Dyeing Wishes

by Molly Macrae

  Debbie’s eyes went from wide and willful to blazing. She checked for customers browsing too close and leaned in with a harsh whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me about that woman and her friend snooping around here? You should have warned me. What else do you know that you aren’t you telling me? And what have you told the others that you haven’t told me?”

  It would have been easy to throw her hissy fit back at her and ask what she was keeping from us, but I stuck to the plan. Ardis was definitely better suited for handling those questions and this flare of temperament, and we didn’t need the public drama and trauma of a major blowup in the store. Besides, I had enough of that in my private and paranormal life with Geneva the diva.

  I raised a placating hand and shook my head. “Nothing. There’s nothing, Debbie.”

  “I asked you to find out what happened. I didn’t ask you to turn me into the number one suspect!”

  Debbie’s voice was still low, but a few heads were turning by now. One woman, with studied nonchalance, moved closer. Ardis took over.

  “Fiddlesticks, hon,” she said, putting her arm around Debbie. “Kath isn’t keeping anything from you or anyone, except maybe Cole Dunbar, but that only makes good sense. And don’t you know by now that Kath isn’t about anything if she isn’t about good sense? Why, she spent the wee hours of this morning turning the wheels in her head and she’s got a plan and assignments for all of us in the posse so we can help. Kath, honey,” she said, turning to me, “before you run off to the library, tell Debbie about the progress you’ve made and what you’d like her to do this afternoon.”

  “Oh, well, um…” I thought fast and put a finger to my lips, tipping my head toward the closest customer. “Let’s hold on to the progress report for now, but Debbie, if you can, I’d like you to keep an ear out in the store…”

  “Surveil the premises,” Ardis cut in. “Take note of everything pertaining.”

  “Notes, yes, notes would be great and…” I tried to gauge Debbie’s response. She didn’t look impressed by that assignment. “And also, I’d like your impressions of everyone you know or have met who’s involved, from Will to Pen Ledford. Write it all down. I want the impressions from you, and I’ll get Thea onto facts, and then we’ll see what meshes and what doesn’t and what we can pick apart. So impressions, okay? Can you do that?”

  That assignment did spark an interest, and Debbie turned the last of her vehemence on Pen. “I don’t know much about that sorry woman, but I’ll bet she knows something. Or she thinks she does, anyway.”

  “Hon, we all think we know things,” Ardis said.

  Something else I didn’t know that day was if I’d known what I was doing when I invited Geneva to go along with me to the library. Maybe I’d banked on her continued lack of response to anything I said or did. She hadn’t acknowledged the invitation when I asked her and still didn’t say anything when I ran up to grab my purse. But when I heard the cat trotting down behind me, I looked back and she was drifting down the stairs behind the cat.

  They followed me into the front room, he looking happy and ready for a jaunt, she like a patch of congealed fog. She drifted over to the mannequin near the counter, sinking as she went, until she ended in a pathetic swirl of mist curled around its base. She would have added the perfect touch to the display if the mannequin had been modeling a deerstalker and one of those classic Sherlock Holmes coats with the short cape. Instead it wore an argyle vest in eye-killing shades of orange, magenta, and lime green and also had on a knit cap with giant pom-poms that were supposed to be earmuffs but looked more like mutant raspberries. Ardis had dressed the mannequin in that getup and I’d thought about suggesting a less unusual combination. She knew the business, though, and by noon we’d already sold six copies of the vest pattern and a dozen for the hat.

  At the moment Debbie was at the end of the counter, hunched over a legal pad and writing notes at a feverish pace, slashing underlines onto the page here and drilling punctuation marks into it there. Ardis sat on the stool behind the counter, going over invoices and making encouraging noises that sounded more like she was egging her on. The cat watched a pair of teenage girls pawing through the sale bins, each swaying to her own plugged-in music. Geneva, except for her eyes staring at me, looked like a circle of ghostly quilt batting. Couldn’t she at least blink?”

  “Something wrong down there, Kath?” Ardis asked, her eyes following my scowl to the base of the mannequin.

