“Has he displayed any of his charms?”
“None that I’ve noticed.”
“Well, okay then.” She sat down. “Good to see you guys.”
Tully introduced her to Dave.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Dave,” she said. “Well, actually, mostly about your chicken-fried steaks. The House of Fry happens to be Agatha’s and Bernice’s favorite restaurant.”
“They obviously are ladies of impeccable taste.”
“Have you always been in the restaurant business?”
Tully and Pap were suddenly interested.
“No, this is my first restaurant. Before that I kind of kicked around the world, which was interesting, but then I got the urge to settle down. Famine struck me as the perfect little town.”
“Kicking around the world sounds wonderful!” Bunny said. “I wouldn’t be wild about living in Famine of all places, or any one place in particular. I would love to travel, though, but I can’t afford it.”
“It never used to be so expensive,” Dave said. “I lived on a beach down in Mexico for a while. It was wonderful and cost practically nothing. I made myself a little hut to sleep in and fished off the beach at night. The locals called the fish pargo, but they looked like red snapper. I coated them with coarse salt and roasted them on a stick over charcoal, just as I had seen a woman in a beachfront café do it. They were delicious! The café had a thatched roof and no walls, only posts, and sometimes the ocean would wash across the floor and I and the other patrons would lift our feet and go on eating, and then the water would recede and we would put our feet back down. I doubt a person could do that anymore, live down there in a hut on a beach. But just talking about it makes me want to go back.”
“I lived in Mexico for a while,” Pap said. “The people were great.”
Tully thought he should mention that was when the FBI was after Pap on numerous corruption charges, but he decided to restrain himself. Furthermore, nothing was ever proved on the corruption charges. He said, “Agatha, it’s time you filled us in on the mystery.”
“Oh, dear!” she said. “I know it’s a bunch of foolishness, but I’ve wondered about my dad’s disappearance my whole life. Did he just run off and leave us, or did something happen to him and his helper?”
Bunny and Bernice got up and cleared the table, while Agatha went on to tell them as much as she knew about her father, all of which came from her mother, some old friends and neighbors, and a few faded photos. She got a photo album off a shelf and opened it on the table. One picture showed her father, Tom Link, with a teenage boy. Both were dressed in jeans and work shirts. Neat handwriting in pencil on the back identified the boy as Sean O’Boyle, age 14. Another photo showed Sean posed with a pick over his shoulder. “What’s that white thing behind him?” Tully said.
Agatha said, “It’s so out of focus I’ve never been able to make it out. It’s odd, though, because those rocks on the edge are sharp. It could be a patch of snow on a steep hillside.”
“Can I take that picture with us?” Tully said.
“I had a copy made for you,” she said. She handed Tully the copy wrapped in plastic and then went on with her report, as methodically as if she were giving a lecture. Having read over her mother’s diaries numerous times, she had by now all but memorized them.
Tom and Sean had camped out in the Snowies all one spring, panning for gold in various streams. One day they found a stream with bits of gold in it. Some of the gold had white quartz still clinging to it. They followed the gold upstream and found a small outcropping of white quartz. Upon close inspection, they found thin veins of gold threaded through the outcropping. They began blasting away the outcropping and following the gold. They worked all that summer on the mine, and the veins of gold grew thicker the deeper they blasted into the mountain.
“As a matter of fact,” Agatha said, “I have a piece of quartz my dad brought home shortly before he and Sean disappeared.” She went into her den and returned carrying a white rock the size of a baseball. She handed it to Tully.
“Holy cow!” he said. “Look at this.” He handed the rock to Pap. Dave stood up and looked over Pap’s shoulder. “They was getting into a major strike,” Pap said. “If anyone ever found that mine, people would have heard about it.”
Agatha explained that Tom and Sean blasted a very small opening to the mine, just high enough to get their wheelbarrow through to dump the tailings from inside. Whenever they left, they covered the opening with brush and pieces of driftwood. Once they were a few feet inside the mountain, they blasted a tunnel large enough to stand up in. When they hit the main veins of gold, Tom started talking about filing a claim. A few days later they disappeared.
