by Celia Kinsey
“I might be able to shed some light on that,” said Ledbetter. “I don’t know if it was true or not, but your Aunt Geraldine believed that Abigail and her daughters were trying to get her declared incompetent and get power of attorney. Geraldine was convinced they suspected she was hiding money from them—which she was, of course—but I don’t think they ever had a clue of how much. According to Geraldine, about the time she got sick, Abigail and the twins started getting the idea that Geraldine wasn’t nearly as broke as she made herself out to be, and everything went downhill from there. They never succeeded in getting power of attorney.”
“Was Aunt Geraldine showing any signs of dementia?” I asked. “Might she really not have understood what she was doing when she changed her will?”
“Absolutely not.” Ledbetter shook his head so vigorously it diverted Earp’s attention from the spot he’d been licking on the linoleum, and he trotted over and reared up with his paws on Ledbetter’s massive calf. “Geraldine was sharp as a tack right up to the end,” Ledbetter insisted.
“Then how were they proposing to get power of attorney?” I asked. “Doesn’t a person need a doctor to sign off on that or something?”
“You do,” said Ledbetter. “I suspect they’d found some unscrupulous physician who was willing to do it for a cut of the cash, but Geraldine went and foiled their plans by dying on them before they had a chance to carry out their scheme.”
“No wonder Aunt Geraldine was so steamed,” I said. “That explains a lot.”
It explained a lot, but it didn’t explain the rock through my window or where Aunt Geraldine had come up with the seed money to invest with Ledbetter. It certainly didn’t explain those mysterious lights in the field behind the trailer court.
Ledbetter was standing up to leave. Earp whined and pawed at his shoes.
“One more thing,” I said, “do you know anything about those lights that Hank keeps seeing? Do you think he’s for real?”
“He may think he’s for real,” said Ledbetter. “I’m not saying Hank’s hallucinating, but bear in mind that Hank Edwards also believes he has the finest collection of genuine stuffed chupacabras in the northern hemisphere.”
I decided Ledbetter had a point. After he left, I double-locked the door and went to bed. I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept imaging that whoever had thrown a rock through my window was standing down there on the street, watching my windows for signs of activity within.
After lying awake for over an hour, I remembered that my Aunt Geraldine had mentioned once that she occasionally slept with my late Uncle Ricky’s antique pearl-handled revolver underneath her pillow.
“In case someone tries to rob me,” she’d said, although at the time I couldn’t imagine what Aunt Geraldine possessed that any self-respecting burglar would think worth carrying off. Even her TV predated the turn of the millennium. In hindsight, I wondered if Aunt Geraldine hadn’t fallen into the habit of keeping large amounts of cash on the premises and lived in constant fear that someone would find out about it.
I rooted around in my aunt’s nightstand and found the revolver hidden in the back of the bottom shelf.
I was afraid to touch the thing, so I removed it gently from the velvet-lined leather case and held it gingerly between my thumb and forefinger. I don’t know how I managed to do it, but somehow my finger depressed the trigger. Fortunately, it wasn’t loaded, but I was so shaken up by nearly shooting myself in the foot that I shoved the thing back in its case.
Whoever it was who threw the rock through the window probably had no intention of inflicting bodily harm on me, they just wanted me out of Little Tombstone.
I carefully put the gun case back where I’d found it behind the stack of paperback thrillers in the bottom of the nightstand and finally fell into a fitful slumber.
Chapter Eight
The next morning, when I went down to the café and told Juanita and Chamomile what had happened, they both agreed with Ledbetter’s advice that I should go to the police.
“With that broken-out window, I really do have to find a handyman,” I said. “Do either of you know of anybody who might be interested?”
Juanita didn’t, and neither did Chamomile. When I stuck my head into the dish room and asked Marco, he just moved his head a fraction of an inch to the left and then a fraction of an inch to the right, all the while deflecting my attempts to make eye contact. I took that as a no.
I borrowed a black marker from underneath the register and went around to the recycling pile behind the motel for a piece of clean cardboard.
“Wanted,” I wrote. “Man with carpentry, plumbing, and electrical experience.” Then I wrote down my phone number. I stared at the sign for a minute, then put the letters HU in front of MAN, so it read “Wanted: Human.” I wasn’t very optimistic that I’d get any takers amongst the humans eating breakfast at the Bird Cage Café, but I was hopeful that maybe somebody would know somebody who knew an unemployed handyperson type.
As I was taping up my cardboard sign over the register, the door jingled, and a young man with wild curly red hair, a bushy red beard, and large, threadbare backpack came into the café.
“You can seat yourself,” I told him.
Chamomile was busy taking orders. The young man took off his backpack.
“Mind if I leave this here?” he asked me. I took the pack and put it behind the counter.
“You from Australia?” I asked. It was obvious from his accent, but I asked anyway.
“Yeah. I’m hitching cross-country. What’s the chance I could work off my meal? You know, wash dishes or something?”
