The Tooth of Time

by Sue Henry

  “She put something in the tea she gave me,” I recalled suddenly.

  “She certainly did. The same stuff she gave Shirley Morgan to knock her out before she killed her.”

  “Oh dear. Why?”

  “Why you? She thought you knew about Shirley.”

  “No. I mean why Shirley?”

  A nurse opened the door and came in before he could answer.

  While we watched, she checked my pulse and did the things you would expect with a thermometer and a blood pressure cuff, saying the sort of things you can imagine while she did them.

  When she finished, she smiled and removed the IV.

  “You’re fine now, Mrs. McNabb,” she assured me. “You can go home as soon as the doctor has a look. He’ll be here in just a few minutes.”

  He was, and declared me fit to travel.

  And right behind him came Herrera.

  “So,” he said. “I should have known you wouldn’t leave the investigating to me. We were very lucky you left a note telling Butch where you were going. What were you thinking to go there alone?”

  So that was how they had found and saved me.

  “I went to see if she was all right,” I told him. “It never crossed my mind that she had—that she really would . . .”

  I let it go unfinished, as I recalled that my thoughts had been all around the truth before I left the Winnebago, following my own guilty impulse. I should have considered it a bit longer, shouldn’t I?

  It had been right there in front of us. So how had we missed it so completely?

  Somehow I think most people may assume that senior citizens are less inclined to revenge, leaving murder to younger people with more physical ability, who have yet to establish complete control over their impulses and the possible consequences. We forget that older people have had longer to generate and adhere to our resentments and hatreds, and some may have learned subtle and effective, if not lethal, methods of expressing them. Practice makes perfect? Time may have teeth for oldies, but they can have teeth of their own. Ann certainly did.

  “Why did she kill Shirley?” I asked Herrera.

  “She thought Shirley had killed her son. Anthony Cole—Earl Jones—was a child she bore out of wedlock, before she married an Edward Barnes, now deceased. She and her son were in it together, you see. Part of the profits he conned out of rich widows and divorcées went to his mother. The arrangement with the door between the two units of the duplex simply made it easier for her to keep an eye on the women he encouraged to move into the place. Ann could go in and search their things for helpful information. It also made it easier for her to drag Shirley through and murder her in her own bathroom. Who would suspect an old lady, after all?”

  I thought about that for a long minute and decided not to explain my ideas on the reality of senior citizenship to him or to take that remark personally. He would learn all that in time, as he met its teeth for himself.

  “So you knew about it before today?” I asked.

  “I suspected.”

  “Should have known you weren’t telling me everything.”

  “Well, Ms. McNabb, I am a police officer, after all.”

  “Maxie, please,” I reminded him.

  Butch chuckled from his place in the chair.

  “Time to take you home, I think,” he said with a grin as he stood up. “Need help getting dressed?”

  I gave him what my Daniel would have in similar circumstances.

  “I may be old, but I haven’t fallen off the perch yet. Give me five minutes, please.”

  Ford Whitaker, who had returned from Santa Fe that afternoon and joined us for dinner, was explaining how he had been friendly with Shirley, having met her at Weaving Southwest, and had taken her out a couple of times before she met Tony.

  “It disappointed me,” he admitted, “when she started turning down my invitations and going everywhere with him. I thought he was questionable, a chameleon sort who wasn’t much by himself but really turned on the charm with her. When I tried to tell her, she said I was just being jealous and refused to have anything more to do with me.”

  “Lucky for you,” Pat commented.

  “Actually unlucky for her, as it turned out,” Herrera said.

  “How was Alan Medina connected to this?” I wanted to know.

  “Medina?” Ford questioned with a frown. “I saw him with Cole several times.”

  “They had an agreement,” Herrera told us. “It was pretty complicated and had nothing to do with either murder—simply a matter of money. Medina is a gambler. He and his gambling buddy have had big debts at the casino out by the pueblo that’s run by the Indians—the Red Willow People. He hooked up with Cole and supplied him with paintings to use as pseudo gifts to his current victims in exchange for a cut of the money stolen from them in the con game Cole was running.

  “When Cole was killed, Medina hadn’t been paid for that last painting Cole had given Shirley. But Medina and his buddy thought it was worth seeing if the con money was still around. If they could find who had it, he thought they might be able to get all of it.

  “After Ann’s first attempt to kill Shirley didn’t work and with her not remembering much, Ann was smart enough to take false credit for saving her tenant and wait to make another try. When Ann convinced him she didn’t have the money, Medina thought Shirley might somehow have gotten it back. So they followed her to your motor home, Maxie, then ransacked it in a search for the journal and the money they had decided might be in it.”

  “How did they know about the journal?”

  “By then Ann, who had read parts of it in Shirley’s place, had found it was missing as well. She had searched Shirley’s things looking for it after killing her because she was afraid there might have been something incriminating written in it at the last that she hadn’t seen. She told Medina, so he was looking for it as well. Her mistake was neglecting to take it earlier. I assume she simply forgot.”

  “And it was in the Winnebago all the time. Was there anything helpful in it?”

