“I’m really glad to see the two of you, Shirley.” I meant that, which surprised me. I felt bad about being surprised, but at least I was honest about it. Honest enough to know this happy-to-see-the-twins interlude probably wouldn’t last and I should take advantage of it. I checked the clock. “You and Mercy are doing a great job.”
“It’s our passion,” Shirley said.
“It shows.”
She
didn’t seem surprised either by my compliment or by my saying I was glad to see them. But maybe that was the way they got through life—and why not? If living in an oblivious, happy bubble really worked for them, more power to them. “The kids are supposed to break for lunch and a presentation from Wes Treadwell in half an hour.”
Shirley made a choking noise.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“She’s fine,” Mercy said. “Knee-jerk reaction. Skip back to the part about us doing a great job and leave Less-and-less Treadwell out of it.”
“You know him?”
“We’d rather not.”
“Oh. Well—”
“And we’d rather not talk about him.”
“Okay. So, not talking about Wes Treadwell, are you two happy in here until lunch? Because if you don’t need me, I thought I’d go into the storage area and scope out what to show the students.”
“You mean snoop,” said Mercy.
“Don’t worry,” Shirley said. “We’ll cover for you.”
T
he only wrinkle in my scheme, other than the Spiveys’ seeing right through it, was noticing that Zach was gone. So were his embroidered bones. Phillip hadn’t covered wandering students in our volunteer orientation. Nadine was aware he’d been helping Jerry, though, and she hadn’t insisted that he stay with the rest of the group, so maybe I didn’t need to worry. Unless I needed to worry about law-breaking. Doggone Clod for putting that in my head. And doggone Zach for disappearing.
As I went down the hall, Zach came out of the restroom. I felt like a jerk.
“Are you through embroidering for the day?” I asked.
“Are you abandoning the class to the old lady twins for the day?”
I looked left and right, but didn’t see anyone else. “The Spiveys are experts in the actual art of quilting. I’m not. I’m taking this opportunity to look around the storage area and the archives.”
Zach seemed to think that was an invitation to join me. Maybe it was. He was a student, after all, and my cover story was showing the storage and archives to students.
Way to take advantage of minors, Kath.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Sounds right. I need to stop in here.”
Phillip’s office door was open, with no deputies in sight. The copier lid was open, too, with no documents in sight. Dratted deputies. The key box—gray, metal, about the size of a phone book and several inches deep—was mounted on the wall behind the door. The storage room key hung inside on a duly labeled hook. I grabbed it and realized that Zach had hung back at the door, hands jammed in his pockets. Interesting that he was fine with sweeping dirt from old bones but reluctant to invade a dead man’s office space.
“That his?”
I looked to see what he meant. “The banjo?”
“Banjos are cool.”
“Do you play?”
His shoulder movement didn’t tell me much. Banjos were cool, but discussing them obviously wasn’t. Casual conversation probably wasn’t cool, either, but as I led the way to the storage room, I tried anyway.
“What did Ms. Spivey and Ms. Spivey tell you about the quilt they showed you?” Okay, so the question wasn’t all that casual. But I didn’t ask leading questions. “Did they have a name for the quilt?” Okay, so I did ask a leading question, but at least I didn’t suggest an answer.
“What do you mean, a name for it?”
“Some well-known quilts have names, the same way paintings or statues do. There’s a famous one called the Kaleidoscope Quilt. Did the twins call theirs anything?”
“Like what?”
“That’s what I was asking you.” I unlocked and opened the storage room door, reaching around the frame to flip the light on. Ahead of us and stretching to
the left for the length of the building were four ranks of six-foot-tall gray metal shelves—one row down each wall and two sets back to back down the middle of the long, narrow space—all laden with bundles and boxes large, medium, small, and enticing.
“What do you see?”
I asked. But it wasn’t a question for Zach, and I answered it myself.
“Wonderful things.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a quotation. It’s what Lord Carnarvon asked and what Howard Carter answered when he first looked into King Tut’s tomb.”
