by Sue Henry
Turning on the radio, I found a station that was playing Western music, retrieved my weaving from inside Pat’s house, and sat down to see what I could do without a handy coach, while I waited for Butch Stringer to arrive. It was pleasant work, especially with those wonderful yarns, easy on the hands and mind, slightly hypnotic, but not as much so as the rhythmic sounds of the pedal loom we had watched Kelly use at the shop. Still, I found a rhythm of my own that went along nicely to Luckenbach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys.
I had thought of calling Herrera to tell him about my midnight visit from Sharon Beil, but something kept me from it. Now that she was gone—and evidently intended to go much farther away—I found myself thinking about her and considering what he had said about her fingerprints on and around the vat where Tony Cole—in another of those senior moments I couldn’t remember his real name—had been killed. Had I made a mistake? She had said I could tell him or not, intimating that it didn’t—or soon wouldn’t—matter to her. Did she already have a plan in place that would allow her to disappear? It seemed so, for from the little I now knew, she didn’t seem the sort to give up easily.
There had evidently been a bond between the two sisters, though they seemed unlike in several significant ways. Still, a sister is a sister; such a bond can be very strong, even if they don’t agree on just how to spend their lives. I had a feeling I’d have liked to know Sharon better.
I took Stretch for a morning walk on a road toward the mountains, but we had to hurry home under a sudden shower that, almost impishly, decided to walk with and on us, reaching the ground, but lightly.
Stretch barked at the postman who showed up at ten o’clock and dropped a couple of letters in Pat’s mailbox, so I knew he was almost back to normal and ready again to challenge the world if appropriate. He too is a survivor and, in dog years, as much a senior citizen as I am.
All in all, it was probably the quietest morning I’d spent since arriving in Taos and I appreciated it as a time to breathe between storms of one kind or another, though I hoped Herrera’s work would be successful and there wouldn’t be another on the way.
I heard Butch arrive in his pickup shortly before noon and stepped out to welcome him back to Taos, very glad to see him again.
Over lunch I told him everything I could think of that had happened since he’d left to go back to Santa Fe—could it possibly have been only four days since we had gone to Bettye’s on the mesa to see how she dyed yarn?
There was no way of knowing that the next couple of days would make me glad of that morning’s quiet as storm clouds of quite another and more threatening kind would gather ominously and be upon us very soon.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THERE WERE SO MANY PIECES TO THE PUZZLE THAT now, as I look back on it, I wonder at how we managed to fit many of them together at all.
Butch and I were sitting at the dinette table with the remains of lunch when Herrera drove up outside in a squad car and came in with a surprise riding on his arm.
When Stretch trotted quickly across to greet him, Herrera cautiously, making sure they wouldn’t quarrel, set his tiny Yorkshire terrier down on the floor and we watched in amusement as the two little dogs circled and sniffed, getting acquainted.
“Puñado, this is Stretch,” Herrera said, hunkering down to give each of them a pat, which they ignored in preference to their interest in each other.
“That’s a pretty fierce police dog,” Butch commented with a grin as he stood up to shake hands with Herrera.
“Well, he thinks he is anyway. Don’t disabuse him of the idea. I wouldn’t want to turn him into a wimp. You should see him cow Officer Tolliver’s German shepherd, who can’t figure out what to do about anything this small.”
Once at ease with a new friend, Puñado scampered off, his tiny legs a blur of motion, to explore the Winnebago from stem to stern, Stretch padding proprietarily along behind.
When the three of us were settled with fresh coffee, I told Herrera about my visitor in the dark of the night. He listened carefully, frowning.
“I’ve been close to catching up to her a couple of times,” he said thoughtfully. “You say she didn’t threaten you in any way?”
“No. She only wanted to know about the journal, and she was relieved to know that I had given it to you.”