  “What? Oh, no. Just thinking. Isn’t there a quote from somewhere about fog and cats?”

  “Sheep,” Debbie said without looking up. “There’s a really depressing poem called ‘Sheep in Fog’ by Sylvia Plath.”

  “I’m sure there is, hon,” Ardis said, “but I think Kath is more likely remembering the Carl Sandburg poem. ‘The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches / and then moves on.’ I made all my students memorize it. You should have read some of the rude parodies they wrote and thought I didn’t know they were passing around.”

  “Will memorized ‘Sheep in Fog.’” Debbie dropped her pen onto the legal pad and leaned her elbows on the counter and her chin on her fists. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but there was a time when he was really into Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Did you know they both committed suicide? Maybe that was something he always had in the back of his mind.”

  “And if he did, then there wasn’t much you or anyone else could do about it,” Ardis said.

  Debbie shook her head. “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “Oh, hon.”

  Ardis and I each reached a hand to Debbie. Ardis touched her cheek. I put mine on the shoulder of her soft yellow sweater.

  “Did you love him?” I asked.

  She jerked away from me with an unintelligible noise and looked around—for an escape route, I thought. Then I realized she was looking to see if anyone else in the room had heard my question or her shocked reaction. But the only customers in the front room then were the two teenagers, and they were still at the sale bins, still listening to their personal soundtracks.

  “Never mind, never mind,” I said in a rush. “Don’t pay any attention to me.” Where had that question come from? Nothing like walking up to an emotionally shaky friend and applying a good old sucker punch straight to the gut. Great interpersonal skills, Kath. “Debbie, I’m sorry.”

  Except…of course I knew where the question came from. It came from my fingertips touching her sweater and that weird transference of emotions…the way it had happened when I touched Will and Shannon and the way I’d been zapped by the intense hatred when I touched Bonny. Except this emotion was muddier. There was love, yes, but also…ambivalence? Uncertainty? I couldn’t tell. But why now? Why, when I hadn’t felt Debbie’s emotions any of the other times I touched her, did I feel them now? Why did I ever feel them? Was it something to do with the types of fibers my fingers touched? Or with the intensity of the emotions involved? I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to stop and think about it. None of it made sense.

  “Forget I said anything, Debbie. Ignore me. You don’t have to answer that.”

  “Yes, I do.” With some effort, her voice produced normal sounds again. “Look, I’ve been upset. I think you can understand that. But I asked you to find out what happened and you need to ask questions and I understand that. So I do need to answer. Did I love Will? It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Will loved Shannon. She was the world to him. When she died, his world ended.”

  I looked at Ardis. She’d been caught off guard by my question, too. Her glance flicked back and forth between Debbie and me, and she looked ready to leap in with another hug if leaping or hugging was needed or could help.

  Debbie was calm, though. Her eyes, voice, and hands were steady. Ardis was right about her and I’d seen it for myself. Debbie knew how to take care of herself. She was tougher than she looked or sometimes sounded. She obviously believed in the single-mindedness and fin
ality of Will’s love for Shannon. But she hadn’t really answered my question, and in fact, it did matter whether she’d loved him. Did she really not see that? Didn’t she know how suspicion worked? Or lovers’ triangles? Or women scorned? Or the pedestrian mind of Clod Dunbar?

  And if I were really cut out for the grilling life, maybe I could ask prying and antagonizing questions without tripping over my tongue, turning into a nervous wreck, or turning tail and running.

  The cat twined in a circle around my ankles, then looked up and blinked at me with the sweetest smile. It’s possible it wasn’t really a smile and he was just busy applying another layer of cat fur to my pant legs, but I chose to interpret the combination of actions as meaning, My friend, you’re doing fine. Just go for the smooth and everything else will slide on in to home. You and me, we are the cat’s pajamas. Believing that’s what he meant gave me strength.

  Then I looked at Ardis and saw Geneva’s hollow eyes staring at me from over her right shoulder.

