Dyeing Wishes (6 page)

“Yes. I’ve noticed that you have become less stringy since we met. I thought I should mention that to show how accurate I am at describing people.”

Said she who need never worry about gaining another ounce for all eternity. I was glad I’d asked only for the salad for lunch. “Thank you, Ms. Eagle Eye. The point is, who was this woman, where did she hear about what happened, and when, and how far has the story already spread?”

“Maybe she was the murderer.” Geneva billowed in and out, excited by that thought.

“Calm down. She wasn’t. It was pretty clear, even to me, what happened. I don’t think anyone’s going to be looking for a murderer.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Really. Well, maybe you’d better tell me what you did hear.”

“Oh good, because it is a good story and I think I can tell it with true inspiration. Marshal Dillon would like to hear it, too, though, so you sit next to him.”

Now was not the time to argue over the cat’s name or his interest in crime. I sat cross-legged beside him in the window seat. He woke long enough to climb into my lap and purr before falling back asleep. Geneva floated into the middle of the room, wispy arms artfully poised.

“You give me my cue,” she stage-whispered.

“Oh, for…Okay. Begin.”

And she did, launching into a short but dramatic retelling of what she’d heard. Or maybe it was her own, more colorful interpretation of what she’d heard. The basics were accurate—a young couple dead under a tree—but in this version they were found with their arms twined around each other, both were murdered, there was more blood than I ever wanted to hear about again, and no weapon was found.

“Um—wow—thanks, Geneva. That was—gee—that was vivid. You know, though, I think maybe the woman
you heard the story from might have confused a few of the details.”

“Well, she probably didn’t see it in person. That could be why,” Geneva said, sounding even-keeled and ready to forgive the woman’s excess rather than explode at my questioning of her rendition.

“If that’s the story she’s telling, then, no, I’m pretty sure she didn’t see it in person.” I stopped and thought about that. Unless she’d been with the deputies and EMTs who responded, but then she wouldn’t have gotten the details so wrong and in fact might still be on duty out there, not here buying rug wool. That meant either an exaggerated story was already running around town, something Ardis and Ernestine warned me would happen, or Geneva was the source of the embroidery. The former would be hurtful to Bonny when it reached her ears, as it was sure to. As for the latter, it seemed disrespectful to Bonny and to the dead to let Geneva continue spinning that yarn, even if the cat and I were the only ones hearing it. Calling her out on the embellishments would be treading dangerous ground, though. Maybe if I approached it from a detective’s point of view.

“You know, Geneva, if we were investigating what happened—”

“Are we?” She billowed toward me, empty eyes wider than I’d ever seen them.

“Investigating? No. You might hear Debbie and Ardis saying something about me looking into it—”

“But you told them you couldn’t do it—”

“Exactly.”

“—on your own.”

“What? No, that’s not what I said.”

She didn’t hear me. She was over the moon. She was also all over the room, whirling and squealing with delight, like a crazed balloon someone blew up and
suddenly let go. The squeal wasn’t a pleasant noise, and the whirling was going to make me sick. I closed my eyes and covered my ears, and that’s how Joe Dunbar found me when he trotted up the back stairs to say he’d brought lunch.

“K
ath? Hey, are you okay?”

When I finally realized there was someone else in the room besides the berserk ghost, I opened my eyes. Joe, younger brother of the antagonistic Deputy Cole Dunbar, was crouched in front of me, peering into my face. The cat had left my lap and was sitting next to me, following Geneva’s acrobatics.

“I heard what happened,” Joe said. “Ardis said you and Debbie found them. That was a hell of a thing to happen. It must’ve been a hell of a thing to see.
Are
you okay?”

“Yeah, I am, thanks. Thanks for asking. I was…” I couldn’t think of a good ending for that sentence.

“You looked as though you were trying to blot out the whole world,” he said.

“Sometimes it helps.”

“Fishing’s good for that, too. It’s good to have a place where you can get away. Be alone.”

