by Celia Kinsey
“It was shoved under your windscreen,” Oliver told me after I’d turned the placard over and discovered nothing more on the other side. “What does pestilence mean?”
“Not sure,” I told Oliver. “It sounds biblical. I’ll go next door and ask Pastor Freddy.”
“I thought next door was a barbershop.”
“It is a barbershop, but it also functions as an informal house of worship on Sundays.”
I let Earp do his business, then took him with me to Freddy Fernandez’s barbershop. I went alone. There was too much to do, so I’d sent Oliver on to Santa Fe for supplies, despite the impending arrival of pestilence, whatever that might be.
A bell jingled over the door as I entered the barbershop. There was a man in the barber chair who I recognized as Jimmy, the backhoe guy. Jimmy had a bib around his neck. His head was thrown back, and he was snoring. Jimmy’s hair was neatly trimmed, so I presumed that Freddy, the devout barber, must be somewhere close by.
I decided to wait. I tethered Earp’s leash to one of the two chairs provided for waiting customers and sat down in the other. Earp flopped down at my feet and lay there until a fly circling his head got him so irritated that he snapped at it. When the fly got away, Earp gave a sharp bark, which woke Jimmy up mid-snore. The excavator shook himself a little like he’d forgotten where he was.
“Oh, hello, Emma,” he said jovially when he’d pulled himself together and wiped the drool from his cheek with the cuff of his shirt. “Here for a haircut?”
“No, I have a theological question for Pastor Freddy.”
“You know,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice, “Freddy’s not really a pastor.”
Chapter Seventeen
I told Jimmy that I was fully aware that Freddy Fernandez was not a licensed minister of the gospel. I merely sought his Bible knowledge, not someone to marry or bury me. It was when I said the word bury that I thought of earthmoving and realized this was an ideal opportunity to quiz Jimmy about the disturbed earth on the Little Tombstone property that adjoined his sister-in-law’s ranch.
“There’s something I’m wondering about,” I prefaced my interrogation. “I happened to be out behind the trailer court at Little Tombstone and noticed that somebody had been digging out there. Did my Aunt Geraldine happen to hire you to do any earth-moving for her?”
I watched Jimmy carefully, but he didn’t flinch. Of course, just because someone had been running a backhoe behind the trailer court, it didn’t mean that person had to be Jimmy. Nevertheless, since the equipment had almost certainly been brought across the property line between Nancy Flynn’s ranch, he seemed the most likely suspect.
“No, Nancy has me do a little work for her every once in a while, but it’s all been up by the barns.”
“I haven’t gotten a bill yet for all that work you did getting our water back on,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jimmy. “Just a neighborly act. I was happy to do it.”
Of course, after he said that, it would have seemed churlish of me to harp on about the unauthorized earth-moving, so I let the subject drop.
Soon after, Freddy came back. Jimmy paid his bill, and I had the barbershop and Pastor Freddy all to myself.
“You want a haircut?” Freddy asked.
“No, I just have a quick question. Juanita tells me you’re quite a Bible scholar. Can you explain where the phrase ‘Flood, Fire, and Pestilence’ comes from?”
“I don’t know if that exact phrase appears anywhere in the Bible,” Freddy said, “but it sounds sort of like the last three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, and pestilence.”
“What is pestilence?”
“Like an epidemic, but sometimes people use it to mean a plague. Like the plagues in the book of Exodus.”
“Or plague as in the medieval disease?”
Freddy said he didn’t know. He wasn’t an expert on medieval history.
“Someone is threatening us,” I told Freddy. “So far, they’ve threatened flood and broken one of our water pipes. Then they threatened fire, and the deep fat fryer in the café inexplicably erupted in flames. You’ve probably heard all about it already from Marco.”
“I came over to look the day the pipe broke. I saw they were digging up a bunch of old bones. Any idea yet who was buried under there?”
I told Freddy there’d been no new developments in identifying the skeletons. He expressed hope that the poor souls would be identified soon for the sake of their surviving loved ones.
