by Elise Sax
Boone stuck his tongue out at me. “Neener neener. Told you so,” he sang.
“Did you give him a painkiller?” I asked the doctor.
“I gave him the good juice,” he said and high-fived Boone. “He’s not going to feel any pain for a good long time. Least I could do. Boone and I go way back.”
“Doc used to sell crystal meth under the bleachers during lunch,” Boone said, smiling. “That’s how he got his name. Doc. And now he’s really a doc. So…”
“Boone wasn’t one of my customers at school, but we were on the same baseball team,” the doctor explained. “Boone is a great pitcher. Well, he used to be. I don’t think he’ll ever pitch again after this.”
We left the hospital, and I helped Boone into the passenger seat of his truck. He was flying high, like he was at Studio 54 in the seventies.
“You know, we’re in Tony Eddy’s neighborhood,” I said. “Amos has blocked me at every turn to really investigate these deaths. He’s always there, not letting me snoop the way I want. The sun isn’t up, yet. Would you mind if we went to Tony’s house and gave it a good going over?”
“You’re pretty,” Boone said, and he slumped against the window and started to snore.
The sun was starting to come up when I parked in front of Tony’s house. I nudged Boone awake, and unfortunately, he was already starting to sober up.
“What are we doing here?”
“I told you. We’re investigating.”
“But I have a boo-boo arm.”
“Seriously? What happened to the studly manly man?”
“I have instant hot chocolate at home. That would really hit the spot,” he whined.
“Maybe Tony has instant hot chocolate, too.”
“I’m not eating or drinking anything from his house. Are you trying to kill me?”
He was right. I had forgotten how disgusting Tony’s house was. We broke in through an open back door. The cats had been rescued and taken away, but it still smelled like they were there.
“How do people live like this?” Boone asked.
“Tony’s dead, so let’s not worry about it.”
The dawn was breaking, and Tony’s house didn’t look any better than it had the first time I had seen it. A little path had been cleared where the paramedics and sheriffs got through to work on Tony. I was putting on a brave, I-don’t-care-about-filth face, but my OCD, love-of-all-things-clean-and-organized self was dying to dig into the mess and clean it all up. It was practically killing me not to throw everything away and scrub all the surfaces down with Pine-Sol.
“What’re we looking for?” Boone asked.
“I don’t know. A VIP Ticket to Heaven, maybe.”
“A what?”
I tapped the tip of my nose with my finger, as I thought. “We’re probably going to need to go into his bedroom.”
“Oh God. I can only imagine what he’s got in there.”
His bedroom was nasty. Worse than any dorm room I had ever seen. He had no sheet on his bed, and there were cat feces in the room, too. Dirt and garbage was piled high in every direction.
“You think we’re going to get a staph infection, or am I being paranoid?” I asked Boone.
“I’m going to bathe in bleach when I get out of here.”
“Search in his nightstand,” I ordered Boone.
“No way. I know what’s in my nightstand, and it’s disgusting enough. And I’m normal. I can’t imagine what’s in his nightstand.”
“You’re just looking for this. At least I think you are,” I said, taking out the two water-damaged heaven tickets from my purse. I had dried them with a hairdryer, and they were mostly intact, at least enough to make out what they were.
“What the hell is a VIP Ticket to Heaven?” Boone asked.
“Exactly.”
He opened the nightstand drawer with the toe of his shoe, and sure enough, there were a lot of sticky, disgusting things in it. But right on top was another golden ticket framed in blue wings. “Eureka,” I said. “Bingo. Voila. There she blows. The plot may be thicker, but my Jessica Fletcher nose has got major talent.”
“It smells like cats peed on possum corpses, and then Ozzy Osbourne bit their heads off and threw up all over everything,” Boone said.
“Duly noted. We can leave now.”
I put the ticket in my purse. It was hard to leave the house messy. I generally needed order in my life. I remembered that I had all kinds of lasso damage at my house to clean up, and the realization made me itch.
“You hungry?” I asked Boone when we returned to Tony’s kitchen.
“Starving. Maybe we could take a road trip and get pancakes? I’m not sure I can brave the diner again.”
My stomach growled at the thought of a big pancake breakfast with bacon and coffee. “Let’s do it.”
“It’s a date. Another one,” Boone said and smiled wide.
“We’ve never been on a date,” I insisted.
“Okay. Play it that way. I’m a patient man. I…wait a minute. That’s odd.” Boone walked around me and crouched down. He studied the floor. “This cabinet moved.”
“What do you mean? It moved just now? Like from rats or something?”
“No, I mean it’s been moved repeatedly. It’s hard to tell because the floor is filthy, but it’s like a Hogan’s Heroes kind of secret door.” He stood and faced me. “This might be good, or it might be the most disgusting thing we ever see, and we’ll be scarred forever. It’s up to you if we try to open it. You decide.”
“How do we get the secret door open?”
Boone opened it with one hand. It opened up to a staircase that went down to a dark room. “Holy shit. This is like a scary movie,” I said. “Rule number one in a scary movie: Don’t go in the cellar.”
“Does that mean you want me to go down first?” Boone asked.
