Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  “Cottonmouth,” he said. “Damned serious. Good thing it wasn’t completely dark yet, or I wouldn’t have seen it.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, nearly fainting.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

  “Well, Mr. Crocodile Dundee, if you’d answer your cell phone, I wouldn’t have had to come out here,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s been a break on one of your cases, or some vital info of some sort, and Peg needs you to call in. I don’t think she needs you to come in or anything. At least she didn’t make it sound that way, but she does need to talk to you. And I know you’re off for the next few days, but I also wanted to ask a favor of you,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Would you reopen the file on the Kendall suicides?”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I’d like it if you would just look over the evidence and see what the investigators at the time had picked up on,” I said. “If you don’t have time, if you could give the files to me and let me read them.”

  “You?”

  “Or Colin. You know you can trust him,” I said. I remembered what Colin had said and decided not to tell Mort the part about how I’d asked Colin where he was.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  Something buzzed by my ear and I swiped at it furiously.

  “Could we maybe go in the cabin or up to the cars? Somewhere away from this water?”

  “Sure,” he said. He walked me up to my car and stopped. I guessed he wasn’t going to invite me in, and I figured he was going to head back down to his fishing as soon as I left. Colin had always said the best times to fish were at sunrise and sunset.

  “I’ve got reason to believe that Glory Kendall may have been murdered,” I said. I repeated what Marty Tarullo had told me. “I had Deputy Oldham take the pins and quilts into the lab for analysis.”

  “Good,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  “So, if she was actually murdered, the evidence that the investigators collected back in 1922 might suddenly mean something different,” I said.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll get on it tomorrow.”

  I was speechless. That wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d thought it was going to be. I thought he was going to protest and whine and I’d have to convince him. “Oh,” I said. “That was easy.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “Thanks for coming down and giving me the message from Peg.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll be at the Gaheimer House for part of the day tomorrow. Then on to the rose show.”

  “Have a safe trip back,” he said. Sure enough, he headed down to the water and his talking fish.

  It was all a little anticlimactic.

  Sixteen

  I stopped by my mother’s and stayed until it was time to pick up Mary from the skating rink. She showed me her latest painting, which was a really nice moody piece of an orange sunset and a girl carrying a water pail up to a silhouette of a church. I think it’s awesome that she can pull an image from her mind and set it on canvas. Then it’s there forever. Mom fed me some peach cobbler and I was on my way. I waited outside the skating rink for about twenty minutes as the kids all filed out of the building, laughing and giggling and talking all the way to their parents’ cars.

  All the kids except Mary.

  After about ten more minutes, I went into the rink to see if I could find Mary maybe hanging around and talking to somebody, completely unaware of what time it was. Because that’s Mary. Quite often I get upset with her over something, thinking that she was deliberately being disrespectful or negligent, when in fact she was just oblivious. I have no idea where her mind is most of the time, but it isn’t in the here and now. Sounds like me, now that I think about it. Rudy gets upset with Mary a lot more than I do, and I think it’s because I find it very difficult to get upset with a child who’s behaving like me.

  Mary wasn’t in the skating rink, at least not that I could see. I checked the girls’ restroom and, short of stomping into the boys’ restroom, was at a loss as to where to look next. I ran back out to the parking lot to see if she was waiting for me in the car, but she wasn’t. I went back into the skating rink and found a familiar face behind one of the skate rental counters. It was Helen’s nephew. I couldn’t remember his name at the moment, but I knew he knew who I was. “Hey, I dropped my daughter off here—”

  “Rachel?”

  “No, Mary. Have you seen her?”

  “Oh, yeah, earlier in the evening,” he said. “Haven’t seen her in a while.”

  Okay, that panic that I can usually keep in check swelled right up in my throat, and I ran for the boys’ restroom. Not to puke, but to see if she was hiding in there. God knows why she’d be hiding in there, but it was the only spot in the rink that I hadn’t checked. She wasn’t in the boys’ room, however, and I had to apologize all over myself to the poor pimply-faced kid who had been taking a whiz. I think I made him pee on his shoe. I shoved the door to the bathroom open with the palm of my hand and kept on going, storming out of the rink. I flipped the cell phone and called Rudy.

  “Is Mary at home?” I asked without saying hello.

  “Torie?”

  “Yes, it’s your wife. Who else would be looking for Mary?”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Is. Mary. At. Home? Simple enough question.”

  “No, she’s at the skating rink,” he said. “You don’t have to be so hateful.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “What do you mean she’s not?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Well, where is she?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “Has she called?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Ask Rachel if she knows where Mary is.”

  I waited, scanning the parking lot, while Rudy asked Rachel if she knew the whereabouts of her very-much-in-trouble sister. “No, Rachel hasn’t seen her.”

