The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

by Nancy Pickard

  Mrs. Potter suddenly found a napkin that needed her full attention to refold. Jed started telling her what he hadn’t gotten around to earlier, about his marriage, his family, his divorce.

  “I met Cynthia about three years after graduation, and we married within the year. We had Haj a couple of years later.”

  “Haj?”

  “Harry J.”

  Mrs. Potter was just on the verge of saying, “So he’d be about thirty-six by now?” when Jed hurried into speech again, and she was relieved she hadn’t had the chance to inquire. Jed and Cynthia’s only child had died in Vietnam in the closing days of the war. He’d gone straight from Harvard Medical School to the army surgical corps, and had served only two months of his duty when the helicopter in which he was riding with wounded soldiers on board had crashed in the jungle.

  “We were lucky,” Jed said, in a quiet and steady voice. “His friends recovered his body and we were able to bury him at home. Cynthia blamed me for his death, because I didn’t try to dissuade him from enlisting. I think she finally divorced me when she just couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. Being a reminder of Haj, you see. She may be right. At the time, I thought he was a grown man who had earned the privilege to make his own decisions.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped him, Jed.”

  “No, and I couldn’t have draped beads over him and stuck flowers in his hair and turned him into a hippie, either. I know that. Rationally. But in my heart, I want to go back in time and try to talk him out of going. I want to listen to his mother. Cynthia was terrified when he left, convinced we’d never see him again. It’s no wonder she never forgave me. I was so proud of him, my handsome, smart young doctor son going off to war, that I nearly cheered for him on the day he left. Oh, I’d change it all, if I could.” He managed a lopsided smile. “I’ll even go so far as to say that I wish I had been a radical Democrat in those days instead of a conservative Republican. I wish I had raised Haj in a household that voted for Eugene McCarthy, so there wouldn’t have been any way for him to consider going to war. I would change everything about the way I was—the way I am—if it would bring him back again.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jed. I can only imagine the pain.”

  He bowed his head for a moment, but when he looked up again his hazel eyes were clear and calm. “It’s been rough. Never goes away. Never should, I guess. Breaks my heart every time I read in the newspaper about somebody’s child being dead or missing. I know how they feel. It’s like reliving it every time.”

  “Then this”—Mrs. Potter motioned vaguely with her hand, as if to encompass the entire situation at her ranch—“is especially painful for you to witness.”

  “You have to find that girl, Andy.”

  “You understand what her family’s going through, don’t you?”

  “It’s an unbelievable hell, you can’t imagine. No, I take that back, you’re one of the few people I’ve ever known who actually can put yourself in another person’s shoes. I always liked that about you, it was like admiring somebody who was really good at”—Jed laughed suddenly, and Mrs. Potter wondered why—“poetry!” Now she understood, and smiled over at him. “One of those talents I didn’t have, heaven knows.”

  “They were lovely poems, Jed.” There was laughter in Mrs. Potter’s voice as she said it. “At least, I loved them.”

  “They were heartfelt, I’ll say that for them.”

  “I probably still have them somewhere.”

  “No! You don’t, really?”

  Mrs. Potter noticed that in spite of his horrified amusement, he looked a bit pink at the top of his lovely, aristocratic-looking ears. Stop that! she said to herself. Leave the man’s ears out of this. “Anyway, it sounds to me as if you have learned to put yourself in another person’s shoes, judging by your sympathy for Linda’s family.”

  “Andy?”

  “Yes, Jed?”

  “Wouldn’t you really rather be out there helping to look for her?”

  Mrs. Potter admitted it with a nod.

  “Well, you did promise me a ranch tour …”

  “Oh, Jed,” she exclaimed, having instantly comprehended his meaning. “Thank you. I haven’t wanted to go out by myself because I’m always afraid that if the car breaks down I’ll be in a real fix out there in the pastures, miles from home. And I thought I could truly be of more help by staying here to field phone calls and fix the chili. But yes, I hate being so passive. I really want to get out there and look for them everywhere I can think to look. Would you really go with me?”