I nodded. He stepped down and found a light switch. Light flooded the room below, and we walked quickly down the rest of the way.
“Sonofabitch,” Boone said.
The room was filled with television monitors, at least ten of them on one wall. There was a desk in the center, piled high with paper and a keyboard, and on the wall behind it were photos. A whole wall of photos.
“That’s Stella,” I said, pointing at one of the pictures. “I recognize her from her wake.”
“Margaret,” Boone said, pointing at another picture. “Sonofabitch.”
Not only had Tony worked on the washers and dryers of all of the dead people, but he had stalked them. “These pictures of them were all taken in their homes,” I noted.
Boone pushed some buttons on the keyboard, and the monitors came to life. On one screen, I saw Bernard and Ted in Margaret’s house. Bernard was standing over Ted in his pajamas, serving him his breakfast. It was video in real time.
“Tony was spying on all of them,” I said. “Why?”
“Because he was crazy, I’m thinking.”
“There’s the witches’ mansion on that monitor,” I said, pointing. “But they’re not dead.”
“So you think Tony Eddy killed all those people? But who killed him?”
It was a good question. “Maybe he killed himself after he killed those people.” But the theory didn’t seem to fit for me. The tickets to heaven were knocking at my brain, telling me that they were important. And what about the curses? How did they fit in?
“Everything’s so confused. Chaotic,” I said. “I wonder if it’s supposed to be, if it’s designed to make us turn in every direction.”
“Us?”
“I think we need to go back to the beginning, to where it all began.”
“After the pancakes,” Boone insisted. “I’ll pay, but the least you can do after breaking my arm is to take me to eat pancakes.”
“You snuck up on me!”
“You were skulking!”
We drove to a breakfast place about halfway between Goodnight and Santa Fe. Boone waved to a bunch of people he knew when we entered. �
�C’mon,” he said to me and took my hand. At first, I didn’t know where he was taking me, but then I saw him. Adam Beatman. Suspended deputy sheriff. Suspected stepmother killer. Verified vaginal soap gift giver. Adam was sitting alone in a center booth. He was sipping a cup of coffee and looked up just as Boone slipped into the seat across from him and patted the vinyl for me to sit next to him.
“Hey there, Adam, how’s it hangin’?” Boone said.
“Hey there, Boone. Glad to see you made it out of the wilderness without getting eaten.” His looked in my direction. “I can’t talk to you people anymore,” he said to me. “Silas kicked me in the balls with that last interview. My ass is going to fry in the electric chair.”
“Totally off the record. This is just a social call,” I said in my best Carl Bernstein voice.
The waitress came with Adam’s breakfast, and Boone and I ordered. When the waitress left again, Adam salted his food and sized us up.
“You two a couple? I thought Amos was going after the new girl. I heard he cooked for her.” Adam said.
I gulped and squirmed in my seat. Amos had cooked for me. Twice. But he was definitely not romantically interested in me anymore. That ship had sailed. Or had it?
“We’re not a couple. I’m a journalist,” I said, as if that meant anything. Did it mean anything? I didn’t know. I had broken out into a sweat, and I gulped down Adam’s glass of water.
“Hey Adam,” Boone said, ignoring the couple question. “Tell us why you bought your stepmother vaginal soap.”
Chapter 12
“That? I’m never going to live that down,” Adam growled. “What do I know? One of her friends said to get it for her for her birthday. I had to get her something, or my father would have skinned me alive. She said women like that sort of thing. I should have known she was lying to me.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Margaret Marshall, the meanest bitch in Goodnight.”
I gasped and leaned back in my seat. “You bought it from her?”
“No, she just told me what to get. That’s all. Why? You think the bitch offed my stepmother? That would be wonderful. You got any proof?”
“No. Why would she kill her? And if she did, maybe you killed Margaret to avenge your stepmother.”
Adam laughed and pointed his fork at me. “Good one. I like your sense of humor.”
“Do you have any idea who wanted your stepmother killed?” I asked him.
“Who knows? I didn’t know her friends, but she did hang around those witches an awful lot. So did Margaret, actually. Huh. I forgot about that. That’s another link between the two. Hey, Amos!” Adam called and waved his hand.
I turned around to see Sheriff Amos Goodnight walk in. He was wearing his usual uniform of boots, jeans, a button-down shirt, and a cowboy hat. He wasn’t pleased when he saw me sitting with Adam, and he was even less pleased when he noticed Boone.
“What did you do to your arm, asshole?” he asked Boone.
“What’s it to you, asshole?” Boone shot back.
I sighed. I didn’t have any siblings, and for the first time in my life, I was happy about it. Boone and Amos were constantly at each other’s throats. “Why can’t you two get along?” I asked.
“They used to be best friends,” Adam said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Then, you know what happened.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Matilda, I’m glad you’re here. I got something to tell you,” Amos said, changing the conversation. Boone rolled his eyes. The waitress arrived with our food. “It won’t take a minute,” Amos added.
I slipped out of the booth and followed Amos to the back of the restaurant by the bathrooms. “Deep background,” he started.
