by J. A. Jance
“Name’s Jonathan Thurgard,” Mr. Masters answered. “I believe he lives in Stockbridge, and he’s a Korean War vet. At least, that’s what I’ve heard, but I don’t know it for sure because when he signs the guest book he never lists an address. He has a reputation for showing up at funerals all over western Massachusetts, usually when the deceased served as a member of the military. He stands on the sidelines and then plants a tiny American flag next to the flowers before he leaves. He didn’t leave a flag, but was your mother a veteran by any chance?”
“Not that I know of,” Liza said.
“Well then, perhaps he was one of your mother’s friends.”
Liza shook her head. She knew better than anyone that Selma Machett didn’t have any friends. “He said he knew my father.”
“There you go then,” Mr. Masters said with a dismissive shrug that indicated the topic had been adequately covered. He held out his arm. “Shall we go?”
Taking Craig Masters’s arm, Liza allowed herself to be led across the field of markers and deposited in the idling limo that had been waiting patiently on the shoulder of one of the many paved lanes that wandered through the cemetery. Liza knew Craig’s brother-in-law, Lester Woundy, from the restaurant—three eggs, scrambled hard, a side of ham along with biscuits and gravy. When he came into Candy’s for breakfast, he was usually dressed in his lawn-mowing/grave-digging overalls. Today, though, tapped as the on-call limo driver, he was dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt, with his bulging neck confined inside to a too-tight collar and a blue-and-gray-striped tie.
Once Liza was inside the limo, Craig leaned over and spoke to Les. “Drop her at Candy’s,” he directed. “You won’t need to wait. Someone else will take her home after the reception.”
“Nice turnout,” Les said to Liza as he put the Town Car in gear and in motion.
While standing at the cash wrap either as hostess or cashier, Liza was often a party to the conversations of people sitting at the counter. She remembered hearing Les say once that he liked small funerals best because there weren’t as many chairs to fold up and put away afterward. From those overheard conversations, she also knew what Les’s game plan would be.
Once he dropped her off, he’d return to the cemetery and change out of his limo-driving duds and into work clothes. Then he’d retrieve the backhoe that was always kept discreetly out of sight in a garage during funerals. Armed with the backhoe, he’d push all the bouquets of flowers into the grave before adding in the dirt he’d dug up earlier and stored twenty yards or so away from the grave, decorously covered with a green tarp during the proceedings. Once any remaining flowers and the excavated dirt had been dumped back into the hole on top of the urn, Les would unroll and replace the turf he had carefully cut out earlier that morning. After that it would be time to return the backhoe to the garage and go out for a beer. Or two. Or maybe even three.
“Yes,” Liza agreed. “It was a nice turnout.”
Leaning back against the headrest, Liza allowed her eyes to close. She was exhausted. For the past month, she had worked harder than she had ever worked in her life, and that superhuman effort had exacted a terrible toll—physically, mentally, and emotionally. She had worked most of her shifts at the diner, she’d visited her mother at least once a day, and she’d used every other remaining moment to oversee the workmen rehabbing Selma’s house.
It had taken almost as long for Selma to die as it had to fix the house. In the end, and with the help of Ted Jackson, the local We’ve Got Junk franchisee—pecan waffle, crisp bacon, iced tea—she’d had thirteen Dumpster loads of stuff hauled away from her mother’s house. Liza had realized early on that she would have to tackle the enterprise in a systematic fashion.
When the rehab project started, there was no electricity in Selma’s house and no sign of any kerosene lanterns, either. Selma Machett had evidently learned to live like the birds, rising with the sun and bedding down at sunset. Because Liza needed to work on the house around her shifts at the diner, there were times when she had to be at the house far into the night. That meant one of her first tasks was to bring her mother’s utility bill situation up-to-date and get the power turned back on. She had also begun the process of reinstating her mother’s home owner’s insurance.
