by Celia Kinsey
We’d only walked down the road a few yards when we came to a point where the back fence of the trailer court was no longer blocking our view.
There really were lights. Hank was not hallucinating.
Just as Hank had described them, they were bright and blueish, in four sets of three, spaced unevenly and appearing to be suspended above the ground.
Oliver and I stood still, looking at the lights.
“I guess Hank isn’t crazy,” I whispered.
“Oh, Hank’s completely crackers,” said Oliver, “but it seems he’s not hallucinating.”
“What do you think?” I said. “I want to get closer.”
The lights were at least three football-field lengths away.
“I don’t believe in aliens,” Oliver said.
“Me neither,” I answered, although, if I’m going to be honest, I’d never come closer to believing in alien life forms than I did at that moment.
“If they aren’t aliens, then they must be human,” Oliver said, “and people would be expecting other people to approach from the road. How about we take the long way around?”
The land behind the trailer court was littered with boulders, sagebrush, cactus, and tumbleweeds. It wasn’t nearly as flat as it looked in the daylight. We proceeded in silence for a while, periodically stumbling down into dips and going behind large boulders that obscured our view of the lights. I thought I made out movement on the ground as if there were people or animals under the lights, but it was still too far away to be sure. Occasionally, the wind would carry faint noises from the direction of the lights. As we got closer, I heard voices shouting indistinctly to one another, and at least one engine running, although it seemed to be turned off from time to time.
“I think they’re digging with a backhoe or something,” I told Oliver. He didn’t offer a dissenting opinion, but that may just have been because he was too busy trying to avoid running into any prickly pear.
We’d shrunk the distance between us and the lights in half when we came to a small arroyo. Oliver slid down first, but I hesitated on the edge.
“I can’t see where I’m going to land,” I hissed down to him. “Turn on your flashlight.”
“They might see the light,” Oliver hissed back. “Just come down where I did, and you won’t hit anything.”
He was wrong.
Chapter Twelve
Oliver insisted that if I followed his path, I would come safely to rest at the bottom of the small arroyo that stood between us and the mysterious lights.
I had a little battle with myself and then launched myself down the slope. I’d started my slide in the same spot as Oliver, but I must have veered a little to the right because I came to rest against a barrel cactus.
I screamed bloody murder. I don’t know what it feels like to be murdered, but at that moment, I felt like I was being stabbed to death with a thousand tiny knives.
I screamed some more, and Oliver turned on the flashlight.
“It’s bad,” he said as he illuminated my lower legs. I looked down. At least two dozen barrel cactus spines were sticking out of my knees and on either side of my lower legs. The right leg was worse than the left, which only had a couple of spines lodged in it.
“Do you think you can walk?” Oliver asked me. I took a couple of cringing steps. “I think if I can get out of this arroyo, I can make it back to Little Tombstone.”
“I think you need to go to the emergency room,” Oliver said.
“For cactus spines?” I protested. Oliver didn’t bother arguing with me. He went ahead of me up the sloping dirt wall of the arroyo and pretty much pulled me up after him. Before we started the long, painful slog through the sagebrush, I looked back in the direction of the lights.
“The lights are gone,” I said. “Do you think whoever it was got scared off when I screamed?”
“You scared off anything with ears in a 30K radius with all that screaming,” Oliver said.
It took us forever to make it back to Little Tombstone, and when we got there, I didn’t attempt to climb the stairs. I dropped onto the floor right there in the dining room and sent Oliver in search of the first aid kit Juanita kept in the kitchen.
He came back with the kit and found a pair of tweezers. I took them out of his hand and set to work, trying to get the cactus spines out. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, but I kept going until I’d removed all of the spines except for two that had broken off.
“You’re tough,” Oliver said.
“Am I?” I didn’t feel very tough. “I’ll go to the walk-in clinic in Santa Fe tomorrow and have them dig these last two out of my leg. It’s hopeless trying to dig them out with these tweezers.”
“Want me to drive you?” he asked.
“I’d really appreciate that, and after that, maybe we can go out and look at the spot where we saw the lights.”
I didn’t sleep much that night. Somehow, with a lot of help from Oliver, I managed to make it up the stairs to bed. Earp barely acknowledged my arrival home, and Oliver’s presence didn’t even seem to register. I took some aspirin in hopes of cutting the pain, but it wasn’t enough. Finally, after lying there for an hour, I got up and went into the bathroom. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was startled to see multiple scratches on my cheeks. I looked like I’d tangled with a bobcat.
After staring in horrified fascination at my war wounds in the mirror, I hobbled to the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea.
Earlier, I’d found a box of old scrapbooks and photo albums in the back of one of the closets, but I hadn’t had time to look at any of them. I couldn’t sleep anyway, so now seemed an ideal time to go through them.
I started with a small notebook off the top of the stack. It didn’t prove very interesting, just the record from some yard sale back in June of 1992. A bunch of items were listed: Cuckoo clock –20, Antique sewing machine –50, copper boiler –36. Many items were identified simply by initials with numbers after them. This went on for pages.
I moved on to a scrapbook. It was full of newspaper clippings. They’d been added over a long period of time, perhaps a span of a decade or so from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and the only unifying theme seemed to be local history.