If he’d been aware of Geneva swooping past his head doing bad Clint Eastwood imitations, he wouldn’t have been so philosophical. She was calming down, though, and being the nosy thing she was, circled him a few times, then settled in the window seat on the other side of the cat. Ghost and cat sat watching Joe as though he were the most exotic creature to set foot in the attic. Joe held
his hand out and the cat sniffed his fingertips, then rubbed the side of his face against them. Geneva reached a wispy hand forward.

“So, Joe,” I said, hopping up and startling him so he dropped his hand and sat back on his heels out of Geneva’s reach. “How’s Maggie?”

“Same as ever,” he said, getting to his feet. “She’s a sweetheart.”

Those two statements didn’t go together, in my experience of pretty Maggie. She was Granny’s cat, whom I’d also inherited. But Maggie’s “as ever” when it came to her opinion of me was the same as that of every other cat Granny had ever had—intense dislike with occasional swatting. It was an interesting phenomenon that baffled Granny and saddened me. But Maggie liked Joe, and after thumbing her nose at me, she went to live with him.

“Have you got a name for your guy yet?” he asked.

“No, still working on it.”

“We are not,” Geneva said. “Marshal Dillon likes his name and it’s as fine as they come. Oh, but wait. I’ve had a thought. It’s rather brilliant. Harry Callahan. Dirty Harry.” She bounced and billowed at her own brilliance. “It suits him, don’t you think?”

I squeezed my eyes shut to blot her out for a moment. Forgetting Joe. He grabbed my elbow.

“Are you sure you’re all right? Maybe you stood up too fast.”

“Could be.”

“Your salad’s down in the kitchen. You should go eat.”

“And while you’re doing that, Dirty Harry and I will be on stakeout in the shop,” Geneva said. “We’ll gather intelligence and report back after your luncheon date.”

Brilliant.

My luncheon date was wishful thinking on Geneva’s part. Joe Dunbar was nice enough, and he was nominally a member of the posse, but it seemed to be a general principle that Dunbars and I had trouble mixing. Anyone glancing at me and noting the lack of a ring on my finger and the absence of PTA meetings in my thirty-nine-year-old life might extend the mixing principle to me and men in general. To them, I would say, be patient. Miracles happen. Witness the cat who actually liked me and sat in my lap. And at least I hadn’t socked this Dunbar in the nose.

But Joe had some baggage I wasn’t too sure about. One of those bags had to do with burglary that might or might not be a habit. The one incident I knew about could have been a first-and-last-time deal, and no one else I knew and trusted seemed to worry about there being a sketchy side to him. His brother, the starched deputy,
did
seem to worry, but I didn’t particularly trust his brother. Besides, Clod’s worries might be nothing more than brotherly baggage.

Joe had some saving graces, too, though, so I tried to keep an open mind. One of those graces was his tendency to
avoid
his brother. Another was what Geneva noticed—not only was he nice enough; he was also nice to look at. Whereas his brother was tall, solid, and mulishly stubborn, Joe was tall, spare, and scruffy in an artistic, outdoorsy sort of way, and he had an easy, accepting manner. Geneva referred to Joe as my gentleman caller, convinced we were an item. Reminding her we weren’t was a waste of breath.

Joe’s most telling grace was his affection for my grandmother and her apparent affection for him. I still wondered why, if they were such pals, I hadn’t known of his existence until recently, but I had an idea the baggage
thing might be a factor there, too. For now it was enough to know he’d liked her and she’d trusted him. Ardis trusted him, too, and that said a lot.

But Joe didn’t join me for lunch downstairs in the kitchen. I didn’t ask where he was off to and he didn’t volunteer the information. He was a man with many trickles, if not streams, of income. He was a sought-after fly-fishing guide and he taught the occasional fly-tying class for us at the Weaver’s Cat. He was also a more than decent watercolorist and did a fairly decent business selling his paintings at another shop in town. A regular Renaissance man, with baggage, was Joe Dunbar. But solo fishing up one or another secluded mountain creek was his go-to way of passing a lovely afternoon. Or so he said.

