She told us the bricks were made onsite with clay dug from the banks of the Little Buck. The bricks’ red had mellowed over the scores of years and now gave the impression the house had sprouted and grown along with the oaks surrounding it.

We climbed out of the car, not sure what kind of reception to expect appearing uninvited after dark, but the light spilling across the porch from the windows on either side of the front door gave us hope. The evening breeze shushed through the new leaves on the massive oaks as we climbed the front steps. Bill barked, once, inside. Ardis took the bagels, letting me bear our offering of tunnel of fudge.

“What if she’s getting ready for bed?” I said, wondering why that hadn’t occurred to me before.

“Only Mel goes to bed this early. And if she is, then there’s more for us.”

“Mel called,” Debbie said when she opened the door.

Bill the border collie’s welcome was less guarded, but Debbie took the cake when I handed it to her, and the two of them ushered us back to the kitchen, where plates, forks, and a cake knife were already waiting on the table. When we sat down, Bill went to his bed in the corner, not far from Debbie’s chair. He lay with one white foreleg extended as though showing off his genteel paw.

Ardis took over serving the cake, saying she knew neither Debbie nor I would cut big enough pieces. Her idea of the ideal size was a slab. I remembered Geneva’s unflattering comments about my perceived weight gain and bravely sacrificed my self-image to our quest for renewed harmony. Debbie helped that along by plying us with more sweet tea than I usually drank in a week. Refilling our glasses seemed to make her happy, though, or at least kept her busy.

She updated us on new mother Mabel and the twin lambs. They were getting along well. We complimented Bill on his excellent manners and remarked on the red geraniums filling the windows on both sides of the corner where he sat. Bill’s smile was wider and looked more genuine than Debbie’s. The small jokes and pleasantries we passed were real enough, but Debbie didn’t bring up the questions she’d seen scrawled on the whiteboard and we didn’t ask about her interview with Clod. Ardis carried most of the conversation.

“I don’t believe I’ve set foot in this kitchen since one spring when I had to bring your uncle Harmon home from school after one of the Dillow boys got hold of him. I won’t tell you what the results of Lester Dillow’s attentions were while we’re still eating. That would have been about forty-five years ago, though, and if I remember right, the kitchen looked exactly the same back then. Although I believe your grandmother grew African violets instead of geraniums and you have more up-to-date appliances. I love your red microwave and toaster.”

Debbie shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve always loved this kitchen.”