by Celia Kinsey
“I’m going up to the ranch again this morning,” I said.
“Why?”
“I have some unanswered questions.”
“Don’t we all,” said Georgia as she slammed down a plate of fried eggs on toast in front of me. She then stood over me and watched while I ate it. I was not allowed to be excused until I’d finished.
“I wish you’d let the police take care of this,” my cousin said as I got up from the table and put on my coat.
“Thanks for breakfast.”
“I might as well be talking to a wall,” Georgia grumbled.
“Perhaps you should start yearning for the day when your entire social circle is made entirely of robots.”
“Don’t think I’m not already yearning for the robot revolution.”
“If the robots revolt, wouldn’t that actually be worse than just dealing with uncooperative humans? Any robot worth his motherboard would be smarter, stronger, more—"
That’s when Georgia threw the dishrag at me.
“Don’t touch the dishes,” I told Georgia, “I’ll do every last one of them when I get back.”
I meant it, I really did, but it was useless to offer. I don’t do dishes up to Georgia’s exacting standards. For one thing, I usually forget to put bleach in the rinse water, plus Georgia isn’t able to settle down to anything else knowing there are dishes piled up in the sink covered in bacteria which is doubtlessly procreating up a storm and plotting to bring humanity to its knees one case of food poisoning at a time.
On the way out the back door of the Bird Cage, I dialed Nancy. This time, before going up to the ranch, I’d make sure Hugo and August were out of the way before I started sticking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
When I told Nancy I’d like for her to accompany me on a look around her bunkhouse, she wanted to know why.
“I’ll tell you in person when I get up there. I just want to be sure before I go up there that neither Hugo nor August are around.”
“August went into town this morning,” said Nancy. “Hugo is back from the hospital with a bandage on his head. I still can’t quite get a straight story about what happened to him during the night.”
“You probably won’t,” I said. “I’ll tell you when I get there, provided Hugo isn’t listening.”
“I can send Hugo off on an errand that needs doing anyway,” Nancy said. “He claims to be perfectly fine.”
I gave Nancy half an hour to get Hugo out of the way. If I never saw Hugo Montrose again in this world or the next, it would be too soon. Having someone point a gun at your head has a tendency to dim any future pleasure in their company, as far as I’m concerned.
As I sat at Nancy’s kitchen table and told her what had happened the night before outside the abandoned ranch house, I watched her face. Curiosity morphed into concern, which soon became outrage.
“Hugo told the police he pulled a gun on you because he thought you were a kidnapper?”
That summed up the situation rather neatly.
“There’s nothing I can do, really. It’s just believable enough of a story, given the circumstances, that I don’t see how I’d ever convince a jury that Hugo had any intention of killing me.”
“But I didn’t tell August or Hugo that Maxwell was missing. I had no idea myself.”
“The police may be interested to hear that at some point, but for now—"
“I’ll fire him,” said Nancy “As soon as Hugo walks through that door for lunch, I’ll send him packing.”
The fact that he’d been packing was what had led to the problem in the first place.
“I don’t think you should,” I said. “I didn’t tell you so you’d fire him, I told you because I thought you ought to know what kind of person you are dealing with. I also told you because I’d like your help. If you don’t know all the behind the scenes stuff, what I’m going to ask for won’t make sense.”
“What are you asking for?”
“Several things: but first, I’d like to search the bunkhouse again.”
Nancy raised her eyebrows when I said ‘again,’ but she didn’t ask any more questions. She grabbed her jacket, and we crossed the yard to the bunkhouse.
As we walked, I asked her about the abandoned ranch next door. Nancy said she hadn’t been out there for years, but that the buildings were actually on Flynn Ranch land.
I decided to wait until I was sure to inform her that at least one of her employees was running an illegal enterprise out of her property.
“That used to be my older brother’s ranch,” said Nancy. “He inherited it from our grandfather. It came to me when my brother died.”
“Did you inherit your portion from your grandfather—”
“Grandpappy didn’t believe women should be ranchers. Thought they were temperamentally unsuited. I bought my place with my own money when I was twenty-eight.”
Nancy’s Grandpappy was clearly a poor judge of character, not to mention a good old-fashioned sexist.
“I have lots of fond memories of the place,” said Nancy. “My brother and I used play bunkers in the root cellar.
“Bunkers?”
“We’d pretend we were being bombed and go down into the root cellar and shoot at the enemy flying over through the vent pipe.”
That should have been Grandpappy’s first clue that his granddaughter was up to managing a ranch.
“I almost died there, you know,” said Nancy. “Fell down the old well. Fortunately, it’s not very deep and only had three feet of water in it.”
I wanted to ask more, but now was not the moment for hearing Nancy’s reminiscences. We’d reached the bunkhouse. We hatched a plan, and I went inside.
Nancy stayed out on the porch with a broom in her hand. The porch didn’t really need sweeping, but if anyone approached, she’d appear to be cleaning, not loitering.
If she started whistling Home on the Range—a little on the nose, I know, but it was Nancy’s idea—I’d know that someone was coming. I would cover my tracks and high tail it out the bathroom window. If Nancy switched from Home on the Range to Wipeout (by the Beatles), discovery was imminent.
