Dyeing Wishes (12 page)

Out of the corner of my eye the blue-gray spider’s web shawl on display near the front window appeared to ripple and Geneva shimmered into view behind it. The effect was weird because the insubstantial shawl was more solid than the ghost. Geneva yawned, stretched, and sighed as though bored beyond tears. She drifted over to see what held us in thrall.

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.