Geneva did join me over lunch to give her first intelligence report. The cat followed her into the kitchen. He purred and twined his furry self around my ankles, and I was still enough in the early sappy stage of cat cohabitation that I found it utterly charming. If he’d asked to share my salad I would have simpered and given him a leaf or two of spinach and a bite of carrot. But he wanted dry, crunchy, fish-smelling things, so I tipped some of those into his bowl. The way he dug in and smacked his little cat lips made his lunch look and sound better than mine. I’d left the dressing off, remembering Geneva’s observation of my increasing lack of stringiness. Her opinionated remarks were taking some getting used to. I was definitely still in the early, perplexed, “why me?” stage of being haunted.

“I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you,” she said, hovering across from me, elbows not quite on the table. “Although I don’t want you to think I begrudge spending my precious time listening for a clue that will crack the case wide open while you sit out here eating. Alone. Do you know, though, for every customer with
something interesting to say about the murders, I have to keep awake through a dozen boring conversations? It’s exhausting.” She yawned to prove it.

There almost certainly hadn’t been a dozen customers in the shop, all carrying on conversations, boring or otherwise, during the ten or fifteen minutes she was on her self-assigned stakeout. And, far from sounding bored, she sounded keyed up. If her eyes could be, they would be glinting.

“But you did hear something interesting?” I whispered so I wouldn’t embarrass myself by being overheard in case Ardis or a customer was near the kitchen.

“I heard quite a lot about self-striping sock yarn. It’s on sale today and is always fascinating, if you enjoy listening to Ardis run on about such things. If I weren’t such a good detective, I think I might try my hand at being a shopkeeper.”

“You’re a good tease, anyway. What did you hear?”

“I have you wondering, don’t I?” She wriggled with satisfaction. “I’ll give you a hint, but the full information is too long and important to rush the details. All the details are extremely interesting, of course, but I can’t stop to tell you the whole fascinating story now, because some of us are doing important and extremely interesting jobs and must get back to them.” She sat back, clapping her soundless fingertips together beneath her chin, and said nothing more.

Self-important and extremely irritating ghost. She’d probably been an irritating woman, too. I waited and counted to ten. Then counted ten more for good measure and forced a smile. Bit my tongue. Raised my eyebrows in a “what gives?” sort of way.

She dropped her hands to the table. “You aren’t being very cooperative. I am expecting you to explode with curiosity.”

“And I’m waiting for you to give me your crumb of information,” I whispered, “so you can return to your very important job and leave me to finish my very bland salad.”

“You’re hissing at me.”

I leaned farther across the table and hissed harder. “We’re in a semipublic place. I’m being careful so I’m not pegged as the next crazy person, and you’re making it seriously difficult.”

“If you were to pretend you’re talking on your telephone, you could speak in a normal tone of voice and not upset me.”

“Oh.” I sat up, snapped my mouth shut, and pulled my phone from my pocket. “My gosh. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

“It will look more realistic if you put the phone to your ear,” she said.

“Good thinking.”

“I’m brilliant, aren’t I?”

“And smug. But brilliant, yes. So what did you hear?”

“Well, and now I fear we’ve run out of time. I did warn you.” She sat back and sighed grandly. “Unfortunately you wasted what time we had with your usual nitpicking, and now I see Dirty Harry has finished his lunch and we must return to our stakeout.” She rose, nose in the air, and floated toward the door.

“After all that, you’re not going to tell me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come along, Dirty Harry.” The cat actually looked up from contemplating his empty dish and started after her.

“I am not calling him Dirty Harry,” I snarled into the phone.

“Him, who?” Ardis asked, zipping in the door.

She zipped straight through Geneva. I’d never seen
that happen before and couldn’t help staring. It didn’t affect Geneva, didn’t part her wispy form or displace it. She saw me staring, though, and turned her back with a
hmph
.