Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (13 page)

I turned my phone off. Stared at nothing. A big, fat nothing. There was nothing to go back to. The state’s budget crisis, which had been a runaway truck and gaining momentum for several years, had just smashed into the museum and careened through the conservation department, running over jobs left and right. Mine didn’t survive.

“Are you all right?” It was Dunbar asking that again.

I might not have a job or my sanity, but this guy and his snarky attitude were becoming a fixture in my life. It didn’t seem like a fair trade. He obviously didn’t believe in privacy, but maybe that was a cop-at-a-crime-scene kind of thing he couldn’t help. I’d walked around the corner of the house to put some distance between us.
He’d circled around the other way and had apparently been standing in front of me.

“It looked like you were hearing bad news,” he said.

“It’s okay. I’m fine.” I was telling myself as much as him. And I would be fine. I knew that. Maybe not that afternoon. Or the next day or the next week or the week after that…

“You don’t want to talk about it? Sometimes it helps, so maybe we…”

“I don’t. Thank you, anyway.”

“Just that it was an odd way to end a phone call,” he said.

“Sorry, what?”

“How exactly was it your grandmother died? I’m not sure I heard the details.”

“She had a massive heart attack. Why are you…do you…oh for Pete’s sake, Dunbar. I was using sarcasm and I’d already hung up. The person I was talking to, in my
private
conversation, said it was lucky I’d inherited my grandmother’s estate. I would rather have my grandmother.”

“You having money problems?”

“No, and you know what? I’m not having this conversation, either. First you hint that Granny killed Emmett Cobb and now you’re thinking I killed Granny. No.” I pivoted, with a mental raspberry in his direction, then immediately turned back. “But I would like to know why you told Ruth Wood you only just happened to stop by last night. Do you or don’t you believe a man was in that pantry?”

“I know how stress and unfamiliar surroundings can affect the mind.”

My mouth opened. It snapped shut. I shook my head and started back around the house, back downtown, on my way to the Weaver’s Cat, where they might have some
of that rosemary chocolate whatever cake left over and I could drown my aggravations and sorrows in four or five slices.

Dunbar caught up with me at the sidewalk. I didn’t stop. He matched his steps to mine, hands in his khaki uniform pockets as though he were Andy Taylor out for a stroll in Mayberry. I ignored him.

“So, I was wondering,” he said.

I didn’t ask what, just kept walking.

“You want to grab a pizza some night?”

That did stop me. “What?”

“A pizza, maybe a beer?”

Clod and me? Raising a pint together? Over a pizza at the local joint? Where did that bizarre idea come from? Was he serious? I stopped laughing when I realized he wasn’t laughing with me.

“Oh my God, you are serious, aren’t you? Was that your ‘meantime’ and ‘maybe’ back there? No, look, I’m sorry I laughed, but I can’t, and this is another conversation I’m not going to have. Just, no.”

He turned around without another word, although he tipped his hat first, proving he completely understood sarcasm and knew how to use it.

Chapter 13

M
y life as a weaver’s glossary: tension, warped, balanced, unbalanced, beaten, snagged, frayed, snapped…I felt like the living, breathing embodiment of all those terms and tribulations as I walked away from that phone call and the undateable Deputy Dunbar and that snug little house. “Living” and “breathing” were the key words, though. I had a place to sleep and a business I could step into, if that’s what I wanted to do.

One foot in front of the other, head held high, nose firmly thumbed at anything and everything trying to bring me down. I pushed away thoughts of bad state budgets and doltish sheriff’s deputies and let my footsteps echo the mantra running through my head.
I will be fine. I will be fine. I will be fine.

Granny gave me the foundation of my career when she taught me the rhythm of weaving on the big floor loom in the corner of her living room. It was a huge piece of equipment to a six- or seven-year-old child, and more like a jungle gym. Granny called the loom Olga.

“She’s a sturdy, dependable old gal,” Granny said, patting the loom the way she might a faithful nag come to nuzzle carrots from her pocket. “We could have an earthquake and she wouldn’t walk across the floor like some of these lightweight hobby looms they sell to folks
who don’t know any better. I’ve seen more frustration woven on those than whole cloth.”

