Spin a Wicked Web

by Cricket McRae

  I slid onto the cedar picnic bench. Brodie waddled over and sat by my foot, making corgi noises in his throat. Now that I had food, I was back on his A-list.

  Across the table, Meghan leaned forward, anticipation all over her face. "So? Who was she?"

  I glanced at Erin, an even more petite version of her mother, and asked, "How was math camp today?"

  "Fun enough," she said. "We played with Mobius strips. Mom already told us some strange woman was at Barr's house today, and you went over there to yell at him about it. So don't try to send me inside or anything."

  Meghan suddenly became inordinately interested in one of our hens pecking at the tray of oyster shell in their pen. What a gossip, I thought, surprised. Maybe Barr should have asked for her help instead of mine.

  "It certainly does sound like you've had a full day," Ruth said.

  "That's putting it mildly." I took a bite of salad. Something peppery in there. I peered at my plate. Ah. Nasturtium leaves. I swallowed. "I either won't sleep at all tonight, or I'll sleep like the dead."

  Meghan coughed.

  "Oh, God. Not like the dead, I mean, you know…" I rubbed my forehead.

  "Whatever," Erin said. "So who was the lady at Barr's house?"

  "We don't want to pry," Ruth said. "But we want to know you're okay."

  So Meghan had told her, too. I couldn't blame her.

  "I'm fine," I said. "It turns out he did tell me about Hannahthat's her name, Ruth. But I didn't realize they were married."

  "He's not actually married now, is he?" Meghan asked.

  "No, it all happened several years ago, and apparently only lasted a couple months."

  "Then what's she doing here now?"

  Between bites, I told them most of my conversation with Barr up until I walked outside his house. Then I found myself growing silent.

  "So Barr's rich?" Erin asked.

  "I guess," I said, reluctant to talk about it further. Now I understood why he'd had such a hard time telling me about his sudden wealth. The idea of having that much money bordered on the obscene.

  Both Meghan and Ruth seemed to sense my unwillingness. "Are you happy with his explanation?" Meghan asked.

  I hesitated, then said, "I think so."

  "You know what you should do, to put it to bed once and for all?" Ruth asked.

  "What?"

  "You should do a background check on him. Then you won't wonder. I bet Meghan's beau would give you a discount."

  My lips parted in surprise. Who knew Ruth was so mercenary?

  "Meghan?" she prompted.

  "Well," Meghan said. "I guess I could ask Kelly about it."

  Kelly O'Connell was Meghan's sort of boyfriend. The sort of part was mostly because he lived in New Jersey. They chatted on the phone for hours every night like school kids, and there'd been talk of him moving out to Cadyville once he got his private investigator's license in the state of Washington.

  Hmmm. I considered the idea. It really would make me feel better to know for sure, to stop wondering if Barr was keeping anything from me. Call it trust issues if you want to, but I'd never before thought of myself as one of those walking wounded who couldn't get close to anyone. I just didn't want to be stupid.

  "Will you talk to him about it tonight?" I asked Meghan.

  "Urn." Her reluctance was palpable.

  "You think it's a bad idea, don't you." "

  11 It's not up to me."

  "Yeah, but…"

  She hesitated, then, "Is that the kind of thing you want to base your relationship on?"

  After a few moments, I met her eyes and shook my head. "No. You're right. It's not. I'd hate it if he did something like that to me, and if I went ahead with it, I could never take it back."

  She smiled her approval.

  Ruth shrugged and changed the subject. "I brought a spinning wheel for you to practice on."

  "The one from the co-op?" I was surprised she'd been allowed to remove it from the crime scene.

  "No-I had an extra at the house."

  "So you have three spinning wheels? Wow."

  She ducked her head. "Four actually."

  "That seems like a lot. Do you use all of them?"

  "Well, not this one, at least not very often. That's why you should keep it as long as you want, until you decide what kind you want to get."

  I grinned. "How do you know I'm going to want my own wheel?"

