by Celia Kinsey
Georgia was scowling, but I wasn’t scared of Georgia. Georgia had given up hitting people around the time we’d all become teenagers, although she had never shed her prickles and peevishness.
Besides, I couldn’t blame Georgia for scowling. She’d always had a well-developed sense of justice and fair play, and I was acutely aware that my Great Aunt Geraldine’s decision to leave me practically everything must have offended it. If I’d been in Georgia’s place, I’d certainly have wanted to know why I’d been left nothing but a stack of antiquated encyclopedias.
The problem was, I was just as much in the dark as Georgia as to why Aunt Geraldine had decided to cut her daughter and granddaughters out of the will.
“You’d better come in,” I said and stepped aside to let the twins into Aunt Geraldine’s apartment.
Chapter Six
“You must be wondering why we’re here,” Freida began, still smiling that hideous fake smile of hers.
Actually, I wasn’t wondering why. I was pretty sure my cousins were there because they’d recently found out they’d been cut out of Aunt Geraldine’s will. What I wasn’t sure of was what they intended to do about it.
My cousins, unlike Juanita, might be privy to just how much Aunt Geraldine had left me. Equally possible, since my aunt had omitted any mention of any of her considerable investments in the will, Georgia and Freida might have no idea that their grandmother had been loaded. I decided to keep quiet and let my cousins do the talking.
“We’re contesting the will,” Georgia said. “Someone was exerting undue influence over Grams when she had it rewritten.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who was exerting undue influence?”
I was curious to know who this person was who might have talked my Great Aunt Geraldine into passing over her daughter and granddaughters and leaving everything to me. The only person I could think of who would even have that kind of clout with my aunt was Juanita, but I couldn’t imagine her urging Aunt Geraldine to cut her offspring out of her will.
“It was you!” said Georgia, pointing an accusing finger at me.
“Me? I haven’t seen Aunt Geraldine in person since my grandmother’s funeral. I didn’t even know she was sick. It was just as much of a shock to me as it was to you when I found out she’d left Little Tombstone to me.”
They clearly didn’t believe me. Georgia huffed through her nose like a bull pawing the ground in preparation for going after the matador. Freida stretched her smile a tiny bit wider—something I wouldn’t have thought possible until she pulled it off.
My cousins didn’t stay long after that. I offered to let them take a look through my great aunt’s things and stake a claim to anything they wanted, but it appeared they were far more interested in getting their paws on the deed to Little Tombstone.
I was just suggesting that perhaps Freida might want to take away her grandmother’s antique tea set when Earp emerged from the bedroom. He’d become a bit deaf, but I was still surprised that Georgia’s pounding on the door earlier had not woken him up.
Now it appeared that he had spontaneously awakened from his midday doze. He stalked into the hallway and stood there, at a distance, bristling and snarling.
There were a great number of people who Earp disliked, but he usually limited his expressions of distaste to surly avoidance and the occasional disgruntled growl. I’d never seen him get so instantly worked up over a familiar person before. I went and grabbed him by the collar before he could do either of my cousins any actual damage.
“Hello, Earp,” said Georgia, fearlessly approaching and giving the still-distraught Earp a perfunctory pat on the head. Earp ignored her and kept his eyes fixed on Freida.
Apparently, it wasn’t both the twins that Earp wanted to tear to pieces. It was just Freida he heartily disliked.
Freida took Earp’s aggression as their cue to leave.
“You’ll be hearing from our lawyer,” said Georgia.
I locked the door behind them, slid the deadbolt back into place, and tried to calm Earp down with a handful of dog treats, but he wasn’t having it. For another ten minutes, he stood bristling, with his eyes glued to the door as if he expected Freida to come back through it at any second and visit unimaginable horrors upon us.
I dug through my handbag and found the card Mr. Wendell had given me the day before when he’d presented me with Aunt Geraldine’s will.
I called the number, but it went to voicemail. Twenty minutes later, Mr. Wendell called me back.
“Your cousins have been by to see me,” Mr. Wendell informed me before I’d even had a chance to explain why I was calling. “I informed them that it would be better for them to communicate with me via their legal representative, but my advice fell on deaf ears.”
“I suppose they told you that they plan to contest the will.”
“They did. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Your cousins appear completely unaware of the investment accounts your great aunt left you. However, they appear determined to contest the will and gain control of Little Tombstone. I can recommend a couple of competent probate lawyers—”
“Aren’t you a competent probate lawyer?” I asked.
“I’m the executor. I also drafted the will at your aunt’s request,” said Mr. Wendell. “If your cousins contest the will on the basis of fraud or undue influence, it would be best for me to be seen as a disinterested outside party.”
“Oh.”
Mr. Wendell texted me the numbers of three probate lawyers in Santa Fe, but I lacked the determination to follow through on calling for an appointment. Nothing about the situation made sense to me, and I hoped time would illuminate the mystery of my great aunt’s wealth and why she had left it all to me. Instead of calling a lawyer, I continued the long slog of clearing out Aunt Geraldine’s overstuffed apartment.
