Spinning in Her Grave

by Molly Macrae

  “Coleridge, that is what we needed to know,” she said, “but here is what I cannot believe. I cannot believe that you dismissed our broken window as petty vandalism. It was not petty vandalism. It wasn’t someone coming in to take something. It was not bored teenagers. Any questions so far?” She’d reverted to her glory days as Clod’s fourth-grade teacher, pausing to make sure she had his full attention. “Either your people missed those guns yesterday, or that window was broken by someone who came in to plant them last night, going up the stairs, as Kath so presciently suggested when we first called you. Which scenario do you like best? I can go with either, but neither is flattering to your colleagues or your department.”

  “Ms. Buchanan,” Clod said. He again waited a second or two, and I realized he might just as easily have learned that trick in fourth grade as at deputy school. His sense of timing was good, too. He waited until Ardis was about to spit but not quite boil over. “My apologies,” he said calmly. “Mistakes were made.”

  “I thought I made a mistake once,” Thea said, “but it turned out I was wrong.” She held up her crocheted creation. It was a flamingo pink noose.

  Chapter 24

  The posse’s supper and planning session at the Weaver’s Cat was scrubbed along with the rest of our business day. In not the friendliest of moods, I called to leave a message for Joe to let him know that if he hadn’t bothered to listen to his messages yet he didn’t need to bother at all. When he picked up, instead of his machine, I had trouble thinking of something more intelligent to say than “wha.”

  “Hey,” he said in his pleasant, soft voice. He’d not only recognized me by my single, mangled syllable, but also managed to give the impression that I’d sounded pleasant and friendly, too. “I got your message and I heard what happened.”

  “The window and the guns?”

  “Would you like to hear what else is burning up the grapevine?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?”

  “It’ll keep. I’m over here at Mel’s. She says why doesn’t the posse meet at the café? It’s Sunday. She says she’ll have folks cleared out by seven.”

  “You’ll stay for the meeting?”

  “You should see the Moroccan sweet potato salad.”

  • • •

  There was an advantage to being turned out of our business several hours before closing time. Again. It gave us more time to stick our noses into police business. Whether Clod had the imagination to wonder about that, I couldn’t say, but as Ardis, Thea, and I went down the Cat’s front steps, I looked over my shoulder. Clod stood at the door watching us go.

  Ardis stopped me at the bottom of the steps with a hand on my shoulder. “Hon, did you tell me about seeing Angie last night?”

  I glanced back. Clod watched. “Big Brother’s got his eye on us. Keep walking.”

  “It’d be more fun to stand here and make him nervous,” Thea said.

  “But a waste of time,” said Ardis. “We can still confuse him by crossing the street and heading in the wrong direction for any of us. But the sooner we’re out of sight, the sooner he’ll get to work in there. We need our shop—and its good, safe name—back.”

  We could have gone to the corner to cross at the crosswalk. But with unspoken coordination, we looked back at Clod, turned back to Main Street and its sedate twenty-five-mile-per-hour traffic. With Thea holding up her noose like a crossing guard’s stop sign, we sauntered between cars to the other side and turned a direction none of us needed to go.

  “Nicely done,” Ardis said. “Now, hon, you told me you were worried about Angie, and asked if she has a gun, but what’s this about Angie and a man?”

  “Sorry. I forgot to tell you that part. After I saw Prescott, I saw Angie on the courthouse steps.”

  “It was getting late by then,” Ardis said.

  “And it was odd. She stood at the top of the steps and spread her arms like she was going to burst into song. She didn’t, though. Then she sat down and looked like she was alone in the world. And then the guy—I couldn’t see him well enough to recognize him—he called to her from the shadows between the columns. She went to him, he put his arm around her, and they went off together. It’s not much of a story, but where is she and who’s the guy?”

  “You’re right, hon. We have lots of questions and lots of directions to go in. What’s the next step?”

  I patted the laptop and notebook under my arm. “The sooner I get home, the sooner I can figure out what we know and what else we need to find out.”

