by Celia Kinsey
“There’s something your great aunt neglected to inform me about,” Mr. Wendell began. “It’s probable she did not inform me of it because she was unaware of it herself.”
This left me as much in the dark as ever, but when Mr. Wendell handed me the papers he held in his hand, it all became clearer.
I read through the document, examined the map, and read through the document again a second time. Omitting all the legalese, it seemed that my Great Uncle Ricky had signed off on a boundary line adjustment over thirty years ago. For reasons unknown, to me, at least, he’d given Nancy Flynn a roughly nine-acre parcel that adjoined her ranch. I looked at the map for a third time.
“These nine acres which were transferred over to you,” I addressed Nancy. “Is that the piece of vacant land between the back fence of the trailer court and your ranch?”
Nancy Flynn nodded.
“Did Aunt Geraldine know about this?” I asked.
“No,” said Nancy. “Richard and I—”
“You had an affair?” I could hear my voice rising. “Did Aunt Geraldine know?”
“She didn’t know,” Nancy said, tacitly acknowledging the existence of the affair. “She didn’t know a lot of things. Richard signed that land over to me because I’d loaned him a large sum of money, which he could not repay. He’d maxed out several lines of credits your aunt had no idea he’d opened. Richard was expecting a windfall which never materialized.”
The windfall Uncle Ricky must have been counting on was finding the gold cache from the stagecoach robbery. If Aunt Geraldine’s treasure map could be believed, Uncle Ricky had come very close to finding it; he’d just died a little too soon.
I wondered if Uncle Ricky had ever had any intention of letting Aunt Geraldine in on his little secret, had he succeeded in finding the treasure. I wondered if he’d planned to hide his discovery from Aunt Geraldine and share his windfall with Nancy instead.
“Is this all legal?” I asked Mr. Wendell. “I mean, was Uncle Ricky within his rights to just sign over the land like that?”
“I already looked into the legality of the boundary line adjustment on Mrs. Flynn’s behalf,” Mr. Wendell said. “During the period of time when the transfer of land was recorded, the entire acreage on which Little Tombstone sits was solely in the names of a Betty Wright—your grandmother, I presume—and Richard Montgomery. Mrs. Wright also signed off on the adjustment to the boundary line, so—”
“My grandmother knew?” I turned to Nancy.
Nancy nodded. Her already reddened face was even redder than usual. She was clearly ashamed of herself, but not so ashamed that she was willing to let the land go.
“Am I right in assuming that you haven’t exercised your rights to the land before out of respect for my aunt?” I asked Nancy.
“I didn’t want her to know,” Nancy said.
Apparently, neither did my grandmother.
“Well,” I said, “It all looks legal enough, and I do understand why it didn’t come up earlier, so I’ll just think of it as becoming even closer neighbors than we already were.”
Nancy looked like she could have hugged me, but she restrained herself. That nine acres seemed to mean an awful lot to her considering she already owned a thousand acres or so of sagebrush already.
“By the way,” I said, as Nancy stood up to leave. “I know now that it’s your land and has been for some time, but are you planning on putting up a new barn or something out there?”
All the relief drained out of Nancy’s face.
“No,” she said. “I’m not planning on building anything on it.”
“That’s funny. I could have sworn that someone was clearing a building site out behind the trailer court. I happened to be wandering around out there, and it looks like someone has moved quite a lot of dirt.”
“Oh, that’s just where my nephews like to ride their dirt bikes,” she said. “I didn’t think they were doing any harm.”
“It didn’t look like dirt bike tracks,” I insisted. “It looks a lot more like someone had been digging holes with a backhoe and then filling them in again.”
“I’m sure no one’s been digging,” Nancy insisted.
“Well, I must have been wrong,” I said. “Hank Edwards is convinced we’re in the middle of an alien invasion because of the lights he keeps seeing out there in the wee hours of the morning, but if your nephews like tearing around on their dirt bikes at two AM, more power to them.”