“Cool.” He tried to see around me. “They got mummies here?”
“No. It’s just something that always goes through my head when I open a door like this. Wait, though.” I stayed in the doorway so he couldn’t go past. “What
did
the twins say about the quilt? Humor me on this, okay? Old quilts are to me like Tut’s tomb was to Carter and Carnarvon.”
“I think I’m on Tut’s team. The old ladies wouldn’t let anyone else touch the quilt.”
“It might be fragile.”
“They talked about their great-grandmother. Could’ve been their great-great-grandmother. Whatever.
They
thought she was great, anyway, and they talked like they actually knew her, which I guess could be possible. How old are they, anyway?”
“That’s an impolite question.”
“You asked how old I am.”
“They’re somewhere in their early seventies.” He didn’t look impressed. “Anything else about the quilt?”
“The Tut connection.”
“You’ve lost me. Is that something they said?”
“No. I did. It’s a game. Connections. The connection between King Tut and the quilt is coffins. And you know, if you need to have a name for it, you could call it the Old Lady Quilt.”
“Coffins?”
“Tiny coffins in a row on one edge. Thirteen of them.”
I’d missed the signatures, and I’d missed the coffins. I hadn’t been given enough time with the quilt. “Did the Spiveys say anything about the coffins? Or the signatures?”
“No. Are we actually going in there? Because, I’m like—”
“Yeah, come on. I’ll show you around.”
Phillip had given me a brief tour of the storage area when I’d agreed to be part of Hands on History, although he’d apologized for the “small-town, small-time” facilities.
“It’s not what you’re used to, coming from a state museum, is it?” he’d asked.
“It’s exactly what I’m used to. Old things, lovingly cared for,” I’d said. “And professionals doing the best they can with the resources they have.”
“Then I’ll put it another way,” he’d said. “It’s not what
I
plan to become used to.”
I enjoyed showing Zach the eclectic variety of artifacts—from clay marbles to several dozen pairs of mule shoes to lace-edged antimacassars to an apple butter kettle and paddle—but I couldn’t help feeling the loss of Phillip’s joy and dramatics. I’d always thought of museum artifacts, resting quietly in their boxes and drawers, as waiting in suspended animation for the right interpreter to come along and tell their stories. And these artifacts—the Homeplace—lost a voice when
Phillip died. Others would come along, but how sad that we’d missed out on his interpretations of those stories.
“Are you allergic to dust?” Zach asked.
I blew my nose.
“Because I don’t see any, but if there is some, it might be so old that it’s toxic.”
“I’m sure that’s it. There’s probably toxic dust in these, anyway.” I pointed to the filing cabinets and shelves of boxes that made up the archives. “It’s hard to avoid a certain amount of dust in old papers.”
“What’s in them?”
“Artifact records, here,” I said, pointing to the accession files cabinet. “Whole lives and fragments of lives, in the rest of it. The history of the Holston family in letters, deeds, newspaper clippings, ledgers, receipts, recipes, photographs, and who knows what else. So, what do you think?” I took the cotton gloves I’d worn earlier out of my pocket and put them back on, then pulled the top drawer out of the first archive cabinet and started flipping through the files. “Storage and archives are reasonably cool, right?”
He didn’t answer, which was cool, and I continued flipping. Then I realized I was being rude by suddenly ignoring him, or at least being un-instructor-like. “That’s the end of the tour, I guess. Any questions?”
“Yeah. What are you looking for?” He pointed at the open drawer, at the file in my hands, at my eyes, which kept returning to the clipping in the file.
“Elbows.”
He looked down his seventeen-year-old nose at me.
“Access points.” I ticked the points off on my fingers. “Names. A Holston family tree would be nice. Names of Holstons who lived here. Names of
anyone
who lived at
the Homeplace. That kind of information shouldn’t be too tough to find.”
“Isn’t all that in one of those guidebooks they sell in the gift shop?”
