Spinning in Her Grave

by Molly Macrae

  “Can I have a bag for that?”

  I took the floss back, put it and one of our class flyers in a bag, smiled, and handed it back.

  “You might as well save this.” She took the flyer back out of the bag and dropped it on the counter. “Oh, but hey,” she said, sounding unconvincingly casual. “Mind if I use your restroom? It’s upstairs, right?”

  My smiles were becoming progressively more plastic, so I was glad when the next person up to the counter was Sally Ann.

  “Thank you,” Sally Ann said.

  “For what?” I looked around on the counter but didn’t see anything.

  “Talking to Mel. I don’t know what you said. It worked, though. The café’s open and she isn’t spitting nails. She isn’t exactly Miss Sunshine, but that’s Mel. She’ll be okay. So thanks.”

  Ardis slid down the counter. “What about you, hon?”

  “I’ll be okay, too,” Sally Ann said.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Oh boy,” I said. “When Ardis starts in with her ‘mm-hmms,’ nobody’s safe.”

  “There are only two things you can do at a time like this,” Ardis said, sliding over more so that I had to move and she ended up in front of Sally Ann. “Throw yourself into your work or take yourself out of it altogether. My recommendation is that you take some time for yourself.”

  “Like that ever happens,” Sally Ann said.

  “Make it happen, hon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Sally Ann picked up the flyer the floss woman had dropped.

  “Pick out a class,” I said. “Come to the fiber side.”

  Ardis nudged me with her elbow. “That’s a great idea. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Work might get in the way,” Sally Ann said. “Seems like something always does.”

  “The first class is on the house,” I said.

  Ardis immediately agreed. I was glad. The offer was pure impulse, but I wanted to see something other than “glum” show up on Sally Ann’s face. As if learning to crochet was going to make her beam. Or replace her sister. What was I thinking?

  “Ardis and I are kind of nutty over things like knitting,” I said. “You don’t need to take the flyer.”

  She hung on to it, though, when I tried to take it back from her. “But maybe I could give something a try? But I don’t want to look like an idiot,” she quickly added.

  “You come by one day,” Ardis said, “and we’ll make it a private lesson.”

  “I might. Anyway, thanks.”

  We watched her go.

  “I didn’t like to tell her to straighten her spine and look life in the eye,” Ardis said. “She’s got too much weighing her down right now.”

  • • •

  I made periodic swings through the kitchen, up to the study, through the second and first floors, and out onto the porch to see if any of our volunteers needed anything and to see how things were going. Ernestine was happy in the kitchen because she could make tea. Thea told me to hush and leave her alone. John’s rough night caught up with him and he’d fallen asleep in his chair. I let him doze. The various TGIFs waved and said they were fine. They’d brought what they wanted with them. The spinners, Jackie and Abby, asked for water.

  “How are our spinners and spies faring?” Ardis asked after I delivered two glasses of ice water and returned to the counter.

  “All’s well,” I said.

  I was immediately proved a liar.

  Chapter 23

  As soon as I’d spoken, a commotion erupted over our heads. The commotion was that immediate for me, anyway, because Geneva flew into the room and swirled around and over the counter, looking as though she’d seen a, well, a ghost. My knee-jerk reaction was to jump and look around wildly for Mattie. That surprised Ardis, who wasn’t aware of anything except a slight chill wafting overhead. I was saved from looking too peculiar or inviting comment, though, when the shouting began upstairs.

  “What on earth?” Ardis asked.

  “I hope it is something on earth,” I said, though not very loudly, as I tried to catch Geneva’s attention.

  The yelling overhead was too frantic and garbled at first to pick out individual words. Then, just as I realized that Geneva was giddy with excitement and not scared out of her wits, one word came through the hubbub clearly.

  “Gun!”

  Geneva yelled it, too, increasing the excitement by adding an s to the word. “Guns!” she shrieked in my face.

