Died in the Wool Page 2

  I turned down Haggeman Road, at the far west end of town. About seven houses down was the old Kendall house. Chipped paint flaked away from the multitude of windows that covered the front of the two-story Victorian. It had been painted a light yellow about fifteen years ago—I remember it well because Sylvia, Wilma, and I were all excited that the house was getting a face-lift—and the trim and windows had been done in forest green. A large front porch wrapped nearly all the way around the house, but stopped just short of it at the side door. A swing hung from one end of the porch, and a beautiful purple-flowering vine of some sort climbed all over the other end. A rather enormous tree—possibly oak—shaded half of the house with its leaf-smothered branches.

  There was a blue Honda parked in the driveway, so Evan Merchant was most likely home. I parked, got out of the car, and made my way back to the guesthouse. The guesthouse was nothing to sneeze at by most people’s standards. It was a nice, cozy bungalow, probably two bedrooms, situated behind the main house and virtually invisible from the street.

  I knocked on the door, and after a moment, Evan Merchant answered. He was close to fifty, fit and trim with a head full of red hair. “Hi,” I said. Just as I put my hand out to shake his, a little bitty dog ran between Evan’s legs and began barking at me as if I were Ted Bundy. “Bon, shut up,” Evan said.

  “I’m Torie O’Shea,” I said.

  “Yes, I remember you,” he said. “Come in.”

  His house was bright and airy and did not come across as a bachelor pad in the least. Well, except for the big flat-screen TV tuned to ESPN. Otherwise, as you could tell from the salmon-colored carpet and the vases sitting around full of floral arrangements, he had embraced his feminine side. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “Um, well, I heard that you were putting the Kendall house up for sale,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You can go through my real estate agent. Hannah Sharpe, over in Wisteria.”

  “So it’s official,” I said.

  “Oh, hell yes, it’s official,” he said. He seemed pretty anxious to get rid of the house, which meant I could have a really good chance of getting it before summer was out. I didn’t know Evan Merchant very well. I’d seen him occasionally in town; he usually showed up for the bluegrass festival we hold once or twice a year. As far as I could remember, he worked somewhere up in South St. Louis. Don’t ask me why, but the townsfolk who drive all the way to St. Louis for work stick out in my mind. “I want to close by July first.”

  Wonderful. I’d have a few months of good weather to do repairs before winter set in. Of course, I hadn’t discussed any of this with my husband, Rudy, but it wouldn’t hurt to have an idea of what I’d need to do if I did get the chance to buy the house.

  I cleared my throat. Bon, the killer Chihuahua, spun around in circles and barked again. Evan shot the dog a look, and Bon jumped on the couch and shut up. If he could get that sort of respect out of a dog, why couldn’t I get it out of my kids? If I shot Mary a look like that, she’d laugh at me. Of course, Mary is on the verge of being an Evil Teenager. I firmly believe the years between ten and fourteen are the worst. At least for the parent. And for the other siblings. Well, for any living being who has the unfortunate luck of being in the vicinity of somebody that age.

  “Bon is an unusual name for a dog,” I said.

  “Oh, I named him after Bon Scott. The original lead singer for AC/DC.”

  “Right,” I said. “Didn’t he drink himself to death?”

  “Yup,” he said. “The dog sounds just like him.” Evan tilted his head to the side as he looked at the dog on the couch. Bon mirrored his movement. “Sorta looks like him, too,” he said, and laughed.

  “I was actually curious about the contents of the house. I heard you were planning on having an estate sale,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Boy, news travels fast in this town.”

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  “You want a Coke? Tea? I might have some Budweiser,” he said.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said, following him into the kitchen. “I’d be really interested in the quilts and anything pertaining to fabric art. I think they would make an excellent display in town. A collection of fabric and needlework from historical women of the area would be a splendid addition to the Gaheimer Collection.”

