Knot the Usual Suspects (13 page)

Mel's Reubens came on grilled pumpernickel with beef she corned and sliced paper thin. The smell alone had calories. Salty, tangy, cheesy, warm—Joe was lucky I hadn't pulled off to the side of the road between Mel's and the school and eaten my sandwich and half of his. It was a messy sandwich for takeout, but so worth it. And Mel, knowing the habits of her sandwiches, included an extra wad of napkins in the bag. The sweet potato fries were caramelized from the hot oven and sprinkled with a nicely balanced combination of salt, garlic powder, and smoked paprika.

“I'm guessing Olive—”

“No more about Olive,” Joe said. “I'm enjoying Reuben.”

“You'll enjoy this, too. I was just going to say that I guess Olive isn't anything like her mother-in-law.” I told
him about meeting Gladys, and about Gladys' pocketbook meeting his brother's diaphragm. It was good to hear him laugh when I described her new superhero status as the Blue Prune.

“Gladys is a pistol,” he said.

Pistol
. “Have you heard anything about how Hugh McPhee died?”

“No.”

“Tell me about him. Ardis and Gladys were happy he'd come home. Your brother seemed excited, too.”

“Someone wasn't. Did you guys come up with anything at the meeting this afternoon?”

“A lot of questions and not much else, but that's the way we usually start. Did you know Hugh?”

“By reputation,” Joe said. “He was enough older that he wasn't on my radar.”

“Cole seems to think he was in town for Handmade.”

Joe chewed that over with the last bites of his sandwich. “No one from the sheriff's department has called to ask if he was registered for a booth. No one's called me, anyway. But they'd probably talk to Olive.”

“Was he registered for one?”

“No, but the committee only took one name for each booth registration. That's been part of the problem. They should have taken the name of every person associated with a booth, but they didn't. So I've had people calling and complaining about how the booths are arranged, and where their booth is, and they're not on my list, so I don't know if they're legit or trying to pull a fast one or trying to screw someone else over.”

“They'd do that?”

“Crazy, isn't it? But these folks are serious, and to
them, you're nowhere without location. No one wants to be buried back by the restrooms.”

“So who is?”

He looked away and raised his hand.

“You're too good.”

He shrugged. “I have a trick or two up my sleeve. People will find me.”

“Isn't there a master list of craftspeople, though? Didn't they all have to pay a fee, separate from the booth fee?”

“Olive said she'll be here tomorrow afternoon and she'll bring the list with her.”

“She couldn't send you a copy? Wouldn't that have helped you deal with the irate calls this afternoon?”

“She's a technophobe. Only has a hard copy, and only the
one
copy.” He wadded his sandwich wrapping, squeezing it into a tight ball. “She would have brought the list this afternoon, but she had other commitments and no time to ‘share the information.' Those were her words, ‘share the information.'”

“You should have given everyone who called her number.”

“She switched her phone off. Her voice mail is full.” He added my sandwich wrapper to his. I hadn't picked the last scrap of salty beef from my paper, though, and watched sadly as he compacted it, his knuckles turning white. It was probably good therapy, but I was glad I wasn't one of those sandwich wrappings.

“Calm down, there, hotshot.”

“Sorry.”

“Here.” I handed him his share of the Chocolate Cubed. “And when Olive calls next year, say no.”

I blessed Mel for the ameliorating effect of her cake. And while we benefited from it, I remembered that I hadn't told Joe about the Spivey invasion or asked if he knew Al from Chicago. One or the other of those tidbits should take his mind further off Olive and her cantankerous craftspeople.

“I forgot to tell you why I was late.”

“I should have asked.” He put his empty cake plate aside. “I've been selfish. Thank you for bringing supper. I feel better.”

“Supper can do that.”

“You do that. Thanks for coming. So go ahead, tell me why you were late.”

He looked so calm. At peace. Maybe I shouldn't disturb the good-natured curve of his lips and the tranquil blue of his eyes by mentioning Shirley and Mercy. But I'd spent too long thinking. His eyebrows rose.

“Did Ardis get back to you?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”

Ardis!
How could I have forgotten? “No, she hasn't called. Wow, I'd better try her again.”

“If anything were really wrong, we would've heard.”

“Would we?”

“If it'll make you feel better, go ahead and call, but first, why
were
you late?”

