The Little Tombstone Cozies Box Set

by Celia Kinsey

  Grandma Flo was sleeping slumped over in a chair underneath the single window in her shared room. I gently shook her awake and hoped for the best. Juanita had informed me that Grandma Flo’s memory was unreliable at best, but that she remembered the old days much better than anything that had happened in recent years.

  Since the old days were what I was curious about, I was hopeful that Grandma Flo might at least be able to confirm a few of my suspicions.

  Grandma Flo looked up at me bleary-eyed, and it was not until after I’d plied her with several mint-chocolate wafers from the package in my tote bag that she perked up and took an interest in me.

  “I’m Emma, Betty’s granddaughter.”

  I got no flicker of recognition.

  “I’m Geraldine’s niece, Emma.”

  Grandma Flo still didn’t seem to recognize me, so I pulled out one of the old photo albums from my Aunt Geraldine’s and pointed to a picture of Freida, Georgia and I standing out in front of Little Tombstone when we were all fifteen or so.

  “Oh, yes, nice girls,” said Grandma Flo. I wasn’t sure how well Grandma Flo could see or how well she remembered any of us. No one with all their faculties intact would ever describe Freida as a “nice girl,” but maybe Juanita’s mother was just too embarrassed to admit she didn’t remember me.

  “That’s me,” I said, “and that’s Freida, and that’s Georgia. Freida and Georgia are Abigail’s girls. You remember Abigail? Geraldine’s daughter Abigail?”

  Grandma Flo looked up at me. She appeared alert for the first time.

  “Abigail’s a bad girl,” Grandma Flo said.

  “Why is she bad?”

  “She killed them,” Grandma Flo said.

  “Killed who?” I asked.

  “Those poor people,” Grandma Flo said. “That bad girl Abigail killed them.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Who did Abigail kill? How did she kill them?” I had a hundred questions, but I wasn’t going to get answers to any of them. Grandma Flo had fallen asleep again.

  I left the rest of the package of mint-chocolate wafers with the nurse at the front desk for Grandma Flo to finish later and went back out to my rental car.

  When I went to put the key in the ignition, my hands were shaking. Grandma Flo’s memory might come and go, but she was clearly convinced that my cousin Abigail had killed somebody, several somebodies if Grandma Flo’s memory was to be relied upon.

  As soon as I got back to Little Tombstone, I pulled out the manila envelope of clippings that I’d hidden underneath the mattress and found the article about the discovery of the missing Halverson’s burned-out car. Then I fired up my laptop and scanned through satellite images of the landscape around Little Tombstone until I thought I’d located the spot where the Halversons’ wrecked car had been discovered.

  The location where the Halversons’ car had been dumped was well off the beaten path, and with any luck, the scene would be more or less as it had been laying for the past fifty years or so. I intended to have a look at it myself.

  I drew myself a crude map and put it in my pocket along with the article about the discovery of the Halversons’ wrecked Plymouth Fury back in the early 80s. I then returned the envelope of clippings back to their hiding place. I leashed Earp and went out to the trailer court in search of Ledbetter.

  While I was knocking on Ledbetter’s door, Morticia stuck her head out of the door of her Winnebago and told me that Ledbetter had gone off somewhere on his motorcycle.

  “Are you busy right now?” I asked Morticia as Earp ignored us both in favor of some fascinating scent in the soil underneath Morticia’s motor home.

  “It’s been a slow day,” Morticia said. “You’d think a death in the community might make people want to find out their own fate, but for some reason, everyone’s been staying away.”

  “I was going to ask Ledbetter to go somewhere with me,” I told Morticia, “but would you feel like going on a search for clues?”

  “Clues?”

  “You’d better have a look at this,” I told her and pulled the clipping out of my bag.

  I tied Earp to the step of the motor home, and Morticia led the way into the patchouli-scented interior of her Winnebago. I could understand why Earp hadn’t been a fan.

  “Where did you find this?” Morticia asked after she’d read the article.

  “I found a whole envelope of clippings concerning this missing couple,” I told her. “They were in a box of Aunt Geraldine’s things.”

  “You think these Halverson people are the ones who were buried under the trailer court?” Morticia squinted at the article in the dim light emanating from the colored paper lantern, which hung over the dinette table that doubled as her fortune-telling booth.

  “I do.”

  “Why don’t you take this to the police, then?”

  “I will,” I said, “but first, I’d like more to go on than a hunch. Also, there are implications that may affect the living.”

  “You think someone around here killed them?”

  “Possibly, but probably not intentionally.”

  For the first time, Morticia looked hesitant to involve herself in my search party.

  “I think it was a hit and run,” I said. “I don’t think they were killed on purpose, but I believe whoever did it had a compelling reason to conceal the fact that this couple was dead.”

  “Oh?” Morticia didn’t look reassured, but at least she hadn’t outright refused to go with me in search of the car. “You think the car might still be there?”

  “I have no idea, but given how people do things around here, and the remote area where it was dumped, I think it’s very likely it was left for the past 50 years to rust away in peace. I have a map with possible locations marked. It’s just a matter of checking them off one by one.”