  “Yeah,” he said, grabbing a beer for himself from the fridge. “I think I remember seeing some old blankets in the house.”

  I handed him my card with my office, home, and cell phone numbers on it. “I would give you a very, very generous price for the whole collection of needlecrafts.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said and took a drink. “Maybe it should go to auction if you think it’s worth so much.”

  “Whatever you decide, I’m sure it would be fair,” I said, “but I really think it’s important that the quilts go to a historical society or a museum so that they don’t end up in somebody’s camping gear. I can guarantee them a good home, and I’m prepared to purchase them right away if you’re in need of money now.”

  His eyes lit up then. Damn, I was good.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Let me talk it over with my lawyers and I’ll get right back to you.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said.

  Evan showed me to the door. As I stepped out into the brilliant sunlight and saw the back of that wonderful home, I couldn’t help but ask the inevitable question. “Evan, why have you never lived in the big house?”

  He turned a bit pale then, especially around the mouth. “I did live in that house once. For about a week. The damn thing is haunted.” I laughed until I realized he was serious. “Every night, I’d hear gunshots that weren’t there. Crashing noises. The final straw was when I saw her…”

  “Her?”

  “The woman, young and so beautiful. She sat down on the edge of my bed and told me in a very polite way that I was sleeping in her bed and then asked if I would please retire to one of the other bedrooms in the house.”

  I laughed even harder. “Oh, Evan. There’s no such thing as ghosts. You know, every single time I’ve thought a house was haunted, there was always a logical explanation for it. Everybody should watch Scooby-Doo. The Scooby gang would always think they had a ghost or zombie or whatever, and then they always found out it wasn’t.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Bring the Scooby gang over to check it out. Because that house is haunted. My dog won’t go near it. He barks at the house all the time. And there’s a room … upstairs.” He shivered. “I was gonna paint it, but I got too spooked before I could get around to doing it. The good thing is that the ghosts seem to be confined to the house. They can’t get out.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. As if they were real.

  “I see her up there in that window all the time,” he said, pointing to one of the second-floor windows. “She stares down at me. Places her hand on the glass like she wants out. But she never comes.”

  Chills danced down my spine. “Okay, well, let me know about the quilt collection, and I’ll be in touch with your real estate agent.”

  I was halfway to my car when I remembered something else. “Evan, why didn’t you just move?”

  “Couldn’t afford to until now. I would have lost my butt if I’d sold it in the first five years. Then, well, I got laid off, and I’d taken out a second and a third mortgage … you know,” he said.

  “Yeah, I understand,” I said. “What kind of vine did I see on that gorgeous front porch?”

  If it was possible, Evan Merchant’s pallor got even worse. “Morning glories,” he said.

  “Morning glories,” I said. “But it’s after noon. I thought they only bloomed in the morning.”

  “Lady, morning glories are annuals, too. You know what that means?”

  “Uhhh, they bloom once?”

  “No, you have to plant them every year. They don’t make it through the winter.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve never
replanted them. They come up every year. I’ve even gone over there and pulled them up by the roots. They come back, and they bloom all morning, all afternoon, and sometimes late at night they’re still open.”

  I didn’t know what to say to him. Surely he had to be mistaken. There must be some weird breed or species of morning glories that bloomed all day and came back every year. Of course, then they’d be called “all-day glories.” Still, there had to be some logical explanation for the flowers.

  “Her name was Glory.”

  “Who was named Glory?” I said.

  “The woman in the house. Her name was Glory Kendall.”

  Three

  As I was leaving Evan Merchant’s house, I decided to head down to Debbie’s Cookie Cutter and buy some chocolate chip cookies. I can honestly say that I believe I’d either be dead or in the nuthouse if it weren’t for chocolate chips. Chocolate chip cookies, chocolate chip ice cream, chocolate chip muffins … I mean, as far as I’m concerned, there really isn’t much need for other food. Okay, except pizza. I get really cranky if I go too long without an injection of chocolate chips. At least I haven’t started carrying a bag of them around with me.

