by Celia Kinsey
My suspicions confirmed I went to the Bird Cage for supper.
Morticia’s business might have suffered in the wake of Freida’s death, but the Bird Cage Café’s business certainly hadn’t. The place was packed.
“You’ll have to wait or go with takeout,” Chamomile told me, “unless you’re willing to share a table with somebody.”
I looked around the room. Most of the tables were crowded with couples or families, but I saw one solo diner in the corner.
Nancy Flynn was contemplating an untouched plate of enchiladas. She didn’t notice me until I spoke to her.
“Mind if I join you?” I asked.
Her expression said she did mind, but her mouth said she didn’t, so I took a seat across from her and signaled for Chamomile to come over and take my order.
After Chamomile had gone off to the kitchen with my request for chicken tamales with salsa verde, I turned my attention to Nancy.
“I found something interesting when I was going through my Aunt Geraldine’s things,” I said.
Nancy barely acknowledged my statement. She had shifted to the edge of her seat and was chowing down on her enchiladas as if she were a contestant in a speed-eating contest. I wanted to tell her that was no way to savor the best chicken enchiladas north of the border, but I doubted she’d take it well.
“I found a map of Little Tombstone,” I told Nancy. “It looked a lot like a treasure map. I remember my Uncle Ricky being big into metal detecting. Do you think he was looking for something?”
Halfway through my little speech, Nancy had started choking. I reached over to pound her on the back before I continued.
“It’s just that I came across this newspaper clipping about a cache of stolen gold coins thought to have been buried somewhere in the area.”
Nancy had stopped coughing, finally. She was still very red in the face, though. She took a long swig of water before she replied.
“I have a vague recollection,” Nancy said, “of hearing some of the old-timers tell stories about a stagecoach robbery.”
“Do you think the story is true?” I asked.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Who knows?” Nancy said. “If the story of the stagecoach robbery is true, somebody probably found the gold years ago.”
“Wouldn’t a discovery like that be hard to hide?” I asked. “The article I read put the value of the gold coins at around $200,000 in today’s dollars, well 1998’s dollars, anyway.”
Nancy had taken another bite.
“That was what my Uncle Ricky was looking for, wasn’t it? That was the windfall he was hoping for?”
Nancy waited until she finished chewing before she replied.
“Yes, he was looking for that gold,” she said, “But he never found it. Not a single coin.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “ls it possible he might have hidden his find from you?”
“No,” Nancy was emphatic. “We told each other everything.”
“So if Uncle Ricky had been involved in something illegal, you would have known?”
Nancy was choking again. I repeated the procedure of pounding her on the back. At this rate, half of those enchiladas were going to go down the wrong way.
“Your Uncle Ricky wasn’t involved in any shady dealings,” Nancy insisted. “Those debts he racked up were the result of overspending and a couple of unfortunate business deals.”
“No shady dealings?” I persisted.
“Not on his part,” Nancy insisted. “Your Uncle Ricky was just too trusting, and he never was very good at keeping a rein on his expenses.”
“So you’re sure Uncle Ricky wasn’t involved in anything shady at all? Not even the disposal of a couple of dead bodies?”
Nancy stood to her feet. Her plate was still half-full, but I could see she had no intention of staying to finish. I could see the bulge under her denim jacket. Just as Ledbetter had suggested, Nancy was carrying a concealed weapon. I decided to change the subject.
“Ledbetter tells me you know a lot about guns,” I said. “I was curious about Uncle Ricky’s old revolver. You know the one I’m talking about?”
“No,” Nancy said.
I didn’t believe her. I could have continued shouting questions at her retreating back, but there didn’t seem to be much point. As Nancy passed the register by the door, she slapped a twenty down on the counter and yelled at Chamomile, who was three tables away, that she was paying her bill and that Chamomile could keep the change.
After I’d finished my own supper, I paid my bill and went into the kitchen in search of Juanita.
“I’m going to have to fire that boy,” Juanita said without even saying hello.
“Marco?”
“He hasn’t shown up for work for three days now,” Juanita said. “Pastor Freddy says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. Marco claims to have the flu but refuses to let his father take him to the doctor.”
I slept fitfully that night. So did Earp. At three in the morning, I was awakened by a crash in the kitchen. Earp had woken up, jumped down from his spot at the end of my bed and somehow managed to scramble onto a dining chair and get at the bag of dog treats I unwisely left out on the kitchen counter.
In the process, he knocked a ceramic bowl and a plastic glass to the floor.
The bowl broke. That’s what woke me.
After I’d cleaned up the mess and given Earp a midnight snack of the kibble I’d selected because the bag promised it was perfectly suited to Sedentary Senior Dogs, I wasn’t a bit sleepy.
Earp turned his nose up at the bowl of diet kibble and went grumbling back to bed.
I decided to tackle the box of tax forms I’d found in the back of Aunt Geraldine’s closet.
The tax forms—no surprise—were not a riveting read. I started with the file marked 1985.
