by Molly Macrae
“Exactly. And if the deputies are going to look at the Cat’s checks and credit card receipts, then we will, too. They’re our records and if those bozos can find something in them like . . . like what? Are they looking for names of people who might have seen something? Then that’s what we’ll do, too. We’ll conduct a parallel investigation. No, wait. Not parallel. Better than parallel. Better and stronger—a two-ply investigation.”
“This is an excellent plan, hon. So, we’ll ask to pay our respects, and we’ll take a good, quick look around, and maybe we’ll pick up on something the deputies missed.”
“They might stop us. . . . I mean, shouldn’t they?”
“Absolutely. But they’re operating under the delusion this is an accident. They probably aren’t treating it like a real crime scene. Besides, we were on the scene before the authorities even got here. We can’t contaminate it any more than we already did.”
“Good point. But you don’t think pretending to pay our respects might be going too far? You know, kind of tacky?”
“Not when we have the good name of the Weaver’s Cat to uphold,” Ardis said. “We can’t have people thinking we run a den of mohair and murderers.”
“Knitters and knockoff artists?”
“Weavers and wasters.”
“Threads and thugs. Uh-oh, better stop.” I put my hand over my mouth. We’d started snickering. The Mennonites, who were still packing up their booth, were casting leery glances our way again.
“Wait, wait,” Ardis said, “one more. Crochet hooks and criminal habitats.” She leaned her forehead on my shoulder and sputtered with suppressed snorts, then swallowed them and straightened back up. “Okay, that’s it. No more. Now it’s time for somber and serious.” And being the veteran Blue Plum Repertory Theater actor she was, and nothing at all like a costumed yahoo, she closed her eyes and held her breath for a moment, and immediately became the picture of serious and somber.
I had a harder time making the transformation, but catching sight of a broken-looking Dan Snapp talking to Clod as we made our way around the end of the tent helped. They were standing beside the body. I pulled Ardis to a stop.
“The guy talking to Cole. That’s Dan Snapp. And the guy in the frock coat, with his hand on Dan’s shoulder, that’s J. Scott Prescott. Maybe we shouldn’t intrude just now.” Maybe I would embarrass myself by intruding in J. Scott’s face.
“No. This is even better. It’ll be real natural for us to offer our condolences to Dan, and we’ll size the two of them up while we’re at it. I’ll do most of the talking. You cast your eyes around. Now, here we go. We will be solemn and we will be sincere.”
And we would be snooping, but I didn’t say that out loud in case her respectable veneer should crack and knowing that mine would. She linked her arm in mine and as we made our decorous way toward brokenhearted Dan and his lost Reva Louise, I scrubbed my forehead with the fingertips of my free hand. If the scrubbing made me look overcome, then good. But really I was trying to scrub away my annoyance with Clod Dunbar and my urge to get in a few finger jabs at J. Scott Prescott.
Clod saw us coming. He was still talking to Dan and J. Scott beside the shrouded body and he made no move to stop us. Another deputy did step forward and ask us what we were doing and where we were going. Ardis answered, but she looked at Clod instead of the deputy who asked. Whether it was her stature as former teacher or some other vibe between them that I couldn’t fathom, I don’t know, but Clod nodded to the other deputy and we were allowed to approach Reva Louise one more time.
Thank goodness the body had been covered or I couldn’t have done it. Standing next to that still shape, I had to look away, not make eye contact with anyone, look anywhere else, look up . . . to the attic window in the Weaver’s Cat. That time I did see a flicker, a waver of light or shadow, and then—Holy cow. Did she jump?
I thought my heart would stop. Geneva didn’t exactly plummet, but leaving the third floor of a building like that sure didn’t look safe. That didn’t make sense, considering she was already dead. Neither did closing my eyes, but I did anyway. When I opened one eye again, a figure of fog and dust motes stood next to me looking down at Reva Louise. I shivered. Had she known she could exit an attic window like that? Maybe not. Geneva shivered, too.