He was still calm, but only in the way strong, silent types appear calm on the surface when they're trying to keep everyone around them from panicking. I wasn't exactly panicking about Ardis, but niceties, such as easing into the topic of Shirley and Mercy, were right out the window.

“The twins were skulking around my house,” I said.
“Not very gracefully, though. Mercy put her foot through a flowerpot and cut her ankle. They were being all Spivey and dramatic.” I waved my hands to capture the full Spivey effect, and thought I detected a smidge of a twitch in Joe's calm strength. “They had Angie's car and pulled it around the side of the garage so no one could see it from the street. Then they peeked in my windows.”

Definitely a twitch that time.

“They said they had information about Hugh McPhee.”

That was met with a minor eye roll.

“That's what I thought, too.” I handed him my root beer bottle, sacrificing the last of it to help him bear up. “They were keen to tell me who they saw with Hugh yesterday afternoon. They obviously thought it was significant, but when I didn't know who they were talking about, they got all snooty and left.”

“Who'd they see?” It would have been better if he'd waited for my answer before swigging the last of the root beer.

“Some guy named Al. Al from Chicago.”

“W
ho
is
this guy?” I grabbed the extra napkins Mel had put in the sandwich bag. “Should I be worried about him? Hey, wait a second—” If I'd thought Joe was blindsided by the mention of Al from Chicago and coughing to clear his lungs of aspirated root beer, I was a hundred and eighty degrees off. He wasn't shocked or shattered. He was laughing. Although still coughing. But coughing meant he was breathing, so I didn't pound him on the back. I waited for an explanation.

“Al Rogalla,” Joe said. “And yeah, he is from Chicago—twenty-five years ago. At least.”

“Okay, so what's the big deal?”

“Nothing. He's a nice guy. An accountant. Volunteer fireman, too.”

“So why would anyone care if he spent time with Hugh McPhee yesterday? Why were the twins acting like it was earth-shattering news and they were in danger for breathing his very name?” And why did the name suddenly sound familiar?

“Consider the source,” Joe said. “Behold, they are
Spivey. The thing is, after all these years, Al does still sound like he's from Chicago.”

“And there's a
problem
with that?” I might have said that with narrowed eyes and a hint of hypersensitivity, having been told on more than one occasion, by people who thought they were being helpful or informative, that I “talked funny.”

“I hope you know that I don't think so.”

I nodded.

“And it was kind of you to snarl on his behalf.”

“Thank you.”

“But again, you have to consider the source. To Shirley and Mercy, and others of the Spivey ilk, Al's still ‘not from around here,' as silly as that is. There are also some who've never forgiven him for being a big, muscular kid who excelled at football for the two years he played on the high school team.”

“That sounds illogical, even by Spivey standards.”

“Doesn't it? But he had the bad grace to break a long-standing record. Two, really. Rushing touchdowns in a single game, and then rushing touchdowns in a season. And he didn't just break the records—he tore them to shreds, mopped the field with them, and tied the rags to the goalposts. If a local boy had done that, it would've been a different story and hailed for all time. But Al was bigger than the other boys, and a better player, and he hadn't paid his local-boy dues.”

“You mean he hadn't been playing here for years? That was hardly his fault if they'd just moved here.”

“Of course it wasn't his fault. And I don't want you to get the wrong idea; not everyone felt that way. But it wasn't just Al, who really was, and is, a nice guy. It was his
father. He came down here, big man from the big city, with a management job at the paper mill, and arrived with all the worn-out myths about benighted, impoverished, uneducated southern Appalachia firmly in place. And he thought he could lend a hand up.”

“Lord Bountiful?”

“With his lady. I'm sure they meant well. They were joiners and they wanted to be movers and shakers. That's what I remember hearing, anyway.”

“People like to talk as if they know all about someone, and if they don't know it, they'll make it up. Granny used to say that.”

“Ivy was another pistol,” Joe said.

I'd never thought of Granny quite like that, but as soon as he'd said it, I knew she would have liked the label. At some point after I'd gotten busy with my preservation career at the museum in Illinois, and didn't make it back to see Granny as often, she and Joe had become good friends. It had turned out that there was a lot of Granny's life I hadn't known about. That was only natural, I knew. But sometimes I wished I could have been a fly on the wall—or like Geneva, a ghost on the ceiling fan—and watched Granny and Joe and listened to what they talked about.

