Spinning in Her Grave

by Molly Macrae

  “You don’t have to do this,” Debbie was saying. “I don’t want you to do this.” She stood in front of the chair, her hands together, pressed to her lips.

  “Yeah, I think you really do,” said Sally Ann.

  “Why?” Debbie pleaded.

  Sally Ann wasn’t listening. “Don’t move, Dan. Don’t move. Kath, get over here. Now! And help Debbie tie his hands.”

  Debbie whimpered and scrambled for a skein of thick yarn. I moved toward them, looking for something I could grab, something to disarm or disorient Sally Ann. Disorient. Where was Geneva when I needed her billowing fog? There was movement over our heads and I quickly looked up. Geneva was wrapped around the blades of the fan.

  “Don’t forget to tie the frock-coated poltroon’s feet, too,” she called.

  “Kath!” Sally Ann shouted. “I am not kidding.”

  While Debbie tied his hands, I started on his feet. He tried to kick, but Sally Ann pressed the shears harder against his throat and he quit. I couldn’t bear to look at his face, in his eyes.

  “What’s going on, Sally Ann?” I asked.

  “It’s all your doing, Kath.” Her voice was chillingly matter-of-fact.

  “How? How is it my doing?” I tried to match her tone, hoping to draw this out until help arrived. If it did.

  “It was all you. Asking about Reva Louise’s phone. Stirring things up. It worked. But maybe better than you thought, and now look.”

  “This isn’t going to work, Sally Ann.”

  “Yes, it is. It already has. Debbie, go on over there and stay out of the way.” Sally Ann nodded to the other side of the room. “If it hadn’t been for you, Kath, Reva Louise’s phone might’ve stayed lost.”

  I heard a siren by then and braced myself for Sally Ann’s reaction when it registered with her. I wondered if I’d be able to fend her off, or tackle her if I had to, to protect Debbie or Dan.

  She flicked a cool glance at me. “You called nine-one-one? Where’s your phone? Where is your phone? Get it. Call 555-7185, quick—555-7185.”

  I grabbed the phone, dialed, then held it away from my ear, not sure what to expect, and definitely not expecting what I heard. “That’s Reva Louise’s ringtone, isn’t it?”

  Frank Sinatra was singing “My Way” in Dan’s pants.

  • • •

  “But I had it backward,” I whispered to Ardis. “I was being so clever turning things around that I ended up backward.”

  “Only at the very end, hon, and at this point it doesn’t matter. Turn yourself around one more time and look at Sally Ann over there.”

  Sally Ann looked tired, but more sure of herself than I’d ever seen her. She tucked loose hair behind her ear and listened to whatever Clod was telling her, her shoulders square, her arms and hands relaxed, no itching or twitching from nerves or wool. Debbie stood beside her giving moral support, but she wasn’t really needed.

  Ardis and Clod, his lone siren wailing, had arrived simultaneously and both tried to get through the front door at the same time. Ardis won. Sally Ann had refused to give the shears to Clod until I’d explained what was going on. She seemed to think I’d known what I was doing all along, and when I looked at it the right way around I saw that she hadn’t threatened Debbie or me at all. She’d enlisted our help to hold Dan until the police got there. Geneva was happy to fill me in on what I’d missed while I was in the kitchen on the phone with Thea.

  “Yon Snapp slithered in and sat down,” she said, reveling in the details. “Sally Ann was all sweet worry and concern. She said she supposed he’d already asked the police about Reva Louise’s phone. He claimed grief and said it hadn’t occurred to him, but he betrayed himself with a sly look at his pocket. Sally Ann saw and so did I. I am sorry I didn’t recognize him in your slide show, but I only saw him from behind that day. The back end of him is not very distinctive, and the sooner we see it, the better, I say.”

  Clod listened to us with his professional, unimpressed cop face. Dan Snapp had nothing intelligent to say for himself; no one had taken the wad of roving from his mouth. Ardis was triumphant and enjoyed rubbing it in.

  “And so, my dear Coleridge,” she said, producing the slightest wrinkle of a wince in his starch, “we have solved another crime for you. Our good work here is done. Please take the garbage out when you go. One question before you do, though. Were you even close to an arrest before we took over for you?”