  Morticia looked skeptical.

  “If we don’t find anything, we don’t find anything,” I urged her, “but I think it’s worth a look.”

  As we bumped along the rutted road, which led to the likely location of the crushed carcass of the Halversons’ Plymouth, I tried to make conversation with Morticia. I’d never spent much time alone with her, and I soon discovered that Morticia wasn’t much of a talker.

  “You must have a pretty good instinct about people,” I said after conversation had lagged for a good five minutes.

  “Most of the time.”

  “You must have spent at least a little time with my cousins.”

  “Freida and Georgia?”

  “And Abigail.”

  “What about them?” Morticia asked.

  “Mr. Wendell believes that the three of them were trying to get Aunt Geraldine declared incompetent,” I told her, “They may have been trying to gain control of Aunt Geraldine’s financial affairs.”

  “They wanted Little Tombstone?” Morticia’s tone suggested that if someone paid her to take Little Tombstone, she’d refuse the gift. I can’t say I wasn’t coming around to her point of view.

  “It seems they did want Little Tombstone, badly enough to try and take it against my aunt’s will,” I said. “Aunt Geraldine never said anything about it to you?”

  Morticia thought for a minute before she replied. “Looking back on it now, I do remember her warning me not to trust your cousins. Geraldine said they were ‘out to get her,’ but then Geraldine was constantly getting into conflicts with Abigail, so I didn’t think much about it. Geraldine never seemed all that fond of her granddaughters—well, Freida, anyway—so when she said they were ‘out to get her,’ I didn’t take it seriously.”

  “We’re here,” I said, pulling off the side of the dirt road. “At least I think this is the right spot.”

  I got out of the car with my crude map and headed off down the sloping landscape in the direction I thought the car might be. After poking around in the sagebrush for fifteen minutes, it was obvious that I’d selected the wrong spot. I’d made the mistake of letting Earp off the leash, and I had a te
rrible time getting him to come back to me.

  We tried four more locations before we finally found the carcass of a green Plymouth Fury. I compared it to the reference picture I’d saved to my phone. It appeared to be a 1967 model. I was comfortable in declaring that we’d found the wreck of the Halversons’ car.

  The car had been pushed (or driven, it was impossible to tell which) off into a small arroyo. The rubber of the tires was rotted, and the front windshield was broken out. There was a large dent on the passenger side and on the roof. I was guessing that at some point, the car had rolled.

  As I walked around the burned-out, rusty remains of the car, I scanned the ground. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but since we’d driven all the way out to the middle of nowhere, I didn’t want to miss a clue.

  “I wonder if it was in a wreck or if it was smashed up afterward,” Morticia said.

  “I think it was in a wreck.”

  I stooped to examine the smashed-in passenger-side door, which was barely scorched. A fire appeared to have been set on the backseat, but whoever set it seemed to have allowed it to peter out without it engulfing the vehicle. “Look at this,” I told Morticia, pointing to the dented-in passenger-side door. “The car that hit it was bright blue.”

  Morticia came over to look at the dented door. “I think you’re right.”

  We spent another twenty minutes going over the car but found nothing else of interest. I tied Earp to the bumper so I could have both hands free to take pictures of the car from various angles. I was convinced that it was the missing couple’s car, but I was no closer to figuring out who had dumped it there.

  When I went back to the front of the car to retrieve Earp, I found him digging in the dirt next to the deflated front tire.

  “What have you got there?” I asked him. Something red glinted in the dirt. At first, I thought it might be a piece of broken taillight. I didn’t want Earp to cut his paws, so I untied him and handed him off to Morticia.

  I used a stick to dig out the object. It was a hood ornament. The chrome was pocked with age, and the red emblem in the center was considerably faded.

  “What do you think this is?” I asked Morticia as I held up the object for Morticia’s inspection. “This car still has its hood ornament.”

  “Looks like a hood ornament to me, too,” Morticia said. “But don’t ask me what kind it is.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When we returned to Little Tombstone, it was almost dark. I noticed that lights were on in the Curio Shop and the Museum of the Unexplained, so I surmised that Hank was back home.

  The previous day, a crew of men in protective suits had rid the premises of bees. I hoped that Hank would suffer no lingering effects from his brush with death.

  The bell on the door jingled as I went inside the Curio Shop, but it took several minutes for Hank to emerge from his tiny apartment in the back of the shop.

  In the meantime, Earp and I made a tour of the premises, which didn’t seem much worse for the wear after having a crew of exterminators tromping all over it. Of course, Hank’s system of organization was a complete mystery to me, so there might have been scores of things out of place. It looked like a lot of piles of faded pseudo-southwestern tchotchkes to me, but doubtless, Hank felt otherwise.

  “How are you feeling, Hank?” I asked him when he finally made an appearance.

  Except for a lot of pink spots remaining on his face and neck, Hank looked remarkably normal.

  I’ve heard that a near-death experience will often inspire a person to take a fresh look at life and how they are living it. Some people take it as a wake-up call to cultivate kindness, gentleness, and generosity. This did not appear to be the case with Hank.

  He was crankier than I’d ever seen him.