I loved the names of the loom’s parts and pieces—batten, beam, heddle, raddle, sley, shuttle, harness, ratchet, reed, temple, castle. What child wouldn’t love a contraption that had a castle? Learning to weave on Olga was an acrobatic experience for one so small, but Olga and Granny were patient and steady. And although I felt frayed and unbalanced by the blows of the past few days, Olga and Granny had woven a safety net for me, too. I turned the corner into Main Street telling myself I was glad to be alive and thankful I’d had those two old girls in my life. Thankful for the Weaver’s Cat, down at the end of the block, too. One way or another, I would be fine.

I passed the bank, picturing Homer listening handsomely as Rachel Meeks described Granny’s finances with the elaborate detail of a medieval tapestry. Mel’s on Main was harder to pass but, with a little effort, I convinced myself that if I removed my nose from the window and walked away quietly, I wouldn’t shrivel into a pathetic bit of lint. Also that I could stop in later and pick up something tasty for supper.

I approached the Cat with new eyes and questions that hadn’t ever been within a blip of my radar: Should I start looking for another conservator’s position? Could I be happy slipping behind the sales counter, into Granny’s groove? Would I be happy settling into Blue Plum? Did I know what I’d be getting into or have any business at all thinking I could take over?

The string of camel bells hanging inside the Cat’s front door jangled as I pushed it open. Ardis, bagging a purchase at the sales counter, looked up and waved.

“How are you today, hon?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“You are?” She raised her eyebrows, prompting her customer to turn and see for herself.

“Yes, I am. That’s what I keep telling myself and sometime soon I might believe it.”

The customer stopped on her way out and put her hand on my arm. “If you want my advice, you’ll buy some of the new baby alpaca they just got in. That’s what I did. I found out this morning my daughter is moving back home. With her dog and her boyfriend. Though, frankly, I find the dog and the boyfriend completely interchangeable. First thing I did, after I realized it was already too late to call a locksmith because Tina—that’s my daughter—was calling from her car while she was sitting in my driveway, first thing I did was run down here to drown my sorrows in chocolate-colored alpaca. Better than drowning myself in alcohol or chocolate-covered cherries is the way I look at it.”

I took a deep breath on her behalf. “What are you going to make?”

“Could be I’ll knit myself a straitjacket. Probably need it.” She took her hand from my arm and patted her bulging bag. Then she plastered a smile on her face, straightened her spine, and marched out the door.

“She’ll have that straitjacket done and have herself strapped into it in no time, too,” Ardis said. “Ivy’s pet name for her was Frenetic Fredda. She knits as fast as she talks.”

“And that’s a good example of a problem I don’t have.” I turned back to Ardis, pointing my thumb over my shoulder at the departing Fredda.

“What problem’s that?”

“Children moving back home. The beauty of always losing the guy or falling for the wrong one is that you don’t usually end up with children to worry about.” Something about my tone of voice alarmed Ardis.

“Hon,” she said, coming from behind the sales counter, “I think you do need to drown something in alcohol or chocolate.” She put her hands on my shoulders and pointed me in the direction of the kitchen. “Alcohol isn’t available, but you go on back to the kitchen. There should be plenty of the other left over from yesterday.”

“Join me?”

“As soon as Nicki gets back from the bank.”

Despite Ardis’ gentle shove, I took the long way to the kitchen. I wanted to find that baby alpaca Fredda bought as a substitute for family therapy. Maybe some of that would bolster my
I will be fine
mantra. I also wanted to see what else was new. I hadn’t been in the shop, hadn’t been back to Blue Plum since Christmas, not even to celebrate Granny’s eightieth birthday the previous month.

“No fuss,” she’d said when I asked if she wanted a party. “Send me a card and donate some time at a nursing home. Do something nice for the poor old souls spending their last days shivering in your wretched prairie winters. And remind me to tell Ardis she’d better not plan any surprises. Better yet, you tell her. She doesn’t always listen to me these days.”

She never had liked a fuss, so I hadn’t thought anything about her refusal of a birthday bash at the time. But now I did wonder.

