by Molly Macrae
“Message received.” J. Scott Prescott held up a placating hand and smiled. “And you just proved my point about preaching to the choir.”
“Huh. Okay. But I guess I’m still not following. How did you get so involved? Here, I mean, and in the skit? All the way from Knoxville?” It was tempting to add “in little old Blue Plum,” but only because I was beginning to feel perverse.
“We’re giving the skit a title, by the way,” he said. “Apparently it’s never had one, other than people calling it the pig skit. It’s now, officially, ‘The Blue Plum Piglet War.’”
He dipped back into his inside suit coat pocket and brought out a third business card. I reached for it, but he was ahead of me again, and he took my reaching hand, cupping it in his. If he’d actually gripped my hand, I would have yanked away from him faster than he could give a Blue Plum Piglet War yell. But all he did was lay the third card on my palm, tap it twice with a fingertip, and wink.
I ignored the wink and removed my hand from his. This third card was simple white cardstock with a stylized sketch of an ink bottle and a feather pen poised as though it had just finished writing the words “Prescott Preservation Plays.” I put the card on the counter next to its friends.
“You’re a man of many business cards.”
“I’m a man of many interests,” J. Scott said, “and by necessity a man of several streams of income. I blame the economy. But writing heritage plays for community celebrations is my true passion. If I may be allowed to put it in such high-flying terms, I feel a calling. I’ve written seven plays, to date, for communities from Darien in coastal Georgia to tiny Cumberland near Kingdom Come State Park in Kentucky. Each one has been well received and made a difference in the lives of the citizens.”
“But the—”
“And you can trust me on the gun issue,” he said. “The reenactors will not be just a bunch of good old boys playing with fantasies and popguns.” He grinned, showing me his ivories and also showing me that he could laugh at a stereotype as easily as the next good old boy. “So, Miss Rutledge, Kath, I know this is short notice, but may we have your blessing and permission to stage part of ‘The Blue Plum Piglet War’ from the upstairs windows of your charming place of business next weekend?”
“No. I’m sorry, but no.”
• • •
J. Scott Prescott finally accepted my answer with a shrug and a sigh. He departed, leaving behind his trio of cards and the dead silence of a shop with no browsing customers. “Dead” and “silent” were two words that should have made perfect sense when used together. They would have for most people I knew. But most people I knew weren’t haunted. In fact, no one I knew was haunted. And although I didn’t know much about the life of my dead friend, I did know “silent” wasn’t the right word to describe Geneva in her current existence.
I never used to believe in ghosts. Why should I? My profession as a textile preservation specialist grounded me in science. I believed in physical attributes, chemicals, logical analysis, stabilization of fragile materials, and the eradication of pests. So how did I explain suddenly seeing, hearing, and interacting with a, um, er . . . a ghost? I didn’t. I couldn’t. More accurately, I hadn’t “gone there” yet and wasn’t sure I wanted to, although I knew that eventually I needed to.
“You spend too much time thinking,” a voice said from on high.
I glanced up. Geneva was curled around the blades of the ceiling fan I hadn’t turned on yet.
“I was thinking about you,” I said.
She appeared to preen. It wasn’t always easy to interpret her facial expressions or body language, owing to the fact that her body was less substantial than an Orenburg lace shawl I’d once had the pleasure of curating and she was never entirely in focus. But smug was easy to see. Anger, too. She billowed and pulsed in alarming ways when she was angry. And although it was hard on my nerves, it helped that she went in for melodramatics. The sound effects, alone, provided useful clues to her moods. Since making Geneva’s acquaintance, I found myself less and less amazed by the odd things I could get used to.
“Were you eavesdropping up there?” I asked, bringing up a sore subject.
She huffed. I ignored it. She wasn’t a fan of sore subjects or being ignored, so she huffed again and heaved her shoulders, behaving like a put-out teenager. I was pretty sure she wasn’t a teenager, but she knew how to act like one.
