Tom pressed her again. “Did Kris by any chance know that Ernest was going to investigate him?”
Yolanda looked out the van windshield. “I’m not sure. But Ernest did say he was going to, you know, open a file on Kris.”
“When did he say this to you?” Tom asked.
“I don’t remember.”
Tom’s fingers tapped the dashboard. “He was going to open a computer file? A paper file?”
“I told you, he had a nice handmade cabinet, with hanging files in it.” Yolanda’s tone had turned sour again. “I didn’t check to see if he had a file on Kris.”
“Tom, please,” I said again. “It’s getting late. The puppies need to be fed. Can we go?”
“Just one more thing. Does either one of you know how to shoot?”
“Tom!” I cried. “You said they weren’t suspects.”
Yolanda sighed. “It’s all right, Goldy. No, I told you before, Tom. I do not know how to shoot a gun, and I don’t want to learn.”
Ferdinanda frowned in defiance. “I know how to shoot. I was a francotiradora, how do you say, sniper, in Raul’s army. Somebody comes after me or Yolanda? I will shoot them.”
“And that’s all either one of them is going to say without a lawyer,” I interjected.
Tom turned in his seat to eye me directly. “Listen to me. I want you to ask permission of the investigators at Ernest’s house before you go in and touch anything. Understand?”
“All right,” I said.
“Yolanda,” said Tom, “do you have a remote to get into Ernest’s garage?”
“Uh,” she said, “yes.”
“Good,” said Tom. “Still, when you all see the police car, I want you to honk or something before you go in. Understand? Yolanda, I know you and your aunt may want to stay there, but I just don’t want the investigation messed up.”
“Okay,” said Yolanda.
I asked, “Could you call me when you know what’s going on with John? Because if Yolanda and Ferdinanda decide to stay with us, and John can’t let the dogs out tonight, I’ll need to find somebody else to do it.”
“Yup,” said Tom as he heaved himself down from the van. “Thanks for your help, ladies.”
“Tell your friend I’m sorry I hurt him,” said Ferdinanda.
When Tom said, “He knows,” I wanted to hug him.
A clap of thunder startled us as we drove toward Aspen Hills. Yolanda had asked if we could trade places, so she could be in back with Ferdinanda. Once they were sitting next to each other, they began to speak in Spanish. I would have tried to follow what they were saying, but they began to speak so fast that there was no way I could make it out.
Which they no doubt knew.
I couldn’t help but wonder, Did Yolanda take Humberto’s money to spy on Ernest? And did she actually spy on him and tell Humberto what Ernest was doing? What is the story on those missing assets?
The sky began to spit large drops. I glanced at my watch. The storm had been brewing all afternoon, and now, at ten to six, it was hitting us. The television meteorologists were always warning that this time of year in Colorado could yield “unsettled” weather patterns. For a caterer, this means “unsettling,” because if you had an outdoor event scheduled, you could, at the last moment, be hustling a lot of chairs and tables inside. Thank goodness for CBHS’s alternate plan to use the gym the next day. Thank goodness we didn’t have anything we needed to cook outside. Thank goodness Arch had his own transportation that night and wasn’t depending on me. Thank goodness . . .
I recognized my own thought pattern. I was trying to calm myself, trying to get distracted, before something potentially unsettling was due to take place. As Yolanda’s tires ground up the hill into the back entrance of Aspen Hills, I swallowed hard. Up, up, up we went. The engine gnashed its innards as I turned the steering wheel hard for first one, then another switchback.
On our right, John Bertram’s house, then his garage, came into view. A hundred yards beyond that, crime-scene ribbons wrapped around rocks and posts fluttered in the wet breeze.
As John Bertram had told us, Ernest McLeod’s house was a third of a mile farther up. When I saw it, my heart plummeted. So much for just worrying about weather, cooking, transportation, and other insignificant issues.
“Hey, you two,” I said to Ferdinanda and Yolanda. “Everything all right?” They’d both begun sniffling, so no.