  "Because you, my dear, are thoroughly hooked"

  Meghan snorted. "I'll say."

  Erin wrinkled her nose. "You're spinning yarn? Like in the olden days?"

  "Well, yes. I guess so. Only, like so many things we do now, it's more for fun than out of necessity. The people who used to spin in order to cloth themselves never had that luxury."

  She nodded. "Yeah, I get it. I guess there are a lot of things like that."

  Ruth gestured over her shoulder toward the pen where our four pullets were quietly clucking and making the low moaning sounds that count as conversation among chickens. "Like keeping laying hens."

  Meghan and I both smiled as Erin jumped in. "But the girls are necessary. How else would we get fresh eggs for breakfast right from our own backyard? Plus they give us fertilizer for the garden, and then turn around and eat all the weeds from it."

  "Girls?" Ruth asked, looking amused.

  "Well, they are girls, aren't they? Girl chickens," Erin said.

  We all liked raising the chickens and keeping them in the backyard, but she was the most enthusiastic. She cared for them exclusively, so the burden on Meghan and I came down to occasionally buying chicken feed, grit and oyster shell. Since "the girls" would likely produce more eggs than we could possibly use in the summer, we'd told Erin she could sell the extras and keep the money for all her hard work.

  "Well," I said, spearing a few leaves of chickweed from my salad and holding them up. "At least we get to eat some of our own weeds, too."

  Conversation continued, and I concentrated on my dinner. As I chewed, I stubbornly pushed aside the disturbing events of the day and focused on my environment: warm friends, the beauty of the vegetable beds, the bat house mounted on a fence post, the chickens getting ready to roost for the night.

  When Ruth touched my arm, I jumped. "Let's take some of these plates in," she said.

  We gathered up plates and utensils, waving Meghan and Erin back when they tried to help. Erin slipped into the hen pen, as she called it, and began murmuring to her girls in a low voice. Meghan watched, smiling.

  In the kitchen, I quickly set to washing the plates. I love the dishwasher, don't get me wrong, but when we grilled in the summer there were rarely enough dishes to justify starting it up. Besides, the house still held heat from the day, and it didn't seem prudent to add to it.

  Ruth said, "The spinning wheel is in the living room."

  "Thanks again for that. It's sweet of you to let me borrow it." "

  I want you to do something, though." "

  I paused in rinsing a plate. "Oh?"

  I want you to go over and talk to Chris Popper."

  Oh.

  Slowly, I dried my hands and sat down at the kitchen table. I'd been so caught up in my own drama that I'd nearly forgotten what Barr had said about Chris killing Ariel. Now I remembered my insistence that she call me if she wanted to talk, and felt torn. She'd lost her husband twice, it seemed: once to another woman and then, finally, to an accident. But would she really have killed Ariel over it? Especially after Scott was already dead?

  "Barr and that woman detective think she killed Ariel," Ruth said.

  There was a note of distaste in her voice when she mentioned Robin Lane. The fledgling detective had tried to bully information out of Ruth a few months previously. Ruth had been flat on her back in a hospital bed at the time and in a lot of pain. Barr was right. His partner had all the people skills of a grumpy badger.

  Cautious, I inclined my head a fraction.

  "Barr already told you?" Ruth said. "Well, of
course he did. Will you talk to Chris before jumping to any conclusions, and make up your own mind? That's all I ask. Because you know how hard it is to lose a husband. Can you imagine how hard it would have been if, in addition to losing your husband, you'd been accused of murdering his lover on the day of his funeral?"

  I blanched. Turned out I couldn't imagine it.

  Barr had asked me to foster gossip amongst the CRAC crowd, and I had already offered a listening ear should Chris be interested. Complying with Ruth's request was a no brainer.

  "Of course I'll talk to her," I said. "Though I'm not sure what good it will do."

  She shrugged and reached for a dishtowel. "To be honest, I don't know, either. But do it anyway."

  Kind of pushy, I thought. "Or you'll take away the spinning wheel?" I joked.