  My brain froze. I couldn’t think. It didn’t compute. She wasn’t at home, she wasn’t at the skating rink … I didn’t know what to think next. Rachel had never done anything like this. How dare she be such a good kid. It had left me completely unprepared for Mary. Not that Mary was a bad kid—in fact, I’d say she was closer to normal and Rachel was the abnormal kid—but still … I’d never had to think this way. Where could she be?

  She’d been kidnapped. That had to be it. What the hell else could it be? Hadn’t I taught her never to go anywhere with strangers? Yes. Hadn’t I taught her never to leave a party or an event with anybody other than her parents or grandparents? Yes. So then she had to have been taken. Right?

  Wrong.

  Just then a car pulled into the parking lot and out stepped Mary. I didn’t recognize the driver of the car, who looked about twenty. Mary’s friend Megan was in the backseat.

  I flipped open my cell phone and hit redial. Rudy answered on half a ring. “Did you find her?” he asked.

  “Yes, I found her.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “For now,” I said.

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “Talk to you later.”

  I was storming across that parking lot without even realizing it.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” I screamed at her.

  “Oh, hi, Mom.”

  “Don’t you oh-hi-Mom me.” I glanced at the driver. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Uh … Zack,” he said.

  “Mom, this is Megan’s brother,” she said.

  “Great. That’s nice. Get your butt in my car now,” I said. I didn’t even look back at the car that had dropped off my daughter. I marched behind Mary across the parking lot.

  When we got in the car, Mary was silent. She knew she was in trouble. I turned over the engine and headed straight for home.

  Finally, after a
bout a mile, Mary said, “Megan needed to change clothes. Some kid spilled his Frosty all over her.”

  “Great,” I said. “Megan doesn’t need you to change her clothes for her. Besides, if her brother drove her all the way home to New Kassel to change her clothes, why didn’t he just drop you off at the house? He had to go right by there. There was no reason for him to bring you all the way back here.”

  “Mom,” she said.

  “What?” I asked. “You know, you know you are not supposed to leave the rink with anybody except me or your father or unless I tell you otherwise!”

  “But I woulda been there all by myself,” she said.

  “Mary,” I said and skidded to a stop at the light. “There were thirteen—yes, thirteen—of your closest friends at that rink tonight. I know because you listed them all off to me as a reason for why you should be there.”

  She was quiet.

  The light had turned green and I hadn’t moved fast enough, so the guy behind me laid on his horn. I put the car in park, got out, and walked back to his car. “Excuse me, I realize you’re in a hurry,” I said to the driver, “but I’m in the middle of a crisis here, and if you could find it in your heart to allow me more than two point four seconds to step on the gas pedal, I’d appreciate it.”

  The man just gaped at me while I stalked back to my car and gave it gas.

  “Oh, my God, Mother,” Mary said. “You are seriously PMS-ing.”

  “PMS-ing? I’ll show you PMS-ing.”

  “Oh, here we go,” she said. “I know, I know, I’m grounded from the phone.”

  “The computer,” I said.

  “What?” she screeched. Then she pleaded. “No, Mom.”

  “You wanna talk to me about PMS-ing? You wanna talk to me about how you just scared the ever-loving bejesus out of me?” I said. That wasn’t it, though. It wasn’t that she scared me. I’d assumed she’d been abducted because I couldn’t bear the thought that my little girl would actually go against one of our house rules. A rule Rudy and I had set up for a reason. As a safety precaution. She’d just blithely ignored it. Either she was stupid, which I doubted, or she’d just done the equivalent of giving me a raspberry to my face. That was it. She’d just told me to kiss off, basically. My sweet little girl.

  That’s what bothered me.

  “Fine,” she said and shrank down in the seat. I realized then that she hadn’t put on her seat belt. Mary will push the limits and try to get by without it, especially in New Kassel, where the speed limit is, like, fifteen miles per hour and she thinks that means she couldn’t get hurt in a wreck. Which isn’t true at all, of course, but the worst part is that when we’re in places like Wisteria that have a higher speed limit she’ll forget to put it on.

  “Put on your seat belt,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “I’d rather leave it off. That way, if we have a wreck, I’ll just die and get away from you!”

  “Get it on now. It’s the law.”

  “Oh, so you don’t care if I die? Is that it? You just want me to wear it because of some stupid law?”

  “Mary, I swear, you either get that seat belt on now or I’ll shove it up your nose.”

  “Whatever,” she said. But she did put the seat belt on.

  When we got home she ran up to her bedroom and slammed the door shut, causing all the pictures in the hallway to move a quarter of an inch to the right.

  Rudy found me sitting on the bottom step with my face in my hands. “So, where was she?”

  “She’d left the rink with Megan and her older brother,” I said.

  “What?” he said, anger rising in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I could tell by the look on her face that she thought she’d gotten back to the rink before I arrived. She knew she wasn’t supposed to leave.”

  “Why’d she do it?”