I was skeptical that Wipeout was a song that lent itself to whistling, but Nancy gave me a few demonstration bars. I made a mental note that should the village of Amatista ever stage an amateur talent competition, Nancy should enter as the Whistling Queen.
When I got inside the bunkhouse, only two bunks had any personal belongings attached to them. The bunk that had belonged to Jorge was bare, and while Jasper’s bunk was still made up, both the plastic bins and the laundry bag, which had been stashed underneath his bed, were missing.
I stuck my head out the door and asked Nancy if anyone had come to take anything away.
“Yesterday morning, a couple of police detectives came and took away Jorge’s things,” she said. “I’d tried to locate some family member, but all the police had on record for next of kin was his ex-girlfriend, and as she’d taken out a restraining order against him—”
“What about Jasper’s things?”
Nancy didn’t know. The police might have taken them, too.
I wondered if someone had finally filed a missing person report on Jasper. I knew Janey hadn’t. I’d asked.
I went back inside and started with Hugo’s belongings. I found absolutely nothing of interest, so I turned to the belongings under August’s bed. The suitcase was just a bunch of clothes, but the contents of the cardboard box beside it turned out to be a lot more interesting.
Inside was a whole stack of mail, some opened, some not, all addressed to a Mr. Augustus Taylor. They’d been sent to three different addresses: one in Des Moines, one in Denver, and one in Omaha. I didn’t dare unseal the closed envelopes, but I took out one of the letters from an envelope that had been torn open. It was a credit card statement, and the number in the balance-due box made my eyes spring from their sockets.
August—or Mr. Augustus Taylor, if you preferred—had racked up an e
normous amount of debt for a man who should have had virtually no expenses besides putting gas in his old truck, buying the odd pair of jeans or boots and a few beers on the weekend.
Clearly, he’d not been taking good advantage of the room and board Nancy provided for her hands.
I spread out three of the envelopes and snapped a photo of the addresses. I concluded that August had been having his mail redirected to Amatista, but why from three different home addresses in three different cities?
I was just removing one of the other opened bills from the envelope when I heard Nancy start sweeping vigorously and whistling.
It wasn’t Home on the Range, it was Wipeout.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I dropped the envelopes into the box and kicked it under the bed, then sprinted for the bathroom where I pulled the door almost shut. Getting out the tiny sash window in the bathroom was no easier the second time around, and just before I dropped to the ground, I heard footsteps on the porch and August say, “Got the pig feed. Put it in the shed.”
I’d walked up to Nancy’s so that nobody would see my car and suspect me of skulking around looking for incriminating evidence.
I didn’t want to be observed walking down the road from the ranch, either, so I took off across the vacant space between Nancy’s ranch headquarters and Little Tombstone.
Halfway back across the rocky expanse of sagebrush and cactus, I got the fright of my life. For a full ten seconds, I was suddenly convinced that I was being buzzed by the world’s largest angry mosquito out for blood.
I may have cowered down and covered my head. A reflex action, you understand, not because I’m afraid of loud noises and unidentified flying objects or anything.
It wasn’t until I heard laughter that I looked up and saw that I was not being harassed by a mutant mosquito, but by a small drone, or rather by the pair of skinny, cowboy-hatted teenage boys controlling it.
It was Cliff and Clive, Nancy’s twin nephews. I’d met them before, but I’d have known they were related to Nancy based purely on appearance. I’ve never seen such a striking family resemblance.
The twins spend a lot of time out at Nancy’s since their father died, and their mother remarried a man who doesn’t like them. According to Nancy, the antipathy is mutual.
While my heart rate was returning to normal, and the twins continued to laugh their heads off, I had an inspiration.
“Do you fly that thing around the ranch a lot?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Cliff.
“What about it?” said Clive.
Clive is the one to watch out for.
“You didn’t happen to be flying your drone the day your aunt’s ranch hand was murdered, by any chance?”
Cliff looked at the ground and shuffled his feet, but Clive looked me straight in the eye.
“Somebody already asked about that.”
“Who?”
“None of your beeswax.”
“Were you flying it over the bunkhouse?”
“What’s it worth to you?”
The kid was shaking me down for money. I was a little shocked, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. I’m sure the Amatista rumor mill had done an excellent job of spreading the word that I’d inherited an impressive stash of cash from my Great Aunt Geraldine.
“Are you trying to start a bidding war?” I asked.
“Maybe I am, maybe I ain’t.”
“Fine,” I said as I riffled through my pockets and pulled out three twenties.
“Nah,” said Clive, ignoring Cliff’s tugging at his sleeve. “The other guy will give me more.”
“How do you know?”
“Besides, I already promised it to him.”
I couldn’t figure out if the kid was lying to me. I decided it didn’t matter.
“How much would it take for you to hand over all the footage from the day of the murder?”
Clive and Cliff withdrew behind a boulder and conferred for a few minutes. They thought I couldn’t hear, but I caught snatches. Cliff was nervous about the whole thing. It seemed he wanted to go to the police with what they had, but Clive disagreed. He argued that here was their chance to “make bank.”