“Some of it. Histories are usually abridged, though. Looking for that information, and finding it easily, will tell us something about the site, too. About how much research has been done and about the state and extent of the archives. About what might be missing. I want to know what kinds of primary source materials are here. Someone else, with more time, is coming in later to do more thorough research. I’m just—” I checked the time on my phone. “We still have time before lunch, so if you want to stay and help, then you and I’ll be the scouting party, finding likely access points, to save time later. What do you think?”
“I think I’m confused. Who are you trying to be, Harriet the Spy or Marshal Dillon?”
“You’re too young to know Marshal Dillon.”
“I’m not too young to know anything.”
A box of white cotton gloves sat on top of the filing cabinets. I handed a pair to him. He curled his lip, but put them on.
As he opened a drawer in the second cabinet and started flipping, I wondered what Geneva would think of Zach. From the way she talked about Matt Dillon, she had a crush on him, thanks to her years of nonstop television watching during the time she’d haunted the cottage. Would she like Zach, because of that, and think of him as a
pardner
, or see him as an indecipherable modern kid? But being indecipherable was a teenager’s general lot in life, and probably not so different from a ghost’s lot in death.
I stopped my own flipping when I came to a file holding a clothbound book. Clothbound. What would happen if I touched it? Probably nothing. It was cloth but not clothing. Was that what made the difference with this weird extra and extraordinary “sense” I’d developed since Granny’s death? Textiles were safe, but some textiles, made into clothing, somehow “radiated” the emotions of the person who wore them? Would the cloth-but-not-clothing rule make the difference so that I could touch the Plague Quilt? Maybe not if the quilt incorporated scraps from dresses. Did I dare touch it? Did I dare touch the book in the filing cabinet? Why not? I touched textiles all the time without flaking out and nothing would happen this time, either.
I pulled a glove off and dabbed a fingertip against the book. Nothing. I put all my fingertips on it. Nothing again. I put the glove back on and picked up the book. It turned out to be a household account book, kept between January 1874 and September 1875. I heard the absence of flipping from Zach and glanced over.
“Why’d you poke it?” he asked. “Did you think it would bite?”
“You can never be too careful. Have you found anything interesting?”
“To me? No.”
Zach slid his drawer closed. I put the account book back in my drawer and thought about making a note for John about it. I patted my pockets. No paper. I turned to Zach. No Zach. But I heard quiet steps behind me, down one of the rows of metal shelves.
“Zach?”
“Yo.”
“Be careful what you touch.”
“Not an idiot.”
“Neither am I.” I checked the time again, opened the second drawer.
Then I heard an exultant cry from Zach. “Wicked.”
“What’d you find?”
“No idea,” he said, carrying his treasure toward me cradled in his gloved hands. “It’s like a miniature bed of nails. What do you think it is?”
I knew what it was. And what it could be. A perfectly wicked murder weapon.
“T
hat’s a flax hackle, Zach.”
Zach looked skeptical, as though I’d pawned a Dr. Seuss rhyme off on him. What he held was a heavy board, six inches wide and a foot long, about an inch thick, with four or five dozen six-inch-long sharp spikes sticking up out of it in even rows—exactly like a miniature bed of nails.
“A hackle is what you use to comb the last pieces of straw from flax when you’re processing it. Sometimes they’re called heckles.” I tried to get a closer look at the spikes without being too obvious. I couldn’t see any signs of . . . of recent use or hasty cleaning. “Where did you find it?”
“Back there.”
“Show me.”
I followed him along the row of metal shelves, looking at his back, wondering if he had any idea what he carried. Except that it wasn’t this one, couldn’t have been. Zach stopped and shrugged his shoulder at an empty space on the middle shelf of the unit along the wall. The space was large enough for several hackles, and the last time I’d looked, when Phillip and I had talked about involving the students in the flax processing, there had been two.
“I didn’t hurt it,” Zach said.
