by Celia Kinsey
Oliver stayed for supper before retiring to his room in the tiny under-renovation eight-room motel that adjoined the trailer court behind the Bird Cage. Janey walked him to the bottom of the stairs, and, judging by the length of time they loitered at the bottom, they were quickly moving out of the friend zone.
I was happy for them. At least, I would have been happy for them if I hadn’t been so worried about the continued health and safety Oliver’s new ladylove.
I slept fitfully on the couch that night, with Earp curled up at my feet, still smelling of fresh mint and festooned with fragments of toilet paper. Janey had been resistant to me giving up my bed, but I had insisted. I wasn’t motivated primarily by an impulse to be generous. I wanted to be the one closest to the door in case we should get any unwelcome night visitors.
Before I went to sleep, I checked the locks on all the windows—even though we were on the second story. I then went to the bottom of the stairwell and tried the knob. I went back upstairs and double-locked the apartment door behind me. Then I retrieved a driver from my late Uncle Ricky’s set of golf clubs that Georgia and I had stashed in the coat closet until we figured out what to do with them.
My Uncle Ricky hadn’t used the clubs to play golf; he’d used them to hit rocks at rattlesnakes. I figured anything that could dispatch a rattlesnake could dispatch a venomous human, so I placed the driver within easy reach.
My precautions proved to be wholly unnecessary. I woke up to bright sunlight and the smell of frying bacon.
“Did you sleep all right out here?” Georgia asked.
I stood up, stretched, and promptly tripped over the driver I’d left beside the couch.
“Where’s Janey?” I asked Georgia as I rubbed the tender spot on my shin where I’d just pitched into the coffee table.
“In the shower,” said Georgia.
“Keep an eye on her,” I said. “Don’t let her go anywhere on her own.”
“Where are you running off to? Don’t you want any breakfast?” Georgia demanded.
“I’m going up to Nancy’s ranch. I’ll eat when I get back.”
“Don’t you think you’re in deep enough as it is?” Georgia eyed the bathroom door and raised her eyebrows.
“I can’t help myself.”
“Well, come straight back,” said Georgia. “If you’re just looking for a way to occupy your mind, I have a little problem of my own I’d like to discuss with you.”
Chapter Nine
I texted Nancy and told her I was coming up. She doesn’t take kindly to unexpected visitors. By not taking kindly to them, I mean she’s been known to point a shotgun in the direction of trespassers.
Nancy texted back and informed me that the gate was unlocked and that I could drive straight up to the house.
I intended to have a word with Nancy, but when I got there, instead of knocking on the front door of Nancy’s home, I headed for the bunkhouse.
I stood on the porch of the bunkhouse in the frosty early morning air and knocked. Nobody answered. I decided that the remaining residents of the bunkhouse must be up at the main house eating breakfast, or perhaps after the events of the previous day they’d elected to sleep elsewhere. I certainly would have.
I turn the knob and pressed gently on the door. It swung open easily.
“Hello!” I said to the empty room.
I stepped inside. Everything in the bunk room looked much as it had the previous day, minus the dead cowboy. Somebody had stripped Jorge’s bunk and replaced the bedding with a couple of suitcases, which I assumed contained the murdered man’s personal effects. I made a mental note to find out if Jorge had family in the area.
I crept over to the bathroom and gingerly pushed the door open. Someone had cleaned up the blood from the tiles, although a closer inspection showed faint rusty red smudges remained near the sink. I hoped the police had taken samples to determine who exactly had been bleeding all over the place.
There wasn’t much to see in the bath, so I returned my attention to the bunk room. I knew questions would be asked if someone came and found that I’d locked myself into the bunkhouse, but even if I didn’t lock myself in, questions were going to be asked anyway. I went to the door and pulled the bolt so that even someone with a key couldn’t sneak up on me.
I then went straight to Jasper’s bunk and started rifling through his stuff. There wasn’t much to rifle through.
Janey’s brother, like Janey herself, was very neat and tidy. He also appeared to be a minimalist. In a plastic bin under the bed I found three nearly identical blue chambray western shirts, two pairs of Wranglers and a few pairs of underwear and socks. There was a spare pair of worn snakeskin cowboy boots lying toes-out under the bed. They were spattered with what looked like paint and motor oil.
I turned my attention to the second, smaller bin. Inside was loose change, Jasper’s social security card, a phone charger, and a small leather case containing tools I could not identify. I took out my phone and snapped pictures of a few pages from the notebook and the tools inside the case.
Only one item remained under the bed: a laundry bag. I almost skipped the laundry bag. I wasn’t in the mood to rifle through other people’s dirty socks. I’m never in the mood to rifle through other people’s dirty socks. I decided I’d just peek inside the bag.
What I saw surprised me. There might have been some dirty socks at the bottom of the bag, but what lay on top was a pair of mechanic’s coveralls.
If Jasper Hamm was normally neat and tidy, he appeared to make an exception when he was doing mechanical work. The coveralls were covered in grease, metal shavings and what appeared to be overspray from automotive paint. At one time there had been a name patch sewn to the chest, but it had been ripped off.