  I bought two dozen chocolate chip cookies from Debbie and ran into the new sheriff of New Kassel on the street outside. “Mort,” I said.

  “Torie, what’s up?”

  Mort Joachim is younger than I am, probably about thirty-one or thirty-two. He’d only been sheriff for about six months. The position had been vacated by my stepfather, Colin Brooke, who had gone on to greener pastures as the town’s mayor. I used to complain about the old mayor quite a bit. Then I found out he was actually a mobster living under an alternate identity. Sort of like a round, bald, bowling-obsessed villain in a comic book. Well, the new mayor, my stepfather, doesn’t spend a lot of time bowling—except his usual Tuesday night league with my husband—but he spends countless hours golfing, since there really doesn’t seem to be that much to do as mayor. I wish I’d known that, because I definitely would have run against him.

  At any rate, the blond-haired, violet-eyed new sheriff was as green as grass and rather friendly. He had won his office against Lou Counts, the closest thing to Satan I’d ever come across. She is ex-military, driven, and no-nonsense, and she hates me with a passion. Unfortunately she is now a deputy for the sheriff’s department, but I rarely have to have anything to do with her. I mostly deal with Mort, since I’m a special consultant to the sheriff—another one of those hats I wear.

  “I was just headed home, Mort. How about you?”

  “Tobias claims somebody dug up one of his rosebushes and did something with his gnomes.”

  “Oh, yeah, Tobias loves his garden gnomes,” I said.

  “So I’m headed over to investigate the vandalism,” he said.

  “Hey, Mort, I was wondering … you think you could check out the Kendall house for me?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Just go over, check the locks, maybe make sure the windows haven’t been broken into or anything,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, Evan Merchant claims the house is haunted. Of course, that’s just not possible, but he says he sees a girl up in one of the windows, so I’m thinking maybe some squatters have taken up residence.”

  “I’ll check it out,” he said.

  “Can you let me know what you find?”

  “Sure.”

  Just then my cell phone rang. “I gotta take this,” I said, and waved to him. It was my husband calling. “Hey, Rudy, what’s up?”

  “Mary decided to use hair spray on the horses’ manes,” he said.

  Well, any sentence that begins with “Mary decided,” especially one that comes over a cell phone, is one to worry about, so my eyes had started rolling before he’d even finished this one. “What do you mean, she used hair spray?”

  “She decided that she wanted the horses to have big hair. Like back in the eighties and nineties. She said Cutter looks like Jon Bon Jovi.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal. Ground her from the hair spray, then tell her she has to wash it out of the manes herself. Then … hell, I don’t know. Tell her she’s on stall duty for the next month.”

  “You seriously want Mary to clean out the horses’ stalls for the next month? We’ll have horse manure everywhere,” he said.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t go and clean up behind her, but she needs to think she’s cleaning the stalls.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Do you always think this deviously, or only when it comes to our kids?”

  “I’m not answering that,” I said and laughed.

  “What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. If there’s nothing thawed, then I guess we’re going with pasta,” I said.

  “How about I make some black beans and rice?” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll be home in a few minutes. I need to pick up Rachel from rehearsal. You’ve got Matthew already, right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  I had to check, because one time we were just sitting down to eat dinner when we realized that neither one of us had retrieved Matthew from my mother’s. I wouldn’t have felt so bad about this if Matthew was a quiet kid, a child that you could forget was there, but Matthew talks incessantly and is constantly blowing things up in his mind, so there’s usually a fair amount of spit flying through the air at all times. You’d think we would notice that there wasn’t a little boy jumping around the kitchen with his light saber making lots of spit noises, but we hadn’t. I felt so horrible that I’d driven right over and gotten him without eating my dinner.