  “She’s got more threads spinning in her head than went into the yarn in my pretty pink noose.” Thea swung the noose in front of her eyes. “I love this thing. I’m going to go hang it from the overhead fan in my office right now. And then I’ll get back to trolling for information so we can hang someone.”

  “What can I do to help the cause this afternoon?” Ardis asked.

  “There’s an important piece of information we need. Knowing it might eliminate one of our dangling threads.”

  “I’m on it like cat fur on black pants. Where do I look?”

  “Can you make a phone call?”

  “Tell me who. What, where, and when would be good, too. And if you don’t know the number, I’ll ferret that out and do you proud.”

  After we’d crossed the street, I’d made sure Thea was walking between Ardis and me. Call me chicken, call me prudent.

  “Find out if Angie is still AWOL. Call her. And if she doesn’t answer, call one of the twins.”

  • • •

  I called Shirley when I got home. Ardis had demurred. She’d called it demurring and I let her, because it wasn’t worth arguing over. To make up for it, she’d offered to go over the sales, receipts, and Ernestine’s and John’s lists again. Neither of us really thought poring over them would produce results, but it was another task that might eliminate a dangling thread, and if she wanted to spend her afternoon doing it . . .

  “You set her up for that,” Thea said after Ardis left us at the next corner and headed home.

  “Worked like a charm, too.”

  “And you’re stuck with calling a twin.”

  “Which at least won’t be boring.”

  And it wasn’t, because the twins might be many things, but boring wasn’t in their oeuvre. Mercy answered Shirley’s phone. She didn’t say as much, but I knew it was Mercy when I asked if they’d heard from Angie.

  “My baby!” Mercy shrieked, drilling the words straight into my ear. She said more, but I didn’t hear it clearly. I was holding my phone at a safer distance and Shirley was wrestling her phone from Mercy.

  “Is that you, Kath?”

  “I’m right here, in your phone, Shirley. Please stop shouting.”

  “Sorry. Caught up in the drama. What do you want? Hold on a sec, Mercy’s trying to tell me something.”

  There were noises in the background that sounded like the honking and hissing of an angry goose followed by someone swinging a rusty gate. Then Shirley came back on.

  “Mercy wants to know what you want and haven’t you done enough with your innuendos and she hopes to hel—to high heaven you didn’t tell the police that you think her angel Angela shot that woman. She said all that before she fell apart. Now she’s crying. And now she’s crying even harder. And now she’s stopped crying—”

  A shaky-sounding Mercy had the phone again. “Kath Rutledge . . .” She paused, drawing in a long, raspy breath. Before she could let it out in another shriek, I cut in.

  “Mercy, listen to me. I’m taking Angie’s disappearance seriously. I don’t know if I can find her, but I’ll try, if you can give me some information. Can you do that?” I heard the rusty gate swinging again and Shirley was back on.

  “She’s crying again. You don’t know what it’s like to lose your only baby like this. Let me tell you, it’s rough. On all of us.”

  I believed it. The baby was a twice-married woman of more than forty, but Shirley sounded ragged herself and I was beginning t
o question my sanity in calling them. Still, it seemed like the right thing to do, so I asked Shirley if they knew about any places where Angie liked to go, places where she might meet friends, where I could go and see if anyone had seen her or knew who the guy I saw might be.

  “You know,” I said, “does she have any usual hangouts?”

  “She wants to know where Angie hangs out and meets strange men.” Shirley helpfully shouted that to Mercy while still holding the phone near her mouth.

  I hung up before the answer exploded my eardrum, turned my phone off, and locked the doors.

  • • •

  Joe acted as doorman at Mel’s that evening, letting us in at the back, and letting anyone else who happened by know that the café was closed for the evening but would open again at its usual hour of six the next morning. I got there first, half expecting to see Carl, still drinking coffee, at his table in the corner. Thea arrived with Ernestine on her arm. John came next, then Ardis. She’d changed into dark slacks and a black-on-black embroidered tunic.

  “The better to sneak down dark alleyways,” she said when Joe complimented her, ignoring the fact that the sun hadn’t set.

  We sat in the kitchen, not the most comfortable place for a meeting because there were only counter-height worktables, but doing so meant our meeting was safe from prying eyes.

