Guru Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  Every alarm in my brain was on red alert. This was not a lost grandmother. This was Jitty—and she was up to no good. She’d come packaged as a loveable senior citizen, but she was a spitfire. I could tell by the way she commanded the kitchen. She removed her coat, revealing a long black dress.

  “For pity’s sake, Jitty, would you stop it with the widow’s weeds? Who are you this time, Mrs. Claus in a depressed state?”

  “I have been in jail more than once, and I expect to go again. If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight.”

  She was in full firebrand mode. “For what?”

  “Clean foods, a wholesome life, the right to know what ingredients are in the food supply. And it is going to be a bloody battle.”

  “Okay, I get it. You’re a forerunner to the late Priya Karsan. But who are you?”

  “My given name is Mary Harris, and my late husband was George Jones. I lost him and my four children in an epidemic. The poor struggle hard every day against hunger and disease.”

  “Mother Jones,” I said, and even though Jitty was pretending to be the famed Mother Jones, I was in awe. “You were arrested more than any other protester at the time.” I couldn’t imagine this grandmotherly figure being put in jail, but it had happened. Numerous times.

  “Workers should have decent pay and safe working conditions. They should be able to feed their families. Children should be in school, not the coal mines.”

  “We don’t have coal mines in the Delta,” I reminded her. My haint was getting a little carried away by the rhetoric.

  “Don’t be a wiseass.” The grandmotherly form morphed into Jitty. “You know good and well what I’m talkin’ about.”

  And I did. Jitty had taken on the cause Priya Karsan started before her untimely death. “You’re right. Mother Jones stood up to Big Coal and anti-worker industries, risking her life and freedom many times. Priya Karsan was doing the same. And someone killed her.”

  “They can’t get away with it.”

  “And won’t,” I said. “I need a cause of death from Doc. Forensics may lead to her killer.” In fact, I was a little put out that Doc Sawyer and Coleman were dodging my calls.

  Jitty quoted Mother Jones’s most famous line. “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” She disappeared in a poof of orange smoke.

  And that was exactly what I intended to do.

  I tried calling Doc—again—for Priya Karsan’s cause of death and for the autopsy report on Ricky Davenport. He didn’t answer. Hospital personnel had no idea where he’d gone. Cece had dropped off the face of the earth, too.

  Which was the first indication something was going on.

  I called my partner. “Tinkie, we’re being excluded.”

  “I’ve tried to call Cece, too. And Coleman. And Doc. What should we do about it?”

  “Cyrus has gone to Grand Bay. Why don’t we go inspect the airplane that crashed? We’ll find our own clues.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  The night was too cold to put down the top on my mother’s vintage Mercedes roadster. The car was old, but I’d drive it until the wheels fell off. I had the best memory of my mom behind the wheel, sun glinting in her chestnut curls as she’d waited for the dismissal bell outside my first grade classroom. She knew I hated school and planned a picnic in the middle of a field of giant sunflowers.

  Yeah, I’d keep the car.

  There was no leaving the house without Sweetie and Pluto, and what was the harm in bringing them along? They had discovered Davenport’s body in the lake.

  We swung by Hilltop, where Tinkie and Chablis were waiting, both dressed in black. No doubt, Tinkie had Chablis’s leather vest and cap tailor-made.

  “Cat burglars?” I asked.

  “Don’t insult Chablis—no offense, Pluto. We’re spies.”

  “We’ll be in the middle of a pumpkin field, Charlie Brown. Spying is a bit over the top.”

  “Chablis and I will slither through the night, mere shadows. You, on the other hand, will be a target. Girl, where did you buy that neon yellow coat?”

  I wouldn’t admit it dated back to my acting days in New York. I’d thought it was so retro-sixties when I found it in a resale shop in SoHo. “It’s very warm.”

  “And in the light of day, it probably repels insects and predators. Wear that around Coleman and he’ll beat a path to the hills.”

  “Ha-ha.” I was tempted to put the top down and freeze the conversation, but it was too cold.

  The roads were empty, and the night was a beautiful shimmer of stars against a velvet sky. Winter nights offered a new vista of the wide-open land. The inky black, filled with the pinprick lights of the stars, held great beauty, but it wouldn’t last long. A storm front was predicted to roll in before morning.