  “Not a thing. But they took Stretch to see if you could be compelled to turn over either the money or the journal or both.”

  What confusion. We all sat thinking about it, fitting pieces of the puzzle together in our minds until some kind of picture made sense.

  “Seems pretty convoluted to me,” Ford said, shaking his head.

  Pat nodded. “I know more than I’ll ever want to even try to remember,” she said.

  Butch gave Herrera a searching look, hesitated, then asked the one question that had not been addressed, which I had decided to let slide for my own personal reasons.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, “I get enough of this to understand most of it, though some of the details and motives are beyond me. But there’re two things you haven’t told us. Where is the money Shirley gave Tony Cole? And who drowned Cole—Jones—whatever his name is—in that vat? I had sort of assumed it must have been Medina.”

  Herrera shook his head and shrugged.

  “I have no idea what happened to the money,” he said. “It may be that Cole put it in a bank somewhere under another name and we’ll never find it. Hundreds of bank accounts are abandoned by people all the time and never touched again. If he did that, he took its secret to the grave. On the other hand, he may have been carrying the money and whoever killed him may have it.”

  “And who killed him?”

  We all waited while he hesitated, considering.

  I held my breath, torn between conflicting emotions, having done my duty and told him all I knew about my midnight visit from Sharon Beil. There was nothing more I could add—except that I had liked and sympathized with the woman and would rather not know that she was responsible. Also, if the money was gone, I would as soon it had gone with her.

  Sharon Beil, who had vanished as completely as if she had never existed. And, considering it, I thought I was the only person living who had ever met or talked to her in Taos.

  “We found
only one set of imperfect fingerprints at the scene that did not belong to the owner,” Herrera said carefully. “They might, or might not, be enough to indict someone, but we will not be making an exhaustive search to find that person, who is not a Taos resident and is no longer at the last two known addresses. So we may never know, or be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, exactly who killed Earl Jones.”

  “Well,” said Pat, voicing what I’m sure we were all thinking, “he’s one less predator loose in the community.”

  I glanced at Butch and found him looking at me with a pensive expression on his face that disappeared as he smiled and gave me a wink.

  “Some strong women around here,” he said to Herrera. “At least we’ve got Maxie back—in good shape if she can just stay out of trouble for a while. So far, every time I meet up with her she’s involved in some kind of difficulty.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Who are you to talk?”

  “I probably won’t be able to get back up here again before you take off,” he told me as he was leaving the next afternoon. “But let’s keep in touch.”

  “Absolutely,” I promised and meant it. He was, and is, a definite keeper. “I’m thinking of taking the Winnebago to Denver for storage and flying back to Alaska for the summer, but I’ll let you know.”

  “You would probably enjoy being peacefully at home for a while after all this,” he said.

  “Yes. But I’ll stop on my way through Cimarron to see the Tooth of Time, as you suggested.”

  I stayed another week before leaving Taos, working every day with Pat at Weaving Southwest and learning everything I could about the craft. One afternoon she let me try the large walking loom and I felt that in completing the piece I had begun on my small one I had passed some kind of test.

  “You should try tapestry next,” she suggested. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll soon have filled your house with pillow covers.”

  “There’s always Christmas and neighbors to think of.”

  I had her ship the small loom home to Alaska for me, so it would be waiting when I got there, along with enough yarn to keep me going for the summer. In the fall I intended that Stretch and I would return to claim the Winnebago in Denver and head for somewhere else we’d never been, but I had plenty of time to make up my mind just where that would be.

  One evening, remembering the invitation extended by the woman at the Kachina Inn, Bettye Sullivan and I went to watch the Indian dancers from the Taos Pueblo. It was a thoroughly enjoyable performance, with colorful traditional costumes of leather, fabric, and feathers. One woman even had dozens of tiny metal bells that hung from bands around her skirt and made pleasant accompaniment to the recorded drum and chanted rhythms to which seven or eight dancers moved around the circular sand-covered fire pit among the trees of the central park area.

  I drove out of Taos bright and early on a Monday morning, heading for Colorado again, but this time I was in no hurry, nor was I looking over my shoulder for pursuers, so I stayed overnight again in Cimarron. The next morning I went a few miles south until I reached the Philmont Scout Ranch, where I stopped at the museum and gift shop and asked permission to take a side road that would lead me to a view of the Tooth of Time.

  Though I had only meant to take a look and some photographs, the Tooth was an unexpected inspiration and I wound up spending most of the afternoon writing in my journal, as the events of my time in Taos somehow needed to be recorded in a way I could go back to for later consideration. That’s part of what journals are for anyway—or at least mine is. It helps me think and reminds me where I have been and what I have learned as a result.

  So I wrote down the events, places, and especially the people I didn’t want to forget, and the afternoon was old when I laid down my pen, drove back to Cimarron, and took the road north to Raton, where I would cross the Colorado border the next day.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Twice during the afternoon the woman took the dachshund out for a short walk. The second time, as the shadows lengthened, she used the camera for several shots of the ridge with its distinctive Tooth of Time.

