The Little Tombstone Cozies Box Set

by Celia Kinsey

  “You’d better come and have a look,” Juanita said.

  I followed Oliver and Juanita down the stairs and out the back door to the trailer court. There was a geyser erupting out of the ground next to Ledbetter’s trailer.

  “Any idea where the main shutoff is?” I asked Juanita.

  “We’ve been there already. Somebody hacked the handle off, so it can’t be turned.”

  “Surely, with a wrench—” I suggested.

  “Tried that,” said Oliver. “Someone sawed the handle off and then took a blow torch to it so that the valve is now frozen in the open position.”

  “Why would—” I was about to say, “why would anyone do that?” when I remembered the note which had been hurled through my window the day before. “This must be the promised flood,” I said.

  “What promised flood?” Juanita raised her eyebrows.

  “I showed you the note,” I said to Juanita.

  Oliver looked confused, but he quickly refocused on the crisis at hand.

  “There’s nothing more I can do,” Oliver said. “You’d better call someone.”

  “Who do I call?” I looked over helplessly at Juanita, but she already had her phone to her ear.

  Five minutes later, the mayor of Amatista showed up to assess the situation.

  Nancy Flynn had been the mayor of Amatista for the last decade at least, mostly because nobody else wanted the job. Nancy was mid-sixties, thin as a rake and tough as nails. She owned the ranch that backed up to the vacant land attached to Little Tombstone. In other words, she was now my closest neighbor.

  Nancy tore up in her enormous extended cab Chevy pickup and skidded to a stop right in the roadway. She jumped out and came running over.

  Nancy didn’t greet us, or offer advice, she just took over. She got on the phone with Tim, whoever Tim was, and told him to go to the pump house at the well and shut off the water system for the whole village.

  “Do you know a good excavator?” she asked, focusing on none of us in particular. I wondered if she’d not yet heard the news that I was the new proprietress of Little Tombstone.

  I waited for Juanita to answer, but when she didn’t, I said, “No.”

  “My brother-in-law has a backhoe,” Nancy said. “As soon as the system drains, you’ll need to dig down to the pipe and fix the leak.”

  That seemed like stating the obvious, but I wasn’t about to turn down the offer of a man with a backhoe, so I just said that sounded good to me.

  “How did this happen?” Nancy asked, a deep furrow forming on her weather-beaten forehead.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I have reason to believe someone did it on purpose.”

  “Why would anyone do a fool thing like that?” Nancy demanded.

  “I don’t have any idea who it was or what they were trying to accomplish,” I told her.

  That was pretty much a lie. I did know what they were trying to accomplish. The note thrown through my window had made the wishes of whoever had threatened the flood abundantly clear. Someone wanted me gone from Little Tombstone.

  Nancy didn’t let the subject go until she’d gotten the complete story of my inheriting Little Tombstone—which she appeared to know already—and the threatening note tied to the rock thrown through my window—which she appeared to be hearing about for the first time.

  She listened to my story, but she didn’t offer up any theories about who might do such a thing, she just told us to go inside and fill containers with water before the system drained and then hurried off to go door-to-door in the village telling everyone else to do the same. The entire village of Amatista—at least those without their own private wells—were going to be out of water until we got our problem fixed.

  After I’d filled every container I could find, I went back out back to see how the gusher on the trailer court was doing. There was still water coming out, but it had stopped erupting like Old Faithful.

  While I was standing there, helplessly staring at the muddy mess, Ledbetter, wearing head-to-toe black leather, pulled up on his motorcycle. The bad-boy effect was somewhat diluted by the kale, leeks, and a new toilet bowl brush peeking out of the grocery sack tucked into his saddlebag.

  “What happened?” Ledbetter asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it looks like whoever wrote that menacing note made good on their threat. I’m sorry, but I think we’re going to have to have your trailer moved to a different spot while they replace the section of damaged pipe.”