  We were the only car out in the November cold. We turned down Cyrus’s driveway and bumped along to his house, which was shuttered and dark. I had a creepy feeling as I parked behind it. It was unlikely anyone would come to this out-of-the-way place, but it didn’t hurt to be careful.

  I took my gun and two flashlights from the trunk. Tinkie was the better shot, but I’d brought the weapon. Just in case. We marched through the pumpkins to the wreckage of the Cessna 182. The plane was pretty banged up but not nearly as bad as I’d anticipated.

  I shone the beam into the cockpit, though I had no idea what I was looking for. “Why would someone crash a plane, just to make it look like toxic chemicals had spread across a field?”

  “Media attention.”

  Tinkie’s answer was like a bolt of lightning down my spine. “That’s it. This whole thing is about manipulating the media. And us. Fake chemicals spread over a field, Coleman controlling all the facts, Doc and Cece hiding from us. This is more about what isn’t being said than what is.”

  “Somebody is due an ass-kicking.” Tinkie normally never cursed. She was a lady. But as the full reality of how we’d spent the whole day being duped dropped over us, I had to agree. An ass-kicking was in order. And I knew right where to start.

  I didn’t get a chance to voice my thoughts. Sweetie Pie’s full-throated bay sounded from near the house. My hound had hit a trail. Chablis’s high-pitched yip blended with Sweetie’s cry.

  “What the heck?” Tinkie ran, jumping pumpkins like Jack Spratt, or Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. She might wear designer boots, but she could boogie when the mood struck. “Chablis!” she called.

  I was right behind her. We returned to the house where Sweetie frantically clawed at Cyrus’s front door. I managed to wrench it open, and Chablis shot inside, with Tinkie hot on her paws. I followed, gun at the ready.

  The dogs tore through the front rooms to the back. A locked door met their assault and held. Sitting in front of it was Pluto. He kneaded my kneecaps and dug in. When I quit yelling and dancing, I thought I heard a muffled cry.

  “Someone is in there,” Tinkie said. “Open it.”

  The lock refused to yield to my knob-twisting.

  Tinkie reached for the gun. “I’ll shoot it open.”

  “No. What if the bullet goes through and hurts someone?”

  “It always works in the movies.” In her leather outfit, Tinkie looked like she could take on Michael Myers, with or without his mask. “Give me the gun.”

  I reared back and kicked with all my weight. The lock gave, and the door burst open. The moonlit window illuminated a silhouette. It squirmed and shifted. Whoever it was had been bound and gagged.

  Tinkie swung the flashlight’s beam to reveal a highly annoyed Priya Karsan. The Food Guru looked like she’d missed a few good meals, along with hydration and a number of other things she preached were necessary for “optimum health.”

  “Ungag her,” Tinkie said.

  “I’m not sure I want to,” I answered. “She’ll tell me a lot of things about my diet I don’t want to hear.”

  Tinkie huffed out a sigh and rushed forward to remove the gag from the Foo
d Guru’s mouth. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be, when you untie me.”

  Tinkie promptly set to work.

  “Who did this?” I asked.

  “An old geezer and a woman. I walked in through The Club’s kitchen door to prepare for the spa day and lecture. They came up behind me, jammed a hood over my head, knocked me out, and hauled me off. I woke up in the trunk of a car and was jostled all over the country. Finally, they tied me to this awful chair. I could hear them outside the room arguing. She wanted to kill me! He said I was more useful alive.”

  “Did you overhear any names?” I asked. “Was the man Cyrus Angler?” Even though we were standing in his house, I found it hard to believe Cyrus would abduct anyone, much less a food advocate who shared his feelings about GMOs and chemical additives.

  “They didn’t bother with formal introductions.” Priya executed limbering antics that would qualify her for a role in Cirque du Soleil. If eating acorn rinds and wheat berries would do that for me, I would sign up now. “The old codger and the woman are plotting something. I don’t know what, but I suspect it has to do with Gyndrex’s board meeting in Memphis.”

