Dyeing Wishes

by Molly Macrae

  “With whom,” Mercy said. “I’ll ask her and get back to you.”

  Geneva was unhappy, again, when I told her I wasn’t going to spend the evening playing audiobooks for her.

  “Oh, fine, you run along,” she moaned when I went up to the study to say good-bye to her and the cat. “And don’t even worry about me and Nero.”

  “He hasn’t gained nearly enough weight to be called Nero Wolfe,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s it. Find fault and then leave. I’ll just disappear into my room and maybe you’ll see me again and maybe you won’t but you won’t care and you’ll just leave Nero to pine away to nothing so that he never suits his name.”

  “You don’t have to be like that, you know.”

  “Then what are you doing that’s so much more important than spending time with us?”

  “Do you remember the fishing trip I took with Joe that might or might not have been a date? I think we’re trying another one. We’re meeting for a picnic in the park behind the courthouse at six.”

  “Considering how well the first one turned out, maybe I should come with you as chaperone this time,” she said.

  “Mm, no, probably not.”

  She came anyway.

  Joe brought wedges of a new sandwich Mel was experimenting with.

  “She told me how she made it,” he said. “It’s roasted vegetables layered in a hollowed-out round bread loaf. Then she pressed it overnight under a gallon jar of pickled jalapeños and this afternoon flash-baked it for ten minutes at five hundred degrees. We’re part of her test group. What do you think?”

  The single bite I had was fabulous. Eggplant, zucchini, red bell pepper, sweet potato, with a caramelized balsamic red onion sauce…

  Before I could take a second heavenly bite, before I had a chance to try the handmade cracked-black-pepper potato chips he brought, or the whole-wheat chocolate chip cookies, Geneva appeared on the picnic bench next to Joe. He looked around, shivered, and moved over.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “The sandwich is fantastic,” I said to Joe.

  “If I can’t taste it, I’m not interested,” Geneva said. She looked at Joe’s profile. “He has a kiss of gray at his temple, just like you. I always think a touch of gray is attractive. On a man.”

  “Oh darn, there’s my phone vibrating,” I said, sounding completely wooden due to being completely torqued. “I should have left it at home.”

  “You could ignore it,” Joe pointed out.

  “You’re right. Whoever it is will call back or leave a message if it’s important, which I seriously doubt.” I sounded ridiculous.

  “Oh,” Geneva said. “That reminds me. I nearly forgot why I came. It is important and you have my very excellent memory to thank for remembering it.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.

  “You look worried,” Joe said. “Go ahead and answer it or call back if you want. No big deal.”

  “That’s okay. I’m sure I’ll hear all about it soon enough.”

  “It might not be soon enough,” Geneva said, “if Bonny realizes where she left that book she wanted to show you this morning. I saw it next to a newspaper article about that man Ardis was so rude about. You know, the Smoky Carlin. I saw them both—the book and the article, not Mr. Carlin—in the not-so-darling cabin in the wood.”

  I put my sandwich down and stared at her. That would mean Bonny had gone to the cabin recently. She couldn’t have forgotten, but why lie? Did it mean she knew Eric Lyle was there…

  “Are you sure?” I asked Geneva. Oops.

  Joe shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  I gave him a quick “thanks” and a “sorry” and yanked my phone out to make the pretend call. I needed a way to “know” what Geneva had just told me. She enjoyed the charade and, wonder of wonders, she repeated the details exactly.

  “Aren’t you glad I have such an excellent memory?” she asked.

  “Yes. Will you do me a favor?”

  “Rouse the villagers and bring the pitchforks?”

  “No. Please don’t get carried away. Please keep quiet for now and I’ll talk to you back at the shop, okay?”

  She gave me a hideous wink. I disconnected and told Joe about the book.

  “If your brother or another deputy got a search warrant and even noticed the book there, he wouldn’t have known what it meant.”

  Joe chewed a bite of sandwich and nodded at the phone still in my hand. “Who’s your friend with ‘inside’ information?”

  “Um, I don’t think you’ve met.”

