Died in the Wool Page 3

  Geena and I had met at a few quilt shows and then ran into each other at a quilt shop out in St. Charles, and finally I asked her to come and appraise the quilts that I have, which she did. Then she realized what a great little quilt shop we had in New Kassel. It’s called the Fabric of Life, known as “the Fab” to us locals. I see Geena at least four times a year when the shop has its quarterly clearance sale.

  Geena answered in her usual bubbly voice. “Hey, it’s Torie,” I said.

  “Torie! How nice to hear from you,” she said.

  “I was wondering if you’d do me a favor,” I said. “I’ll pay you, of course, since it falls in the realm of your occupation.”

  “Got a new old quilt you want me to look at?”

  “I may have several,” I said. “I’m about to purchase a bunch of quilts by Glory Kendall. I need you to come down and appraise them, partly so I know what I’m getting and partly so I can pay the owner a fair price.”

  “Glory Kendall?” she said, instantly recognizing the name. “She’s got a quilt at the Smithsonian, and her Ode to Mother won the most prestigious award at the San Francisco World’s Fair in 1915. She was only seventeen when she quilted it! How have you come across such a wonderful windfall?”

  “She was born and raised here in town, and the present owner of the quilts is selling them.”

  “Oh, that’s fantastic,” she said. “You’re going to do right by them, I know you will. Will you have a display?”

  “Oh, you betcha,” I said. “Even if I don’t get the Kendall house, I’ll clear out a room at the Gaheimer House for them.”

  “The house?”

  I explained to her that it was up for sale as well. “When can you come down? I think he’s pretty anxious for some quick cash.”

  “I’m free tomorrow afternoon,” she said.

  “Great, I’ll meet you at the Fab,” I said. “I can drive you out to the house.”

  “Oh, I can’t wait to see these quilts.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  We said good-bye and hung up. I was about to get comfortable and watch a movie when there was a knock at the door. It was Sheriff Mort.

  “Torie,” Mort said, “I went by the Kendall house, and I don’t see anything wrong.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “What’s this about the Kendall house?” Rudy asked. Rudy and Mort get along really well. I think Rudy’s trying to talk him into joining his bowling team. Any help Rudy’s bowling team could get would be a good thing.

  “Evan thinks it’s haunted,” I said. “I thought maybe there were squatters there.”

  “Oh, no,” Rudy said. “That house is haunted.”

  I just stared at him. He plopped down in his recliner, and Matthew crawled up in his lap. Matthew was almost too big to fit there anymore, but that didn’t stop him from wiggling his butt into the chair until Rudy winced. “Ouch. That’s my hip, son,” he said.

  “What do you mean, the house is haunted?” I asked.

  “Everybody knows that,” Rudy said. I said nothing. Suddenly Rudy smiled. “Oh, my gosh, do I actually know something about New Kassel that you don’t?”

  I ignored him and turned my attention back to Mort. “No sign of breaking and entering at all?”

  “No,” he said, “In fact, other than some major dust, the house looked fine. I think a pipe busted a few years back, because there was a water stain on the dining room ceiling, and there’s that one room on the second floor, but I saw absolutely no evidence of anybody being in the house who shouldn’t be. I guess I was so set on the idea of squatters that I went right past the part about that one room.

  “What’s the deal with that house, anyway?” Mort asked. “It looks like a museum on the inside. Why all the furniture and stuff?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” I said. “Evan bought it from Herbie Pyle back in the early eighties. Herbie had bought it from Sandy Kendall just before he died, I want to say somewhere around 1956, but I’m not sure. Since there were no surviving members of the Kendall family, when Sandy sold the house, he sold all the belongings inside as well. So most of the stuff inside probably belonged to the Kendall family. Guess I should look into that.”

  “Whatever,” Mort said. “I found nothing wrong with the place.”

  “Did you check all the rooms?”

  “Yeah,” Mort said. “Cellar, too. Why the interest in the house?”

  “I’m thinking about buying it,” I said.

  “We are?” Rudy asked. “When do I get to find out about this?”

  “I haven’t gotten to talk to you about it yet, honey,” I said with a smile. “It would make a great addition to the historical society. I was concerned, of course, because if there were homeless people taking up residence in the house, there might be a lot of damage done to the property.”

  “No, nothing like that,” Mort said.

  “Wait,” I said. Now my brain kicked in. “What did you say about the one room? On the second floor?”

  “There were some bloodstains and stuff…”

  “Bloodstains?”

  “Yeah, on one of the walls.”

  “Probably from one of the suicides,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, sounds like a house I want to buy,” Rudy said.

  “We can clean it up,” I said.

  “Clean it up?” Rudy said. “Why would I want to voluntarily clean up blood? This wasn’t in the contract when I married you.”

  “It’s blood that’s almost eighty-five years old.”

  “Old blood, new blood, it’s still blood!” Rudy said.

  I sighed heavily and turned to Mort. “Thanks for checking into it for me,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “But, Torie, there’s some crazy stuff in that one room. The suicide room.” He shook his head and then made the loony sign with his finger beside his ear. “I mean … not good.”