  “How did someone manage to break a buried pipe without anyone noticing?” Ledbetter wondered aloud.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know, but I suspected that once the damaged section was dug up, it might become more apparent how the culprit had managed to create such a mess.

  “You didn’t notice anything earlier, did you?” I asked Ledbetter. “Have you been gone all day?”

  “I left around ten. Morticia’s been gone since Thursday. She went to Phoenix to see her sister.”

  “And Katie left for work early this morning?”

  “I assume so. She leaves around five AM every day but Sunday and Monday.”

  “Chamomile might have seen something,” I pointed out hopefully. “She must take an extended break between lunch and supper, and she might have gone back to her trailer.”

  I went inside the Bird Cage Café, but even though it was time for supper, the place was deserted. I found Juanita out front, fashioning a large CLOSED sign from a couple of fruit boxes and a pair of old sawhorses.

  “Where’s Chamomile?” I asked Juanita.

  “I let her leave since supper isn’t going to happen. She said she was running up to Santa Fe to do a little shopping.”

  “And Marco?”

  “He called in sick today, or rather Pastor Freddy called in for him. I was irritated, but I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Nancy’s brother-in-law with his backhoe. He pulled his truck around the side of the café and got out to survey the situation.

  “What do you think?” I asked as I came up behind him. He was standing next to Ledbetter, who’d been joined by Oliver. They stood staring at the muddy pond which surrounded Ledbetter’s trailer.

  “Name’s Jimmy,” Nancy’s brother-in-law said, extending his hand to me. “You must be Emma.”

  I said I was indeed Emma and asked him if he thought Ledbetter’s trailer ought to be moved.

  “There’s a couple of empty slots down at the end,” I pointed out.

  Jimmy offloaded his backhoe and then set to work unhooking his utility trailer so that he could attach his truck to Ledbetter’s ancient travel trailer.

  While Jimmy was moving Ledbetter’s trailer, Nancy came back and waved Jimmy over to her pickup. Jimmy got into the passenger seat, and they sat inside for a while. It looked like they were arguing about something. At last, Jimmy opened the passenger side door of Nancy’s pickup.

  “I don’t know why you’re asking me to do this,” I heard him say as he climbed down. “It makes no sense to wait. We need to get the water back on as soon as possible. I’ll start working now, and I won’t quit until I’m too tired to go on.”

  I couldn’t hear what Nancy said back. After that, Nancy drove off, and Jimmy went back to work.

  As I stood watching Jimmy attempt to maneuver his pickup truck through the mud without getting stuck, I remembered that Earp hadn’t had his supper, so I went back inside.

  I stayed out of Jimmy’s way after that, although I’d peek out of a window overlooking the trailer court from time to time to assess his progress. He worked well into the night. By the time Ledbetter’s trailer was successfully transferred to an empty slot at the other end of the trailer court, it had been dark for a while. Another pickup arrived with a friend of Jimmy’s—I assumed—who brought a pair of bright utility lights like those used by road construction crews. Jimmy set these up to shine on the area he was digging and set to work unearthing the damaged sect
ion of pipe.

  When I woke up in the morning, there was a large muddy hole where the pond had been. The backhoe was sitting idle and not a soul to be seen. I gave Earp his breakfast and made myself a cup of coffee using water from an old milk jug I’d filled the afternoon before.

  I put a leash on Earp—which he vigorously objected to, but I did not relent—I didn’t want him falling into the hole. I held Earp’s leash in one hand and my coffee in the other and went downstairs to look at the hole in the ground while Earp answered the call of nature.

  After watering an errant tumbleweed, Earp strained at the leash and was so difficult to control that I almost spilled my coffee. I went as close to the hole as I dared without giving Earp an opportunity to dash into it. A length of pipe about six feet long lay on the ground beside the hole. I set my coffee down on an overturned bucket and picked up the piece of pipe, further exciting Earp. He seemed to think it was all some kind of delightful game of tug-of-war.

