by Molly Macrae
“I wonder if Al’s mother was a knitter. I wonder if Granny knew her.”
“No idea if she was into any kind of needlework,” Joe said. “They joined every organization they could. Happy to help, happy to donate money when asked. But it wouldn’t have mattered if Al’s father had come down here and given folks the honest-to-God and verifiable secret to spinning straw into gold. An awful lot of them wouldn’t have listened. Some would’ve listened, but after they’d spun their fortunes, they still wouldn’t have liked Mr. Rogalla.” Joe ticked off a string of unflattering adjectives off on his fingers. “I heard every one of those applied to that family.”
“Al’s still here, though.”
“Yeah, because he was that big, muscular kid, and he had an incredibly thick hide. His folks and younger sister moved on. Al never had his folks’ attitude. He probably could have gone anywhere he wanted after college, but he liked it here. After graduation he came back and made a place for himself.”
“But some memories never let go?”
“W-e-e-e-e-e-l-l, there’s still the matter of the long-standing records he rushed right into the ground.”
“Oh, come on.”
“People like their grudges. There but for Al Rogalla stood a record they or their boys might have knocked down. And no one’s busted that record since.”
“Wait a second. Now I know where I heard that name. Your brother. Yesterday morning. He asked if I’d been talking to Hugh McPhee at the courthouse. I told him I didn’t know, and he said he’d find out—before Rogalla found out. What kind of rivalry have they got going?”
“Pfft. There’s always been something between the firefighters and the deputies. That tug-of-war they have across the creek every summer? No playacting involved.”
“You’re not serious.”
“And Cole?” Joe said. “Captain of the varsity team junior and senior year. Starting quarterback both years. Had his eye—they all had their eyes—on breaking Hugh McPhee’s record. And Cole got it into his head that but for Al from Chicago, he would have been hailed the next Hugh McPhee.”
“That’s so . . . wait. It was Hugh McPhee’s record? You might have mentioned that sooner.”
“Didn’t I? But what difference does it make? How could that record have anything to do with Hugh’s death? Hugh was the hero and Al was the villain. Years ago. But he was the villain for killing the record. Why would he kill the hero, too? Especially at this late date?”
“You said there were long memories,” I reminded him.
“But long, lethal memories? And why kill Hugh? Rogalla’s the one who broke the record and destroyed the myth of invincible Hugh McPhee.”
“Yeah, I guess if the long memories came into play, either Cole or Rogalla would snap and one of them would kill the other.”
“It wouldn’t happen, though,” Joe said. “Al’s never had anything against Cole, personally, and by now Cole’s gotten so used to hating Al that if he stopped to think about it, he’d realize they’re friends. What? You don’t believe that?”
“I’ll have to see them out for a beer together before I believe it.”
“It could be true, though. It makes a nice story, anyway.”
“You only think that because you’re a booth-half-built kind of guy. Cole’s more of a single-minded mule playing tug-of-war.”
That reminded him that he had to get back to assembling his booth, and I wanted to call Ardis again.
“Why don’t you call her now?” Joe asked.
But I wanted to wait until I was home, surrounded by Granny’s things, her comfortable memories, in case there was any reason to fall apart. Not that I was really worried Ardis had been arrested. Or detained for hours. Not really. But where was she? So I told Joe I didn’t want to distract him from his work, and he wiggled his eyebrows in a distracting way, so that it took a few minutes to say good-bye. Then I drove home, hoping to find no one there.
All appeared to be well as I rolled cautiously down Lavender Street. No cars lurked at the curb under the maple in front of the house. None waited for me down the driveway when I turned in. The house looked quiet. It sounded quiet, too, when I stopped outside the back door before going in. A stale whiff of Mercy’s cologne brushed past my nose when I opened the door, but it dissipated when I fanned the door a time or two. I went into the living room and sat in one of the faded blue comfy chairs, letting my head rest in the hollow Granny’s had made and left for me. Except for my nerves, all was peaceful. I called Ardis, and she finally answered on the eighth ring.
“Don’t you check your messages?” she asked. “I sent you a text a couple of hours ago.”
“It never showed up.”
“I wonder who I sent it to. It’s this new phone. Well, never mind. All is well and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Wait! Did you learn anything from Darla? About the paper? The book? The sporran? How he died? Anything?”
“Darla was being cagey,” she, the Queen of Cage, said.
“So nothing?”
“Well, now, I wouldn’t say it was nothing. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Good night, hon.”
“Wait! Ardis?”
“Daddy,” she shouted, though not directly into the phone, “I’ll be there in two shakes. Keep your shirt on. That was not an idiom, Kath,” she said, speaking to me again. “He’s been stripping off and prancing around all evening and here he goes again. All I can say is thank goodness he sleeps through the night and God bless the in-home day care ladies who let me out of this nuthouse during daylight hours. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
* * *
I dreamed that night that I was juggling bombs. Bombs that fell whistling toward my hands, and the whistle turned into the wheeze of bagpipes. I was a good juggler until I got cocky. Then I dropped one of the bombs. But it vaporized before it hit the ground, and became a misty, gray ghost. That startled me and I missed the next one. As I watched it fall to the floor, it turned into a pair of pants, and when I looked up, Ardis’ daddy pranced by.
