Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (23 page)

“Honey, all you have to do is ask. Is it going back to Illinois with you?”

I shook my head. “No room.” I didn’t add “no job” or “soon no home.” “Storage for now.”

Ardis flicked her dustrag a few desultory times more. “I do hate to think of Ivy gone from that house. And why on earth did she sell it?” She tucked her rag in the dirty-rag bag behind the counter and looked at me, searching my face. “Have you found out anything?”

I shook my head.

“And why didn’t she tell anyone?” She was probing for an entry point.

I shook my head again, tried to keep the word “blackmail” as far from my tongue as possible.

“I mean, good Lord. Emmett Cobb?” Slowly, as though approaching a wary animal, she came a few steps closer. “Why, in all the whole wide world, would Ivy up and sell her house to Emmett Cobb?”

My phone rang. I was actually glad to hear Clod Dunbar’s voice.

Chapter 23

O
ur guided tour of the crime scene started in Granny’s backyard, Deputy Clod Dunbar presiding. We drove the few blocks there.

“Otherwise it could take us half an hour to go half a block, depending on who we run into,” Ardis said. “It’s why Debbie or Nicki go to the bank instead of me. I know my strengths. Walking past a good chin-wag isn’t one of them.”

She and I made similar shocked noises when we saw the broken window for the first time. For some reason, that it was one of Granny’s bedroom windows made it worse.

Dunbar apparently saw the occasion as a teachable moment and started in on a personal-safety lecture about the role overgrown foundation plantings and decorative shrubs play in providing cover for people looking for opportunities to break windows to gain entry. He hardly had a chance to get going, though, before Ardis lopped him off.

“How do we know Max didn’t do this?”

“Why would Max break into his own house?” Dunbar asked.

“Heaven only knows. A better question is why does he even own the house?”

“Let’s take it on good faith that Max Cobb had keys and a legal homeowner’s right to be in the house, Ms. Buchanan. We assume he was here checking on his property, either after noticing the broken window or after receiving word of the break-in.”

“Are the police allowed to take things on good faith?” Ardis asked. “Or to assume anything? And did Max hear about the broken window before the police did? Or did he just get here faster than they did?” Ardis was definitely on my side in this equation.

“Ms. Buchanan—,” Clod started.

“Yes?” she cut in, chin up, challenging.

“Shall we go inside and get on with this?”

“Oh my goodness, I’ve only just thought.” She caught at Clod’s arm, suddenly less sure of herself. “He isn’t still in there at the bottom of the stairs, is he?”

“No, Ms. Buchanan. You won’t have to step over Max. He left shortly before I called Ms. Rutledge and she so kindly invited you to accompany us.”

“She invited me along after receiving insightful legal counsel.” Ardis let go of his arm and wiped her hands together as though brushing off her momentary panic.

Clod held his tongue and held the door for us. I smiled to show him I appreciated his appreciation of my kindness. But I hadn’t been prepared for finally setting foot inside the house. Stepping over the threshold was too much for even the sham smile I’d produced to irk Clod. At least at the Weaver’s Cat there had been the background hum of customers and the crowd of fibers. There, I could almost believe Granny was in the next room or on the next floor up or down. There was bustle and breath and pulse in the Cat. Here, I was home, but there was no homecoming.

The house was closed up, turned in on itself, silent. Ardis felt it, too, and we both stopped just inside the
back door, in the kitchen. It still smelled like Granny’s kitchen, like her house, but stale and fading, even with the broken window in the bedroom. And it was beginning to smell of dust. Disturbed dust, at that. A succession of people who didn’t belong had snuck in or tramped through in the past however many hours.

“Look at the mud.” Ardis tsked. “Didn’t anyone wipe their feet?”

“Person who broke in did,” Clod said. “No useful finger- or footprints anywhere. Max wiped his, too; otherwise Shorty would’ve found him sooner.”

We looked at the basement door in the corner of the room. It was shut, thank goodness. No yawning dark hole to face. No dank basement miasma drifting up the stairs. Drifting up…It suddenly occurred to me to wonder about the nature of ghosts. Why did the ghost in the cottage exist, if “exist” was the right word for it? Why was she there, in that particular place? And if she existed, then was Granny’s ghost somewhere? I found myself turning in a wild circle, trying to catch a glimpse of something, anything, a blur, a watery outline. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? Was Granny here?