“Now, the same person who busted up the water pipe and started the fry vat on fire is threatening to visit pestilence upon us,” I told Freddy. “What do you suppose they intend to do this time?”
“I guess it depends upon what they think pestilence means. What do you think the word pestilence means?”
Freddy was not asking me the question. Instead, he directed it to his son, Marco, who came into the shop from the room in the back. I wondered if the whole family lived over the barbershop, or if they had a home elsewhere. Maybe Marco was simply coming in to say hi to his father during his afternoon break.
“Pestilence?” Marco echoed. “You mean like swarms of frogs and bugs and stuff? Like in the book of Exodus?”
Freddy didn’t bother to correct his son, but Pastor Freddy had made his point. That threat of “pestilence” could mean we were in for just about anything.
“You guys live here?” I asked as I stood to leave. I looked at Marco as I asked the question, but he was looking at the floor. I had yet to see the boy make direct eye contact with another living soul. I wondered if when he stood in front of a mirror, he looked even himself in the eye.
“Upstairs,” Freddy said, pointing up at the ceiling. “It’s just me and Marco since his mother moved back to Albuquerque.”
The rest of the day was uneventful. There were no outbreaks of dread diseases; we were not overrun with rats or frogs, nor did a swarm of locusts appear.
By evening, I had relaxed a little. I decided to finish going through the box of scrapbooks and albums where I’d found the articles about the stagecoach robbery and the probable treasure map. I’d tucked those away between the mattress and box springs in Aunt Geraldine’s bedroom.
I took the remainder of the scrapbooks down from where I’d stashed them in the tumble dryer in case Freida came back for more stuff. I was happy to pass them on to my cousins eventually, but not until I’d sifted through them for clues as to what my Aunt Geraldine had been up to all these years.
The first few albums I looked at were entertaining, but not particularly illuminating. There were pictures of Christmases and birthdays and family vacations. They all featured a little girl, and later a teenager, who was unmistakably my cousin Abigail. There were lots of pictures of her up until Christmas 1979 and then abruptly, for a few years at least, Aunt Geraldine and Uncle Ricky had taken to celebrating holidays without her. Abigail’s absence coincided roughly with her pregnancy. I decided that must have been the reason my cousin had stopped showing up in photos for a few years. Perhaps Abigail had moved away for a while. It had been a different era. Maybe being a teenaged unwed mother had been such a big deal she’d gone off somewhere and not returned to Amatista until the twins were a few years old. I made a mental note to ask Juanita about it and moved on to the next item, a manila envelope of newspaper clippings.
All the clippings concerned a couple who’d gone missing sometime around the first of the year in 1980. The clippings followed the trajectory of the investigation. The couple, Greg and Stacy Halverson, had been reported missing mid-January. By the end of January, their considerably damaged vehicle, a green 1967 Plymouth Fury, had been discovered dumped into an arroyo just off a remote road a mile or so south of Amatista. There were numerous subsequent clippings that followed developments in the investigation. Several suspects were investigated and then cleared. Several possible sightings of the couple were reported, but their bodies never turned up. The time between new stories bec
ame increasingly long, and the clipping at the very bottom of the pile, which simply reported that there was nothing new to report, was dated two years after the date of their disappearance. There were a few handwritten notations on the clippings, but it didn’t look like Aunt Geraldine’s handwriting.
I took the manila envelope of clippings and the album from my cousin Abigail’s childhood and stashed them under the mattress with the treasure map and the scrapbook about the stagecoach robbery.
While I was adjusting the mattress back into position over the box springs, Earp came in and nosed around my ankles. As he tried to wriggle in between me and the bed, he rubbed against my injured legs, and I stumbled backward in pain.
That’s how I knocked over the nightstand.
It was a mess. The nightstand went over, spilling out the contents of both the small drawer and the lower open shelf. The lamp on top of the nightstand toppled, and the shade broke. The water glass I kept next to the bed fell over and drenched the lot.
