Dyeing Wishes (30 page)

“You must be Debbie’s cousin Darla the Deputy,” I called. It was more of a shout in hopes Geneva would hear and take the hint. She didn’t.

Even in her uniform, Darla looked pleasant. Her hair was a shade darker than Debbie’s and she wore it pulled back in a tight bun, but she had the same smile and general shape. She started to wave back until Clod turned his mirrored sunglasses on her in what must have been an official “look.”

“Ms. Rutledge,” he said, “I am going to ask you what you’re doing here and then I’m going to ask you to leave.”

“Okay.” It wasn’t nice of me, but I sat there and waited for him to go ahead and ask me. In the twenty or thirty nanoseconds it took him to become furious, I madly wondered what would happen if he made me leave before Geneva reappeared. What would she do if she floated back out of the cabin and I was gone? As he began to stew, he trained his starched face and sunglasses on me with increasing intensity, and suddenly I knew what to do. I slipped my own sunglasses from my purse onto the porch where he couldn’t see them.

“Oh, were you waiting for me to answer?” I said, sounding as clueless as I could. “I thought you said you were
going
to ask, but I guess that’s kind of what you already did, isn’t it? Okay, well, I was just basically taking a drive, you know? And then I saw the name on the mailbox and I thought, oh, hey, why not stop by? No one’s home, though, but it’s such a nice evening I thought I’d enjoy the peace and quiet for a while sitting here on the porch. It’s really pleasant. So what are you doing here?”

“Slemmons,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I
thought
so.” He might as well have said, “Aha, gotcha,” but the joke turned out to be on him. “You don’t know the owners and you didn’t just happen to stop by,” he said. “You’re sticking your nose in again, aren’t you? Slemmons is the name on the mailbox. What are you doing here?”

“You don’t know?”

He started to snarl.

“No, I mean, you really don’t know, do you? Slemmons is Bonny’s mother’s maiden name. Bonny inherited. This is her land. This is her cabin. I guess she’s never cared about changing the name on the mailbox.”

That was when Deputy Darla contributed her only
speaking lines that afternoon. I liked them a lot. “You didn’t know that, Cole? Sorry, I thought you knew that.”

“And now I will ask you to leave,” Clod said. From the grouse in his voice and the look he gave me and then Darla, he might have been speaking to both of us. She knew better and didn’t seem to take offense. She was going to make a fine, even-tempered deputy. “Leave now,” Clod said, now looking only at me, “or I will arrest you for trespassing.”

“I don’t think you can do that just because you want me to leave, can you?”

“Now.”

I got up, wanting so badly to go pound on the door for Geneva. Instead I gave Deputy Darla another wave and walked to the car without looking back. I got in. Started it up. Beeped the horn accidentally on purpose. Looked toward Clod standing at the bottom of the stairs, arms crossed, waiting for me to leave. Gave him a sheepish shrug. Didn’t see Geneva anywhere. Sighed and drove away.

I went about a quarter mile down the road to the next gravel drive, turned around, and drove back for my sunglasses. When I pulled back into the clearing, neither of the deputies was in sight, but there was a patch of damp fog at the bottom of the stairs. It must be Geneva, I realized, but I’d never seen her from such a distance. She was happy to see me get out of the car. Clod, who appeared from behind the cabin, was not.

“I thought you would never come back,” Geneva said.

“Why are you back?” Clod demanded.

The two of them in stereo, both prissy and pissy, came close to making me laugh.

“Deputy, you made me leave so fast, I accidentally left something behind,” I said.

“You mean you didn’t leave me on purpose?” Geneva asked.

“Left on purpose, you mean,” Clod said. He held up my sunglasses.

“No,” I said, answering both of them. “Not on purpose. Deputy, if I you’ll give me my sunglasses, I’ll make sure I don’t leave anything else behind and I’ll be on my way.”

“Good,” Geneva said. She made a rude noise at Clod and floated to the car, nose in the air.

“Good,” Clod said. “All except the part about giving you the sunglasses.” He stuck his other hand in a pocket and pulled out a clear plastic bag. He slipped my sunglasses inside. “These are evidence.”

I
missed my sunglasses all the way back to town, but not as much as I missed my sanity. Breaking into a house? Leaving behind incriminating evidence? Where was my common sense? Neither of those charges, if they really were charges, would stand up to any kind of legal scrutiny—especially the breaking-in part because, technically speaking, no living person I knew
had
broken in. But it was the principle of the thing. I was a law abider and I should not be contributing to the delinquency of my ghost. Geneva moaned in the seat next to me.

“I am so sorry I had to leave you behind like that,” I told her.

“And I am sorry,” she moaned, “for myself, because who will turn on my audiobooks when they throw you in the hoosegow?”

“I’m glad to know you’ll miss me.”

“I am thoughtful that way. I am also observant. For instance, I saw a flat-screen television in the cabin and I thought that, as long as we were already breaking one law, you might like to take it home for me. It looked like a very good one, so I thought about that for quite a while. I would say there’s always next time, but for you, locked up with the key thrown away, there isn’t.” She moaned again.

“What else did you see in the cabin?”

“It wasn’t to my taste, really.”

“But did it look like anyone was staying there? Was there toothpaste in the bathroom? Milk in the fridge? Dishes in the drainer? Had someone been sleeping in a bed?”

“Of course I don’t know what their housekeeping standards are, but I would say there are signs of recent occupancy.”

“What signs? How recent?”

