Spinning in Her Grave

by Molly Macrae

  • • •

  Geneva was oddly bright and chipper when I went by the Cat. She’d felt safe having the sheriff’s deputies there much of the evening. She said it was like having her own armed security force.

  “An amusing armed security force. You should have heard their wonderful jokes about yarn and knitters.”

  “Any singing last night?”

  “No, and wouldn’t that have been a hoot? I would have liked to hear a deputies’ chorus singing songs about weaving around and spinning and dyeing.”

  “I’m sure you would, but I meant did you hear Mattie?”

  She hadn’t and she hadn’t liked being reminded. I’d popped her lonely bubble of joy, she said, and now she would spend the rest of the day in gloom. I fed Argyle and left.

  • • •

  The loom houses I’d heard of in the Southeast dated to the early nineteenth century. They were built at a time when estates consisted of a main house and several separate buildings, usually log structures, such as a kitchen and an office and sometimes a loom house where the women sat to weave and spin. I was surprised, if there was a loom house worth its name anywhere near Blue Plum, that Granny hadn’t ever mentioned it. That probably meant the structure at the Snapps’ wasn’t worth the name, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth my professional—and amateur—attention.

  No one appeared to be home when I arrived. That suited me fine. I parked in the drive and knocked anyway, on a front door in sore need of a lick of paint. The house was a tall, narrow, two up, two down with another set of two and two built onto the back. At one time the place might have been full of happy voices. My knock was answered by silence.

  Around the back, out of view of the street, which was more of a country road this far from the bustling center of Blue Plum, I knocked on the kitchen door. I also peered through a window, pressed my ear to the door, counted dirty dishes on the table, and decided there were too many for them to be a useful clue. Except—if Angie was staying there, would she put up with that mess? I didn’t know. And if I saw signs of female habitation, they were as likely, or more likely, to be signs of Reva Louise.

  The fancy new boat and trailer weren’t there. Just as well. I knew next to nothing about boats and didn’t need to spend precious time gawking at one. Boat and trailer might be in the ramshackle barn, but the barn looked so unstable I didn’t think the new owner of an expensive boat would risk it. Besides, my skill at reading tire tracks and flattened grass, coupled with my knowledge of Dan’s backing abilities, told me he’d spent a deal of time maneuvering the thing in the open area between the house and the barn and then driven away. It helped that the grass hadn’t been mowed in recent weeks.

  What I took to be the loom house stood across the gravel drive from the house, snuggling up against the woods surrounding the place. It looked as though it had the right proportions for a log building of the right age. It was hard to tell; ivy covered one side and the roof and someone had covered at least the front, and probably the whole thing, in tar paper shingles. The shingles could be removed, though, and wouldn’t it be sweet to find out what was underneath? Or inside?

  I’d brought my camera as part of my cover story. I took a few pictures to “document” my search for a candidate for the National Register of Historic Buildings. I didn’t walk all the way around the building, because the weeds around the back were thick and more than waist-high. I wasn’t that invested in my cover story. I took pictures of the ivy, though, pretending I was doing before and after shots.

  The door was my first clue that this really was an old log building. It was also covered in shingles, but only on the outside. I knew because, conveniently, the door was unlocked. That probably meant there wasn’t anything inside worth stealing. But the door itself was massive by modern standards. The timbers were solid and thick. No signs of termites or borers. I closed the door behind me, for privacy’s sake, and set to my real work of snooping.

  The place needed a new roof. There were two or three walnut-sized holes overhead, and after a few minutes I was able to see well enough in the deep twilight to navigate without tripping or bumping into something. I had a small flashlight with me, too, good for closer inspections. Three of the walls were covered with cheap paneling, so cheap someone had been able to pull it away in places and break pieces off. All of the paneling had been removed from the fourth wall. Sections of more, newer paneling were stacked against that wall. A shy little tendril of ivy peaked around the edge of the paneling and there, in the corner, my flashlight showed the original logs. Wow, good-sized logs. I wondered if they were American chestnut. The building definitely had potential—poor Reva Louise.