  Well, everybody’s forgotten his or her kid at least once. Right? Most of the time I can tell someone is missing when the decibel level in the house has changed by just a fraction. I’m usually very tuned in to what my children are doing, especially when they’re out of the room. It’s that Mommy Sense. I guess I had just been preoccupied that night, and, to be fair, each of us had assumed the other one had picked him up. Nevertheless, it was the low point of my maternal career, but worth several packages of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and at least one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure for Matthew. He came out pretty good on the deal. In fact, Mary had asked if I could forget about her a few times.

  I picked up Rachel from play practice at school. Her boyfriend, Riley, waved to us as we pulled out of the parking lot. Rachel is old enough to drive now, but she’s sort of short and panics easily, so I’m not real thrilled with the idea.

  Later, at dinner, Rachel wouldn’t shut up. You must understand that there is absolutely nothing unusual about this, but Mary was fast losing her patience, as she had tried to speak at least three times.

  Mary is a talker, too. She talks at such amazing speeds that sometimes I worry about her lips burning off. One of the kids at school told her she should become the “prices may vary” person. Yup, that person at the end of the commercials that comes on and says, “Prices may vary…” and then spews out this long tirade of disclaimers so fast that you can barely understand them. There’s a reason for Mary’s linguistic velocity. If she didn’t speak quickly, Rachel would be talking again and Mary would never get anything said.

  So, after ten minutes of listening to Rachel drone on and on about what person was playing what part in the play and how amazing each and every actor was, Mary lost all sense of propriety and let out a burp that rattled the walls. Rachel took one look at Mary and said, “Pig,” and then just glared.

  It was during that glaring moment that Mary cupped her hand to her ear. “Do you hear that?” Mary asked. “Silence.”

  Rachel stuck her tongue out at Mary.

  “Jenny Abraham tried to kill herself,” Mary said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she’s, like, fifteen. I’ve been trying to tell you this for, like, the last twenty hours, but motormouth over there wouldn’t give me a chance.”

  “Her mother must be devastated,” I sa
id.

  “Why did she do it?” Rudy asked.

  Mary shrugged. “Who knows?” she said.

  “Well, is she all right? Is she at home or in the hospital?” I asked.

  “She’s fine. I think she’s still at the hospital, though,” Mary said, making designs on her plate with the black beans. Then she looked to Rachel. “You can continue with all that crap none of us care about now.”

  “So,” Rachel said, “Mr. Zozlowski thought Deanna would make a better Juliet, but after watching Melinda, I’m telling you, Melinda owns the part. She is Juliet.”

  We all just stared at her. “What?” she asked, shoving her fork in her mouth.

  The phone rang then, and I answered it on the second ring. “Hello,” I said.

  “Yeah, is this Torie O’Shea?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Hi, it’s Evan Merchant,” he said. “I’d like to sell you those blankets and things.”

  “Great,” I said. “Look, I’m going to call a local appraiser. I want this to be a fair deal. She’ll come out and look at the quilts and let you know what they’re worth.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “She’ll need to get in the house and see the quilts, though.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “You going to be with her?”

  “Probably.”

  “Good, then I don’t need to be.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Call me when she’s available.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Later, after dinner and Matthew’s bath—which is always a drenching event—I called Geena Campbell, the appraiser, who lives in St. Louis. I’ve known Geena for a few years now. We have some quilts in the Gaheimer Collection, and I had inherited a few of my own family heirloom quilts. In fact, a few years back, I started quilting. I’m not very good, and it takes me forever to finish one. I always have more ideas than actual projects, and I’ve bought fabric for all of those ideas. I’ve also bought fabric just because it was cool fabric, and I’ve bought fabric because I might need it for a project. Basically, I’ve become a fabric hound. At any rate, I love quilts and quilting, even though I think the Über Quilting Gene did not get passed to me. My aunt can quilt nine stitches to the inch; my grandmother could quilt ten stitches to the inch. I’m lucky if I get in six. Of course, the idea is to get as many stitches to the inch as possible.