Dyeing Wishes (5 page)

“No, I’m not, because it isn’t a case. There aren’t any suspects. It’s a murder-suicide, Thea. There’s nobody to suspect of anything—even if I do wonder about why he was cradling her and even if Debbie insists he’d never kill her. Neither of those sentimental interpretations changes the facts. If that’s what they are.” I wished I’d quit throwing in qualifiers.

“See? I told you. You
are
on the case. You’re looking
at this from your ivory tower scientific perspective. That’s good. And don’t worry about suspects. You’ll come up with some or you’ll come up with something else.”

“The Illinois State Museum is not an ivory tower.”

“But you
are
on the case.”

“I don’t think so.” I meant that to come out with more certainty and shook my head at that failure. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” Rats, I hadn’t meant that to come out at all.

Thea patted my shoulder, too, before turning around and heading for the library. I sat in the car awhile longer, drinking in the sanity of the symmetrical lines of the Weaver’s Cat across the street. Since the upheavals in my life, the Cat had become my refuge of choice. Granny’s lovingly tended pet occupied the three floors of a nineteenth-century row house on Main Street. The square, high-ceilinged rooms contained enough colors and textures to lure and possibly drown any fiber artist or needle crafter brave enough to look in the front windows or dip a toe inside.

“Wool, cotton, herbs, dyes, bricks, wood, women, gossip, coffee, and, if we’re lucky, a hint of cinnamon or chocolate,” Granny had rattled off when I told her I wanted to chemically analyze the Cat’s particular scent so I could reproduce it and let it loose in my museum lab back in Illinois. “I’ve spun them together for years. The proportions are a secret recipe, though. I’ll leave it to you in my will.” Instead of that secret, she’d left me a few others not quite so straightforward as a recipe for aromatherapy. And she’d left me the Cat.

I locked my car then, and ran rather than walked across the street to my refuge. Where it turned out parts of the morning’s story had arrived ahead of me.

A
rdis Buchanan, longtime manager of the Weaver’s Cat, gave me a subdued wave from behind the sales counter when she saw me. Ardis was at least a foot taller than either Granny or I had ever hoped to be. Every so often she made token complaints about thinning hair and a spreading waistline, but for the most part she couldn’t be bothered to worry. If the Cat was my refuge, Ardis was my rock. A rock that always smelled of honeysuckle, but steady and reliable.

“No need to be here, honey, if you don’t want,” she said when I reached the counter. “I’ve just hung up from Debbie.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Says she’ll be here in the morning as usual. But between you and me, she didn’t sound so ‘as usual.’”

“Coming in to work might be what she needs.”

“That and finding out what happened.”

“I don’t think there’s much question about what happened,” I said.

“Much.” She nodded.

“There’s no reason to think the police will miss or misinterpret anything.”

“Miss and misinterpret,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

“I said ‘or.’”

She dismissed that quibble with a flick of her wrist. “Ernestine said you’re considering reconvening and redeputizing.”

“You’ve talked to Ernestine already?”

“And Mel,” Ardis said.

“What did Mel know? She wasn’t there.”

Melody Gresham was another member of the original posse. She was also the owner and operator of the best café in town and would have been up to her talented elbows in pastry dough for hours by the time Debbie and I made our discovery in the sheep pasture.

“Quick is how word spreads in most towns,” Ardis said. “Like blue lightning is how it spreads in Blue Plum. And think about this—if information walks in here, and it sprints into Mel’s, can you imagine how much of it will be sitting around sipping iced tea and ripe for the picking at the always wonderful and often hysterical Historical Trust Annual Meeting and Potluck come Saturday night?”

“Huh. You’re right.”

“Of course I am. So what do you think? About redeputizing the posse?”

“Right now I’d like to stop thinking about all of it, so if you really don’t need me, I’ll be in the attic. Land of the never-ending opportunity to sort and organize. That’s what my brain needs.”

“Mine needs lunch,” Ardis said. “If I see Joe I’ll send him over to Mel’s.” Joe was Joe Dunbar, Deputy Clod’s brother and a complete yin to Clod’s yang. “Would you like something?”

“Sure. Popeye salad, dressing on the side. If you don’t see him, let me know and I’ll go. Has the cat behaved himself?”

“Good as gold. He came down for his bite of breakfast, asked after you, then took himself back upstairs to
the land of the rarely ending naps. He needs a name, you know.”

“Still working on that.”

I loved Granny’s private study in the attic, loved its snug proportions and angled ceilings, its built-in cupboards and bookcases. It had been the place where Granny worked the bugs out of one project and designed the next; read the latest on rigid-heddle looms, hand spinning, and natural dyes; or simply put her feet up and stared out the dormer window and dreamed undisturbed.

For me, the study wasn’t quite so private. Two others also loved it and spent time there—the cat and a ghost named Geneva. I hadn’t believed in ghosts until I met Geneva. And there were times I wished I
hadn’t
met her so I could stop believing in the other odd things that had entered my life recently. Nothing against her personally.

I still didn’t know much about her. I had reason to believe she’d lived sometime during the nineteenth century, but pegging her age and era more specifically wasn’t easy. She didn’t like being pressed for details about her life or death and it didn’t help that she wasn’t ever any clearer to my eyes than someone seen through a ripple of water.

Cat and ghost were both in the window seat when I reached the study. The cat raised his chin in greeting, but before I could say hello, Geneva put her nose in the air and vanished. I shook my head. Ghosts. Go figure. Maybe I would find out what that snub was about and maybe I wouldn’t. I was definitely on a learning curve, but I was coming to realize ghosts were a lot like cats. They were finicky and they needed a certain amount of downtime. And just as a woman shouldn’t have too many cats, if she
could help it she probably shouldn’t have too many ghosts, or she might end up being called a crazy ghost lady. Or just plain crazy. The crazy part was something I worried about because, crazy as it seemed, the cat and I were the only ones who saw or heard Geneva. And that sometimes made my life difficult, or at least tricky.