Once the power was back on, Al of Al’s EZ Plumbing—whole wheat BLT with no T, french fries, and a Pepsi—came in and got the sewer pipe cleared and the septic system pumped. Although it was most likely not an entirely environmentally approved activity, Al had pumped out the outhouse as well, after which the hole had been filled, the outhouse demolished, and a sweet little some-assembly-required potting shed straight from Home Depot was erected where the outhouse had once stood.
“If you’re trying to sell the place and some nosy home inspector comes looking for an outhouse,” Al instructed her, “you look at him all innocent like and say, ‘Outhouse? What outhouse? That’s my mother’s gardening shed.’ ”
Supplied with power and water, Liza went to work on the books and on the magazines, too, that had been stacked, row upon row, in Selma’s house. It wasn’t just the cookbooks that had money squirreled away inside them. Liza had to look through everything—through hundreds of dog-eared paperback mysteries and romance novels; through every single volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with corners of pages turned down where Selma had researched the symptoms of her many various and untreated maladies; through stacks and stacks of crumbling National Geographic and Life and People magazines to say nothing of countless Reader’s Digests. Early on, Liza managed to unearth the dining room table. That way she could sit under an overhead light and with a fan blowing cool air in her direction during the endless hours while she paged through book after book after book and magazine after magazine.
It was like a nightmare Easter egg hunt. Not every volume held a cache of cash, but enough did that it was worth Liza’s while to do a complete job of it. By the time she finished, $147,000 had been filtered through her coffee bean decontamination process. She had also found a flock of canning jars filled with coins. Those amounted to around five hundred dollars and didn’t stink the way the bills did.
Every hundred-dollar bill that surfaced added another brick to the wall of resentment Liza was building toward her mother. Had Selma had all this money in her possession the whole time Liza had been growing up? If so, why the hell had she pretended to be poor? Why had she forced her daughter to live as though they didn’t have two pennies to rub together? Why?
For the first Dumpster load, Liza had hauled the crap out through the kitchen door, down the crooked back steps, and then up into the Dumpster. After that, Ted convinced her to let him install a chute from the dining room window down to the next waiting Dumpster. She got to the point that she could toss a book from across the room and hit the Dumpster chute window almost every time.
Liza handled the books and magazines herself. For the kitchen, she hired two of the busboys from the restaurant, brothers Salvatore and Xavier Macias. Hardworking immigrants from Ecuador who sent money to their family back home each week, Salvatore and Xavier were more than happy to tackle that ungodly mess during their off-hours. Once they started, Ted rigged up a second Dumpster chute from the kitchen to make their lives easier as well. When the kitchen had been cleared of garbage and dead appliances, Liza looked around and had them remove the kitchen cabinets and the ancient linoleum along with the damaged wallboard. Then they moved on to the bathroom and bedrooms and did the same, stripping everything down to the studs.
In Selma’s bedroom and bathroom, Liza was appalled at how much of the trash was stuff that had been purchased and never even opened, much less used. Unfortunately, mouse droppings rendered the excess paper products as well as the new and used clothing, some with price tags still attached, unusable and unsalvageable. When they finally got down to the bare bones of furniture, Salvatore and Xavier were happy to take the chests of drawers and the tables and the plain wooden chairs. The putrid odor clinging to the cloth m
eant that all upholstered pieces went to the Dumpster.
By this time, the army of pickup-driving guys from Candy’s was on full alert, and they were all more than happy to work for cash on the barrel. As long as the money was good, none of them asked where it came from, and because it was all in the Candy’s Diner family, as it were, not one of them cut any corners when it came to his part of the job.
John, of Great Barrington Electric—two eggs over easy; bacon crisp; hash browns crisp; coffee, cream and sugar; and a coffee, cream and sugar, to go—redid the electrical service, bringing it into the twenty-first century. Ralph Boreson of Boreson Home Remodeling—OJ; oatmeal with raisins, brown sugar, and cream; whole wheat toast—handled all the permits in a timely fashion since his sister-in-law worked in the building department and was able to move things along. Ralph also managed to find the low-end cabinets and fixtures, which had been installed the previous week. This week he’d had a full crew on-site, installing and taping wallboard, painting walls, installing new flooring, and replacing single-pane windows with double panes.
