by Molly Macrae
“How quietly?”
I motioned zipping my lips.
“Sadly, I do not have a zipper and I am fairly certain that I have never had one.”
“Silent.”
“Really? Do you mean totally silent?”
“Yes.” I heard Ardis coming back down the hall from the kitchen. “Silent. Please. Can you do that?”
“Watch me,” she said with a ghastly wink. “I can be as silent as the grave.”
I wasn’t too sure about that, but she sat primly on the counter and clasped her hands in her lap. Her only other movement, after Ardis came in and handed me the glass of water, was to open her eyes wider and lean forward—an exaggerated look of earnest listening that made me suspicious, but she was as good as her word and she said nothing more.
Until I made a mistake.
Chapter 5
“Not deep enough for a burial, then?” Ardis asked.
“Not if six feet really is standard. Besides, Phillip and Jerry wouldn’t have been surprised by the bones if there’d been anything in the records about a family plot in that area.” I finished the water she’d brought me and looked at the glass, turning it in my hands. Geneva hadn’t interrupted. I glanced at her watery form. She hadn’t moved, was still listening attentively. What was the end of her story? I wondered. How easy was it for somebody to break a human body? To crack a bone the way I could shatter the water glass, and then toss it in the garbage?
“I have an idea,” I said. I put the glass on the counter and pushed it away from the edge. Ardis was a mirror of Geneva—both listening, neither speaking. At least one no longer breathing.
“What if we could figure out who it is? Whose bones they are?”
“The posse’s first cold case? Oh, hon.”
I could tell, then, that she was breathing. “The posse,” as Ardis called it, was an unofficial subgroup of the TGIF knitting group called Friday’s Fast and Furious. Together, we’d solved several local crimes, mostly murders. Ardis and Geneva were the posse’s most ardent members, and one of Geneva’s sorest grievances was that the other members were never aware of her contributions to our investigations. She considered herself second in command. I was the reluctant chief detective. But reluctant only up to a point. We had proved ourselves, and catching the bad guys turned out to be very satisfying.
“But do you think we can do it?” Ardis asked. “How cold is the case? Where would we start? Wait. Scratch that.” She thumped a fist on the counter. “Of course we can do it. You’ll tell us where to start.”
“I have an idea about that, too.”
“Of course you do. Go on,” she urged. “This is very exciting.”
Geneva was excited, too, and working hard to contain it. She looked as though she was simmering and about to bubble over. She clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were huge. Blue, Geneva had told me once. She’d looked at me and told me that her eyes were blue like mine. I hadn’t been able to picture it.
“Do you remember the night we opened the newel post in the caretaker’s cottage at the Homeplace?”
“I’m not likely to forget anything about that night,” Ardis said. “None of us will.”
“No.”
Geneva was still now and listening intently. The antebellum caretaker’s cottage at the Homeplace was where she and I had met, both of us recently bereft of someone we’d loved. I’d only been staying there temporarily, but Geneva had existed in the cottage—no one had known she was there, so it wasn’t really as though she’d haunted the place—for so long that she’d lost track of most of the details of her life. She hadn’t even been able to tell me with any certainty that her name was Geneva, and it upset her now, if I pressed her to remember more. Her only connection to the outside world had been through the caretaker’s television, which he’d apparently left on twenty-four hours a day to provide company for his own lonely life.
“We found a note in the bottom of the newel,” I said.
“And we put it back. Joe resealed the newel cap.”
“I memorized it. It said:
‘Finished this house this day for this family
My dear wife and our dear children
Elihu Bowman
29th April 1853.’”
“A clue,” Ardis said on a happy exhalation.
“It might be.” I said that carefully, but of course it might be a clue. That was why I’d memorized the words. Someday I’d planned to search for Elihu Bowman or his descendants and to see if that path led me to Geneva. I’d met her in the cottage, so wasn’t it likely that she’d lived there? Why else would she have haunted that house? I just hadn’t imagined connecting Elihu’s yellowed and fading note to a skeleton that might be a murder vic . . . I glanced at Geneva. She’d moved closer on the counter, settling next to Argyle. He shivered and curled into a tighter ball of fur. “I thought maybe we could look through records at the courthouse.”
“Not ‘could,’” Ardis said. “Pick that word ‘could’ right out of your pattern and toss it on the scrap heap. ‘Can’ is what we are all about. We’ll storm the courthouse and we’ll get Thea to find out what other records are available in the archives at the library and wherever. But what are we looking for?”
“Names of children? Members of the household?” I hesitated. As usual, I was making the process up as I went along.
“His wife?” Ardis prompted. “You don’t think it’s his wife, do you? I have trouble thinking of anyone named Elihu as a low-down scoundrel. It’s such an upright-sounding name. And this? Murder? Concealing a murder? Concealing a mutilation?” Ardis swallowed, looking sick. “This would be the worst kind of low-down.”
Geneva looked as though she agreed, but not as though she felt a personal stake in Elihu’s supposed villainy.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but we probably shouldn’t start with any preconceived notions.”
“Innocent until proven guilty—that’s one way of doing things,” Ardis said.
“Let’s start out that way, anyway. I wonder how complete the local records are, going that far back?”
