The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery

by Ann Ripley

  Still, he had to find out everything he could about Mr. and Mrs. Louise Eldridge. He sped the Jaguar up the mountain road, taking the tight switchbacks like a race car at Indianapolis. Soon he pulled into the underground garage of his Boulder Heights home and raised a hand to check his wristwatch. Nine minutes. That was nearly a record.

  He went into the house, took a chilled bottle of 1993 Ratzenberger Beerenauslese from the steel refrigerator, and opened it. With his glass of wine in hand, he walked back out to his porch with its fantastic view of the mountains, and looked to the north. All that beautiful land up there would soon belong to him. When it did, he intended to build a new house, on the highest and the best site on those thirteen thousand acres.

  By the time Louise was settled in her own house, she was exhausted. She didn’t know what to make of Josef Reingold. Was he a killer or not? He could be involved in the Porter murders—perhaps putting Eddie up to it, with little or no trouble—and still not have wanted to kill her on a public roadway. After all, if she had been found dead, Jeremy the stripper easily could have fingered Reingold as the killer.

  For the first time since arriving in Boulder County, she had to admit to herself that she was in too deep—with no family and no neighborhood full of friends to help. It was a little like teasing a mountain lion, or bear, and expecting nothing bad to happen. And it appeared that she had teased both a mountain lion and a bear.

  She wished she could talk to Bill. She missed him, and felt guilty that she had even leaned into Pete Fitzsimmons with romantic intent. And she desperately wanted to tell him that she was seriously over her head in the Porter Ranch affair.

  Tonight, she took no chances against intruders of either the two-footed or the four-footed variety. She went into the bedroom and placed the pepper spray beside her bed. Fearing that was inadequate, she went through the house and jammed a wooden kitchen chair under each door. Knowing Reingold, and having seen some of the electronic contrivances at his house, she was sure he knew how to disarm a simple thing like a house alarm system. Dislodging the chairs would at least make enough noise to waken her.

  Tomorrow, she would borrow that shotgun from Herb. A gun would be a great equalizer if Reingold, or anyone else, tried to attack her. As her daughter Janie might say, a gun ruled.

  Chapter 17

  LOUISE ROSE SATURDAY MORNING with the sun. And when she did, she rued the fact that she had missed all the Colorado sunrises up until now by sleeping too late. Sunrise was a spectacular show in a place surrounded by foothills on three sides. Dramatic bands of deep rose clouds, like magma from an erupting volcano, filled a notch between the hills to the east, while a milder rose—the color of a Betty Pryor hybrid tea—was reflected onto the filigree clouds that floated in the West. She wondered how she could go home to northern Virginia and live without these glorious skies.

  With a jolt, she realized her stay in Colorado was coming to a close. As she looked out into the bright day, nothing seemed as desperate as it had last night. There was no need for her to borrow Herb’s shotgun after all, for within a few days she would be out of here, and the Porter murders would be left for someone else to fret over.

  And there was Janie to think about. Louise had nearly forgotten she had to collect the girl tomorrow, the closing day of the wilderness camp. She called the YMCA Center in Estes Park, but was told by some person in the know that Janie and her campers were out climbing Long’s Peak. Long’s Peak—the very one in whose shadow they had taped one of the programs, and which had cried out to Louise, “Climb me.” She was glad somebody in the family was answering the challenge.

  The person in the know—youth, or woman, she couldn’t tell from the high voice—had more to say. “Oh, yes, Janie Eldridge. A fine young woman. She knows a lot about the environment for her age. Quite a lecturer on the subject. She has made great contributions here at camp.”

  “Well,” said Louise, her heart swelling with pride, “I’m glad to hear—”

  “And,” said the youthful but authoritative voice, “she’s—well, she’s developing very strong personal relationships as well. And of course, that’s usually good.”

  Usually? What did that mean? Was the girl caught up in another love affair? “Well, good,” she responded slowly. Strong personal relationships with whom was the question. She never thought she would prefer to have Chris with Janie, teetering on the brink of serious romance as they were. But now she did. And Chris Radebaugh was back in Washington, D.C.