“It’s not all top of the line,” Ralph told Liza, “but the house will look good enough that no one will be able to rip you off by claiming it’s nothing but a teardown.”
Seeing the results, Liza had to agree. The place looked clean and smelled clean. In fact, it was downright livable again, not that she ever intended to live there. Now, though, she’d be able to list it and sell it. In fact, she had made an appointment for early next week with Rose Kelly—egg salad sandwich, hold the bread, tomato slices on the side, and green tea. Rose was a local real estate agent whose bright red Kia was often the only small car tucked in among all those hulking pickups. Rose was eager to do the listing and already had a potential buyer in mind.
“Excuse me, miss,” Les Woundy was saying. “We’re here.”
Liza roused herself out of her stupor and looked around. The limo had pulled up in front of Candy’s, where a handwritten sign on the door said, SORRY! CLOSED FOR A PRIVATE FUNCTION.
After allowing Les to help her out of the limo, Liza shook off her lethargy and went inside. The counter by the cash wrap had been turned into a bar, with Honey Baxter pouring generous drinks into red paper cups. Honey was an energetic seventy-something with bright blue eye shadow and a beehive hairdo that was decades out-of-date. She still worked full-time and cared for an ailing husband even though she was almost twenty years older than Selma Machett had been when she died.
Honey looked up as Liza came in the door, and there was a tiny lull in the general conversation.
“Well, there she is!” Honey announced. “You come right on over here, sweetheart, and let me give you something that’ll be good for what ails you. I make a mean sloe gin fizz.”
“How about a glass of white wine?” Liza suggested. “I have a feeling one of your sloe gins would put me on my lips.”
In a matter of seconds, conversations in the room resumed and the noise level amped up. The restaurant was full of people juggling loaded plates, napkins, silverware, and drinks. The long counter had been turned into a makeshift buffet, which meant that there was far less seating than people were used to, especially considering that customers who usually drifted in and out over the space of several hours had all arrived at once. Since none of these people knew Selma personally, the after-funeral gathering was a far more lighthearted party than one would have anticipated.
Candy sidled up beside her. “How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Okay,” Liza said. “Better than expected. Thanks for doing this,” she added.
“Least I could do,” Candy replied. “The guys tell me that work on the house is pretty much finished.”
Liza nodded. “Everybody really pitched in. They’ve done an amazing amount of work in an astonishingly short time.”
“You have me to thank for that,” Candy said with a self-satisfied grin. “I told some of those lazy bastards to get with the program, otherwise they’d have to deal with me!”
When someone came by to ask Candy a question, Liza wandered off through the crowd—mingling, talking to people, thanking them for coming, and thanking them for whatever role they had played in the home-rehab miracle. She had taken only a sip or two of wine and a single bite of an egg salad sandwich when a vehicle with flashing blue lights pulled up outside the restaurant’s front door.
Moments later a beefy deputy—Leon Bufford—ham and cheese omelet, side of bacon, double hash browns, double white toast, coffee, and a large milk—barged into the room.
The crowd fell silent. Deputy Bufford stood in the door briefly, scanning the room. At last his eyes found their target. “Hey, Liza,” he said. “You’d better come with me. Quick.”
“Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Looks like somebody burned down that house of yours—all the way to the ground.”
CHAPTER 6
BY THE TIME JOANNA RETURNED TO THE PARKING LOT AT ST. DOMINICK’S, the place was deserted because Alvin had dismissed his entire crew of volunteers. The church ladies, along with their accompanying refreshment tables, chairs, and any remaining goodies, had also disappeared.
As Joanna and Marianne stepped out of the midmorning sunlight and into the cool interior of the church, Joanna felt a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the building’s stone-clad exterior and everything to do with the emotional burden of her job.
