Dyeing Wishes (20 page)

He gave a minimal nod, a more minimal shrug.

“Good. Find Otterbank.”

I
’d never known someone who ambled half so well as Joe Dunbar. There was a lazy grace to his long legs, and ambling off into the morning, the afternoon, the sunset—wherever they went—seemed to be what they did best. His legs might have studied Clint Eastwood Casual at some finishing school for mystery men. True to form, after making no promises, except to see us that night at the potluck, he ambled on out of the Cat. Ardis put a hand on my arm.

“I hope I didn’t overstep there, Kath.”

“Hmm? Overstep what?”

“Giving him that assignment without consulting you.”

“Joe has ties to Asheville? What ties?”

“He lived there for years, hon. He’s quite well-known.”

Really?
So much I didn’t know about long, tall, ambling Joe.

“Hon? About sending Joe to find out who this Otterbank person is?”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about it. It’s not like I really know what I’m doing.” Wasn’t that the truth.

There was a lot I didn’t know that day. For instance, I didn’t know what to expect from Debbie when she came in for her shift. She’d been on an adrenaline roller coaster
all week—holding it together for the most part, but with an erratic swing or two along the way. Not that I thought I would do any better if I found bodies and burglars and was badgered by boorish Clod Dunbar.

On the other hand, it wasn’t as though Debbie had gone through those experiences alone; I’d been there, too. And I had been alone when I interrupted a burglar not so many months before and when I’d found a body. I hadn’t had anyone to share the screams and heart-thumping horror with. Although maybe in comparing our reactions I was feeling a tad juvenile just now. And really, I hadn’t been all alone. I’d had Geneva. But I could honestly say that discovering
her
was a horror that I shared with no one else. Period. But as soon as that thought said “boo” in my head, I tried to erase it. Geneva was histrionic and somewhat annoying and not entirely without creep factor, but her existence was complicated and she wasn’t truly a horror. She was a ghost and she couldn’t help that.

Debbie was subdued when she did arrive shortly before noon, and she looked about as tired as I felt. She had on one of her long skirts and a lightweight sweater in a pretty soft yellow. I looked down at my blue chambray tucked into my khakis and felt ordinary and uninspired.

“You look as pretty as sunshine, hon,” Ardis told her. “But that was some storm we had out at your place last night, wasn’t it?”

Debbie’s response was curt and corrective. “It didn’t rain.”

“Well, no, hon, it didn’t.”

“Then maybe I misunderstood. I thought you said it stormed.” Debbie’s eyes were wide and bright. The snap to her words and set of her chin gave her away, though, and I decided I wasn’t patient enough to stick around playing games of disingenuous misunderstanding.

“Now that you’re here, Debbie, I’m going to dash over to the library,” I said, thankful for Ardis’ brilliant plan to let me disappear while she gently wrestled out of Debbie whatever it was she was hiding. If Debbie was going to be prickly or snarky, I liked that plan better and better. “I’m glad to see you’re no worse for the wear after last night, storm or no storm.” Another good plan would be to avoid confrontational or glib exit lines.

Debbie’s eyes went from wide and willful to blazing. She checked for customers browsing too close and leaned in with a harsh whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me about that woman and her friend snooping around here? You should have warned me. What else do you know that you aren’t you telling me? And what have you told the others that you haven’t told me?”

It would have been easy to throw her hissy fit back at her and ask what she was keeping from us, but I stuck to the plan. Ardis was definitely better suited for handling those questions and this flare of temperament, and we didn’t need the public drama and trauma of a major blowup in the store. Besides, I had enough of that in my private and paranormal life with Geneva the diva.

I raised a placating hand and shook my head. “Nothing. There’s nothing, Debbie.”

“I asked you to find out what happened. I didn’t ask you to turn me into the number one suspect!”

Debbie’s voice was still low, but a few heads were turning by now. One woman, with studied nonchalance, moved closer. Ardis took over.

“Fiddlesticks, hon,” she said, putting her arm around Debbie. “Kath isn’t keeping anything from you or anyone, except maybe Cole Dunbar, but that only makes good sense. And don’t you know by now that Kath isn’t about anything if she isn’t about good sense? Why, she spent the wee hours of this morning turning the wheels
in her head and she’s got a plan and assignments for all of us in the posse so we can help. Kath, honey,” she said, turning to me, “before you run off to the library, tell Debbie about the progress you’ve made and what you’d like her to do this afternoon.”

“Oh, well, um…” I thought fast and put a finger to my lips, tipping my head toward the closest customer. “Let’s hold on to the progress report for now, but Debbie, if you can, I’d like you to keep an ear out in the store…”

“Surveil the premises,” Ardis cut in. “Take note of everything pertaining.”

“Notes, yes, notes would be great and…” I tried to gauge Debbie’s response. She didn’t look impressed by that assignment. “And also, I’d like your impressions of everyone you know or have met who’s involved, from Will to Pen Ledford. Write it all down. I want the impressions from you, and I’ll get Thea onto facts, and then we’ll see what meshes and what doesn’t and what we can pick apart. So impressions, okay? Can you do that?”

That assignment did spark an interest, and Debbie turned the last of her vehemence on Pen. “I don’t know much about that sorry woman, but I’ll bet she knows something. Or she thinks she does, anyway.”

“Hon, we all think we know things,” Ardis said.