  Louise hung up the phone. While her daughter was impressing wilderness camp staff with her intellectual and social strides, and Bill was out getting his man, what the heck was she doing? Nothing, except being lonely and dodging both bullets and wild game. Unable to help her husband in any way and flummoxed in her efforts to unravel the Porter Ranch affair, she brought a cup of coffee into the living room and slumped into the overstuffed chair. It was as if a black Colorado raincloud were hanging over her. But surely coffee would help.

  She had few responsibilities for the next two days: Clean up the house for departure, do a little wash, review scripts, contact a couple of people up at Porter Ranch about the Monday shoot. And she would call Ann. She wanted to tell her about the complicated events of Friday night. It was quite evident she couldn’t confide in Pete. Though she hated herself for it, as soon as she was away from his compelling presence, she had serious doubts about him. The big Longmont annexation deal tied him and Reingold together like Siamese twins.

  She reached for the phone and dialed Ann’s home number. They agreed to meet in Boulder for a late lunch at the Rattlesnake Grill.

  Once that was settled, Louise stood in the living room, as restless as before, staring out at the hovering foothills of the Rockies and gathering her thoughts. There were things related to the Porter murders that she hadn’t pinned down, facts she hadn’t gathered, because other people—had it been Pete?—had discounted them. Questions about the circumstances surrounding both Jimmy and Sally Porter’s deaths.

  Then, an inspiration hit her. There was an oral historian who might clear up the picture, if she only put her mind to it: Ruthie Dunn. She might be able to tell Louise things that no county records could reveal. Or she could have learned something from Sally Porter in the days before Sally’s death, as the unfortunate younger woman sat at a restaurant stool and quietly talked to the elderly proprietor while eating her piece of cherry pie.

  Louise tried phoning both Frank Porter and Harriet Bingham, without success. A wave of nervousness passed through her. Harriet was probably out pulling weeds and sneezing her head off, on the verge of collapse. And Frank—she hoped he was safe. She closed up the house, drove to Lyons and parked in front of the Gold Strike Café. At the kitchen entrance, Ruthie, perspiring in the heat of the morning, answered her knock on the screen door.

  “Louise! It’s good to see you. C’mon in.” She opened the door, pushing curly white hair away from her forehead. “It’s just plum hot today, isn’t it?”

  Louise held the door open but didn’t enter. “Ruthie, I need to talk…” She peered in the kitchen, bustling with Ruthie’s helpers, aromatic with the smell of peach and apple pies.

  “Good grief, Louise, I’d like to but I really can’t, not right now. I’ve got my hands full with the late breakfast and early lunch crowd. Tourists are comin’ out of the woodwork. Sure you don’t want to come in and have a bite and wait for the crowd to leave?”

  “Thanks, but I can’t. What if I stop back later in the afternoon? Would that be good for you?”

  “Sure would,” said the old woman, closing the door. “See you then. I’m liable to be dozin’ in a chair, but you just go ahead and shake me, hear?”

  Chapter 18

  LOUISE DROVE UP THE STEEP back road to Porter Ranch with one hand loosely on the wheel, the other resting casually on the window, her cowboy hat tilted back on her head but not falling off. If it threatened to, she knew just the right muscles in her scalp to flex to restore its equilibrium. She
smiled, for in the matter of wearing hats, she had learned to defy the laws of physics just like Pete.

  Braless this morning, in what she thought of as the Boulder way, and wearing comfortable clothes that, granted, needed a wash, she felt free and unfettered. And it felt good to be unafraid of heights for a change. She sped up the perilous road at fifty miles per hour—slowing, of course, for the curves.

  Hank Williams, Sr., blared from the radio. She hoped it would help restore her inner peace. She blushed to remember her romantic encounter with Pete, and she felt a stab of discomfort again as she thought of Josef Reingold on that isolated road. All this had taken a toll on her nerves, and a little down-home music would surely help.

  She smiled. Her “edgy, East Coast chick” image was fading. She’d become westernized.

  In her side-view mirror, she caught a flash of light from a car following her up the road. She forced herself to stay calm. She should be safe up here. There would be people around—at the very least, Harriet. Since she hadn’t been able to reach either Frank or Harriet by phone, she’d decided to drive up and settle business directly. Marty Corbin would be furious if she blew it.

