by Molly Macrae
Praise for
the Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries
Last Wool and Testament
“A great start to a new series! By weaving together quirky characters, an interesting small-town setting, and a ghost with a mind of her own, Molly MacRae has created a clever yarn you don’t want to end.”
—Betty Hechtman, national bestselling authorof Yarn to Go
“A delightful paranormal regional whodunit that…accelerates into an enjoyable investigation. Kath is a fascinating lead character.”
—Genre Go Round Reviews
“A delightful and warm mystery…with a strong, twisting finish.”
—Gumshoe
“Suspense and much page flipping!…I loved the characters, the mystery; everything about it was pitch-perfect!”
—Cozy Mystery Book Reviews
“The paranormal elements are light, and the haunted yarn shop premise is fresh and amusing.”
—RT Book Reviews
Praise for Other
Mysteries by Molly MacRae
“MacRae writes with familiarity, wit, and charm.”
—Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
“Witty…keeps the reader guessing.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Murder with a dose of drollery…entertaining and suspenseful.”
—The Boston Globe
Also by Molly MacRae
Last Wool and Testament
DYEING
WISHES
Molly MacRae
OBSIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.
First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, July 2013
Copyright © Molly MacRae, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61459-4
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.
For the Little Wool Shop,
opened in 1935 in the Market Square in Lake Forest,
Illinois, by my grandmother
Katharine Vincent Canby
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It takes an agent, an editor, friends, and a family to raise a writer. To raise a mystery writer it also takes putting up with questions about blunt instruments, red herrings, poisons, and plot twists. For every ounce of support they give me, I’m grateful to my agent, Cynthia Manson, my editor at Penguin, Sandy Harding, my colleagues at the Champaign Public Library, my writing friends, and members of the Champaign Urbana Spinners and Weavers Guild. Special thanks to Kate Winkler, whose knitting needles produce not only catnip mice but magic. And above all, thank you to the guys at home who do the laundry and the shopping and who cook, wash dishes, and cheer me on with love and dark chocolate.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Catnip Mouse
Chocolate Cake with Ganache
Joe Dunbar’s Versatile Squashed Squash
Spinning in Her Grave
Chapter 1
“Where are the lambs?” Ernestine asked when she and I caught up to the rest of our group at the pasture fence. “Did Kath and I dawdle too long? Have they already run off to play?”
“Oh, sorry, Ernestine,” I said. She was spry for being nearly round and almost eighty, but I’d been sure I was doing her a favor by walking slowly down the farm lane with her. As it turned out, she’d been the one waiting for me because I couldn’t help stopping to take pictures of our beautiful Upper East Tennessee springtime along the way. She kindly hadn’t complained, but now I felt bad because we’d expected to see Debbie’s new lambs frisking in the field. “Did we miss them, Debbie?”
“No. They’re with their mamas,” Debbie said, “at the far end, over there under that beech tree.” She pointed across the hillocky field.
Not knowing much about lambs or their mamas, I wasn’t surprised they weren’t hanging around at the fence waiting for us. Debbie seemed puzzled, though, and it was her farm and they were her sheep, so I mimicked her scrunched nose and stared across the field where she pointed. I could just make them out standing in a white huddle under a huge tree.
Ernestine put her cheek to Debbie’s extended arm, using it and Debbie’s index finger as a sight. Her head barely reached Debbie’s shoulder, and as she squinted toward the sheep, her thick glasses flashed in the sun. Concentrating and leaning into her squint the way she did, and dressed in a gray sweater and slacks, she looked like a grandmother mole trying to bring the world into better focus. She wasn’t as blind as a mole but she probably didn’t see the tree, much less the sheep, at that distance.
Thea and Bonny, the other two women with us, had already gotten tired of straining to see the sheep. Thea, in jeans and a Windbreaker, climbed up and sat on the fence. Bonny was checking her phone for messages.
“I don’t get it,” Debbie said. “Usually they’ll come see if I’ve brought treats. And the lambs are always curious. But I don’t think they’ve even noticed us.”
The five of us, members of the needle arts group Thank Goodness It’s Fiber (TGIF), had met up that morning at Debbie Keith’s farm, Cloud Hollow. Thea and Ernestine had been smart and had carpooled with Bonny, letting her navigate the half dozen winding miles up the Little Buck River valley from our small town of Blue Plum. I’d driven out alone, arriving last and feeling as though I’d made it despite, rather than because of, Debbie’s directions, which included the near-fatal phrase “and you can’t miss it.”
