Last Wool and Testament: A Haunted Yarn Shop Mystery (7 page)

To say, outright, “I am a witch” is putting it too bluntly. Too black and white. There are so many shades of gray in this, you see, and mauve and lilac and every other color, for that matter. I don’t like using the word “witch,” anyway. I prefer to think of the situation more in terms of having a talent. I have a talent which allows me to help my neighbors out of certain pickles from time to time. It’s a marvelous gift, Dearie, and I hope you know I don’t use the word “marvelous” lightly.

But I’m not going to burden you with details now. There’s time enough for that later. I’ve kept notes, over the years, in my private dye journals. You’ll want to find them and take your time making a proper study of them. They’re locked away in a safe place in my study at the Cat. Read my journals and all will be revealed. There, that’s rather exciting, isn’t it? I hope it gives you a chuckle to think of your old Granny being mysterious and melodramatic. It makes a change from responsible and unflappable, a reputation I’ve cultivated and tended as carefully as my dye garden.

I also hope I needn’t tell you that what I’ve just told you is a secret and must remain one. I’ve never discussed it with anyone, not at the Weaver’s Cat or anywhere else. There are inklings and “quiet understandings,” shall we say, at the shop, in town, and around out in the county, but
I’m quite good at leaving them unacknowledged and going about my business. Of course, if I’d hung a sign in the shop window all these years, my reputation as “Crazy Ivy” would have been colorfast and permanent. (Yes, I am aware of the nickname and it has never bothered me. Its origin isn’t important, either in the great crazy quilt of life or in my own small patch of it.)

Enough philosophy, though. Here’s what I really want to tell you. In addition to my worldly possessions, you also now have my talent. I inherited it from my grandmother. You have inherited it from me. Kath, you are a bit of a witch.

Chapter 6

I
needed more than a nip.

Or maybe I
had
added something to my cocoa and I was blotto. That could explain the over-the-rainbow sensation I was swimming in. It would be nice if
something
explained it. Or maybe I’d somehow gotten a dose of the poison that killed Emmett and I was hallucinating before keeling over. Or I was out of my mind with grief over Granny’s death. No, unfortunately, I was pretty sure neither nip nor poison nor abject misery was a likely possibility. But that’s all I was sure of.

Kath, you are a bit of a witch.

Oh my God. There were a few more lines to the letter but I couldn’t bear to read them. I dropped it in the chair and resorted to pacing. And muttering. There was great relief in muttering. She
must
have been going gaga. Senile. Goofy. Whiffy, as she so politely described the mental state of some of her elderly friends. Whatever. This was nuts. And it turned out muttering wasn’t much relief after all.

…mysterious and melodramatic…

Loony, Granny. Try loony and out to lunch.

…what I’ve just told you is a secret and must remain one.

You think?

…inklings and “quiet understandings”…“Crazy Ivy”…it has never bothered me.

I allowed myself a few more pointed mutters, took several deep breaths, slowed my pacing, stopped. I closed my eyes and took several more breaths. This was no time to go crazy myself. I retrieved the letter and sat down to finish reading it. Maybe, just maybe, there was a big “ha-ha, got you” at the end.

Finish your cocoa, now. Better yet, have another cup and a larger nip. The main thing, the important thing, is that you shouldn’t worry about any of this. In fact, you needn’t ever do anything with the talent. You can ignore it and move on with your excellent career. You
are
like me, though, you know, and you might be surprised how much you enjoy this gift. A bit of advice from your old Granny: Never take surprise or joy lightly. Look for them. Weave them into your life wherever you can.

Well, a good night’s sleep will give you perspective. Sleep tight, now, and always remember, I am your loving Granny.

The radio in the other room took a mournful turn, playing some dirgelike piano piece. I couldn’t be bothered to get up and either change the channel or turn it off. I sat with my head bowed, fingers laced over the top of my skull, probably keeping my wits from flying off in all directions.

I am your loving Granny.

