Wicked Weaves

by Lavene, Joyce

  “What do you mean?” Roger asked her. “Are you saying you strangled this man?”

  “No,” she denied. “I said it was my weave. I didn’t say I know how it got there.”

  Roger got up and glanced around the area. “The police are on their way. I know you tell a pretty good story, Mary. I hope you have a good tale to tell them. They’ll want to know how a piece of your weaving got around his throat if you didn’t put it there.”

  “I got nothin’ to say. I’ve been here weaving all day.”

  I knew she was lying. I liked her too well to call her on it, especially in front of Roger and Chase. It didn’t make any sense to me, anyway. How could Mary strangle a man twice as big as her?

  “The police will want to talk to both of you,” Roger told Chase and me. “I wouldn’t make any sudden moves or volunteer too much information.”

  “What happened?” Master Armorer Daisy Reynolds panted as she reached us. Her formidable breastplate, with the image of a phoenix engraved on it, shone in the sun. Her muscled arms bulged. “I heard the queen found a dead man.”

  Thankfully a few other craftsmen, some flower girls, and the Village dragon were all there by then. I was glad we weren’t alone in that space between the buildings. No doubt the story would be recounted many times over. There was always plenty going on in the Village, but it didn’t usually include death. At least not real death.

  Briskly, Roger filled everyone in.

  “The police.” Daisy shuddered. “I didn’t see anything. There’s no reason for me to be here when they come.”

  “Me, either.” Fred, the human voice from inside the large, red dragon, spoke. “I’ve got a few bad parking tickets. They might be looking for me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Roger said. “You know I’m an ex-cop. This will be a routine investigation. Nobody’s going to wonder about your parking tickets, Fred. They’ll want to know what happened to this man and who was here when it happened. Everyone needs to calm down.”

  “Livy actually found him, but I don’t think that old rule of thumb applies this time,” Chase volunteered. “As usual, her entourage was with her. I’m sure she’s not involved.”

  Fred shrugged, not an easy thing in one of the heavy costumes. I was a giant for a whole summer one year. I wouldn’t care to do it again, even with the air-conditioning in the costume.

  Roger looked up at Chase and me. “So the two of you were here in Wicked Weaves when they found him? You might be witnesses Mary will need.”

  I grabbed Chase’s hand before he could answer. I couldn’t tell him not to give Mary away. I stared hard at him and hoped he’d get it. It might’ve looked more like a sad puppy face, but it worked.

  “That’s right.”

  Chase squeezed my hand and continued to hold it.

  “The three of us were in the shop talking when Livy came up to get lemonade.” I dared Roger to question my lie.

  He didn’t. He stood up and began looking around the small alleyway again. I couldn’t see anything unusual. But I’m not an ex-cop, and maybe they could see things I couldn’t.

  Mary didn’t contradict us, even though she knew we were lying. She stood there as straight and tall as her five-foot-nothing frame would let her. Maybe she was there the whole time. Her tiny apartment was upstairs from the shop. Maybe she went up there, and I didn’t see her.

  Whatever it was, there was no point standing there talking about it. The nearest law enforcement was the police department on Oak Street. In the meantime, the paramedics, stationed at the entrance to the Village for emergencies, ran toward us from the street. “Step aside. Let us through.”

  Their equipment and modern blue uniforms looked strangely out of place, like Chase’s jeans. I looked away from that sight quickly, once I’d realized I was staring. I didn’t have any business looking at Chase’s jeans.

  Standing off of the King’s Highway without the usual visitors in shorts and tank tops rubbing elbows with fairies and knights gave the whole incident a surreal quality, even more so than normal. It was like taking a real step back in history and finding there were time travelers in medical uniforms already there.

  I’ve always had an active imagination. Sometimes it takes some quirky turns. This was definitely one of those times.

  The two paramedics put on latex gloves and carefully checked the dead guy’s pulse. One of them shook his head. “He’s been dead a while. Why didn’t you call us sooner?”

  “We only found him a few minutes ago.” Chase was still standing next to me. “If he was dead out here for long, I’m sure someone would’ve seen him. It looks like he might’ve been killed somewhere else, then moved here.”

  “I was a cop for most of my life,” Roger said for the millionth time since I’d met him five years ago. “It looks like that to me, too. You should leave him alone before the crime scene is disturbed any more. We’ve probably done enough damage as it is.”

  “This is stupid.” Daisy turned to leave. “I’m going back to the forge. Anyone needs to talk to me, they know where to find me.”

  Mary didn’t say anything. She stood there, staring at the dead guy. The layer of basket weaving was very white against his black throat. The afternoon sunlight made it stand out even more. Maybe it was my imagination, but I was pretty sure Mary knew him.

  The paramedics did what Roger told them to do, but they waited there with us for the police. It seemed odd that our little section of the Village suddenly got so quiet until I realized that gossip traveled quickly. In some ways, it surprised me even more that people weren’t all over the area if they thought something interesting was going on.