  I shrugged. “Apparently, Megan got something spilled on her clothes, and you know thirteen-year-old-girls can’t change their clothes without somebody to hold their hands. But who knows, that could have been an excuse they concocted. That’s just it. Now that she’s done this, it makes me doubt everything she says.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

  “If you talk to her now, it won’t do any good. Anything you say will justify everything she’s feeling. Wait until tomorrow,” I said.

  “She’s supposed to work the sno-cone stand at the rose show.”

  “I know,” I said, “and she will. I grounded her from the computer.”

  Rudy smiled because he understood how huge the computer was in Mary’s life. Aside from the horses, the computer was everything. “You’re good.”

  “Not good enough,” I said, “or I wouldn’t have had to do this in the first place.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” he said. “She’s being thirteen.”

  “She’s being a brat.”

  “Brat … thirteen … they’re interchangeable.”

  * * *

  The first-ever annual New Kassel Rose Show was a success in my book. It was Saturday, and I was doing what I loved best: walking the streets of New Kassel at midday during a festival with the aroma of kettle corn wafting through the trees and the sounds of laughter and Tobias’s accordion flitting all around me.

  Tobias had insisted that he play his accordion, even though he was in charge of the rose show and had many other things to do. His accordion playing has become somewhat famous regionally. He’s been the star of several magazine and newspaper articles, and I think there was a certain amount of pride at stake. He’d rather juggle the rose show and the accordion than have somebody else take over and play for him.

  My sister had taken the morning off to have breakfast with her husband and kids at Fraulein Krista’s, and now she was taking the afternoon shift at the Gaheimer House, which freed me up to walk the town. I tried not to think about what Mary had done last night. I kept reliving that split second during which I’d thought she’d been abducted, that split second when I wasn’t certain where she was or what had happened to her. I could still feel the little prickles of sweat that had beaded on the back of my neck. My God, what must Sandy Kendall have felt when he found Rupert hanging from that tree?

  I didn’t want to know. If it was one smidgen worse than what I felt last night—and I knew it had to be—I didn’t want to know it.

  Elmer Kolbe waved at me from across the road, and I waved back. Rachel and Riley were seated on the top rung of Gerri Harold’s fence, sharing an ice cream cone. It really disturbed me that the same daughter who would not eat potato chips out of a bag that somebody else had stuck his hand in would now lick an ice cream cone that Riley had licked. I mean, his spit particles were all over that ice cream! I guess it was living proof that Riley was here to stay.

  I made my way to the area we had set up for the roses. They were awarding the blue ribbon for the best fragrance as I walked up. It went to Sam Hill’s wife, Janie, for her Golden Celebration. I found the names of roses quite interesting. Walking through the rows of “contestants,” I saw names like Betty Boop, Don Juan, Glamis Castle, and Sunsprite. There was also a slew of roses named after famous people like Cary Grant, Queen Elizabeth, Julia Child, and Anne Boleyn. What about Martha Stewart? Is there a rose named after Martha Stewart? There should be. I wonder what you have to do to get a rose named after you.

  I stuck my nose in the blue ribbon winner and could not believe the fragrance, light and fruity and like nothing I’d ever smelled before. In fact, it was so wonderful that I just kept right on smelling it. I think I would have stood there with my nose in the rose for the next hour if Sheriff Mort hadn’t walked up and spoken to me.

  “Show a success?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so. Everybody seems pretty happy. Maddie and the gang had an open show where anybody could bring roses in, and they gave away blue ribbons. I didn’t know they were going to do that. I thought only the garden club members were
going to bring in roses. This turned out to be really neat.”

  “So we’re doing it again next year?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  “Where’s Rudy?”

  “He took Matthew to the ball game,” I said. “Cardinals are playing the Cubs. Can’t miss a Cards-Cubs game.”

  “Well,” he said, glancing around, “a lot of people did. You’ve got quite a crowd here.”

  “Yes, we do have a great crowd,” I said, looking around at all the people shopping and sniffing roses. “What’s up?”

  “I got the files on the Kendall suicides,” he said.

  “And?”

  “I looked through them. Where can we talk?”

  “How about my office?”

  As we walked back toward the Gaheimer House, I saw Eleanore approaching on the sidewalk. It was the third or fourth time I’d seen her since her “incarceration,” as she had so eloquently put it, although I hadn’t had much chance to speak with her. She wore a hot pink dress that touched the ground, a large hat with at least two dozen freshly cut roses stuck haphazardly in the brim, and an orange ribbon pinned over her heart. Charity Burgermeister told Helen Wickland that ever since her time in jail, Eleanore has worn that orange ribbon over her heart to remind her of the injustice done to her at the hands of Granite County law enforcement. I thought she was going to wave and go on by, but instead she stopped me. “Torie, I would just like to say that the rose show has been an overwhelming success.” For the record, she didn’t even look at Sheriff Mort.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I think the garden club deserves all the credit.”

  She leaned in with one hand on her hip and said, “And don’t you forget it.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Because I’ll never forget just how much you did to get me out of jail,” she said.

  “But Eleanore, I didn’t do anything to get you out of jail.”