by Molly Macrae
Debbie shivered as though someone had drifted over her grave, and that was enough to get her moving and refocused on the workday ahead. “You go ahead and read the article,” she said. “I’ll take care of the cash register and get the place ready to open. There’s another article rehashing the old mess with Victory Paper. It might be more accurate than what the Knoxville and Nashville papers dredged from their files.”
I held the Bugle out so Geneva could see it without buddying up too close. Even if she couldn’t literally breathe down my neck, having a ghost reading over my shoulder gave new meaning to the word “claustrophobia.” She didn’t do any more than glance at the paper, though, before complaining.
“I liked the other picture better,” she said. “Where is it?”
“What other…” I smothered the rest of that with a “hmm” and a throat clearing.
“These pictures are boring. When you look at the other one, you see a whole lovely, tragic story. Maybe it’s inside. Turn the page.”
I whispered “Hush,” then called after Debbie, who was already busy with the cash drawer. “You’re sure you don’t mind opening by yourself?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll take the paper to the kitchen, then, and get out of your hair.”
“Take your time. Absorb it. It’s good background material for the investigation.”
I spread the A section of the Bugle on the kitchen table, separating the three sheets so the lead article, its continuation on page six, and the Victory Paper article from page three were all face up. Besides the pictures of Shannon and the two men, there were pictures of the paper plant and the river with the second article, but no other photographs. I looked at Geneva.
“It must be on the back side of a page,” she said. “Let’s turn them over.”
There wasn’t really any “us” in Geneva’s “let’s” because she wasn’t the kind of ghost who could move or manipulate objects. I hadn’t thought about it until then, but that could be a source of her occasional depression. Spending eternity taunted by pages one couldn’t turn or—more to her taste—televisions one couldn’t turn on or channels one couldn’t flip, would be hellish. Another source of frustration for her was how slowly she thought I responded to the blithe suggestions she made that started with “let’s.”
“Turn the pages! Turn the pages!”
I turned the three sheets over, but only the new superintendent of schools smiled out at us from page four. She was flanked by stories about roadwork and new sewer connections. Page five had ads and miscellaneous items of county news. I flipped the pages back to the articles and the photographs of Shannon, Will, and Eric.
“When did you think you saw another picture?” I whispered. There’d been articles in all the big-city dailies on Tuesday and Wednesday. They’d run the same photographs of Will and Shannon, though, and nothing more.
“It’s not what I think. It’s what I know. It was in the paper. I saw it.”
I shrugged. “Sorry.”
“There are two whole sections of the paper you haven’t even touched.” She pointed at the two sections I’d put aside.
“Those are sports and human interest stuff.”
“Open them! Open them!”
“Calm down.” I opened them, turning the pages slowly so she could see them, telling myself I was calm, as well as sweet and accommodating. Also telling myself I only imagined that I wanted to snap each page open and slam it down on the table, although I was finding myself hard to believe. Section B contained four pages of community organization and school sports news. I was especially sweet and didn’t say, “I told you so.” Section C was nothing but classified ads. When I’d turned and displayed all the pages, I turned my empty hands palms up. “Sorry, it’s not here.”
“I saw it.” She billowed a time or two—an unnerving sight that made me glad she couldn’t move objects. Or throw them. She was obviously convinced she’d seen the photograph, and she was obviously getting more frustrated and upset.
“Where did you see it?” I asked. “Where were you and where was it?”
She stopped billowing. She stopped moving altogether and looked more dead and disturbing than if she’d shrieked and flown at me.
I hesitated before saying, “It wasn’t in this paper, was it.”
She stared.
“How long ago did you see it?” I tried to keep my voice low and even because she didn’t like questions that stirred up her memories. She didn’t like it when I questioned those stirred-up memories, either.
She continued staring and I felt my shoulders creeping toward my ears in case of sudden ghost implosion. But then she appeared to give herself a shake, as though coming out of a trance. The effect was more as if a watery reflection riffled.