  “It’s the sniper!” someone running down the stairs shouted. “He’s got guns!”

  By then people throughout the store were screaming and running, some for the door, others in confusion. It was my nightmare vision come true—people panicked by guns in the streets of Blue Plum—except this was worse because they were panicked by a man with guns in the Weaver’s Cat.

  Ardis did the smart thing. She dropped to the floor behind the counter and then reached up and dragged me down, too. Geneva followed me, still in my face.

  “Are we playing hide-and-seek?” she asked.

  “No!” I mouthed as hard as I could.

  “Because John is looking for you and it would not be nice to make an old man like him get down here on the floor to show you the guns he found in the linen closet.”

  Ardis was already speaking urgently into her phone, to the 911 operator, no doubt. I snatched my phone out of my pocket.

  “Tell me,” I said to Geneva

  “John found several guns—”

  I cut her off. “No one else?”

  “There were all those silly screaming people, but—”

  I didn’t wait for her to finish that sentence, either. The screaming people might have left the building, but screaming sirens were fast approaching. I jumped up. Ardis made another grab for me. I pulled away and dashed for the stairs. Ardis shouted after me, and Geneva came whooping on my heels, but all I cared about was getting up the stairs to John before someone mistook him for a sniper and shot him.

  In going over it in my mind afterward, I’d have to say I didn’t think through my assault on the stairs with guns at the top and the near certainty of more guns coming through the front door behind me as thoroughly as I might have. Not that I was about to admit that to Clod Dunbar. He was the first responder through the front door.

  I was halfway up the stairs, quietly telling an aghast John Berry he probably ought to put the guns down and move away from them. He was asking me, in his extraordinarily polite way, if Ardis and I really thought the linen closet was a safe place to keep guns. That’s when Clod and his cavalry showed up.

  “Down!” Clod yelled as he came through the door. “Get down on the floor! Everyone down on the floor! Now!”

  “Hey!” That was Thea, disturbed from her research in the study and annoyed by the continuing ruckus below. She obviously didn’t know what was going on and didn’t know to whom she was issuing orders. She came down the attic stairs bellowing, “Librarian at work, so shut the floss up!”

  John and I sat down next to each other on the stairs, hands in our laps, and waited for things to calm down.

  Ernestine came from the kitchen about then, with a smile and the teapot, her myopic lenses flashing as she searched faces. “Which one of you just ran through the kitchen?” she asked. “I didn’t catch your answer. Did you want tea?”

  Geneva squeezed onto the stair between me and the wall, making me shiver.

  “Well, Ollie,” she whispered in my ear. “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”

  • • •

  Two or three deputies did a sweep of the shop, rounding up the few customers and TGIFs who hadn’t made it out the door, and bringing the wide-eyed spinners in off the porch. Stragglers and spinners were questioned briefly and then allowed to leave. I wondered if Jackie and Abby would ever volunteer to spin for us again.

  On her way out, the woman who’d irked Ardis by telling her she would shop online later stopped to as
k her own question. “So, is there some kind of gang operating out of this place? Hiding their guns and ammo? Because I don’t think that’s a safe situation. Especially for a small-town yarn shop.”

  It’s possible the sheriff’s department had a standard, scripted, authoritative answer for a question like that. If so, one of the deputies should have spit that answer out faster. Before Thea gave her unscripted answer.

  “Are you implying that it isn’t so bad for yarn shops in medium-sized or large towns to be taken over by gangs?” she asked. “Because I’d be interested in knowing exactly what population figure tips a town from the safety of ‘especially’ into the abyss of ‘whatever.’”

  It was easy to tell that Thea was still annoyed at having her research interrupted and then being told she couldn’t go back up to the study to continue. Even one of the deputies picked up on her cranky mood. He escorted the now pop-eyed woman with the question past her and out the door. Ardis grabbed the nearest crochet hook and skein of yarn and put them in Thea’s hands to calm her.