  I yipped, which scared the cat. The cat leapt straight up onto the counter, which startled Debbie. Debbie, obviously not as calm as I thought, screamed, which sent Ardis—eyes as wide as Geneva’s—into mother-tiger-to-the-rescue mode.

  “Did he scratch you?” Ardis demanded. She turned to the cat, hands on her hips. “Did you scratch her? We will have none of that, buster, because if we do, we will have none of you. Is that clear?”

  “Mrrrph?” said the cat.

  “No, no, it was my fault,” I said. “I thought I stepped on him.” I leaned down and put my face close to his—a move that would have earned me a stripe across the nose from any of Granny’s cats. “Are you okay, sweetie?” I asked. I hadn’t known I could make such a goo-goo voice.

  He butted his forehead against mine, then flopped on his side with a loud purr.

  “Well,” Ardis said, “so long as he’s clear on that.”

  The cat turned partially onto his back and waved a paw, inviting her to rub his belly, which she was happy to do. Debbie joined in the reconciliation love fest by smoothing the fur between his ears. It was cat bliss.

  “I think Buster is pretty clear on how things are around here,” I said.

  “Oh my, did I just name him for you?” Ardis asked.

  “Ab-so-lute-ly not,” Geneva said, enunciating each syllable with ponderous thunder. “I would rather kill myself than call him Buster.”

  That seemed unnecessarily harsh. “Um, no,” I paraphrased, eyeing Geneva uneasily. She still hovered behind Ardis’ shoulder. She didn’t look any less dismal or droopy, but she was slightly denser and more cohesive, if those were the right words. And pretty cranky. “No, he isn’t really a Buster, I don’t think. I’ll keep working on it. But thanks, anyway, Ardis.”

  Ardis shivered and pulled her sweater more snuggly around her.

  “Can we go now?” Geneva asked. She had all the dampening enthusiasm of a spoiled and bored child.

  Chapter 21

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come with me,” I said into my cell phone as we crossed the street toward the courthouse. “I wasn’t sure you were ever going to talk to me again. Are you going to be okay out here, though? Do you really think it’s a good idea?”

  Trying to carry on a conversation along the way probably wasn’t a good idea considering I still slipped up occasionally. But she was with me, and that was an improvement, even if she did turn her hollow eyes toward me with a look that might as well have said, Don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t want to live.

  “Don’t run into that pole—oh…oh well.” She passed right through a utility pole without a bobble. She certainly didn’t hurt the pole. “Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you? It might help.”

  She raised her shoulders and dropped them with a barely audible sigh. If she’d had pockets, her hands would be buried in them and she’d be kicking along the pavement in a dejected hunch.

  “Okay, well, you can tell from the way I blundered into that question with Debbie that I’m not the best at touchy-feely emotional stuff. I try, but…wait a second. Speaking of touchy-feely, do you know anything about other spoo…um, other paranormal stuff?” I was so busy looking at her to see if that sparked any interest that I almost walked into the mailbox outside the bank. What a pair we were. The dangerous duo out for a blunder down the sidewalks of Blue Plum.

  Some tourist boys dragging behind their tourist parents snickered and I heard one of them say something about not being able to walk and talk at the same time. Geneva wasn’t talking anyway, so I decided I might as well put the phone away.

  “The library’s a few blocks down,” I told her. “I’m going to hang up now, but stay close, okay? I don’t want to lose you out here.” Or anywhere, I realized as I dropped the phone back into my purse.

  I was a tad nervous now that we were out in public—open-air public as opposed to the contained public of the Weaver’s Cat. Geneva had traveled with me a few times by car between the cottage where we’d met and the shop. And I knew enough not to worry that a sudden gust of wind would carry her vaporous presence away. But before relocating to the Cat she hadn’t been anywhere, hadn’t left that tiny cottage for who knew how long. She certainly didn’t know how long she’d been cooped up there. Being housebound or shop-bound for weeks or months—let alone a dozen or so decades—would bore most people to death. Although, come to think of it, maybe that was why the confines of the cottage hadn’t bothered Geneva.