  And besides, this was one last opportunity to check things out.

  As she approached the ranch, she could see Harriet at the roadside pulling weeds. One down, one to go, though she knew it might be harder to locate Frank.

  She pulled the car to the side of the road and hopped out. Harriet was an engaging picture, there on her knees. Louise would have to persuade her to do it again it for the Monday shoot—wear the same clothes, bend over the dry ground in the same resolute manner. She was a portrait of a western pioneer woman with her wide-brimmed black hat, aged denim shirt, and long gray skirt. Old leather gloves covered her hands as she pulled out blooming knapweed plants.

  “Miss Bingham,” Louise said enthusiastically, “hello. I came up to ask you a favor.” As she squatted alongside Harriet and pitched her proposal for the program, she took hold of a weed herself. Grasping it firmly near its base and trying to ignore the fact that it had the prickles of a baby porcupine, she gave it a sharp tug. It didn’t budge. It was as if this recalcitrant weed with its cunning white flowers was pulling back toward the center of the earth with all its might. Her fingers were raw from the effort. She looked at the woman kneeling beside her with increased respect for her strength.

  Harriet’s face was engraved with sadness. It was as if this weed-pulling was a spiritual moment that Louise shouldn’t have interrupted. Finally she answered. “Yes, I’ll allow you to photograph me, but … I don’t want to do any talkin’.”

  “Well…” Louise would have loved the woman’s terse, to-the-point commentary on western weeds, but she could see in her face that she was getting prepared to scotch the whole deal. “No, no talking on camera if you don’t want to.”

  Harriet, still kneeling, was phasing out again, staring beyond Louise out into blue space, her hands shaking slightly. Maybe the weeds had got to her, too. “I don’t have much talk left in me these days.”

  Louise thanked her and said good-bye. As she slowly drove onward up the isolated road, she felt a twinge of guilt, as if she had somehow taken advantage of the old woman.

  Then came the traffic. First, a UPS truck passed her, apparently looking for Porter Ranch. Close behind it was a white four-wheel-drive vehicle that pulled to the side of the road so she couldn’t see the driver; it must have stopped near Harriet. She frowned. More people came and went on this mountain than she ever realized.

  She continued the short distance to the ranch, passing the delivery truck again on its way back down. She drove into the yard, and Frank came out of the ranch house to greet her. “Louise, good to see you.”

  She was inordinately grateful to see this slim dark-haired man, whom she hardly knew. Grateful to see he was safe and sound. His life was in danger, but she was in no position to blurt it out to him. She realized he probably knew his brother was perfidious enough to kill him, too.

  “It’s beautiful up here, Frank,” she said, as they strolled toward the house.

  “I remember it when I was a child, before Mom died, and before Jacob died. It was like a perfect childhood dream of a happy family. Why, even Eddie and Sally were happy then.”

  “I’m so sorry about your mother…”

  He shook his head. “Actually, everything changed before that. It was after Jacob passed away. He was eight when I was four, and everyone, everyone loved Jacob. Although they wouldn’t admit it, he was the favorite of Dad and Mom, and Harriet and her father, too,—even the ranch hands and the kids at Lyons Elementary. When he died, I only heard him screaming. They closed the bedroom door and wouldn’t let me see him once he got real sick.”

  Louise looked at him, afraid to ask too much, wishing she knew how to offer some comfort to smooth over the long-ago trauma.

  “Everyone died a little when Jacob died,” Frank continued, in a sad voice. “These days they’d call it ‘freaking out.’ Dad started drinking. We kids were kind of shooed away. But Mom was hit the worst, I remember. For that year between when Jacob died and she died, she never read us another bedtime story.”

  “It must have been terrible.”

  “Yes. I think that’s why, when Dad finally found another woman that he loved, he didn’t want the world to know he’d decided to marry again. I thought it was great, as long as he loved Grace.”

  “He kept that engagement quiet, then?”

  Frank scratched his head. His tone was sympathetic, as if he identified closely with his dead father. “You see, he was a private man. And I know he didn’t want to hurt our neighbor, Harriet, either. She’s being left all alone up here when Porter Ranch gets sold.”