  There was actually quite a lot of stuff in the loom house worth stealing, including yard and lawn tools Dan wasn’t wearing out with overuse. I looked through the tools and equipment, half hoping to find a rifle casually hiding next to a weed trimmer. No such luck. It did look as though someone had dreams of repairing small engines. As far as I could tell, anyway, but what did I know? There was a workbench and a newish-looking set of socket wrenches. Cans of various weights of oil. Cans of gasoline along the back wall. Seven of them. For running small engines, I guessed. Oddly enough, there was also a restaurant steam table and a collection of industrial-sized kettles and roasting pans. A meat slicer. I might have thought they were left over from Pokey’s roadhouse, but they weren’t dusty.

  There was also a two-drawer filing cabinet. The top drawer had a few folders containing parts catalogs full of exciting things like gauges and gaskets. Maybe Dan found them as exciting as I did. They were all addressed to Reva Louise. Behind the folders was a sturdy metal box, about the size of a large shoe box, with a lock. No key. I put the flashlight between my teeth and lifted the box to get a sense of what was in it. Nothing too heavy, nothing that clanked. I reminded me of a cashbox, although it didn’t look like any cashbox I’d seen. I set it back in its nest behind the file folders.

  The bottom drawer had a mouse nest in it. Geneva would have hated that. I did, too, and slammed the drawer shut. Although, speaking of mice, I heard noises at the back wall. Yeek. Mice? Rats? Raccoons? Bats? The sounds from the back wall didn’t come any closer, and the hair on my head was beginning to lie back down, when someone rattled the door latch.

  I didn’t panic and I didn’t hide. But I was crouched next to the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, behind the steam table, which was almost as good as hiding. I flicked off my flashlight and I stayed there, quieter than the bears or whatever they were at the back wall.

  Whoever came in seemed to know I was there. I wasn’t afraid, but I didn’t breathe and willed my heart to stop crashing against the walls of my chest. Whoever came in closed the door so that we were there together in the dark.

  And then whoever it was held his flashlight under his chin and turned it on.

  “Boo, Ms. Rutledge.” Stupid Clod.

  “You are without a doubt the biggest cl— What do you think you’re doing coming in here like that? Women suffer silent heart attacks, you know. How do you know I’m not having one right now?”

  “Well, not a silent one, anyway.”

  He had a point.

  “And while we’re on the subject,” he said, “what are you doing in here? In the dark. Hiding.”

  “Research.” I’d never heard myself say that word in such a squeaky voice before. It was pitiful. I coughed and tried again. “I’m developing documentation to prove that this fine log building is an early nineteenth-century—”

  “Quiet.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Do you smell that?” he asked.

  “You don’t need to be quiet to smell smoke.”

  “Did you hear that?” He pivoted to the door where it sounded as though something bigger than a mouse was doing something outside.

  Then the word “smoke” and the smell registered in my brain. I didn’t panic right off the bat, though. I waited until it made good sense.

  “T
he door?” I asked with admirable calm.

  “Something’s blocking it.”

  “Your phone?”

  “Front seat of my car. Stupid. What about yours?”

  “At home, plugged in, so it’ll be fully charged when I need it.”

  Chapter 27

  “You’re getting hysterical,” Clod said.

  “I’m trying hard not to. I am also trying not to be critical or sarcastic, but I’d like very much not to become a smoked ham in here, so please use your gun!”

  “Look at me, Kath. Look at me.” He shone his flashlight up and down his length. “Am I wearing my holster?” He was using the infuriating tone of voice of someone who doesn’t know how to calm a two-year-old, let alone the woman with whom he’s about to become seared tuna. “Do you see my gun, Kath? I did not say I won’t use my gun. I said I can’t. I can’t use my gun because my gun is not here. No gun. Besides, you obviously watch too much TV or not enough of the right kind of TV. Shooting a door, especially a thick oak-plank door with iron hardware, isn’t the best way to get out of a building. Especially a burning building. Especially a burning building that also contains seven cans of gasoline.”