  “Would you like me to quote the statistics on how women are more likely to be murdered by their husbands than perfect strangers?” Clod asked.

  “And yet,” Ardis said, “here we are.”

  “May I ask Dan a few questions?” I asked. “I think he owes some of us and the Weaver’s Cat some answers.”

  “He isn’t obliged to say anything,” Clod said. “And when my backup gets here, he’s gone.” Clod took a pair of latex gloves and an evidence bag from a pocket and removed the makeshift gag.

  I did look into Dan Snapp’s face then. I wanted to see the eyes of a man who could shoot his wife and traumatize a town, call it the saddest day of his life, and then buy himself a boat. But there wasn’t anything special in them. Not even the tear I’d seen earlier. He looked past me out the front window.

  “Why did you bother to come back here today? What were you planning to do?” He didn’t answer, but his eyes shifted from the front window. They flicked to his hip pocket, then toward the stairs and overhead. “You were going to hide the phone upstairs? Really? That’s so uninspired.”

  “Zing!” Geneva said.

  “And your eyes give you away,” I added. “Why didn’t you just get rid of the phone?”

  His eyes spoke for him then, too. They didn’t have nice things to say.

  “But it was you who threw the rock through our window, right? And came in to hide the guns?”

  “Ask him if he heard Mattie singing,” Geneva said.

  Why not? I did and that question got a response.

  “What?”

  I didn’t look around to see if his opinion of the question was mirrored on anyone else’s face, but as long as I’d gotten something out of him, I decided to try one more question. “Why did you set fire to the loom house and try to kill Deputy Dunbar and me?”

  “Pest control.”

  Clod shifted by the door but didn’t say anything. Sally Ann came and stood next to me, arms crossed over her narrow chest. “Dan, you’re about the laziest man I know,” she said without any emotion. “And now I know you for the evilest. Reva Louise said it took a prod in your posterior just to make you pick up your feet, much less pick up after yourself.”

  “She did, did she?” He didn’t seem interested.

  “And that makes it hard for me to believe you did this on your own.”

  “Believe what you like, Sally Ann.”

  “And that’s the problem right there,” she said. “You can’t even stir yourself enough to make someone else believe in you. So, no, I don’t think you could’ve done this. Not on your own. I don’t believe it.” Sally Ann’s voice was rising. “Reva Louise did everything for you. She organized your life for you. And someone else is leading you now. Who?”

  “Ms. Jilton.” Clod touched her elbow.

  “There is someone,” Sally Ann insisted, yanking away from Clod. “Because Dan Snapp wouldn’t move a muscle to swat a mosquito if it was biting his—”

  “Wrong, Sally Ann,” Dan said. “That is where you’re wrong. And that is where you’re just like her. You will not stop. She would not stop. She. Would. Not. Stop. And it always had to be her way. So yeah, you’re right. There was someone else in charge, someone else responsible. Reva Louise. She did it to herself. None of this would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for her. So I showed her I could do something. I called her and I told her where to stand and I shot her. But she’s the one to blame. And you want to know why I kept her stupid phone? Because in the end, I did it my way.”

  Clod’s backup was there by then. He and Clod
got Dan to his feet and started for the door. I called one last question after them.

  “How did you get through the cow parsnip behind your building when you set the fire? That stuff’s like poison ivy. Why aren’t you itching?”

  “There’s no cow parsnip back there,” Dan said. “Where’d you get a fool idea like that?”

  We watched as Clod and his partner hustled Dan out. Then I turned to Sally Ann, a question still niggling in my mind and a risk I needed to take—I put my hand on Sally Ann’s shoulder and felt nothing but the soft warmth of the flannel shirt and Sally Ann’s thin shoulder.

  “Can I ask you a weird question, Sally Ann?”

  “About singing?”

  “About the shirt you had on the other night at Mel’s. Remember? I asked if it was Reva Louise’s.”

  “I don’t know why it matters to you. I told you it wasn’t.”

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “She borrowed it when I left it at the café one day. It took me a while to get it back. You asked what she was like as a kid? Like that. Big on ‘borrowing.’ And in the end, she borrowed a whole lot of trouble, didn’t she?”