  One of the queen’s pages ran up and announced that Queen Olivia was at her castle. She would receive anyone with questions there. She would not be back again until the untidy dead man was cleaned out of her kingdom.

  After delivering her message, Debby, one of my students, stared at the dead man, then looked at me. “Who is that? He must not work here. He isn’t wearing a costume.”

  As statements of undeniable fact go, it wasn’t much. But she did have a point. He obviously didn’t work here. I looked at his shoes for the first time. They were spats. I know that because a friend of mine wore them last year for a costume party.

  They had mud on them. The trouser cuffs were muddy, too. There was sand around the Village property. The only place with this light-colored mud was around the privies. I wasn’t sure what that meant except that he’d spent too much time walking around the privies.

  “I’m going in b’dout you want me out here.” Mary pulled her shawl closer around her thin form. “I got baskets to make that won’t be making themselves.”

  Roger put his hand on her arm and told her he’d let her know when the police got there. “They’ll want to talk to you.”

  She nodded but didn’t speak, walking slowly into the shop. I thought she seemed smaller, less full of that vibrant energy I was used to. I guessed a dead man could do that to you.

  “I’m going in, too.” No one stopped me. I guessed it was better to be ignored than considered a suspect. I wasn’t worried about Chase. He could take care of himself. We both knew he wasn’t involved in whatever happened to the dead guy.

  I let go of his warm hand. That took some doing. I wanted to use my anxiety over seeing the dead guy as a justification to sleep with him. I mean, hold his hand. He was big and warm, and my logical brain got fuzzy around him. I repeated my mantra—Don’t get involved with Chase; he doesn’t want anything from life—but it wasn’t helping. I wanted to stand as close to him as possible, but I made myself move away. No matter what happened, dead guy or not, I wasn’t getting involved with Chase.

  I found Mary inside the basket shop. She was staring out the front window at the cobblestone street that was strangely empty and quiet. Even the bakery shop across the way, the King’s Tarts, was empty. And believe me, normally there are plenty of tarts, both varieties, inside. The three bountiful maidens on the sign lo
oked overexposed and lonely.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her. She was holding a small basket that almost defied the laws of basket weaving. It was so tiny and woven so tightly it could probably have held water. The colors woven into it were remarkable as well. There was a coral tint to whatever plant was woven with the sweetgrass. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than an inch wide and an inch high with a tiny top.

  “I’m fine.” Her long, thin fingers rubbed against the grass grain in the weave. “I’m always fine.”

  I sat on one of the stools that were topped with a strong weave. “I’m glad you’re okay. I’m not. I haven’t seen many dead people in my life, and that’s fine with me. How about you?”

  She didn’t answer right away. I started to repeat myself as she looked up. There was something in her eyes that stopped me. I can’t explain what it was. A terrible sorrow? Maybe the anger that makes you blind to everything else. I don’t know.

  “I’ve seen too many,” Mary said. “I buried too many.”

  “I guess it’s something you get used to.” I was trying to keep the conversation going until I could ask her where she was when Livy found the dead man. Then I planned to go on to the suit the dead guy was wearing bearing a striking resemblance to her friend’s suit.

  “No.” Her voice was glacial. “It’s not something you ever get used to.”

  I tried to think of something else to say. Something besides my questions and curiosity. I picked up one of the baskets and glanced at it, examining the cunning weave that had created it. Mary was more than a creative basket maker. She was gifted. I noticed how tight the weave was and wondered how she got it that way.

  “Sometimes when you want them really tight,” she responded as though reading my mind, “you can weave them wet. As they dry, they tighten up a little bit at a time. Sometimes they tighten dead tight.”

  “You mean like someone choked the dead guy with your weave?” I considered the terrible truth of how he’d died.

  “That’s right. I’ve seen it before.”

  A chill raced through me, even though it was the end of June and I was wearing twenty pounds of linen. I watched, hypnotized by the movements of her fingers against the basket she was holding. In a hundred years I might be able to weave something like that, but the chances were I’d never have that skill in my lifetime.

  “What’s that basket for?” My voice sounded like a bad car radio. I gulped after I’d said it and shivered.

  “It’s a ring basket.” She held it out to me. “It can hold any small trinket. I use it to hold my rings when my joints swell. Using your hands so much isn’t good sometimes.”

  I took the basket from her and lifted the lid. Inside was a plain gold wedding band. “You didn’t tell me you were married. Your husband isn’t here with you?”

  “No. I’m not married anymore.”

  Those steady, bright eyes stared at me, daring me to ask more. I could never resist temptation. “Where were you when Livy found the dead man?”

  She tossed her head. “I was busy for a few minutes.”

  “And your husband?”

  “He lies out yonder. I’m alone now.”