Before we met, Geneva had lived, for lack of a better word, in the caretaker’s cottage at the local living history site. She didn’t haunt the cottage in the traditional sense, because the caretaker hadn’t known she existed. But she did haunt—as in spent every second of every day in—the room where the caretaker left his television permanently on, and she’d developed an insatiable appetite for cop shows, talk shows, old movies, Westerns, and reruns of fifties and sixties sitcoms. All that accumulated pop culture gave an interesting twist to her personality.

I scritched the cat between his ears and he obligingly started his motor. I never had found out where he came from, but he’d arrived looking as though he’d stuck his paw in an electrical outlet. The vet said she thought he might have been tossed out of a moving car, poor old guy. He bore the world no grudges, though, and after a few months of hard napping and gentle cosseting, he was becoming quite the dapper fellow. He was a lovely ginger tom with a white bib and a white fur mustache that turned upward as though it curled at the ends. The only problem was what to call him. Geneva tried a new name every few days, but our agreement was that we both had to like a name, and so far that hadn’t happened.

The three of us actually got along fairly well. We clicked, the cat, the ghost, and I. Maybe because of what we had in common—loss, disorientation, the need for a place to anchor. Maybe the reasons weren’t important.

I gave Mr. No Name’s chin a rub for good measure, then did a slow three-sixty of the room, pivoting on my heel and wondering where I should start. Where did one begin to search for secret journals? And really search, not just bemusedly, skeptically check around? Because I had kept an eye out for the journals when I put Granny’s papers and desk in order, but at that point it didn’t surprise me when I didn’t find them.

I didn’t bother asking myself when I’d started believing the journals existed. Anyone who previously hadn’t believed in ghosts, who now shared a cat with one, shouldn’t spend too much time examining beliefs.

The journals, according to Granny’s letter, contained her recipes for special dyes that allowed her to help her neighbors
out of certain pickles from time to time
. She didn’t specify what she meant by “help,” “pickles,” or “from time to time,” but she thought the whole thing was marvelous and was sure I would, too. Maybe if everything else in my life hadn’t fallen apart at the same time Granny died, my reaction would have been more enthusiastic.

But even if I obviously hadn’t known Granny as well as I thought, I did think she would understand my need to sort, straighten, and organize my life back into some semblance of order before looking for her journals. So that’s how I’d filled my hours and days since I’d packed my belongings in Illinois and moved to Blue Plum, telling myself I was busy and productive and was not avoiding the journals. But now their time had come.

I continued my slow three-sixty of the room. It wasn’t a large space. It was the finished part of the attic, walled off from the rest and made cozy by my grandfather, who had enjoyed woodworking as much as Granny had enjoyed her fibers and weaving. He had built the bookcases, too. I’d looked through the books on the shelves,
in case the journals were disguised and in plain sight. That would have been too obvious, though, and not safe enough if she was concerned about prying eyes, and I didn’t find them there.

Granddaddy had found Granny’s desk as a derelict at the flea market and refinished it for her. It was one of those old, heavy oak teacher’s desks, and Granny said she never wanted to know how he got it up the three flights of stairs and around the last tight corner into the study. I’d looked the desk over carefully for false-bottom drawers and secret panels. No luck there, either. Granny was clever, though, and she was confident that I was clever, too. She wouldn’t hide the journals where it was too hard to get at them. Maybe under a hinged floorboard?

Geneva floated back in while I was crawling around examining, tapping, and attempting to pry.

“You can grovel all you like,” she said. “It won’t make me feel any better.”

“Sorry?” I sat back on my heels and pushed my hair behind my ears. “What are you talking about?”

“Me. You left me behind this morning.”

“Is that what you were in a grump about a few minutes ago? You said you didn’t want to come with me.”

“And then I changed my mind, but you’d already left without me.” She looked at me and waited. I waited, too. “Well, I can see you aren’t going to apologize, so I’ll be kind and forgive you for that. But
then
…” She stopped and heaved a throbbing sigh.

“‘Then’ what?”

“You didn’t
tell
me. I had to hear about it from a customer just now, and she was buying the most horrible shade of orange rug wool while she was talking about it. The whole experience was too much.” She had a tendency to billow when she was upset, and she tended to
upset herself with her own melodrama. I scooted back to give her more room.

“Are you talking about what happened at Debbie’s farm? Geneva, I was going to tell you.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Because you left, but I was going to.”

“Really?”

“Of course. I knew you’d be interested.”

She blew her nose. “Okay. I feel better.”

“Good. So now tell me what you heard, but first, do you know who the woman was that you heard it from?”

“Besides being someone with painful taste? No, I have no idea.”

“What did she look like?”

“That is such an uninteresting detail compared to what she said. Why does it matter?”

“I just wondered if it was one of the women at Debbie’s this morning, except I don’t see how it could’ve been. You know Debbie and you’ve seen Ernestine and Thea often enough. I’m sure it wasn’t Bonny. What did the woman look like?”

“Her hair was straight and stringy, much like her figure.”

“Well, no, that doesn’t describe any of us.”

“I don’t know Bonny, but I imagine her grief will work on her so that she begins to fade away,” Geneva said with some relish. “That is a sad fact of bereavement, except perhaps in your case. You were not stringy when we first met, and even though you’ve suffered through the death of your dear grandmother and the loss of your job and your home and all your friends and—”

“Is there a point you’re trying to make?”