“I only wish I’d listened to my mother,” she said, “and always kept a clean hankie in my pocket.”
“Sorry, what?”
“You have no idea what it’s like being forever without one, especially when there is so much to weep and wail about.”
“Um, is there any way I can help?”
“No. But don’t worry about me.” She sighed. “I will tax my strength by describing the missing photograph for you and then I will melt away into a dusty corner and sob.”
I started to interrupt her—there were no dusty corners in the Weaver’s Cat unless she meant to sob in the farthest corners of the rafters in the attic—but she was playing her role to the hilt and no protest from me was going to stop her.
“I will sob and mourn,” she said, “because they were so beautiful and romantic, even in their tragic death. The picture shows them laid out, lying head to head in that grassy meadow, their eyes staring up into the sky as though they looked beyond the passing clouds and all the way to heaven. And he was so proper in his suit—serge, I think it was, though I’m not certain. And she was lovely and demure in pale dotted lawn—pale except for the ghastly bloodstain seeping through her bodice. And she had a ribbon with a cameo at her neck and the hair escaping her snood curled sweetly at her temples. Chestnut. That’s a good name for the color of her hair. And it was sad the way it still shone so in the sun.
“The shotgun lay beside them. They could not have used it themselves. Not and lie there as they did, as though their bodies were composed for the photographer. It is a shocking picture and not one you would forget if you had seen it. It tells a shocking story and my tears fail to wash either the picture or the story from my memory. I do not know what the world is coming to when the lives of two such true sweethearts are so cruelly ended. At least the photograph spares us the dreadful colors of their death. It was far worse seeing them there in that gory spring grass.”
It was my turn to stare. “Geneva, what are you talking about? I thought you were describing a photograph. But did you see…what are you remembering?”
“Horror.” She said it with bleak simplicity, all color fading from her voice. “I will go weep now.” And she faded away, too.
It wasn’t payback for Debbie’s falling asleep Tuesday morning that kept me in the kitchen, but I sat there longer than I should have. First, trying to clamp down on the images Geneva had left to haunt me. Unfortunately, I didn’t see how there was anything I could do right then either to make her feel better or to somehow sort out her story. If it even was her story. But from her telling of it and from her reaction to the telling, that surely wasn’t just some television episode she’d absorbed and internalized.
But even if it was a fabricated memory, I didn’t need those disturbing images in my head mixing with and clouding the disturbing images already there. So I dusted off a technique I’d used for dealing with troubled textiles when I wasn’t able to give them immediate attention. The technique was to isolate and plan—seal the problematic item away to protect it and surrounding pieces, then develop a plan for diagnosing and solving the issues discovered. That worked well when dealing with filth of undetermined origins or stains or mold. Maybe I could make it work for memories of
murder, too.
That settled, memories compartmentalized (I hoped), I made a pot of strong coffee and finished reading the lead story in the Bugle. Debbie was right about it raising questions.
Autopsy results, in addition to showing that Shannon died several hours before Will, also showed she was pregnant. Funny that Debbie hadn’t mentioned either of those twists when she handed me the paper, but maybe she hadn’t absorbed much past the part about Eric Lyle’s gun. And where was Eric Lyle? What part did he play in the Cloud Hollow tragedy? Gunpowder residue was found on Will’s hands. What if Will killed both Shannon and Eric before killing himself? But then where was Eric? In his car at the bottom of Lake Watauga? But why bother to dispose of him? Why kill either of them? Who died first? Was the whole thing a horrible chain reaction—literally boom, boom, boom? Between questions like those crashing around in my head and the effort it was taking to keep Geneva’s story from leaping back out of its box, I felt a massive headache brewing that no amount of caffeine was going to fix.