“Did I say you
did
?” I retorted, and immediately felt bad. “Sorry, Zach. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“Why’s it such a big deal?” He put the hackle on the shelf and peeled off the cotton gloves.
“It isn’t such a big deal.” That statement could not have sounded like anything but a patronizing lie. Of course
his
touching one of the hackles wasn’t a big deal. But that someone
else
had helped him- or herself to the
other
hackle was a humongously huge deal. Because I was sure that’s what had happened, and I was also sure that the other hackle had been used to kill Phillip. It had to be. But if Clod and his buddies knew that, and if they had the murder weapon, then why weren’t they crawling all over the storage room looking for more evidence? Or had they already crawled?
I glanced around. I didn’t see any evidence of cops crawling around, but I wasn’t really sure what such evidence would look like. Nadine wouldn’t have let them leave fingerprint dust everywhere.
But that brought up another question. If Phillip’s murder was some kind of inside job, why was the site still open?
Oh, right. The answer to that and most of my questions was that they already had their murderer. Grace. “Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?” Zach asked.
“Did I say that out loud? I was thinking about how sorry I am that the flax production part of Hands on History has been axed.”
Cool Zach actually winced at the word “axed,” and didn’t ask any more questions. Just as well. We needed to get out of the storage room. There wasn’t a chance in a
million that a villain with another hackle lurked in a corner, but the less we disturbed anything else in there, the better. Even if the professionals from the sheriff’s department didn’t have plans to crawl all over it. One more thing, though. I went to the accession file and looked for the records for flax hackles. As I thought—the site owned two, both listed in storage.
“Come on, Zach. Time we were out of here. I need to check in on the quilting, and it’s almost time for lunch. What are your plans for the afternoon?” He might not have any more questions, but I swept him ahead of me with my own. “Are you bored with the dig, or is Mr. Hicks going to let you continue helping out there?”
“I’m not bored with the excavation,” he said, sounding offended. “Jerry had to take off for a while, that’s all. He’ll be back after lunch and I’m going back, too.”
“And are you coming back to the education room now?”
“That’s where lunch is.”
Which answered my question as clearly as a “yes.” He walked back with me, and when we got there, the other students were putting away the quilt project for the day. Under Spivey direction, they tidied away the scraps and needles and threads, talking and laughing as they did so, no one casting sulky or heavy glances toward the twins. The twins, though, gave an in-tandem jump when they looked up and saw me in the doorway. Why did that make me suspicious?
“Shipshape,” Mercy said when I went over to thank them. “That’s the way we’re leaving things.”
“Back in the morning, though,” said Shirley. “Making excellent progress.”
“Um, good. That’s great,” I said. “Say, did anyone call
you late last night or early this morning and tell you that we didn’t need volunteers for the program after all? I’m only asking because I’m trying to track down an odd message some of the volunteers got.” And because it would be just like the Spiveys to ignore the message if someone
had
called them.
“No,” Shirley said.
“Huh. Well, I guess that’s good, then. The morning wouldn’t have gone as well without you. Thanks, and we’ll see you again tomorrow.”
They turned to get the Plague Quilt, safe and secret in its muslin, from the table behind them. One of the teens—Carmen—offered to take it to the car for them. They thanked her, but said no. They saw me watching, and I must have been too close to the quilt for their liking. Shirley carefully took the quilt, Mercy grabbed their pocketbooks, and they scuttled.
Interesting that they hadn’t received the cancellation phone call. But their names weren’t on the original roster of volunteers. So who had access to the roster besides Nadine? Grace. And Grace also had access to the hackle. But Grace was already in jail when the calls were made. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the way this was going at all. I needed to find out a number of things, but first on the list was whether Ernestine had been allowed to see Grace at the jail.
* * *
Geneva heard the back door at the Weaver’s Cat “baa” when I arrived, and she swirled into the kitchen to meet me—in high-excitement mode.
“Quick!” she said, whirling around me. “Run out there yelling ‘Stop action.’ You do not want to miss a single minute!”