“I wonder if Al's mother was a knitter. I wonder if Granny knew her.”

“No idea if she was into any kind of needlework,” Joe said. “They joined every organization they could. Happy to help, happy to donate money when asked. But it wouldn't have mattered if Al's father had come down here and given folks the honest-to-God and verifiable secret to spinning straw into gold. An awful lot of them
wouldn't have listened. Some would've listened, but after they'd spun their fortunes, they still wouldn't have liked Mr. Rogalla.” Joe ticked off a string of unflattering adjectives off on his fingers. “I heard every one of those applied to that family.”

“Al's still here, though.”

“Yeah, because he
was
that big, muscular kid, and he had an incredibly thick hide. His folks and younger sister moved on. Al never had his folks' attitude. He probably could have gone anywhere he wanted after college, but he liked it here. After graduation he came back and made a place for himself.”

“But some memories never let go?”

“W-e-e-e-e-e-l-l, there's still the matter of the long-standing records he rushed right into the ground.”

“Oh, come on.”

“People like their grudges. There but for Al Rogalla stood a record they or their boys might have knocked down. And no one's busted that record since.”

“Wait a second. Now I know where I heard that name. Your brother. Yesterday morning. He asked if I'd been talking to Hugh McPhee at the courthouse. I told him I didn't know, and he said he'd find out—before Rogalla found out. What kind of rivalry have they got going?”

“Pfft. There's always been something between the firefighters and the deputies. That tug-of-war they have across the creek every summer? No playacting involved.”

“You're not serious.”

“And Cole?” Joe said. “Captain of the varsity team junior and senior year. Starting quarterback both years. Had his eye—they all had their eyes—on breaking Hugh McPhee's record. And Cole got it into his head that but
for Al from Chicago, he would have been hailed the next Hugh McPhee.”

“That's so . . . wait. It was Hugh McPhee's record? You might have mentioned that sooner.”

“Didn't I? But what difference does it make? How could that record have anything to do with Hugh's death? Hugh was the hero and Al was the villain. Years ago. But he was the villain for killing the record. Why would he kill the hero, too? Especially at this late date?”

“You said there were long memories,” I reminded him.

“But long, lethal memories? And why kill Hugh? Rogalla's the one who broke the record and destroyed the myth of invincible Hugh McPhee.”

“Yeah, I guess if the long memories came into play, either Cole or Rogalla would snap and one of them would kill the other.”

“It wouldn't happen, though,” Joe said. “Al's never had anything against Cole, personally, and by now Cole's gotten so used to hating Al that if he stopped to think about it, he'd realize they're friends. What? You don't believe that?”

“I'll have to see them out for a beer together before I believe it.”

“It could be true, though. It makes a nice story, anyway.”

“You only think that because you're a booth-half-built kind of guy. Cole's more of a single-minded mule playing tug-of-war.”

That reminded him that he had to get back to assembling his booth, and I wanted to call Ardis again.

“Why don't you call her now?” Joe asked.

But I wanted to wait until I was home, surrounded by Granny's things, her comfortable memories, in case there was any reason to fall apart. Not that I was really worried Ardis had been arrested. Or detained for hours. Not really. But where was she? So I told Joe I didn't want to distract him from his work, and he wiggled his eyebrows in a distracting way, so that it took a few minutes to say good-bye. Then I drove home, hoping to find no one there.

All appeared to be well as I rolled cautiously down Lavender Street. No cars lurked at the curb under the maple in front of the house. None waited for me down the driveway when I turned in. The house looked quiet. It sounded quiet, too, when I stopped outside the back door before going in. A stale whiff of Mercy's cologne brushed past my nose when I opened the door, but it dissipated when I fanned the door a time or two. I went into the living room and sat in one of the faded blue comfy chairs, letting my head rest in the hollow Granny's had made and left for me. Except for my nerves, all was peaceful. I called Ardis, and she finally answered on the eighth ring.

“Don't you check your messages?” she asked. “I sent you a text a couple of hours ago.”

“It never showed up.”

“I wonder who I sent it to. It's this new phone. Well, never mind. All is well and I'll see you tomorrow.”

“Wait! Did you learn anything from Darla? About the paper? The book? The sporran? How he died? Anything?”

“Darla was being cagey,” she, the Queen of Cage, said.