She was. I knew she was. And if believing she had a “talent” made her happy, whether in the great scheme of things or in her
great crazy quilt of life
, what was wrong
with that? Especially if she hadn’t advertised the fact. And so what if she believed she’d somehow passed that talent on to me? I thought back to the day she died. I certainly wasn’t aware of any sudden jolt running through me. Couldn’t pinpoint any zap of power transferred. No flash or frisson of abrupt good fortune. I sat back and sighed, absentmindedly running my fingers over the fibers in the light green paper, stroking it as though it were a cat. It was soothing, somehow. More soothing than pacing and muttering, anyway.

The radio slid from mournful to downright lugubrious. Ridiculously lugubrious. There was even sobbing in the background. Talk about melodramatic. If they were going to keep that up, I’d have to stir myself and turn it off. Thankfully that piece drew to its soggy conclusion and the lively fiddle sprang back into action.

And then someone hiccupped. In the kitchen.

What? I strained to hear over the annoying accordion that had joined the fiddle. Was Dunbar back with a last insult? Or Pantry Guy? Had he been drinking and decided to slip back in the window to finish whatever it was he started? This was too much. By God, I’d scare the hiccups out of whoever it was. I didn’t even try to be stealthy. I stomped over to the fireplace, grabbed the poker and shovel from the convenient homeowner’s fireplace weapon rack, and started for the kitchen. I was armed, dangerous, and dangerously close to being unhinged. Kath on the warpath in full cast-iron attack mode.

Another hiccup. More sobbing.

I pulled up short, not quite to the kitchen door, not quite sure I could believe my ears. This wasn’t sound effects on the radio; it was live. Live sobbing and distinctly female. What on earth? How many people had keys to this place or were wont to wander in through the pantry window? Two other questions, more obvious, escaped me for the moment, maybe due to that surprise
thing Granny was so keen on, which seemed to be disrupting the connection between my ears and my brain. In this small space, how had someone gotten in without my noticing or, conversely, how had that someone not realized I was there, too?

I hugged the wall and moved closer to the door, weapons still at the ready. I slid my left eye around the corner and spied…a woman sitting at the kitchen table, her head bowed. I saw her and yet I didn’t see her. Thinking my vision must be blurry, I rubbed my left eye with a knuckle. I rubbed my right eye, too, for good measure, then peeked all the way around the edge of the door.

The woman was weeping with such abandon at this point that I could have taken a flying leap over to the refrigerator and beaten it like a gong with the poker and she wouldn’t have registered my presence. But, still, I was barely able to register hers. If my own eyes had been teary, I’d have understood why I was having trouble focusing on her, but the table, the cabinets, the radio, all the rest of the kitchen appeared crisp and clear. I blinked, tried squinting. Neither did any good. The woman wavered as if I saw her through a film of water or through a raindrop on a windowpane. Details of the hair on her bowed head and the cloth covering her arms and heaving shoulders were distorted. She wept as though alone in the universe, indistinct, colorless, altogether unearthly.

I stepped all the way into the kitchen, poker and shovel forgotten as weapons, now only deadweight in my hands. The word “dead” repeated itself in my mind several times. No, it couldn’t be. I didn’t believe in ghosts any more than I believed in witches. That otherwise sane adults ever did believe in either had always amazed me. But something well out of my sense of the ordinary was going on before my unbelieving eyes. And as bright as I liked to think I was, it took several more blazing road signs before my rational self took the indicated detour.

The first hint that caught my attention was the appearance of the chair the woman was drooping and dripping in. The parts of the chair that I could see
through
her were as blurry as she was. That made me feel a little dizzy. Or crazy. I couldn’t tell which. I put the back of my hand to my forehead. I wasn’t feverish, more’s the pity.

The second clue that my accustomed beliefs might be on shaky ground came when the woman started moaning. If I’d thought my nerves were nearing the edge earlier over the whole Pantry Guy and Dunbar incident or after reading Granny’s letter, those mournful lamentations told me different. Her keening vibrated up and down my spine so that my nerves weren’t just teetering on the brink—they were abandoning hope and preparing to dive. Despite that, my feet refused to carry me out of the room.