  He had to mention the gasoline again. I spun around to see how close we were to blowing sky-high and following the seven cans, the roof, and the rest of the building to either North Carolina or Kingdom Come, Kentucky. I’d already dragged the cans from the back wall into the middle of the structure, but that wasn’t going to help much. The whole place was only fifteen feet by twenty. The middle of it wasn’t a safe distance from any other part of it, smoking, smoldering, crackling, or otherwise.

  “We’d better finish coming up with an alternative exit plan fast, then,” I said, turning back. “Now what are you doing?”

  He’d put the palms of his hands on the door. He held them there for a few seconds, and then moved them to another spot, and then another lower down.

  “Testing for heat,” he said.

  “Even the door’s on fire?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he straightened, reared back, and rammed his shoulder into the door. He made a good thump when he hit, and he let out a muffled “oof,” but nothing else happened. The whole sweet little loom-house-turned-storage-shed might be starting to smolder, but you couldn’t fault its stout materials and construction. Deputy Dunbar rubbed his shoulder and clamped his lips on anything further.

  “Ouch,” I said for him. “Okay, now I am going to be critical. Why don’t you have your gun? What were you going to do if I hadn’t been me you found snooping around in here? Did you think of that? What if I’d been someone else, who did have a gun?”

  “You want to know why I don’t have my gun with me? It’s because I was afraid I’d want to shoot you. And you know what the difference is between you and me?” He turned from the door to scrabble through the motley collection of yard tools I’d already searched. “It’s the difference between talk and action. You can’t shut up about the gun.” He swept aside leaf rakes and a snow shovel. “And I’m trying to get us out of here.”

  “With that?”

  He held the weed trimmer in his white-knuckled fist.

  “No.” He tossed the trimmer aside and lunged past me. “This!” With a look of triumph, he grabbed a three-foot length of black pipe from the shadows against the wall behind me. He weighed it in both hands like a trophy fish. Then he moved his hands apart and I saw, as though he’d performed sleight of hand, there were actually two pipes, one sliding in and out of the other, and the inner piece ended in a wicked-looking wedged tip, like a giant screwdriver.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Solid-steel salvation!”

  “Hang on a second, though—”

  “No time.”

  We were both coughing from the acrid smoke by then, and flames licked the back wall, but there was something there in the shadows. . . .

  “But there’s—”

  “No buts. Wish me luck, little sweetheart, and then stand back.” Before I realized what was happening, he swept me into a one-armed embrace, planted a kiss on my lips, and pushed me behind him.

  And then Deputy Cole Dunbar, man of action but not so many listening skills, holding the whatever-it-was like a medieval pole-arm or miniature battering ram, charged full tilt at the door. And in the split second before he smashed our way out of that fiery death trap, I knew I should be impressed, grateful, and possibly in starry-eyed love with a true hero.

  Instead I felt like a complete heel. There I was, surrounded by smoke, threatened by flames and exploding gasoline cans, being rescued by a tall, fit, gung ho deputy sheriff, and the only thoughts sputtering in my head were A kiss? Little sweetheart? Well, this is a disturbing turn of events.

  Almost as disturbing as Clod’s unforewarned endearments was the tremendous slamming clang of one metal pipe sliding into the other and, judging from the tremendous explosion of cursing, the massive pinching of fingers between those pipes when they all met that really sturdy early-nineteenth-century door. But it was exactly that commotion that convinced me I wasn’t even on the outskirts of the neighborhood of being in love with Clod Dunbar. Because if I were in love, or even in strong like, then I probably would have turned around to see if he was bleeding or in one piece.

  Instead I groped for the edge of the paneling stacked against the wall where Clod had discovered his implement of self-destruction. That shy tendril of ivy I’d seen earlier—that tendril of green ivy—was sneaking in from behind those panels and it must be coming from somewhere with sunlight and fresh air. Maybe, just maybe . . .