“I will always remember her for the beautiful smell of her gingerbread,” Geneva said, “and her lies. You have very complicated friends. Are you checking to see if she’s lying about being dead, too?”
Speaking of complicated friends, I was sandwiched between two of them. On one side Ardis held Dan Snapp’s hand, blessing his heart and recalling the joy Reva Louise carried with her and the gift of surprise that she brought into all our lives. On my other side, Geneva was making sure I understood—in greater detail than seemed necessary—that Reva Louise really was no longer with us. The situation was a little hard to take. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic—not quite like screaming and bolting from between them but squeezed somewhat like toothpaste—when I glanced over at Clod. He was watching us. Intently. So was J. Scott.
“It could be you’re looking suspicious,” Geneva said on one side.
Ardis leaned over and whispered on the other, “Sink to your knees.”
They were a pair of cartoon consciences, one nattering at my left shoulder and one at my right, except they were wily conscience and weird conscience instead of good and evil. I did sink to my knees; it would have been hard not to with Ardis attached to my left arm and dragging me down beside her. And praying would have made good sense—praying that she wasn’t also dragging us into trouble or praying that Clod wouldn’t suddenly find a reason to charge us with tampering or obstruction and drag us off to jail. But nothing about what we were doing made good sense, and there in front of me was a fold of Reva Louise’s voluminous skirt that had escaped from under the sheet covering her.
I touched it.
“I knew you couldn’t resist,” Geneva said.
Chapter 12
“What do you feel?”Geneva asked.
Beyond the cotton polyester blend of Reva Louise’s skirt, I didn’t know. The other times I’d experienced the weird effect, I’d had an immediate impression of emotions. I couldn’t necessarily tell to what or to whom the emotions were directed, but they’d been clear enough that I could name them—love, fear, dishonesty, hatred. The feeling that came from Reva Louise was a confused swirl. Anticipation? Excitement? Suspicion? Cunning? Some of all of them, maybe, but they were as slippery to catch and be sure of as the shreds of a half-remembered dream. Geneva was right when she’d said I had complicated friends. Except I didn’t think friendliness was part of that Reva Louise mix.
“What?” Geneva asked.
I gave a small shrug.
“Try again. I’ll distract the flatfoot.”
With that, Geneva flew up into Clod’s face. He took half a step back. He couldn’t see her, but he sensed something and he batted at what he must have thought was an insect. Geneva stayed with him, Dan Snapp, J. Scott, and Ardis looked at him, and I slipped both hands under the sheet.
My eyes on the others, I ran my fingers over the near edge of Reva Louise’s skirt, feeling the cunning and excitement again, but also something real and tangible, under the fabric, along the seam. Quickly, I felt for and found a slit in the seam—a pocket—with a card in it. Did I dare? Yes. I palmed the card, brought it out, and took a look.
So did Geneva, which meant she was no longer distracting Clod.
• • •
“You removed a personal belonging from the body.” Clod sounded aggressively aghast. He’d marched us away from the body and over to his car.
“I was tucking her skirt under the tarp,” I said.
“It didn’t need tucking. We don’t call it a tarp.” He looked dangerously explosive.
“I found J. Scott Prescott’s business card sticking out of a pocket,” I said, sure that I looked and sounded completely reasonable. “So I did you a favor, because it
might have gotten lost when you moved the body. And you’ll be interested in this—his card was in a hidden pocket. More like an enlarged seam. Come to think of it, you might want to check for more of them. It isn’t unusual in a nineteenth-century dress, with that kind of full skirt, to find openings in the seams or hemmed slits in the panels. They’d give access to a loose pocket worn on a tape tied around the waist or have flat bags sewn to the openings, much the way our pockets are today. But the openings for pockets in a nineteenth-century skirt, even a reproduction like this, might not be where you’d expect to find them. Usually they were on the right side or right rear. But sometimes they were all the way around in the middle of the back. Ardis, do you mind?” I showed him what I meant, using Ardis for my model. She obliged by turning her side and then her rear toward him.