  Ruth smiled gently.

  I stared at her placid face. "You're blackmailing me?"

  "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "I'm bribing you."

  EIGHT

  AFTER RUTH LEFT, I took a long shower, dressed in a soft, oversized T-shirt and crawled into bed with one of Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books. Her descriptions of bucolic life in the lateseventeenth-century farmhouse she and her friend Jill had rehabbed in 1920s and '30s Connecticut seemed the perfect continuation of my determined affection for the home life I had with Meghan and Erin.

  Meghan came and stood in my bedroom doorway. I put my book down.

  "Think tomorrow will be as exciting as today?" she asked with a rueful look.

  "I hope not."

  "What did Ruth want?"

  I pasted innocence on my face.

  "Come on. I know she came over specifically to talk to you, and it wasn't just about twisting fiber into yarn."

  "She wants me to talk to Chris."

  "Oh. Well, that makes sense, since you're a, you know… widow."

  "Yeah, that and the police think Chris had something to do with Ariel's death."

  "What!"

  "Ariel and Scott were having an affair. Barr wants me to talk to Chris, too. Well," I amended, "not just Chris. He wants me to talk to other people at CRAC, too. More like get them talking." I'd sort of left that out when I'd recounted my conversation with him earlier.

  She stared at me. "He wants you to?"

  I nodded.

  "Well. I, um… " Meghan rarely looked as flummoxed as she did at that news. "I guess nothing I say is going to make any difference."

  "I'm not investigating. I promise. I'm not asking a bunch of questions or putting myself in danger. I'm just acting as some extra eyes and ears because Robin Lane may be gorgeous, but she has the tact of a sledgehammer when it comes to questioning people about murder."

  Understanding settled onto Meghan's face. "Ah. Promise you'll be careful?"

  "Cross my heart."

  She started to leave, then turned back. "You do lead an exciting life, don't you?"

  I snorted. I couldn't help it. "Yeah. Maybe a little too exciting."

  She grinned. "Goodnight."

  "'Night," I said, and reached for the lamp. It was only ninethirty, but I was ready for some shut-eye. I heard Meghan dialing New Jersey as I drifted off.

  ***

  Fitful dreams punctuated my nighttime and early morning hours, and sunlight began to creep through my window at four-thirty. Days were long on both sides in the summer.

  At six I gave up trying to sleep, showered again, and donned a lightweight skirt and T-shirt in response to the weather forecast; the temperature was supposed to advance into the nineties, which was hot for this early in the summer. Humidity curled in the air like a languid animal after a big meal.

  Meghan, mom of the world, had breakfast waiting for me when I came downstairs a bit before seven. Fresh strawberries from the farmer's market piled in a bright blue bowl and splashed with cream looked like a Fourth of July decoration as much as something to scarf down to start the day. Chicken and apple sausage, also from the farmer's market, was joined within minutes by eggs scrambled with fresh chives and oregano. The eggs had probably still been warm from the chickens when she'd cracked them into the bowl. A steaming cup of coffee topped the whole meal off. How could I even think about leaving this?

  "Where's Erin?" I asked, between bites of sausage.

  Meghan joined me at the table with her own plate. She nodded toward the backyard.

  "Already?"

  "Not the chickens this time," she said. "I told her if she'd weed bed three I'd take her to the river this afternoon after camp to swim."

  "Nice" We only had four small vegetable beds, but they seemed to require constant attention. "I'll weed one today, too."

  "Do you have time?" Meghan asked.

  "Oddly enough, I'm pretty much caught up, except for the usual order filling. Cyan is coming by tomorrow, so I can have her do some of that." I bit into a juicy strawberry and let out a low moan. "God, these are good."

  "Aren't they? Of course, by the time the season is over we'll be sick to death of them."

  It was hard to imagine, but she was right. "That's what freezers are for. Do you have any clients today?"

  "Two" Her massage business had begun to slow for the summer, too. "At noon and at one."

  I have an errand to run. I'll be home later," I said.