According to the tax forms, signed by both my Aunt Geraldine and my Uncle Ricky, Little Tombstone had been operating at a loss. My Aunt Geraldine and Uncle Ricky’s personal finances were in barely better shape. The same was true of 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1990. Nothing changed in 1991 except that the 1991 return was signed only by Aunt Geraldine. Uncle Ricky had died the summer of that year.
On the 1992 return, everything was different; Little Tombstone was finally making a profit. One could be forgiven for assuming that Uncle Ricky had been the factor weighing down the business, but I believed otherwise.
I retrieved the graph-paper treasure map from underneath the mattress and double-checked the date beside the large star marking what I believed was the location where my Aunt Geraldine had unearthed the hidden gold. It said January 23, 1992.
I skimmed through another ten years’ worth of tax returns. Every single one showed Little Tombstone operating at a substantial—albeit not wildly unrealistic—profit. Then, around 2002, Little Tombstone had gone back to losing money. However, my Aunt’s personal tax returns told quite a contrasting story; she’d been taking modest withdrawals from her investment accounts to live on.
I fired up my laptop and used the login information that Mr. Wendell had given me to access the accounts that Ledbetter had maintained for my aunt. The trajectory of growth on the accounts amounted to some million and a half dollars. The modest amount my Aunt took out each year to live on had been more than replaced by new growth each year. Clearly, Ledbetter was something of a stock-picking genius.
By the time I finally fell asleep, it was getting light. I was woken up mid-morning by the ringing of my phone. It was Officer Reyes on the other end.
“I thought you might be relieved to know,” he said stiffly, “that you are no longer a suspect in your cousin’s death.”
No one had bothered to inform me I was a suspect in the first place, but I decided to let it go.
“The fingerprints on the antique Colt were a perfect match for you,” Officer Reyes said, “but the results of the autopsy showed your cousin died of a single bullet to the head.”
I wasn’t at all sure how that conclusively
ruled me out as a suspect, but I kept listening.
“The bullet that killed your cousin was a 9mm. She was shot with a different gun. The forensic analysis also suggested that she was shot from a distance of ten to twenty feet.”
Interesting.
“What kind of guns take 9mm bullets?” I asked.
“The bullet could have come from any number of modern handguns,” Officer Reyes said. “It doesn’t get us any closer to finding your cousin’s killer, but it is clear that the antique revolver was planted at the scene.”
After Officer Reyes hung up, I was in no mental state to doze off again, so I got dressed and took Earp out back to answer the call of nature.
After Earp had done his business, I knocked on the door of Ledbetter’s trailer. When he answered, I told him what Officer Reyes had told me about the bullet that had killed Freida.
“Do you know anybody around here who carries a 9mm handgun?” I asked him.
“I carry one,” said Ledbetter, “I have a Beretta. I keep it next to my bed when I’m sleeping, and I stick it in my saddlebag when I take my bike out.”
I didn’t think Ledbetter would be so forthcoming with that information if he were the one who’d shot Freida, so I asked, “Anybody else? Does Hank carry a handgun?”
“Hank hates guns,” Ledbetter said. “As a boy, his father was killed in a hunting accident, so he refuses to touch firearms.”
“Oh, what about Nancy?”
“Nancy carries a 9mm Luger,” Ledbetter said.
“Do you think she could have shot Freida?” I asked. “Officer Reyes said Freida was shot from a distance.”
“How would that even be possible?” Ledbetter asked. “Freida was found inside a room in the motel.”
“I think it’s time we took another look at room one,” I said.
Ledbetter walked me over to the motel, but he didn’t seem awfully eager to go inside room one.
“I’ll keep an eye on Earp while you snoop around,” he told me. “I really don’t believe you are going to find anything. The police already went over the place with a fine-tooth comb.”
Inside room one, everything appeared exactly as it had last I had seen it, minus Freida’s body sprawled across the old mattress in the middle of the floor. There was a tiny dark brown stain on the mattress where blood had trickled from the wound in my cousin’s head. I tried not to look at it.
I looked around the perimeter of the room, trying to figure out how anyone could have managed to shoot Freida from a distance. Of course, there was the possibility that someone had shot her elsewhere and then moved the body into the motel.
This theory was complicated by the fact that several people had heard gunshots. In fact, the sound of shots was what had summoned Oliver to room one in the first place, but it was always possible that whoever had killed Freida might have moved her body and then fired off a gun to make it seem as if she’d just been shot.
The only possible point of entry for a bullet, assuming that Freida had died inside the motel room, was through a broken window facing the road which passed by Little Tombstone and continued on to the cemetery and ended at the gated entrance to Nancy Flynn’s ranch.
I was about to go out and look around for possible places the shooter might have been standing when I noticed a bit of splintered wood on the underside of the trim around the windowsill. I went closer to investigate.
“Come in and take a look at this,” I called out to Ledbetter.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ledbetter came inside reluctantly, dragging an equally reluctant Earp behind him. Earp strained in the direction of the mattress, and when Ledbetter let him, he went over and started sniffing so vigorously I thought he might hyperventilate.
“Did you find anything?” Ledbetter asked.
“Look at that,” I said and pointed to the splintered windowsill.