Nancy stared at me with her mouth open, then regained her composure sufficiently to thank Mr. Wendell for his time.
“Tell your nephews to watch out for barrel cactuses,” I said to her retreating back. “The spines hurt like the dickens to get out once they’re in.”
“You took that well,” said Mr. Wendell as soon as the front door of the building had closed behind Nancy.
“It’s a believable story,” I told him. “I always suspected that my Uncle Ricky wasn’t the most loyal of men. And he was never good with money if all the stories my grandmother told me were accurate. I do have reason to believe Uncle Ricky might have been expecting a windfall. Nancy Flynn’s explanation of the boundary-line adjustment rings true. I’m just not completely convinced that all that disturbed dirt out there is the result of a couple of boys on dirt bikes.”
Mr. Wendell sat across his desk from me and laced and unlaced his fingers, a trifle nervously, I thought. The man had an impeccable manicure.
“What can I do for you?” Mr. Wendell finally asked.
I hastily produced the copy of the possibly-or-possibly-not-genuine letter from my grandmother, then folded my hands in my lap to hide my chipped polish and ragged cuticles.
“I assume you’ve heard about the discovery of the bodies under the trailer court at Little Tombstone?” I said.
I couldn’t imagine that Mr. Wendell had not. It had even made the local news. Although I’d declined to be interviewed, Jimmy had been happy to take my place in the limelight. I thought he’d rather exaggerated his role in the discovery, but that was fine with me. I didn’t particularly care to become a local celebrity because I’d discovered a pile of old bones.
Besides, if anyone deserved credit for the discovery, it was Earp. Earp had known there were bodies buried down there long before the rest of us had a clue.
“I did hear that a couple of skeletons were dug up,” Mr. Wendell said. “I understand they were unearthed during some routine repairs to the water main.”
“I would not characterize them as routine repairs,” I said. “It was clearly a case of sabotage.”
Chapter Twenty
“Sabotage?” Mr. Wendell said. Clearly, he’d not heard the news that someone—my money was on Freida being the mastermind—was trying to force me out of Little Tombstone.
“I’ve gotten a series of anonymous threats. First, it was a threat of flood; then somebody busted up the water main. Then it was a threat of fire, and the fry vat in the café malfunctioned. That nearly sent the whole place up in flames. Finally, yesterday, I got a note threatening me with ‘pestilence.’ I wasn’t even sure what pestilence was, but this morning, whoever was behind the notes made good on their threat by planting a hive of angry bees in the Curio Shop. Poor Hank got severely stung. He could have died if Morticia hadn’t happened to have been giving a reading to a client who carried an EpiPen on her.”
Mr. Wendell stared at me, wide-eyed. It seemed he hadn’t heard that the sleepy village of Amatista was fast transforming into a hotbed of crime. He shook his head a couple of times and then transferred his attention to the copy of the letter from my grandmother I’d slid across the desk to him.
“The letter is purported to be written by my grandmother,” I told Mr. Wendell.
“Betty Wright?”
“It’s typed, but the signature looks genuine,” I told him. “I just can’t believe my Grandmother would be confessing to anything like that.”
“Sometimes, in life, one has to become comfortable with ambiguity,”
Mr. Wendell said.
“I don’t have that luxury,” I told him. “Freida is blackmailing me with that letter. She says that if I don’t sign over Little Tombstone to her by this time tomorrow, then she’s going to go to the police and the press with this letter.”
“But your grandmother has been dead for years,” Mr. Wendell pointed out. “Does it really matter what Freida does with the letter?”
“My grandmother may have passed away, but Freida knows how much I loved her. I couldn’t bear for people to think my grandmother had done something so horrible. Betty Wright was a pillar of the community for decades. There isn’t a person in the entire town of Amatista who has a bad word to say about her. I can’t allow their memories of her to be ruined like that.”
“But the letter claims that it was an accident.”
“I know, but the letter also claims my grandmother was under the influence, not to mention the lengths she supposedly went to in order to conceal her involvement in the deaths.”