Agatha said, “There’s one big gold mine over in that area of the Snowies, but it’s been shut down since the 1940s. Now with the price of gold going through the roof, you would think someone might try to open it up again, but I guess the shaft and tunnels are all rotted and caving in. I hear it would be just too dangerous and expensive to open them to mining again. But no one has ever found a single sign of my dad’s little mine. It’s just as if it vanished from the face of the earth.”
“How did Tom and Sean supply their mine?” Tully asked. “They had to haul in blasting powder or dynamite, food, tools, camp gear. They didn’t haul all that in on their backs.”
“No,” Agatha said, “they hauled it in with a team of horses and a wagon. Then Sean drove the team back to the ranch, because there was no place to keep the horses near the mine. Then he walked back to the mine.”
“Sean do all this in one day?”
Agatha thought for a moment. “Mama kept a lot of it in her diary, but I never paid much attention to the details.” She went into her bedroom and returned with the diary. “Here’s what she wrote about a month before Papa and Sean disappeared.” She read a passage that said Tom and Sean had taken a wagonload of supplies to their mine that morning, starting right after Tom had milked the cow. The boy had returned with the wagon late that afternoon, eaten dinner with Agatha’s mother and the baby Agatha that evening. He spent the night at their house. In the morning, he milked the cow, ate breakfast, and walked back to the mine.
Tully stared at the ceiling. After a bit, he said, “Anybody know how fast horses walk?”
Bernice said, “I can Google it for you.”
“That would be great. While you’re running your computer, Bernice, I’ll go get a topographical map I have in the truck.”
By the time he returned with the map, Bernice had finished Googling.
“How far to the base of the Snowies from here, Agatha?”
“Exactly fifteen miles. We’ve checked it on the car speedometer. The road runs straight from the ranch over to the Snowies. It intersects there with Hastings Road, which runs along the base of the mountains.”
“I know Hastings Road,” Tully said. “I’ve fished those creeks many times. Did Google know how fast horses walk?”
“It said five, which I assume means five miles an hour.”
“Great!” Tully spread the map out on the table. He drew a square on it. Dave stood up and peered over his shoulder.
“Okay, here’s the ranch,” Tully said. “It’s fifteen miles over to the base of the mountains. That would take three hours, with the horses pulling the wagon at five miles an hour. After they reached the base of the Snowies, they could have turned either north or south at Hastings Road.”
Tully frowned. He tugged on the corner of his mustache to help him concentrate. “Okay, let’s assume they turned north on Hastings. They get to the drainage where the mine is located and unload the wagon. They can’t leave the team alone on the road and they can’t leave supplies stacked in view for somebody to come along and steal them. They have to haul them back into the woods and out of sight. Tom then packs the supplies up to the mine while Sean drives the horses and wagon back to the ranch.”
Pap got up from the table and walked over to look out a window. “I can
’t stand this,” he muttered.
Dave said, “Let’s say it takes three hours to drive to the mountains at five miles an hour and an hour to unload the wagon. That’s four hours. It takes Sean three hours to drive back from Hastings to the ranch. That’s seven hours. Sean is gone a total of about ten hours. So he spent a total of three hours going and coming on Hastings. Divide that in half. It took them an hour and a half to drive up to the drainage where the mine is. At five miles an hour, that’s seven and a half miles from the intersection with Hastings.”
“That’s about what I calculate,” Tully said.
“Me, too,” Pap said. “Of course, they could have turned south.”
Tully put his finger on the map. “Don’t complicate things, Pap! This will at least put us in the ballpark of where to look for the mine. The mine was either within a range of seven and a half miles north of the intersection with Hastings or seven and a half miles south.”
He ran his finger along the road on the map. “There are two small drainages and one big one in that seven and a half miles north of the intersection. Deadman Creek flows out of the big one right at the end of that section.” He tapped his finger on a symbol. “Look, there’s a mine symbol on top of the ridge above the second drainage. I’ll bet it’s a gold mine, too.”
