Death & the Redheaded Woman

by Loretta Ross

“Okay,” Roy said. “Now, are you going to explain yourself, or is this some kind of psychotic break with reality?”

  Death laughed. “I would be glad to explain myself. Would it be alright if we close the door and lock it first?”

  Sam went to close and lock the door and Death pulled the auction catalog from his pocket.

  “So, who was it who put together this catalog, anyway?”

  “Me,” Doris said.

  “Doris,” Wren supplied. “She’s our art expert, remember?”

  “Ah ha. I see. And you didn’t bother to read it before the sale at all?”

  “Well, I’ve been busy. And we all knew what the stuff for sale was.”

  “Did you? Really? Are you sure?”

  Sam and Roy were standing side by side, arms crossed, and for once it was obvious that they were identical twins in spite of their different clothes.

  “If he doesn’t start talking soon, I say one of us should kick him,” Roy said.

  “I’ll flip you for it.”

  “Wren,” Death said, “remember when you found those letters and we were reading them?”

  “Before or after you started ripping each other’s clothes off ?” Leona asked.

  Death felt his cheeks flame, but plowed ahead. “Before,” he said. “In the first part of the letter he said that Mr. Monroe liked Gentlemen Dancing, remember?”

  Wren nodded.

  Death held up the top picture, the one of smiling men shaking hands and hiding knives behind their backs. “This is Gentlemen Dancing. All of these cartoons have names.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Doris said. “Please tell me you didn’t just buy these because they have names?”

  “It’s because of what their names are,” he said. When he spoke again it was in a high-pitched, feminine voice. “Oh, you poor thing! Those bad men took all your pretty jewels!”

  He paused to look around at his audience and Wren, catching on first, gasped and sank down on the edge of the desk. He switched to a second voice, still feminine but lower pitched, with a deep Southern accent.

  “They didn’t get them. Ah hid ’em good.”

  “God in Heaven,” Leona said. “Millie Weeks is gonna go postal.”

  “Tell me where,” Death continued in the first woman’s voice. “I’ll get them for you.” He grinned and went back to the second voice. “Look behind The Seventh Stone,” he said, lifting the picture that showed Maryland as a stone in the nation’s foundation. “Stars in the Water,” he switched to the cartoon about the War of 1812, with the tattered reflection of Old Glory, “and See All The Pretty Colors,” he finished, brandishing the last cartoon with the frontiersmen at the tailor shop.

  “You think the pictures are a clue to where the jewels are?” Roy asked.

  “I think the jewels are in the pictures,” Death said. He turned Gentlemen Dancing over and showed them the back. The back of the frame was open, with the back of the matting clearly visible. Then he turned the others over, one by one. The backs of the frames were covered with heavy, yellowing paper tacked on with rusted brads. Death picked up Stars in the Water and shook it gently and it made a noise like sand and gravel moving through a gold miner’s sluice.

  “And you figured this out when?” Sam asked dryly.

  “Just as you were about to sell them to Obermeier for thirty-one, five.” Death took out his pocket knife and slit the paper on the back of Stars in the Water on three sides. He peeled it back and the cavity it had closed off was completely filled with a tangle of tarnished jewelry. He repeated the process with the other two pictures and the six of them stood there staring in silent awe at the long-lost muddle of rare metals and precious gems.

  “I can’t believe we’re the first people to see these since the Civil War.” Doris said.

  “So what do you think now?” Death asked her. “Did I get my money’s worth?”

  “Yes, and then some, I should say. Leona’s right, Millie’s going to have kittens. She has no call to complain, though. She’s the one who proofread the catalog. She should have figured it out herself.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Sam asked.

  Death shrugged. “I haven’t really thought that far ahead. Sell most of it, probably. Donate some to the museum, maybe. I got a safe deposit box, but the bank’s closed now so I’ll probably take it to the police station and ask the chief to lock it up overnight.”

  “You could cover your girlfriend in diamonds and jewels,” Roy suggested.

  “No !” Wren and Death said simultaneously.

  Death picked gingerly through the tangled mess of jewelry, grinned suddenly, and worked an elaborate serpentine necklace free.

  “I’ve got an idea! We could play dress-up.”

  Wren looked at him askance. “You want to play dress-up?”

  “Well, I don’t want to dress up. I just thought it would be fun for you to dress up. See, I remember seeing this necklace in an old picture, and I was thinking you could wear what the lady in the picture was wearing and imitate the pose and everything. Art come to life, sort of.”

  “That’s a clever idea,” Leona said. “And you could take pictures and display them side by side.”

  “We could do that,” Death agreed. He was biting the inside of his cheek.

  “I don’t know where I’d get a hoop skirt,” Wren said. “I suppose I could make one …”

  “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. The lady in the picture wasn’t wearing a hoop skirt. I think it was probably from before they were popular.”

  “Not Carolina then? What picture was it? Do you know who she was?”

  “Well, I assume it was Eustacia Healey.”

  “Eustacia Healey? Where did you see a picture of … oh!”

  “Yeah, that picture.”

  “The one in the, um …”

  “The one in the love letters. Remember? The classy porn?”

  “She was wearing this necklace?”

  “And nothing else.” Death leaned forward and clasped the necklace around Wren’s neck, then laughed at her as she stammered and stuttered. Her face turned as red as her hair.