I picked up the protesting Earp, hobbled to the bathroom, and locked him in.
It was not until I’d picked up the nightstand and was putting everything back in place that I realized something was very wrong.
Uncle Ricky’s antique pearl-handled revolver which had been tucked behind the paperbacks in the bottom shelf of the nightstand had gone missing, case and all.
Chapter Eighteen
It took me eons to fall asleep that night. I hadn’t had a really good night’s sleep since my return to Little Tombstone, but that night was especially fitful. Somewhere, out there in the darkness, somebody had my Uncle Ricky’s revolver, and that same someone had rifled through the apartment when I wasn’t looking. That meant that someone either had a key or was adept at picking locks.
I felt relatively secure with the deadbolt engaged, but there was nothing I could do to keep someone with either a key (or burglars’ tools) out of the apartment whenever I left it.
The first thing the next morning, I went looking for Oliver. He was under the sink in the café ladies’ room, trying to find the source of a slow leak in the drainpipe. When I called his name, he hastily withdrew his head from under the sink.
“If you stay on long enough,” I told him. “This place might get worked back into shape.”
I was joking, of course. Eliminating the drips in drainpipes was all well and good, but the entire place needed a new roof, and acres of peeling paint would need removal before any competent painter would consider adding a fresh coat.
“There’s something more urgent,” I told Oliver as I handed him the keys to the rental car and the one remaining valid credit card to my name. I’d run out of cash, and it was probably naïve of me to hand off my credit card to a complete stranger, but that’s just how I am.
When I trust someone, I act like it. When I don’t trust someone, I take prompt action to protect myself. That’s why I was so set on getting the locks changed on every building at Little Tombstone as soon as possible.
“Rekey everything,” I told Oliver. “If it can’t be rekeyed, then install a whole new lock. Don’t let the new keys out of your sight for a second. Key every building differently. I don’t want a master made. Guard those with your life until—”
I was cut short by the arrival of Hank. He staggered through the front door of the Bird Cage Café and made it halfway across the dining room before he collapsed on the floor.
“What’s wrong? Hank? Hank!” I said as I bent over the unresponsive old man. I took my phone out of my pocket and handed it up to Oliver. “Call 911 and tell them to send an ambulance.”
Hank’s face was swollen almost beyond recognition, and his hands and neck were covered with welts. I felt his pulse. It was weak and fluttering, but he was alive.
“Bees,” Oliver said, as he waited on the line with the emergency services operator who’d informed us that an ambulance had been dispatched but that it would be at least twenty minutes before help arrived. “I’m pretty sure Hank’s gotten into a nest of bees. That happened to a mate of mine when we were kids. He decided to harass a hive of bees, and they came out at him with a vengeance.”
“If it is bees, in twenty minutes, he could be dead,” I said. “Stay with him, and I’ll see if someone has an EpiPen.”
Juanita and Chamomile were already hovering over us. Marco was hanging around the dish room door, trying to look cool and disinterested but failing by a mile. For the first time since I’d met him, he had an actual expression on his face. He looked genuinely worried. Maybe there was some good in the boy, after all. No one present carried an epinephrine injector, so I ran out back to check with Morticia and Ledbetter.
Apparently, Hank’s days on earth were not yet numbered, because when I banged frantically on Morticia’s door, she opened up right away. I told her Hank had been badly stung by bees and did she have an EpiPen. She didn’t, but the woman whose fortune she’d been telling was a nurse and carried one with her. The nurse rushed to the café dining room and administered the dose of epinephrine. By the time the ambulance arrived, Hank was coming around.
They took him into the hospital in Santa Fe. I expected Hank to refuse treatment, now that he was conscious again, and his swelling had started going down, but, apparently, his objections to “Big Pharma” and the “Medical Industrial Complex” were considerably muted by having just been pulled back from the brink of death.
