A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge

by Terry Shames

  “Good thing she has an SUV,” Cole says. “Probably saved her life. If she was in a small car, she’d have been toast.”

  Mosier is looking over at the SUV, frowning. “I don’t understand why the airbag didn’t deploy.”

  Cole says, “She wouldn’t have been hurt so bad if the bag had opened. She might have a lawsuit against the car manufacturer or the airbag company.”

  All three of us stare at the wrecked vehicle. “Whoever did it is going to have a big dent in their fender,” I say.

  “We’ll alert all the body shops, although . . .” His voice trails away. I know as well as he does that there are plenty of places where somebody can get a dented bumper repaired or replaced without anybody being suspicious of where the dent came from—or caring. The highway patrol can’t canvas every little two-bit town that has a service station with a garage on the side.

  I shine my light into Jenny’s car to see if I ought to get anything out. Her briefcase has slid to the door on the down side, and there’s no way I can get to it. I ask Mosier and Cole to retrieve it for me when the car gets pulled out of the ditch.

  I follow the ambulance to the hospital in Bobtail. On the way, I’m going over what Jenny told me. She said it was a dark car that hit her, and it doesn’t sound random. My first thought is that the Borlands have upped their war on her. But then I remember that the car I saw her brother Eddie get into when he left the hospital was a black town car. I don’t know why he’d want to force Jenny off the road, possibly killing her. But I do know there is big trouble between the two of them. I wish I could have gotten more out of Vera. It’s time I found out more about Eddie.

  CHAPTER 15

  The next morning, when Loretta brings me a big hunk of coffee cake, she’s excited about some news.

  “Hold up,” I say. “Before you go off on a tangent, I need to tell you what happened last night.” I give her most of the details of Jenny’s accident, leaving out the part about her being run off the road. “They had to do emergency surgery on her spleen, but they said she should be okay to get out in a couple of days.”

  “I’ll go over to the hospital right away.”

  “Wait a little while,” I say. “I expect she’s going to be sleeping late this morning.”

  “I’m glad they took her to the hospital if she had a bump on her head. People get those hematomas. That’s what happened to that poor actress.”

  Until a few years ago, people got bumps on the head all the time without anybody getting all worked up over it. “She’ll be okay,” I say, tamping down the little twinge of worry that starts up. “Now tell me your news.”

  “You probably already know this, but for quite a while they’ve been planning to put up an outlet mall in Bobtail. Now they’re finally going to do it.”

  “I don’t know what you’ll want to buy there that you can’t buy right here in Jarrett Creek,” I say.

  “Samuel, you know good and well there’s not a dress store here in town or anyplace to buy any kind of shoes.”

  “They’ve got shoes at Palmer’s,” I say, all innocent.

  “I’m not even going to grace that with an answer.”

  Palmer’s is a general store that caters to hunters and fishermen. They sell waders and hiking boots and moccasins. “I guess you know more about shopping than I do.”

  She looks at me with a critical eye. “No argument there. In fact, by the time the mall gets built, those pants of yours are going to be so worn out, you’re going to need to go over there and get some new ones or risk giving people a show.”

  “I’ve got plenty of pants,” I say. “But I happen to like these. They’re comfortable. And I can get anything I want here in town. Where’s this new shopping center going to be?”

  “Out west of town. They’re tearing down a subdivision to make room for it. Bobtail Ridge. Can you believe they’re going to call the shopping center that, too?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Ridge? The whole town of Bobtail is flat as a pancake. Not a ridge in sight. Some of the names they give those subdivisions are ridiculous. There ought to be a truth-in-naming law. There’s one called Rio Linda over in San Antonio. It’s as far from the river as you can get.”

  “They’re tearing down a whole subdivision to build the shopping center? Seems like there’d be plenty of places to build it without tearing something down.”

  “You have to take that up with the city council. Somebody said the subdivision was rundown, but I don’t know if that’s why they chose that site. I don’t care where they build it, as long as they build it.”

  She has heard the gossip about Ellen Forester’s latest run-in with her ex and wants to know more. I tell her the bare bones.

  “I don’t see why a woman would put up with that kind of thing,” she says. “If my husband had gotten out of line that way, he would have been seeing the inside of the doghouse.”

  I don’t know that Loretta is as tough as she makes out to be, but I wish she could instill some of it into Ellen Forester.

  When I get to police headquarters I return a couple of messages and then I call over to the hospital. They tell me that Jenny spent a good night and was asking for me.

  I’m glad that Rodell Skinner is coming into the office today. I’m going to leave him in charge, which will make him feel good. I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to count on him. I keep expecting him to decide that he’d rather go out sooner with a bottle in his hand than later, and sober. It’s a damn shame because sober, he’s got some sense—something you wouldn’t have known if you saw him with a case of beer under his belt.

  He comes shambling in before eleven and eases himself into his chair. This morning his color is pretty good—not quite as yellow as it was earlier in the week. His voice has become high and querulous with illness. “Samuel, don’t you have someplace to be?” he says. He still has a strong territorial instinct for the job as chief.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” I tell him what happened last night.