Agatha looked at the map. “Yes, it’s the Finch Mine. It’s owned by Teddy and Margaret Finch. I know both of them well. The family shut the mine down over fifty years ago, but all the buildings are still up there. It was quite an operation.”
“Yeah, it was,” Pap said. He walked back to the table and looked at the map. “When I was just a mite, my daddy worked there for a couple of years. He’d bring me home pieces of rock and I’d pound it up with a hammer and get bits of gold out of it. I put the gold in an empty ketchup bottle. I must have had a couple ounces of gold in that bottle, but when we moved away I forgot all about it. Every once in a while I think about going back up to the mine and seeing if I can find that bottle. But they’ve got a heavy chain and a lock on the road and No Trespassing signs all over the place.”
Dave laughed. “You let No Trespassing signs keep you out, Pap? I find that hard to believe, given a person of your character.”
“Actually, I usually forget to bring my bolt cutter when I’m up this way. Fortunately, I had the good sense to bring it along this time.”
“About what I figured,” Tully said.
“I suppose I could have parked my truck at the chain and walked in but the road is pretty steep from there on,” Pap said. “Now that we’ve got the area narrowed down to seven and a half miles, we should turn up Tom’s mine in no time. How long are we going to spend looking for this mine, which may not even exist?”
“Who knows?” Tully said. “I’d be glad to leave you here with Agatha and Bernice. They could find some chores for you, right, Agatha?”
She put her hands on her hips and looked at Pap. “Oh my, yes, we certainly could use an old reprobate to pull some knotweed for us. We’ve been getting a terrible infestation of it the last few years.”
Pap straightened up and stretched. “Too bad, Agatha, but this old reprobate has got to go help these boys find a lost gold mine.”
Tully folded up his map and looked at Agatha. Somehow in the past few moments she seemed to have shrunk. Maybe it was a change of light in the room. Her wrinkles seemed to dominate her face, even framed as it was with a halo of white hair. “What’s wrong, Agatha? You look worried.”
“Bo, I just thought about that madman that’s after you. And I noticed you reached under your vest when Bunny’s car drove into the yard. You have to be awfully concerned about that monster. So, here I am, asking you to go off on a frivolous goose chase just for me. Kincaid could be out there in the mountains waiting for you.”
“Agatha! Agatha! Agatha! The last thing I ever want to do is cause you the slightest worry about me. As far as Kincaid goes, we’re getting that problem taken care of. I’ve got Pap and Dave with me, and you know they’re a whole lot more dangerous than Kincaid. If the three of us can’t handle that nut, I’d better look for another kind of work. I may not have mentioned this to Pap and Dave but I’ve got one of my best deputies concentrating on Kincaid and we’ve worked out a little trap for him.”
Pap looked surprised. “We have a plan? Don’t tell me it involves Pugh! Our lives depend on Pugh?”
Bernice put her hand on Tully’s cheek. “Bo, I wish you would give up this job. You know you could make a nice living now as an artist and you wouldn’t have some maniac out to kill you.”
“Probably only art critics then,” Tully said. “But right now I’m up here to enjoy myself, and there’s nothing I like more than delving into a mystery, particularly one provided by you, Agatha.”
“You’re sure, Bo?” she said. “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather be out there trying to arrest Kincaid?”
“Arrest Kincaid? I’m absolutely sure of that, Agatha. Anyway, there’s one thing I’ve been wondering about. How did you and your mother survive here on the ranch after your father disappeared?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Agatha said. She told them how her mother had been teaching all eight grades at the Boulder Creek School when she married Tom Link. The school was one room and built of logs. It was three miles from the ranch. After Tom disappeared, her mother went back to teaching at the school. She would get up at four, milk the cow, fix breakfast, bundle Agatha up, and drop her off at the O’Boyles’, who lived between the ranch and Boulder Creek. Then she would walk on to the school, build a fire in the stove, dip a bucket of drinking water out of the creek, and get ready to teach the dozen or so kids in eight different grades. At noon, she would cook them hot lunch from government commodities and then read to them from Mark Twain or Jack London or one of her other favorite authors, and finally start the afternoon session. She would pick up Agatha from the O’Boyles’ that night and walk home carrying the little girl, milk the cow, and cook supper. “That’s the way it was in those days,” Agatha said. “People did what they had to do.”
