Wicked Weaves (16 page)

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Authors: Joyce Lavene,Jim

BOOK: Wicked Weaves
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I looked at my almost completed basket. I was willing to give Chase the credit for my smile but not for my basket. “I started feeling the rhythm yesterday. I think I’m getting it.”
“You keep those stitches tight and mind the grass stays the same length. Don’t let that coil stick out longer than your finger.”
I listened to her as I continued using the bone and coiling the sweetgrass; over, under and through. I heard the bell ring on the front door in the shop. It was too early for customers, but could be a resident. “I’ll get it.”
Mary nodded and puffed at her pipe as her fingers flew through the coils of sweetgrass with her bone.
I left my basket on the back stair and went inside. A tall, thin black man was looking at the baskets. He looked familiar; something about the eyes, but I was sure I hadn’t seen him around the Village. And he was dressed like a visitor in khaki pants and a tan T-shirt. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone. She makes baskets, and I was told she might be here.”
Mary came in through the back door and dropped her basket on the floor. “Jah!”
Eleven
Jah looked like he was in his early twenties. He had broad, thin shoulders and long arms. His shirtsleeves looked too short for him. His face was narrow and angular. He had his mother’s dark eyes, sensitive but sharp, and his mouth looked as though it rarely smiled.
“Mother?” His eyes narrowed as he took in the red scarf covering her head and the patterned red dress she wore.
“My son!” Mary rushed to him, apparently not feeling the doubt I saw in Jah’s eyes. “I thought I would never see you again. But here you are, a man. Of all the gifts I have received in this life, this is the best one.”
She hugged him with one of those full-body hugs. I could see him holding back, not wrapping those long arms around her. He didn’t seem prepared to meet Mary, even though he was looking for her. She, on the other hand, might not have been prepared but was willing to put everything aside to be with him.
Mary wiped tears from her eyes as she asked him a hundred questions every mother wants to know: Are you well? Are you happy? Is there someone special in your life?
Jah didn’t answer. He stood there looking awkward and uneasy, taking in the baskets and the layout of the shop around him. Mary tugged at his sleeve and introduced him to me. I could tell that made even less of an impression on him.
“How did you find me?” she asked. “Did your father tell you where I was?”
“My father told me you were dead,” he shot back. “Another man, a man who
claimed
to be my real father, told me where to find you.”
She stared at him. “Abraham Shift is
not
your real father. He forced me out of our home and demanded your father give you to him to raise. Joshua told you the truth.”
His nostrils flared. I know it sounds silly, but that’s what it looked like to me. He didn’t have a large nose, either. I guess it was the angle of his head. I think he was looking down at us in more ways than one.
“The truth? That my birth mother left me with my father, who chose not to raise me and gave me to another man. That’s a hard truth to learn. I’ve known where you were for a year. I couldn’t bring myself to come and face you.”
Mary looked crushed. It was as if the weight of all the bad things she’d endured in her life suddenly came down on her. She folded her arms protectively across her chest and raised her chin. “You don’t understand. I never thought I’d have to explain to you. Your father told me you’d died after they made me leave. I believed him. I didn’t learn until a few days ago that you were alive and living with his brother. If I’d known, no power on earth could’ve stopped me from seeing you.”
“Yet you left and didn’t take me with you. That tells a different story.”
“Your father—your
real
father—and I had an arrangement that he would meet me with you every few weeks. There was no way for me to know what really happened.”
“My
father.
” Jah said the word like it was poison on his tongue. “I have no father. I have no mother. I’m alone in the world.”
The silence after his words was enough to keep me from jumping in and pointing out that Mary had done the best she could and that times had changed. Jah might’ve been good to look at, but he had a lot to learn about life.
“Why did you come here?” Mary demanded. “Why did you seek me out if you felt this way?”
“I wanted to see what the face of deception looked like. I wanted to know what kind of woman leaves her son to come to a place like this and make baskets for
tourists
.”
“And what do you see?”
“What I expected.” He stared hard at her, then looked around the shop again. “A woman who has lost her dignity and is no longer welcome with her own people.”
Mary had been getting feisty at the end, but hearing those words, she wrapped her shawl around her and walked out the back door.
I looked at the big dumb oaf who was her son. My God, how stupid could one man be? He turned to walk out of the shop as well, but I wasn’t stunned into silence anymore. “And that’s it? You came all this way to insult your mother, a woman who has more dignity and grace in her little finger than most people have in their whole bodies? You aren’t as smart as you look.”
He faced me with rage burning in his eyes. “You don’t know. Stay out of this. It’s a family matter.”
“Maybe. But I still get to say what I think. As far as I know, Harry is the only king in Renaissance Faire Village. You’re just a big bully. I deal with students like you every morning before breakfast and six times a day after lunch. You don’t scare me.”
“No?” He started walking toward me with a murderous expression on his dark chocolate face. “You look scared to me. If you’re not, you should be. You may not be as smart as you think.”
The front door burst open, and Chase entered with a wide grin. “Donuts, anyone? They’re fresh out of the cooker.”
Jah gave me one last furious look, then stalked out the door, brushing by Chase as he went. I sort of collapsed back on a basket table, surprised and pleased that it didn’t collapse under me.
“Who’s the thundercloud?” Chase watched as Jah strode away from Wicked Weaves. “Hey! Are you okay?”
“Yes. It was just very . . . intense.” I filled him in about Jah while I wolfed down both donuts he was holding. “I may have to rethink my investigation into Joshua’s death. It’s very possible Jah murdered him instead of Abraham. That boy is super angry with life.”
“Don’t say that!” Mary yelled as she came back into the shop. “Jah has every right to be angry, but that doesn’t make him a killer. Where did he go, Jessie? I have to talk to him.”
“He went that way.” Chase pointed down the street toward Baron’s Beer and Brats.
“Tend to the shop,” she told me. “I’ll be back after I find my son.”
The door closed quickly behind her. I looked at Chase. “You should go after her. Otherwise, he might kill her, too.”
“Aren’t you being a little paranoid? Just because the guy is angry doesn’t make him a killer. Mary’s right.”
“Mary doesn’t think anyone killed Joshua. She thinks he died of natural causes that just seem to include almost having alcohol poisoning and being strangled. She’s not a good judge of what’s going on.”
“And
you
are?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means she might know best. You have to leave this to the police, Jessie. Someone could get hurt.”
This wasn’t the time or the place to talk about it as two visitors dressed as ladies-in-waiting with high hennins and long veils came into the shop, laughing. I dragged Chase into a corner. “I don’t have time to argue with you right now. I think Mary could be in danger, and you’re the only one who can do something about it, since she’d kill me if I left the shop while she’s gone.”
I pulled him close and kissed him hard. “You have to take care of this for me. Even if we got the police involved, it could be too late.
“Is that it?” He raised that left brow at me. “Is that all you’ve got? Because it’s really hot out there, and following Mary and her son could be a long, hard job.”
“What else do you want?” I eyed the customers warily, but they were too busy exclaiming over baskets to notice us. “We’re in a public place with people watching us. I’m not—”
Chase lifted me off the floor. It’s a bad habit I wished he’d stop. He finally put me down and put his hands in my hair and kissed me, slowly and thoroughly for a few minutes. “Okay. Now I can go.” He walked out the door, whistling.
Now the two ladies were interested. “Was that playacting?” one asked.
“Yes.” My heart was pounding hard, and my lips could barely form coherent sentences.
Both women giggled and asked how they could get summer jobs there. I couldn’t answer, since my brain still felt like it was filled with cotton candy. The women each bought a small basket and left Wicked Weaves.
I took my basket outside on the back steps and thought about lighting up Mary’s pipe. But that was going too far. Instead, I stared off and thought about Mary and the life she’d led. I thought Tony and I had a hard life without our folks. At least we knew who they were and that they were dead, not just hiding out in an old village somewhere.
 