“Your voice is getting shrill.”

“Sorry.”

“There were mustard and ketchup in the refrigerator.”

“They could’ve been there for months. You didn’t happen to check their sell-by dates, did you?”

“Their what?”

“Never mind. What else did you see?”

“A stack of newspapers next to the woodbox. Kindling
in
the woodbox.”

“Did you check the date of the newspaper on top of the stack?”

“If you were so keen on details, you should have better prepared me or done it yourself.”

She was right, if annoying, and we rode in silence as I tried to figure out if I’d learned anything useful. I’d learned several useful things, I decided. That I’d been one up on Deputy Clod. That Geneva, much as I’d wished to the contrary, was not a reliable partner in crime and was possibly a dangerous one. And that, much as I didn’t want to intrude on a grieving mother, I needed to go see Bonny. And now was as good a time as any.

“Geneva, do you mind if we make one more stop?”

“You mean on your way to the slammer?”

Such a way she had with words.

But when we got to Bonny’s there was an ugly beige
Buick parked out front—the Spiveymobile. Maybe I did need to talk to Bonny and to the twins, but there was no way I was going to make myself talk to all three of them together. I dropped Geneva back at the Weaver’s Cat and then called Ardis for an update on her end. She was in the middle of getting her aged father to bed.

“Wheels are in motion, hon, and by that I mean Ernestine and John are in motion. Full report in the morning.”

Hoping “wheels in motion” didn’t in any way involve Ernestine behind a wheel, I treated myself to a frozen pizza for supper followed by a half pint of cookie dough ice cream—with the curtains drawn and the porch light off so no one knew I was home.

The combination of pizza, ice cream, and peace and quiet produced a full night’s sleep—in both senses of “full.” I woke in the morning to a message on my phone from Joe. He said he felt bad about the way the fishing trip ended and wondered if I’d care to meet him in the park along the creek behind the courthouse for a picnic supper to make up for it. Maybe Geneva had been right and the fishing
was
supposed to be a date. Funny that I still couldn’t tell for sure, but I decided I didn’t mind spending a little more time trying to find out, so I called and left a message on his phone saying sure and I’d meet him in the park at six.

Feeling brave and strong after that, and willing to give everyone another chance, including myself and my ghostly sidekick, I straightened my spine and went to see Bonny. There was time to do that before opening the shop, although I stopped by on the way and invited Geneva to come along.

Bonny’s house up on Fox Street was a showcase Gothic Victorian with upper and lower porches and the most
elaborate display of fretwork, brackets, spindles, and spandrels I’d ever seen in architectural gingerbread. It was like embroidery rendered in woodwork and as beautiful inside as out. Bonny herself looked worn-down.

She met me at the door and her salon-fixed hair and neat pantsuit of Saturday night had given way to an inefficient run-through with a comb and baggy sweats. It wasn’t cold outside or in, but she’d also pulled on the sage green sweater she’d worn that day out at Cloud Hollow. The sweater had been the only thing soft about her then. Now it might be the only thing holding her together. So much had happened that it was hard for me to believe it was barely more than a week since the deaths in the meadow. For Bonny it must have been more like one never-ending hell of a day. She wasn’t overjoyed to see me, but she wasn’t angry, either. She asked me in and took me through to the kitchen. Geneva followed.

“I don’t know why I spend most of my time in here,” she said as she moved some library books off a chair for me. “But this is where I live.”

I could tell her why. It was because the kitchen was as unlike the other magazine-photo-spread-perfect rooms we’d walked through as the Weaver’s Cat or my whole house was. The kitchen was alive with a flower garden of colors and textures—in the curtains, in the crockery displayed in the antique corner cupboard, in the rag rugs scattered on the brick floor, in the shelves of cookbooks, and in the baskets of yarn sitting handy to her chair.

“The rest of the house needs an intervention,” Geneva said. “It reminds me of her not-so-darling cabin. As my very darling mama used to say about houses that put on such airs, there’s no place to put your feet up and no place to spit. But this room is more like it.”

I coughed. It was a signal I’d come up with on the way
over. I’d told Geneva it meant “pay close attention; this might be important.” What it really meant was “shut up.” Her very darling mother didn’t sound especially so to me, but Geneva rarely mentioned her family, so at least it was an interesting insight.

“How are you holding up?” I asked Bonny.

“I’m dead. That about sums it up,” Geneva said.

I coughed. Bonny brought me a glass of water. Geneva slouched over to droop on the corner cupboard and sulk. I drank the water to be polite and to cover the fact that I didn’t know how to start after my initial lame question. Straightforward was probably best.

“Bonny, I…”

“Your grandmother saved my life,” Bonny said, looking me in the eye. “Did you know that? After my snake of a husband left—after he slithered out in the middle of the night—and I couldn’t see which way to turn or where any hope lay, Ivy saved my life.”

“How?” I asked, afraid of what I was about to hear. I’d heard a few stories start out like that, lovely tributes to Granny, tributes that ended with a fey warning bell…

“She threw me a lifeline made of the loveliest soft green wool you’ve ever seen. I don’t know how she did it. How she knew exactly what I needed when I didn’t know myself—but as soon as she put that yarn in my hands, I knew she was right and I sat down and I knit this sweater.” Her hand stroked her sleeve. “I suppose it was that knack that made her such a good businesswoman.”

Or a good businesswitch. I gulped and asked my next question. “Do you know, did Granny dye the wool?”