  “Your elders get the best seats,” Mel said when Thea complained about sitting with her chin nearly even with the butcher block prep table. Ernestine and John were perched on two tall stools so they could use the tabletop easily. “And I can’t have you getting too comfortable. I’m providing a room out of view, board, and solid information, but someone’s got to get up and bake for the morning before the bats fly home to roost, and I don’t think it’s going to be you.”

  “Did you hear anything about Prescott from your real estate friend in Knoxville?” I asked.

  “Let’s get the chow line started first,” Mel said. “Chop-chop.”

  Mel’s invitation to hold our meeting at the café came with strings attached—delicious strings if looks and smells could be trusted. We were guinea pigs for three new recipes, the Moroccan sweet potato salad and two others. One was a crispy, thin-crust white pizza with ham, baby green peas, mozzarella, a smattering of Parmesan, and a scattering of fresh mint. The other was dessert—sourdough rhubarb bread pudding with orange zest, pecans, and crystallized ginger. There probably wasn’t enough scent from the crystallized ginger to satisfy Geneva’s aroma request, but oh my goodness, that pudding looked good.

  “What do you think of the salad?” I asked Joe. He was eating with concentration, tipping his head every so often as though listening to the food as well as tasting it.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “Yet the spices and lemon, mixed with the parsley and cilantro, are bright and bold. It’s pretty and it’s delicious.”

  “The toasted almonds absolutely make it.”

  He’d just taken another bite, but he nodded and swallowed. “It’d be great at any potluck.”

  “Heaped in that black stoneware casserole dish you’ve got.”

  “Or Ivy’s big round stoneware bowl. Perfect.” Joe was a connoisseur of Blue Plum potlucks and known for his photographic memory of which dishes to make a beeline for or which ones to avoid. “What do you think of the pizza?”

  “Do you see any left on my plate?”

  “More?”

  “Saving room.” I gave an exaggerated and longing look toward the bread pudding. Mel noticed.

  “Not yet, Red.” She made us vote for or against adding the salad and pizza to her menu. The salad received unanimous raves. The pizza only lacked Thea’s approval. She hadn’t cared for the mint.

  “But peas and mint are a classic combination,” John said.

  “Mouthwash,” Thea retorted.

  “You don’t think the saltiness of the ham and cheese works with the mint?” Joe asked. “That they’re balanced and made more complicated by it?”

  “No. What I think is toothpaste.”

  “Don’t order it, then,” Mel said. “Majority rules. The salad and pizza are both going on the menu. Now, you’re welcome to tell me what you think of this,” she said as she handed around plates of the gorgeous bread pudding, “but I’m already in love, so we won’t vote. Until my dying day and as long as I have a source for good rhubarb, I will serve this bread pudding. It is that good.”

  I looked at the plate she handed me. It had a very dainty portion of the pudding on it. All the plates were the same and everyone looked as surprised. All the plates were emptied in two or three bites. Two or three dainty but superb bites.

  “What do you think?” Mel asked. “Good enough for seconds?”

  “Or thirds or fourths, hon,” Ardis said, eyeing the acres of pudding left in the pan with a barely disguised drool.

  “Good. Anyone who stays to help with the dishes gets more. Red, let’s get down to business.”

  I stood up and looked at each of them. Six good, earnest faces looking back at me. The basic setup, a meeting and expectant faces, reminded me of the many planning sessions I’d led back at the museum in Illinois. Then we would have been gathered in the conservation lab ready to discuss pest eradication or textile stabilization. How different this room, this group, the purpose . . .

  “Treadle to the metal, Red, so we can spin on out of here.”

  “Don’t be nervous, hon.”

  “I’m not nervous. I’m looking for the right words to begin. But there aren’t any right words for what happened. And so far the words we’re coming up with for who or why aren’t so good, either.”

  “She needs a push,” said Thea. “This’ll get her going. One word. Stinkin’ embezzler.”

  She sat back, looking pleased with herself and the stir she’d created. It was as good a place as any to start, too.