“Out where? Why?” Her excitement caught me by the throat. I jerked back around to look out the door, saw nothing. “Where? Miss what?” I turned back, my heart racing.
Joe stood in the kitchen door. “I don’t know. Miss Connection?”
“Mistimed,” Geneva moaned. “Now I will lose you to canoodling and common misbehaving.”
“Miss Understood,” I said, trying for a laugh. But there were those darn tight throat muscles again. And since when had Joe and I ever scandalized Geneva, or anyone else, in the shop with any amount of “canoodling”?
“How’d the program go this morning?” Joe nuzzled my ear.
Geneva said, “Eep,” and turned her back on us. Then peeked over her shoulder. Romance in the presence of a ghost—
anything
in the presence of a ghost—posed problems I’d never dreamed I would encounter.
“The program went well, mostly thanks to Shirley and Mercy.”
“Mystifying.”
“That about sums it up. Who knew, but they’re good with the teenagers and have a knack for quilting. More than a knack—they’re artists. Is that something that’s generally known? Have you seen their quilted skirts?”
“I’ve seen their yoga pants.”
“Gah.”
“Ernestine’s out front.”
“As I was trying to tell you,” Geneva said with a sniff, “before you fell for his rakish ways.”
* * *
Ardis and Debbie sat on the high stools behind the sales counter admiring Ernestine as she modeled her Aunt
Bee outfit. She looked perfect, turned out in a paisley shirtwaist dress in shades of lavender, a string of pearls, stockings, and sturdy, low-heeled shoes. With her usual attention to detail, she’d worn hose with seams up the back. She completed the Mayberry impression by carrying a large pocketbook on one arm, which she held at her waist. She twiddled a wave with her fingers when she saw Rakish Joe and me.
“How’d the quilting go?” Debbie asked. She organized most of the classes we held at the Cat. If she could spend more time away from her sheep, she would have loved to teach all of them, too.
“Surprisingly well.”
“How so?”
“Tell you later.” I shouldn’t have added the interest-piquing adjective and hoped I wouldn’t regret it. I hadn’t told Debbie or Ardis about the twins’ helping with Hands on History and didn’t feel like introducing that freighted subject yet. Debbie was her usual sunny self, though, and didn’t look for any subtext in my comment.
The bell over the front door jingled. A couple of regular customers came in and Debbie hopped off her stool.
“It’s about time for you to take off, isn’t it?” I asked her. “Why don’t you go on? I can get this.”
“You’ll want to hear Ernestine’s report, and I can stay a little longer.” The customers waved and went into the next room. Debbie followed.
“Are your fly-tying boys finished?” Ardis asked Joe.
To Ardis, anyone who’d been in her third- or fourth-grade classroom was still a boy, a girl, or a hon. She was referring to the weekly session Joe led, mostly attended by men who came in during an early lunch hour. They used the TGIF workroom on the second floor, and
gathered around one of the oak worktables with their dubbing needles, hooks, bobbins, loop spinners, scissors, fur, feathers, and fly-tying vises. Ardis thought they looked cute, arriving with their toolboxes full of gadgets and gizmos. She got a kick out of watching them test the weight and feel of fluffy and sparkly yarns, and she loved listening to them discus the merits of one eye-killing color of frothy marabou over another for attracting the wily fish they went after.
“Phooey on the fly-tying fellowship,” Geneva groused. “Aunt Bee is going to tell us how she infiltrated the hoosegow.”
“Did you get in to see Grace?” I asked Ernestine.
“I did, although I had to wait for Cole to leave. I sat outside on that shady bench at the courthouse knitting baby hats. I finished a pale peach hat and started another one in lilac that looks pretty next to my dress.” She put her pocketbook on the counter and brought out the hats.
“You finished
both
?” I was definitely the slowest knitter in Friday’s Fast and Furious. Before I’d taken over running the Weaver’s Cat—before I’d joined TGIF—the group had set a goal to knit one thousand hats for preemies and hospitalized infants by the end of the year. Thank goodness there were enough knitting whizzes in the group to make up for my dawdling needles.
