Dyeing Wishes (28 page)

“That’s a nasty head wound,” Clod said when he arrived on the riverbank. “I kind of hoped, though, if you went looking for the poor sap, that you’d find him still on his feet and breathing.”

“It is Lyle, then?” Joe asked.

“Oh yeah,” Clod said. “A shame, too. I had a few questions he could’ve answered for me. Now I’ve got a couple more. Did he fall and hit his own head or did someone hit it for him? And what’s that trailing from his back pocket? See there? How it moves in the bit of current and catches the light a little farther out from the bank? Kind of pretty. Looks too pretty for a guy like that. Why’s he got that jammed in his pocket? Whose is it?”

“Sylvia’s,” Joe said. “Sylvia Furches.”

He was right. And again, it was the quick impression and the colors that stayed with me—the beautiful watery blues and greens of the silk-and-something scarf her sister wove for her. But I hadn’t told Joe the scarf was hers. I hadn’t done anything since he called his brother. I’d
only sat in the canoe with my hand over my mouth and refused to get out.

“How do you know her?” I asked, moving my hand from my mouth to the side of my face so it blocked my view of Clod and whatever his colleagues were doing with Eric Lyle.

“And what’s she doing here?” Clod asked. “I thought you two didn’t have plans.”

Joe shrugged one shoulder. The only way from the canoe to the bank was to carefully step over the side and wade to the mossy bank. He’d done that and then been able to pull the canoe closer in, but I’d stayed put. Joe sat crouched on the bank now, holding the canoe steady. He was looking toward Clod, so I assumed his shrug answered Clod’s question and not mine.

“Well, did you see anything on your way downriver?” Clod asked. “Anything obvious? Any idea where she might have gone in? Or were you too busy fishing?”

The emphasis he put on “fishing” was more than I could bear. “I’d like to go home now,” I said loudly, possibly close to hysterically, and I started to stand up in the canoe.

“Whoa, there,” Joe said calmly, and he held a hand out to me.

“Yeah, watch yourself,” Clod said. “I don’t need you falling in and muddying up the waters.”

They hadn’t taken Lyle out of the river yet, and the thought of tipping and falling in anywhere near him had me sitting back down. With my hand clamped over my mouth again. I shook my head at Joe, and he dropped his hand.

“I didn’t see anything,” he said to Clod. “It’d be hard to know what to look for, though.”

“Of course, there’s the bridge on Arnold Road,” Clod said.

“And a few others farther up. Any idea how long or how far he…”

Clod shook his head. “Not even a day, but that’s only a guess. How far, hard to say. So how’s this Furches woman tied up with Lyle? What do you know about her?”

“
I
told you about her, night before last,” I said taking my hand from my mouth again. I wished he wouldn’t look at me that way. It always made me say things I should regret.
Should. Didn’t. Who gives a flip?
My own contribution to Zen philosophy. “She’s one of the journalism students who’s been nosing around. Maybe you don’t remember because it was so very long ago, but the other one broke into Debbie’s workshop night before last. Holy cow, what if in all their nosing they found something incriminating against Eric Lyle and he found out? What if they confronted him? What if Sylvia or Pen is in the water, too…”

At that not-necessarily-logical thought I was on my feet and pretty much leapt right over Joe to the bank. It might have been more of a scramble from the looks of Joe when I turned around and stared, horrified, back at the water. But Granny was right when she told me not turn my back on that river for a minute. I might never go near it again. Clod, as ever, was unimpressed by my deductive reasoning.

“Okay, here’s what you two are going to do. You, Cupcake”—he jabbed a finger at me—“are pulling your nose out of this case. You’re leaving it alone. You’re letting the professionals handle it. You’re sitting on your butt with your knitting needles clacking and you are minding your own business. Am I clear? And you, Tonto”—he jabbed two fingers at Joe, and the fingers looked like a Moe Howard poke in the eye—“are taking her outta here and taking her home. Shorty will give you a lift back to your
car. You can leave the canoe. I’ll make sure you get it back. And thanks for all your help.”

Ooh, I could hear the drip, drip, dripping of sarcasm. I wanted to kick him.

Joe started to take my arm. I yanked it away. Forget the sitting and the knitting. What I was going to do was go to the Cat, locate Debbie’s notes and Thea’s dossiers, and climb the stairs to the study, and somewhere in all that information, I was going to find the threads and shreds of evidence and clues we needed to solve three murders. And then that was exactly what TGIF and I were going to go out and do. And I just hoped we didn’t find any more bodies along the way.

Joe and I didn’t talk much on the way back to town, either, until I asked him how he knew Sylvia. He thought about it far longer than seemed necessary, maybe wondering whether to answer. He did, though, and at first I didn’t see why he’d been reluctant.

“We met in class.”

“What class—wait, the
journalism
class?”

He nodded, shrugged. “I thought it might be interesting.”

“You aren’t the one who told those two to stop by the Cat, are you? Or how to get to Cloud Hollow?”

“I never gave them the opportunity.”

I could believe that. Quiet Joe, Journalist Burglar. “Huh. So, we know what their big project was. What’s yours?”

“Already finished and turned in.”

“Okay. Good. And what was it?”