  The piece I held in my hands was obviously the damaged section cut from the pipe removed from the ground, and it didn’t take long to discover the source of the leak. Several round holes about an inch in diameter were punched in the pipe at random. Toward the middle of the damaged section, multiple holes had been punched so close together that the pipe had been nearly severed.

  I was distracted by my discovery of the holes in the pipe, and Earp took advantage of my inattention to jerk sharply at his leash and slip from my grasp. Two seconds later he was sliding down the sloped sides of the hole. He reached the bottom and sniffed around, barking excitedly. Then he began to dig at the edge of a muddy puddle with a singleness of purpose, which would put a reporter investigating a shady congressional candidate to shame.

  I didn’t bother with trying to pull Earp out. He hadn’t injured himself during his descent into the hole, and it wasn’t likely to cave in on him, so I decided to let him have his fun. I retrieved my coffee and sat down on the edge of the hole to watch.

  “What’s he digging for?” a voice said behind me. I turned my head. It was Oliver. He’d spent the night on the floor in the dining room of the Bird Cage. The trailer court, which would normally have been a perfectly adequate place to pitch a tent, was now a mudflat.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said. Oliver sat down beside me, and we both silently watched Earp until he managed to unearth his treasure.

  “I hope that’s not what I think it is,” said Oliver, as Earp finally managed to pull the object he’d been trying to extricate from the earth free.

  Earp stood protectively over his precious find.

  The pug had just dug up a human skull.

  Chapter Ten

  I stared at the skull. Oliver stared at the skull. Then we turned and stared at each other. Oliver got up and climbed into the hole with a shovel that had been left leaning against the backhoe. Earp stayed beside the skull, standing guard. I hoped he wouldn’t decide to start using the skull as a chew toy.

  I slid down into the hole after Oliver and took the shovel. I gingerly poked around the area where Earp had unearthed the skull. I’d been working at carefully removing the mud around what looked suspiciously like it might turn out to be a rib cage when the arrival of Jimmy halted my progress.

  “What is that?” he said, pointing at the skull. He couldn’t get close enough to it to get a better look because Earp inserted himself between the skull and Jimmy and growled.

  “It’s a skull,” I said. “And it looks very much like the body that went with it is still down here.”

  “You’d better stop digging,” said Jimmy. “If there really is a body down there, we’d better alert the authorities.”

  That seemed like sensible advice, so I took it. The dispatcher at the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office promised that someone would call me right back. Within fifteen minutes, I was on the phone with the Sheriff himself, who informed me that he’d come out personally.

  By lunchtime, the trailer court was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape and swarming with people.

  I expected Nancy Flynn to show up in her capacity as mayor, but she didn’t. I had Juanita try calling her, but it went to voicemail.

  Before the police arrived, Jimmy had done a rush job of getting a new section of pipe put in, so Amatista had water again, although the pipe was still exposed, and the hole in the middle of the trailer court was bigger than ever.

  By the time evening came, the digging had stopped. Two almost-complete skeletons lay on a big blue tarp behind Morticia’s motor home.

  “There seem to be a few pieces missing,” Officer Reyes, the man in charge, told me.

  “I might be able to help you with that,” I said. “It seems our dog here has been digging up bones from time to time. We all thought he was getting them from the cemetery up on the hill, but maybe that’s not it at all.”

  I went in search of the banana box of miscellaneous bones. I located it in room two of the motel just as Morticia had informed me I would.

  “How old do you think these skeletons are?” I asked Officer Reyes after I’d presented him with the box of bleached extras.

  “I have no idea, other than it has to have been at least a few years for there to be nothing left but bones.”

  “Will there be an investigation?” I asked.

  “I’m sure there will be,” he said. “Although it may turn out that it’s just a very old gravesite that whoever built this place was unaware of.” He lowered his voice. “I’d suggest you quiz all the old-timers around here and see what you can find out for yourself. Given how long these bodies have probably been in the ground, I doubt an investigation into their identities is going to be a priority.”