  I pushed and pried and coughed, shifting the panels . . .

  Clod clanged and banged and cursed away at the door and then he was coughing and retching. I looked over. He’d dropped his battering ram and had his hands on his knees, trying to get a breath.

  “It’s no use,” he gasped. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought that would work.”

  “That’s okay. Maybe this will. But now we really do need to hurry.”

  By the time we’d wrenched the long-unused window open, and clawed our way through the thick curtain of ivy hiding it from the outside world, and tumbled through, and stumbled to a safe distance to collapse in the bright sun and the sweet, sweet green, unmowed grass and gulp clean, fresh air, we heard the sirens of the Blue Plum Volunteer Fire Department.

  And Clod looked over at me and said, “So, you wanna grab a beer sometime?”

  I started to think that I couldn’t believe this guy. That he had some nerve and that nerve was blind or unobservant. Did he never catch my aggression? Aggression that ranged from quiet sarcasm to a fist breaking his nose? That didn’t tell him this was a no-go? That I was not interested?

  But maybe sharing a near-death experience does more than make one’s life flash before one’s eyes. It had certainly added another layer of confusion to my life. I looked at him. He sat up and cradled the fingers he’d creamed with the log splitter, an expectant, clueless look on his face, waiting for my answer.

  “Make it a whiskey,” I said, “and you’re on.”

  Chapter 28

  We didn’t get around to setting a day or time. The commotion of the fire trucks arriving took over the moment and Clod dragged himself to his feet to go be in his element.

  “Stay over here,” he said. “Stay out of the way.”

  No strings attached. That was the first thing I needed to tell him when we met for our drink. No strings attached or I really would stay out of his way.

  • • •

  Someone had wedged a length of two-by-four between the ground and the antique door latch so that the more Clod had tried to crash our way out, the tighter the two-by-four became wedged. One of the volunteer firemen told me that. There was also evidence of an accelerant, possibly gasoline.

  “I guess we’re lucky to be alive.” I’d turned my back to the loom house. Fiery death trap aside, it was a piece of history and it hurt to watch it burn.

  • �
�� •

  “You are lucky to be alive!” Ardis stormed when I walked through the front door of the Cat. Debbie stood beside her at the counter, fists on her hips. I got the impression Ardis had coached her. The look of relief on her face didn’t match the posture, and when I smiled at her she raised one hand in a little wave. Ardis grabbed the hand and put it back on Debbie’s hip.

  “Shh, Ardis, the firemen said they would’ve gotten us out in plenty of time because old buildings like that take a while to really catch. I’m fine. I’ve been home, took a shower, smell as good as new. It’s okay.”

  “Except for the small matter that someone tried to kill you.”

  “Which is great, because it proves our point that someone meant to kill Reva Louise. I’m looking at this as a win-win situation. I’m alive. The police believe us.”

  Ardis still didn’t look happy, but her eyes weren’t focused like lasers on me anymore. She was thinking. Her eyes moved from left to right, as though her thinking process was laid out before them and her eyes were following it step by step. When they reached far right, she looked at me and nodded. “That means we need to work fast, hon, if we want to find the killer first.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “And you know what I always say. There’s nothing like lighting a fire under a cop to get things going.”

  • • •

  The loom house fire got a lot of people going, and most of them stopped by the Weaver’s Cat that afternoon. Debbie, thank goodness, said she could stay until four to help the “real” customers while Ardis and I dealt with the rest and figured out our next move.

  “Our next move is as simple as A-B-C,” Ardis said. “Alibis, bad guys, and criminality. Figure those key parts out and we’re home free.”

  “Let’s not talk like that in front of the customers, though. Did Ernestine and John get hold of Prescott?”

  “They did and they made an appointment. He said he would meet them at the mercantile at ten, but he left them standing on the sidewalk like brides at the altar. He did not return further calls.”