  He looked at me, head cocked. “You should call Cole.”

  “He isn’t real keen on what he calls Nancy Drew–ish clues, and the Mystery of the Mislaid Library Book is about as Drew-ish as they come.” Although it was better than the Disclosure of the Dispirited Spirit, which he’d really hate.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Call the posse.”

  “You should call Cole.” This from Blue Plum’s premier part-time burglar.

  If we were having a second date, then it didn’t end well, either.

  Ardis agreed we shouldn’t call Debbie for a couple of reasons. We didn’t want to wait for her to drive into town, and given Bonny’s attitude toward her, we didn’t want her to become a focal point for Bonny’s reaction.

  “‘Focal point’ and ‘reaction’ sound less scary than ‘target’ and ‘ballistic,’” I said. “But that’s really what we’re saying. You don’t think Bonny’s going to get violent, do you?” I remembered the jolt from touching her sweater and I scrubbed my hands together to make them forget.

  “No, hon. She’s tactless and humorless at the best of times and she’s out of her mind with grief right now at this worst of times, but…I’m making a good case for leaving Debbie out of it and safety in numbers, aren’t I?”

  “Maybe I should call Cole.”

  “Now, there is the ultimate in tactless and humorless for you,” Ardis said. “No, we won’t bother him. We don’t know for certain that Bonny has anything to tell.”

  “And we wouldn’t hear the end of it if we wasted his evening.”

  “We would not. So we’ll call Ernestine and Thea and go on over there ourselves—you don’t think Joe will change his mind?”

  I shook my head. He’d eaten his cookie, said one more time I should call his brother, then ambled off to I knew not where.

  “All right, then. We have two things going for us—the element of surprise and the fact we’re all friends. Make that three—because Bonny is a woman who knows how to do the right thing, and she will.”

  “Make that four,” Geneva said, “because how can those other three things go wrong when you’ve got me?”

  Chapter 31

  It was too bad the rest of the posse couldn’t see Geneva. Or so she obviously thought. She swaggered around Bonny’s living room doing a bad imitation of John Wayne while everyone else made settling-in small talk. It was one of those times when I really wished I didn’t see her. But sitting down on Bonny’s brocade love seat next to Ardis and immediately closing my eyes so that I couldn’t see her wasn’t an option. At least we’d reached an agreement on interruptions—she would keep her comments to a minimum and her voice down if I promised not to cough at her. She said the coughing disturbed her sensitive nature. I told her I reserved the right to clear my throat if her sensitive nature got out of hand.

  “Isn’t this nice,” Bonny said, making no attempt to sound as though she meant it. She sat in a chintz wingback, still in the sweat pants she’d worn earlier, still in her sage green sweater. The only thing about her that had changed was the look in her eyes. It had gone from lost to confused.

  Our group had gone from four plus a ghost to five plus a ghost and we’d had a change of cast. Thea was babysitting her niece for the evening, so Ardis called Mel. Mel came straight from the café and smelled vaguely of roasting vegetables. John Berry, looking his part as an old sa
ilor in a Greek fisherman’s hat and Aran sweater he’d probably knit himself, came with Ernestine. They’d been playing Scrabble.

  “Too many,” Geneva whispered to me. “We’ll spook her. Why don’t you send the old coot out to guard the horses?”

  I cleared my throat. Everyone turned to me.

  “Oh, um,” I said, always the smooth ad-libber, “so it’s nice to see you, Bonny.”

  “You were just here this morning.”

  “Well, yes, and then there we all were”—I waved a hand at the others—“down at the Cat, having an impromptu dye workshop…”

  “Really? Down at the Cat?”

  We exchanged nods and murmurs.

  “And we got to talking while we worked,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bonny said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You aren’t dressed for it. You and Ardis are still dressed for work. Ernestine’s wearing a white blouse. None of you is dressed for dyeing.”

  Geneva raised a hand. “I am.”