  “I ought to sue you,” were his first words.

  “I’m very sorry about what happened,” I told Hank. “We’re trying to determine who put the bees’ nest in your shop.”

  “How am I to know it wasn’t you?” Hank pointed an accusatory finger at me. I noticed that his hand trembled. I hoped he wasn’t about to pass out on me.

  “Are you sure you are feeling well enough to be up and around?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed with your friend Phyllis, so she can keep an eye on you?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Hank said. “That was your little plan all along. You want me to go away long enough so you can empty out this place and put me and everything I own on the street.”

  I had to suppress a smile at the thought of everything Hank owned on the street. It would bring traffic through Amatista to a standstill.

  “Your great aunt would turn over in her grave if she only knew how you were treating such a loyal friend,” Hank continued. “After all I’ve done for her—”

  “I have no intention of evicting you,” I tried to reassure Hank. “You’ve been here for years. Little Tombstone wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  “That’s not what Freida told me.”

  Surely Hank knew Freida was dead, but I decided not to bring it up just in case he hadn’t yet heard. In his present mood, he’d probably accuse me of being the one who killed her.

  “What did Freida tell you?”

  “She told me you planned to knock this place down and put in one of those big truck stops.”

  Replacing Little Tombstone with a truck stop probably wasn’t a bad idea, from a business standpoint, but I was certain that wasn’t what my Aunt Geraldine had in mind when she left me the place. I tried my best to reassure Hank that I had no plans for major changes to Little Tombstone.

  Hank appeared moderately mollified, so I decided to press my luck and pump him for information.

  “You’ve lived here for a long time. How many years has it been?”

  “I opened up the shop in 1968.”

  That was over a decade before the Halversons had gone missing.

  “Do you remember anything about this?” I asked him as I handed him the clipping about the discovery of the Halversons’ missing car.

  “Yep,” Hank said. “I remember that.”

  “What do you think happened to the Halversons?”

  “Dunno. Never met the people.”

  According to one of the early articles concerning the Halversons’ mysterious disappearance, they hadn’t lived long in Amatista before they went missing, so I supposed that Hank’s protest that he’d never met them was believable.

  “Any theories, hunches, suspicions? There must have been a lot of talk when they disappeared.”

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you?”

  Hank’s voice was very high and shrill, and his already-pink face was considerably pinker. It had never entered my mind that Hank had had anything to do with the Halversons’ disappearance, but I suddenly started to wonder if he might have.

  “Of course I don’t think you had anything to do with the Halversons going missing,” I said. “It’s just that you’ve lived around here for a long time. I thought you might have seen something or heard rumors.”

  “I don’t listen to rumors,” Hank said as if that settled the matter.

  Maybe Hank didn’t listen to rumors, but he was all ears when it came to conspiracy theories, so I decided that desperate times called for desperate measures.

  “You know,” I said, “some people have gone so far as to suggest that the Halversons were Soviet agents. Do you think that’s why they were killed?”

  I was ‘some people’, but Hank didn’t need to know that I was quite possibly the only one who’d ever suggested the Halversons were Russian spies.

  “That’s a bunch of baloney,” Hank said. “Greg Halverson was an auto mechanic, and his Missus was a housewife. Nicest people you ever met.”

  “I thought you’d never met them?”

  “I didn’t,” Hank said defensively. “That’s just what people said.”

  “So you don’t think there’s any possibility that th
ose bodies that were buried under the trailer court might be the missing Halversons?”

  “Listen,” Hank said, coming closer and prompting Earp, who’d been nosing about among the labyrinth of kachina dolls propped against a display case of “Zuni” pottery of questionable provenance, to come and lean protectively against my ankles. When Hank got a couple of feet away, Earp started to growl. “There’s no good comes from digging up anyone’s past sins,” Hank continued as he stepped even closer, “it’ll just end up coming back to bite the living in the—”

  “Thank you, Hank, for your valuable input,” I said as I backed out the door with my hand firmly clutching Earp’s collar.

  Hank had already been attacked by a swarm of bees. Being bitten on the leg by an elderly pug would be adding insult to injury.

  Clearly, Hank knew a lot more about the disappearance of the Halversons than he was telling me. He’d all but admitted that he believed the missing couple had been buried underneath the trailer court, but I was pretty sure Hank would never repeat that suspicion to anyone wearing a badge.

  It was fully dark by the time I was done dealing with Hank, so I took Earp upstairs.

  I was starving, but I had one more task to perform before I went down to the Bird Cage Café to have some supper.

  I went around to the back of the motel, where Uncle Ricky’s old Cutlass Supreme was rusting away quietly under a ripped tarp. I pulled up the front of the tarp covering the hood and shone the light from my phone onto where the hood ornament should have been but wasn’t.

  The hood ornament appeared to have been broken off, rather than unscrewed from its position, so I took the hood ornament I’d found next to the Halverson’s wrecked Plymouth and fitted it to the broken bit protruding from the hood of the Cutlass.

  The hood ornament fit to the broken shaft perfectly. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that, somehow, Uncle Ricky’s Cutlass had been involved in pushing the Halversons’ car off into the arroyo.