I looked him up and down. He was awfully skinny. I wondered how much of the time he spent walking along the side of the road waiting for some brave soul who hadn’t watched too many movies about hitchhikers who turn out to be serial killers to pick him up. I decided to live dangerously and assume that this particular hitchhiker was not a serial killer. Or maybe it was the other way around, and it was drivers who picked up hitchhikers who turned out to be serial killers. For someone who worked in the movie industry, I was woefully ignorant of the hitchhiker/serial killer protocol.
“Do you happen to know anything about carpentry?” I asked the hitchhiker.
His name was Oliver, he told me. He was twenty-four. He had three brothers and one sister back home, all of whom worked for the family construction business. He’d be happy to do any little jobs we needed to have done in return for meals and a place to pitch his tent for a few nights.
“Perfect!” I told him. “I have a list, but first, you should get a good hot meal inside you.”
As soon as I said it, I realized that it sounded just like something my grandmother would have said. Disconcerting, but compared to some of the other things my grandmother had said in her time, it could have been worse.
After Oliver had gotten outside of a plate of Juanita’s famous beef fajitas, I took him upstairs to look at my broken window.
“How did this happen?” Oliver asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
Actually, it was a short story, but I didn’t want to tell it. My eyes involuntarily strayed toward the rock, sitting on top of the folded note next to the little ball of bright green surveyor’s string on the coffee table.
“Did someone throw a rock through your window?”
I nodded. Oliver looked like he had lots more questions, but he didn’t ask any of them. Instead, he inquired if I had a tape measure. I dug one out from the toolbox I’d discovered under the kitchen sink.
“You’ll need to order a pane of glass, and I’ll need some glazer’s putty, but as soon as you have those things on hand, I can fix it easily,” Oliver said as he handed me the measurements for the replacement pane.
“I can take you in to the Home Depot in Santa Fe this afternoon,” I said. “And I’ll look up glass places.”
By the time we left for Santa Fe after lunch, Oliver had a lengthy list of materials to buy. I hoped he knew what
he was doing, but I doubted he could make things worse even if it turned out he was bluffing about his carpentry skills.
I dropped Oliver off at Home Depot with his list and a wad of bills and loose change I’d scrounged from Aunt Geraldine’s nightstand.
Oliver’s backpack was still behind the counter at the Bird Cage Cafe, so I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t come back and find out that he’d skipped on me.
While Oliver was shopping, I went to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office and filed a report. The officer who filled out the paperwork for me said they’d try to send someone out in the next day or two “as staffing and time allowed,” but I wasn’t optimistic. There wouldn’t be much to see when the officer got there, anyway.
When I returned, Oliver was waiting at the curb for me, a bulging bag in each hand and a couple of two-by-fours lying at his feet.
“Where are we going to put those?” I asked, pointing to the eight-foot lengths of lumber.
“We’ll have to stick them out the window,” he said.
I don’t know how I managed to get out of Santa Fe without being pulled over for carrying an unsecured load, but somehow we made it back to Amatista without mishap. Oliver unloaded the car and immediately went to work repairing the broken-down step at the front of the café.
I went upstairs to let Earp out to do his business and almost tripped over my cousin Freida, who was sitting on the landing waiting for me.
“You changed the locks,” she said.
I hadn’t, but I figured that my Aunt Geraldine might have changed them during the whole power of attorney drama, so I didn’t bother to dispute Freida’s point.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I changed my mind.”
“About what?”
“I want the tea set and a few other things.”
I let Freida in and set to work wrapping up the tea set in newspaper while she went in search of a box of love letters my aunt and uncle had sent to each other during their courtship. It struck me as odd that Freida would want something so sentimental, but I’d offered for her to take anything of Aunt Geraldine’s that she wanted, so I was in no position to question her choice.
Freida was in and out in half an hour. She went away with the tea set, the box of letters, and a cuckoo clock that my aunt had kept in the hall.
Before she went, she asked to see my Uncle Ricky’s antique pearl-handled revolver.
“You’re welcome to it,” I told Freida, “You’ll find it in the nightstand.”
Freida retrieved the case from Aunt Geraldine’s bedroom. She unfurled a paper towel and gingerly removed the gun from its case.
“This thing is filthy,” Freida said, wrinkling her nose like a fastidious five-year-old smelling a run-over skunk through the open window of a car.
It didn’t look any filthier than anything else in the apartment, which, admittedly, did seem to be coated with a layer of dust and grime. Perhaps Great Aunt Geraldine’s eyesight had deteriorated considerably during her last years, or perhaps she’d simply stopped caring about trivial tasks like dusting.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I protested, “it’s not that bad.”
“No, seriously, take a closer look,” Freida said, suddenly chummy.
She thrust the gun toward me, and I had no choice but to take it.
I pretended to look at it and handed it back to Freida, but instead of taking it out of my hand, she held out the case.
I placed the revolver inside the antique velvet-lined case, and Freida snapped it shut.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “After seeing it, I don’t think I really want it after all.”
When Freida left, I let Earp out of the bathroom where I’d barricaded him. He’d made a terrible ruckus the whole time my cousin had been there, which had hampered conversation, not that I cared to chat with Freida anyway. Earp popped out of the bathroom door like the cork out of a champagne bottle and ran around the apartment, sniffing everywhere Freida had been until he’d reassured himself that she was really gone.