  “That’s a damn shame. Just losing her mamma and then ending up in the hospital. You think it might be related to that business with her horses?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

  Jenny’s eyes are closed when I walk into her room, but she hears my footsteps and lifts her head. “Well, this is a fine pickle,” she says. Her voice is scratchy.

  “You may not like it,” I say. “But I’ve been thinking it might be the best thing that happened. You’re safer here than you’re likely to be anywhere else until I find out who’s after you.”

  The swelling over her left eye has gone down, but it’s left an ugly purple bruise. “Now don’t you start,” she grumbles. “I’ve already had Will Landreau over here giving me chapter and verse about the danger I’m in. And speaking of Will, I have a little question for you.”

  “You’re wondering how he heard you were in an accident?”

  “You wouldn’t interfere in my personal life, would you?”

  “I figured your office needed to know where you were.”

  “Will and I are not in the same office. If you don’t recall, he’s a defender and I’m a prosecutor. And you just happened to have his phone number close at hand?”

  She may have had emergency surgery last night, but it didn’t slow down her thinking. As far as she knows, there’s no way I should have Will’s phone number. Will and I met on the sly to talk about the Borlands. “I remembered his name, and the two of you seemed friendly, so that’s who I asked for when I called the courthouse. He’s a nice guy.”

  The fire in her eyes tells me she’d like to challenge my lie, but her sigh tells me she doesn’t have the strength at the moment. “I feel like hell,” she says. “But I’ve had some more thoughts about who did this.”

  “Good. What have you got?”

  “I guess I ought to tell you what Will Landreau and I were arguing about the day you saw us in the hospital.”

  I
already know because Will told me, but I’m curious to know how Jenny is going to spin it. She tells me pretty much the same thing Will did, with a few details of the trial that put Scott Borland away. “His son is as hotheaded as he is, and I guess with his daddy out of prison, they decided it’s time to put a scare into me.”

  It’s a relief to have the business with the Borlands out in the open. I don’t tell her I’ve already been on their trail. Plenty of time for her to find out when I track them down.

  When I ask Wallace Lyndall how I can find Scott Borland’s wife, he rears back in his chair and squints up at me. “Must not be a lot going on in Jarrett Creek. You seem to have plenty of time to be poking your nose into business best left to Bobtail.”

  “I’ve got plenty of backup,” I tell him. He doesn’t really want to handle the Borland matter, but he doesn’t want me to do it either. Jealous of his territory. I tell him about Jenny’s accident. “I don’t know if they had anything to do with it, but I want to find out. The Borlands are in your patch, but most of the mischief they’ve done is in mine. So I’d at least like to have a chance to talk to the Borland woman and see if she has any idea where they are.”

  He ponders for a second, can’t find a hole in my request, and sits forward and starts digging through the folders on his desk. “Here’s what I’ve got.” He hands me a sheet of paper with some scribbles on it that include “Donna Mae Borland” and an address and phone number.

  “I’m happy for you to go with me if you’d like,” I say.

  “Knock yourself out,” he says. He takes his glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose. “If you get anything out of her, I owe you lunch.”

  The address is in a trailer park on the outskirts of Bobtail. Scott Borland’s wife lives in a small Airstream, old but in fairly good shape. A Pontiac convertible with a patched top is parked out front. Standing sentinel at the bottom of the two-step porch there’s a long-dead geranium in a terra cotta pot. I have to knock on the front door a couple of times before I hear someone inside say, “Hold on, I’m coming as fast as I can.”

  The woman who opens the door is hefty but seems easy in her body. She’s dressed in a robe of some kind of slithery material, green with purple flowers. Her hair is dull blonde and frowsy, and her face is puffy in a way that makes me think I woke her up. “What do you want?”

  “Are you Donna Mae Borland?”

  “Yes, but I don’t owe anybody a damn dime and don’t plan on buying anything that will change the situation.”

  “I’m the chief of police over in Jarrett Creek and I’m looking for your husband.”

  She snorts. “Good luck with that.” She reaches in her dressing gown and comes out with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lights the cigarette and blows smoke out the side of her mouth.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  She takes another drag. “Three nights ago. He came by where I was working to remind me he was out of prison. I told him whoop-di-doo and he had a beer and left. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “You have any idea where he might have gone?”

  She yawns, and with her free hand she fluffs up her hair. “Don’t know, don’t care. I have me a new man and as far as I’m concerned, my marriage with Scott Borland is over.”

  “Is he likely to go along with that?”

  She looks surprised at the question. “Not a lot he can do about it.” She seems to be enjoying the chat. She’s leaned up against the door, relaxed.

  “How about your son, Jett? You know where I can find him?”

  She brings herself upright. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know about Scott, but I’ve got nothing to say to you about Jett. He’s a good boy. Never gave me any trouble.”

  “Where does he work?”

  She plucks something off the end of her tongue with her forefinger and thumb and flicks it off to the side of me. “Like I said, I’ve got nothing to say about him.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “You’re a persistent man, aren’t you?”

  “Got to be. Especially when somebody doesn’t want to tell me what I need to know.”

  She starts to close the door.

  “Wait. Where do you work? Maybe I’ll stop by for a beer.”