  “This isn’t some kind of intervention, is it?” Bonny asked. She looked down at herself and pulled her sweater straight, flicked something off her knee. “I’ll admit I wasn’t at my best Saturday night and I shouldn’t have yelled the way I did. John, I apologize if I offended you or insulted your brother. I was right, though, about your opinion of Will Embree, wasn’t I?”

  “No, not really. I hardly knew him,” John said.

  “My daughter said you knew them both, Will and Terry, and she also said Will tried to convince the police that you could clear him. I told her to forget Will Embree. That if the police believed Will for even one minute they would have tracked you and your sailboat down. I also told her that if you knew they needed your account to nail Will’s hide to a tree, then you’d be back here so fast it would make Will’s head spin.”

  “No. I didn’t know him well enough to feel that way,” John said. “But when I left they were saying Terry’s death was an accident. And then I was out of the country and out of touch for so many months and I never heard about Will’s troubles.”

  “Boats are convenient that way,” Bonny said. She studied John’s face. “But it’s true you were there the day Terry died? So you do know the truth of Will’s guilt.”

  “John?” Ernestine asked when he didn’t answer.

  “I know that Will is dead,” John said quietly. “And that piece of truth about Terry’s death doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Unless,” I said, puzzling something through, “unless Will heard you were back.” They all looked at me again. “And he could have. You said it the other night at the potluck, John. You said you talked to Shannon at the post office. If she was in contact with Will, then she would have told him you were back. What if Will was coming back to turn himself in because he was sure you could clear him? And that could be why Shannon was afraid. Not of Will, but for him, because maybe you couldn’t or wouldn’t. It fits. But was Will right? Can you clear him?”

  “That’s the saddest part,” John said. “I don’t think I know anything that would prove it one way or the other. Not a thing.”

  Bonny made a dismissive noise and I turned back to her.

  “How do you know Shannon and Eric were engaged? Did she tell you?

  “What?”

  “Did she tell you about the baby?”

  “No. It’s disgraceful. I had to hear it in the autopsy report.”

  “She kept it from you. She didn’t tell you about being engaged to Eric, either, did she. Because she wasn’t engaged to Eric. But did he tell you that? Did Eric tell you?” By then I’d stopped looking at Bonny, stopped waiting for her to answer. I was in the middle of a one-woman brainstorming session, staring at the pattern in the Aubusson carpet on her floor as though I could follow its colorful lines far enough to find answers to the questions racing ahead of them.

  Geneva nudged me with an icy elbow. “Take a gander, pardner. The little lady looks volcanic.”

  I glanced up. Bonny’s face was as unreadable as the rug. And about as ugly.

  “Bonny…”

  Mel’s good sense leapt between us. “Kath, you’re tripping over your tongue, there, and I need to be home and in my bed sooner rather than later because, try as I might, I cannot get the breakfast biscuits to bake themselves. Why don’t you ask Bonny what you came to ask her so I can be on my way?”

  “Shucks,” Geneva said, making a spitting noise. “I was looking forward to the eruption.”

  I cleared my throat. Everyone looked at me. I needed to come up with a different “shut up” signal.

  I’d ruined our hastily thrown together plan to chat casually and meander into asking Bonny to show us the library book. Acting natural and sounding curious weren’t going to cut it with Bonny anymore. Her face still looked dangerous, so I went with my own element of surprise—Kath being clear and concise. But not brutal. Bonny was still a mother mourning her only child, and I tried to give her room to explain.

  “Bonny, where’s the book you donated to the library in Granny’s memory? We’d like to see it.”

  Bonny stared. “That’s why you’re here? I told you this morning, it’s upstair—”

  I watched the progression of thoughts from huh to you’re kidding to oh…pass through her eyes. The only change in her face was the set of her jaw.

  “The book is in the cabin,” I said. “When did you leave it there?”

  She said nothing.

  “Did you know Eric was there?”

  Nothing.

  Mel shifted her feet. Ernestine leaned forward, peering intently at Bonny’s face. Geneva unfurled from behind me and floated closer. Bonny blinked as Geneva floated around behind her.

