'What?'
'You should do a background check on him. Then you won't wonder. I bet Meghan's beau would give you a discount.'
My lips parted in surprise. Who knew Ruth was so mercenary?
'Meghan?' she prompted.
'Well,' Meghan said. 'I guess I could ask Kelly about it.'
Kelly O'Connell was Meghan's sort of boyfriend. The sort of part was mostly because he lived in New Jersey. They chatted on the phone for hours every night like school kids, and there'd been talk of him moving out to Cadyville once he got his private investigator's license in the state of Washington.
Hmmm. I considered the idea. It really would make me feel better to know for sure, to stop wondering if Barr was keeping anything from me. Call it trust issues if you want to, but I'd never before thought of myself as one of those walking wounded who couldn't get close to anyone. I just didn't want to be stupid.
'Will you talk to him about it tonight?' I asked Meghan.
'Urn.' Her reluctance was palpable.
'You think it's a bad idea, don't you.' '
11 It's not up to me.'
'Yeah, but…'
She hesitated, then, 'Is that the kind of thing you want to base your relationship on?'
After a few moments, I met her eyes and shook my head. 'No. You're right. It's not. I'd hate it if he did something like that to me, and if I went ahead with it, I could never take it back.'
She smiled her approval.
Ruth shrugged and changed the subject. 'I brought a spinning wheel for you to practice on.'
'The one from the co-op?' I was surprised she'd been allowed to remove it from the crime scene.
'No-I had an extra at the house.'
'So you have three spinning wheels? Wow.'
She ducked her head. 'Four actually.'
'That seems like a lot. Do you use all of them?'
'Well, not this one, at least not very often. That's why you should keep it as long as you want, until you decide what kind you want to get.'
I grinned. 'How do you know I'm going to want my own wheel?'
'Because you, my dear, are thoroughly hooked'
Meghan snorted. 'I'll say.'
Erin wrinkled her nose. 'You're spinning yarn? Like in the olden days?'
'Well, yes. I guess so. Only, like so many things we do now, it's more for fun than out of necessity. The people who used to spin in order to cloth themselves never had that luxury.'
She nodded. 'Yeah, I get it. I guess there are a lot of things like that.'
Ruth gestured over her shoulder toward the pen where our four pullets were quietly clucking and making the low moaning sounds that count as conversation among chickens. 'Like keeping laying hens.'
Meghan and I both smiled as Erin jumped in. 'But the girls are necessary. How else would we get fresh eggs for breakfast right from our own backyard? Plus they give us fertilizer for the garden, and then turn around and eat all the weeds from it.'
'Girls?' Ruth asked, looking amused.
'Well, they are girls, aren't they? Girl chickens,' Erin said.
We all liked raising the chickens and keeping them in the backyard, but she was the most enthusiastic. She cared for them exclusively, so the burden on Meghan and I came down to occasionally buying chicken feed, grit and oyster shell. Since 'the girls' would likely produce more eggs than we could possibly use in the summer, we'd told Erin she could sell the extras and keep the money for all her hard work.
'Well,' I said, spearing a few leaves of chickweed from my salad and holding them up. 'At least we get to eat some of our own weeds, too.'
Conversation continued, and I concentrated on my dinner. As I chewed, I stubbornly pushed aside the disturbing events of the day and focused on my environment: warm friends, the beauty of the vegetable beds, the bat house mounted on a fence post, the chickens getting ready to roost for the night.
When Ruth touched my arm, I jumped. 'Let's take some of these plates in,' she said.
We gathered up plates and utensils, waving Meghan and Erin back when they tried to help. Erin slipped into the hen pen, as she called it, and began murmuring to her girls in a low voice. Meghan watched, smiling.
In the kitchen, I quickly set to washing the plates. I love the dishwasher, don't get me wrong, but when we grilled in the summer there were rarely enough dishes to justify starting it up. Besides, the house still held heat from the day, and it didn't seem prudent to add to it.
Ruth said, 'The spinning wheel is in the living room.'
'Thanks again for that. It's sweet of you to let me borrow it.' '
I want you to do something, though.' '
I paused in rinsing a plate. 'Oh?'
I want you to go over and talk to Chris Popper.'
Oh.
Slowly, I dried my hands and sat down at the kitchen table. I'd been so caught up in my own drama that I'd nearly forgotten what Barr had said about Chris killing Ariel. Now I remembered my insistence that she call me if she wanted to talk, and felt torn. She'd lost her husband twice, it seemed: once to another woman and then, finally, to an accident. But would she really have killed Ariel over it? Especially after Scott was already dead?
'Barr and that woman detective think she killed Ariel,' Ruth said.
There was a note of distaste in her voice when she mentioned Robin Lane. The fledgling detective had tried to bully information out of Ruth a few months previously. Ruth had been flat on her back in a hospital bed at the time and in a lot of pain. Barr was right. His partner had all the people skills of a grumpy badger.
Cautious, I inclined my head a fraction.
'Barr already told you?' Ruth said. 'Well, of course he did. Will you talk to Chris before jumping to any conclusions, and make up your own mind? That's all I ask. Because you know how hard it is to lose a husband. Can you imagine how hard it would have been if, in addition to losing your husband, you'd been accused of murdering his lover on the day of his funeral?'
I blanched. Turned out I couldn't imagine it.
Barr had asked me to foster gossip amongst the CRAC crowd, and I had already offered a listening ear should Chris be interested. Complying with Ruth's request was a no brainer.
'Of course I'll talk to her,' I said. 'Though I'm not sure what good it will do.'
She shrugged and reached for a dishtowel. 'To be honest, I don't know, either. But do it anyway.'
Kind of pushy, I thought. 'Or you'll take away the spinning wheel?' I joked.
Ruth smiled gently.
I stared at her placid face. 'You're blackmailing me?'
'Don't be ridiculous,' she said. 'I'm bribing you.'
EIGHT
AFTER RUTH LEFT, I took a long shower, dressed in a soft, oversized T-shirt and crawled into bed with one of Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books. Her descriptions of bucolic life in the lateseventeenth-century farmhouse she and her friend Jill had rehabbed in 1920s and '30s Connecticut seemed the perfect continuation of my determined affection for the home life I had with Meghan and Erin.
Meghan came and stood in my bedroom doorway. I put my book down.
'Think tomorrow will be as exciting as today?' she asked with a rueful look.
'I hope not.'
'What did Ruth want?'
I pasted innocence on my face.
'Come on. I know she came over specifically to talk to you, and it wasn't just about twisting fiber into yarn.'
'She wants me to talk to Chris.'
'Oh. Well, that makes sense, since you're a, you know… widow.'
'Yeah, that and the police think Chris had something to do with Ariel's death.'
'What!'
'Ariel and Scott were having an affair. Barr wants me to talk to Chris, too. Well,' I amended, 'not just Chris. He wants me to talk to other people at CRAC, too. More like get them talking.' I'd sort of left that out when I'd recounted my conversation with him earlier.