“So the pocket I just found in the seam halfway down the skirt? There’s something sneaky about its size and its placement and if I were you I’d check all the seams. It reminds me of an early twentieth-century morning coat I saw in a costume collection in a local history museum in Niles, California, that must have belonged to a pickpocket. The coat did, not the museum, and it was so cool. It had to have been custom-made. It was a piece of art, really. And what a piece of work the guy it belonged to must have been.”
Clod looked less than impressed by my rapturous knowledge of pocket placement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century costumes, standard or sneaky. And as so often happened when he and I tried to exchange information, I was less than impressed by his imagination.
“The way I see it,” Ardis said, “there are two things you should be wondering. What was Reva Louise doing with a business card for a commercial real estate agent from Knoxville hidden away in her ingenious little pocket? And what bearing, if any, do the card and the pocket, or the owner of the card in the pocket, have on her murder?”
Clod made a low noise in his throat.
“You have only yourself to blame, Coleridge,” Ardis said. “In fact, I find it hard to believe you let us traipse all over what might be more of a crime scene than you realize. If your people had done their job right to begin with, you would have had the business card sooner. But you have it now and everyone’s happy.”
“It will make me very happy,” Clod snarled, “if you two will stay put, in my car, and stay out of trouble.” He slammed the door of his car and stalked off. It was his official car, the kind where suspects and perpetrators were put in the backseat and the doors couldn’t be opened from the inside. Ardis and I were in the backseat.
“I think he’s just blowing off steam,” Ardis said. “I don’t think we’re really under arrest.”
“I don’t think he could make the charges stick if we were.”
“I wish you would try to look more desperate and dangerous,” Geneva said. She’d glided into the front passenger seat. “You look irritable, but that’s hardly inspiring. Try sneering.”
“You were brilliant, though,” Ardis said. “So, tell me, was it your textile expertise that led you to that pocket or was it your keen understanding of Reva Louise’s underhanded personality?”
“Would you believe me if I said I really was just tucking her skirt under the tarp?”
“We can stick to that story if you want.”
I did want.
“I just realized, though, hon, that there’s a problem with your theory that someone targeted Reva Louise, in that spot, at that time.”
“I thought it was your theory.”
“We won’t quibble over ownership. But you see the problem, don’t you?”
What I saw was the ghost now sitting in the driver’s seat of Clod Dunbar’s official car. I was glad she couldn’t turn anything on. Like a siren.
“I can tell by your scowl that you do see the problem,” Ardis said. “And you’re right. It’s going to be a stumper. I’m looking forward to seeing how you tackle it. Oh, look, here comes Ten.”
Joe never seemed to mind that Ardis called him Ten. It slipped into her conversation as easily as “hon” and with just as much warmth. She’d been Joe’s third and fourth grade teacher, too, but they’d ended up with an easier relationship than she and Clod had. Maybe being the younger brother let Joe be more relaxed. I’d noticed that Ardis never went as far as calling him Tennyson, which made me think she used Clod’s full name for the same reason he would always be Clod to me.
Joe opened the squad car’s back door. “Must be getting kind of warm in there. Why don’t you come on out?”
“Are you allowed to do that?” I looked nervously past him to where Clod was wrapping up his talk to Dan Snapp and J. Scott Prescott. Clod shook J. Scott’s hand and put a hand briefly on Dan’s shoulder. Dan’s head was bowed. He appeared to wipe away a tear.
“You aren’t under arrest or material witnesses, are you?” Joe asked.
“Are we?” Geneva, her eyes huge, looked at me over the headrest.
“Nope,” I said, scooting out of the car. “Not under arrest and not witnesses in any way, shape, or form.”
“Good enough,” Joe said.
Ardis followed me out. Judging by the sharp intake of her breath at Joe’s question, she was as excited as Geneva at the prospect of being a lawbreaker. She might have opted to stay in the car, but it really had been getting warm in there. Geneva did stay. She trickled into the backseat and sat very still, looking at her wispy hands clasped in her lap.
“So, did you just happen to wander by to see who you could spring from your brother’s car?” I asked.