  • • •

  Mel heard from her source in Knoxville that J. Scott Prescott returned there and was being treated for a hellacious number of infected flea bites. He was resting uncomfortably at his parents’ and applying for jobs. When she called to tell me, I mentioned the curious box I’d seen in the loom house.

  “I don’t know what was in it. But the place didn’t burn to the ground, and the box might’ve been protected enough that it survived.”

  “And you mention this to me, why?” Mel asked.

  “The box intrigued me. I’m nosy. She was your sister. Maybe you can get access.”

  “Not because Joe told you I kept my mother’s and grandmother’s recipes in a box?”

  “No, he didn’t tell me that.”

  “Good. Thanks, Kath.”

  • • •

  It was the spinners, Jackie and Abby, who said we should try one more time to celebrate with our own mini Blue Plum Preserves at the Weaver’s Cat.

  “‘Preserves’ has almost the same letters as ‘persevere,’” Jackie said. “And it never hurts to do that.”

  Ardis, Debbie, and I agreed and we planned it for that Saturday. “It’s short notice, but the sooner we get all this behind us, the better,” Debbie said. “Because the world keeps spinning, and that’s what we need to do, too.” We didn’t care if we attracted a crowd or not; between the other demonstration spinners and all of TGIF, there would be crowd enough.

  Joe stopped by to ask if we’d like live music. “It’s someone new,” he said, “who lost out when the festival was shut down early.”

  “That’s a fine idea,” Ardis said.

  “There’s a short intro act, too,” Joe said. “You’ll like it. Oh, and I’ll bring your new back doorbell over then.”

  • • •

  The day after we trapped Dan—it didn’t seem possible it was only Wednesday—I took Geneva a present. She smelled the gingerbread before I was halfway up the stairs to the study.

  “I truly do think I’ve died and gone home to my mama’s kitchen,” she said, swirling around me. “Mama would have been the first to tell you that you are gooder than any angel.”

  “Sometime will you tell me more about your mama’s kitchen? And your mama?”

  “Yes, but hush. Not now.”

  I cut the gingerbread into squares and put one piece on a plate for her in her “room.” I took the rest down to the kitchen and froze the pieces individually so she had spares for days or weeks to come. When I went back up to the study, she was curled around the plate in the cupboard, crooning.

  Thea had given me copies of the personals she’d found in old issues of the Blue Plum Bugle. They’d appeared in the October 7 and October 14, 1872, editions. I didn’t show the copies to Geneva or tell her about them. Her distress over Mattie and Sam was real whether or not her vivid “memories” were. Somewhere, somehow, sometime she had internalized a traumatic incident and she absolutely believed that she’d seen Mattie and Sam lying dead in a green grassy field. I wanted to help her. Gingerbread therapy was probably a lame start, but maybe there was something more I could do. I took Granny’s private dye journals, with their supposed hocus-pocus, from the shelf above Geneva and went to sit in the window seat.

  Toward the end of the second journal, I found a sample of warm yellow wool. The name for the accompanying recipe, written out in Granny’s neat hand, was “Wax Myrtle and Hellebore, Sweet Memories Evermore.” Geneva wouldn’t be able to feel or touch warm yellow wool, so I wasn’t sure what good this would do—I wasn’t sure about anything associated with Granny’s dye journals—but how could it hurt to knit a pretty, warm yellow shawl and lay it on the window seat? If nothing else, Argyle would look handsome curled up on it.

  • • •

  Saturday was a whirl—a “whorl,” as Debbie said—of spinners and spinning wheels on the porch and in almost every room. Abby came wearing shorts and a T-shirt and gave herself the title “Mobile Advertising Manager.” She walked from one end of our block of Main Street to the other, showing off her drop spindle prowess with nonstop spinning. She told us she’d silk-screened the T-shirt especially for the day. It said SPIN, IT’S IN on the front and THE WEAVER’S CAT IS WHERE IT’S AT on the back. Ardis and I offered her a part-time job on the spot.