“Ms. Rutledge?”

Or Max? I blinked and blinked again, looking for a ripple interrupting the breathless air.

“Kath, honey?”

Nothing. There was nothing. I’d only made myself dizzy and bumped against Ardis. She put her arm around my shoulders and held me still. Solid Ardis. She was there and didn’t ask what my dervish was all about, just held me still. Until we heard a cough from Clod, who was standing behind us in the doorway.

“Ms. Rutledge, is something wrong? Is something missing from this room that you expected to see?”

“No.” I put my hands to my spinning head and blinked
again, this time to bring Granny’s kitchen back into focus. I didn’t look at Clod because I didn’t want to see if he believed me. “No. So, how do we do this?”

“Walk through each room. Tell me if you think anything has been disturbed or if anything is missing. Take your time, but don’t turn it into a nostalgia tour.”

“You’ll take notes?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ardis and Clod both answered.

Ardis gave Clod a look and pulled a large notebook from her purse. “I am the permanent recording secretary for TGIF,” she told him. “I am taking minutes of this meeting for Kath’s benefit. And don’t you roll your eyes at me, Cole Dunbar.”

“No, ma’am.”

While they sized each other up in the middle of the room, I went to the cabinets nearest the door and opened Granny’s junk drawer. Pencils, rubber bands, jar lids, nails. In the cupboard above, several dozen mugs waited quietly for a coffee morning, sitting on the shelves she’d lined with tartan wrapping paper.

“How will I possibly know if anything’s missing?”

“To coin a phrase, don’t sweat the small stuff. Think about electronics, portable stuff with big price tags, jewelry.”

“Look for blank spaces where something was?” Ardis suggested.

“Unless your burglar was clever and shifted things to fill in the gaps. I’m not saying that’s what happened here. I’m just saying look carefully but don’t get caught up in counting the pencils in that drawer or her shoes in the closet.”

“Aw, her shoes.” I didn’t want to open her closet and see her shoes in a row on the floor, her shirts and pants hanging above, and her bathrobe on its hook on the door, all of them wondering when she’d come home.

“Come on, hon, you can do this,” Ardis said. “We’ll break down later, when we start packing it up. For now, pretend Ivy asked you to find something for her.”

I nodded and opened her maple cabinets and drawers, running the contents past memories and mental snapshots. It was clear pretty quickly that the burglar hadn’t been interested in mismatched Franciscan ware or much-used Pyrex and pots and pans. “But her cookbooks.”

“What about them?” Clod asked.

“I don’t know. They look too even?” I slid a booklike accordion recipe file out from between a couple of church cookbooks with comb bindings. “She used the recipes in here most often.” I pictured Granny’s hand flipping through the clippings and handwritten cards and almost smelled her peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. “But the shelf’s crowded, so she’d leave the file out about an inch. That made it easier to get hold of. And she didn’t put it between these two, either. They’re flimsy and fall over.” I scooted the church cookbooks over and put the file back between
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and
The Best of Craig Claiborne
where it belonged. “She said Julia and Craig liked to gossip over the fence and exchange recipes with her.”

Clod muttered something that sounded like “Nancy Drew meets Crazy Ivy,” but I chose to ignore it.

“Did she keep cash between the pages of books?”

“No. Not unless she started to recently.”

“Okay, well, unless she used her mattress and
The Joy of Cooking
instead of the bank, a box of old recipes out of place in a bookcase full of cookbooks is the kind of small stuff you don’t need to sweat. Who’s to say she didn’t rearrange the books herself or push her file in when she was dusting? If she ever dusted. Hey!”

Ardis had smacked his shoulder with a metal spatula she took from a crock on the counter. “No aspersions, Cole Dunbar. You cast another and I’ll crack your skull.”

Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Aye-aye, Captain Buchanan. Anything else in here, Ms. Rutledge?”

I opened the refrigerator and stood looking in, willing Granny or her ghost to fuss at me for hanging on the door and letting all the cold out. It looked so normal. She’d probably meant to eat the leftover soup for supper. Cream of tomato and half a grilled cheese sandwich, a Granny specialty. I must have made a noise.