The moaning didn’t last long, thank goodness. The effort seemed to tire the poor thing, and her moans subsided with a few shuddering breaths and another hiccup or two into quieter sobs. I felt as though I’d watched a storm reaching a crescendo and tailing off into a clammy gray drizzle, albeit a drizzle rocking back and forth in a stainless-steel dinette chair.

Then she spoke. At first it was more of a blubber, not easy to understand. I thought she was saying “Ebb, ebb” over and over again. That was logical, my newly reorganized sense of reality told me, because ebb was something her life had obviously already done. But after she blew her nose on her sleeve, with another sound I’d be just as happy never to hear again, her articulation was better.

“Em, Em, my darling, darling Em,” she wailed. “I’ll never forgive myself. Why oh why, Em? Why did I do it? Why did I kill you?”

“You?” I blurted. And that’s when the third sign, more like a flashing neon marquee, smacked me over the
head, confirming that my views on paranormal phenomena needed an adjustment.

With a startled yelp, the woman stopped rocking. Her hands flew to her mouth, stifling her hiccups and sobs. She sat hunched and frozen for several moments like a worried wet rabbit. Then slowly, hesitating with each slight movement, she lifted her head enough to peer at me. Her eyes, which should have been red and swollen from her torrential weeping, were as colorless as the rest of her, but less blurry. They struck me as being the oldest eyes I’d ever seen. Ageless. Definitely lifeless.

“You’re kidding.” Somehow I managed to get that out with only a few stutters. “
You
killed Emmett Cobb?”

Not taking her eyes from mine, she straightened, drawing in a long breath as she did. She seemed to swell along with the intake and held the breath as she continued to hold my eyes. Without thinking, I held my breath, too, wishing she’d give up and let go. That is, until she did let go with a piercing scream, as though I were the apparition who’d scared
her
out of
her
wits. It was a scream that could only be described as bloody murder. Dropping the poker and the shovel, I clapped my hands to my ears and shut my eyes, too, trying to keep that sound out of my head. It went on way too long, then abruptly vanished, leaving behind a silence almost as painful.

My hands stayed clamped to my ears, but I opened my eyes a slit.

She was gone. Vanished with the last shattering notes of the scream. I whirled around. No one behind me. I ran to the back door. It was closed. Locked. I raced from it to the front door, then from window to window. All closed. All locked.

That did it. I’d arrived in town driving like a crazed woman and now it was time to reverse that process. Maybe even go faster. I took the stairs two at a time to
grab my still-packed bag, a nanosecond away from hyperventilating and needing a respirator. Either this place was haunted or I was as gaga as Granny.
Get me out of here,
every hair standing up on my scalp begged. I snagged the suitcase from beside the bed, spotted Granny’s coverlet Ruth had lent me, and snatched it up, too. Throwing it around my shoulders, I started back down, suitcase in hand.

By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, my breath started to come more easily. By the time I was crossing the kitchen, heading for the door, I’d slowed to a walk. At the back door I stopped and held a corner of the coverlet to my cheek. Something was different; something had changed. I tried to figure out what and discarded every possibility other than that rational thought was seeping back, sealing off my panic. I’d been sleepwalking or hallucinating or having some kind of mind-blowing hysterical interlude. No matter. Whatever mental flip I’d experienced was over. Given the stress and grief I was operating under, it was understandable.

…a good night’s sleep will give you perspective.

Granny was, indeed, always right. Relief, respite, perspective—a good night’s sleep should bring some or all of that. I walked back to the bottom of the stairs and eyed the dark at the top. My feet were reluctant to carry me back up there. In fact, they encouraged me to experiment with the comforts of a good night’s sleep in the backseat of my car. In the end I convinced my feet to compromise and together we curled up on the sofa, in the parlor, wrapped in Granny’s comforting coverlet.

Chapter 7

I
t wasn’t until sunlight streamed through the eastern window, puddling around my head on the makeshift pillow I’d fashioned from my sweatshirt and all the socks and underwear I’d packed, that I woke up. My coverlet cocoon and the sofa had provided a peaceful refuge. A bit of the bright puddle dripped into my eyes and I opened them ready to laugh at myself and my wild imaginings. I was also hungry enough to eat anything not nailed down, possibly even tuna casserole.