Having a ghost in the shop didn’t present as many problems as one might think. The most obvious problem—the whole boo factor with customers shrieking and running out—wasn’t a problem at all. Except for Argyle, the shop cat, no one else saw or heard Geneva. This was my own, private haunting. And privacy was the main issue. Geneva could materialize and fade out and drift through walls so that, unless I saw her hovering like a wisp of smoke somewhere, I never knew if I was alone and couldn’t ever be sure I was having a private conversation. Maybe she’d grown up in a two-room log house with thirteen brothers and sisters or maybe her sense of personal space had atrophied over the century or more since her death. But getting her to accept, gracefully, that she couldn’t listen in anytime she wanted—or worse, join in—as an ongoing “negotiation.”
I started tidying the baskets of impulse-buy notions near the cash register. She swooped down from the fan and popped up in front of me.
“We agreed,” she said, “that you can have no expectations of privacy when you’re interacting with customers.”
“You’re right. We did. But we also agreed that it’s impolite if you don’t make your presence known.” I gave myself two points for being firm but calm and a third point for smiling while doing it. Sometimes it helped if I treated our interactions like a competition.
“It’s hard to keep track of all your rules and restrictions,” she said with a sniff. She floated over to perch on the shoulder of the mannequin standing near the counter and I gave myself a bonus point for not telling her she looked like a giant, cobwebby parrot.
“So, have you ever heard of this feud Mr. Prescott was talking about?” I was always looking for historical details she knew firsthand that might help pinpoint when she’d lived. She claimed she didn’t remember much about her life and got upset if I pressed her to try. From her reaction to the deaths of a young couple earlier in the year, there was clearly something traumatic in her own background that she was blocking out. Her memory, otherwise, especially for dialogue and plotlines from fifty-year-old television shows, was unbeatable.
“He’s calling it the ‘The Blue Plum Piglet War,’” I said. “It happened sometime in the 1820s or 1830s during a boundary dispute that escalated when one guy let his pigs get into another guy’s crops.”
“What was he growing?”
“Something tasty to pigs. I don’t know. Potatoes?”
“Potatoes, pigs, and pandemonium,” she said with relish.
“Do you remember it?”
“I’m not that old.”
“Well, no, I didn’t think you were, but people have always told stories about it. My grandmother told them to me. Maybe your grandmother told them to you. Maybe she was there. Anyway, you might be interested in watching the reenactment next weekend.”
“I’m more interested in your reenactment. You do the same thing every time.”
“And what are we talking about now?”
“The way you rebuff every gentleman caller who shows the least bit of interest in you. Mr. J. Snot Big Shot. He was full of himself, but I saw the way he took your hand.”
“That is absolute baloney.”
“It’s not. He’s sweet on you and you spurned his advance.” Her voice throbbed with pathos for J. Scott.
“I spurned his attempt to put good old boys with guns in our upstairs window and his advance on the building. He’s a slick salesman. He doesn’t give a flying fig about me.”
“No one would with that attitude.”
“My attitude is fine.”
“For a nun.”
My outer t
hirty-nine-year-old was willing to pick up a dust rag and move away from that jab. But that went against everything my inner seven-year-old stood for. “Joe,” I snapped. “For your information, I don’t rebuff Joe. We’re having dinner tomorrow night at Mel’s.”
“We are?”
“Not you. Joe and I.”
“And there you go.” She threw her wispy hands in the air. “Rebuffing again. But never mind. Loneliness is my lot in death. I’ll never understand your need to exclude a lost soul from the warmth and gaiety of a simple dinner out. But I’ll survive.”
A customer came in while I was still clutching the top of my skull, and the last vibrations of my heartfelt “aaaaargh” echoed in the attic. I gave myself three points for telling the customer a credible story about banging my head against a brick. There was a quietly sniffed “so unprofessional” from the irritating ghost now sitting in the front window with Argyle the cat and I gave myself another two points for not throwing a large, firm cone of rug wool at her. That would have been so unfair to Argyle.