There was one article about the derelict amethyst mine, which closed in the 1960s and which was responsible for the town of Amatista’s name. There was another about Amatista being home to New Mexico’s first lady physician in the 1880s (apparently, the lady doctor wore a gent’s suit so convincingly that the local populace had only discovered they’d not been treated by a man after she herself fell deathly ill). Towards the back of the scrapbook was a series of articles about a stagecoach robbery.
According to the articles, back in 1910, a stagecoach carrying mail to Santa Fe had been robbed by two outlaws who murdered the stagecoach driver and made off, not with the mail, but with a consignment of gold coins the stagecoach had been transporting. The outlaws had been caught within days, not far from the village of Amatista, but before they were captured, they’d succeeded in stashing the gold somewhere. One of the robbers had died in prison, and the other had been eighty and in poor health by the time he’d been released. Whether the surviving outlaw had succeeded in eventually retrieving his ill-gotten gains was uncertain.
According to one article, it had been a major local hobby for a while to go out with a metal detector and a shovel and try to find that fortune in old gold coins. There was even an article featuring a picture of my Great Uncle Ricky wandering around in the sagebrush with his metal detector in front of him. The headline read, “Local Man Looks for Treasure.”
Tucked into the page containing that clipping was a crude map.
The map consisted of several sheets of graph paper taped together with yellowed and brittle tape. I gingerly unfolded the papers and tried to make sense of the diagram. The buildings of Little Tombstone, the road to Nancy Flynn’s ranch, and the cemetery were all labeled. Even the arroyo I’d fallen into earlier i
n the night was shown by a pair of faded squiggly parallel lines.
A number of the squares on the graph paper map had been colored in, some in red and some in yellow. Clusters of colored-in squares were labeled with what I took to be a date. In the middle of one of the clusters of yellow squares was a messy star drawn in black ink and the numbers 1/23/92, which I took to mean January 23, 1992.
I stared down at the messy map on the table. I looked again at the article showing my late Uncle Ricky and his metal detector. I was convinced that I was looking at my Uncle Ricky’s treasure map, but what did the star mean? Did it mean that he’d found what he was looking for? Had my Uncle Ricky really found a fortune in gold?
I’d been seven in 1992. I tried to remember if my Uncle Ricky had still been alive when I was seven. I didn’t think so.
I didn’t waste time trying to sift through Aunt Geraldine’s things for some record of his death. Instead, I fired up my laptop and searched for Uncle Ricky’s date of death. It took me about ten minutes and several false leads to find it, but when I succeeded, I was in for a bit of a shock. Richard Norton Montgomery, born November 13, 1928, died July 7, 1991.
If that star meant someone really had found that stash of stolen gold, it hadn’t been my Uncle Ricky, and if it hadn’t been my Uncle Ricky than it must have been my Aunt Geraldine. It was finally clear to me how she had managed to amass a fortune and keep it hidden from everyone.
More than likely, she’d even hidden it from the taxman.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, I had a terrible time getting out of bed. Everywhere I’d been skewered with a cactus spine was red and swollen. The locations of the two spines that remained in my leg throbbed with pain. Earp was agitating to go out, so I dragged myself downstairs and let Earp outside to do his business in his usual spot by the dumpster out back of the café.
I’m generally the responsible sort who would never think of leaving poop unscooped, but that morning it was beyond my capabilities. I lured Earp back to me with a dog treat and went inside in search of Oliver.
Before I found Oliver, Juanita found me.
“What in the world happened to you?” Juanita said, horrified.
I hadn’t looked in the mirror yet that morning, but based on what I’d looked like the night before, I wasn’t surprised that Juanita was shocked.
“I may have tangled with a barrel cactus in the wee hours of the morning. Is Oliver around?”
“What were you doing anywhere a barrel cactus could get at you in the wee hours of the morning?” Juanita demanded.
“Hank saw lights again,” I told her.
“And you went chasing off after them on your own?”
“I wasn’t on my own. Oliver went with me.”
This did not seem to reassure Juanita in the least. “About Oliver—” she said, but she broke off when the front door jingled, and the man in question walked into the dining room.
“You ready to go to the clinic?” he asked me.
Earp, who had been sniffing around under the tables in hopes of finding something edible, left off his search for abandoned morsels and came over to Oliver and leaned against his leg until Oliver bent down scratched him behind the ears.
“You mind taking Earp upstairs?” I asked Oliver. “I don’t think I have the strength. His food is under the kitchen sink, and my purse is on the dining table. If you don’t mind, I’d also like to have the jacket that’s hanging on the hook by the front door.”
I didn’t remember until it was too late that I’d left the graph paper map I’d discovered the night before laying spread out on the table next to my purse.
It was a very quiet, awkward drive to the clinic. I kept glancing over at Oliver, sitting at the wheel of my rental car, and thinking how green his eyes were and how perfect his nose was. After that, I alternated between watching the play of the tendons in his forearms as he turned the steering wheel and wondering if he’d taken a close look at the map I’d left sitting on the table.