  “It would make me feel better too.”

  Mrs. Potter understood what he meant, and that it had something to do with his own lost boy.

  CHAPTER 15

  In her four-wheel-drive vehicle, with Mrs. Potter driving and Jed in the passenger’s seat, he said it was her turn to talk. He wanted to know more about Lew and about her children; he wanted to know “the long story” about how she’d ended up in Arizona.

  “And Maine and Iowa,” she added.

  “So tell me everything you’ve done every minute of the day for the last forty years. Don’t skip anything. Tell me what you love, tell me what you hate, tell me what interests you and makes you laugh and what you do with your spare time, and whether you have any spare time, and tell me what you read and did you do those beautiful needlepoints in your house, and—”

  Mrs. Potter took her hand off the gear shift long enough to hold it up, as she laughed, to halt his flow of questions.

  “One of my daughters writes,” she teased him, “and she tells me that a cardinal rule of writing is ‘show, don’t tell.’ ”

  “I can’t wait that long, Andy. You’re going to have to tell me. We’ve wasted too many years already. You’ll just have to tell me some things, to catch me up to this moment. In the meantime, you are showing me”—he suddenly turned his face toward the window. Mrs. Potter thought, but could not be entirely sure, that the phrase with which he ended that sentence was—“what I’ve missed.”

  “I wish,” she said, abruptly, “we could climb to the top of El Bizcocho.”

  “El what?”

  She pointed. “See that sandstone formation, how it looks like a big round biscuit? I’m told that from the top of that, you can see all of Wind Valley in every direction. Ricardo says it gives you a perspective on things, shows you the topography in its proper scale …”

  “That’s what I’d like to have, all right, perspective. Actually, I think age has imparted a bit of that to me, although—Andy?”

  Her thoughts elsewhere, she didn’t answer him.

  “Andy, what’s the matter?”

  “It isn’t ‘Elb,’ it’s ‘El b.’ And what was the number beside it? Five, I think. El b: 5. Circled. As if it was important. I wonder if Ricardo was supposed to meet someone at El Bizcocho at five o’clock. And would that be morning or evening?”

  “I suppose you know what you’re talking about, Andy? It’s all Czechoslovakian to me.”

  “Morning, I’ll bet. And that’s why he left so early, with Linda following him.” She turned toward her passenger. “Jed, who did my foreman make an appointment to meet at El Bizcocho at five o’clock on the morning he disappeared? Did he ever get there? What happened to him there, if he did?”

  “Croatian.”

  “What?”

  “The foreign language you’re speaking, which I hope you’re going to translate so that I may continue to converse with you.”

  Mrs. Potter put the car in reverse, backed it up, wheeled around to the east, and said, “Sorry. I’ll explain as we go there.”

  “Go where?”

  “An old Czechoslovakian landmark, Jed. Better known to you tourists as The Biscuit.”

  Jed insisted on opening and closing all the gates for her.

  “They’re called Texas gates,” she told him, when he asked about the triple strands of barbed wire strung between two light end poles. All he had to do was drop the gate to the ground while she drov
e through and then pick the gate up again and refasten it before climbing back into the car with her.

  “You’ll get your exercise today, Jed.”

  “Good. I need it,” he said, with a hand on the paunch that seemed to Mrs. Potter virtually to have disappeared in the last couple of hours. Maybe she’d only imagined it. He really was wonderfully slim and vigorous for a man of his—their—age, she thought, and was glad there wasn’t any roll of flab at her own waistline in spite of the fact that it still felt too tight after her weeks away from the ranch. “I’ve never seen white cattle before, what are these fellows?”

  “A mix of Charolais, which is a French breed as you may tell by the name, and Brahman. They get the grayish-white color from the Charolais. The Brahman blood is what gives them that slight hump between their shoulders and that funny-looking wattle under their chins. I think it makes them look rather wise, myself. Or foolish, I’m not sure which. Rather like some old men I’ve known. They get those long droopy ears from the Brahman side of the family.”

  “The old men, or the bulls?”