Chapter 2
The customer I’d lied to about hitting my head fell in love with the rug wool I so prudently hadn’t sent flying through the ghost and the front window. The wool was a lovely mango color. The woman bought it and three other cones in shades of deep green, warm brown, and ripe tomato for a rug she said she would call “East Tennessee Curry.”
Ardis Buchanan arrived in time to hear the woman tell me she hoped my head felt better soon. There was a noise like a raspberry from the window, but only I heard it. Argyle was sound asleep on his back, his yellow tabby tummy exposed for maximum radiant heat absorption. He took industrial-grade naps and none of Geneva’s noise ever bothered him. Ardis held the door for the customer and raised her eyebrows in my direction.
“Headache, hon?” she asked. “You should take something for it before it gets out of hand.”
I waved off her concern and she slipped into the small office behind the counter to leave her purse. I’d “inherited” Ardis when I inherited the Weaver’s Cat and so many other things from Granny. She’d been Granny’s business manager and good friend for as long as I could remember, and now I was lucky enough to say she was both those things to me. Lucky, because there was no way I would try running the Cat without her. Always smelling of honeysuckle, she was tall, rock solid, and sensible. I wasn’t so tall and wasn’t quite such a rock, although I did like to think I was steady and sensible. Or I had thought I was sensible. Until my world was turned cockeyed . . . in so many ways . . . interesting ways.
• • •
“Anything going on this morning?” Ardis asked the same question every morning. She had a knack for making it sound like idle curiosity or a bid for juicy gossip more than a check to see if I was floundering.
I started to tell her about J. Scott Prescott’s visit, but she interrupted, her nose wrinkling.
“Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“I don’t know.” She took tentative sniffs in several directions. “Something. Maybe nothing.” She shook her head. “A whiff and now it’s gone. Maybe something that woman tracked in?”
I dutifully scanned our hardwood floor, retracing the woman’s steps between the counter and the door and back again. I didn’t find anything obvious and didn’t smell anything less pleasant than wool and honeysuckle.
Ardis walked over to the wall and flipped on the ceiling fan. “Let’s move the air around anyway,” she said, “just in case.” She sniffed again, then made another face.
“You still smell it?”
“No, I’m on to the next topic. But first, are there customers?”
I shook my head.
“Okay, then, next topic. Reva Louise.” She thumped her fist on the counter. “I cannot tell you how much I wish that woman was as easy to get rid of as that stink was just now.”
“Wow, Ardis. You don’t think that’s a tad strong?”
“Strong is what we’ll need to be to keep Reva Louise at bay. I stopped by the café to pick up coffee on my way here, and do you know what she had the gall to tell me? Tell me, mind you, not hint, or suggest, or in any other way inquire or ask. She told me that she knows the best way to run a demonstration tent and she has ‘arranged her schedule’ so she can give us the help we must surely need. Also, she wants to borrow a drop spindle so she can learn to spin and be one of our demonstrators next weekend.”
“And after hearing all that, you forgot your coffee?”
Ardis thumped the counter again.
Reva Louise Snapp was the new baker at Mel’s on Main, the café down the street from us. Reva Louise was also Melody Gresham’s—Mel’s—half sister, although there wasn’t any noticeable family resemblance. Mel’s energy was obvious in her compact, muscular frame and bristling personality, and that energy seemed to percolate out the top of her head and straight up through her spiked, mustard yellow hair. Most of her energy went into running her café, arguably the best eating establishment in a radius of many miles.
Reva Louise, in town for five or six weeks, was . . . less defined. Hair? A middling brown. Height? Not quite tall. Weight? Someday she might have to watch it. But if I were asked to recall distinguishing characteristics to identify her in a crowd, I couldn’t have come up with any.
“Maybe she did events like this back wherever she came from and she’s just trying to fit in,” I said.
“More like trying to shove her way in,” Ardis huffed. “Do you know what she said when I told her our demonstration roster was full? With a waiting list? She said, and I quote, ‘In that case, I can cover the sales counter in your shop.’”
“I guess she’s trying to be helpful.”