“No.” Joe shut the car door. Geneva didn’t look around. “I came to tell you they’re canceling the rest of the festival.”
Chapter 13
“Who’s closing the festival down?” Ardis asked. “The mayor? I cannot imagine. The very idea of it would make his head explode.”
Geneva hadn’t left the squad car. Joe saw me looking in and he peered in, too. At nothing he could see.
“I thought you’d be more upset about the festival,” he said to me. “What are you doing? Did you leave something in there?”
Geneva continued to sit in the backseat, her hands worrying in her lap.
“Ardis is upset enough for both of us,” I said. “But yeah, I . . .” I tried to get Geneva’s attention with a nervous patter of my fingers on the window.
“Grab it fast, then,” Joe said, opening the door again. “Here comes Cole.”
I thanked Joe and leaned in, pretending to grope for something that might have slipped down the back of the seat. “Come on,” I whispered to Geneva. “The sheriff’s deputies are going to take over the shop.”
“Looking for clues? And witnesses?” Geneva asked.
“Yeah, and maybe more. I don’t know, but this is really serious. They’re closing the festival.” I looked over my shoulder. Joe and Ardis stood shoulder to shoulder, stalling Clod. Clod wasn’t happy. I scrabbled down the backseat with renewed vigor. “Geneva, come on, there’s no time for this.”
“I should probably stay.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” the voice of Clod asked. Ardis and Joe had parted like the Red Sea and he’d boiled on through.
“Um, why am I always losing something?”
“Out,” he said.
I wished I had the nerve to imitate Miss Piggy with an indignant “Moi?”
Clod, of course, had plenty of nerve. He opened the front door of the car, stuck his head in, and looked around with exaggerated care, ending the tour with his eyes on me. Except that he’d put his mirrored sunglasses back on so I couldn’t see his skewering glare. “You,” he said, then pointed at several random spots in the car, “and all your little friends. Out.”
“How rude,” Geneva said. She blew a raspberry at Clod as she swirled past him. “I will be in my room, should anyone be interested. I want to be alone.”
“Did you find it, hon?” Ardis asked.
“Find what?” I slammed the back door and watched Geneva float through one of the Cat’s first-floo
r windows. Could she float back up to the attic window she’d come out of?
“Kath?”
“Hm? Oh, what I left in the car? Yeah, thanks. Hey.” I rapped on Clod’s window. He’d started the car and was probably thinking about running over my toes as he backed out instead of answering my knock, but he lowered the window anyway.
“Why are they canceling the festival?”
“No comment.”
“Do your buddies still have Ernestine and John in there?”
“Ms. Odell and Mr. Berry have left the building.”
“Cute. How much longer until we can move our stuff back in?”
He pointed behind me. “Ask them.”
• • •
“Them” were two deputies who, after several static-obscured minutes of consultation with the radios at their shoulders, finally gave us permission to move our boxes and the tables, chairs, displays, and tent back into the Weaver’s Cat. Permission but no help. The teenaged woodworkers and their uncle were kind and gave me a hand while, under the watchful eye of a third deputy, Ardis collected customer names from the day’s electronic transactions and checks. All three deputies watched us with unnerving attention. As a result, we scurried, saying little. When we’d gotten everything inside and the tent and tables stowed, rather than say good–bye, the kids’ uncle wished us a quiet “Good luck.”
Joe had disappeared sometime earlier. That didn’t surprise me.
“We need to feed the cat before we leave,” I said. “And I need to run upstairs—”
Two of the deputies shifted toward me at the words “run upstairs.”
“Not to the second floor,” I said. “To the attic. The study. To get my purse.”
“There are two pocketbooks in here,” said the unnerving deputy standing in the office behind the sales counter. “A wallet with your name in it is in this one.” He held my purse up, one finger through the strap.
“Thank you.” I smiled. “Actually, I need to get something of a more personal nature, if you know what I mean. You can inspect it before I take it away, if that will make you feel more comfortable. I’ll hand it right to you. But I really need to have it. Tonight. Or if it’s better, I can tell you exactly where it is and you can run up and get it for me.”
