Legends Can Be Murder

by Shelton, Connie

  I purchased an admission. He was right about the incredible story that unfolded with the displays of supplies, tools and gambling equipment that had been preserved, and I gained a whole lot better image of what life must have been like in the old days. I could not imagine trudging through snow on those high peaks, wearing leather boots and carrying a pack that weighed more than I did, having to cover the distance dozens of times to move the required two thousand pounds of gear. And after the arduous hike a man had to construct himself a boat and float down the river to reach the site of the gold discoveries. Still, regarding Joshua Farmer, I didn’t find my answers.

  “Miss?” The same man was at the desk when I exited. “I thought of one more thing. A lot of men went missing during those years and their families tried to find them. The official records were either sketchy or non-existent, but there’s a woman here in town who compiled a list of the inquiries, whatever she could get her hands on. It’s not a fancy list, and we couldn’t figure out a way to turn it into a museum display, but you could call her if you like.”

  I took the slip of paper he handed me and thanked him. Maddie Farmer’s inquiries were already known to me, through her letters with the Pinkerton detective, but you never knew what else might turn up. I sat outside on a low stone wall and dialed the number for Gertrude Manicot.

  Ten minutes later, after explaining how I’d gotten her number, I was on the way to her house, which turned out to be a cozy wood frame structure with a huge blooming Sitka mountain-ash tree outside. Since speaking to the docent at the museum, I couldn’t help but wonder about Joshua Farmer’s final letter to his wife. If there wasn’t time to actually find gold in the Yukon, maybe he had come by his riches in an illicit manner and didn’t want to admit as much to Maddie. There had been hints of his gambling and names of several men with whom he’d become acquainted. Before I had time to piece any of those ideas together, Gertrude’s door opened.

  “Hello, you’re the gal who just called.” Gertrude Manicot (just call me Gert—everyone does) had little-old-lady features and lumberjack clothing. Heavy wrinkling indicated a lifetime of smoking, and she was due for a visit to the colorist judging by the inch-wide strip of white at the part-line in her dark hair.

  “Yes. The man at the museum ...” Darn, I’d forgotten to get his name.

  “That would be Stewart.”

  “Thank you. He mentioned that you kept some records of missing miners?”

  “More like a little catalog of people who’ve called looking for someone. You’d be surprised—folks still contact me now and then to see if they can find out whether their great-great-grandpa was on the gold rush. Some of ’em love genealogy, others just think there might be a family fortune up here in Alaska.”

  She had stepped aside and ushered me into a small living room jammed to the rafters. Overstuffed armchairs and two couches were sized too large for the space, and they had been shoved into a tight grouping around a coffee table, the kind with two overflowing ashtrays. This allowed room for a pot-bellied woodstove in one corner. Shelves of VHS tapes and lopsided books filled the longest wall, while four or five unsealed cardboard cartons revealed office supplies such as scissors and marking pens, bargain-sized packs of double-A batteries, lengths of wire and cable that looked as if they belonged to a stereo system. She could have wired two more homes with the materials she had here.

  “Come on in,” she said in her gravelly voice. “Sorry, I didn’t have time to tidy up.”

  In the past ten years. I edged my way toward the deep chair she indicated.

  “Now, let me just find my database,” she mumbled, her gaze darting around the room.

  The database turned out to be a shoebox, and when she lifted the lid I saw two tightly packed rows of white index cards.

  “Everybody seems to think you need a computer these days. Internet and all that stuff,” she said. “Not me. My mother started with a box of scrap papers from the old postmaster’s attic. She came up with this system, and then I just added entries for every letter and phone call we ever received. I can find what I need, right here.”

  I suppressed the inclination to look around the cluttered room, trying to meet her gaze and give a nod instead.

  “Now, what did you say the name was?”

  “Joshua Farmer is the man who wrote the letters home, saying he’d found gold and was on his way back.”