I had just gotten the coveralls stuffed back into the laundry bag when there was a rattling of the doorknob, which quickly escalated to a banging on the door. The banging soon gave way to yelling.
I recognized the voice. It was Hugo, and he wanted to know why August had locked himself inside the bunkhouse.
“I’m out here,” said a second male voice, which I surmised must belong to August.
While Hugo and August debated how the door came to be bolted shut, I slipped into the bathroom and slid open the sash window as quietly as I could. It was a tight fit, but I managed to wedge myself through, and dropped to the ground.
It was a good thing I’d opted to make my escape, because as I rounded the corner of the bunkhouse, Hugo was kicking the door in.
“Good morning,” I said. “Have you seen Nancy around?”
“She’s up at the house,” August told me.
“What about Jasper?” I asked.
August got quiet. He looked over at Hugo, but Hugo was too busy trying to break the door down to notice.
“Ain’t seen him,” said August.
“Since when?”
“Since yesterday morning. Before—you know.”
The door finally gave way and Hugo wrenched it open.
“Problem solved,” he said.
I wondered if Hugo’s default solution for every problem he encountered was violence, but it wasn’t the sort of question one can ask out loud. So far, my presence seemed barely to have registered with Hugo, and I wanted to keep it that way.
“See you around,” I told August, and headed up to the house.
As I knocked on the back door, I could see Nancy loading the dishwasher. She waved me inside and placed a cup of coffee in my hand.
“What can I do for you, Emma?” she asked.
I told her about Hugo’s threatening phone call to Jasper and my conviction that Janey was in danger. Then I told her about finding the bloody glove with Jasper’s initials.
“August tells me that no one around here has seen Jasper since yesterday morning,” I said.
“He came to breakfast yesterday, and that’s the last we’ve seen of him,” Nancy told me.
“I’m starting to think he was the one who was bleedi
ng all over the bathroom floor yesterday morning.”
“If that were true, then why didn’t he go straight to the hospital, or to the police?”
“There wasn’t a lot of blood, so maybe he isn’t hurt that badly, or maybe he collapsed somewhere and can’t go for help. We know for certain he doesn’t have his phone with him.”
Nancy shrugged.
“Have you ever known Jasper to fight with the others?” I asked Nancy
“No. I thought Jasper, Hugo, and Jorge were like three peas in a pod.”
“Oh?”
“Practically every evening after they’re done working, they go off somewhere.”
“Together?”
“Jorge and Hugo, do, for sure.”
“What about Jasper?”
“I often see him leaving in the evenings after supper, but he usually borrows August’s truck.”
“Where do they go?”
“I have no idea. They just work for me. I’m not their mother.”
I thought Nancy was a bit defensive, but I guess I’d be feeling a bit defensive, too, if one of my employees had gotten shot dead in his sleep while I was in town buying pig feed.
“Are you sure August wasn’t in the habit of going out with the others in the evening?” I asked.
Nancy told me August seemed to have gotten along fine with the others, but that he stayed in evenings to study for his GED. She also pointed out that August was least a decade older than the other three of her hands and that might have made a difference in how they’d bonded.
“Every time I go down to the bunkhouse, I see August’s study materials spread out on the table by the window.”
“That table next to the woodstove?”
“I know August studies every evening because I can see his hat through the window.”
“He wears his hat inside?”
“I’m not sure he even takes it off to sleep.”
I think Nancy was joking.
“How are you going to get along with Jorge gone and Jasper missing?” I asked.
“Jasper is my pigman, and I can carry on with feeding and watering them until he shows up again, but—”
If he shows up again, I wanted to point out.
“But?”
“Jasper is a real animal lover and takes terrific care of my pigs. He’s such an animal lover that he would have refused to raise animals for anything but pets. He’s the one who talked me into the potbellies. He’s a vegan.”
“A vegan cowboy?”
“The first I’ve ever come across,” Nancy admitted.
“Exactly how vegan is Jasper?”
At first Nancy didn’t grasp what I was getting at. I explained that I wanted to know if Jasper’s veganism extended to a distaste for all animal products, or if his prohibition against exploiting our fellow creatures only extended to what he put in his stomach.
Nancy said she’d never felt the need to keep tabs on the wardrobe and personal care product choices of her hands. She left off the bit where she called me an idiot for thinking she’d concern herself with such things, but I could tell she was thinking it.
“What about the pigs?” I asked. “Who’s taking care of them?”
“I can go out there morning and evening and throw a little feed in the troughs for the sows, but it’s the runt of the litter I’m worried about,” Nancy said. “She’s not as strong as her littermates, and they won’t let her eat, and I don’t have time to be bottle feeding a finicky piglet three or four times a day.”
I’d been digesting the revelation that Jasper was a vegan pigman with one half of my brain. Now I devoted the other half to cooking up a solution to Nancy’s conundrum of what to do with her runt.
“It may not work,” I told Nancy. “But I might have a rather unorthodox solution to your piglet problem.”
Chapter Ten
Solving Nancy’s piglet problem would have to wait. While I’d been sitting in Nancy’s kitchen, I’d seen Hugo take off toward town in one of the trucks belonging to the ranch. I intended to pump August for information while Hugo—who I found rather frightening, to be honest—wasn’t around to interfere.