And I really had to look at Geneva’s story again. That couldn’t have been just a performance. She’d begun with her usual melodrama, and certainly her weeping was true to form, but fading away quietly like that at the end was not her usual shtick. She was convinced, and convincing, that she’d seen a newspaper photograph of a double murder. Worse, it sounded as though she might also have been there and seen the bodies. But where? Except for the green grass, her description matched nothing at Cloud Hollow. And when had she seen the bodies? Before or after she died? Had she stumbled across the scene? Witnessed the crime? I rubbed my temples and the back of my neck, troubled by putting words to another thought. Was Geneva that bloodstained young woman?
Surely not. Although I was new to the world of believing in ghosts, I was pretty sure they couldn’t change their clothes and hairstyles after death. The watery, blurry ghost haunting me wore her hair loose, not neatly captured in a snood. It was harder to tell about a ribbon with a cameo around her neck, but I didn’t think she wore that, either. More to the point, there didn’t appear to be a ghastly bloodstain across her bodice. But maybe bloodstains don’t make the transition to the afterlife? But then where did all the stories of bloodstained ghosts come from? That was a very strange line of thought for someone schooled in chemical analysis and the scientific method. I decided I’d reached my quota of weird for the day and it was time to go pull my share of real-world retail weight.
Before leaving the kitchen, I cocked an ear but didn’t hear Geneva weeping. And that’s what happens when you give in to being haunted, I told myself, shaking my head sadly. Listening for a ghost’s sobbing becomes ordinary.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” Debbie said when she saw me. “Eric Lyle is the one. He killed them.”
That wasn’t the best topic of conversation for setting a happy mood in the shop, but she was alone at the counter and I didn’t hear floorboards creaking or customers chattering anywhere else. Rather than cause friction by disagreeing with her about the certainty of Eric Lyle’s guilt, or by suggesting other possibilities, I dodged the current murder altogether.
“Have you heard anything about another double murder around here?”
Prefacing that question with a time frame would have been a good idea. Judging from Debbie’s eyes and mouth flown wide, and her hand suddenly pressed to her chest, I’d almost given her a heart attack. The camel bells on the door jingled as she blinked, breathed, and recovered her voice.
“What do you mean, ‘another double murder’?” she asked.
From the look of his set jaw, his flinty, suspicious eyes, and the hand resting on the butt of his revolver, Deputy Cole Dunbar was interested in knowing that, too.
Chapter 12
Deputy Cole Dunbar wasn’t an idiot, and he had good instincts. Neither of those attributes worked to improve our relations. Even though I tended to be a polite, nonconfrontational person, one with a reasonable sense of self-preservation so that I didn’t call him Clod to his face or to anyone else, he sensed it anyway.
“Two bodies weren’t enough for you?” he asked. “You’re back in town a few months so you need to celebrate by finding a couple more?”
“You are an insensitive clod.” So much for being polite. Back in town a few months and I’d already blown my cover. Calling him a clod wasn’t the same as calling him Clod, though, so I could still pat myself on the back. “And why are you keeping track of how long I’ve been back in town?”
“As a sworn peace officer, it’s my duty to keep track of movements in and out of town. Forewarned is forearmed. You were here for several weeks following the death of your grandmother. You left to pack up your belongings in Illinois. You moved them here, and here you seem to be staying. Not so hard to keep track. And, as I recall, while here during the initial few weeks, you racked up a pretty good body count.”
Sententious clod.
“It’s also my duty to follow up on information received, so I will repeat Ms. Keith’s question. What do you mean, another double murder?”
I looked over at Debbie. She was sitting on the stool behind the counter quietly crying. “Oh, Debbie, no, it’s nothing.” I grabbed the box of Kleenex from the end of the counter and took it to her. Touching her tentatively, I was relieved to feel nothing, and I put my arm around her. “There hasn’t been another murder. It was some old story I heard. I think. I mean, I heard it and I think it’s old. Aw, now, it’s going to be okay.”
“Ahem,” Clod said.