“No idea. That’s not my area of expertise. I’ll tell you what I do know, though. It is situations like this that call for Hansel and Gretel.”
“Um . . .”
“Ivy never told you about Hansel and Gretel? It’s her strategy, but I named it,” Ardis said proudly. “Say a customer comes in with a vague memory of a pattern or of a book of designs that she only saw once and wished she’d splurged on when she had the chance. How are we going to find it if she doesn’t know a name or title? With Hansel and Gretel, that’s how. We ask for any information she does remember, no matter how small—even as small as a crumb.”
“Okay, that works.”
“For fairy tales,” Geneva muttered. “And why do you keep sneaking looks at me? Stop with your once-upon-a-time stalling and tell us something useful.”
Ardis was a close echo. “So, tell me, do you have any crumbs for us to work with?”
“Tell us,” Geneva said.
“Elihu might be enough, but there is something else. I, uh, I did some poking around. After we found the note.” I fiddled with Ardis’ stack of pretty fabric fat quarters, smoothing and restacking them, telling myself I wasn’t exactly lying. Telling myself that prodding at Geneva’s misty memory was a legitimate form of poking around. Surely it was a form of oral history. Or was it spectral history?
Ardis moved the fat quarters out of my reach. Geneva drifted closer with an impatient hum growing in her throat.
“I came across—well, it’s just a name. It really is only a crumb, but it’s stayed with me, even though there isn’t much to follow up on.” I was putting it badly but decided to finish. “She kind of disappeared.”
“From the records?” Ardis asked.
“I haven’t done a thorough search.
”
“Or are you suggesting that she disappeared—as in, she might be the bones in the barnyard? Because I have to ask what makes you think that? It’s not that I doubt you, but don’t you need to have more than a name before you jump that far toward a conclusion?”
Geneva flew between us and flung her arms wide. “Do not listen to that kind of twaddle. This is too exciting to let rational thoughts intervene. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Who? Who is it?”
I saw Ardis as though through a film of water—through Geneva—and saw her batting at what she must have thought was an insect buzzing in front of her eyes.
“What is the name?” she asked.
“The name!” Geneva said.
“Geneva.”
Geneva threw her hands in the air. “Yes, I am Geneva. Now throw me the crumb.”
“I did. It’s Geneva. The crumb is Geneva.”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Geneva look so surprised. She froze, with her mouth open, in front of Ardis, who also had her mouth open. Geneva stayed there, staring at me. Ardis shivered and slid a few feet to her right.
“Hon?”
Then Geneva thawed, but in a more chilling way than I’d expected. Although, truth be told, I hadn’t known what to expect. How could I? I’d been hauntless for all but the last few months of my life, and I had no idea where to find ghost guidelines to help me navigate these treacherous seas.
“I have never been so insulted in my life,” Geneva said in a low, slow, unforgiving voice. That line, alone, would have been good for an exit. But never let it be said that Geneva lacked a keen sense of the overly melodramatic. In the same bleak tone she added, “You are dead to me.”
“Maybe I should get you another glass of water.”
That was Ardis. I heard her say that about water, but Geneva was taking my whole attention. Her nose was inches from my nose, and her hollow eyes stared into mine, so that all I could think was bleak, bleak. I cringed, forcing myself to meet her gaze and not shut my eyes. She didn’t screech or scream. She didn’t say anything more. She simply faded and was gone.
I heard a small, anguished wrench of noise. It came from somewhere deep inside me and scared poor Argyle. He backed away from me, low and hissing.
“It’s okay, Argyle, sweetie,” I said. He didn’t think so. He slunk off the counter and ran from the room. I knew I was probably alone, but I called softly anyway. “Geneva?”
Ardis came back with her cure-all of cold water and heard me call. “Where were you poking around when you found the name?” she asked. She held the water glass out to me. When I didn’t take it, she took a sip herself.
“I honestly can’t say.”
She took another sip of water, and I went to straighten the other rooms so it was easier to avoid her eyes.
* * *
At the end of the afternoon, I climbed the two flights of stairs to the study—the room tucked under the eaves in a corner of the attic. That room had been Granny’s retreat from the bustle of the shop, and now it was mine. It was a snug and private space, but it still contained so much of Granny, in her books and notebooks, and so much of Granddaddy’s love for her in the shelves and cupboards he’d built, that I never felt alone.
“Geneva?” I called softly when I stood in the middle of the room. Another reason I never felt alone in the study was that Geneva and Argyle had also adopted it as their private space—“private” obviously having a different meaning to ghosts and cats. They spent many hours curled in the dormer window seat. Neither of them sat there now. Their absence wasn’t so unusual, but Argyle hadn’t ever run from me like that, and I wondered where he’d gone.
“Argyle?” I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the desk. “Kitty, kitty?” Not there, hiding or hissing. He wasn’t the first cat to hiss at me. In fact, he was the only cat I’d known who hadn’t. Every one of Granny’s cats, over the years, had hissed and swatted at me. That made Argyle an altogether unusual cat, because he not only tolerated me, but he even seemed to like me. So where had my boy gone and what had gotten into him?