“That makes some sense, for because of it I now have Alan Medina in temporary custody, though he’s not talking, except to swear that he had nothing to do with the killing of either Shirley Morgan or Earl Jones, aka Anthony Cole. The painting you saw in Shirley’s apartment and then again in the gallery? He says he let Cole take it for a few days on speculation, but that Cole decided not to buy it and brought it back sometime before the end of last week. But in the journal Shirley says it was a gift to her from Cole.”
“She told me it was a gift, but she didn’t mention him.”
“Medina also says he doesn’t know Ford Whitaker and had nothing to do with the two of Whitaker’s woven pieces you saw in the gallery. He says that his mother made all the arrangements for them. I have trouble with that because this is a small, tight community with lots of artists and most of them know each other, or at least know of each other. How can you show an artist in your gallery and not know something?”
“Did you ask Ford?”
“He’s evidently gone to take some of his work to Santa Fe. Won’t be back till tomorrow or Friday.”
“He called me this morning and said he’d be back tomorrow,” an unexpected voice informed us as the screen door opened and Pat climbed in. “He took two tapestries along with him to deliver for me—one of mine and one of Bettye Sullivan’s. Hey, Butch. Good to see you. And, speaking of Ford, I just rolled the rug you bought at the show and wrapped it for transport. You can pick it up anytime you like, since you’re here . . .”
That pretty much broke up the discussion.
Herrera took Puñado to ride in the squad car, leaving Stretch with his nose against the screen door, looking after them as if he’d been abandoned. In a world of motor-home-traveling Labradors and shepherds, there aren’t many dogs around even close to his size, and he refuses to play with the likes of toy poodles or any breed that resembles a yapping, walking dust mop, which he views as an infringement upon his dignity.
Pat took a look at the weaving I had done and pronounced it acceptable, then showed me a trick or two about how to change colors or kinds of yarn. “You could be really good at this with a little practice,” she told me.
Still tired from the interruption of my sleep the night before, I decided to take a nap. So I apologized to Butch, and he followed Pat off to the shop to claim his rug.
“No problem,” he told me. “Call me when you wake up and I’ll come back and we can decide what to do about dinner.”
I was snoozing peacefully when the thunderstorm rolled in and began to pour rain on the roof of the Winnebago with a roar that woke me and sent me hurrying to close the overhead vents and a window I had left open. The sunshine had disappeared and overhead were none of the small, rather puffy, singular clouds that I had watched earlier as they walked thin rain across the distant mesa. Instead, the sky had grown a much darker charcoal gray in the form of a solid bank of heavy clouds that were now dumping water on Taos with a vengeance. It probably wouldn’t last long, but it had pulled out all the timpani and cymbals and the rest of the percussion. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and Stretch, unused to such a cacophony, came to curl up next to my feet under the table as I sat watching the torrent out the window. A sudden wind buffeted the motor home so that I could feel each gust, even though the stabilizers were in place.
As it began to quiet down to a more gentle rain, I went back and lay down on my bed, taking Stretch with me. He settled at my feet and was soon wheezing, as he sometimes does, but I couldn’t get back to sleep for thinking things over again.
So Herrera had caught up with Alan Medina, but was getting nothing but denials out of him. I remembered how fast he h
ad exited the gallery once he knew I was there. Why would he have all but fled from me if he weren’t involved somehow—as he claimed he wasn’t? I had never heard him speak, but Herrera thought it was Medina’s voice that I had heard calling from the black pickup to the man who had tossed Stretch into the Dumpster behind Charley’s Corner. Who was that man? Had the two of them killed Shirley? If so, why?
There were so many unanswered questions. I found I was still feeling glad to have met Shirley’s sister, Sharon. If her fingerprints on Doris Matthews’s dye vat were an indication that she had drowned Tony Cole—and I had to admit that I could think of no other reason they would have been found there—then a part of me hoped she would, as she had said, leave Taos and disappear. Maybe he didn’t deserve to die for his con games, but he had certainly asked for it, especially from an unforgiving sister. Had he killed Shirley? No, I reminded myself, he had died first. Then who had killed her—and tried to make it look like a second and finally successful attempt at suicide?