  “I’ve been working at the Smokin’ Pistol for thirty years. It’s about a half mile down the road. Don’t expect anything on the house just because you’re a cop, though.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I call headquarters to see how Rodell is faring, and Zeke Dibble answers the phone. “What are you doing there?” I say.

  “Rodell wasn’t feeling all that good and he called and asked me if I could come in. I wasn’t doing anything. My wife was after me to work in the garden with her, so I was happy for the excuse. I’ve got myself a good book to read and some iced tea from the café, and I’m having a nice quiet afternoon. What can I do for you?”

  “Just checking in.” I tell Zeke to call me if he needs me.

  I want to find out more background on Eddie Sandstone before I talk to him in person. He seemed to have been a well-liked kid in high school, but obviously something happened to get him into trouble.

  The best place for me to start finding information about his history is the high school. Eddie is two years older than Jenny, which puts him in his late forties. That means any teacher he had back then would be at best close to retirement. Still, it’s a place to start. If Eddie had a scholarship to SMU, some teachers would likely remember him. I’ll start with the football coach and work from there.

  Bobtail High School was built back in the ‘50s, but because it was built of local stone, it looks ageless. Over the years, as the town has grown, they’ve added to it, but the main entrance remains as a reminder of how architecture can define the way a building is used. Walking up to the massive front door, you feel the importance of education. At least I do—I suspect the students have too many other things on their minds to pay any attention.

  “I need some information on a student who would have been here somewhere around thirty years ago,” I tell the bright-eyed young woman behind the front desk.

  “I’m going to turn you over to Mollie,” she says. “She’s been here longer than anybody. If she doesn’t know the answer, she’ll know where to find it.”

  She leads me down the hall to an office of admissions and into the presence of a stern-looking woman of at least seventy with steel-gray hair and the posture of a drill sergeant, Mollie Cleaver. But she turns out to have a warm smile and gives keen attention to my request. “I’m going to look up the records for Edward Sandstone. You know his mother Vera taught here for many years. She passed on recently, God rest her soul.”

  “I had the pleasure of meeting her a time or two,” I say.

  “Now with regard to her son,” Mollie says, and a frown puckers her forehead. “The specifics are long gone from memory, so let’s dig out his transcript and the yearbooks and maybe we’ll find the name of somebody who can tell you what you need to know.”

  It’s not likely that there will be any mention of the assault charge against Eddie in his school records, because it happened after he left high school. What I want to know is if Eddie ever got in trouble in high school as well.

  Mollie sits down in front of a big computer screen and starts tapping into it. After a few minutes she says, “Here we are,” and turns the screen toward me.

  “You’ve got all these records computerized?”

  “I certainly do. I’m not one of those technophobes. I love computers. People need to keep up with the times. As soon as we got the computers in here, I took a course over at the junior college and learned how to set up the files, and then I got students to help me with it.”

  I look at the screen and see that Eddie Sandstone’s grades were pretty good. Not good enough to be valedictorian, but if SMU recruited him to play football they wouldn’t have had to fudge his records.

  “These are his grades,” I say, �
�but do you have anything that details his conduct—any trouble he might have gotten into, that sort of thing?”

  “We decided to only keep that kind of information for ten years, so you’re out of luck with that. So let’s look at those yearbooks and see who his teachers were. Teachers remember strange things about students. Somebody is bound to remember something.”

  Eddie’s picture is on every other page of the yearbook—in the student council and the yearbook staff and the Spanish club. And he’s an athlete—on the football team in the fall and the baseball team in the spring, lettering in both sports. He’s Homecoming King and Prom King and Most Likely to Succeed. In all his photos, he shows a cocky, dazzling smile that declares he’s got the world by the tail. Jenny told me that high school was hard for her—she was never a popular girl, being taller and heftier than her counterparts. It must have been especially hard having her brother be the big man on campus.

  I pause looking over the yearbook. “Handsome, talented, popular, smart . . . so why isn’t he the governor?”

  Mollie Cleaver laughs. “Some people peak too early. They walk out of here thinking life is theirs for the taking, and the first time they’re faced with the real world, they don’t know how to handle it. They go off to college full of plans and dreams, and they come home baffled by the fact that in college they met a hundred kids just like them.”

  “Can you point out to me which of Eddie’s teachers might be likely to remember him?”

  She thumbs through some pages and comes to the football section and frowns. “The coach back then was Cougar Johnson. He died of a heart attack a few years ago. Maybe an assistant coach.” Her fingers trace the photos. “Here. Stubby Clark. He’s moved up in the world. Coaches at the junior college, though why they think they need a football team is beyond me.” She writes his name down in neat, firm cursive and then looks through the books some more.

  “Oh, yes there’s one more.” She looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “This one will know any little thing that happened with the boys.” She taps a photo of a sultry-looking woman with pouty lips and dark, lustrous hair. “That’s Careen Hudson. The typing teacher. You can see by her looks why the boys fell all over themselves for her. She got a lot of the athletes in her class, too, because she was an easy grader. She was only seven years older than they were and didn’t have the sense of a goose. She got herself fired for making out with a seventeen-year-old boy in the backseat of her Chevy—right here on school grounds.”