“It was a lovely morning,” Ernestine said modestly, “and I thought Cole must have a lot of paperwork.”
“He was out at the Homeplace before nine,” I said. “They found the sec—” I stopped and looked for Geneva. She sat on the sales counter in front of the cash register, kicking her heels and watching Ernestine, her eyes wide. This might not be the best time to mention the second skeleton, either. “He was already there when I
got there. I think he went out kind of early,” I ended clumsily.
“Which is what I found out when I got tired of waiting and went inside,” Ernestine said. “I was glad I didn’t run into him, in any case. And the sweet young deputy behind the desk let me go back to see Grace immediately. After I said I was her grandmother. I apologized to Grace for impersonating a loved one.”
Geneva moved closer to Ernestine, looking askance at Joe, who’d snorted. “What happened next?” she asked. “Did you inveigle your way into her good graces? Ha! Did you hear my wonderful joke? Good gracious—Grace’s good graces!” She rocked on the counter, slapping her thigh. But when no one else laughed—because no one heard her joke but me—she drew her knees up, sinking her chin onto her crossed arms. “What is the sound of one ghost laughing?” she asked forlornly. “Dead silence.”
Sometimes her solitude was heartbreaking. I tried to signal her, using one of the signs we’d come up with for when I couldn’t speak to her. Putting a hand on my heart meant that I promised I’d talk to her, or fill her in, later. But now she’d sunk so far into her doldrums that she didn’t see me. Even though I tried catching her eye and put my hand to my heart, and even thumped it several times, she didn’t notice. Neither did Ernestine, whose thick lenses helped only so much. And Joe had wandered over to a display of the new purple and black marabou we’d ordered on his recommendation—apparently bass went gaga over anything purple and black. Ardis, however, did notice.
“Hon?”
“Thinking,” I said. “Just thinking.” I drummed my fingers on my chest a few more times to prove it.
“About Ernestine’s question?”
I stopped drumming. “No. Sorry. About something else. What was your question, Ernestine?”
“When Cole told you they’d arrested Grace, and told you about the weapon, did he say they’d
found
the weapon, or that Grace had told them
where
they could find it?”
“Wow. Ernestine, that’s a great question, and it parallels something I think I discovered this morning.”
“What did you discover?” Ardis asked, almost as wide-eyed as Geneva had been.
“Can we
please
let Aunt Bee
finish
?” Geneva said. Being sunk in the doldrums didn’t keep her from being impatient. Or bossy.
“Let me answer Ernestine’s question first, Ardis, and then let’s hear the rest of what she has to report. We don’t want to lose track of details.”
“Rapid developments and ramifications?” Ardis did an abrupt switch from wide-eyed to serious. “Excellent. I’ll take notes.”
“Good idea.” I turned to Ernestine. She smiled and touched her hair, and I saw that she’d swept it back in the signature Aunt Bee hairstyle. “You look perfect, Ernestine.” She gave a half curtsy. “Okay, so you asked if Cole said they’d found the weapon? I don’t think so.” I drummed my fingertips on the counter—actually thinking, this time. “No, I don’t think he said that. Why?”
“Grace is clear on that point. She says she doesn’t know what the weapon is and that she didn’t tell the deputies what it is. What she did tell them is advice supposedly dating from centuries past, the sort of half-serious advice you might read in an almanac, and it’s this—
If
you need to hide or get rid of something, throw it in the
retting pond.
Apparently they smell atrocious. But she says she didn’t tell the deputies the weapon
is
in the retting pond, and she didn’t tell them where they
would
find it. She says she only told them where to
look
. She didn’t give them a fact, she gave them a possibility, and facts and possibilities aren’t the same thing. Nuances are sometimes lost on thick skulls, though, don’t you think? Begging your pardon for the slur on Cole’s skull, Joe.”