  The bright morning had turned into an afternoon of gray clouds with only fleeting patches of sunshine, dreary one minute and dazzling the next. Much like Geneva on a more typical day. I wasn’t used to seeing her in direct sunlight and the effect was interesting. In the sun she faded to the point where she wasn’t much more than a collection of dust motes. But not the sparkling kind of motes that make one think of tiny tinkling fairy bells. Hers were just dust—dull, dusty dust motes. I didn’t share that observation with her, though. That would have been about as sensitive as telling Mercy Spivey her roots were showing.

  The first time Geneva came into Blue Plum with me, she said she vaguely recognized it. But after wafting into the Cat she hadn’t expressed interest in looking any further around town. Walking to the library I thought she might see something familiar, something that would catch her eye or jog a memory. Something that would cheer her up. The exteriors and roof lines of many of the buildings hadn’t changed for a hundred or more years, so there was a chance. But she paid no attention to anything we passed. She didn’t seem to notice the warm patches of sun. And she didn’t seem to care that I’d stopped talking to her. Yet she stayed beside me.

  The name of the J.F. Culp Memorial Public Library was almost bigger than the impressive block of limestone J.F.’s family donated for the sign—in the shape of an open book—out front. There were some who thought the sign looked more like a distorted gravestone than a book, but as Granny said, there were also some who wouldn’t recognize a book if you hit them upside the head with it.

  The library’s redbrick exterior was designed to fit into the town’s historical streetscape without jarring the eye. It gave the general feeling of bygone architecture without mimicking any particular style or period. The interior was supposed to be cutting-edge, or at least up-to-date. To hear Thea tell it, though, the reality of the functionality fell short. We’ve got all the inconveniences of late-twentieth-century shoddy workmanship, I’d heard her say, and none of the actual charms of the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

  I held the heavy glass door for Geneva. Needlessly. She drifted through one of the sidelights, stopped in the lobby to stare at the drinking fountain, then drifted through the security gate. In the open area in front of the circulation desk she stopped again and drew in a breath. Or not exactly a breath, but she made a sound of sharp inhalation. The weirdness of a ghost emitting sounds of respiration hardly fazed me anymore.

  “How many books are there in this library?” she asked in awe. That something finally shook her out of
her doldrums and made her utter anything other than a complaint did faze me—so much so that I answered.

  “I don’t know. Let’s ask Thea.”

  “Ask me what?” Thea looked up from her computer behind the circulation desk, reading glasses pulled down her nose.

  Geneva threw her hands in the air. “Now you’ve done it. Now the loud one will think you’re crazy. Pretend you didn’t say anything. I’ve seen that movie with Marian the Librarian, and these women are territorial around their books. Please don’t do anything else to get us kicked out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many books in one place and I want to look around.”

  “Ask me what?” Thea repeated less patiently.

  “Answer her. Answer her.” Geneva shooed me toward Thea, but I turned and watched as she sailed into the stacks looking as full of herself as the figurehead on a ship. On a ghost ship. Grumbling, bossy thing.

  “Kath?”

  “Answer her!” came a shriek from somewhere in the biography section.

  “Have you got a minute?” I asked, turning back to Thea. “Can I ask you to do some research for me?”

  “Where does the minute come into it—in the asking part or in the research?”

  “The asking. I don’t know how easy the research will be.”

  “Leave that to the expert. What do you need?”

  I looked around to make no sure no one else would hear. I heard Geneva humming her favorite dirge-like tune as she navigated the shelves but otherwise didn’t see or hear anyone. I lowered my voice anyway. “Information on a few people?”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Anything you can find.”

  She nodded. “It’s a slow Saturday afternoon. I’ll see what I can do. And let me assure you that my professional scruples and my allegiance to the American Library Association prevent me from asking why you want this information, what you intend to do with it, and from alerting others to your interest without your consent. They also keep me from putting any label other than ‘people’ on the subjects constituting the focus of your request. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should tell you that if I have the opportunity to take a short personal break this afternoon, it’s possible my mind will wander in the general direction of the word ‘suspects.’”