  How bad could it be? I’ve seen fresh blood from a murder scene before. Whatever was in that room at the Kendall house couldn’t be as bad as that. Nothing could ever be as bad as that.

  Mort left, and Rudy’s gaze followed me from the door as I walked through the living room. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not cleaning up a bunch of eighty-five-year-old blood.”

  That’s a sentence you won’t find spoken in many marriages. At least I hope not.

  Just then Mary walked into the house with straw in her hair and horse manure all over her shoes and pants. “I never knew horses pooped so much,” she said.

  “What goes in has to come out,” Rudy said.

  “I’ll be in the shower,” she said. As she walked up the stairs I heard her say, “It was just a little bit of hair spray.”

  I stifled a laugh, and Rudy’s eyes grew huge. “I took a picture of the horses before she shampooed them,” he said. “I didn’t think horsehair would do that.”

  I laughed then, and so did Rudy. “Did anybody feed the chickens?” I asked.

  “No,” Rudy said.

  Heading out to the chicken coop, I breathed in the intoxicating smell of an oxygen-rich night. There’s something about the smell of the air in spring. The only way to describe it is green.

  We don’t live on a farm, but we do live on several acres just outside of town, surrounded by woods on one side, pasture on two sides, and a service road in the front. I’d brought my chickens over from the house that we used to own on River Pointe Road in town. The horses were a new addition. Already the kids wanted to buy llamas like my aunt has. I was waiting on the llamas.

  We had the house built for us last year. It took me a while to get used to not being able to see Old Man River from my bedroom window. Now I look out across fields and wooded acres. I love water. I could gaze at a big body of water for hours on end and not even be aware of the time that has slipped by. Still, I have to admit, the view I have now is breathtaking.

  I fed the chickens and thought about what Mort had told me. There was nothing unusual about the Kendall house, except for bloodstai
ns in one of the rooms upstairs. No squatters. No evidence of breaking and entering or kids using the place to drink or do drugs. Was Evan Merchant crazy? Or maybe he drank a lot and hallucinated when he got drunk.

  When I finished feeding the chickens, I went inside and up to my office to look up morning glories on the Internet.

  THE NEW KASSEL GAZETTE

  The News You Might Miss

  By Eleanore Murdoch

  Spring, glorious spring! It won’t be long until the Strawberry Festival is upon us. But before we settle in for all those good jams and jellies, we’re about ready to embark on our first—and, I’ve been told, annual—rose show! In honor of this new festivity, I would like to take a poll of the residents of New Kassel. Please phone in your favorite rose. That way we can get an idea of what sort of roses we should include in the show, and most likely set aside any squabble about floribundas. Call me at the Murdoch Inn with your vote!

  The gnome thief is back. Unfortunately, we have been unable to catch this pervert. If anybody has any news about this, please contact our new and illustrious sheriff, Mort Joachim, at the sheriff’s department in Wisteria.

  Really, I thought the people of New Kassel were a more congenial lot than this. Somebody painted the spots on Elmer’s dalmatian white. So now he has an all-white dog! He’s not a dalmatian without spots! Father Bingham says to remind all of you that animals are God’s children, too, and that whoever did this should repent.

  I just received exciting news! Midwest Traveler is coming to New Kassel to do an article on our lovely town. I needn’t remind everybody to keep the streets clean and be on your best behavior.

  Chuck Velasco has company from out of town, so why not stop in at the pizza parlor and give them a big hello. Oh, and Lucy Kleinschmidt is looking for a new pineapple upside-down cake recipe.

  Until next time,

  Eleanore

  Four

  There wasn’t a whole lot of information on morning glories. They are found on vines, and originally they grew wild. Almost all of them only bloom in the morning. The moonflower kind only blooms at night, but I could not find a single reference to a morning glory blooming day and night. Nor could I find a single reference to a “perennial” morning glory, meaning that the flower would come back every year on its own.

  I needed a flower expert.

  Maybe the flower at the Kendall house wasn’t a morning glory at all. Maybe Evan Merchant didn’t know a morning glory from a daisy. At least that was what I told myself the next day, all the way over to Tobias Thorley’s house.

  Tobias lives right in the thick of “downtown.” His front yard is rectangular and perfectly manicured. A mass of color graces every nook and cranny. Flowers are everywhere, and little cutesy things decorate every available space—wishing wells, fairy fountains, leprechauns, and, of course, gnomes, although the gnomes were missing at the moment. He has busts of famous people in his backyard; he has his Mozart corner and his Lincoln garden. As best I could tell, he planted whatever flower or plant represented those people to him. Tobias is much more than just the resident accordion player.

  I rang his doorbell. He answered in a huff and said, “What?”

  Tobias is one of those people who makes you wonder if he’s actually alive or if his body is just up moving around without the benefit of heart and blood. He’s old and scarecrow thin, with a hook nose and skin darkened by years in the sun. His knees are knobby, which I know because I see his knees every time he puts on his little knickers outfit for events. It’s like there’s nothing but skin and bones, no muscle or sinew in between.

  “Hi, Tobias,” I said.