I peered ahead into the gloom. I could not see any police cars. If Ernest had had one garage remote and Yolanda had had the other, how had they gotten in? Well, presumably John Bertram had a spare key to his friend’s house and had given it to the sheriff’s department. And even if John hadn’t, the police had their ways. They’d already gotten in once and found the seventeen thousand under the mattress.
But if Tom wanted me to honk at the police car, then to get permission to go inside, how was I supposed to do that if I couldn’t see anybody there?
Yolanda and Ferdinanda were still crying. I pulled over onto the graveled shoulder, then reached into my bag and handed tissues back to Yolanda, who kept one and gave the other to her aunt. Ferdinanda wiped her eyes and then tucked the tissue into another unseen compartment of her wheelchair. I wondered where she kept the baton, and how often she used it.
We were just above the highest location of the crime-scene tape stretching around a boulder. The rain pelted down; the yellow ribbons blew sideways. I strained to see up to Ernest’s house. There was no police car. Could the investigators have been dropped off by another team? There were no lights. Was it possible they were done already?
Tom had said they would be there. I honked three times. There was no reponse.
I punched in first Tom’s cell, then his office number, but was directed to voice mail both times. I left messages saying I couldn’t see a department car at Ernest’s house, and that I’d honked, to no avail. If I couldn’t see the investigators or reach them, should we go in?
Could the team have left already? That didn’t seem likely. County investigators usually stay on a fresh murder for hours in pursuit of clues. I didn’t know which investigators were assigned to Ernest’s place. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk Tom’s wrath by going into the house without the permission I’d promised him I would get.
I called Tom’s cell four more times during the next ten minutes. I tried Sergeant Boyd, his most trusted subordinate, and got voice mail there, too.
On my last try to Tom, I said that even if Yolanda and Ferdinanda decided to stay with us, they would need toiletries, clothes, and so on. I knew he wouldn’t want us to come back to Ernest’s house when it was completely dark and the team had left, would he? I supposed we could go to the grocery store for essentials, I said, and run the washing machine for Yolanda’s clothes for tomorrow. . . .
I reluctantly hung up. Ferdinanda and Yolanda had started up their Spanish conversation again. Shame or no shame, I wanted to ask Yolanda why she hadn’t felt the confidence to call me when Kris hit her. She knew my history. Had she been too proud to ask for help? I wondered.
While waiting for Tom to call back, I contemplated Ernest’s dark house, which was barely visible now through the relentless downpour.
The weathered-gray-clapboard-sided house had originally been a one-story summer vacation home for a public school teacher. The teacher, who’d had the old-fashioned name Portia, had lived and worked in Denver from the end of the Second World War, when the house had been new, until the early seventies. Never married, Portia had lived year-round in the house after her retirement. Like many Aspen Meadow residences of that era, the place had been small—only two bedrooms and one bath. But its glory had been the fifteen gorgeous, sloping acres that commanded a spectacular vista of national forest.
I stared at my cell phone, willing Tom, Sergeant Boyd, or someone from the department to call me. Nothing. I shook my head and stared back at the house.
Over the years, Portia had told Ernest, she’d had multiple offers from builders ridi
ng various booms. He told us this story as he waved his hand, the way she had, as if Portia had been a princess who’d dismissed suitors who weren’t up to snuff. These builders, Portia had angrily told Ernest, were trying to take advantage of unincorporated Furman County’s lax building restrictions. They wanted to put sixty structures on one-quarter-acre parcels. How could anyone enjoy the view with all the houses cheek by jowl? No, no, Portia told Ernest. She put her house up for sale several times, to take advantage of rising prices. But she stood firm in one area: Whoever purchased it had to sign a legal notice that he or she would never tear down the original house nor subdivide her land. Buyers weren’t interested in a small, outdated, ramshackle place with only two bedrooms and a single bath. Builders were scared to death to sign away their desire to develop.
And then along came Ernest McLeod, a cop who was unmarried at the time. Ernest charmed Portia and asked if he could have her permission to buy her house and add on to it. No matter what, he promised, he would never subdivide her land. And for the addition, he would use the same siding, let it weather, and keep Portia’s style of architecture, which even an amateur art critic would sneeringly call nondescript. Ernest also insisted he would do all the work himself and, as if to prove it, showed Portia pictures of the addition he’d done to his place in Denver. He’d also told her he’d just been accepted into the Furman County Sheriff’s Department. He wanted to live in Aspen Meadow, because the people were so nice. And, he said, he would be using the land only to host picnics for his fellow law enforcement officers.