“Geneva?” I tapped on the door of her “room.” It wasn’t a room; it was a cupboard—tall, narrow, and painted indigo blue inside—that Granddaddy had built behind a panel in the wall. Granny had kept her private dye journals hidden there. I’d never asked Geneva if she noticed that her “room’s” dimensions were similar to those of a coffin standing on end.
“Geneva? Come on, now. We need to talk.” But she didn’t answer. I tapped again and sighed. Ghosts and cats—would I ever know how they worked?
But saying “we need to talk” jogged my memory. Phillip had said the same thing to me before he’d taken the students back to the visitors’ center. About the name Geneva.
The phone number for the Homeplace was in a packet of orientation materials Nadine had given to the Hands on History volunteers. My packet was buried in a stack of quilt and textile books on the desk. I excavated it and was happy to find individual numbers for Nadine and Phillip, too. By then it was late enough in the afternoon that the students should have gone home. I took a chance and called Phillip directly. The phone rang six or seven times. I hadn’t really thought through a message to leave on voice mail, and was about to hang up when a woman answered.
“You rang?” she said with a sputter and a swallowed laugh. Then the laugh bubbled out of her throat. It was followed by muffled words, thumps, and something that sounded like a slap and a squeal.
Just before I jammed my thumb on the END CALL button, Phillip came on the line with a terse “hello.”
“Hi,” I said tentatively. “This is Kath Rutledge.”
“Okay.”
“It sounds like this is a bad time—”
“Only because we were having such a good time,” Phillip said.
“I’ll call back. But not tonight—”
“No, no, wait. I’m sorry. That was out of line. Was there something I can do for you?”
“You wanted to talk.”
“I did? Why?”
“About a name. It’s okay; it can wait.” This could hardly get more awkward.
“Oh, right, right.” He suddenly sounded more engaged with our conversation—and less engaged otherwise. “Geneva? Yeah, definitely. What do you know about her?” Kissing noises somewhere near his phone broke his concentration. After a sharp intake of breath he said, “Look, this really isn’t a good time. But I’m working on something you might be interested in, and you’ll be out here tomorrow morning, anyway, right?”
“You’re at the site now?” With whom and where? The italics of my subtext must have communicated themselves. Our awkward conversation became an awkward silence. Silence on his part and mine, anyway. There was an undercurrent of throaty chuckle in the background.
“I live here,” Phillip finally said. “In the cottage near the entrance gate. A perk of the job. Convenient and cozy. I’d invite you for breakfast, but—”
I quickly agreed to meet him at the visitors’ center at eight the next morning and was relieved to end the call. I’d planned to be at the Homeplace by eight thirty, anyway, to get materials set up for the first quilting session. Depending on what Phillip had to say or show me, there should still be plenty of time for that and to meet the TGIF volunteers before our avid and eager overachieving students arrived at nine.
I called Geneva one more time before leaving. She didn’t answer. I said good-bye anyway, gathered the books and notes I needed for the next day’s program, and went back downstairs. In the front room, Argyle and Ardis were having a tête-à-tête. It was nice to see that he, at least, had returned to his senses. He sat on the counter looking entitled while Ardis asked his opinion of the orange-and-white-striped baby hat she was knitting.
“There’s my handsome boy,” I said. But I’d no sooner said it than he leapt from the counter and ran out of the room.
“What in heaven’s name is that about?” Ardis asked. “I thought he liked my orange tabby hat.”
“It’s not the hat. It’s me. The honeymoon is over.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Facts are facts, Ardis. He’s a cat, and he’s finally caught on to the fact that I’m me. Cats don’t like me. You know that. They never have. I’m going home now. I’ll be in after the program tomorrow.”
“But how did this happen?”
“Don’t worry. He’ll be back as soon as I’m gone.”
* * *
I spent the evening going over my quilt notes and tried not to let the behavior of the ghost and the cat weigh on me. It was easier to deal with the patched-together facts about the quilts on display and in storage at the Homeplace. Facts were facts; sometimes they just weren’t what we wanted to hear.
* * *
On my way out to the Homeplace the next morning, a small worry stitched itself into my thoughts. What if Phillip and his “you rang” friend had partied too hard and I had to call him and wake him up to come unlock the entry gate for me? But the gate was open, and I drove through and parked in the gravel area next to the visitors’ center. I got out, glad I wasn’t climbing out into the oppressive heat and humidity of an August morning back in central Illinois. Here the sky wasn’t molten white, a mockingbird sang in place of the traffic noises I’d known in Springfield, and the air smelled of hay being mowed in a field across the road instead of like diesel and dust. But the visitors’ center was locked and no one answered my knock.
I waited. I went to the barn and said good morning to Portia and her piglets. They grunted in return. I went back to the visitors’ center. Heard and saw no one. I walked back down the drive toward Phillip’s cottage—the caretaker’s cottage. I wasn’t sure I wanted to knock on that door. Somehow the cottage looked more lived in than it had when Geneva and I met there. Bees buzzed in the lavender on either side of the door. It was the end of the season and the lavender had seen better days. A breeze moved the curtain in the open kitchen window. There were no other movements or sounds.