We’d all looked forward to spending the morning in Debbie’s studio. She was going to teach us her techniques for dyeing yarn and wool roving by “painting” them. Unfortunately, in her flurry of prepa
rations, Debbie had locked the key to the studio inside it. She’d phoned her neighbor across the river, who kept an extra set of keys for her. The neighbor said she’d drop the keys off on her way to town and we’d decided to make the most of our wait by walking down the farm lane to visit the new lambs. But, as we saw, the lambs and their mamas were otherwise occupied.
“Can’t you call them?” Thea asked. “Whistle for them or something?”
“Not at this distance,” Debbie said. “I’m not loud enough. And that’s not really how sheep work, anyway.”
“See, Bonny?” Thea said. “I told you that’s what Bill is for.”
“I know what a sheepdog is for,” Bonny said. She brushed at something on her black pants legs, maybe imaginary dog hair. “But dogs in general don’t like me, except to bite, so I don’t like them back. And I make it a point to never give them the chance to bite in the first place. No offense intended—I hope you know that, Debbie—but I am much obliged to you for putting what’s his name in the house.”
Debbie, still looking at the distant flock, waved off Bonny’s tepid thanks.
I was pretty sure I heard a muttered “wuss” from Thea, but Bonny, farther down the fence and engrossed by her phone, didn’t catch it. When Bill, Debbie’s border collie, had bounced out of the house with her after she’d phoned for the spare keys, Bonny had taken one look, jumped back in her car, and slammed the door. She’d refused to come out, even though Bill appeared to be a perfect gentleman, until Debbie graciously put him back in the house.
Bonny pocketed her phone as she made a disgusted noise. “The morning’s turning out to be a complete bust, though,” she said. Ernestine tried to shush her, but Bonny continued grousing. “Driving the whole blessed way out here and trying to find this place was bad enough, but now we’re standing around in wet grass and accomplishing absolutely nothing.”
“But isn’t it a beautiful morning for getting nothing done?” Ernestine asked.
No one could argue with that. It was the kind of gorgeous spring day in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that looked like the inspiration for an Easter card. The world smelled of fresh breezes. Also of the wild onions I was standing on. I stepped back from the fence and took a picture of the grassy lane we were in and another where the lane disappeared around the next hill. Then I snapped a few candids of the other women.
Thea, sitting on the top fence rail, was a tempting target. Her orange Windbreaker was stretched across her broad back, making her look like a giant pumpkin perched on the fence, her brown head making the stem. I skipped that picture, though. Thea was our town librarian and defied all stereotypes associated with that position except two—she was single and she had more than two cats. But she was far from being hushed and, in fact, called herself the Loud Librarian. I knew she’d be loudly unappreciative of a picture taken of the particular view I had in my lens.
Ernestine and Bonny stood farther along the fence, Ernestine distracting Bonny from her grumbles by asking about her winter in Florida. Ernestine’s white hair became a dandelion nimbus as she turned her wrinkles to the sun, eyes closed behind her glasses. She was retired from a number of jobs, most recently as receptionist for my late grandmother’s lawyer. She had a dry sense of humor and although her eyesight was failing, she easily saw the good in people and frequently apologized for their shortcomings.
I’d met Bonny for the first time that morning. The only things I knew about her were what I’d just heard—she’d returned from Florida the week before, she was a gung ho spring, summer, and fall member of TGIF, and she didn’t like dogs. She also seemed to be expecting a phone call or expecting someone to answer a call she was trying to put through. And she wasn’t patient.
At a passing glance, she looked to be on the good side of fifty. But after studying her face and hair in my viewfinder, I suspected she was closer to the upper end of sixty and had a hairdresser and possibly a plastic surgeon under orders to fight for every year they could gain. She was solid without being overweight and there didn’t appear to be anything soft about her, except the pretty sage green hand-knit sweater she’d pulled on before we set out to see the lambs. Even her hair was under control, no wisps flying astray. My own dark red curls danced with every wandering breeze.
Debbie stood at the fence, a hand shading her eyes, staring across the field toward her sheep. With her blond braid down her back she could have been a Norse maiden scanning the horizon for sails. My grandmother had liked to say Debbie looked as though she’d stepped out of one of Carl Larsson’s watercolors. She had that bright, decorative look of the young women in his nineteenth-century domestic scenes. Debbie worked part-time at the Weaver’s Cat, the yarn shop in Blue Plum that had been Granny’s pride and passion up until her death a little more than two months earlier. The shop was mine now, which made Debbie my employee, but truthfully, she and the shop’s longtime manager were still teaching me the stitches of owning and running the business.