  “Did you steal my gnomes?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then I don’t have time to talk to you,” he said.

  He started to shut the door, but I stuck my foot out to stop him. I have never been known as subtle in this town, even when I think I’m being subtle. Why start now? “Tobias, I know you want your gnomes back, but I have a really important question for you.”

  “It’s not so much that I want my gnomes back. I can buy new ones. I just want the stealing to stop,” he said. “For years, people have taken perverse pleasure in taking what’s mine. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anybody would want a used garden gnome!”

  I started to say something, but he wasn’t finished.

  “No, I don’t want the gnomes back, I want the cad who took them to be found and punished to the fullest extent of the law! I want … I want a public flogging!”

  “Well, I doubt if you’ll get a public flogging, Tobias, because I’m not exactly sure they still do that in this country,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll have to go to jail or pay a fine or something, though.”

  “A fine,” he said, and stepped outside on the front porch. “A fine? How will that make up for the years of torment and harassment that I have been put through?”

  Clearly, this man was serious about his garden.

  “I think I’ve found a morning glory that blooms all day and some nights and comes back every year,” I said.

  His eyes grew wide. “You don’t say?” Just like that, all thoughts of those puny little gnomes went right out the window. “Can’t be. No such thing. Unless it’s one of those newer varieties.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “Over at the old Kendall place,” I said.

  “Well, let’s go have a look-see.” He grabbed his hat from some magical place inside his door and was off his front porch, heading for my minivan before I could even blink.

  I’d deliberately waited to take Tobias to the morning glory until about one in the afternoon, so it would be after morning and he could see it blooming for himself. On the way over to the Kendall house, I asked Tobias just what was so great about gardening. I mean, my old house came with a lilac bush and maybe a few roses. I’d deliberately planted a few other things around my yard, but I’d never gone all-out with flowers and the like. At the new house, we really hadn’t done much landscaping, since we’d moved in during late autumn. We should have done it this spring, but it just seemed as though there’d been too many other things to do. Plants could wait. I could almost hear Tobias gasping at my thoughts. Plants, wait?

  “What’s so great about gardening?” he echoed.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Where to start,” he said. “The smell of the earth is intoxicating, but that’s not it. I could just dig a pot of dirt and keep it by my bed if that were it.”

  I laughed, and as I looked over at him, he winked at me.

  “There is something primal, something … real about planting a little bitty seed and then watching it grow and grow and grow until it produces whatever it’s supposed to produce: fruit, flower, tomato, whatever. The thing that drives me is a love of beauty. I can take a piece of plain old land and make it beautiful, and I made it. Plants are living things, you know. Really alive. Like people and animals. There’s so many species of plants and flowers … it’s relaxing, it’s good exercise, it’s just where I’m supposed to be.”

  Those were the most words I’d ever heard Tobias speak in the entire time I’d known him. Which had been my whole life. Truth be told, I hadn’t known he was capable of such a speech.

  I pulled into the driveway at the Kendall house, and Tobias was out of the van before I’d turned off the engine. He ran up to the wildly climbing vine—it was entangled in the porch posts and curling up along the porch ceiling—took his hat off, and scratched his head. He looked up at the sky, then fingered the leaves on the vine. Then he fingered the flowers, which were completely open and beautiful.

  “Well?” I said. “Is it a morning glory?”

  “Sure as hell is,” he said. “It’s a standard Heavenly Blue.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s a type of morning glory,” he said, clucking his teeth. “You say it comes back every year?”

  “According to Evan Me
rchant.”

  “Well, in the tropics, that’s not unheard of,” he said, “but not here. Does Evan do anything special to it in the winter? Not that it matters, because this is impossible.”

  “No, he does nothing special. In fact, he told me that he’s actually dug it up and whacked it down.”

  Tobias looked at me sharply.

  “It just keeps coming back.”

  “These flowers … See, a morning glory bloom opens once in the early morning. Then it closes quickly and that bloom dies. A new one replaces it, so … And the roots, well, they’re supersensitive,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “So it is definitely a morning glory.”

  “It’s a freak of nature, but yeah. And it’s an oldie. This is not one of those new ones.”

  You know, I’d really been hoping that Tobias would tell me that Evan had been wrong about what sort of flower it was. A freak of nature … it just made me uncomfortable.

  Tobias glanced over at the fence and said, “That’s a wisteria bush.” Then he completely digressed into what was planted where throughout the entire yard. Within ten minutes, though, he was back to studying the morning glory. He walked up onto the porch to get a better look at it from the other side. I wasn’t sure what he thought a different angle would tell him, but I wasn’t going to interfere with his study.

  “Do you think Evan would mind if I brought the garden club over here to look at it?” he asked.

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, especially since he’s selling the house.”

  “Yeah, I’d heard that,” Tobias said. He came down off of the porch and glanced up at the house, shading his eyes from the sun with his hat. “Well, I’m going to go and get Dudley. He’s got to see this.”

  With that, he was off. He didn’t even wait for me to give him a ride back to his house. Not that he couldn’t make it to his house in ten or fifteen minutes without a ride, because he could.