  Finally, with a sigh, she closed the journal, put it away, and readied the motor home for travel. Turning it around, before starting back along the dirt road, she hesitated and, over her left shoulder, took a long last look at the Tooth of Time, crowning the ridge. Then, satisfied, she nodded and let the Winnebago roll steadily eastward.

  The breeze had departed in midafternoon. With nothing to lift it, the dust that glowed briefly golden in the long rays of the setting sun drifted slowly back down onto the empty road.

  Read on for an intriguing excerpt from

  THE REFUGE

  Sue Henry’s exciting new mystery

  starring Maxie McNabb and Stretch

  Available in hardcover from

  New American Library

  SOMETIME IN THE DEEP OF THE NIGHT, I BECAME vaguely aware of a soft breeze blowing on my face and the gentle susurrus of a window curtain moving above my head. For a breath or two, I didn’t move, eyes closed, dreamily curious and a bit puzzled by those sensations in combination with the sound of rain pouring down outside the window. Could it have been the low percussion of its arrival on the roof that had roused me?

  I opened my eyes to the shadowy dark, sat up, and swung my feet over the side of the bed onto—a polished wood floor, surprisingly cool and certainly not a part of my well-known bedroom. From what I could see, the size and configuration of the space in which I found myself was unfamiliar and, in my sleepy state, disorienting.

  Sitting there, bemused, I was reminded of other times I had come awake in the dark of an unfamiliar room, with the same bewildered reaction: “Where am I?” But as I assessed the space, one significant clue caught my attention.

  Though most of the room was dark, a kind of half-light from some artificial outside source illuminated the window curtains, which were being ballooned by the breeze and allowed me to see that they were made of a yellow fabric with wide bands of green leaves and red and white flowers—hibiscus blossoms! Though known from pictures and southern places I had visited, the print of these curtains was certainly not native to my home in Alaska.

  Then the penny finally dropped. Hawaii! I was in Hawaii, on the Big Island, where I had arrived unexpectedly, having made no previous plans of my own to visit. I had intended to spend the summer at home in Homer, Alaska, in the house that is most comfortingly mine, recuperating from nine stressful months in the Southwest Four Corners area of the Lower Forty-eight in my Winnebago motor home, so waking to confusion in the dark made sense. I had never thought to be in Karen’s Hilo house, where a torrential tropical rain could come sweeping in on my first night to rouse and befuddle me. But it was without doubt where I now found myself, tired after a five-hour plane ride.

  More awake and feeling better for having identified my surroundings, I sat quietly, appreciating the clean scent of the breeze, the rhythm of the rain hammering on the roof over my head, and the xylophonic water music it made as it fell from the eaves into pools that must have quickly accumulated below. I had read somewhere that Hilo was on the rainy side of the largest island of the Hawaiian chain, so this must be rain that arrived on a regular basis and disappeared almost at once into the soil that, unlike Alaska, is never frozen, always thirsty for water, and damp beneath the surface. No wonder whatever seeds find their way into such soil sprout and grow quickly in rich profusion in our fiftieth state.

  Satisfied, I was about to lie down and go back to sleep, when, suddenly, within the splash of running water there was a reminder of something I had half heard and subconsciously retained: a different kind of sound, just the hint of a clink, soft and metallic, that had nothing to do with rain. Listening intently, I waited, holding my breath until it came again, faint and far away, either within the house or close outside. I sat very still, anticipating another repetition, which came almost immediately, bringing me to my feet and across to the door that I had left half open to allow
circulation in the room.

  As I stepped through it and went quietly barefoot along a hallway, I could hear the rain on the roof of the single-story dwelling lessen in intensity. The hall ended at the living room, where I paused again to listen and was once more rewarded with that quiet clink and the scrape of metal contacting metal to my right. Someone outside was trying to insert either a key that didn’t fit or some metal tool into the deadlock of the front door of Karen’s house.

  The sound was as small as that a mouse might make in gnawing at something within a closed cupboard. Someone was clearly trying to get in—evidently to break in, for with a key that fit, there would have been no such trouble in opening the door easily, quickly, and most of all, quietly.

  I crept cautiously forward, focused on the door, hands extended in front of me in the obscurity of that dark corner, feeling a bit mouselike myself. Then, unluckily and without warning, my left shin collided painfully with a low stool that slid with a screech across the bare wood floor and fell over with a crash. That clatter, along with the curse it elicited from me, was responsible for an instant termination of sound from outside.

  There was a long expectant pause while both I and whoever was on the other side of the door froze to listen in suspenseful silence, but I heard nothing besides the slow trickle of water that was still slowly falling into the puddles. The invisible presence beyond the door was first to capitulate. I heard footsteps go pounding away through the carport that lay just beyond the front step.

  Moving as quickly as possible, with care not to encounter upon another obstacle, I reached the entry, found and fumbled to turn the knob that released the deadbolt, yanked open the door, and went out onto the step—too late. All I caught was a glimpse of a shadowy figure, no more than a swiftly moving silhouette in dark clothing going away from the carport to disappear around the corner of the house—gone before I could get any real impression of size, age, or gender.