  The authorities took away all the bones. They even took away the banana box. Somebody took down the yellow tape. Jimmy filled in the hole, loaded up his backhoe, and left.

  Ledbetter’s trailer stayed in the slot where it had been moved to give the fill dirt in the hole a chance to settle.

  That evening after the supper rush was over, Juanita, Chamomile, Oliver, and I stood in the kitchen of the Bird Cage Café and tried to make sense of it all.

  “It’s almost as if someone wanted those graves to be discovered,” Juanita said.

  I was doubtful.

  True, the timing of the tampering with the water system was suspect, but how would whoever wanted me out of Little Tombstone know there were bodies buried underneath the trailer court unless that person had been involved with putting them there? And if they did know there were bodies, how would their discovery serve to drive me out?

  “Who’s lived the longest in Amatista?” I asked Juanita.

  “My mother,” Juanita said. “She was here from 1960 until just a few years ago when she went into the nursing home. Hank came in the late 60s, so he’s been here a while, too.”

  “What about Ledbetter and Morticia?” I asked.

  “I think Ledbetter’s been here for eight years, and Morticia came the year after Ledbetter.”

  I decided that I’d leave looking into Ledbetter and Morticia until later.

  Juanita’s mother, Florenza Hernandez, was in a memory care center in Santa Fe. Grandma Flo’s mind wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t that she’d lost her memory completely, according to Juanita, it was just that her attachment to reality came and went at regular intervals.

  I’d go and visit Grandma Flo the next chance I got, I decided, but first, I’d have a nice long chat with Hank.

  It was late. I was tired. I wasn’t up to a nice long chat with Hank without a good night’s sleep, so I decided to leave interrogating Hank about the possibility of sinister goings-on in Little Tombstone’s past until tomorrow.

  Hank had other ideas.

  Chapter Eleven

  Shortly after one in the morning, I was jolted awake by the ringing of my phone. My first thought was that whoever had sabotaged the water system was calling to issue another ultimatum, but it was just Hank.

  “I seen ’em!�
� he said.

  “The lights?”

  I switched on the lamp and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing my eyes. Earp grumbled in his sleep. All I wanted to do was switch the light back off and pull the covers over my eyes, but instead, I pulled on my aunt’s woolly bathrobe over my flannel pajamas and put on my sturdiest shoes.

  Then I crept down the stairs to the café dining room. I stood there with the light off and tried to decide whether or not to wake up Oliver.

  “Emma?” I heard Oliver say from the darkness.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was trying to decide how to break it to my Australian hitchhiker that I wanted him to accompany me on a nocturnal hunt for alien life without sounding completely deranged when Oliver switched on the light.

  I stared at him. I couldn’t stop. He’d shaved off his beard and cut his hair. He looked like a different person.

  “Emma?” he said.

  I tried to think of something intelligent to say. All I could think of was that he was much better looking under all that facial hair than I’d imagined.

  “Emma?” he said again.

  “Has Hank happened to mention that he believes we are experiencing an alien invasion?” I said.

  “Hank?”

  “From the Curio Shop.”

  “Old man who smokes the cigars and is perpetually blotto? Looks like a mad scientist?”

  “He’s the one. Has he talked to you about aliens?

  “No. We did have one conversation while I was trying to get his kitchen faucet to stop leaking, but that was about whether NASA is in league with the Illuminati. Hank thinks so. I don’t.”

  “Well, Hank is firmly convinced we’ve got extraterrestrial visitors. He just called me insisting that there are strange lights in the field behind the trailer court, and he wants me to have a look.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Oliver said without being asked. “I’ll get my torch.”

  We went out the back door as soundlessly as we could. There was a full moon overhead. Oliver left his flashlight off. We walked out to the road that bordered Little Tombstone and led up to Nancy Flynn’s ranch and the Amatista cemetery.