  • • •

  John’s crisp, naval bearing was taxed, but it held up well, when he had to explain several times to three armed and hyped-up deputies why he’d been rooting around in the linen closet in the first place. (A child had opened the door and started pulling things out onto the floor. John found the guns when he was refolding and putting things back.) He continued to hold his own while explaining more than several times why he’d felt compelled to do anything other than leave the guns under the tablecloth where he’d found them. (He didn’t think that under a tablecloth, in a linen closet with no lock on the door, was the safest place for two semiautomatic handguns that might be loaded.)

  “Calling us is the first thing you should have done,” Clod said, hammering at John. “And running up the stairs toward a suspected gunman is the last thing you should have done,” he said, rounding on me. “Unless you knew those guns were there and knew they weren’t loaded, but even if you did, you could not possibly have known who was up there waving them or some other guns around. That was a stunningly stupid thing to do.”

  “Stunningly,” Ardis said, shoulder to shoulder with Clod. “Hon, I thought you’d lost your mind. You scared the sheep dip out of me. What on earth possessed you?”

  I couldn’t disagree with them or think of a reasonable-sounding explanation.

  Geneva could. “I am affronted,” she said. “Please explain that being haunted is not at all the same as being possessed and then tell them you were acting for God and country. And thank him for putting on his uniform.”

  I went with looking at the floor, a hand to my brow, and shaking my head.

  • • •

  When John’s repeated answers had finally satisfied the deputies, he came out to the kitchen where Ardis, Ernestine, Thea, and I were.

  “That’s twice I’ve been grilled by police in two days,” he said, sitting down at the table with the rest of us.

  “John, I am so sorry,” I said.

  “Nonsense. Everyone needs a bit of fun. A good lawyer probably helps, too. No, don’t worry,” he rushed to assure us. “I won’t need one, but did you know that’s what Ambrose is? Was. He didn’t make many friends during his career—that’s how very good he was. But, no, answering the phrased and rephrased questions of these good old boys is a piece of cake compared to dealing with Ambrose when he gets obstinate or querulous. These boys wouldn’t know querulous if it bit them in the . . .” He coughed. “Bit them in the alpaca.”

  Clod came out to the kitchen. Ardis stood up, glowering at him eye to eye. Ernestine, rapt, peered from Clod’s face to Ardis’ as though watching a Ping-Pong match. Thea sat and ignored everyone else, crocheting something oddly narrow and rapidly getting longer. John waited until Clod broke eye contact with Ardis and looked toward him. With Clod’s eyes on him, John yawned and flicked something off his sleeve.

  “What is the loud one making?” Geneva asked as she watched Thea’s blazing hook.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?” Clod snapped.

  “I don’t know what we’re all still doing here,” I said.

  “Well, you want to know what I don’t know?”

  “It isn’t a competition, but sure.”

  “I don’t know why this door is still open to anyone who wanders into town and down the alley.” He thumped the kitchen door with his fist. “Did it even occur to you that Reva Louise Snapp would be alive today if you’d kept the door locked?”

  “Oh no, you don’t.” I was on my feet and as eye to eye with him as I could get without developing a neck cramp. “No, sir. Don’t you put that on us. Her death wasn’t a mistake. And it wasn’t random.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ardis give a sharp nod and a fist pump.

  Clod surely saw them, too; he had the most infuriating not quite half smile. “You’re saying the rumors are true? You and your shop are the unwitting hosts of a sniper’s nest?”

  “Vipers?” Geneva asked. “Where?”

  “We are no more a sniper’s nest,” I enunciated, “than the sheriff’s department is a haven for redneck yahoos. Okay, okay, I tell you what, why don’t we all calm down? We”—I gestured with open, nonthreatening hands to Ardis and myself—“We will tell you that you should be considering other possibilities for the solution to this crime. You should open yourself to the idea that someone targeted Reva Louise. You should wonder about J. Scott Prescott and his real estate deals in town. You might even look for Angie Cobb. You haven’t, have you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You haven’t thought about her as a suspect, have you? And you haven’t looked for her?”