Only a slight hesitation. And a slight blush? “You read it,” he said.

“I did?” I thought for a second. What…“Oh my gosh. You’re Otterbank.”

Joe wouldn’t say any more about the interview or Aaron Carlin, except to say he was protecting his source. I didn’t point out that he’d
named
his source, because naming Aaron Carlin and telling how to find him were two different things.

I asked him to say hi to Aaron for me next time he saw him, though, and then we were back in town and I said he could just drop me at the courthouse. I waited until he drove away before walking to the Cat. I wasn’t sure why I waited. He could have figured out where I went easily enough. But I was feeling secretive and decided not to worry about why.

I spent the evening in the study, cell phone off, avoiding Spiveys and the rest of the world, and reading through Debbie’s notes and Thea’s dossiers. It was better than thinking about Eric Lyle and wondering about Sylvia and Pen. It took less and more time than I thought. More because there were inconsequential details that had to be read and considered before setting them aside and moving on. Less because Geneva insisted on doing her share. If I flipped the pages for her. And if she could read the dossiers, because she found Debbie’s handwriting too flowery for her taste.

When she finally settled down to read, we made progress. Although she did insist on saying “ping” every time she wanted me to turn a page, and the cat insisted on sprawling in the middle of the desk so I had to reach around him to turn her pages.

Debbie’s notes were more personal than I’d expected. That made me glad Geneva insisted on reading the dossiers. It wouldn’t have felt right turning the notes over to someone else, even if that someone else couldn’t spread gossip. The notes went on for pages, stream-of-consciousness memories flowing in a cathartic cascade. I
hoped it was cathartic, anyway. Parts of them were confessional, too. Will and Debbie’s late husband had been good friends. She believed he was innocent of the death in the river. He
had
occasionally slunk by the farm for a meal or a night out of the coldest winter weather, which he would spend in the roughly finished attic space above her dye kitchen. The notes showed her conflicted honesty, too. She was telling
me
, she wrote, but she’d lied to Cole Dunbar about Will’s visits. That made me stop reading and try to stop thinking.

“Ping.”

It was getting late. I was hungry and wanted to go home—not just home, but home-home to Illinois and my organized life that didn’t exist anymore.

“Ping-ping-ping.”

I turned Geneva’s page and mine and continued reading.

The rest of the notes only confirmed that Debbie was as confused as I thought. She really didn’t get it, didn’t see that it mattered whether she’d loved Will Embree, because she’d made sure he never knew. And with this glimpse into her honest, steady mind I could maybe understand why she didn’t think it mattered. She used the analogy of dyeing—something that made sense to her. She knew that Will loved Shannon—they were a true, clear color. She knew that if she allowed her own feelings for Will to show, they would introduce another element into the dye bath that would taint and muddy everything that followed. I raked my fingers through my hair. I needed to do something. But what? What was I supposed to do with all this?

Geneva provided the answer.

“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” she said. “Is that something people say in real life?”

“Not much. Why are you saying it?”

“Or only on
I Love Lucy
?”

“Geneva, did you find something?”

“Not much. There’s just something here that I forgot the adorable twins mentioned when they said they were about to crack the case.”

“What?”

“Don’t snap at me. I’m being extremely helpful.”

“I wasn’t snapping. I was being focused. So will you please focus and tell me what the Spiveys mentioned?”

“The little hideaway cabin.”

“Oh,” I said, working hard not to focus to the point of snapping. “What cabin is that and what did they say about it?”

“It sounds darling, doesn’t it?”

“Sure. Darling.”

“I thought so, too. The twins said it belonged to Shannon’s granny’s family, and according to this note it’s on several acres the family kept after selling the rest for oodles of money to a paper company. And the Spiveys said it belongs to Shannon’s mama now, but Shannon and her friends go there more often than her mama because her mama is such a hoity-toity, tooty-fruity, highfalutin city girl. That sounds like a song, doesn’t it?”

I rubbed the cat between his ears, using his head as a furry worry stone. It helped. He purred and that helped, too. “You heard the Spiveys say all that?”

“Are you doubting my excellent memory?”

I rubbed the cat harder. He purred harder. Such a good animal. “I’m not doubting you. This sounds like important information, though.”

“I think so, too,” she said. “That’s why I told you as soon as I remembered.”

“And I’m glad you did. Did the Spiveys mention how they know about the cabin?”

“The snooty one, Carolyn Proffitt, told them. She was
looking for you and they told her they assist you in all your cases.”

“Mm-hmm.” And that shed light on Carolyn’s “I had you figured wrong” remark. If she knew anything about the Spiveys and if she now believed the Spiveys and I were sleuthing pals, then she couldn’t help but think I was wrong top to bottom and inside and out to boot.

Word came the next morning that Eric Lyle had died by drowning in the Little Buck River. Ardis and I heard it from the first customer to jingle the camel bells on the Cat’s door and almost every customer that came after. Lyle had sustained two head injuries, either of which might have occurred from falling or jumping in the river and landing on a rock. There were plenty of rocks in the Little Buck, and as Joe and Clod had discussed, there were numerous places from which to fall or jump. Secondary to news of Lyle’s death came a report that Sylvia Furches was missing.