At the shop Debbie tended toward long skirts and embroidered tops, hence Granny’s Carl Larsson comment, but that morning she was wearing farm-sensible jeans, a navy blue hoodie that brought out the blue of her eyes, and a great pair of red tartan rubber boots that I coveted. She had four or five inches on me, though, and I’d heard she was strong enough to toss a bale of hay or hold a sheep between her knees for shearing, so I didn’t plan to try wrestling the boots off her feet. Part of her strength, mental as well as physical, came from successfully running her farm alone since the death of her husband three or four years earlier.
Framing each face in my camera, I realized we were a nice range of ages. Debbie was in her early thirties, I’d turned thirty-nine two months before, Thea was an honest mid-forties, Bonny could cover both fifties and sixties for us, and Ernestine capped us out with her nearly eighty. I snapped another picture of Ernestine smiling at Bonny, who was showing her the size of something by holding her hands out and looking from one hand to the other, maybe telling Ernestine a Florida fish story. Thea turned and I was able to get a picture of her face in profile.
“I know what the sheep are doing,” Thea said. “It’s Monday-morning book group. They’re reading Three Bags Full and making plans.”
Debbie gave a quick smile but didn’t look as though she’d really heard Thea. “Hey, Kath, have you got a zoom on that camera?”
“Good idea.” The camera was new to me, one of several I’d inherited from Granny, and I hadn’t played around with all the features yet. I fiddled with the adjustments, held the camera up, and fiddled some more before finding the beech tree and the sheep in the lens. “Okay, got them.”
“What do you see?” Debbie asked.
“Sheep. And…something? Nope, they shifted for a second but now they’re not budging. They’re standing with their backs to us.”
“Well, I think I want to go out there and see what’s going on with those girls,” Debbie said, still staring across the field. “That’s so unlike them. Anyone want to come with me?”
“Sure.” I looked at the others. They might have come prepared for playing with pots of dye, but Debbie, Thea, and I were the only ones wearing anything on our feet suitable for crossing a wet pasture.
“Come on, Thea, we’ll go with her,” I said.
“Sorry, no.” Thea shook her head. “Mud, maybe, but these shoes don’t do ewe poo.”
“You two go on and round them up,” Bonny said. “We’ll stay here holding up the fence and cheering you on.”
The others laughed and Debbie and I climbed over and started across the meadow. The sun felt as yellow as the patches of buttercups and warmed every delicate shade of green in the fields and woods around us. A flock of clouds meandered high above in the soft blue sky. The mud and the ewe poo were mostly avoidable. But through the camera’s zoom I’d caught a glimpse of something under the beech tree that wasn’t right. From the behavior of the sheep, Debbie knew something was up, too, but from her own behavior I didn’t think she had any idea what.
She was a fast walker and I skipped to catch her.
“Debbie, I need to tell you—”
“Look at them, would you?” she said. “It’s like they’re standing in a prayer circle. They don’t look scared, though. I hope one of them isn’t hurt.” She walked faster.
“It isn’t a sheep.”
“Sorry, what?” She didn’t slow down.
I grabbed at her arm. “It looked like a person.”
Debbie turned her head, nose wrinkled. “What?”
“Well, I’m probably wrong. I only got a quick look when a couple of the sheep moved, and it was hard to tell. Wow.” We’d gone about three-quarters of the distance from the fence to where the sheep stood under the tree, and not only was the size of the tree more amazing the closer we got, but the sheep—my goodness. I’d pictured a flock of Mary’s little lambs—petite things prancing and nibbling grass—or at least not what I was seeing, which was more along the lines of a herd of Saint Bernards. “Wow. You know, I thought sheep were shorter than that.”
“They’re Cotswolds.”
“That makes them big?”
“Yup, Cotswolds are big,” Debbie said. “The older ewes weigh a hundred seventy, a hundred eighty pounds. If your boots don’t have steel toes, try not to get stepped on.”
I wondered how I’d avoid that if the whole flock turned and suddenly came at me. Did sheep do that?
A couple of the lambs heard us and finally decided we were more interesting than whatever the herd mentality was still engrossed in. They frisked toward us, very cute with their spindly legs and wagging tails even if they were taller than I’d expected. Debbie stopped and greeted them by name.
I was brave and went closer to see what was capturing their mamas’ attention. And immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Debbie?”
She was down on one knee making goo-goo noises to her babies.
“Debbie? Hey, Deb. Debbie! These sheep over here need you.” That brought her head up. “And we need the sheriff.” It was probably too late for an ambulance.