Portia, a lifelong Republican who was a great believer in law and order, had gladly sold Ernest her house. Shoveling the long driveway might have kept her in shape for the first decade of her retirement years, but the winters had begun to grind on her. She wanted to move to Arizona. The deal was made, and they were both happy.
Portia had sent Ernest postcards from Tucson, which he’d shown us. In reply, he’d sent her pictures of her old house, with whatever project he was undertaking highlighted in “before” and “after” snapshots. Ernest had begun by adding a garage and a cantilevered second story that featured a second, new kitchen, a new living/dining room, and two more bedrooms, plus two more baths. He’d then moved on to building a deck in the middle of the second-story façade, with a greenhouse on one side and a glassed-in winter porch complete with wood-burning fireplace on the other. He’d carved a sign that said PORTIA’S PERCH and hung it outside the winter porch, then another one that read PORTIA’S PARCEL, which he’d staked next to a boulder. Portia had written back to Ernest that they were her favorite photographs; she showed them to everyone in her retirement home.
Even after Ernest married Faye, who divorced him three years into their union for the Wyoming doctor, he’d sent snapshots to Portia, until his last letter was returned, stamped “Addressee Deceased.” He’d told us about her passing with tears in his eyes, and shortly after that, his casual drinking had turned heavy, then addictive, and he’d been forced into early retirement. Still, he’d told us at one of the department picnics he still hosted at his house, he’d found spiritual renewal through AA and a “new way to fight the bad guys,” as he put it, in his job as a private investigator.
Tom and I had often admired the view from Ernest’s deck. Every house in Aspen Meadow had a slightly different view. It was that same puzzle posed by the Mountain Journal, which Tom had reminded me of: “Whose view is this?” For a whopping five bucks, you could drive around and try to figure it out.
Portia, for her part, had hated the newspapers and had called the cops when the Mountain Journal had shown up, uninvited, to take a photograph of her view. Ernest said Portia called the media “a bunch of pinkos.” Remembering, I smiled as I recalled Tom putting his arm around me as he pointed out the spectacular vista of national forest, with its steep nearby mountains. Around Ernest’s house, the land was peppered with quartz and granite boulders, towering lodgepole and ponderosa pines, stands of aspen, and the occasional perfect, Christmas tree–shaped blue spruce. After some December poachers had come in with chain saws, which they’d used to cut down over two dozen of the spruce, Ernest had put up signs every twelve feet that read ABSOLUTELY NO TREE CUTTING, although he’d told us we could come get a tree any time we wanted. We demurred, saying Portia wouldn’t have wanted it.
I sighed and stared at the house, which, with all the additions, had a hodgepodge look to it. The place already showed indications of neglect, although Ernest had been gone—I couldn’t bring myself to think dead—for only two days. It was hard to make things out through the wind, the rain, and the gathering gloom. The PORTIA’S PERCH sign hung at an angle. The long deck had the painful look of abandonment. When Ernest hadn’t returned Saturday night, Yolanda clearly hadn’t known to bring in the pots of annuals. These massive displays—petunias, geraniums, nicotiana, and a dozen other florals—had died from the frost we’d had the previous night. Every spring, Ernest had grown the flowers from seed in his greenhouse, before placing them outside on the deck. Now they looked scraggly and forlorn, as did the whole house, come to think of it. I felt a rush of sorrow.
After fifteen minutes, I still hadn’t heard back from Tom. No one appeared. Yolanda and Ferdinanda seemed to have exhausted their conversation. Ferdinanda’s voice sounded like stones scraping together when she said she needed to go to the bathroom.
I called John Bertram’s house, since it was just down the road. There was no answer, and the place was dark. I started the van, moved it to the end of Ernest’s driveway, and honked again. There was no response.
Finally, I told Yolanda and her aunt that I would call out to whatever law enforcement people were in the house, if there were any, to get their permission to come in.