  “Ask her where she was the night of the twenty-third,” Geneva said. “Ask her who she’s working with and where she’s hidden Sylvia.”

  “You did know Eric was there,” I said.

  “She isn’t going to talk, sweetheart,” Geneva said, sounding like a bad Bogart or Cagney.

  I looked at Ardis. She was so sure Bonny would do the right thing, but I was afraid Geneva was right.

  Geneva was moving back and forth behind Bonny, shoulders hunched and slapping one hand into the other. “Give me ten minutes alone with her,” she said. “That’s all I’m asking.” She was starting to billow. Not a good sign.

  Ardis hitched forward on the love seat and leaned toward Bonny, her elbows on her knees, hands clasped in front of her. “Bonny, honey,” she said, all earnest honeysuckle, “we know you’re a good woman—”

  “No!” Geneva said. “Don’t let her take over. Two minutes alone with her is all we need. She’ll tell me what I want to know.”

  I cleared my throat. Loudly. Everyone looked at me.

  “Sorry. I had a ghost in my throat.” They still looked at me. “Frog. In my throat. Sorry.”

  Ardis looked at me longer than the others, with slightly more narrowed eyes. Then she patted my knee and turned back to Bonny. “Bonny, you need to tell us about Eric—”

  “No!” Geneva shrieked, swirling at me. “This is our collar. You ask the questions. Ask her if she killed them.”

  I tried to bat her away.

  “Ask her if she shot Samuel and Martha on their way home from the schoolhouse and left them in that field!”

  She was frantic, howling, out of control. I put my hands over my ears. It did no good. She was all around me with horrifying, heart-wrenching shrieks.

  “Ask her if she shot Sam and Matty!”

  “She didn’t shoot Sam and Matty,” I shouted. “It was Shannon and Will!”

  “No,” Bonny said into the silence that followed my outburst. “Only Eric. And I only wanted him to do what was right, to turn himself in. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t listen, so I hit him upside the head to make him see sense. Hit him too hard, I guess. Stunned him…he’d been drinking…he stumbled off toward the river and I let him go.”

  “What did you hit him with?” Ernestine
asked. She seemed more interested than appalled.

  Bonny closed her eyes and shook her head. “The book. The book on natural dyeing.”

  “Who’re Sam and Matty?” Mel asked.

  “Shh,” Ardis said. “Shh, let’s all just have a moment of silence for all the dead.” She had her arm around me and I cuddled against her, feeling vacant, wishing I could cry like a big baby.

  Geneva watched me from the mantelpiece, howled out and looking desolate and depleted. But then she turned her head toward the door, listening. I couldn’t hear anything. She looked back at me and opened her mouth, then covered it, maybe afraid of the look on my face. But then she couldn’t help herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a voice as small as I’d ever heard her use, “but I know you like things in twos, so there are two more things, and then I won’t bother you anymore. First, you should have let me look for Pen this morning. Second is a riddle. What is the sound of one twin snooping?”

  Her first sounded like a riddle, too. I didn’t have time to puzzle it out, though, because I knew the answer to the second. “Spiveys,” I spat.

  Then they were all looking at me again, but I didn’t care. I jumped up, crossed to the hallway door, and pulled it open. Mercy Spivey, caught with her ear pressed against the door, fell into the room, her horrible scent wafting in behind.

  Chapter 32

  The exclamations surrounding Mercy’s stumble into the room were followed by more exclamations at the appearance of Shirley. Shirley tried to enter more gracefully, though her success was questionable due to the unattractive combination of gloating and looking flustered with which she did it. She was flustered because Clod Dunbar and Deputy Darla followed directly behind her; she gloated because she was thrilled to point at Bonny and say, “Arrest that woman.”

  Clod, to his credit, put his hand to his forehead, and along with the rest of us, looked at the floor, shaking his head. I might have heard him mutter something rude, but if he did I didn’t blame him. Bonny’s Aubusson carpet had more people using it as a convenient focal point that night than any other in its life.

  “Ms. Goforth,” Clod eventually said, “may I have a word with you?”