  Ernestine circulated through the rooms, stopping a couple of times to ask the mannequin if it was having a good time. Geneva, sitting on the mannequin’s shoulder, answered politely that she enjoyed a good mob scene. John manned a table of cookies and lemonade Mel sent over. Sally Ann sent her regrets. Mel had lent her the money to go see her mother down in Florida. Argyle thought it better to nap in the study.

  Thea set herself up as a recruiter for Fast and Furious. She sat in one of the comfy chairs, surrounded by the plastic bins full of our baby hats. While she worked on another of her favorite red-and-white-striped beanies, she encouraged people to guess how many hats we’d already made.

  “It’s a story problem,” she told one child. “If a librarian and her friends set out to knit one thousand hats between January first and December thirty-first, and if they aren’t hit by a freight train driven by Curious George going east at fifty miles per hour, how many hats have they knit by the middle of July?”

  Joe wouldn’t tell us anything about the musician or opening act, saying only that the show would start at eleven, on the front porch, and if well received, be repeated at two. I would say that he and I were shy of each other since “The Night of the Dead-End Kiss” as I liked to think of it, but we didn’t have a history of being much more than shy with each other. I was working up the nerve to change that.

  Clod had stopped by the shop once and I’d repaid Ardis for all the times she did her Spivey-induced disappearing act. He might have called, too, but I’d turned my phone off and wasn’t checking messages.

  At five minutes of eleven, Joe shooed Ardis, Debbie, and me out to the kitchen.

  “It’ll be best if you go out this way and around so you get the full frontal effect,” he said. “Ready?” He opened the back door.

  “Baaaaa,” said the door.

  “What do you think?” Joe asked. He closed the door and opened it again. It baaed beautifully each time. “I used a recordable sound chip.”

  Ardis grabbed his head and kissed his brow.

  • • •

  Aaron Carlin, in bowler hat and sleeve garters, stood at the top of the front steps as we rounded the corner.

  “Welcome to Dr. Carlin’s Porch of Incredible Wonders,” he said as we approached. “For the next ten minutes I will astound you with exhibits and artifacts the likes of which you never thought you’d pay to see, and for this onetime, limited-edition show, which will be repeated at two o’clock this afternoon, you indeed haven’t. At great personal expense and risk to my personal reputation, I have acquired these
items, gathering them from the six corners of the globe. Everything I am about to show you is real—including the six-foot-tall man eating chicken—and everything I say is true.”

  “Lord love a duck,” Ardis whispered, “the man’s a raving genius.”

  Aaron delighted the crowd with, as he said, “but a tiny fraction of his vast and incredible collection,” bringing his exhibits one at a time from behind a trifold screen in a corner of the porch. He showed us vials that had contained not two, but three, identical snowflakes—alas, no longer in their solid state. He had the skulls of Japanese dragons, the skull of Charles Darwin, and the skull of Charles Darwin as a boy. He described the world’s largest jackalope antler but didn’t have it with him. “No room,” he said.

  “Now, what you’ve all been waiting for. Ladies and gentlemen, please stand back if you are easily frightened by poultry. I give you, the six-foot-tall man eating chicken.

  Joe stepped from behind the screen, gnawing on a drumstick.

  • • •

  Shirley and Mercy had joined the crowd on the sidewalk at some point, unamused. They sidled over to say they’d been coerced. Ardis sidled away. Joe took her place beside me and handed the twins each a wing and me another leg.

  “Mel doesn’t need you today?” I asked.

  “She hired someone. Started right off the bat this morning. Doing a split shift today.” In-the-know Joe. “Look,” he said, nodding toward the porch.

  Aaron, with a guitar now instead of the bowler and sleeve garters, sat down on the top step and started playing a haunting melody. And Angela Cobb stepped from behind the screen. She held the edge of it for a moment and then she walked to the top step, held her arms wide, and sang.

  “Oh, my angel,” Mercy murmured.

  “She’ll need to be back at the café for the supper shift,” said Joe. “Been taking a restaurant course at Northeast State, couple of singing classes. Impressed Mel with her tarts and crème brûlée.”

  “She wasn’t studying real estate?” I asked.

  “Apparently not. She and Aaron kind of hooked up last weekend. Sort of ‘clinched’ the deal inn the Tent of Incredible Wonders Saturday night.”