by Celia Kinsey
She left me there, clutching the copy of my grandmother’s letter in my hand, shaken to the core.
I heard the door close behind Freida, and then Oliver was back, kneeling down in front of me with a glass of water in his hand. “Do I need to take you back to the clinic?” he asked. “You’re not having a reaction to the medication they gave you?”
“No, no,” I insisted. “But could you go down and ask Juanita to come up here just as soon as she has a minute to spare?”
It was another hour before Juanita knocked on my door. By that time, I was feeling a bit calmer. I didn’t try to explain; I just asked Juanita to sit down and handed her the copy of the letter.
Juanita read the letter twice.
“This can’t be true,” Juanita insisted. “It must be a forgery or something.”
“It looks real,” I told her. “It’s definitely Grandma’s signature.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t want to think it’s a real letter—”
“I’m afraid Freida intends to stop at nothing to get ahold of Little Tombstone,” said Juanita. “And she may not be the only one. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I found this taped to your door as I came in.”
Juanita handed me a message which had been cut and pasted using words and letters from magazines.
LEAVE LITTLE TOMBSTONE BY TOMORROW OR IT WILL BE FIRE THIS TIME.
“You don’t think Freida put this on my door?” I asked Juanita.
“I don’t know,” she said soberly. “I don’t think it’s really Freida’s style. Of course, I may be assuming too much.”
“Assuming too much? How?”
“You know I grew up with Abigail. We were in the same grade all the way through school.”
I wasn’t sure where Juanita was going with this.
“Abigail was as mean as a snake,” Juanita continued. “And the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but I may be mistaken in assuming that Freida is mean in exactly the same way her mother was.”
“Freida always gets someone else to do her dirty work,” I said. “Historically speaking.”
“That’s exactly how Abigail was. She’d manipulate someone else into doing something downright cruel, and then pretend she had nothing to do with it. Either that, or she’d do the dirty deed herself and then pin it on some other poor fool.”
“So you think someone else is delivering the threats, but Freida’s the brains behind them?”
“I do,” said Juanita, “This time, I think you’d better insist that the police take these threats seriously. What do you think about sending Oliver into Santa Fe to buy more fire extinguishers? I bet the only ones around this place are the ones in the kitchen.”
“I wouldn’t know what to tell him to buy.”
“Ask him to get the wet kind, so we can use them later as replacements in the kitchen. I’m really hoping we don’t have to use them.”
“Wet?”
“We have to keep the wet kind in the kitchen, in case of a grease fire. The dry kind would only spread the flames.”
I made my way downstairs to find Oliver and sent him off with cash and the keys to my rental car, then I went in search of Ledbetter.
When I knocked on the door of his trailer, he took a while to answer. When he did he looked bleary-eyed, as if he’d been sleeping.
“I suppose you heard about my tangle with a barrel cactus,” I said.
He nodded. I didn’t bother asking how he’d heard. I was starting to realize one couldn’t keep any secret for long around Little Tombstone.
“Then I suppose you know how I came to be wandering around in the sagebrush in the middle of the night?” I asked.
“I heard you were investigating an alien sighting. Hank was very impressed.”
“I don’t know why he should be,” I said. “We didn’t make it all the way out to the lights before they disappeared. That’s why I was wondering if you’d be willing to go there with me and see if there’s anything out there where we sighted the lights. I sent Oliver to town on an urgent errand.”
“Sure,” said Ledbetter. “But are you sure you’re up to it?”
I wasn’t sure I was up to it. My legs were hurting less, but the painkillers combined with the shock of reading my Grandmother’s letter had me feeling light-headed.
I’d sent Oliver off with my rental car, and I didn’t think my injured legs were up to a ride on the back of Ledbetter’s motorcycle.
“Can you drive Aunt Geraldine’s truck?” I asked Ledbetter.
“Sure,” he said as if it were no big deal.
I held up the bristling ring of keys my aunt had left me.
“Would you happen to know which key it is?”
“I’m sure the key is in the truck,” Ledbetter said. “She never bothered taking it out.”
“Did you ever hear any rumors going around about hidden gold from a stagecoach holdup back in the 1800s?” I asked Ledbetter as I hobbled beside him toward my aunt’s old Chevy parked around the end of the old motel.
“Yeah. I heard those stories. People have been searching for years, but nobody ever found it. If you ask me, those lights—”
We’d reached the pickup, and Ledbetter had swung open the heavy passenger side door for me. He held out his hand to help me up, but I, too, was busy examining what was in the bed of the pickup to acknowledge him.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing to a long, thick semi-rusted rod that was slightly pointed on both ends.
“It looks like an old axel.”
Accompanying the axel was a propane torch and an old hack saw.
“You know what we’re looking at?” I asked Ledbetter.
He shook his head.
“I think these are the things whoever bashed holes in the water pipes left behind.”
Ledbetter hefted the axel and banged it down speculatively on the ground. It sunk in a few inches. When he pulled it out, a round hole about an inch in diameter was left behind.
“I suppose somebody could have knocked holes in the pipe this way,” he said. “But it would have taken them a while.”
