by Molly Macrae
“I’ll be right back, Ardis.”
* * *
Great. How had I managed to alienate my two best friends—Ardis, my rock, and Geneva, my flighty ghost—in one short afternoon? Upsetting Geneva didn’t take much skill, but this was the second time in not so many days I’d managed to do it, so my skills must be improving. Granny used to say the old adage about a thing worth doing being a thing worth doing well was nothing but a crock of codswallop. Everything is worth doing well, she’d said, even if what you’re doing is making a crock of codswallop. I’d certainly made a crock of well-done codswallop that afternoon.
I would have stomped up to the study in the attic, but Ardis didn’t deserve my selfish tantrum. Neither did the customers. Once again, when I got to the study, I hoped to find Geneva. I didn’t, but I did find Argyle. He sat curled in the window seat and chirruped when he saw me, wrapping me around his little paw instantly.
“Hey, sweetie puss. Is our old girl here?”
Argyle stood and stretched, shivering his tail upright, then jumped to the floor. He didn’t gaze into a corner and chirrup again, and he didn’t walk over to sit in front of the hidden cupboard that was Geneva’s “room.”
“Ghost on the loose, Argyle. She’s a vigilante ghost and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
He leapt up on the desk and yawned.
“Really? You think not much?”
He looked around the desktop, found a pencil, and dribbled it with his paws to the edge. He gave the pencil one last swat and watched it hit the floor, then he flopped on his side and yawned again.
“A little excitement and then a nap? I hope you’re right. Would you mind napping on another pile of papers, though? I need these.”
He graciously let me tug the papers carefully out from under him. After I had them, he jumped down and headed for the door with a more demanding meow.
“Yeah, okay.”
I followed him down to the kitchen and tipped crunchy, fishy kibbles into his dish. Then I went back out front to face Ardis. She was with a customer, listening to an animated story about the woman’s first attempt to use circular needles. Ardis wiped tears from her eyes and told the woman she was lucky not to have garroted herself. The woman agreed and left with a bag full of alpaca. When Ardis saw me watching from the hall doorway, the smile she’d had for the customer disappeared.
“I want you to see something, Ardis.”
“You don’t need to show me anything. I’ll keep my nose out of your business.” She turned her back to me.
I moved down the counter so I could see her face. “Did I say I wouldn’t tell you how I know about the double murders?”
“As good as.”
“What happened to the vow you made about henceforth trusting your friends?”
“A hasty decision if there’s no two-way street.”
“I said it wasn’t important how I know about them. And in the great scheme of things—”
“There is no great scheme. There’s only what we have right here, right now.” She shifted around the other way, so her back was to me again.
“Then let’s deal with what we have. What I have is not much information about the woman who told me about the double murder. I’ll tell you what I can.”
“What you can. Is the rest top secret?”
“Ardis. I honestly don’t know her very well. I don’t know her full name. I don’t even know how to get hold of her right now.”
“What part of her name do you know? I might know her.”
“She doesn’t live around here . . . anymore. She told me she doesn’t know anyone. I met her when I was staying in the cottage at the Homeplace in the spring, after Emmett Cobb died. She knew him.”
“Emmett was a first-class wretch. Was she a friend of his? I don’t know that we should trust her.”
“No, she just knew him. They weren’t friends.” How could they be? Emmett had lived in the cottage Geneva haunted, but he never saw her, heard her, or knew she existed.
“Hmph. Well, then.”
“And then, after Will Embree and Shannon Goforth were killed, I saw her again, and she was terribly upset. Reading about Will’s and Shannon’s murders triggered something, and she suddenly remembered seeing a photograph of two murder victims. This would’ve been years ago that she saw it. She remembers the picture showing two bodies, a young couple, lying faceup, head to head in a green field. She was so specific. She even described the woman’s dress. She said it was white lawn. And she remembered the color of blood.”
“I don’t want to hear about blood.”
“No. I know. But the picture must have shocked the poor thing horribly so that she repressed the memory. You believe that can happen, don’t you?”
Ardis shrugged one shoulder.
“And the article about Will and Shannon in the Bugle brought it all back. She described the scene in the photograph so vividly—it was horrible for her all over again.”
“Like post-traumatic stress disorder?”
“I guess so.”
Ardis twisted partway around, still not quite facing me. “No one around here talks of such a dreadful thing happening. I’ve never heard about it, anyway, and you know how much I manage to hear. When was this supposed to have happened? Did she tell you that much?”
“No. But from her description of the clothes, late eighteen hundreds.”
“Then a color photograph makes no sense whatsoever. How did she know about green grass and the color of blood? Are you sure this woman isn’t delusional?”
A color photograph didn’t make sense. That had been the problem with Geneva’s story about the double murder from the beginning. But when the memory had started coming back to her, she’d been looking at photographs of Will and Shannon in the Bugle. Maybe the memory came back to her as a photograph—because a photograph was safer than the real memory. Her trauma definitely was real. Somewhere, somehow, sometime she’d internalized a traumatic incident, and she absolutely believed she’d seen a couple she knew—Mattie and Sam—lying dead in a field in Blue Plum.
“She absolutely convinced me, Ardis.”