“No,” Ardis said. “Helpful is asking if we actually need help. Or stopping by with an offer of cold lemonade.” She picked up a dust cloth and snapped it at an imaginary army of dust bunnies.
“Or bringing the coffee you forgot?” Reminding her of the caffeine she’d left behind was a mistake. I had to rescue the poor dust cloth before she wrung its neck. “So, what did Reva Louise say when you told her we didn’t need her help in here, either? Was she angry?”
“Oh no, hon. I left that for you to tell her. She’s bringing the treats for Fast and Furious this afternoon.”
Chapter 3
Rock-solid Ardis said that leaving me to deal with Reva Louise was the sensible course of action.
“You don’t see it as wimping out?” I asked.
“No, hon, because there is no telling what I might do when my dander’s up. Trust me.” She put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a trustworthy squeeze. “It is much better for customer relations and safer for all concerned if we stick to our normal routine. I’ll mind the shop this afternoon and you go on upstairs to Friday’s Fast and Furious and have a good time.”
“Have a good time and also tell Reva Louise thank you but no, thank you.”
“Tell her firmly, Kath. Be calm, but very firm. And don’t worry. Debbie will be there to back you up.”
Debbie Keith, who worked for us part-time, was a marshmallow.
• • •
Friday’s Fast and Furious, a challenge knitting circle, was an offshoot of the fiber arts group that Granny had started called TGIF—Thank Goodness It’s Fiber. Every Friday at four o’clock, anywhere from three to a dozen of us met in the TGIF workroom on the second floor of the Weaver’s Cat to enjoy the company of other driven knitters and spur one another on toward our goal. The challenge the group had set was to knit one thousand hats for hospitalized babies and toddlers by the end of the year.
“That’s two and three-quarter hats per day, for the group as a whole,” Debbie had told me when I joined the group, “rounding up slightly.”
“That’s almost twenty hats a week.”
“Twenty very small hats,” Debbie said. “And there’s no point in calling it a challenge if it isn’t one.”
Fast and Furious meetings were casual and the TGIF workroom contrib
uted to the laid-back atmosphere. Granddaddy had made the space by knocking down the wall between the two back bedrooms on the second floor. He built shelves and cupboards along two of the walls for storage, and Granny lined the other two walls with sideboards and Welsh cupboards for more storage. Oak worktables took up most of the floor space, but there was enough room left for a circle of mismatched, overstuffed comfy chairs grouped around a low coffee table.
People dropped in and out of the Friday meetings as their schedules allowed. The only constants were time and place, background music to set the knitting mood, refreshments from Mel’s, and two important questions. That Friday afternoon, Debbie put on a CD of instrumental jazz with some nice percussion, tossed the hats she’d finished onto the coffee table, and asked the first question.
“How many this week?” Her three hats were sweet little brown things with bear cub ears.
I hadn’t been fair when I’d thought of Debbie as a marshmallow. She was a young widow, living alone, raising sheep on a farm that had been in her family for more than a century—hardly the work of a pushover. But at the Cat she wore long skirts and embroidered tops and with her blond hair pulled back in a loose braid she looked as though she’d stepped out of a delicate Carl Larsen watercolor. Now she looked expectantly at the rest of us. We were five so far, including Ernestine Odell, John Berry, and Mel.
“I’ll see your three and raise you one.” John laid out four navy blue hats, two with pink roses made of felted wool. John was one of Granny’s oldest friends. He’d spent most of his eighty-plus years torn between his roots in the Blue Ridge Mountains and his love for the waves on the deep blue sea, and anyone who noticed his resemblance to the handsome sea captain in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir could guess the sea had always held the stronger hand. John had come home only occasionally in recent years, to see his brother and—so he said—to convince Granny to sail away with him after Granddaddy died. He was full of stories, and that might have been one of them, but the light in his navy blue eyes when he told it to me, and the pink in his cheeks, convinced me it was true even if he’d never been able to convince Granny to go. Now he was back in Blue Plum for good. He’d sold his boat and come home to care for his brother.