“Do you mind if I have a word with August? I have a few questions for him.”
“Ask away,” said Nancy.
I was halfway out the back door when Nancy reminded me that the Little Tombstone Preservation Board was meeting that evening in the dining room of the Bird Cage.
“I’ll probably be back later today to collect your runt,” I told Nancy in parting. “I suspect I may be in possession of a perfect pair of piglet-sitters.”
I got out the door and to the barn barely in time to catch August, before he, too, took off on a quad. Judging by the fence wire and the tools strapped to the back, he was on a fence-mending mission, which was where he claimed to have been the previous morning when Jorge met his demise in the bunkhouse.
The engine to the quad was running, and when I walked up behind August and tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped. When I motioned to the running engine, he shut it off and listened politely to my questions regarding the distressing occurrences of the previous day.
He confirmed that he had departed the ranch headquarters shortly after breakfast the previous day to ride the fence. August had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary until he’d arrived back at the bunkhouse to find the police removing yellow crime scene tape from the premises. The police had asked him a lot of questions, but, by August’s own admission, he’d provided them nothing in the way of useful information.
When I asked August point-blank if he knew anything about the whereabouts of Jasper Hamm, he told me he hadn’t seen Jasper since the previous morning and had no idea where he might have gone off to.
“Nancy says that Jorge, Hugo, and Jasper would often go somewhere together in the evenings,” I told August. “Do you have any idea where they were going?”
August shrugged. “Drinking, maybe?”
If anyone wants to have a drink in Amatista, their best bet is to come to the Bird Cage Café and order a cerveza or two, and I mean that literally. Juanita maintains a liquor license, but she also enforces a strict two-drink maximum per patron, per visit, and she only stocks beer. Juanita, who is personally a tea-totaler and a devout churchgoer, maintains she’s running a restaurant, not a bar. Diners don’t have to be drunk to get cut off.
If anyone wants to get drunk, or even buzzed, they’ll have to drive north out of town to the truck stop and buy their own bottles.
I’d never seen Jasper, Hugo, or Jorge sitting in the Bird Cage drinking beer of an evening. I supposed it was possible that Nancy’s three ranch hands had been in the habit of traveling to the truck stop, buying a case and splitting it between them while they sat on lawn chairs in the bed of a pickup and looked up at the stars, but I didn’t find that theory very likely.
“I hear you stay in evenings to study for your GED.”
August started slightly, which made me wonder if he was less than pleased that his status as a high school dropout was being made common knowledge.
“I do,” he said, but only after a pause.
“I’ve been made aware that Jasper was moonlighting as a mechanic,” I said.
I watched August’s face grow wary. He knew more than he was going to tell me.
“He worked on his sister’s car from time to time,” August said, “and maybe the cars of friends, but I don’t think he was doing it professionally.”
The state of those coveralls I’d discovered in Jasper’s laundry bag suggested differently, but I did not press my point.
“Did you ever know Jasper and Hugo to fight with each other?” I asked.
August had never seen them fight, although he did describe Hugo as being hot tempered and prone to outbursts. I suspected that was something of an understatement.
“Jorge hit me once, though,” said August.
“Why?”
“I broke one of his tools.”
This did not surpr
ise me. Apparently, Jorge had made a habit of hitting people.
I thanked August for his time and drove back down the hill to Little Tombstone.
There was a plate of bacon and eggs waiting for me on my arrival. My cousin Georgia, for all her girlhood prickles and peevishness, was proving to be a much better housemate than I had anticipated when I’d agreed to let her and little Maxwell move in with me. I was fast growing attached to them, and when they finally managed to carve out a habitable space of their own from the ramshackle tourist cottage out back of the trailer court, I was going to miss them.
I sat eating my bacon and eggs, thinking these warm thoughts, and stifling the impulse to give Georgia an awkward one-armed hug/slap on the back as she stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. We are not a family of huggers and probably never will be. My affectionate impulse was aborted when Georgia broke the silence.
“We’ve got to do something about Hank.”
Georgia spoke quietly as if worried little ears were listening. I could hear Maxwell back in the spare bedroom he currently shared with his mother. He was solemnly instructing Earp on the hunting habits of the Chupacabra and how the rare beasts could be observed in the wild if one went out in search of them under the full moon.
I had no doubt where Maxwell had come upon this information. The cornerstone exhibit in Hank’s Museum of the Unexplained consisted of a family of stuffed Chupacabras. Grandma Wright and Great Aunt Geraldine had always insisted the family of mythical creatures were the work of a talented and highly creative taxidermist, but Hank, himself, was completely convinced of the Chupacabras’ authenticity.
“I wouldn’t worry about Hank influencing Maxwell to devote his life to the study of Chupacabras,” I told Georgia. “Maxwell will eventually figure out Hank’s just a crazy old coot.”
“It’s not just about the Chupacabras,” Georgia insisted. “Look at this. The entire population of Amatista is conspiring to feed my innocent child hokum and hogwash.”
“Hokum and hogwash” had been one of my grandmother’s favorite expressions, and hearing Georgia use it made me smile.