“Did your grandmother have a problem with alcohol?”
“No!” I was talking much too loud, but I couldn’t contain my indignation. “My grandmother had a glass of wine on Christmas and Easter and possibly champagne at New Year’s. My cousin Abigail is the only person in our family who’s ever had a drinking problem.”
“Abigail? You mean Mrs. Montgomery’s daughter.”
“Yes, Freida and Georgia’s mother. She’s been very quiet throughout this whole thing. I haven’t heard boo from her since my Great Aunt Geraldine died.”
“Perhaps you should pay her a visit,” Mr. Wendell suggested. “Since she hasn’t yet expressed any intention of contesting the will, there might be something she knows that your cousins aren’t telling you.”
I decided this was good advice and fully intended to take it, only I didn’t have a chance to head up to Santa Fe to pay Abigail a visit because, by the time I got back to Little Tombstone, things had taken a very sinister turn.
As I walked along Highway 14, which did double duty as Amatista’s Main Street, a police car tore past me, lights flashing, and then came to a stop in front of the Bird Cage Café.
I went up the steps into the Café and looked around, but the place was deserted. I called out for Juanita, then Chamomile, and finally for Oliver, but no one answered.
I walked to the back entrance and found that the door had been left open. I stepped out into the alley behind the café and followed the sound of voices to the trailer court.
There was quite a congregation clustered around the open door of room one of the motel. Of all the residents and employees of Little Tombstone, only Hank and Marco were missing.
As I approached the group surrounding the open door of the derelict motel room, Officer Reyes came out, a very grim look on his face.
“The ambulance is coming,” he said, “but I’m afraid it’s too late.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Officer Reyes looked at me as if he didn’t want to say. Morticia came over and put one arm around me before she said, “I’m sorry, but it looks like your cousin Freida may have shot herself.”
“Shot herself?” That didn’t sound like Freida at all. If Morticia had told me Freida had shot someone else, then I wouldn’t have had nearly so much trouble wrapping my mind around it.
“Who found her?” I asked no one in particular.
“Oliver did,” Morticia said.
I looked over at Oliver. He was looking very pale and shaken.
“I heard a couple of shots,” Oliver said. “I was on the other side of the motel, installing one of the locks that I got rekeyed this morning when I heard them. When I came around the front to see what was happening, the door was hanging open, and she was just lying there—”
Officer Reyes had instructed us to stay out of the motel room while he went back to his car for a roll of tape to block off access to the scene, but I scuttled up to the door and looked inside.
We might have been instructed to stay out of room one, but Officer Reyes had not said anything about not taking a peek through the door.
As soon as I saw Freida, I wished that I hadn’t let my curiosity get the better of me.
My cousin lay sprawled out on an old box spring, with a single bullet hole in the center of her forehead. She was clutching an antique pearl-handled revolver in her left hand.
Chapter Twenty-One
The ambulance came and took Freida’s body away, and a swarm of police cars parked out front of the motel. Juanita put up a Closed sign in the window of the Bird Cage Café and sent Chamomile home for the evening.
“Where was Marco during all the commotion?” I asked Juanita. “I didn’t see him out back after the police came.”
“I’d sent him home,” Juanita told me. “He was sick again. I found him throwing up in the dirt back by the dumpster. The poor thing must have a terrible case of the flu. He looked like he was about to pass out.”
“When did you find Marco throwing up?”
“Right before Oliver came in and told us Freida had shot herself.”
“So, you didn’t hear the gunshots?”
“No. We don’t hear much back in the kitchen. I like to have the radio on, and it can get pretty noisy banging pots and pans around.”
“You know,” I said as I looked around to make sure no one else was in earshot. “I don’t think Freida shot herself.”
“Why?”
“I looked in before they took her away, and the gun was in her left hand. Freida is right-handed. Somebody else fired the shot and then placed the gun in her hand.”
“Are you sure you weren’t confused?” Juanita asked. “It had to have been shocking to see her like that. I couldn’t bring myself to look inside.”