I thought back to that bloody bathroom scene. Had there been anything at all to give us a clue? Closing my eyes, I tried to visualize it as I had found it, beginning with opening the door. There had been a towel on the toilet seat near the tub in which she died. What else? I remembered that Ann Barnes’s threatening to be sick had interrupted my examination of the room. This long afterward, it was difficult to recall anything that I had overlooked at the time. Parts of the room remained a blank. Had there been soap in the tray by the tub? Had the medicine chest door been open, even a little? I had no idea.
My focus had been primarily on the body in the water, for obvious reasons. I could envision that with no trouble and wished I could not, for it was an ugly scene. It swam clearly into memory, the face with eyes staring upward, arms extended along her sides, hands palm up, and the horrible cuts that started at the wrist and continued vertically up her arms almost to the elbows. Why had her killer found it necessary to make such long, deep cuts? It must have been extremely painful, but there had been no indication that she had been restrained, or that she had struggled with her attacker. Except for the bruises on her ankles, there had been no sign that she had been held down by force. Could she have been drugged?
Shirley’s murder had not been the result of a sudden impulse by her killer. Her supposed second and successful attempt at suicide had been very well planned and executed—perhaps too well.
Without consciously registering it at the time, I suddenly remembered that I had seen and recorded a thing that her killer had overlooked. To make it seem that Shirley had butchered her own arms, allowing herself to bleed to death, there should have been something left near at hand that she would have used to make the cuts. There had been nothing sharp within reach of that tub—no knife, no razor blade, nothing at all that I could remember. The police had found nothing in the tub with her body. So she could not have cut her own arms and there was no blood anywhere but in the tub. It must have been done there.
Herrera had said that they would have the results of the postmortem in about a week. Shirley had died on a Friday. Could it possibly have been only five days ago? Would he know yet if she had been drugged? If so, he hadn’t mentioned it.
I sat up, wondering about Ann Barnes, and realized that I had not given her a thought since we found Shirley dead. She had been upset enough to be sick, but how had she been taking it all since then? Poor lonely soul, I thought. She might not be terribly likeable, but living alone couldn’t be easy for her, without a family. No wonder she kept such close watch on whoever rented the place next door.
Guiltily, I knew I could, and should, have checked in on her. It wouldn’t hurt to do so now, and with the rental car I had the means to do it. Herrera had Alan Medina supposedly walking a narrow line in answering his questions and would, I imagined, probably soon have the name of his confederate in the kidnapping of Stretch, so I would most likely be safe if I used the back roads to reach the duplex.
It had been almost two hours since Butch left with Pat. I thought about calling him, but decided that I wouldn’t be gone long and would make the call when I came back.
Instead I wrote him a quick note, just in case he returned before I did. Then I took Stretch in the rental car and the long way around to Ann Barnes’s, where I left him in the car and went up the walk, expecting to spend only a few minutes.
Once again the curtain twitched after I knocked on the door, but she opened it almost immediately.
“Oh, Mrs. McNabb!” she said with a surprised and pleased expression. “I was just wondering about you. Come in. Come right in.”
“I can’t stay,” I told her, stepping in far enough to allow her to close the door behind me. “I just thought I’d be sure you were all right after—ah—the other day.”
“Oh yes, I’m fine.” She led the way across to her table next to the kitchen. “I’m just having a glass of iced tea. Please have one with me, will you?”
I really didn’t want the tea, but she was patently anxious for company, so I agreed and took the chair she had pulled out and was waving me into. “Shirley told me you make fruit-flavored tea that is very good.”
“Oh, I think I do, but the proof is in the tasting,” she said from the kitchen, from which I heard the clink of ice and the pouring of liquid. Setting a tall, frosty glass of pinkish-brown tea and several ice cubes down in front of me, she smiled. “This is raspberry. Try it.”