  But she didn’t say no.

  epilogue

  “Death?” Wren said. “I think it’s done now.”

  He slid out from under his Jeep, parked in her driveway. Wren sat on the porch steps, Lucy at her feet and Thomas watching from the newel post with a bored expression as she fought with the crank of an old-fashioned wooden ice cream freezer.

  He wiped his hands carefully on an old rag, went over and easily spun the handle a couple of times.

  “It’s not frozen yet?” she despaired. “Remind me again why I got this thing instead of a nice electric one that does the turning for you?”

  “You thought it was quaint,” he grinned.

  “Quaint, right.” She groaned. “Listen, next time I think something silly like that you—” She broke off and he turned to follow her gaze. A strange car had pulled up to the curb in front of the house.

  While they watched, a man got out of the car. Death registered his uniform first and, even after ten months, pain stabbed through him like a knife to the heart.

  Wren must have read something in his body language. She turned to him with worry in her blue eyes.

  “It’s okay.” He released the crank from the freezer lid, lifted the lid and took the ice cream out of the slushy mixture of half-melted ice and rock salt inside. “I was only teasing you. This is done. You can put it in the freezer and it’ll be just fine.”

  “But that man … ?”

  “I know. I need to talk to him. You go on. We’ll be in in a minute.”

  Wren took the ice cream and went inside and Death stood and walked down to meet the stranger, who had been watching them from the sidewalk. He was a thin, middle-aged black man and he stood almost at attention, holding a briefcase. He offered Death his hand.

  “Sergeant Bogart? I’m Captain Jonathan Cairn, of the St. Louis Fire Department.”r />
  “Cap. I know.” Death took his hand in a firm grip. “Randy told me a lot about you.”

  “And he told us a lot about you. I’d wanted to meet with you earlier,” the captain said. “I know how close the two of you were. This must all have been incredibly hard on you. I haven’t had any way to get hold of you, though.”

  “Yeah, things have been pretty messed up. I actually thought about looking you up a couple of times, but I didn’t know what I’d say. Would you like to come in?”

  They went in the house and settled in the living room. Wren was in the kitchen, pretending she hadn’t been peeking out the front window, and she came out to say hello.

  “Honey, this is Captain Cairn. He was my brother’s commanding officer. Captain—”

  “Call me Cap. Everyone does.”

  Death shot him a faint grin. “Cap, this is my girlfriend, Wren Morgan.”

  “Miss Morgan, a pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  They settled around the coffee table and Cap set his briefcase on the table and opened it. “One reason I needed to see you is because we still have to settle your brother’s estate.”

  Death was surprised. “It’s not already settled?”

  “No. You didn’t know?”

  “By the time I woke up in Germany, it seemed like everything was already done. I just figured my ex-wife got any money and spent it while I was overseas.”

  “I see.” Cap rustled some papers. “Actually there was a complication. The day before Bogie—Randy—”

  “It’s okay,” Death said with a wry grin. “I was Bogie in the Marine Corps, too.”

  “Right.” Cap spared him a brief smile. “The day before Bogie died he got word that you’d been killed in action. Glad that turned out not to be true, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” Death nodded.

  “Anyway, that morning he got a call from, ah, your ex-wife?”

  “Madeline.”

  “Madeline. Right. They had a bit of an altercation and the upshot was that he re-wrote his will at the last minute. He left everything to the fire station—I don’t think he could think of anyone else right then and he was determined that, if anything happened to him, Madeline wasn’t going to profit by it. After he died and you were found alive, Madeline filed to contest the will, arguing that he wouldn’t have written you out of it if he knew you were still alive. Frankly, we agree, and there shouldn’t be any problem with having that will thrown out and his previous will reinstated. However, we can’t just do it on our own.”

  Death sighed and looked down at the floor between his feet.

  Cap’s voice softened. “Are you alright talking about this, son?”

  “Yeah, I guess. It just … feels kinda like blood money, you know?”

  “I know, but your brother would have wanted you to have it. I tried contacting you through Madeline, but after you divorced I wasn’t able to get in touch with her. I just happened to see your name in the news and the police chief here knew where to find you. Anyway, I’ve got some papers here for you, so we can finally get this taken care of. Also,” He reached into his briefcase. “I thought that maybe you’d like to have this.”

  He pulled out a silver shield, set against red velvet in a burnished silver frame. He offered it to Death, who took it with a puzzled frown.

  “It’s your brother’s badge,” Cap said.

  “Yeah, I know but … did he have two? Because I already have one the coroner sent me.”

  He got up and went to a curio cabinet. Though he slept at his own apartment, Wren’s place was quickly becoming home. His pictures and his few mementos sat on the shelves and hung on the walls beside hers now. He came back with a small box containing a copy of the badge in Cap’s hand.

  Cap took it with a frown. “Did the coroner say where he got this?”

  “He said he took it off the body.”

  “That’s impossible. The morning he died, Bogie snapped the back off his badge. We got called out before he had time to fix it. When he went into that fire, his shield was lying on my desk.”

  the end

  about the author

  Loretta Ross is a writer and historian who lives and works in rural Missouri. She is an alumna of Cottey College and holds a BA in archaeology from the University of Missouri–Columbia. She has loved mysteries since she first learned to read. Death and the Redheaded Woman is her first published novel.

  Author photo by About Faces Photography.