“Normal people don’t actually pronounce the word ‘ahem,’ Deputy. They cough or clear their throats. What are you doing here, anyway?” So much for being nonconfrontational and having a reasonable sense of self-preservation. I stopped myself and held up a hand. “Sorry, I’m sorry, can you wait just a moment, please?” I breathed in, breathed out, worked at letting the annoyance slide past. He was a lot of annoyance, but it was good practice. “Sorry, Deputy. Off on the wrong foot. Is there something we can help you with this morning?”
He had the flinty, suspicious eyes again. Or maybe they’d never warmed up in the first place. “I’m looking for Joe.”
“Why are you looking for him here?”
“Isn’t he here on Fridays?”
“Afternoons.” Debbie sniffled into her Kleenex. “Friday afternoons.”
I tamped down a moment of annoyance with Debbie for giving Clod that information. So what if he was looking for his brother? Interesting, though, that he had to look for Joe and couldn’t just call or text him. It made me wonder. If Joe caught wind of the fact that Clod was looking for him, would he stick to his Friday-afternoon schedule or go find someplace that needed to be fished? And given the opportunity, would I provide the notifying wind? I felt a conspiratorial smile sneaking past my guard. It put me in a sunnier mood.
“You might actually be able to help me, Deputy,” I said.
He darted glances at the skeins and balls and scarves and needles and knitting and weaving surrounding him. His eyes went from flinty and suspicious to alarmed and suspicious. That was a curious improvement.
“I mean with this story of an old murder.”
He relaxed back into his own element, cocking one hip and nodding for me to continue. I told him the sketchy details, removing Geneva’s melodramatic grace notes and keeping an eye on Debbie to make sure she wasn’t freaking out.
“Where’d you hear this from?” he asked.
“A woman. I’m not sure who she is.”
“Where’d it happen? How long ago?”
“I don’t know.”
“Victims’ names?”
“No, I…”
“Well, you know, Ms. Rutledge, it’s kind of hard to pin something like this down without a few of the things we call ‘facts.’”
“Why? Because you’ve had so many sensational double murders in Blue Plum you can’t keep track?” Clod might know how to ooze condescension, but I know how to pour on the sarcasm.
“Because they make it ea
sier to search records and archives,” he said.
“Which is why I asked if you’d ever heard about it. I thought if you had, then you might be able to supply some of the missing facts. I hoped your knowledge of crime in the area might provide an entry point for locating and accessing further information. But you haven’t heard of it, so you can’t help, so thank you anyway.” I moved down the counter away from him and tried to look busy with a pair of scissors. He followed.
“What’s your interest in this old story?” he asked.
I folded a piece of scratch paper and started snipping. “Same reason I don’t like leaving a movie before the credits are over.”
“Because you’re into useless trivia?”
“Because I like to know how things work from start to finish.”
“Could be. Or it could be you’re plain nosy.” He nodded. “Yeah, well, Ms. Nancy Drew, I can understand that. I do think making paper dolls like you’re doing there is a better hobby than hunting up old murders, but even that’s a safer hobby than chasing around after real bad guys. I’m glad to see all your handicrafts here are keeping you off the streets.”
I held up what I’d cut. It looked like a string of paper ghosts. I tucked them in my pocket to show Geneva later and started on a string of paper deputies. Still, I couldn’t help flapping my mouth. “You mean like instead of asking questions about a missing security guard? Or about the gun owned by that security guard that was used to shoot and kill two people? Or why the owner of the field where the deaths occurred didn’t hear anything about the security guard, who is possibly at large and dangerous, before that information showed up in the paper four days later?”
Clod gave me a narrow-eyed glare before ignoring my questions and turning to Debbie. “Ms. Keith, what time will Joe be in this afternoon?”
“Fast and Furious,” she sniffled.
“Is there a translation for that?”
“Four o’clock sit and knit,” she said.
“Pfft.” On his way to the door he stopped. “Ms. Rutledge?”