Around eight, I realized I’d had nothing to eat since breakfast besides a jumbo bag of potato chips, so I went downstairs in hopes that there’d be a serving left from the supper special. I didn’t want to trouble Juanita to cook me up something just as she was preparing to go home for the evening.
When I came into the kitchen, I observed Juanita and Chamomile huddled in whispered conference. I cleared my throat loudly, and Chamomile scuttled away.
“What was that about?” I couldn’t resist asking.
“It’s Marco,” Juanita whispered, one eye on the door into the dish room. “Chamomile is convinced he’s stealing money from the register.”
“Why does she think that?”
“She saw him in the dish room, right after supper, counting out a wad of cash.”
“Couldn’t you compare the order slips with what’s in the register?”
“That’s what I intend to do,” Juanita said grimly, “and if there’s a discrepancy, I won’t hesitate to fire him.”
I sat in the empty dining room eating a plate of chicken enchiladas while Juanita sat at the cash register with the order slips from supper and an old-fashioned adding machine, calculating the day’s earnings. Then she counted out what was in the register.
“It’s all there according to the order slips, and it added up to about what I expected it to be,” Juanita said in a low voice as she went past my table. “I don’t know where he got the money.”
“Do you suppose he’s stealing Chamomile’s tips?”
“Chamomile saw Marco with a thick stack of twenties. Nobody around here leaves twenties as tips.”
After I’d polished off the enchiladas, I took my plate back to the dish room. Marco and Chamomile had both departed for the night, so I rinsed my plate and left it in the sink to be run through the sterilizer in the morning.
Juanita was putting on her jacket as I came back through the kitchen.
“I’m heading upstairs,” I said. “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
As it turned out, I was the one who almost got bitten, and by something considerably bigger than a bedbug.
Chapt
er Seven
As soon as I stepped into my aunt’s apartment, I knew something was amiss. I hadn’t left any windows open, yet I felt a cool breeze. I switched on the light and called out for Earp. I heard a dull thud as he jumped off the stepstool I’d left by the bed so he could coax his arthritic legs into making it up onto his favorite perch.
Earp was just emerging from the bedroom when something dark fluttered down from the light fixture which hung over the table in the kitchen dinette and headed for my face.
I screamed and waved my arms around. I hit something soft, and it fell to the floor.
The bat lay there, stunned for a few seconds. I didn’t know what to do. Earp came over cautiously, barking anxiously at the creature that lay inert on the floor. I looked around for something to protect the bat from Earp and Earp from the bat. I found a plastic laundry basket on top of the washing machine, overturned it, and placed it over the bat like a cage.
The bat was safely contained, although I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was going to do with it when it came to again. While waiting to see if the bat would revive, I went in search of how it had gotten into the apartment in the first place.
I did not have to look far. I was positive I’d closed all the windows when I went down to the café for supper, and they were all closed still. Technically. However, in the living room, which overlooked the street parking in front of the café, one window was missing most of the glass out of the bottom sash.
Before investigating further, I picked up the protesting Earp and carried him writhing and pawing to the bedroom and locked him in before he cut himself walking over shards of glass. Then I cautiously picked my way over to the window.
There was broken glass everywhere. In the middle of the rug was a large rock with a note securely knotted to it with a piece of neon green surveyor’s string. I cut the string with a kitchen knife and carefully unfolded the note.
The note was handwritten in black permanent marker on a sheet torn from a yellow legal pad.
I read aloud to the empty room. “Get out of town before the flood comes.” My voice was clear and steady, but my hands were shaking.
Meanwhile, Earp was throwing himself against the inside of the bedroom door and howling. I glanced over at the bat under the laundry basket and saw that it was stirring back to life.
I put down the note and went over to the bat under the basket. I stared at it for several minutes before I decided that this was all too much for me. I needed reinforcements.
I went out of the apartment, locking the door behind me, and crept downstairs. The lights were off on the ground floor, so I knew that Juanita had gone home.
It creeped me out to know that sometime while I’d been merrily chowing down on chicken enchiladas in the dining room, somebody had thrown a rock through my window, and no one had even noticed. I let myself out the back door, closing it soundlessly behind me. It was delusional to believe that if I were quiet enough, whoever was out there—if they still were—would not be able to see me, but I nevertheless kept as quiet as I could.
The lights in Morticia’s Winnebago were off, and the little red Honda she drove was missing, so I decided she had gone off somewhere for the evening. It had never occurred to me to wonder about Morticia’s private life, but now I was curious to know where she’d gone. Did she have friends in Amatista? A boyfriend, perhaps?
There was one light on in the trailer that Katie and Chamomile shared, but I figured it was only Chamomile who was still awake since Katie got up before the crack of dawn to go work at the post office. Chamomile did not seem like a good candidate to cope with bats.
There was a light on in Ledbetter’s trailer. I decided he was my best bet. He was the biggest man I’d ever met in real life—and I mean muscular big, not like fat or anything—and he used to be in the marines, so I figured a little bitty bat trapped under a laundry basket wouldn’t faze him, or at least he’d be too macho to admit it, if it did.