When we got to the clinic, they got me in right away. Oliver came right into the room with me, although I hadn’t asked him to. Fortunately, nobody tried to get me to change into one of those humiliating exam gowns that flap open in the back. I hadn’t bothered changing out of my baggy flannel pajamas, so I was able to roll the bottoms up over my knees and expose the flesh in question.
“How did this happen?” the nurse asked. She pursed her lips and held her pen poised over the form on her clipboard.
“I ran into a cactus—slid into a cactus, to be completely accurate.”
“Did you not see the cactus?” The nurse looked increasingly suspicious.
“It was dark,” I said. “We were night hiking.” I pointed over at Oliver and immediately realized that I shouldn’t have brought him into it.
If I told the nurse the truth, that Oliver and I had been out late at night traipsing through the tumbleweeds in search of alien life forms, she’d for sure think I was lying. She was looking censoriously over at Oliver as if she suspected him of throwing me into a cactus in a fit of rage. She obviously thought she was dealing with a case of domestic violence, although I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she seemed to think Oliver and I were a couple. Oliver was way out of my league, clean-shaven Oliver, at any rate.
“We were stargazing,” Oliver said. “There was a meteor shower last night, so we went on a night hike and had an unfortunate tangle with a barrel cactus.”
“That’s exactly what happened,” I insisted and pointed down at my legs. “Are you going to get these spines out, or will I have to wait for the doctor?”
It took two hours, but by the time I left the clinic my legs were free of spiny plant matter, and I was finally free of pain thanks to the shot and the prescription painkillers I’d picked up at the pharmacy on the way out the door.
“I want to go out and look at where we saw the lights,” I said to Oliver as we neared Little Tombstone.
“Are you sure you’re up to all that walking?” Oliver protested. “We can drive part of the way, but I’m pretty sure—”
“Don’t pull in at the café! Keep driving!” I yelled at Oliver.
I knew I sounded like a crazy woman, but I’d just caught sight of a figure sitting on the steps of the Bird Cage Café. It was my cousin Freida, and I was in no condition to deal with that creature from the black lagoon.
Chapter Fourteen
I considered throwing myself down on the floorboards, but I didn’t think the condition of my perforated legs would allow it, so I hunkered down a little. It was too little, too late. Freida was standing to her feet and looking right at me as we came up even with Little Tombstone.
“Never mind,” I told Oliver. “Go ahead and pull in.”
“Who is that?” he asked. “Why is she smiling at you like that?”
“My cousin,” I told him. “Second cousin, actually, and she only smiles like that when she’s about to perpetrate an evil act.”
“Want me to stay with you?” Oliver asked as I reached for the door handle. Freida was already approaching the car.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never known her to be violent, although I wouldn’t put it past her to manipulate some weak-minded weasel into inflicting bodily harm on somebody else.”
It was as I spoke that I realized who was behind the threat note and the broken water pipe. Freida hadn’t done those things—and I was not one bit closer to figuring out who had committed the actual sabotage—but I was pretty sure she’d been the one who’d put the perpetrator up to it.
“Hello, Freida,” I said, pasting a smile on my face. I could feel Oliver still hovering in the background.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Freida said. “There’s something you need to see.”
“Sure, but I’ll need to take Earp out first thing. I just got back from the clinic.”
“The clinic?”
“I had a clash of wills with a cactus.”
“Oh.” Freida was looking a
t me like I was insane.
“I’ll be fine,” I said to Oliver, who was still haunting me like a shadow. What I really wanted to say was, “I appreciate your concern, but you can get lost now.”
“I’ll take Earp out for you,” Oliver suggested, “so you don’t have to navigate the stairs twice.”
“That would be great,” I told him and hobbled painfully up the back stairs, Freida and Oliver at my heels.
Oliver disappeared downstairs with Earp, and Freida stood in the middle of Aunt Geraldine’s living room, looking around distastefully.
“This is a wreck,” she said. “The whole place is falling apart.”
I wanted to ask her why she wanted Little Tombstone so badly since it was in such a sorry state, but I bit my tongue.
“What is it you wanted to show me?” I said. “Oliver will be back soon with Earp.”
I don’t know why I felt compelled to point that out. Maybe it was because Freida was smiling more expansively than I’d ever seen her smile before, even that time she busted my grandmother’s pufferfish vase and blamed me for it.
“Here.” Freida thrust a folded piece of white paper into my hand. “There were a few of your grandmother’s papers mixed in together with that box of love letters I took away with me last time.”
I started to read the photocopied typed letter, and my knees went weak. I somehow made it to the couch, the paper still clutched in my hand. I forced myself to read all the way to the end, where I ran a shaky finger over my grandmother’s handwritten signature.
I heard Oliver return with Earp. The pug ran over to me, jumped up on the couch, and stationed himself beside me, growling softly, while he kept a wary eye on Freida.
“Are you OK?” I heard Oliver ask. “You look like you are about to faint.”
“She’s had a shock,” Freida told him. She stood to her feet, and Earp bolted for the bedroom. Freida took Earp’s place on the couch beside me and whispered in my ear, “You have forty-eight hours to disclaim your inheritance, or I’m going to the police and the press with that letter.