 
It was three, and there was still no sign of Mary or Chase. I wished I had my cell phone and that Chase had a cell phone, too. Or we could both have two-way radios. Anything so that I’d know what was going on.
The Village closed early on Sunday for the King’s Feast. At this rate, I was going to have to close up and head over to the castle without knowing what was going on. I wasn’t crazy about that idea. Chase was right; I was paranoid. I kept picturing all kinds of terrible things happening to him and Mary— like Mary was dead and Jah killed Chase when he’d found her, and it was all my fault because I’d sent him after them.
I’d sold a few baskets. The crowd was light. It might’ve been a race weekend again. I couldn’t keep up with what was going on at the speedway. At least I couldn’t imagine Chase being killed by a car in the Village. A fast-moving camel, maybe, but not a car.
I’d waited as long as I could before locking the front door and counting up receipts. I stashed everything in Mary’s rooms upstairs. There was no protocol for closing up without her. I guess she never thought it would happen.
I took the opportunity to look around her apartment. I knew it wasn’t polite or nice to look through someone else’s things. I wouldn’t have liked it if someone looked through my stuff. I told myself it was okay because I needed some clues to what was going on, but really I was just curious.
The three rooms on top of Wicked Weaves were sparse like my room in the hut. You’d never guess Mary had lived there for ten years. There were small, personal touches, but mostly it was very plain.
I looked at the tiny, carved wooden animals she collected. There was an owl, a horse and a chicken. There was no sign of baskets or sweetgrass up here. I guessed she got enough of that downstairs.
Her clothes in the tiny closet were brightly colored and almost the same; dresses and matching scarves and shawls. Everything was made of cotton. She seemed to have two pairs of sandals: the one she was wearing and the other in her closet. They were exactly the same.
In all, I had no feeling for the woman who lived here. If I hadn’t known Mary already, I wouldn’t have learned anything about her besides the fact that she liked carved animals. Everything else was something you might find in a hotel.
I took a brief peek at her bed. Now there was something that gave her away. Mary might not have any elegant clothes or room decor, but she had expensive sheets. They were at least a thousand threads per square inch. Premium. I smiled, thinking about that indulgence.
I heard a noise downstairs and hurried out of her room. I didn’t want her to come back and catch me snooping around. Especially since I hadn’t learned anything of value doing it.
But it was only my brother Tony. “How did you get in here?” I asked him. I knew I’d locked the doors.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I have a key that opened the door.”
“Let’s see.” We went outside and locked the front door. Tony used his key and got back inside. “Where did you get that?”
“Remember when I was working at the pub for a while? Brewster gave it to me to open early so he wouldn’t have to come in.” Tony frowned. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“So one key opens the whole Village?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. One key seems to open Brewster’s and Wicked Weaves. Why all the questions?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, weird things have been happening here the last few days. Give me the key.”
“Weird things
always
happen here, Jessie.” He laughed and handed me the key. “We’re in the middle of a village built on an old airstrip and set up to look like it’s in the Middle Ages.”

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