Ledbetter opened the door after the first knock and peered out into the darkness with his intense blue eyes.
“It’s Emma,” I said. “Geraldine’s grandniece.”
Ledbetter opened the door wider, and light streamed out the trailer door. I noticed that he’d grown a beard since I’d last seen him, and it only served to make him more intimidating, although, sadly, the effect of all that facial hair would likely be lost on the bat.
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “But there’s a bat in Aunt Geraldine’s apartment, and I’m afraid getting it out may be a two-person job.”
“A bat?” Ledbetter echoed. “I hope you don’t want me to kill it.”
“No!” I said. “I don’t want you to kill it. I just don’t want it to be flying around the room and roosting on the chandelier.”
“Oh.” Ledbetter sounded relieved. “Sure, I can help you get it out of the apartment.”
When we got upstairs to Aunt Geraldine’s, I showed him the bat trapped under the laundry basket, but he seemed a lot more interested in the broken window.
“Someone threw a rock through it.” I pointed to the rock still sitting on the living room rug. “It happened while I was downstairs eating supper at the Bird Cage.”
Ledbetter picked his way through the broken glass and looked out the damaged window.
“They had to have been standing out in the middle of the street to throw it up here.” He looked back at the rock. “Something that size,” he continued, “would need a slingshot or a catapult unless the person who threw it was really jacked.”
“Jacked?”
“You know—” Ledbetter flexed his biceps and veins stood out all over the place.
I stared up into his bright blue eyes. He didn’t even blink.
“You didn’t do it, did you?” I asked.
Ledbetter laughed. He never laughs. He stopped laughing when I handed him the note which had been tied around the rock.
“You should report this to the police,” he said.
“What police? Does Amatista even have a police department?”
“Call the county sheriff’s office in the morning,” Ledbetter insisted. “Seriously, I mean it. Don’t blow this off.”
We got the bat out by sliding a flattened cardboard box underneath the laundry basket and carrying the whole thing, overturned basket and bat, gingerly down the stairs, and out the back door. After Ledbetter took the basket off, the bat fluttered away, hopefully to rejoin his bat family.
“Ledbetter,” I said, as soon as the bat had disappeared into the darkness. “Is there something about Aunt Geraldine that nobody’s telling me?”
Ledbetter and my aunt had been close in the years leading up to her death, although I’d never quite figured out why they’d hit it off. Maybe it was more a matter of proximity than anything. Neither of them ever seemed to leave Little Tombstone unless they absolutely had to.
Ledbetter nodded, then put his finger to his lips and said, “You’d better get something to cover up that window, or the bat will come back and bring fifteen of his closest friends with him.
“How about this?” I suggested, holding up the box we’d used to contain the bat in the laundry basket. “I know where Aunt Geraldine kept her duct tape.”
Ledbetter followed me upstairs and taped the box to the window frame while I swept up the broken glass. Earp had settled down considerably, but he was still agitating to get out, so after I’d picked the last of the glass out of the carpet, I released him from detention in the bedroom.
He ran straight to Ledbetter and sniffed around his ankles before stalking over to his water dish and drinking noisily.
“Coffee?” I asked Ledbetter.
“Don’t drink coffee. Makes me jittery.”
“Tea?”
He shook his head.
“Water?”
Ledbetter accepted a glass of water and sat down at the dining table. “I’ll tell you everything I know about your Aunt Geraldine,” he said. “I think you have a right to know.”
&
nbsp; I waited while he tossed back his water like it was a shot of whiskey.
“I suppose you must be wondering where your aunt got all that money.”
I had been wondering that. I was also wondering how Ledbetter knew my aunt had made a killing, when even Juanita, who’d been my aunt’s best friend for at least the last 40 years, seemed to be in the dark about Aunt Geraldine’s wealth.
“I don’t know where she got her original cash,” Ledbetter continued. “She never told me, and I never asked, but about eight years ago, she came to me with $150,000.”
“Came to you?”
“There’s something you don’t know about me, either. I’m not a struggling vet living off disability, although I can understand why people think so. Very few people know my real circumstances, and I’m happy to keep it that way.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.
“I’m a stock trader,” Ledbetter continued. “I make short term trades. I taught myself. I read a lot of books, did a lot of fake practice trades; I got good at it.”
“How good?”
“I’m a multimillionaire.”
I stared at him. He stared back, still not blinking. I wondered if the man slept with his eyes open.
“You’re probably wondering why I still live in that old trailer?” Ledbetter asked.
I was wondering that.
“It’s comfortable; nobody bothers me, and I can keep to myself,” Ledbetter said. “It never was about the money, anyway. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could succeed at something.”
“So you invested Aunt Geraldine’s money for her?”
“Yes.”
“There’s something else I’m baffled about,” I said. “Why did Aunt Geraldine leave everything to me?”
“She liked you,” Ledbetter said.
“I know she liked me, but if that was the only reason, it would have made a lot more sense just to leave me a portion of her estate. My question is: why did she decide to leave my aunt and cousins nothing at all?”