  Gert began flipping through the cards, no easy task given how tightly they were jammed into the box. I caught sight of a clock on one of the shelves that indicated it was a quarter of twelve. Yikes—the morning had gotten away from me and I would be late meeting Drake for lunch.

  “I need to make a call,” I said. “If you don’t mind?”

  Gert nodded and kept flipping. I speed-dialed Drake’s phone.

  “Hon, I’m really sorry,” he said. “I meant to call you fifteen minutes ago. Kerby booked me on another flight.”

  “Do you need me there, to take some of them or anything?”

  “Don’t think so. He would have called you.” The turbine engine spun up in the background. “Go ahead and eat without me. I’ll grab something.”

  “Ah-ha! Told you!” Gertrude’s exclamation came just as I clicked off the call. She waved a white card in the air. “Farmer, Joshua.”

  I got out my little notebook, ready to copy the information. She didn’t hand it over, but began reading from it.

  “Contact: Letter. Date: 1947. Interested party: Isabelle Farmer. Relationship: daughter.”

  I scribbled. “That’s it?”

  “In the Notes section Mother put down that the woman said he’d come to Skagway to get to the Klondike. Last contact with family: July, 1898.”

  Isabelle. The infant daughter who had been mentioned in Joshua’s and Maddie’s letters to each other. By 1947 she would have been about fifty years old.

  Gert set the card beside her on the couch and flipped through a few more, near the spot where she’d marked her place with an index finger.

  “Nope. Looks like that’s the only one.”

  “Could I make a copy of it?” I asked. “I’d be happy to run to the library and then bring the card right back.”

  “No need. I don’t like these cards to leave the house.” She set the box aside, walked to the shelving and picked up a stack of videos. Placing them on the floor, she revealed a small, inexpensive printer. “This thing’s made me about a million copies already. I’ll just do you one right now.”

  “Did you keep the actual letters these family members sent?” I suspected a request letter would be a little more rich in details than what Gert could fit on an index card.

  “Oh, yes. Certainly.”

  “It would help me to read Isabelle Farmer’s correspondence, if I could also get a copy of that.”

  The machine lit up and made a series of jerky little noises.

  “Well, I don’t quite have all those as neat as the things in this room. Give me a day or two. I’ll find it.”

  With little hope that the letter would ever turn up, I gave Gert my card and held out a ten dollar bill. She brushed it away but accepted a dollar to cover the paper and ink for her printer.

  “I’ll call you,” she said as I walked outside and breathed fresh air.

  With no lunch plans after all, I decided to catch up with Mina. She sounded a little harried on the phone—something about Wilbur pushing a deadline—but said we could chat as she ran an errand for him. When I told her where I was she said, “Gotcha” and a moment later a horn tooted behind me.

  “How’s that for service?” she said, powering down the passenger window of an unfamiliar white sedan, herself at the wheel. “Hop in.”

  “So this is Wilbur’s car?”

  “Right. Here we are on deadline and it’s suddenly going to be an emergency if the car doesn’t get washed today.”

  She made a couple of turns.

  “With Wilbur, it doesn’t matter what job in the office you are hired to do, you do what
ever he wants done at the moment. I don’t mind, really. It breaks up the routine and, really, I’m getting paid either way.”

  She pulled up to one of those drive-through outfits, where she pressed a few buttons and inserted some cash at the electronic voice’s request. As we cruised into the contraption, she turned to me.

  “So, what’s up?”

  “I may be on the brink of finding out how our two cave skeletons are related.” I told her about my visit to Gertrude Manicot. “The letters I found in the garage of our rental house were between a man and wife during the gold rush. They had an infant daughter named Isabelle and a woman named Isabelle Farmer inquired about her father, a missing gold rusher, a bunch of years later.”

  “He might be the man in the cave?”

  “He might. Or, he might be our killer.”

  Mina digested that information while a spray arm traveled across the top of the car, splattering gloppy suds onto it, encasing us in a cocoon of soapy seclusion.