  Three

  It sounded crazy at that point, but my first instinct was to put Mary on a bus and help her escape. Clearly, she’d killed her husband. Maybe she had good reason. I speculated on all the motives that could have driven her to such an end.

  I could’ve understood it better if the man I’d seen her with earlier had been her husband. He seemed to be threatening her. But the dead man outside was not the same man. Had the earlier visitor helped her kill her husband? When had she found time to strangle him? She’d been missing for a few minutes, but that didn’t seem long enough to me.

  Mary sat down on the stairs in back and started working again. The basket moved very slowly in her hands. I sat down beside her with the basket I’d started a few days ago. It had taken me almost a week to do what she could do in a few hours. My weave wasn’t as tight or fine as hers. There were some stray bits of sweetgrass that stuck out like little hairs from the ponytail my mom used to make me before I went to school. The color was similar to Mary’s, green and off white. The pine needles didn’t want to stay in my weave. They poked out more than the grass.

  “What kind of plant is that in the weave around his neck?” I asked like I was asking if there were raisins in the oatmeal.

  “Bulrush,” she answered without looking up from the basket. She didn’t even appear surprised or pretend to question what I was talking about.

  I used the bone she’d given me to push the palm leaf over and under the third coil in my basket. “You have to get out of here. The police will come, and you shouldn’t be here.”

  She stopped weaving her basket, bone poised in midair. “Why? Why should I leave? I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  I glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “You said the dead man is your husband. The weave around his neck is yours. I just got done explaining to that woman in the awful velvet dress that no two styles are exactly the same.”

  “What are you saying, Jessie? You think I killed him?”

  “No.” I stuck the sharp end of the palm leaf in my hand, then put it up to my mouth to keep the blood from getting on the basket. God was punishing me for lying. “Okay, yes. I know you probably didn’t mean to. I know it was probably an accident.”

  Mary made a noise somewhere between a cough and a grunt. “Don’t be crazy. That weave was meant to kill. I’ve seen it before. Someone murdered my husband. But it wasn’t me.”

  It seemed unlikely to me that it could be an accident. I mean, the man didn’t fall into the weave and have it tighten around his neck. Someone had to choke him with it. There was little that seemed accidental about it. “How else could it happen?”

  “Someone else did it.”

  “But that’s your particular weave.”

  “Not just mine. He taught it to me. I was very young. It was important to me.”

  I heard the doubt and soft questioning in her voice, but the only thing that stuck with me was that he’d known how to do the same weave. “You’re saying he killed himself? I don’t think anyone’s going to buy that. You have to think of something better, Mary. Don’t you watch TV shows? They’ll put you in jail. The real jail. Not the hokey dungeon.”

  “You know I don’t watch them demmed things.” She spat on the ground. “I don’t have time for that foolishness.”

  “Well, let me tell you, the police won’t fool around. They’re going to ask hard questions. Who was he? Why was he here? Why did you split up? That kind of thing. And when they find out he was killed with something you wove, they might arrest you.”

  “That’s crazy talking.” But her fingers started moving faster up and under the coil in the basket she was weaving. “I didn’t know he was here until Abraham told me.”

  “And that was the man with the same suit who was threatening you earlier?”

  “Nah. He wasn’t threatening me. He was telling me Joshua was here. He wanted me to send him home.”

  I took it all in while I nursed my finger and looked at the mess I’d made of my basket. There were holes between the places the coils were sewn and tiny bloodstains on two of the coils. “Your husband’s name was Joshua?”

  “It’s a fine name where I come from.”

  “Why would Abraham want to keep you and Joshua apart?” This was beginning to sound more like Romeo and Juliet, the senior version, instead of CSI. “Is that why Joshua wasn’t here with you? Because of Abraham?”

  She waved her hand. “Lord, you ask so many questions it tires a body right out. And just look at your basket. You might as well throw it away. Nobody wants to buy a basket with blood on it.”

  I couldn’t argue that point with her. I was about to press her for answers to my questions when Roger and Chase came around the corner with another man. Since he was wearing a suit and tie, I assumed he had to be a cop.


  “Mary Shift?” The heavy folds of the man’s chin vanished into his neck beneath his sweaty white shirt. “And you must be Jessie Morton?”

  I didn’t respond. He obviously knew who I was. I couldn’t help but notice his shirt had some kind of stain where the food must have bounced off of his stomach on the way down from his mouth.

  “I’m Mary. What do you want?”

  “I’m Detective Almond. There’s a dead man over there who looks like he was strangled with a piece of a basket.” The detective looked at the basket I was holding. “Both of you make baskets?”

  “I’m her teacher,” Mary chastised him. “She is doing what I tell her to do.”

  “Are you saying you made the basket that killed that man?” The detective opened a black leather wallet that had seen better days and read the ID inside. “Joshua Shift. Are you related?”