  “All righty,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of strands going—probably too many for some people to count—and it’s time to spread them out, look them over, see if we can toss any of them, and see which ones we can spin together.” I pulled a sheaf of papers from a file folder I’d brought. “On one side of these sheets is a summary of what we know—what I think we know. Below the summary are some of the questions we still have. It’s a lot of questions. More questions than summary. Take a minute to read the summary and the questions. Then we’ll go around the room, and if you have information to add or more questions, that’ll be the time to do it.” I handed the papers to Joe. “Pass them around, please? And, Thea, if Ernestine trades places with you, will you take notes on my laptop? That’ll be more efficient.”

  Also, Ernestine was beginning to look tottery on her high perch. Mel helped her down and she plopped onto Thea’s vacated chair with a sigh. Not only did she look mole-ish, but like a mole, she seemed happier closer to the ground. The stool worked better for Thea, too, putting her at a better height for typing at the butcher block. She pulled a pair of zebra-striped glasses from her purse.

  “Librarian Spyware model 007,” she said, settling them on her nose.

  “I take it we are to keep these papers out of the public eye?” John asked, scanning the front and back of his sheet. “What with names and nosy questions . . . Ah, no, I see. Initials only.”

  “But they’re still nosy questions and the initials aren’t much of a safeguard,” I said, “so yes, let’s keep them private.”

  “More of a safeguard than you might think,” John said. “I can see that R.L.S. is Reva Louise and D.S. is probably her husband, Dan, but who are J.S.P. and A.S.C.?”

  “And which A.C. is Angie Cobb and which one is Aaron Carlin?” Ardis asked. “Context isn’t helping.”

  “But R.L.S. could be Robert Louis Stevenson,” Thea said. “It always is in crossword puzzles. But he’s long dead and I don’t think there are any ghosts involved.”

  It might have been better if I’d run the initials past the ghost who was involved. She would have been happy to tell me the idea was a miserable f
ailure right off the bat. Why did they keep insisting I be in charge?

  “Have you got half a dozen pencils, Mel? Forget the initials. Dumb idea. I’ll tell you who they are and you can write them down.”

  “I like the initials,” said Joe. “A.S.C. is Angie, right? Angie Cobb with S for her Spiveyness.”

  “You also do the Sunday crossword in ink,” said Mel.

  “It’s good to have the copies here now so we’re all on the same page,” Joe said. “But before we leave, why don’t we give them back to you and you can e-mail updated versions after the evening’s meeting? That way, we can write on them, but if you take them home with you, we’ll know they’re safe.”

  “Thank you. That’s a great idea.”

  Mel handed around pencils. When she came past me she whispered, “You’re doing great, Red, and the initials were a nice touch. We all needed a laugh.”

  I told them who each set of initials stood for. Everyone but Joe and Ernestine wrote them down. Ernestine caught my eye with a wiggle of her fingertip toward her temple.

  “No need to write them down. I’ve been practicing memory-building skills,” she said. “Plus . . .” She held the finger up and then dipped into her purse. She brought out a large, ornate magnifying glass and held it to her eye. “No more need to use my needlework magnifier. My grandson gave me this. He says my new name is Grammy Gumshoe.”

  As they read over each side of the paper, Ernestine reading hers through the magnifying glass, I wondered what else I’d left off or garbled or twisted. The summary was three short paragraphs containing what I hoped were basic facts and not opinions.

  The first shouldn’t have contained anything anyone didn’t already know: Reva Louise Snapp, wife of Dan Snapp, half sister of Mel Gresham, half sister of Sally Ann Jilton, baker at Mel’s on Main, was killed with a shot fired from the window of the second-floor bathroom at the Weaver’s Cat.

  The second paragraph was meant to catch people up to events after the shooting: my suspicion that J. Scott Prescott had snooped through the study at the Weaver’s Cat; Prescott’s stopping by while I sat on the porch in the dark the night before; Angie’s meeting up with someone at the courthouse and subsequent disappearance; the rock through the window and with probable entry by a person unknown; John’s discovery of the guns; the bombshell for some of them—Reva Louise’s record for embezzling. I could tell when Ardis read that. She sucked in a breath and shot a look at Mel.