  "Sounds good."

  I refrained from mentioning the errand involved spending time alone with a possible murderer.

  ***

  The ranch-style house was located on ten acres of land on the east side of Cadyville, set back from the county road that wound north from Highway 2. A large black dog and a smaller brown one greeted my arrival with joyous barks and wagging tails. Laughing at their enthusiasm, I pushed their cold noses away from my bare legs. A metallic clang sounded from behind the house as I reached for the doorbell.

  Chris didn't answer. Another loud reverberation carried through the air, followed by another and then another. A low droning underscored the mesmerizing rhythm. The dogs gamboled around me as I walked around the house to the backyard.

  The drone became the roar of an enclosed fire as I neared the source: Chris' blacksmith shop. No walls enclosed the thirty-bythirty space, but eight thick corner posts supported the octagonal roof. The floor was bare dirt, swept smooth. Her arm, pale in the relative darkness, rose and fell, the clank of the hammer on redhot metal sparking with each blow. The pounding stopped, and, with a pair of tongs, she transferred a flat, tapering rod from the anvil to the forge.

  Chris turned and saw me watching. I raised a hand in greeting.

  "Oh. It's you," she said, swiping at the sheen of sweat on her forehead with the back of her wrist. She beckoned me in. "Be careful. Forge's hot."

  The air close to the blaze warped and shimmered with heat. The tang of hot iron mingled with the earthy scent of Chris' perspiration. It smelled like hard work.

  "Do you want some iced tea?" she asked.

  "Sure"

  "Oh. Well, there's some in the big thermos over there. Should be some cups by it."

  I found the cups and opened the thermos. "Do you want some?" I asked. "You must be roasting in here."

  "I'm fine." She sighed. "I'm sorry. I know I'm not being very gracious."

  Her hair hung lank, as if she hadn't washed it for days, and it was held back off her face on each side by blue plastic barrettes more suited to a ten-year-old girl. She wore a white tank top that needed an appointment with a washing machine, and faded jeans, frayed at the edges. I wondered whether it wouldn't be safer to wear long sleeves when working with hot metal.

  "Don't worry about it," I said. I could hardly recall the period right after Mike died. Mostly I remembered having to put on a good show for all the people who were trying to be nice to me. At the time it had felt almost like an imposition, but now I realized it had been one of the things that had kept me from falling apart completely.

  Chris, on the other hand didn't seem to be concerned with putting on a game face. She dipped a sopping bandanna out of a bucket of water ne
ar her feet, used it to swab the back of her neck, and then rubbed her forehead furiously, leaving behind a bright pink patch of skin.

  "Is there anyone who can stay with you?" I asked, and took a sip of tea. The stuff was strong enough to strip paint, and so cold it made my teeth hurt. I rolled the sweating cup across my cheek.

  "I don't want anyone to. I just want to get through this mess." She sat on a bench and waved to the space beside her. I joined her. She grew still, looking at me. Really looking at me for the first time since I'd interrupted her work. "Does Barr know you're here?"

  I shook my head. Well, he didn't, did he?

  "Do you know about the murder investigation?"

  I paused, and her gaze became suspicious. No way to lie here, and probably no reason to, either. Thank God. I was a horrible liar.

  "Oh, I know about it," I said. "For one thing, I found Ariel. And, yes, Barr mentioned something about you being a suspect."

  For a split second she looked triumphant, before it quickly faded to sadness underscored with a heavy dose of anger.

  "So did Ruth," I added.

  Chris looked at me curiously. "Is that why you're here?"

  "Did you kill Ariel?"

  "No!"

  "Okay then. I told you after the funeral that I'd lost my husband. I know how rough it is. But… can I be frank?"

  "Please. I'm sick and tired of people tiptoeing around me."

  "My husband died of cancer, not in a sudden accident. He wasn't having an affair. And I wasn't accused of killing his lover. So in my book, this has got to be even harder on you than it was on me. I thought you might want someone to talk to. Or cry on. Or yell at."