Ardis twisted the rest of the way around and faced me.
“I asked both Cole Dunbar and Thea to look for a record or mention of the murders,” I said. “Or a photograph.”
“I remember. Cole was more rude than usual about it.”
“But Thea found something.”
“Bless the Goddess of Information. What did she find?”
I handed Ardis the two pages I’d brought down from the study—photocopies of the Blue Plum Bugle, one page from the October 7, 1872 issue, and the second from the week following.
“This isn’t much.” Ardis turned the papers over. The backs were blank.
“I know.”
Both photocopies were of pages from the Personals section of the Bugle’s classified ads. As Thea had explained it, the Personals were the social media of that time. If a person had no better way of communicating with someone, then paying for a message in the Personals was the way to go. The first ad read, Mattie Severs, please forgive and contact the ones who will always love you. The second was simpler and sadder, asking anyone who’d seen Mattie Severs or knew of her whereabouts to contact a post office box.
“There’s only the one name,” Ardis said. “This could be your Mattie, but where did the name Sam come from? How did your mystery woman know that name?”
“It’s from somewhere in her memories. Ardis, I wish I knew the whole story. I want to know it. That’s why I’ve been trying to find out. If I ever see her again, I’d like to be able to tell that woman whatever I do find out. Knowing the rest, or knowing more, might help her.”
“But if she doesn’t live here, how do you know you’ll ever see her again?”
“I hope I do. I have to believe it’s a possib
ility.”
“Ivy believed in all kinds of possibilities,” Ardis said. She laid the photocopies of the Bugle on the counter and looked at me with an interesting, assessing sort of glint in her eye. The kind of look that made me nervous. “And you certainly are your granny’s granddaughter. In so many ways.”
“Well, so”—I picked up the photocopies and tapped their edges on the counter—“that’s what I know about the double murder. And this is what I think. Unless Jerry Hicks uncovers a bunch more skeletons, or unless there have been an unusual number of double homicides in and around Blue Plum that nobody knows anything about, then I think we’ve found Mattie and Sam.”
“What’s the possibility of positively identifying them?”
“I’m not sure.” I was beginning to think I liked it better when she’d kept her back to me. There’d been a few times, over the past months, when Ardis seemed to be skirting a suspicion or on the verge of voicing one. She might not be able to see or hear Geneva, but, as careful as I tried to be, she couldn’t help seeing and hearing me reacting to Geneva.
And then there was the Crazy Ivy thing that Ardis mentioned. I’d been aware of the nickname, mostly whispered. Granny had always brushed it aside, but then she’d left a letter for me to read when she died that gave me reason to wonder. I’m a bit of what some people might call a witch, she’d said, although apparently she hadn’t liked the word “witch.” I prefer to think of the situation more in terms of having a talent. I have a talent which allows me to help my neighbors out of certain pickles from time to time. That sounded so friendly, so gentle. Innocuous and something to smile at. I could almost have brushed it aside, as she had the name Crazy Ivy, but she’d also left me her secret dye journal—a notebook with her recipes for natural dyes that would let me continue her good work—and then she told me I was a bit of a witch, too.
Was it all just so much codswallop? My science-trained brain had been sure it was. Then I’d met Geneva . . . and started feeling the occasional jolt of emotion from a piece of clothing . . . and couldn’t keep myself from trying a few of Granny’s dye recipes. And started catching Ardis eyeing me with “interest.”
Talk about being in a pickle. Maybe I could find a recipe in Granny’s dye journal for laying aside suspicions. And if I didn’t watch out, Ardis and everyone else would start calling me Crazy Kath.
“Here’s another possibility,” Ardis said.
“What?” That came out squeakier than I’d wanted. Darn tight throat muscles.
“When you’re out at the Homeplace in the morning, why don’t you look through the guest register for those few weeks you stayed in the cottage. You might find your mystery woman’s name. Her address, too.”
“Oh. Yes. Good idea. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“That way you can contact her. For further information. Or to pass it along.”
The three young women who’d been knitting upstairs came down at that point and I practically leapt across the room to see if they needed any help. No, they didn’t; the front door hadn’t moved since they’d arrived, and it looked as though they hadn’t forgotten where to find it. I thought about following them out onto the porch, in a further show of friendly customer service. But I was saved from going overboard by the arrival of a tour bus of senior citizens, many of them bent on spending time and, better yet, money in the Weaver’s Cat. They kept us busy and let me avoid Ardis’ scrutiny for the rest of the afternoon.
There were still a few straggling shoppers at closing. I magnanimously told Ardis I would stay to balance the register, lock up, and say good night to Argyle so that she could go home and her daddy’s supper wouldn’t be late.
* * *
When I got home myself, I dropped my purse and sprawled in one of Granny’s faded blue comfy chairs in the living room. My head nestled where her head and gray braid had. It’s a good thinking position, she’d said, because your head and back are supported and all the thoughts or pictures running through your brain won’t unbalance you. I wanted to feel myself relax. I wanted to feel answers to my questions bubbling to the surface. Neither my muscles nor the answers cooperated, though. I sprawled harder, but there was no noticeable improvement.