“How in the world did he get into a beehive?” I wondered aloud after the ambulance had taken him off to the hospital. Hank had turned down my offer to accompany him, although he had given me a phone number and instructed me to call a lady friend of his named Phyllis. The existence of a lady friend in Hank’s life probably explained why he spent the night out on occasion. I was terribly curious to meet this Phyllis person. I couldn’t imagine what kind of woman would fall for Hank.
“Hank doesn’t seem to spend much time outside,” Oliver said. “Do you suppose that bees got into the Curio Shop somehow?”
“The pestilence!” I said it so loudly that it made Oliver jump. “The bees must be the promised pestilence.”
“Well, if those bees attacked Hank, then they’ll attack someone else if they aren’t taken care of,” said Oliver. “We’d better figure out where Hank got into them.”
We started our search for the bees’ nest next door at the Curio Shop and the Museum of the Unexplained. As soon as I reached for the swinging screen door which hung on the outside of the entrance to the Curio Shop, I knew we’d found what we’d been looking for.
Several bees were drunkenly darting around the entrance. Through the screen door, I could see that the solid interior door was flung open—probably by Hank in his haste to get away—giving me a clear view inside the Curio Shop. The place was swarming with bees.
“I think this is a job for a professional beekeeper or an exterminator,” I said to Oliver. “We’d better put up a warning sign for people to keep out. Stand back in the street, and I’ll just open the screen door long enough to close the solid door inside. That should keep the bees contained until the cavalry arrives.”
I got stung twice for my efforts, but I managed to close and lock the door to the shop. I had to search for ten minutes through my ring of keys to find the one that fit the entrance to the Museum of the Unexplained, but twenty minutes after the ambulance had taken Hank away, the perimeter was secured, and an exterminator was on his way.
I belatedly sent Oliver off to remove the locksets on everything but the building containing the bees so he could have them rekeyed in Santa Fe. I hoped nothing horrible would happen while he was away, but so far, the mischief-maker around Little Tombstone hadn’t made a move without issuing a warning first.
Thinking of warnings brought my mind back to the ultimatum issued by my cousin Freida.
If I didn’t relinquish my inheritance, Freida had threatened to take my grandmother’s confession letter to the police and to the press. According to Freida, I had less than twenty-four more hours to figu
re out what to do.
I decided that I needed some good legal advice. Although Mr. Wendell had declined to get involved in my defense against Freida and Georgia’s contest to my Great Aunt Geraldine’s will, I had a feeling that all the skullduggery going around Little Tombstone might pique his interest enough to get him to change his mind.
I didn’t call ahead. Oliver had my rental car, so I set out on foot through downtown Amatista toward Mr. Wendell’s office on the south edge of town.
When I got to Mr. Wendell’s office, there was someone with him. The door to the inner office was shut, and I could hear the indistinct murmur of voices. There was a desk for a secretary, but I had yet to see anyone sitting at it, which made me wonder if it was just for show, Maybe Mr. Wendell had not yet found a suitable underling among the inhabitants of Amatista. I imagined Mr. Wendell might have quite a challenge finding a local receptionist type who would be compatible with the ambiance of his office space.
I waited a full fifteen minutes before the door opened, and Nancy Flynn came out.
“Mrs. Iverson!” Mr. Wendell seemed surprised to see me, but he quickly returned to equilibrium. “I’m glad you stopped by,” he continued more calmly. “Miss Flynn has something she’d like to discuss with you.”
Chapter Nineteen
Nancy Flynn stood in the middle of Mr. Wendell’s waiting room, shifting her weight from one cowboy-booted foot to the other. Mr. Wendell might be glad I’d stopped by, but my neighbor clearly wasn’t.
“This is very awkward,” she began. “That’s why I wanted to involve a lawyer.”
“What’s awkward?” I asked.
“You’d better come in, and I’ll explain,” Mr. Wendell said and escorted Nancy and me back inside his office.
Mr. Wendell sat behind his desk. Nancy and I each took one of the slick leather chairs Mr. Wendell kept for the use of his clients.