  “So that’s why you’re in the Delta.” I’d wondered what brought the Food Guru, an international celebrity, to Zinnia. I should have put two and two together. She was biding her time until the meeting. “You plan to disrupt it.”

  “In front of the biggest audience I can muster. People are killing themselves forkful by forkful. It’s wrong. I intend to stage a protest on the sidewalk outside the Gyndrex board meeting.” Her expression conveyed pure determination.

  “Great plan, but right now we need to catch your abductors and possible killers. Think. Maybe you’ve heard their voices before,” Tinkie said.

  Priya shook her head. “I don’t know, but the woman is a bossy thing. She must have money and power she doesn’t hesitate to use.”

  About fifty women came to mind, but this was Tinkie’s bailiwick.

  “We’ll find out who she is, but I’m more worried about you,” Tinkie told Priya. “You’re going to get yourself killed. Or sued. Gyndrex is powerful. It can ruin you just as effectively with a lawsuit.”

  “I tell the truth. Americans deserve to know what’s in their food. The chemicals, the artificial flavors and additives designed to act on the brain like crack cocaine, the pesticides—all of it. These things aren’t allowed in the food supply in Europe. They have consumer protection laws there. Here, it’s the Wild West. Companies take advantage however they can.”

  “There is conflicting scientific data,” Tinkie said.

  I whipped around to look at her. Tinkie had never willingly read a scientific paper in her life.

  Priya put her hands on her hips. “Follow the money. Who paid for those conflicting reports?”

  “I appreciate your passion, and I agree with you—sort of,” I said. “But I’m afraid they’ll hurt you. This is big, big money. The trouble you’re creating impacts the bottom line. This won’t be tolerated.”

  I filled her in on the fake Priya Karsan cocoon and the deliberate implication she was dead. “The sign hung on the effigy said, ‘Karsan lies, so Karsan dies.’ They will hurt you.”

  “And I won’t quit.”

  Tinkie pointed at both of us. “Are you sure you two aren’t related? Priya is every bit as stubborn as you are.”

  I took it as a compliment. I liked Priya’s fighting spirit, her passion, and her drive to tell the truth. A pretty cool chick, and when this was over, I would read her book on how to detox. I might even consider limiting my sugar consumption.

  “We won’t settle this here,” I said. “Tinkie and I want you to stay safe, but we can’t sit on you. What we can do is give you a lift to town.”

  “Oh, yes. I don’t have a clue where I am. I need a ride and a cell phone.”

  “We should call Coleman,” Tinkie said. “Let him know Ms. Karsan is safe.”

  “Not on your life.” Oh, I had a bone to pick with Coleman Peters.

  “Sarah Booth, we must.” Tinkie crossed her arms.

  I was just as stubborn as Priya and twice as mad. “We’ve been played, and our friends were in on it. I’ll prove it.”

  “If you two are finished arguing . . .” Priya motioned at the door. “I really need to call my publicist and arrange a ride to Memphis.”

  I rounded up the animals, and we were off. We dropped her at the local B&B. It had the three amenities Priya wanted most: food, a phone, and a hot shower. In whatever order.

  “Where to now?” Tinkie asked.

  “Cece’s house. She played a role in deceiving us, and I can’t wait to ask her about it.”

  Except Cece Dee Falcon wasn’t home. Not a trace of her or Jaytee. And she wasn’t at the Zinnia Dispatch, either.

  “Why would Cece set us up this way?” Tinkie was diehard loyal and had twisted the events into a million knots to prevent Cece from being guilty of deceit.

  I had no doubt Cece loved us both, but I also knew she had to be involved in this elaborate cover-up. To prove it, I put fifty cents into the newspaper stand’s slot and snatched a copy of the latest issue. Page one had a story about the closing of The Club and the cancellation of spa day due to sabotage.

  No photo of Priya Karsan’s body.

  No mention of a dead woman encased in a white substance.

  My photo of disgruntled, would-be spa attendees was printed—with a photo credit, no less. But no upside-down, swinging Priya Karsan. No dead Food Guru. Because Cece knew Priya Karsan wasn’t dead.

