by Alice Duncan
“So you were going to poison me? Like you poisoned Kenny?” Phil’s voice was soft, and he sounded gentle, as if he were talking to a little kid.
She looked sort of sad. “I didn’t want to, Phil, dear. But I have to do God’s will.”
Oh, brother. I hadn’t realized the sheriff had pushed his way through the crowd and come up behind me. When he spoke, he startled me.
“So you’re the one who killed Kenny, Miss Strickland? And Miss Fish?”
With absolute, unfeigned, wide-eyed innocence, she said, “I did God’s will. Mr. Sawyer was a bad man. And Miss Fish needed to be stopped.”
“Using my brother’s baseball bat?” I asked, pretty darned enraged by that time.
She eyed me sympathetically, as if she couldn’t figure out how anyone could be so dense. “It was clearly God’s will that your sinful brother leave his bat there, so that I could carry out God’s commands.”
Milo Strickland sobbed aloud. Charles and Edward, stoic as ever, remained at Esther’s sides, each hanging on to her by an arm. She looked so slim and tiny and fragile, anyone might have taken her for a child.
By that time, I was willing to chalk up Esther’s murderous actions to total insanity. She seemed to be living in some other atmosphere altogether, one she’d made up and believed in. But Milo Strickland didn’t have the excuse of insanity to absolve him from the guilt. As far as I’m concerned, he was the more culpable of the two if he knew what she was capable of and hadn’t had her locked up before this.
Releasing Phil, I took a step toward the minister until I was standing right smack in front of him. He wasn’t much bigger than I was, and I wanted to get a few things straight, both for my own sake and for the sake of the citizens of Rosedale. “I think it’s time you stopped blubbering and told us what’s going on, Mr. Strickland. You knew it was Esther who’d killed Kenny and Hazel, didn’t you? Your wife. Yet you did nothing to stop her. You didn’t tell anyone what you know about her. You didn’t do anything! Were you going to let her kill Phil tonight? And if she’d succeeded, what would you have done? Nothing, as usual?” I was so mad, I was shaking.
The sheriff laid a hand on my shoulder, and I stiffened. However, I guess he didn’t intend to haul me away, but to back me up. His support was really pretty gratifying. “Yeah, Reverend Strickland,” said Sheriff Greene. “Suppose you tell us what’s going on here. And I suggest you do so quickly.”
Strickland allowed his hands to drop from his face, which was red and splotchy and wet. “It’s true. It’s all my fault. I should have done something to keep Esther from hurting people. But I thought I had her under control when I hired Charles and Edward!” He had the nerve to look accusingly at his henchmen.
I said, “Ha! It’s not their fault that you—”
The sheriff’s hand tightened on my shoulder. It hurt, but I got the message and shut up.
“I hired Charles and Edward to watch out for her. To see that she was never by herself. If they’d kept an eye on her. . . .” His words petered out. I guess even he could tell his lame excuse wouldn’t wash.
“I think you’re worse than she is,” I told him, my voice clearly conveying disgust at his criminal behavior.
“I think you’d all better come with me,” said Sheriff Greene. “Reverend Milo Strickland, I guess I’m going to have to arrest you as accessory to murder.”
You should have heard the gasp that time.
“You’d better arrest Charles and Edward, too,” I said. The two men frowned at me, but I was relentless. “If they knew why they’d been hired, they’re as culpable as Strickland.”
The sheriff sighed heavily. “Right. And until we get this mess figured out, I reckon I’m going to have to arrest your sister—I mean, your wife, too. If she’s as loony as it looks like she is, she’ll probably end up in a hospital somewheres.”
Humph. I wasn’t sure I approved of that, but that’s because I didn’t like her.
Esther shook her head. She still appeared serene and unruffled. “I carry out God’s will. I am His instrument.” With a sweeping glance at the crowd, she said, “You people don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what Jesus said on the cross. It’s the same with me, you see.”
Oh, boy. Now she was setting herself up as our savior? Talk about nuts.
“Yeah, maybe.” Sheriff Greene didn’t sound too interested in anything Esther had to say, probably because it was obvious by that time that she was totally removed from reality. He nodded to Charles and Edward. Unless it was Edward and Charles. “You fellers come along, too. We’ve got a lot of sorting out to do.”
Because I was furious as well as curious, I spoke up one last time. “Before you go, Reverend Strickland, I’d really like to know how many people your wife has killed during your career as a revivalist.”
Strickland’s face scrunched up, he shook his head, and he didn’t answer me. Earl Wilcox took his hands and slapped handcuffs on him.
Disgusted, I said, “Coward!”
Phil whispered in my ear, “Annabelle, let’s step aside and let the law handle this.”
Nuts. I wanted to yell at them all some more.
However, as the sheriff and his deputy led Milo and Esther Strickland and Charles and Edward away to their waiting automobiles, and even before the crowd could commence buzzing over the excitement, another distraction occurred in the form of two small bright lights aimed directly at the campfire. They came a little closer, and I could see that they were headlights. Most people parked their automobiles and wagons in the field on the other side of the Gundersons’ ranch house, so this was kind of alarming at first. My initial thought was that the Stricklands had prepared for an emergency of this nature and had planned a disturbance that would discombobulate everybody and allow for their escape. I know that sounds melodramatic, but it’s what I thought.