“I’m positive someone shot Freida, and whoever killed her must have been a virtual stranger, or they wouldn’t have made such an obvious mistake.”
“Do the police think it’s a simple case of suicide?”
“I don’t know.”
“Poor Freida,” said Juanita. She seemed a lot fonder of Freida now that she was dead. I had to admit that I was feeling quite a bit more pity for my cruel cousin than I’d ever felt before.
“There’s something else,” I told Juanita. “You remember that old pearl-handled revolver that used be Uncle Ricky’s? Until yesterday it lived in the back of the nightstand beside Aunt Geraldine’s bed. I’m sure that’s the gun Freida had in her hand.”
“You mean that antique gun with the shiny handle?” Juanita asked. “Your Uncle Ricky used to take that out back and shoot at tin cans, but half the time it refused to fire.”
“That’s the one, and I’d bet anything it’s got my fingerprints all over it.”
The very next day, I was politely but firmly requested to make an appearance at the county sheriff’s office.
I sat across a table in what looked like a breakroom while Officer Reyes took great pains to inform me that I was there voluntarily and that I was not a suspect. I’d have been a lot less nervous if he hadn’t felt the need to be quite so adamant about how nobody was accusing me of being responsible for my cousin Freida’s death.
“I don’t believe it was a suicide,” I told Officer Reyes after he’d taken my statement about where I’d been and what I’d done on the previous afternoon. “I looked in at the hotel door just before the ambulance came to take her away and saw that she was holding the gun in her left hand. My cousin wasn’t left-handed. She always used to tease me mercilessly because I was a leftie when we were kids.”
“You and Miss Montgomery grew up together?”
“Yes, we—Freida, Georgia, and I—spent practically every summer together at Little Tombstone growing up.”
“Who is Georgia?”
I was pretty sure he already knew exactly who Georgia was, but I figured it was in my best interest to play along.
“Georgia is my other cousin,” I told Officer Reyes, “Second cousins, actually. She and Freida are—were�
�twins.”
“Identical?”
“No.”
“Did you and Freida get along?”
I knew where Officer Reyes was going with this, but I believe that honesty is the best policy, so I forged ahead with the truth.
“Freida and Georgia were upset that their grandmother left Little Tombstone to me instead of to them.” I decided to leave the fat investment accounts out of it. Freida had only suspected Aunt Geraldine had a stash of cash. Officer Reyes didn’t need to know every detail of my Great Aunt Geraldine’s financial status.
“Have either of your cousins threatened you directly?” Officer Reyes asked.
The simple answer was “yes,” but without producing my grandmother’s supposed confession, I couldn’t tell the officer that Freida had threatened me.
“Do you suspect one or both of your cousins might have been behind the threat notes that you’ve received?”
“Yes. But only Freida. I’m sure Georgia had nothing to do with it.”
I wondered how Georgia was taking her sister’s death. Poor Georgia. Poor Abigail.
“There’s something else you should know,” I said. Officer Reyes had his head down in his paperwork, but he sat up straight and looked me in the eye. “That gun,” I continued. “That antique gun Freida had in her hand, I think that was stolen from my aunt’s apartment a couple of days ago.”
“Is your late aunt’s apartment currently occupied?”
“I’m occupying it. I discovered that gun a couple of days ago, among my aunt Geraldine’s things, but I put it back where I’d found it. Last night I discovered that it had gone missing.”
Officer Reyes scribbled furiously on the form which lay in front of him, then he asked me if I’d be willing to voluntarily submit to fingerprinting.
I said yes.
After that, since I was already in Santa Fe, I decided to go visit Juanita’s mother. I’d have to make a condolence call on Abigail and Georgia sooner or later, but I wasn’t ready, and I was pretty sure they weren’t ready, either.
Juanita’s mother lived in a memory care facility on the southern outskirts of town. I buzzed myself into the secured unit using the code Juanita had given me and asked one of the nursing assistants to direct me to Florenza Hernandez’s room.