Pulling on my jacket, I took the remote that Yolanda handed me and jumped from the warmth of the van. I was immediately stung with freezing rain and another clap of thunder, but I trotted up the driveway to the garage door anyway. When I opened it, only Ernest’s pickup was inside.
“Hello?” I called.
I raced to the door leading into the house, tentatively calling, “Tom Schulz sent me!” and “Hello!” The only response was a chorus of yips. Nine puppies? Only nine? The place sounded like a kennel at feeding time.
“Is anybody here?” I yelled when I pushed through the door.
No one answered. The house did have a slightly peculiar smell, but I couldn’t place it. Not rotting food, not puppy mess, but something else . . . what? My mother had always claimed I had overdeveloped olfactory receptors and that I could sniff scents that she couldn’t. This was common among foodies, I later discovered, and so it was only natural, I told my mother much later, that I should go into catering. Then it had been her turn to sniff, but that was another story.
I pressed switches on a nearby panel, which brought illumination to the shadowy interior. Then I raced back to the van.
“Let’s go,” I said as I shook drops out of my wet hair. I eased the van into the space next to Ernest’s pickup truck, and Yolanda brought Ferdinanda into the basement.
“We’ve decided to stay with you,” said Yolanda. “Will it be all right for us to make calls from your house? We still need to phone Ernest’s friends and make arrangements.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But we’d better go as quickly as possible,” I warned them. “I was supposed to get permission for us to be in here.”
“Five minutes,” Yolanda replied. “We don’t have much stuff.”
“Do you have suitcases?” I asked, but my words were drowned out by the barking of the puppies. “Should I go do something with them?” I called to Yolanda, who was rolling her aunt into the bathroom.
“No, I can do it,” said Yolanda. “Ernest told me what to do. It’ll just take me a few minutes to—”
“I can figure out what the dogs need,” I called back. “You’ve got enough to worry about already.”
“Thanks, Goldy.” Her beautiful face was filled with gratitude. “You do
too much for me.”
“Where are the dogs?”
She pointed at a door. Before I could go through it, though, my glance snagged on a section of the small living room where Yolanda and Ferdinanda watched television. The hearth of the tiny moss-rock fireplace was covered with a cloth topped with various statues: the Virgin Mary, a metal chalice with a rooster on top, and a mask of some kind, with cowrie shells for eyes and a mouth. It was some kind of . . . well, what? Altar?
The dogs’ crying pulled my attention away, and I pushed through the door Yolanda had indicated. It opened into a small, linoleum-floored storage room, which also served as the laundry room. I flipped on the lights and was immediately greeted with a barking storm and a horde of beagles.
“Wait, wait!” I cried as I tried to get my bearings in a world of stink. Whatever order Ernest had imposed on this room, where he had placed a row of metal cabinets, all labeled alphabetically, Auto to Yard, was gone. The floor was strewn with stained wet newspapers. The beagles raced about, clambering over my feet, clawing my legs, and falling every which way. They were probably the cutest animals I’d ever seen, a tumble of brown, black, and white fur and lovable baby hound faces. Still, I resisted the urge to get down on the floor and play with them. The stench of dog urine and feces was so strong that my eyes watered. I looked around wildly. Ernest had hung a mop, a broom, and other cleaning items next to the washer and dryer. Above the machines was a shelf that blessedly contained a neat pile of newspapers and a spray bottle of disinfectant. On the floor was a trash can lined with a plastic bag. Hooray.
I gathered up all the soiled papers, shoved them into the garbage, and sprayed the entire floor with disinfectant. This was no easy task, as the puppies kept yipping madly, whining, licking my ankles, digging their tiny teeth into my calves, and rolling onto their backs to have their tummies rubbed. When they decided to go off and play with their pals, their paws slid every which way on whatever part of the floor I’d just mopped. I pushed the sponge-on-a-stick as best I could to get the whole floor, then sprayed again and mopped again. When I got on my hands and knees to lay down clean newspaper, the puppies decided I was the Eiger and began to climb. They also licked my face, my hands, and my arms before they went back to whining.
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