“Five hundred dollars,” said Clive when they came back to stand in front of me.
“Five hundred cash and you give me every second of footage you’ve gotten for the past three weeks.”
“Three weeks?” said Cliff. “There are hours of—”
“All the better,” I said. “For five hundred dollars, I have high expectations.”
Clive hemmed and hawed and then agreed.
“I have one additional condition,” I said. “You are not to tell your other—” I wasn’t sure what to call him, but I finally settled on “buyer.” “You’re not to tell your other buyer who you sold the footage to. I also suggest, for your personal safety, that you take a copy of every bit of footage you give to me straight to the police.”
“Why should we?” said Clive.
“Whoever wants that footage doesn’t want the police to see it,” I said.
“How do you know that?”
I didn’t want to scare the kids, but they needed to know what they were dealing with.
“Last night, someone threatened to shoot me because I’ve been doing a little amateur investigation into who killed Jorge.”
Cliff’s eyes got big, but Clive just upped his swagger, clearly his default reaction to getting scared.
“Let me take a guess at who wants that footage,” I said. “If I get it right, you have to tell me.”
“Why should we?” said Clive.
“There’s an extra hundred dollars in it if you give me three guesses.”
“Two guesses.”
“Fine.”
I stuck out my hand to shake on it, then said, ”It was Hugo Montrose, wasn’t it?”
I watched Cliff’s face. He was the more honest of the two. And the most scared.
“Wrong!” said Clive and made that buzzer sound they use on quiz shows when somebody gives an incorrect answer.
I looked at Cliff. He shook his head. I decided neither boy was lying.
“I get one more guess,” I said.
The boys watched me as I tried to decide between my other two suspects. I had been eighty-percent sure it had been Hugo that had wanted the footage, but it seemed I’d been wrong.
“Was it Augustus Taylor?”
Clive didn’t answer right away. He didn’t have to. Cliff’s face told me everything I needed to know.
“Bring your footage down to the Bird Cage by noon,” I said. “When you hand over the footage, I’ll hand over the cash.”
At a quarter to twelve, we made the exchange in the back vestibule of the Bird Cage. When Clive handed over the USB, I insisted on inserting it into my laptop and scrolling through the files. There were at least twenty hours of footage; it would take me forever to get through it all.
“You’ve made a copy of this for the police?” I asked.
Clive said, “Yes,” but Cliff’s face said no.
I decided not to press the matter. Even if the boys presented the police with twenty hours of footage, I doubted the Santa Fe Sheriff’s department would have the resources to get someone to sit through it all looking for something which might not even be there.
I’d scour the footage myself, and if I found anything that seemed significant, I’d take that clip to Officer Reyes.
I handed three hundreds to Clive and three hundreds to Cliff and told them to take it down to the local bank and open themselves a savings account.
Clive openly scoffed at the notion, and Cliff didn’t seem to think much of it either, although he was less rude in his protest.
“I don’t really care what you do with the money,” I said. “Just don’t get involved any further with August Taylor if you can help it. If he asks for the footage, give it to him, and for Pete’s sake, don’t try to shake him down for money like you did me.”
“I thought—�
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“That man’s dangerous,” I said, “and the same goes for Hugo Montrose.”
“Why are you—”
“You should also know that your aunt is in full possession of the terms of our little transaction. I called her a few minutes ago.”
“You told Aunt Nancy!” Clive wailed.
Cliff looked a trifle ill.
“You never asked me not to, and your aunt has your best interest at heart.”
The twins didn’t appear to be so sure of Nancy’s best interests but cut short their indignant protests when I floated the idea that, should I suggest it, their aunt would likely be more than happy to drive them up to the Santa Fe Savings and Loan and help them open a college fund account and oversee their first deposit. When I pointed out that their initial deposit would earn them their first half-day of college classes, Cliff looked even iller, and Clive announced that he was going to be a heavy equipment operator and intended to make “good money” without the benefit of a college education.
“I’ll be sure and share any findings of interest from your footage with your aunt,” I said to their retreating backs.
I took my laptop upstairs, but instead of diving into the footage, I typed the name Augustus Taylor into the search bar. I didn’t come up with anything of interest, so I added the words “arrest” and “Denver.”
Nothing. I substituted “Des Moines” for “Denver.”
That’s where things got interesting. Augustus, or someone sharing his name, had been arrested for bigamy three years previously. Subsequent searching revealed that he’d been convicted and served six months of a two-year sentence. All those home addresses were starting to make a lot more sense.
I took out my phone and typed in the addresses from the creditor’s demands I’d found amongst August’s things. If the people-lookup-sites I used were accurate, which they often were not, I now had a list of twenty potential names of August’s possibly multiple wives and children. I’d look into that later, but in the meantime, I had another problem to consider.
Roberta Haskell was going around and telling anyone who’d listen that Juanita was stealing her blind. I didn’t believe it, but people who knew Juanita less well might, and I couldn’t clear Juanita’s name until I got to the bottom of the problem of the missing mail.