“Don’t tell me the lettuce has been rearranged,” Clod said in mock horror. He moved out of the way before Ardis got him with the spatula again.

“She’s out of cat food.” I picked up the carton of milk and sloshed it. “But she’s almost out of milk, too.” I closed the fridge and slid open the freezer drawer. Her secret vice smiled up at me. Chunky Monkey. But she usually kept the cartons hidden under less-tempting fare. “She must’ve used up the goldenrod we cut last summer.” I caught the blank look on Clod’s face. “She had bags of it and last time I was here she was using it to hide the ice cream from herself.” His face was still blank. “She dyed with it.” His face switched from blank to unnerving and I realized my mistake. “For dyeing wool, Deputy Dunbar. Not to commit suicide or kill Emmett Cobb.”

“So is it somehow important that she used up the goldenrod but not the ice cream, and failed to do her shopping?”

I shrugged.

“Then let’s move on.”

“We don’t have to go in the basement, do we?” Ardis asked, following close behind and bringing the spatula.

“We’ll save that for last,” Clod said. “Maybe by then you’ll have gotten tired and gone home.”

“Not a chance. If nothing else, I can work out how many boxes Kath will need for packing.”

“Boxes! Where will I get boxes for all this?”

“Liquor store, grocery store, buy them from the U-Haul. Focus, please, Ms. Rutledge. Dining room. Is anything missing? Did she have valuable silver?”

She had the walnut table and sideboard that were passed down to her and Grandfather when they set up housekeeping. She had yellowed wallpaper with peonies so ancient they should have wilted and dropped their faded pink petals decades before. She had pictures hanging over the peonies. Family photographs, photographs of women from around the world weaving. She had a small inkle loom sitting on the sideboard, the narrow band she’d been weaving on it half finished. She had a painting of Grandfather sitting at his rolltop desk. And she had so many books my knees threatened to buckle at the thought of packing them.

“Did she keep a tea set or anything in here?” Clod tapped the sideboard.

“No, her cameras and boxes of old pictures and slides.” I opened the right-hand door, releasing the familiar smells of old wood, old polish, old celluloid, and old dust. “Someone else looked through here, though.”

“How do you know?”

“The left-hand door. The hinges have been missing forever and the door falls out unless you wedge it in place. There, see?” I pointed to a square of paper, folded and creased, just visible under the sideboard. “That fell out when someone pulled the door open. And the door would have come off altogether.” I demonstrated, catching the door before it hit the hardwood floor, but noticing, with an inner smirk of satisfaction, that Clod flinched. “Whoever opened it set the door back in place like this. And it looks fine, but it’ll fall out the next time someone bumps into it or the humidity changes. Unless I do this.” I wedged the paper between the door and the frame.

“That might’ve been Shorty,” Clod said.

“Would he remove a memory card from one of her
cameras?” I held up Granny’s little Elph and pointed at the empty card slot and its sprung cover. Then I picked up the new SLR she’d bought herself in honor of Ansel Adams’ hundred and tenth birthday and turned it until I found its card slot. The cover was closed, but when I checked, that slot was empty, too.

“No, he wouldn’t,” Clod said. “They’re missing?”

“They’re not here, anyway.”

“Maybe she took them out to download the pictures,” he said.

“But then the cameras would be sitting next to the computer.”

“Maybe.” He wasn’t convinced. “They’re nice cameras, though. That one looks expensive.” He nodded at the SLR. “Why not take them? Why just the memory cards?”

“Because they’re not obvious?”

“They’re not worth much, either.”

“That depends on what someone thinks is on them,” I said.

“And what would that be?”

“I don’t know. But she documented her work. Usually from beginning to end.”

“And why would that be worth stealing?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine. Or didn’t want to imagine? I didn’t want to follow that thread, anyway, so I asked my own question. “How much small stuff adds up to something big enough to sweat?”

“Rearranged cookbooks, Ms. Rutledge? Possibly missing memory cards? Not enough milk for breakfast?” He wasn’t impressed and I couldn’t blame him.

Ardis was unimpressed for another reason. “Where’s all the fingerprint powder? For a crime scene this seems awfully neat and tame.”

“Except for the body in the basement,” I said.

She looked at the floor and shifted her feet uneasily.