  “Now there’s this problem of who to sell it to.”

  “Yeah. And speak of the devil, here comes Eddie. We can’t quite agree on it, as you well know.” She had heard a car pull up, and turned to see Eddie jump out of his red pickup. He hustled onto the porch and stared at Louise, self-consciously trying to smooth down the stubborn cowlick in his hair. “Hi,” he grunted. “Let’s get in the house—I need coffee.”

  It was dim inside the old ranch house. The front hall had several doors, all of which were slightly crooked, as if the house had settled. One led to a formal parlor in which Louise could spy an old organ and faded flowered wallpaper. Another led to a well-lit kitchen with white-painted, oilcloth-covered walls. There were creases in the corners where the heavy cloth didn’t fit quite right. Gingham curtains moved slightly in the breeze.

  Here, Jimmy Porter had knocked put an old wall and installed a large picture window that gave one of those postcard views of the ponderosa forest with back range behind it. A strange little window on the inner wall of the kitchen drew her attention. “Is that part of the double walls?” she asked.

  “Yes. That’s all that’s left of the Indian escape routes,” said Frank. “When this house was built in 1870, there were double walls all through the house, so you could slip down those narrow spaces away from an Indian attack and get out a back door or window. Dad kept that one window just for history’s sake. It opens into the stairwell.”

  Turning away from the little window, Louise could see that the Porter kitchen was an interesting room, with one corner devoted to crude, built-in shelves that Sally had carefully edged in two-inch-deep brown cotton cutwork edging. At first, Louise’d thought it was a dropped carved edge. The shelves held well-dusted, framed family photos of children grouped around Jimmy and Bonnie Porter in their earlier, happier days. In a glass-front antique cabinet stood a collection of distinctive carved figures—primitive and homemade. When she inquired, Frank said they were sculpted by his father long ago. Little Hummel statues sat upon most of the other flat surfaces, including a Victorian sewing cabinet with a neat basket of undone sewing still resting on its top. Sally’s touch remained.

  “Sit down and get comfortable,” said Frank, indicating a chair at the very long, old pine table. She gu
essed this table had seated not only the family, but many ranch hands in its day.

  She took a seat deliberately near a pile of papers. Quickly, her eyes sought out meaning in the upside-down letters before an alert Eddie swept them into a tan envelope. Raising an eyebrow at her, he shoved the envelope into a blue-green painted sideboard that would have made an antique dealer want to deal.

  She smiled disingenuously at both brothers and told Frank that yes, she would have that cup of coffee.

  When the brothers settled in their chairs, Louise knew from their demeanor that there had been good times and bad at this weathered table, the good times sufficient to draw them back here again to try to talk things out. It helped reduce her gut fear that Frank Porter was somehow in danger from his cantankerous brother—or his creditors. She sipped the coffee, and the cup nearly jumped from her hands as she took the first surprisingly hot mouthful. Slightly embarassed, she wiped away the spots with a dishcloth Frank offered her.

  Frank said, “Sorry—didn’t know it was that hot. I’m glad you drove up, Louise. Eddie and I are talking about the disposal of the ranch. Since you’re doing this program, you understand what open space really means to this country, and that we can’t keep plundering our resources.”

  “Oh, come on, Frank,” said Eddie, “you’ve already plundered some of this land. You plumb wore out that land near the river.”

  “You mean the andesite quarry?” asked Louise.

  Frank nodded. “It’s true, we’ve about run that out—”

  Eddie said, “So all the more reason for you to want to sell to a private party. Simple fact, you get more money. When this land is gone, my knee-jerk friend, that’s the end of your inheritance!” He sat with the chair cocked back on two legs, his cowlick sticking up as if in defiance, his beer belly pushing his faded plaid shirt out into a rounded shape. He turned toward Louise. “I may become a murder suspect because I feel this way, but that sure as hell ain’t gonna stop me from sayin’ my piece.” He flapped a hand in the direction of the sideboard where he had stashed the papers. “I even got us an offer for this property that would make us both rich.” He stared at his brother. “Rich, hear me?”