  I went back over the general content of the letters, telling what I’d learned about Joshua Farmer’s activities when he came to Skagway—the gambling, the feelings of resentment, the desperation as he ran out of money and needed to get home.

  “A lot of what I’m saying involves reading between the lines,” I said. “He tried to paint a good picture for his wife, but there’s just something ... I’m not sure what, exactly, that sounds, off. He didn’t come prepared to make the journey to the Klondike. He didn’t have much of a plan, doesn’t mention any job skills to earn the money he needed. He claims he was cheated at cards. Every setback was always someone else’s fault.”

  “So, we have to wonder,” she said as clear water blasted the car, “did he ever intend to prospect for gold or did he come here as a thief who intended all along to take someone else’s treasure?”

  “Maybe that. Maybe he started out with good intentions, became desperate, resorted to violence at the end. The skull in the cave was pretty thoroughly bashed in.”

  “And, according to Chief Branson, there was nothing of value found among the clothing or possessions, right?”

  “Exactly. So, if the man who walked up that trail toward the cave had money or gold, it was taken.”

  An obnoxious buzzer came on, cuing Mina that the wash was done and we’d better get out. She put the sedan in gear and guided it toward the exit door.

  “What’s our next step then?” she asked, as she paused at the street for a few other vehicles to go by.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. We know the two skeletons are related. We know the identity of the younger man, Michael Ratcliff. If we can prove that the Ratcliffs and Farmers are related, we can be pretty sure the older man is Joshua Farmer. If not, then there is someone else in Skagway’s history who died a violent death in that cave.”

  “And someone who killed him.”

  Chapter 23

  I rode along with Mina to drop her editor’s car back at the news office.

  “The layout is going to eat up my afternoon but it goes to the printer at four o’clock,” she said. “If you want to get together after that, we could do some more research.”

  I felt a little impatient at the delay, but there were things I could do and I always like working on my own anyway. We said goodbye at the sidewalk. From this central location in town I was now free to go anywhere I wanted. My stomach reminded me about the skipped lunch so I stopped for a deli sandwich and found a bench in the sunshine where I could sit and eat it.

  My first thought was to ask more questions of Katherine Ratcliff so I dialed the number she’d given me.

  “You must be a busy lady,” she said. “Still working on my brother’s case?”

  “On both of them, really. Remember the second set of bones that were found in the same location? Well, I’ve been asking around, trying to find out that man’s identity. An inquiry was made a long time ago, a woman named Isabelle Farmer asking about her father, Joshua Farmer. Do either of those names mean anything to you? Are they connected to the Ratcliffs at all?”

  A few seconds went by. I could almost hear her thoughts bouncing around.

  “My father’s name was Charles Ratcliff, and I’m fairly certain his mother’s first name was Isabelle. Our family lived in Seattle and Grandma was in San Francisco, and we had little contact. I don’t remember her well. She lived to her seventies. I had married and moved east and was unable to attend her funeral.”

  “But you’re pretty sure she was Isabelle?”

  “It sounds very familiar but don’t ask me to swear to it in court.” She chuckled a little.

  Once again I asked her to call me if she found any new information, then hung up. This sure seemed like slow going. I wadded up my sandwich wrapper and tossed it in a trash barrel at the edge of the park.

  I spent the time as I walked home thinking of possible scenarios. If Michael Ratcliff had discovered that he was related to Isabelle and Joshua, he might have decided to come here to continue the search that his grandmother had initiated in the 1940s. How did either of them know that Skagway was the place to look, though?

  Then it hit me. The letters.

  The very letters I’d been reading must have been in Isabelle’s possession. If she had stored them in the old trunk and Michael the history buff went through it and came upon them ... that could very well be the thing that spurred him to research his family’s history. That made sense. The name Isabelle had been used in the letters between Joshua and Maddie, and maybe Michael snapped to the connection a lot quicker than Katherine did just now.