“You know what I think?”
“What do you think?”
“This has to have been an inside job,” I told Ledbetter.
Chapter Fifteen
“What do you mean about this being an ‘inside job’?” Ledbetter asked as we bumped along the road up toward the location where Oliver and I had spotted the lights the night before.
“Think about it,” I said. “Whoever threw that rock through my window did it while I was eating supper. They must have been hanging around waiting for me to leave the apartment. The pipes were tampered with during the early afternoon. I went out back around noon, and nothing was amiss, then I lay down on the couch for a nap and was awakened shortly after three by Oliver and Juanita telling me there was a geyser erupting in the trailer court.”
“I don’t follow,” said Ledbetter.
“A stranger would be worried about being recognized as an intruder,” I explained. “But whoever is doing these things is more comfortable working in broad daylight. He, or she, isn’t worried about being recognized as being out of place.”
“I guess,” said Ledbetter, “but he still might get caught.”
“Or she,” I said.
“Sure, I suppose.”
“I got another threat note,” I said.
“When?”
“Just a few minutes ago.”
“What did it say?”
“It’s threatening fire this time.”
I saw Ledbetter’s hands tense on the steering wheel, and I expected him to say something more about the note, but instead, he pulled off the side of the road.
“If we go any farther,” he said, “we’ll be onto Nancy Flynn’s land, and she’s hard on trespassers.”
“Hard on them?” I asked Ledbetter.
“She comes after them with a shotgun.”
“We aren’t trespassers,” I pointed out. �
�We’re neighbors.”
“It will be hard to explain that to her if she’s already shot you,” Ledbetter said with a perfectly straight face. I couldn’t decide if he was joking or not. “Nancy keeps a shotgun on a rack in her truck, and she’s always carrying. I bet she sleeps with a handgun under her pillow.”
I bet Ledbetter did too, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
I slid painfully out of the passenger seat and down to the ground. I stood for a minute on the roadside surveying the landscape.
“I think the arroyo I fell into is over there,” I said, pointing to the east. “The lights were over there,” I pointed to the west. “Just beyond that little rise, I think.”
“You lead the way,” said Ledbetter, and we headed off into the sagebrush.
It was much easier going in the daylight, despite my injuries, and it wasn’t long before we came to the spot where I thought Oliver and I had seen the lights.
“Do you think we’re still on Little Tombstone land out here?” I asked Ledbetter.
“I think so,” he said.
There had undoubtedly been human activity in the area, either that or Hank was right about the aliens. The ground was scarred, and a wide swath of sagebrush and cactus had been removed.
“Do those look like backhoe tracks to you?” I asked Ledbetter.
“Yes, and at least one truck. There’s been a lot of traffic in and out of here.”
“I wonder if all these vehicles been coming in from the road.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Ledbetter.
We made our way back to the pickup, and Ledbetter drove slowly along the road. We crept past the old cemetery on the hill. As we passed, I could see the erosion that Morticia had talked about. We continued keeping an eagle eye out for tracks leading off the gravel road while we rounded the back of the hill, but we soon reached a locked gate with a sign that warned us that trespassers would be shot on sight.
“This is Nancy Flynn’s ranch?”
“Yep.”
“So whoever is digging on Little Tombstone land has to be coming across her land.”
“Looks like it.”
There was nothing to do but turn around.
“What were you about to say earlier?” I asked Ledbetter. “Right before we found that stuff in the back of the pickup? It sounded like you had some theory about the lights.”
“I was just going to suggest that somebody might be on the hunt for that gold again.”
It was a plausible theory. More plausible than Hank’s supposition that we were being invaded by alien life forms.
When we got back to Little Tombstone, Oliver was back with the fire extinguishers.
I hid one in the utility closet under the stairs. I gave one each to Ledbetter and Oliver and charged them with guarding the extinguishers with their lives. Then I took one over to Hank. The door to the Curio Shop was locked, and a Closed sign hung on the door to the museum. I left the extinguisher on the step with a note taped to it. I took the single remaining extinguisher and concealed it under the kitchen sink in my aunt’s apartment.
Juanita and I inspected the older extinguishers in the café. They all seemed to be in working order. I had done all I could. There was nothing to do but wait for the saboteur to make his or her next move.
Around ten the following morning, just as I sat down to a plate of migas in the café dining room, I smelled smoke.
“Do you smell that?” I asked Chamomile, who was restocking the napkin dispensers before going on her morning break.
Chamomile disappeared into the kitchen. Almost immediately, I heard her scream, then she came running out of the kitchen yelling for help.
I rushed into the kitchen to find Juanita battling a grease fire, or rather Juanita attempting to battle a grease fire. She was sorely deficient in ammunition.
Juanita was standing in front of a fry vat that had erupted in flames, trying to discharge the special wet-fire extinguisher she kept nearby for just such an unlucky occasion, but the extinguisher appeared to be jammed.
“Turn off the propane!” Juanita yelled. I didn’t know where the shut-off for the propane was, but Chamomile materialized from somewhere behind me and darted over to the wall and turned a valve.