Turned out I was wrong, but the experience was still really eerie at first. The headlights kept coming, heading directly at the crowd, and people had begun to shuffle uncomfortably. The headlights had practically reached us when the driver of the automobile to which they were attached started squeezing his horn. Loud blasts of what sounded like “Ooga! Ooga!” ripped through the night, and everybody jumped a mile or so in the air and started screaming and scattering in all directions.
Then the most enormous car any of us had ever seen came to a halt right smack beside the fire circle, and who should emerge but Josephine and Armando Contreras and my brother-in-law Richard MacDougall! I wasn’t the only one whose mouth dropped open. Phil, standing beside me still, tightened the arm he’d put around my waist in order to prevent me from slaughtering the preacher.
Hannah cried, “Richard!” Her voice sang out loud and clear above the throng, since all other noises had stilled. It was as if an angel had passed over and blessed the congregation with the gift of silence, and Hannah’d shattered it. “What in the world are you doing?”
His smile a mile wide, Richard hurried over to Hannah, his arms extended. Taking her hands in both of his, he cried, “Happy birthday, darling! This is your present!”
And by gum, if Richard hadn’t bought my own very sister, Hannah Rachel Blue MacDougall, a brand-new, spiffy, bright-green, four-door Cadillac Touring Car, the fanciest automobile anyone in Rosedale—perhaps in the entire state of New Mexico—had ever seen in our collective lives.
“Oh, Richard!” Hannah threw her arms around her husband right there, in front of everybody in the town and God Himself, and kissed him on the lips.
After she let him go, Richard’s sheepish glance slid around the accumulated people, including the sheriff and the Stricklands, whose forward progress had been halted because of the commotion. “Sorry, Sheriff. And I know it’s kind of a bad time to be celebrating anything at all, but tomorrow is Hannah’s birthday, and we—Armando and Josephine and I—had planned this surprise for a long time.”
Sheriff Greene, shaking his head at the foolishness of men, I guess, said nothing, but recommenced his pa
th toward the automobiles that were going to take the Stricklands and their cronies to jail.
“You see,” Richard went on, “Armando came to me a few weeks ago and proposed that the bank give him a loan so he could establish an automobile dealership here in Rosedale.”
Murmurings erupted in the crowd. Until that time, Rosedale didn’t have anybody in town who sold cars. If you wanted to buy an automobile, you had to go to Albuquerque, Santa Fe, or El Paso. So this news was really pretty darned exciting, if you discounted the circumstances, which, as Richard had said, were kind of bum.
“So, after looking the proposition over every way we could, we did it!” Richard concluded. “Contreras Auto Works will be coming to Rosedale in January of nineteen twenty-four! What do y’all think of that?”
And darned if everybody didn’t start whooping and stomping their approval, thus proving that life goes on, in spite of people like Milo and Esther Strickland.
The party broke up shortly after that. My obnoxious brother Jack, in spite of his recent offensive behavior, got to ride in the Cadillac back to town with Hannah and Richard. I didn’t really mind, since that meant he wouldn’t be able to annoy me as I drove the Model T and my parents’ home.
“That was something, when those lights showed up, coming toward the fire circle,” I said. “It was really scary at first.”
“It was, indeed. Good old Richard,” said Pa indulgently.
“I’m happy for Hannah,” said Ma.
I was, too. And I was positively ecstatic to find out conclusively that Richard wasn’t having an affair with Josephine Contreras.
Chapter Eleven
Thus ended rodeo season, 1923. It had been an exciting time, but I was glad it was over. What’s more, I prayed that nothing quite that exciting would ever happen again in my little town. Rosedale might not be a garden spot, and it might sit in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere, but darn it, it was my home, and I didn’t appreciate people like Milo and Esther Strickland coming in and gumming up its works.
I got to ride in Hannah’s new car, too. She drove Zilpha and me out to the Bottomless Lakes for a spin the following Saturday, leaving Jack at home, and we took along a picnic lunch. We had a wonderful time, and the car was great. That was the last picnic anyone in Rosedale indulged in that year, because winter came in hard before October was over. The weather turned icy, the wind blew day and night, and by the time Christmas rolled around, I was ready for summer again.
The evil days of the Stricklands had left the good citizens in Rosedale more than a little shaken. It’s not every day a homicidal lunatic visits our semi-peaceful little town. The fact that the lunatic in this case was a small and ethereally lovely woman was especially troubling, at least to me. We’d all had a firsthand gander at true insanity. The real problem was that insanity in this case looked so normal. And that meant that, try as one might, one couldn’t ever be sure of anything or anybody. Frightening thought.
I could, however, be sure of Phil. He’s such a sweetheart. I’m not sure to this day how he did it, but for my birthday, late in November, he gave me a Whitman’s Sampler. I think he and Ma conspired, but she never did let on and neither did he.