  Was there something in the letters that I’d missed, something that would lead a great-grandson on this journey? Or was I trying to make too much of it? Perhaps it was simple curiosity on Michael’s part, nothing more. It felt as if there were too many gaps in the story.

  I stopped at the market on the way and picked up fresh greens and vegetables to make a big salad for tonight’s dinner. Next to the tomatoes I spotted Berta.

  “Hey Charlie, how’s it going?” She lit up with her usual smile, all signs of having dealt with Mina’s cat tragedy gone now.

  “That box of letters I told you I found in the garage at the rental … If they aren’t yours, do you have any idea how they got there?”

  “Some previous tenant, I imagine,” she said. “I’ve owned that house for thirty years and rented it out every single summer.”

  I nodded. “Have all the tenants been summer workers, like us, or did you ever rent long-term to a local?”

  She looked a little impatient at the questions, trying to focus on choosing tomatoes instead.

  “I don’t know, Charlie. I don’t hardly remember any of them. It’s a whole new set of faces every year, and really, you and Drake are the only couple I’ve ever conversed with much.”

  I apologized for being such a pain and thanked her even though she’d really given me nothing, but as I checked out and started the walk home, the line of questions did begin to spark an idea. At the house I set my grocery bag into the fridge and went out to unlock the garage. If a tenant—specifically, if one of them in pre-Berta times—had left the box of letters, he may have very well left something else, something that connected the dots about how and why Michael Ratcliff came to Skagway and what the connection was with Joshua Farmer.

  I shoved one of the big garage doors aside and looked around for a light switch. Finding none, I went back to the house for a flashlight, chafing at the delay. I must be getting hormonal—everything today made me impatient. I shined the light in a general arc around the space, settling on the shelf where I’d found the box. I started in on the stacks of dusty boxes that filled it.

  The first box contained light fixtures and another had an assortment of plumbing parts, all old, all appearing to be taken off and discarded when a newer replacement was installed. My guess was that before Berta a man had owned this place, the kind of guy who never threw away anything. When she bought the place as a rental, she must have concentrate
d on making the house comfortable; she’d pretty much admitted that she didn’t care about the garage. Next to the spot where I’d found the floral-printed box sat a carton bristling with wires; I set it on the floor and aimed my light at the back of the shelf. Jammed up against the wall, behind the box I’d just removed, were two leather-bound books and a cheap notebook with a rusted spiral binding. On tiptoe, I could barely reach them.

  I pulled the three items out and gave them a closer look by flashlight. The leather-covered books were of good quality and a thumb-through showed feminine writing. The spiral looked like the kind of thing I used to carry to sophomore English. The handwriting had a strong slant to the neat, block print that filled quite a few pages. I spotted the name Isabelle and my heart began to beat a little quicker. Finally—on the right track. I hoped.

  I blew off a cloud of dust and carried them into the house.

  In the living room, Freckles lay on her belly, front paws and nose aimed toward the door where I had departed without her. I knelt, rubbed her ears and reassured her I really hadn’t left forever, and she sniffed the books until the dust went up her nose and she let go with a huge sneeze. I found a cloth and tried to clean up the books a bit so I wouldn’t end up doing the same.

  The two of us settled on the sofa and I turned on a lamp. The smaller of the leather-bound books had a pink cover and the dated entries began in 1917.

  Isabelle referred to her mother and a man named Franklin, how they had invited a young man to dinner and blatantly hinted that he would be a wonderful husband for her.

  I could only think, what might be the matter with him, aside from possible flat feet or bad eyesight? With the war on, surely he would have been called up if he were eligible. I knew in very short order that David Ratcliff’s penchant for undue flattery and the habit of stroking his thin mustache before responding to a question would annoy me to no end.

  I understand, truly, why Mother and Frank want to see me marry. I am a burden in their household. I am not his child and he has been most patient with me as it is. And little Frankie has so many health needs. But a quick marriage to someone I care nothing about—the thought makes my heart heavy.