“Just like nowadays,” Tully said.
Pap snorted. “I hope you’re joking, Bo. It ain’t the way it is nowadays at all! Now gov’ment rushes in and gives out handfuls of cash! It’s terrible!”
“Oh, for the good old days,” Tully said.
6
THEY ARRIVED AT Hastings Road by early afternoon. “What’s the plan?” Dave said.
“The first thing we better do is set up camp on Dead-man,” Tully said. “I’ve camped there lots of times over the years. There’s a great campsite at the end of an old logging road. The high country above it is about as rugged as I’ve ever seen. I got lost up there on a hunting trip twenty years ago. Thought I was going to die, but I worked down to the headwaters of the creek and managed to find my way out.”
“Didn’t happen to see a gold mine, did you?” Dave asked.
“Afraid not. Most of my attention was used up staying alive.”
“Deadman,” Pap said. “The name has a nice ring, don’t it?”
“It’s the biggest stream,” Tully said. “Probably run your dredge and find some gold there, Pap. The logging road is drivable at least as far as the campsite.”
Dave nudged Bo in the ribs. “Better take a look in your rearview mirror.”
“I’ve been watching it.” He pulled over to the edge of the road and stopped.
Pap grabbed his rifle. “What you watching?”
“There’s a vehicle following us,” Dave said. “Hangs there about half a mile back. Now that we’re stopped, it stopped. It’s about the size of a BB.”
“The size of a BB!” Pap said. “That’s small enough we could tromp it to death.” He opened the door and stepped out.
“It’s a blue Ford pickup,” Tully said. “I make it out to be an ’85 four-by-four with a dented left fender.”
“Man, either you have eyes like an eagle,” Dave said, “or you’re totally full of it.”
“Check it o
ut, Dave. There’s a pair of glasses in the glove compartment, if you’re hard of seeing.”
Dave grabbed the binoculars, stepped out of the cab, and stood next to Pap. He brought the binoculars to his eyes and brought them into focus. “He’s just sitting there, watching us.”
“What kind of vehicle?”
“Looks like a blue pickup,” Dave said. “Ford.”
“How about the dent in the left fender?” Tully asked.
“I can’t see that even with the glasses.”
“And you call yourself an Indian!”
“Forget what I call myself,” Dave said. “I was thinking Kincaid might be tailing us. Maybe he followed us all the way to the ranch. A guy like Kincaid could kill Agatha, Bernice, and Bunny just to pass the time until he could get a shot at us.”
“You’re right, Dave! That’s exactly what Kincaid would do.” Tully dug his cell phone out of the glove compartment and dialed. Daisy answered.
“Bo! It’s about time you called!”
“Why? What’s up?” He could not still a cold shiver that ran through him.
“Just about everything. An old couple in a cabin up on Woods Lake have been murdered. Family members found them this morning, both of them shot to death. Whoever did it took several guns, the couple’s car, and some other stuff, according to people who knew them.”
“What kind of car?”
“A red Humvee.”
“Put out an APB on the car. Tell the state patrol I’d like a couple of troopers patrolling the highway to Angst and ten miles beyond and to be on the lookout for that red Humvee. He may have switched cars by now, though.”
“You think Kincaid killed them?”
“Kill an old couple for their car? Sounds just like him. He would do it for sport. Now here’s what I want you to do. I know you’re spending nights at my mom’s house, but I want you to drop everything and get over to her place right now. Take your gun and don’t bother coming into the office tomorrow. Stay at Mom’s until I get back. You understand, Daisy?”
“But what about the office?”
The Double-Jack Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries) Page 5