  Mrs. Potter laughed out loud, which produced a pleased smile on her companion’s face. She pointed to an enormous white bull who stared aggressively at them from beyond a fence in the next pasture. He had a confident, kingly bearing, a noble brow, and short white curls above wide-set eyes.

  “There’s our only full-blooded Charolais bull, Jed. I think I keep him just because he’s so gorgeous. Ricardo says that Charolais bulls make him think of Roman emperors. He says they only lack a toga, casually tossed over one of those great shoulders, to be hailed as Caesars.”

  “I’m impressed by your knowledge, Andy.”

  “Don’t be. I have only the most superficial knowledge about cattle and ranching. If you want to hear it from an expert, you’ll have to talk to Ricardo.” Mrs. Potter paused for a moment, took a breath, swallowed hard. Jed suddenly reached over and placed his left hand on top of her hand on the gear shift. She felt enormously comforted by his sympathetic touch, so much so, in fact, that she nearly burst into tears. Only iron self-control—fueled by a horror of disgracing herself in front of him—kept her from displaying the fear and sadness that had lodged, seemingly permanently, beneath her breastbone. In a few moments, she felt sufficiently in control of her emotions to continue. Jed removed his hand from atop hers, but the warmth of his touch lingered on her skin. “I don’t have any illusions about my abilities as a cowboy or a ranch manager. I’ll tell you, Jed, I would be at such a loss without him.”

  “Like losing Lew all over again?”

  “Oh, no, not like that, but it would be an awful blow, and to a lot more people than myself.” She told Jed about Ricardo’s near-legendary standing in the community, about his status as the best cowboy and one of the finest men in the valley, how he knew everything and everybody. She related stories of his generosity to their neighbors, of the helping hand he’d lent to everybody from Bandy’s “nephews” to landowners like Charlie Watt and the McHenrys.…

  “You don’t mean Reynolds McHenry?”

  Mrs. Potter glanced in surprise at Jed. “You know him?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. Finally, he seemed to come to some decision. When he turned his face toward her again, there was a bemused smile on it. “He’s the business I’m here to do.”

  “What?” Mrs. Potter felt a stirring of unease. “Are you saying that Reynolds McHenry is your potential client for J. H. White Research?”

  “Yes, I didn’t dream you’d know him.”

  “Jed, surely you can see by now that everybody knows everybody else in Wind Valley. I couldn’t possibly not know Reynolds. Or Marj, for that matter.”

  “His wife.”

  “Yes.”

  She felt Jed’s gaze on her, studying her, it seemed.

  “Why,” he said, “do I get the feeling you’re holding out on me?”

  Mrs. Potter was taken aback by his perception. But she didn’t want to gossip about her neighbors, particularly when it might do them actual harm in terms of a business deal that was none of her business. And besides, she didn’t have anything concrete to say, nothing she could prove, because nobody really knew what the McHenrys were up to on their exceedingly private property. So she ducked and feinted, saying lightly, “I’d say you’re the one who’s holding back!”

  “Well, remember those industrial secrets that Lew used to share with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The ones you promised not to reveal unless you were tortured?”

  “Like the orange peel in my chili, yes.”

  “I think you’re about to hear some more of those secrets, Andy. This business of mine with the McHenrys is very hush-hush. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention the connection to anybody. We’re talking about the possibility of a merger, and so it’s important that no word get out. White Research went public a few years ago, and so any leak of this might affect our stock. I was hoping to fly in and get this business accomplished and then fly back out again without anybody being the wiser.”

  “Well, rest assured that I couldn’t possibly break this confidence, Jed. If I did, you might tell somebody about the grated orange peel.”

  “You bet I would.”

  “Ingrate.”

  He groaned at the pun, as she’d hoped he would, because Mrs. Potter wanted very much to distract this perceptive, intelligent man from the unhappiness she felt over the knowledge that he might be involved in some scheme with the owners of the mysterious Highlands Ranch, with its guardhouse at the gate and its electrified fence all around. Should she warn him, she wondered? But of what? Anyway, it would be slanderous to do that, as she knew of no ill-doing on the part of the McHenrys.