While serving as Cochise County sheriff, Joanna attended not one but two fallen officer memorials inside the hallowed halls of St. Dominick’s Catholic Church. The first had been for a departmental jail matron, Yolanda Ortiz Cañedo, who had succumbed to cervical cancer. The second had been for Deputy Dan Sloan, who had been gunned down by a fleeing homicide suspect. In fact, Joanna’s first dealings with Father Rowan had been on the night Deputy Sloan had died, when she and the newly arrived Catholic priest had joined forces to do a next-of-kin notification to Deputy Sloan’s widow. Sunny Sloan had been pregnant at the time. Now a single mother, she worked part-time as a clerk in the sheriff department’s public office.
This time, as Joanna entered the church, she was carrying the burden of knowing she was the bearer of heartbreaking news. Turning to Marianne, she asked the question that was in her heart. “When bad things happen, why do we always end up at St. Dominick’s?”
Marianne simply shook her head. It wasn’t necessary for her to say anything aloud. She understood. Unspoken communication was one of the blessings of their longtime friendship.
They walked down the center aisle together. At the front of the church, they turned left into what they knew to be the study—a book-lined office Father Rowan shared with the parish’s other priest, Father Patrick Morris, who was currently away on an extended sick leave. The room was dimly lit. In the artificial gloom, Father Rowan sat at a polished wood desk facing Moe and Daisy Maxwell. A few feet away, Ernie Carpenter stood at ease in front of a towering bookcase. As Joanna and Marianne entered, everyone in the room turned toward them expectantly. From the anguished look on Daisy’s tear-streaked face, Joanna knew the woman already understood the new arrivals wouldn’t be bringing good news.
“You found him?” Daisy asked in a hushed voice.
Joanna nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“He’s dead then?”
Joanna nodded again.
“Where?” Daisy asked. “What happened to him?”
“He fell at least thirty feet into an old mine shaft inside a cave up above the highway.”
“Junior in a cave?” Daisy asked. “That makes no sense. He was afraid of the dark. Terrified. That’s why we always had to leave a lamp on in his room—in case he woke up at night.”
“But that’s where he was found,” Joanna continued, “in a cave. I saw him myself. The M.E. has yet to confirm this, but I believe he died on impact. As I said, he fell about thirty feet. Is there a chance Junior would have taken his own life?”
“No,” Daisy insisted at once. “That’s simply not p
ossible. Absolutely not. Suicide is a mortal sin. It must have been an accident.”
“You said you thought he died on impact,” Moe interjected softly. “Does that mean he didn’t suffer?”
“I don’t believe he did,” Joanna replied, “but again, that’s just my opinion. The real answer to that will have to come from the medical examiner.”
“I’m glad he didn’t suffer,” Moe said resignedly, reaching out to take Daisy’s hand. “As sick as he was and the way things were going, it’s probably just as well.”
Joanna understood the reasons behind Moe’s quiet statement. Junior had been developmentally disabled. He suffered from a horribly debilitating illness that eventually would have left him lost and helpless. Had he somehow managed to outlive his foster parents, who would have cared for him? What would have become of him? Those may have been the tough realities behind Moe’s comment, but Daisy definitely wasn’t on the same page.
She snatched her hand away from her husband’s in sudden fury. “It is not just as well!” Daisy hissed at him. “There’s nothing about this that’s ‘just as well’! For one thing, we never got to say good-bye to him. Besides, what would Junior be doing outside by himself in the middle of the night? And why would he go near a cave? Remember what happened when we tried to take him to Kartchner Caverns? Once Junior realized we’d be going into a cave and that it would be dark, he absolutely refused to set foot inside, even though we’d already paid for the tickets.”
“But the people were very nice about it,” Moe reminded her. “They refunded the tickets, remember?”
Without acknowledging his comment, Daisy turned beseechingly to Joanna as if looking for answers. Unfortunately, all Sheriff Brady had to offer Junior’s grieving foster parents were more questions, tougher ones at that.
“Did Junior have any pets?” she asked.
“Pets?” Daisy repeated. “You mean like a dog or a cat? We had a parakeet named Budgie once, back when Junior first came to live with us, but he died.”