* * *
“If I were able to make a pot of coffee for you, I would,” Geneva said when I let myself in the back door of the Cat the next morning. “Your disguise does not help.”
“Good morning to you, too. What are you talking about?”
“Slender black skirt, snug-as-a-bug emerald green sweater with the plunging neckline.”
“It’s called a V-neck, and in this case it isn’t much more than a lowercase v.”
“But meant to attract and distract. Do you see how well I am noticing? You dressed up because you are feeling down.”
“Close. Tired, though, not down. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”
“The distraction isn’t working. Have you looked at your eyes in the mirror? I am sorry, but I believe that even I look livelier than you do this morning. Perhaps I should keep Ardent company in the shop this morning so you can take a nap in the window seat upstairs with Argyle. He has not come down yet, because neither of us expected you this early.”
“Ardis would be happy to see you in the shop.”
“She’s happy and yappy and you look crappy.” She slapped her hands to her mouth, then took them away. “Have you noticed that I am helpless in the face of a snappy rhyme? But really, do think about taking a nap. You might be surprised how improving they can be.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Argyle and I slept quite well in the absence of midnight bagpipes. What was your problem? A guilty conscience?”
“A bad dream. It had a bagpipe in it, though. Why would I have a guilty conscience?”
“Because,” she said, floating closer and whispering, “you’re sneaking in here to talk to me before Ardent shows up. Keeping things from your business partner could easily lead to a guilty conscience. And bags under the eyes.”
“I do want to talk to
you, but this is something that Ardis knows about. It’s not a secret from her; it’s a secret from almost everyone else in town.”
“So you and I are having a hush-hush rendezvous?”
“A hush-hush rendezvous about a hush-hush rendezvous. It’s about something a group of us is getting together to do, later tonight, and I wondered if you’d like to come along. The whole thing’s been top secret. That’s why you haven’t heard us talking about it.”
She leaned close. “Top secret?”
“Yes. It’s called a yarn bombing.”
She mouthed the word “bomb” and a shiver ran through her. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but her hollow eyes grew wider. “Tell me all about it,” she said. “Spare no details.”
I spared most of the details because I figured either they didn’t matter or they’d bore her. Although maybe I didn’t spare enough of them. When I got to the part about everyone coming back to the Cat afterward, for refreshments, she drew back.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “How does this tie in with our investigation?”
“It doesn’t. It’s more like an art project.”
“Then I am getting it even less. How is it that you have time for frivolity and yarn spewing when there is a murderer on the loose?”
“Sometimes what looks like fun and games, or what begins that way, turns out to yield the best clues. It’s a strategy of blending in and observing. You’re good at both of those, you know.”
“Yes, I do know. They are two of my strengths.”
“The yarn bombing is something we’ve been planning and looking forward to. We think it’ll add extra zest to the town and the arts and crafts fair this weekend.”
“And nothing says ‘zest’ like yarn and bombs?”
“Something like that. Besides, when we’ve worked on cases in the past, we haven’t spent every second investigating. The rest of life goes on.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Sorry. That was insensitive.”
“I forgive you. But I do see what you mean. Death goes on, too. And on and on. Do you know what has occurred to me? You and I are always in a life-and-death situation. We are the yin and yang of existence.” She wafted back and forth—miming yin and yang with her arms, first one on top, then the other—in a watery, ghostly ballet.
“Did you believe in ghosts when you were alive?”
She froze, left arm cradling her imaginary yin-yang orb, her right arm curved over its top. I froze, too. The question I’d asked was the kind that had so often made her howl, in the past, or sent her into a huddle of gray mist. She’d mellowed over the months we’d known each other, though. Mellowed somewhat. I held my breath.
“Death was not such a stranger to us then, as it is to people now,” she said. “Although you and I seem to attract more than our share.”
“Deputy Dunbar would agree with you on that. But did you believe in ghosts?” I hesitated. “Did you see them?”
She stared at me and swayed. I thought I might have pressed my luck. She didn’t swell or look thunderous, though. “Have you ever seen a wreath made from human hair?” she asked. “Mourners weave them from the hair of deceased loved ones.”
“We had a few of them in the museum’s collections back in Illinois. People don’t make them anymore.”
“I’m glad.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Someone put one in my hands when I was a child. It didn’t feel like hair.”
“The ones I saw were fairly intricate. From the way they were braided and woven, I can imagine they wouldn’t feel much like hair anymore. Not like the hair on someone’s head.”
“The wreath felt cold in my hands.” She held her hands out as though they carried a great and sorrowful weight. “The cold sucked at me like a breath. The wreath felt like death in my hands, and I dropped it.” She rubbed her upper arms to warm herself, or to scrub the memory of that feeling from her hands. “I dropped it, because in my hands it was no longer a wreath. It was a ghost. Do you know what I mean?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
“You do know what I mean,” she said, “because you see ghosts and you feel them the same way I did. That’s what is happening when you touch people. You feel something, don’t you?”