Downstairs, I could hear hammering. My Australian hitchhiker was certainly earning his keep. I decided to go next door and see if there were any urgently needed repairs at the Curio Shop or the Museum of the Unexplained before my itinerant handyman moved on.
It had been years since I’d been inside the Museum of the Unexplained, but the only thing that appeared to have changed was that everything was coated in a slightly thicker layer of dust.
The featured display in the jumbled gallery was a family of chupacabras under glass. Both my grandmother and Aunt Geraldine had been adamant that the chupacabras were hoaxes, the work of a talented and highly creative taxidermist. Hank, on the other hand, was completely convicted of their authenticity.
“Hank?” I called out.
I wondered how often Hank had visitors to the Museum of the Unexplained. It was a good thing—at least for Hank—that his rent was purely symbolic. When I caught Hank in a good mood, I intended to try and pry out of him how he’d come to such a generous arrangement with my aunt.
I’d momentarily toyed with the possibility that Hank and my Great Aunt Geraldine had been carrying on an affair behind everyone’s back, but then I’d gotten a close-up view of Hank and eliminated that as a possibility. There was no way that Hank Edwards was sufficiently hot stuff to inspire his landlady to give him—for all practical purposes—free rent for life. My Great Aunt Geraldine might have been an eccentric, but she’d not been blind, deaf, and deprived of her sense of smell.
Hank shuffled out from his living quarters in the back of the Curio Shop. The Curio Shop was connected to the Museum of the Unexplained by a large arched opening. Hank held onto the archway to steady himself.
“What do you want?” Hank asked. His clothing was rumpled, and his long unwashed gray hair was matted down on one side like he’d been asleep for the last nine hours. He smelled of whiskey, stale cigar smoke, and bacon grease.
I suspected that Hank was just getting out of bed. Maybe that was why Hank kept seeing unexplained lights. He was staying up all night, drinking hard liquor, and working himself into a paranoid frenzy.
Our alien invasion might be easily eradicated by the administration of a good sleeping pill, not that Hank was likely to visit a sleep clinic. Hank was deeply suspicious of the “Medical Industrial Complex” and “Big Pharma.” According to him, everyone in the medical professions was conspiring to perniciously poison the entire US population for profit.
“I have someone here doing some repairs,” I told Hank. “I was just checking to see if there was anything you were desperate to have fixed right away.”
Hank stared around the museum. I was guessing there were dozens of things that needed repairing, but it was nearly impossible to tell because of the collection of valuable and not-so-valuable artifacts that covered every surface.
“You done anything about them aliens yet?” Hank demanded.
“I’m looking into it,” I told him.
“No, you’re not.”
“I am, I really am,” I insisted. “I’ve been asking around.”
“Asking who?”
“People who live around here.”
“They’re lying,” Hank said. “They’re all lying. They call me crazy, but they’re the ones who—”
“Juanita told me she’s seen the lights. Do you think she’s lying?”
“Juanita said that?” Hank looked genuinely shocked.
“She says she’s seen strange lights on three separate occasions,” I told Hank. “I really am serious about getting to the bottom of this. Did you see the lights again last night?”
“I was out last night.”
“Out?”
Hank remained silent. He obviously didn’t want to tell me where he’d been. I decided not to press the point.
“Something interesting happened yesterday evening,” I said, watching his expression closely. “Someone threw a rock through my window with a threatening note attach
ed.”
“I knew that already,” he said, his expression betraying nothing.
“How?”
“Katie told me when she came by with my mail.”
“Oh,” I said. I wondered how Hank had talked Katie into personally delivering his mail when everyone else had to go down to the post office to pick up theirs. After that, I moved on to wondering how Katie knew about that rock through my window.
I decided that Chamomile must have told her. Probably everyone in Amatista knew by now. I let the subject drop. “So, you don’t want me to send the repair guy over here?” I asked Hank.
He grunted, which I took to be a “yes.” I started to leave, but halfway out the door, I turned back.
“Do you think the lights will appear tonight?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Do you have a pen and paper?”
After I’d written down my number, I thrust it into Hank’s hand. “The next time you see those lights, I want you to call me. It doesn’t matter what time it is.”
After I was done talking to Hank, I went and knocked on the door of Ledbetter’s trailer. Nobody answered. Morticia’s car was gone again, or maybe she’d never returned. I knew that Chamomile was inside the café, and Katie was still on her mail route. The place was deserted.
I was suddenly unbearably tired. What little sleep I’d gotten the night before had been fitful. I decided to go upstairs for a nap.
I drifted off to sleep on the couch, Earp snuggled up next to me.
Both Earp and I were jolted awake by a relentless banging on the door.
Chapter Nine
The banging continued. Earp bolted off the couch, raced to the door, and hurled himself at it, barking frantically until I sat up, momentarily confused about where I was.
“Coming,” I shouted in the direction of the banging.
Oliver stood outside the door, completely drenched in muddy water. Juanita stood beside him, also covered in mud, but only from the knees down.
“What happened?” I asked.