It did nothing to extinguish the fire because the grease was still burning, but at least we weren’t about to go up with a bang, providing Chamomile knew what she was doing.
I went to the closet under the stairs and brought out the extinguisher I’d wrapped in rags and tucked behind a case of paper towels.
I thrust the new extinguisher into Juanita’s hands, and she discharged its entire contents into the column of flames coming up from the deep fat fryer.
By the time Marco wandered in from the dish room, and Oliver materialized from the front porch where he’d been putting the finishing touches on the broken step, it was all over.
“What happened?” Oliver asked.
“Grease fire,” Juanita said. “I don’t understand how it happened. It was probably caused by a thermostat malfunction, but I hadn’t even turned that fry vat on.”
“The note!” I said, “The threat note promising a fire if I don’t leave Little Tombstone. This was it.”
“I certainly hope this was it,” said Juanita, “because we’re down at least two fire extinguishers.”
Chapter Sixteen
We stood around soberly, looking at the smoke-blackened ceiling above the fry vat until Marco announced that he had to finish the dishes. Chamomile excused herself to finish tidying the dining room, and Oliver went back to working on the steps.
I remained standing beside Juanita, staring at the mess.
“What if someone ends up getting hurt?” I said. “The broken water pipe was a pain, but it put no one in danger. This is different—somebody could have died. You could have gotten severely burned if you hadn’t known how to put it out. We could have all gone up in a flash of propane if the fire had spread too far.”
“It wasn’t that serious,” Juanita tried to sound reassuring but missed by a mile. It’s hard to sound really reassuring when your voice is trembling.
“I’ll call the police,” I said.
It’s funny how once you’ve had dead bodies discovered on your property—never mind they’ve probably been dead for decades—the police become extremely attentive to your concerns.
Officer Reyes showed up in less than an hour to take photographs of our blackened ceiling.
“You’re very lucky it wasn’t worse,” he told Juanita and me. “You’ve already confirmed with all your staff that no one accidentally turned on the fryer and forgot about it?”
“I only have two people who work for me,” Juanita told the officer. “My waitress, Chamomile, helps out in the kitchen when things are slow in the dining room, but she swears she hasn’t touched the fry vat in days. My dishwasher, Marco, rarely comes into the kitchen at all. He’d have no reason to touch it.
“Are you sure it couldn’t have been turned on by accident? Couldn’t someone have inadvertently bumped the knobs?” Officer Reyes asked Juanita. “Is it possible that you turned it on yourself and then forgot about it?”
“It has to be lit by hand with an open flame,” Juanita said frostily. She looked like she wanted to sock the officer. She’d reached the age where people start to get sensitive about anyone more than twenty years younger than they are questioning their memory. “The fryer isn’t something that could get turned on by accident,” Juanita told Officer Reyes. “Even if it had somehow been on for hours, that doesn’t begin to explain why it suddenly went up in flames.”
“What do you think might have happened?” Officer Reyes asked.
“Fires like this one are sometimes caused by a thermostat malfunctioning so that the oil gets too hot and eventually combusts, but that’s very rare,” Juanita told Officer Reyes. “I’ve worked in restaurants for almost fifty years, and I’ve only known a fryer to spontaneously catch on fire once.”
&
nbsp; “There’s something else that strongly suggests this could be arson,” I told Officer Reyes. “Look at these.”
I handed the officer the two threat notes I’d received.
“I reported the first note to the Sheriff’s office already,” I told him. “But the second one threatening me with fire was discovered yesterday taped to the door of the apartment I’m staying in.”
The officer had me drop the cut-and-pasted note into an evidence bag and said he’d take it back to the station with him. He told Juanita not to touch the fryer. Someone would come to take it away and send it off to determine if the thermostat had been tampered with.
“If the thermostat has been messed with,” Juanita told me after Officer Reyes had departed, “not just anyone would know how to do that.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” I agreed, “but we live in the age of the internet, and a smart, resourceful person can find detailed instructions about how to do almost anything on the web.”
“I wonder what’s next,” Juanita said wearily. “Once whoever is behind the flood and the fire finds out you won’t be driven away, what will they resort to after that?”
It didn’t take long for the next threat to be delivered.
I’d spent the morning dealing with the aftermath of the fire, and Earp was sure to be upstairs agitating to be let out. Before I went up, I went in search of Oliver, who’d requested the use of my rental car to drive into Santa Fe after more building supplies.
My Australian hitchhiker was making remarkable progress on the lengthy list of tasks I’d given him. I was going to have to start paying him. Three meals a day and a spot on the floor to roll out his sleeping bag were not adequate compensation for his accomplishments.
I gave Oliver the keys and the last of my cash. I was going to have to visit the ATM again soon. I had myriad things to do to put my affairs in order, what with my impending divorce and my new status as proprietress of Little Tombstone, but I was having trouble accomplishing much between dealing with paranoid tenants and periodic sabotage.
I had just put Earp’s leash on and was heading downstairs again when Oliver met me on the stairs. He didn’t say anything, just held out a piece of bright pink poster board which said in big block letters: PREPARE FOR PESTILENCE.