  No answer other than lips pursed.

  “Despite the fact that, until Reva Louise came along, Angie was married to Dan. And despite the fact that she owns guns. I saw her last night. She and some guy met up at the courthouse and went off together. What if it was Dan?”

  No reaction.

  “And now it’s your turn, Deputy Dunbar. You tell us if you’ve located and spoken to all the actors. Tell us if you’ve accounted for and verified all their movements during that free-form street play, including Dan Snapp’s and J. Scott Prescott’s. You tell us that you’re even close to finding the nut who’s making everyone believe that we are a sniper’s nest.”

  “Ask him if any of that gives him grist for his mill,” Geneva said, studying Clod’s starched, nonreactive face. “On second thought, maybe you should hush. You might be giving away our best clues and leads and I should warn you; that is never done by professionals like Sheriff Andy Taylor.”

  • • •

  Once again, the Weaver’s Cat was forced to close early. Deputies were poised to crawl all over the shop, waiting while we closed up and gathered out belongings. Geneva and Argyle followed me to the attic. Before I could invite her home with me, she reiterated her commitment to being my eyes and ears.

  “Unless we hear Mattie.”

  “Okay.”

  “Or an entire gang of cutthroats breaks in. We couldn’t possibly keep track of more than two or three. But we will be on duty, just as we were this afternoon.”

  “Where?” I hadn’t seen her any of the times I’d walked through.

  “I was worried at first that my lookout post would be indelicate and I would have to cover my eyes and ears, defeating the purpose of being there. If I’d had to do that, I wouldn’t have seen what I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How is that helpful?”

  “Because it is like your pet dog theory. Isn’t it helpful to know that nobody did anything but gawk? A few also gasped, but nobody tried to make off with the macabre mementoes you worried about.”

  “You were in the bathroom?”

  “Yes. Wasn’t that clever? Would you like to know how clever?”

  I wasn’t sure. Indelicate hardly seemed to cover the situation.

  “I know that nobody put tho
se guns in the linen closet this afternoon. No one but the young rascals John was cleaning up after opened that door. I believe that is important information.”

  I did, too, and I thanked her.

  “Do you know what you can do to reward me?” she asked. “I shall tell you because you will not ever guess. You can bring me a piece of gingerbread so that I can sit quietly and breathe it in.”

  I thanked her again and told her I would do that. What a sweet, simple request. I grabbed my purse and Thea’s, my notebook and laptop, and promised to be back in the morning, if I could. When I got down to the kitchen, John and Ernestine were gone. Thea stopped crocheting long enough to tell me she’d saved her searches to a file.

  “It’s called ‘Spinning in Her Grave,’” she said. “I put it in a cloud, too, just in case.”

  “What file?” Clod asked.

  “Sorry, Dunbar. Need-to-know basis only.” She put her hook down, snapped the yarn with her hands as though she were breaking someone’s neck, and started doing something else with the crocheted length she’d made.

  “Here’s what we need to know,” Ardis said. “When can Joe get in to fix our window?”

  “When did he say he’d get here?” Clod asked.

  “He didn’t,” I said reluctantly.

  “Kind of what I thought. Tell you what; if he shows up, we’ll let him put a board over it for the night.”

  “After the fingerprint guys go over the frame inside and out?” I asked. “Because they haven’t been here yet, but when they do, they should dust both sides of the frame. And maybe examine the wall inside and out, too.”

  Clod’s response to my helpful suggestions was a second or two of silence and an infinitesimal twitch at the corner of his left eye. Then he said, “If Joe doesn’t show, I’ll cover the window for you.”

  And we’d be beholden to him. Blast Joe for not getting back to us. Ardis must have felt the same way. The “thank you” she strained through her clenched teeth sounded painful.