I passed rainbows of yarns and roving, finding the alpaca almost by accident as my fingers made their way from skein to skein, my thoughts following other threads. An involuntary “oooh” escaped me when my hand brushed against a raspberry-colored hank, and a barely appropriate “ohhhhh” when I picked it up and held it to my cheek. I’d have felt self-conscious, but I was probably only the latest customer unable to control herself around the stuff.

The shop was rarely a silent place. Fondling and cooing were openly encouraged. Granny called it word of
mouth and moan advertising. I returned the raspberry skein to its littermates and stroked a sage green one in the next bin. It was no wonder Fredda ran down here and bought all the chocolate brown she could lay her hands on. It was comfort food in the form of fiber. And if Fredda could knit a straitjacket from it, maybe I could knit myself a cocoon. Or a cave.

“That darker green, up there, would be beautiful with your hair.”

A woman appeared at my side. She wasn’t looking at the darker shade, though. She stared at the sage green my hand rested on.

“Darker? You think? I kind of like the muted tones of this one.” I picked up two sage skeins and posed, holding them to my hair.

“Oh, no, no, no.” The woman countered with a deep jade, plucking the two sage skeins from my hands, and replacing them with three of the darker bundles. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes,” she said. “That sets off your red beautifully.”

She might have been right, and even sincere, but she ruined the effect by turning away immediately, scooping up all but one of the sage skeins, tucking them in her shopping basket, and bolting. Thank goodness I hadn’t really intended to buy any of it. She looked wiry and wily enough to wrestle me to the floor, break my arm, and use my carcass as a stepstool.

It was tempting to keep one of the jade skeins with me, to carry it around like a tension-relieving purse dog. Mauling the merchandise for short-term personal gain wasn’t a good business practice, though. Reluctantly, I tucked all three back in their bin.

Reluctant. Why had Granny suddenly been reluctant to see me? Because, now that I thought about it, that seemed a better description of her recent attitude—reluctance.
Not adamantly against me coming for a visit, the way she was against a birthday party. She was wily herself, and an “absolutely not” or an “out of the question” would have been immediately suspicious. But at some point she started making excuses and putting me off. Even when I said I’d come for a flying visit and bring her birthday card myself. The excuses weren’t earth-shattering. Most of them weren’t even memorable.

So what was the problem? She’d sounded like old times every Sunday afternoon on the phone. Busy, feisty, full of plans. Except on the few occasions I mentioned visiting, and then she was suddenly busier, feistier, and full of too many plans to make a visit worth my while or hers. So plausible. Clever, wily Granny.

Or was I being too hard on her, reading more in hindsight than was actually there? She was eighty, after all. I should ask Ardis and the rest of the staff if they’d noticed a change.

But I was sliding past the real question. Was there a connection between her reluctance or refusal or whatever it was and the fact that her house ended up in Emmett Cobb’s hands? Because that’s what I was beginning to believe must have happened. And then in Max Cobb’s hands because someone killed Emmett?

But, no, not that. I was not going to let my mind go anywhere near thoughts of Granny kil…, Granny mur…Nope, that was definitely not going to happen. Time to go drown myself in whatever was left over from the wake. I’d kill myself with unnecessary calories before I’d think the unthinkable of Granny. I’d even go ahead and add Deputy Grab-a-Pizza Dunbar to my list of suspects. And Max.

The kitchen was empty and quiet. No class of neophyte needleworkers learning the ropes or threads of their chosen craft. Too bad. It would have been harder to
think in a room full of clicking needles and instructional chatter. Harder to overindulge with everyone staring at me, too. Now I’d have to depend on my small reserve of self-control. Dear, dear. There were several foil-covered plates on the counter. There was also a domed cake server. Under the lid, ah, the rosemary chocolate cake. I could have identified it with my eyes closed. There wasn’t much left and I allowed myself the indulgence of cutting a wedge twice the size any reasonable person should eat before lunch. Then I cut the wedge in two and put half on a plate for Ardis.

I was about to check the fridge for leftover watermelon lemonade, when I heard someone moving around in the stockroom just off the kitchen. My first thought was to freeze. My second thought was that I’d turned into a paranoid idiot. The door to the stockroom was ajar, but opened away from me, so I couldn’t see in.

“Ardis?” She had probably come back to the kitchen while I was mooning over the alpaca. But she didn’t answer, and then I heard her laugh, still out front with customers.