  “That’s how you ended up at the C Lazy U, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, the McHenrys got me a reservation there.”

  Begging the question, Mrs. Potter thought, as to why they didn’t put him up at their own place. Apparently they didn’t want Jed around any more than they wanted other visitors.

  “They’ve invited me to their ranch for dinner,” he said.

  So much for that theory, she thought. “Really? How nice.”

  He glanced at her, and she was afraid she detected a glint of curiosity in his eyes. He was too damned sensitive to the nuances of what she said and how she said it! After an absence of forty years, how could he know her so well?

  “Tomorrow night,” he added. “Want to come with me?” With a mischievous twinkle, he added, “You’d be my cover. Make it look like a strictly social event, one couple having a simple home-cooked meal with another couple. And the McHenrys will undoubtedly think more highly of me if I show up with you on my arm.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Mrs. Potter, and then added firmly, because she was dying to go, just to get a gander at the inside of the McHenry estate and to eavesdrop on Jed’s business with Reynolds, “But yes, I’d love to, thank you very much.”

  Depending, of course, as she didn’t have to say, on Ricardo and Linda.

  “Jed,” she said as casually as she dared. “What is Reynolds’s business?”

  “I’ll get out and get this gate.”

  And suddenly Jed was out of the car and gone, before he’d answered her. And then he was back in the car, waxing lyrical about the beauty of her ranch, and her great good fortune in having it, and asking all sorts of intelligent questions about the valley, and its economic base and its fertility and its population, so there wasn’t any tactful moment for Mrs. Potter to return to the subject of the McHenrys’ mysterious business, which seemed to earn them so very much money from no visible source. Maybe she’d find out tomorrow night.

  El Bizcocho loomed larger through her windshield.

  As they drew near, Mrs. Potter saw that large birds were circling, swooping, and dipping midway down the mountainside.

  The arroyo that cut between El Bizcocho and the government-owned mountains to the east was dry in spite of last night’s storm,
which she knew had probably flooded it. Mrs. Potter was looking down the arroyo, squinting against the glare of the afternoon, when she made out the vision of a man on horseback. At first her heart leapt: Ricardo? She braked the car to a stop to await the approach of the man.

  “How do you know it’s a man?” Jed asked, when she told him why they had stopped. “I can’t see that far from here.”

  “Something about the set of his shoulders, I think, his height …”

  As the lone rider advanced, his appearance felt familiar to her.

  Mrs. Potter recognized the horse first.

  “Palo Alto,” she said, naming the animal, which identified the man. “It’s Ken Ryerson.” She explained that Ken was her part-time hired hand, who served as a sort of second-in-command to Ricardo. “When he has time. He also hires himself out to other ranchers to help out or fill in when they’re gone. We’ve got a lot of absentee owners in the valley. I guess most of the locals would count me among them. Ken would probably like to be a ranch manager like Ricardo, but those slots are few and far between.”

  She was talking too much, she knew, but she was anxious, so anxious, watching Ken ride inexorably toward them.

  “His first loyalty should be to us, because we’re his primary employer, but Ricardo gives him plenty of leeway to find other work to support himself, too, because a young man with any ambition couldn’t possibly hope to have a family just on what we pay him.”

  Mrs. Potter thought of Ken’s hopes of marrying Linda Scarritt, and nearly told Jed about it until she remembered that that news had been imparted to her in confidence.

  “He’s not like our other hired hand, Bandy Esposito. Bandy gets his lodging free, mainly because he always has, but a ranch this size can’t afford to provide that for every employee. So Ken’s got the ordinary expenses that everybody has, although he gets more than a few perks—sides of beef, access to our propane gas tank, and I don’t know what else from his other employers.” Actually, she knew that Ricardo had been growing increasingly exasperated by Ken’s other commitments and that the young man was, in Ricardo’s view, all too often over helping out the Amorys or the McHenrys or somebody else in the valley, instead of here at Las Palomas when Ricardo wanted him. Juanita had hinted at the same frustration last night.