Granny had bought this old frame house shortly after Granddaddy died, saying it was her way of letting go and holding on at the same time. It gives us both room to breathe, she’d told me over the phone, the other half of that “us” being the other love of her life, the Weaver’s Cat. She’d taken some furniture and her looms and books with her to the new old house, giving the growing Cat permission to stretch and fill all the corners of the space she’d shared with Granddaddy since they were married. I was lucky enough, now, to own both places and to have stewardship of the loving memories woven between them. I’d hated losing my job and my life in Illinois, but I loved the safety net of Blue Plum that I’d fallen into. My move to this house had been, like Granny’s, one of letting go and holding on, at the same time.
Phillip had moved to town not much more than a month and a half earlier. New like me. By all accounts, he’d loved his job and profession. But someone in town had come to hate him enough to kill him. At least to hate him enough at that one crucial moment—at the swing of that wicked hackle. Did that make it a crime of passion? A momentary loss of humanity? Or had someone planned to kill him with the hackle there and then? Was it reasonable for anyone to think they could be accurate and forceful enough to kill with the swing of a hackle? But if the murder wasn’t premeditated, who’d taken the hackle to the retting pond? Phillip? And if he had, then it didn’t matter who had access to the storage area. It only mattered who knew where to find him, or happened to find him, that morning, at that hour. And what had that person gained by his death? Or what hadn’t that person lost?
Sprawling in the faded blue chair wasn’t producing the coherent answers I wanted, just more confusion and questions. On the theory that comfort and better accessories might make a difference, I went to change out of my presentable shopkeeper khakis and knit top into dark jeans and a black T-shirt. Then I took the ultimate accessory out of the drawer in the bedside table—a notebook from Ernestine. She, who always carried the perfect props, had given me a “casebook” suitable for a sleuth from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction—chocolate brown leather, the size of a deck of cards, dark red ribbon bookmark, and an elastic band bound into its cover to keep it closed. I felt almost indecent every time I stroked it.
My little beauty and the sheaf of notes from the meeting at Ardis’ went with me to sit on the front porch swing. There we swung gently to and fro, and I read and thought and made more notes. None of that helped, either, except to pass the time until it was too dark on the unlit porch to read. A good supper might have helped, considering I’d eaten only Mel’s cookies since breakfast, but I’d decided to skip eating until later. Not that I wasn’t hungry, but nothing I ate was going to sit well. The thought of driving out to the Homeplace and breaking in was giving me the heebie-jeebies.
Chapter 19
I was “visiting the Holston Homeplace Living History Farm after hours.” That sounded better to my rationalizing ears than “I was breaking in.” And I left my car at the Quickie Mart, a quarter of a mile away from the site, not because I planned to sneak in on foot, but because the warm evening reminded me of the first night I’d spent in the cottage. On that night I’d walked to the store for milk, so on this night, walking in the shadows along the edge of the dark, winding country road was a pleasant nostalgia tour. Although, after thinking of the phrase “nostalgia tour,” I wished I hadn’t, because I’d first heard it from Clod. Still, “nostalgia tour” sounded better than “breaking in,” too. So did “looking for a lost and fragile friend.”
And entering the grounds of the Homeplace hardly involved breaking in. Anyone could walk around the locked gate that barred the drive. “Stroll” was more like it. And most people would only need to duck behind a rhodod
endron if a car came along the road. And a smaller person hardly even had to duck, because some of the rhododendrons in east Tennessee were huge.
Once around the gate (and after brushing off a few rhododendron leaves), I headed for the caretaker’s cottage. Geneva, if she’d made it out to the site, might have gone to one of the other buildings. But as far as I knew, she’d never left the cottage once she’d started haunting it, so that was the first place to look for her. That it was also a place I wanted to look around because Phillip had lived there was only a coincidence.
Since meeting my less-than-corporeal friend, I’d done some research on ghosts. I’d read both that lavender kept ghosts at bay and that it attracted them—contradictory and confusing, like so many pieces of my life lately. The bees I’d seen buzzing in the lavender the other morning were all home and in bed when I walked past Phillip’s door and around to the side that was hidden from view. I put on the white cotton museum gloves I’d so handily stuck in my pocket. Then I checked to see if the window in the pantry was still in the habit of being unlocked, and I smiled. Yes, it was.
It occurred to me, after I’d climbed less than gracefully through the window, that it was now possible I’d broken into—that is, that I’d entered unlocked premises—more often than Joe had. It also occurred to me that long, lithe legs built for ambling were an advantage during such activities. So was the small LED flashlight on my key ring.
The pantry opened into the kitchen, which wasn’t as neat and clean as when I’d stayed there. Phillip hadn’t done his dishes before he died. I admired the variety of spices he’d left out on the counter—cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, rosemary, smoked salt, basil, dill—the inventory was wasting time and making me hungry. There wasn’t a hackle sitting on the counter or table or on top of the refrigerator. No ghost wept in a chair at the table as she had the first time I met her.
I moved into the living room, still furnished with the shabby sofa and upholstered rocker. Phillip had squeezed a desk into the corner near the window seat. Stacks of books surrounded a laptop-sized space in the middle of the desk.