Something else I didn’t know that day was if I’d known what I was doing when I invited Geneva to go along with me to the library. Maybe I’d banked on her continued lack of response to anything I said or did. She hadn’t acknowledged the invitation when I asked her and still didn’t say anything when I ran up to grab my purse. But when I heard the cat trotting down behind me, I looked back and she was drifting down the stairs behind the cat.

They followed me into the front room, he looking
happy and ready for a jaunt, she like a patch of congealed fog. She drifted over to the mannequin near the counter, sinking as she went, until she ended in a pathetic swirl of mist curled around its base. She would have added the perfect touch to the display if the mannequin had been modeling a deerstalker and one of those classic Sherlock Holmes coats with the short cape. Instead it wore an argyle vest in eye-killing shades of orange, magenta, and lime green and also had on a knit cap with giant pom-poms that were supposed to be earmuffs but looked more like mutant raspberries. Ardis had dressed the mannequin in that getup and I’d thought about suggesting a less unusual combination. She knew the business, though, and by noon we’d already sold six copies of the vest pattern and a dozen for the hat.

At the moment Debbie was at the end of the counter, hunched over a legal pad and writing notes at a feverish pace, slashing underlines onto the page here and drilling punctuation marks into it there. Ardis sat on the stool behind the counter, going over invoices and making encouraging noises that sounded more like she was egging her on. The cat watched a pair of teenage girls pawing through the sale bins, each swaying to her own plugged-in music. Geneva, except for her eyes staring at me, looked like a circle of ghostly quilt batting. Couldn’t she at least blink?”

“Something wrong down there, Kath?” Ardis asked, her eyes following my scowl to the base of the mannequin.

“What? Oh, no. Just thinking. Isn’t there a quote from somewhere about fog and cats?”

“Sheep,” Debbie said without looking up. “There’s a really depressing poem called ‘Sheep in Fog’ by Sylvia Plath.”

“I’m sure there is, hon,” Ardis said, “but I think Kath
is more likely remembering the Carl Sandburg poem. ‘The fog comes on
little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches / and then moves on.’ I made all my students memorize it. You should have read some of the rude parodies they wrote and thought I didn’t know they were passing around.”

“Will memorized ‘Sheep in Fog.’” Debbie dropped her pen onto the legal pad and leaned her elbows on the counter and her chin on her fists. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but there was a time when he was really into Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Did you know they both committed suicide? Maybe that was something he always had in the back of his mind.”

“And if he did, then there wasn’t much you or anyone else could do about it,” Ardis said.

Debbie shook her head. “I don’t know if I believe that.”

“Oh, hon.”

Ardis and I each reached a hand to Debbie. Ardis touched her cheek. I put mine on the shoulder of her soft yellow sweater.

“Did you love him?” I asked.

She jerked away from me with an unintelligible noise and looked around—for an escape route, I thought. Then I realized she was looking to see if anyone else in the room had heard my question or her shocked reaction. But the only customers in the front room then were the two teenagers, and they were still at the sale bins, still listening to their personal soundtracks.

“Never mind, never mind,” I said in a rush. “Don’t pay any attention to me.” Where had
that
question come from? Nothing like walking up to an emotionally shaky friend and applying a good old sucker punch straight to the gut. Great interpersonal skills, Kath. “Debbie, I’m sorry.”

Except…of course I knew where the question came from. It came from my fingertips touching her sweater and that weird transference of emotions…the way it had happened when I touched Will and Shannon and the way I’d been zapped by the intense hatred when I touched Bonny. Except this emotion was muddier. There was love, yes, but also…ambivalence? Uncertainty? I couldn’t tell. But why now? Why, when I hadn’t felt Debbie’s emotions any of the other times I touched her, did I feel them now? Why did I
ever
feel them? Was it something to do with the types of fibers my fingers touched? Or with the intensity of the emotions involved? I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to stop and think about it. None of it made sense.

“Forget I said anything, Debbie. Ignore me. You don’t have to answer that.”

“Yes, I do.” With some effort, her voice produced normal sounds again. “Look, I’ve been upset. I think you can understand that. But I asked you to find out what happened and you need to ask questions and
I
understand that. So I do need to answer. Did I love Will? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Will loved Shannon. She was the world to him. When she died, his world ended.”

I looked at Ardis. She’d been caught off guard by my question, too. Her glance flicked back and forth between Debbie and me, and she looked ready to leap in with another hug if leaping or hugging was needed or could help.

Debbie was calm, though. Her eyes, voice, and hands were steady. Ardis was right about her and I’d seen it for myself. Debbie knew how to take care of herself. She was tougher than she looked or sometimes sounded. She obviously believed in the single-mindedness and finality of Will’s love for Shannon. But she hadn’t really answered
my question, and in fact, it
did
matter whether she’d loved him. Did she really not see that? Didn’t she know how suspicion worked? Or lovers’ triangles? Or women scorned? Or the pedestrian mind of Clod Dunbar?

And if I were really cut out for the grilling life, maybe I could ask prying and antagonizing questions without tripping over my tongue, turning into a nervous wreck, or turning tail and running.

The cat twined in a circle around my ankles, then looked up and blinked at me with the sweetest smile. It’s possible it wasn’t really a smile and he was just busy applying another layer of cat fur to my pant legs, but I chose to interpret the combination of actions as meaning,
My friend, you’re doing fine. Just go for the smooth and everything else will slide on in to home. You and me, we are the cat’s pajamas.
Believing that’s what he meant gave me strength.