I took Earp’s leash so Ledbetter could squat down and examine the wood. The damage was barely visible when standing.
Ledbetter prodded the spot with his finger, then took out his pocketknife.
“Do you think that’s a bullet in there?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Maybe we should leave it be until the police can take a look,” I said.
“You’re probably right about that.”
Ledbetter put his knife away. As he moved back from the window, he stepped on a floorboard that squeaked loudly.
This attracted the attention of the already overwrought Earp. The pug darted over and started nosing around the floorboards. I went over and put a dog treat in front of his nose. While Earp was wolfing it down, I examined the board. It looked loose. I found an old table knife lying nearby and used it to pry up the corner of the board.
When I removed the board, I found nothing but dirt underneath.
“Do you think this was a hiding place?” I asked Ledbetter.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or it might just be a loose board. This place is practically falling down around our heads.”
He was right about that.
The ground underneath the board was far looser than I would have expected desert soil to be after sitting under a building for over fifty years.
“Want to try this?” Ledbetter handed me an old spoon he’d found in the piles of junk scattered around the room.
I took the spoon and dug around in the loose soil. I found nothing but some rusty nails and an old button. Regardless, I was convinced that, up until quite recently, something had been hidden there underneath the floorboards.
“I’d better call Officer Reyes,” I told Ledbetter, “and have him send someone out to have a look at this second bullet. Maybe they already found it, but he didn’t mention it to me, so it’s better to be sure.”
After I’d parted ways with Ledbetter and called Officer Reyes, I turned my attention to the thing I’d been dreading most: visiting Abigail and Georgia.
I texted Abigail and got no reply. Georgia, however, replied back right away and suggested that we meet in a little coffee shop in Santa Fe.
Three hours later, I was sitting on the second-story terrace of an old adobe building in the historic district. It was a beautiful sunny fall day, and I was basking in the sunshine, eyes closed against the bright light, when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was Georgia. I wanted to hug my cousin, but we’re not a family of huggers, so I shuffled around awkwardly and ended up slapping her on the back.
“I’m so sorry about your sister,” I said.
Georgia mumbled something under her breath—I think it was “thanks”—and asked me if I’d ordered.
After that, we digressed into small talk. I asked Georgia how her little boy was doing—she had a six-year-old named Maxwell—and she asked me how I was settling down at Little Tombstone. This went on for ten minutes while we waited for our coffees.
After the coffees arrived, I got to the point.
“I’d like to talk about Freida’s death,” I said, “if you’re up to it.”
Georgia nodded stiffly.
“I was a suspect for a short time,” I said.
This appeared to be news to Georgia. “Why would they think you did it?” she asked.
“Freida was holding Uncle Ricky’s antique revolver in her hand when her body was discovered,” I said. “Someone stole Uncle Ricky’s revolver from Aunt Geraldine’s apartment not long before Freida died, and my fingerprints were on it, so the police figured—”
“But why would anyone think you’d want to kill Freida? Do they think just because we were contesting the will—”
I noticed that Georgia was using the past tense. Had Freida been the sole driving force behind the campaign to gain control of Little Tombstone?
“The police don’t know about this,” I said as I withdrew my grandmother’s confession letter from my handbag, “but if they had, this alone would have been enough to convince them I had a motive.”
I handed the letter over to Georgia.
“A few
days before Freida died, she came by Little Tombstone and informed me that I must relinquish all claims on Little Tombstone, or she was taking that letter to the police and the press.”
Georgia read through the letter and then, to my shock, took it and tore it up in little bits, right there at the table.
“It’s clearly fake,” she said, “Freida must have typed up that letter and forged Aunt Betty’s signature.”
Georgia stuffed the pieces of torn paper one by one into the remains of her coffee, replaced the plastic lid and shook it a little.
“There,” she said. “That’s taken care of.”
I supposed that it was, but what I didn’t understand was how completely confident Georgia could be that my grandmother had nothing to do with the untimely disappearance of the Halversons.
“I know who did it,” Georgia said. “I know who killed the Halversons. It wasn’t your grandmother.”
“Who was it?” I asked.
“It was a hit-and-run,” Georgia said, “but from what I understand, it wouldn’t have changed anything if the person who hit them hadn’t panicked. They both died at the scene.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
Georgia pressed her lips together and lapsed into silence.
“I’m pretty sure those bones they dug up from under the trailer court are the remains of the Halversons,” I told Georgia. “I assume you’ve heard about that.”
“I did,” Georgia said. “Freida said there was a broken water main or something. She seemed a little shocked there were bodies buried at Little Tombstone.”
“Freida didn’t know how the Halversons died?”
“Freida didn’t know a lot of things. Freida wasn’t the sort to be trusted with sensitive information, so nobody told her.”
I decided I wasn’t going to get any more information about the Halversons out of Georgia, so I moved on to the horrible main topic.
“I was there at the scene,” I said, “shortly after Freida died, and I’m having a very hard time believing it was a suicide.”
“That’s what the detective told us, too,” Georgia was looking a bit pale. She’d been idly drawing lines with her finger in some sugar that had spilled on the tabletop. I noticed her hands were shaking.