“Not always. Sometimes.” She was talking about that other weird “talent” I’d developed after Granny died—the ability to “feel” a person’s emotions by touching a piece of clothing. Love, hate, confusion, fear. But not always, thank goodness, and not when I touched a person I’d come to know, trust, and love. “Only sometimes,” I said. “And not everyone.”
She was suddenly directly in front of me, her eyes pulling mine in. “You do feel ghosts, though, and when you do, they come like a jolt out of the blue.”
“No. Not ghosts.”
“Not like me, but ghosts all the same. Ghosts of feelings. Ghosts of emotional energy. And that feeling—that connection—gives you the willies.”
She was giving me the willies.
“Don’t turn away,” she said.
I couldn’t. She was right. Or her words for the weird sensation were as good as any—ghosts of feelings. “When you felt the wreath, you felt—”
“The agony of a woman dying in childbirth.”
“And was that the only time you felt emotional energy?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“As you said, it was only sometimes.”
“But what did you do? How did you deal with it? You’re right; it comes like a jolt. How did you handle it?”
“I do not remember that I did. Although a child will learn not to touch a hot stove.”
We hadn’t moved from the kitchen. I could hear someone coming up the back steps, probably Ardis, but I didn’t turn to see.
“Geneva, quick, why do I see you? Why do I feel whatever that energy is? Why did you? Do you know? Now that you’re dead, have you found out why?”
She stopped midshrug as Ardis put her key in the lock. “I’ve told you before. I’m only dead; I’m not an expert. But if your granny was still here, and if you could ask her, what do you think she would say?”
The back door said, “Baa,” Geneva echoed it and disappeared, and Ardis blustered in, already talking.
“I might as well admit it front, right, and center,” she said. “I know, I know. This isn’t how we planned to do it. But you know how carried away I get, especially when emotions are running high, so let me just confess and get it over with.” She stopped for a wide-eyed breath, then rushed on. “It’s out of the bag and it won’t go back in.”
“And, um, I think I might still be outside this conversation trying to get in.”
“Really? I thought for sure you were getting suspicious when you finally got hold of me last night.”
“Mm, no. There were several layers of worry going on, with a heavy infusion of angst about your interview with Darla, but no suspicion. I’m suspicious now, though.” I tried a Geneva maneuver and took a step closer.
“Oh.” She glanced at the door, as though there might be time to slide back out of it and come in again, minus the confession. But that wasn’t like Ardis. She turned back to me, squared her shoulders, and pasted a large repertory theater smile on her face. “I told Deputy Darla about the yarn bombing and guess what. She’s decided to join us.”
Chapter 15
“It’s a bit of a bombshell, isn’t it, hon.” Ardis might as well have said there, there and patted my cheek. She didn’t pat; she fixed her repertory theater smile back in place and brought her hands together in a single loud clap. “And here we are. B-day at last. That’s catchy, don’t you think? B for bombshell. B for yarn bombing. B for Blue Plum. B for I am beyond excited. Let’s go with what we’ve got. No, let’s run with what we’ve got—and who we’ve got—and see what h
appens.”
I hadn’t really moved past suspicion yet, so I almost certainly didn’t look as excited about a sheriff’s deputy joining us as Ardis hoped. Not that I had anything against Darla, but we’d discussed and agreed not to . . .
“Ardis, why—”
“Why don’t I go open shop for the day? That’s what I was about to say myself. I’m glad we’re on the same wavelength.” With that, she turned tail and very nearly ran for the front room.
Speaking of tails, Argyle trotted down the stairs from the attic with his tail held high and a trill on his lips. He twined around my ankles to let me know he was happy to see me and would also be happy to have breakfast.
“And how happy would you be,” I asked him as I tipped his favorite fishy kibbles into his dish, “to have a sheriff’s deputy joining you while you’re covering the town in graffiti?”
Argyle said, “Mrrph,” which was noncommittal but sounded calm and practical. I hung around in the kitchen while he ate, waiting to see if Geneva would reappear, and practicing a calm and practical acceptance of our evolving bomb squad.
“The more the merrier, right, Argyle? Although, after hearing John describe Ambrose as ‘mean as snakes’ more than a few times, I think we have to wonder if anyone will end up being merry with him along. And how many more surprises do you think we’ll have before we’re finished tonight?”
He asked for a few more kibbles.
“Sure, why not? Here’s a better question. How many more surprises do you think we can stand?”
He finished breakfast without offering any further advice, and I followed his calm, practical tail down the hall to join Ardis in the front room. She and a customer, whose back was to us, were standing next to the mannequin, chatting as though the three of them were old friends. The four of them. The air above the mannequin’s left shoulder rippled and—surprise, surprise—Geneva appeared.
Ardis, bless her self-control, acknowledged Geneva with a barely perceptible nod. When she saw me, she used some of her pent-up enthusiasm to wave me over. Argyle naturally assumed he was welcome, too, and leapt onto the counter, inviting everyone within reach to scrub him between the ears. The customer declined his pretty invitation and took a step back.