I did and found that Shirley had been half right. It was good, but a little too sweet, as many people seem to prefer their flavored teas, and had a faint bitter aftertaste, as if she had steeped it too long. “It’s lovely, thank you.”
“How nice of you to stop to see me,” Ann smiled, sitting down across from me at the table. “And how are you and your little dog doing? It was such a horrid experience—finding her that way—wasn’t it? The poor dear girl. And she was such a good tenant, too.”
“Will you rent the place next door again soon?”
“Oh, I shall have to,” she said, frowning slightly. “I depend on it so. Along with my Social Security, that income is all I have to keep me going. I must get someone to come in and clean the bathroom, though. I would be sick again if I tried to do it myself.”
“No help from family?” I asked, curious, and took a long swallow of my tea, hoping to finish it quickly and be on my way before she could refill the glass.
“Oh, no. All my family is dead—now,” she said softly, with an odd hesitation and a glance across the room. “I’m all by myself. But that’s all right—I get by one way or another.”
Interesting, I thought, how at a certain age some women simply retreat into a comfortable cave of their own making and avoid the world and other people. How old was she, anyway?
I had something in my eye, and rubbed at it with the back of one hand.
My glass of tea was almost empty, so I reached to finish it and was startled when my fingers hit it and knocked it over. The remaining liquid, along with the ice, spilled out across the table, leaving a brownish-pink stain on the embroidered cloth. I stared at it, wondering why I was suddenly so clumsy.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sho shorry. How mumsy of me.”
Blinking in an attempt to clear away the haze that had somehow settled in between us, I watched the pattern of the tablecloth writhe and blur. What the hell was going on?
The sound as the glass rolled off the table and shattered on the floor startled me enough for a realization.
How could I have been so stupid?
The woman has poisoned me!
I peered across at her, everything faded, and I felt myself falling out of the chair. Elsewhere in the room there was some kind of crash as blackness settled in, but the last thing I remember was her wide grin—and the straight razor in her hand.
TWENTY-EIGHT
AFTER A GOOD DINNER, PAT, FORD, HERRERA, BUTCH, and I sat together around a table on the outside patio at the Taos Inn, drinking margaritas and watching the younger crowd cruise by on Pas
eo del Pueblo Norte, like kids anywhere on Friday night. Between their calls to each other, and to others who sat at tables around us on the patio, I could hear some fine flamenco music that was being played by a seriously talented guitarist in the Adobe Bar behind us.
We were a cheerful and compatible group. I was feeling much relieved at knowing that everyone—including me—was safe and that our questions had been, or were being, answered. How different from Ann Barnes, a woman alone in a world she held at arm’s length and couldn’t help seeing as hostile, for to her way of thinking, piece by piece it had taken everything from her that she cherished. I thought back to my visit with her, looked around the table, and knew how lucky I was to be sitting there at all, alive and well, with people who cared for me and for whom I cared.
I had come slowly awake in a hospital hours after I fell from the chair at Ann’s table and opened my eyes to find Butch Stringer asleep in a chair next to my bed. As I moved he woke, sat up, and leaned toward me with a huge smile.
“There you are finally,” he said. “How do you feel?”
I thought about it, then tried to answer, but my throat hurt, so I nodded and croaked out, “Why is my throat so sore?”
“They pumped your stomach,” he told me, reaching for a glass on the table by my bed. “Here. Have a drink of water.”
He held it while I took a sip through a straw that had an accordion bend in it. That helped.
“What happened?”
“Do you remember being at the Barnes woman’s house?” he asked.
Some confused pictures crowded into my mind of someone yelling, a brown stain spreading across the top of a table, and the crash of glass breaking.
“I went to see if she was okay,” I said, remembering as I tried to sit up and noticed for the first time that I had an IV in my left arm.
Butch helped, tucking a second pillow behind me, and then sat back down.