“So nothing?”

“Well, now, I wouldn't say it was nothing. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow. Good night, hon.”

“Wait! Ardis?”

“
Daddy,
” she shouted, though not directly into the phone, “I'll be there in two shakes. Keep your shirt on. That was not an idiom, Kath,” she said, speaking to me again. “He's been stripping off and prancing around all evening and here he goes again. All I can say is thank goodness he sleeps through the night and God bless the in-home day care ladies who let me out of this nuthouse during daylight hours. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

*   *   *

I dreamed that night that I was juggling bombs. Bombs that fell whistling toward my hands, and the whistle turned into the wheeze of bagpipes. I was a good juggler until I got cocky. Then I dropped one of the bombs. But it vaporized before it hit the ground, and became a misty, gray ghost. That startled me and I missed the next one. As I watched it fall to the floor, it turned into a pair of pants, and when I looked up, Ardis' daddy pranced by.

*   *   *

“If I were able to make a pot of coffee for you, I would,” Geneva said when I let myself in the back door of the Cat the next morning. “Your disguise does not help.”

“Good morning to you, too. What are you talking about?”

“Slender black skirt, snug-as-a-bug emerald green sweater with the
plunging
neckline.”

“It's called a V-neck, and in this case it isn't much more than a lowercase
v
.”

“But meant to attract and distract. Do you see how
well I am noticing? You dressed up because you are feeling down.”

“Close. Tired, though, not down. I didn't sleep very well last night.”

“The distraction isn't working. Have you looked at your eyes in the mirror? I am sorry, but I believe that even I look livelier than you do this morning. Perhaps I should keep Ardent company in the shop this morning so you can take a nap in the window seat upstairs with Argyle. He has not come down yet, because neither of us expected you this early.”

“Ardis would be happy to see you in the shop.”

“She's happy and yappy and you look crappy.” She slapped her hands to her mouth, then took them away. “Have you noticed that I am helpless in the face of a snappy rhyme? But really,
do
think about taking a nap. You might be surprised how improving they can be.”

“I'll be fine.”

“Argyle and I slept quite well in the absence of midnight bagpipes. What was your problem? A guilty conscience?”

“A bad dream. It had a bagpipe in it, though. Why would I have a guilty conscience?”

“Because,” she said, floating closer and whispering, “you're sneaking in here to talk to me before Ardent shows up. Keeping things from your business partner could easily lead to a guilty conscience. And bags under the eyes.”

“I do want to talk to you, but this is something that Ardis knows about. It's not a secret from her; it's a secret from almost everyone else in town.”

“So you and I are having a hush-hush rendezvous?”

“A hush-hush rendezvous
about
a hush-hush rendezvous. It's about something a group of us is getting together to do, later tonight, and I wondered if you'd like to come along. The whole thing's been top secret. That's why you haven't heard us talking about it.”

She leaned close. “
Top
secret?”

“Yes. It's called a yarn bombing.”

She mouthed the word “bomb” and a shiver ran through her. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but her hollow eyes grew wider. “Tell me all about it,” she said. “Spare no details.”

I spared most of the details because I figured either they didn't matter or they'd bore her. Although maybe I didn't spare enough of them. When I got to the part about everyone coming back to the Cat afterward, for refreshments, she drew back.

“I don't get it,” she said. “How does this tie in with our investigation?”

“It doesn't. It's more like an art project.”

“Then I am getting it even less. How is it that you have time for frivolity and yarn spewing when there is a murderer on the loose?”

“Sometimes what looks like fun and games, or what begins that way, turns out to yield the best clues. It's a strategy of blending in and observing. You're good at both of those, you know.”

“Yes, I do know. They are two of my strengths.”

“The yarn bombing is something we've been planning and looking forward to. We think it'll add extra zest to the town and the arts and crafts fair this weekend.”

“And nothing says ‘zest' like yarn and bombs?”

“Something like that. Besides, when we've worked on cases in the past, we haven't spent every second investigating. The rest of life goes on.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Sorry. That was insensitive.”

“I forgive you. But I do see what you mean. Death goes on, too. And on and on. Do you know what has occurred to me? You and I are always in a life-and-death situation. We are the yin and yang of existence.” She wafted back and forth—miming yin and yang with her arms, first one on top, then the other—in a watery, ghostly ballet.