Something else good came of the Stricklands’ murderous intrusion into Rosedale. Jack, while still twelve years old and uncivilized because of it, never did regain his full measure of obnoxiousness. I guess having somebody use something of yours to commit a vicious, bloody crime—and all because you’d been an idiot—makes even people like my brother think better of their wicked ways. He was subdued for a month or two after the rodeo, he paid more attention to his teachers that was his usual wont, and, for a few weeks, he actually did his homework without whining.
As for the Stricklands themselves, Esther was found to be as crazy as she appeared to be, and was sent to the lunatic asylum in Las Vegas, New Mexico. As far as I know, she’s still there. For some reason, my heart hurts when I think about her. God knows, I didn’t like her. Heck, I didn’t even much like the two people she’d murdered in Rosedale, and I’d been terribly jealous of her. But she truly was a beautiful woman on the outside. It seemed a terrible shame that she should be so absolutely devoid of conscience. We never did learn how many victims she’d left in her mad wake, but we were all sure there were more than just the two we knew about. Why else would Milo Strickland have hired watchdogs for her?
What makes people turn out like Esther Strickland, anyhow? I wanted to ask my old psychology teacher, but he’d retired and moved to Phoenix, so I couldn’t. I looked up a couple of books in the library, but they didn’t answer my question. Maybe nobody knows, which is almost as frightening as that sort of craziness itself.
I’m not sure what happened to Charles and Edward, but I hope they got their just desserts.
Milo Strickland was tried and convicted of being an accessory to murder and of obstructing justice, both of which verdicts were fair and just in my opinion. He was sentenced to several years in the state pen, and I do believe a couple of other states had at him after New Mexico was through with him. Stupid man.
I suppose he took up his ministry again in prison, which might be a good thing. I don’t know. The whole Strickland episode left a nasty taste in my mouth.
It did the same to Myrtle. We talked about the Stricklands a lot in the weeks after the rodeo. It didn’t seem possible that we’d never be annoyed by Hazel Fish again in our lifetimes. I felt terribly sorry for Mrs. Fish, even though I knew I wouldn’t miss Hazel a whole lot.
And Kenny Sawyer. I’m not sure what to say about Kenny. He’d been boastful and full of himself, and he’d been a blowhard, and he fooled around on Sarah Molina, but darn it, those are pretty pathetic reasons to kill a man. Anyhow, Miss Esther didn’t kill him for any of those reasons. She’d killed him because he’d not paid her the attention, she felt she deserved. Is that conceit, or is it insanity? Maybe it’s both.
Anyhow, she might well have done the same thing to Phil. That thought made me shudder every time I entertained it, so I tried not to. And that, as you can imagine, was sort of like trying not to think about an elephant when it’s standing in front of you, snuffling in your pockets for peanuts with its big long trunk.
Nevertheless, life went on. Halloween came and went, and Thanksgiving, and my birthday, and Christmas, and then, lo and behold, springtime showed up, dry and windy and miserable. When the March cattle drives started, we were all ready for them—although I’m pretty sure everybody in town was a little anxious, after what had happened in October.
The following October, Phil took all the top prizes during the rodeo. Being Phil, he disparaged his accomplishment, telling anyone who congratulated him that he’d never have done so well if Kenny had been there. I don’t think that’s true—but his honest modesty made one more reason for me to love Phil.
The two of us haven’t spoken of marriage since that day at the fall rodeo, and I hope he doesn’t bring it up any time soon.
I still haven’t had any adventures, darn it.
A Look At: Pecos Valley Rainbow (Pecos Valley 3)
In 1923 flooding is not uncommon in Rosedale, New Mexico, but Annabelle Blue has never found a corpse floating in the floodwaters before now.
As if discovering the body of the murdered president of the Rosedale Farmer’s and Rancher’s Bank isn’t bad enough, Annabelle is further dismayed when her brother-in-law falls under suspicion. Since Annabelle has no faith in the local police, she sets out to discover who the true murderer is, dragging her long-suffering boyfriend, Phil Gunderson, along with her.
On one jaunt in the middle of the night, a reluctant and grumbling Phil at her side, Annabelle stumbles over another corpse, that of the dead banker’s son. Naturally, gossip about why she and Phil were out walking past midnight spreads through the town, and her parents are livid.
Book three in the historical, cozy-mystery series is a lighthearted look at a vivacious girl living in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, USA.
> COMING APRIL 2019 FROM ALICE DUNCAN AND WOLFPACK PUBLISHING
About the Author
Alice Duncan has written many novels under her own name. She’s also written as Emma Craig, Rachel Wilson, Anne Robins, and twice as Jon Sharpe (the fictitious author of the “Trailsman” series).
She was born and reared in Pasadena, California. When she was three months old, the family moved to a farm between Kezar Falls and Cornish, Maine. The only thing Alice remembers from her life back east is her mother telling her never to eat yellow snow.
When she lived in California, Alice loved writing books set in the Old West. Now that she lives in New Mexico, she wishes she could return to California. Unfortunately, California is still too expensive for her. Because her two daughters remain there, Alice visits California as often as she can.
When she’s not writing, Alice Duncan rescues wiener dogs. She used to sing, but bronchitis put an end to her singing career in 2018. Kind of like Julie Andrews, only a couple of octaves lower.