  The cocoon I’d photographed in the supply room was a dummy. Some freaky-deaky had created the life-sized effigy of the Food Guru, implying her demise from a lethal substance. They’d coated her in something to disguise her features. Everyone from Doc Sawyer to Cece had known it was a fake and no one had told me or Tinkie.

  There would be blood!

  “We have to tell Coleman that Priya has been rescued,” Tinkie said. “Seriously, Sarah Booth. We can be mad at Doc, Coleman, and Cece, but Coleman has to know. Think about it. If everyone believed Priya was dead, it would weed out the suspects. I’m sure Coleman was hoping for a ransom call. He was doing his job.”

  She was right, but I didn’t like it. “You call him.”

  “What will you do?” Trepidation threaded her voice.

  “Figure out how all this works.”

  “Maybe Coleman can help.”

  “In hell.” Of all the conspirators, Coleman’s betrayal stung the worst. He’d pressed me against him, teased my ear with his lips, and all the while he knew he was lying to me.

  When Tinkie called the sheriff’s office, DeWayne thanked Tinkie for her report but told her Coleman was indisposed. He wouldn’t be available until the next morning, which wasn’t far away.

  Fine by me. I could kick his butt just as well after sunrise as in the dark.

  I had the broad strokes of the case figured out. Priya’s faked death and the pilotless plane crash were both stunts engineered to create attention. In both instances, no one was harmed. No property—except a stolen plane—was destroyed. What eluded me was the motive behind these seemingly nonsensical actions. What benefit to Cyrus was there in abducting Priya and hog-tying her in his home? The two were on the same team.

  And why would Cyrus damage his pumpkin crop with a fake chemical dump? The substance in the plane might not have been lethal, but it sure wasn’t healthy. If Cyrus was after headlines, his plan didn’t work. Sure, there was a media stir—for about three minutes. And if Cyrus was behind any of this, the media backlash would be brutal.

  Besides, Cyrus had played on Tinkie’s sympathies to investigate. Why? It didn’t make sense.

  While those questions begged answers, the biggie was: Who killed Ricky Davenport? And why?

  Ricky was something of a con man who knew how to play women. He may have stolen the crashed Cessna. He was connected with Bert and Betty Henderson, who produced GMO crops, and were nutcases of the first
order. He had access to the country club where Priya was abducted. None of that explained why he was dead.

  I called Doc. When he came to the phone, it took all my control not to tell him how betrayed I felt. “I won’t bother asking about the autopsy on Priya since she isn’t dead,” I said with stiff formality. I quickly relayed the details of her rescue. “Do you have anything on Ricky’s post-mortem?”

  Doc’s chuckle made me angrier. “Coleman didn’t know if Priya was in danger. He played it safe by keeping it secret that she was alive. He didn’t know who was holding her or if there would be a ransom. He thought the wisest thing to do was let the story play out while he turned the county upside-down looking for her. He’s been going full speed.”

  “He told Cece she wasn’t dead.” Okay, I sounded like a five year old.

  “Wrong. Cece stumbled into the autopsy room when I was cracking open Priya’s papier-mâché corpse.” He laughed heartily. “I just had to know how they’d structured the cocoon. You should have seen Cece’s face. It was beautiful. I had this big sledgehammer over my head and brought it down on the dummy’s chest. Pieces of the body went everywhere. Cece thought it was really Priya.”

  Laughter bubbled out. “I would have loved to see that.”

  “Oh, if only I’d had my cell phone out. Her face . . .” He laughed so hard he had to catch his breath. “It was wonderful. She’s so mad, she’s hung up on me three times.”

  “It still hurts that neither you nor Coleman trusted me enough to tell me the truth.”

  “Sarah Booth, sometimes you have to trust that people are making the best decision at the time. You want to get huffy that we didn’t trust you. It’s the same shoe that’s pinching your other foot.”

  Dammit. He was right. I hated it when Doc dished out those life lessons in such a reasonable tone. My only recourse was to change the subject, before I had to eat another serving of humble pie. “So how was Ricky Davenport killed?”

  “Now that’s a curiosity. He was struck in the head with something like a golf club. Brain bleed. Then poison was put in his mouth, but none reached his digestive system. It was the blow that killed him.”