“Silas is going to kill me. Nobody does deep background with him.”
Amos arched an eyebrow. “Deep background. Silas will get this information later, but I thought with all the snooping you’re doing, you might need to know first.”
“How do you know I’m snooping?”
He arched his other eyebrow.
“Okay, I’m snooping,” I said. “And fine to the deep background as long as you tell Silas soon.”
“He’ll know when the report comes out, which will happen in a couple days, but I thought you’d like to know. Leonard Shetland died of a heart attack.”
I was sort of stunned, and I took a step back, hitting the wall. “You mean the poison gave him a heart attack?”
“What poison?”
“The poison that killed him.”
Amos ran a hand down his face. “There was no poison. He had a heart attack. Natural causes.”
“I’m confused. Who murdered him?”
“God. God murdered him. It was natural causes. You understand natural causes? He died of a heart attack. You know, he ate a lot of cheese.”
“He wrote the letter and then he dropped dead of a heart attack?” I asked.
“Died in his sleep. Lucky bastard.”
He wrote the letter and then dropped dead. How was that possible? Did coincidences like that exist in the world? “Well, that makes one less murder,” I said. “We’re down to three.”
“Two. We’re calling Margaret’s death an accident. By the way, it looks like Tony was poisoned with the same thing as Stella.”
“He used vaginal soap?” I asked.
“No. It was in his eye drops. Tony had glaucoma.”
Eye drops. Vaginal soap. It was like the local pharmacist was knocking folks off. “Thank you for the deep background.”
“You better get to your food before it gets cold. I just stopped by for a cup of coffee. The diner’s a mess, and I need caffeine if I’m going to finally get Fifi to leave that damned Friends of Daisy the Giraffe Home for Abused Wildlife.”
“Did she give up trying to save the giraffes? What happened to Quint?”
“I don’t know about Fifi. Strange woman. She keeps going on about needing a bigger boat. We let her stay the night in the museum to see if that calmed her. Meanwhile, no one’s seen Quint in a while.”
“I saw him at the river when you were fishing.”
“No one’s seen him since then,” Amos said. “I hope a giraffe ate him.”
I turned to go back to the booth, but a niggling guilt worked at me, and I figured one good deed deserved another. I turned back to Amos.
“This is on deep background,” I began.
“It doesn’t go that way, from journalist to law enforcement. It’s the other way around. Law enforcement to journalist.”
“Just work with me here, will you?”
Amos sighed and put three fingers up in a Boy Scout promise. “Fine. Deep background.”
“Go back to Tony Eddy’s house. There’s a secret door in the kitchen that looks like a cabinet. It’ll take you to a cellar. There’s stuff in the cellar you’ll want to look at.”
“What stuff?”
“My food’s getting cold,” I said.
Amos grabbed my arm and pulled me back to him. “Be careful, Trouble.”
“I’m careful. Boone has been with me.”
“No, I mean be careful of Boone.”
As I walked back to the booth, my mind was swimming. Maybe Leonard’s letter was a hint, and he was actually the killer? There were so many suspects now that I could start a baseball team with them. But now the one link between all the victims was clear. Jenny and Joyce.
Boone and I ate with Adam, and by the time we were done, Boone was fading fast. I decided to take him home before I did any more snooping. I put him to bed with a cup of instant hot chocolate and returned to my side of the house, where my dogs were waiting for me.
They danced around me, begging for their breakfast. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” I told them. I scooped dog food out of the airtight container and poured it in their bowls and gave them fresh water. My friends had left while I was away, and they had cleaned the house. Even the window was fixed, and the food in the pantry had been replaced.
&nb
sp; Wow, you get three women together, you can change the world.
There was a message from Faye left on the kitchen table. Sorry for the mess. And sorry I’ve left you in the lurch. I’ll fix the hole in the floor on Sunday. BTW, fed the dogs their breakfast. Love, Faye.
“You liars,” I told the dogs. “Faye fed you already. You ate two meals. You’re con artists, just like the ticket to heaven guy and the witches.” They looked up at me with big smiles on their faces. It was impossible to be upset with them. I took them for a walk in the forest before stopping by the Gazette office.
“Someone saw Bernard Marshall toss his mother off the cliff,” Jack announced when I walked in the door.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I need a thousand words on the Cook-off troubles!” Klee ordered Jack.
“But Klee…” Jack whined, sounding his age. “I wanna write about Bernard offing his mom. I’ve been looking up all kinds of synonyms for bitch and heinous and bloody in the thesaurus.”
Klee stood. She was a beautiful, stately woman. Today she was wearing a long, multi-colored woven skirt and a white shirt with a gorgeous woven scarf draped around her neck several times. Her long black hair was loose down her back, and she wasn’t wearing a drop of makeup.
“The Cook-off is the biggest event in this town. It brings in folks from all corners of Goodnight and beyond. And now everything’s fucked up,” Klee announced, making Jack gasp in shock. “Yes, you heard me right. F.U.C.K.ed up. That’s big news, and it’s a complicated story. So, that means only you or Silas can do it.” Here she shot me a look like I was wasting air and space in the world. “So, get to it. I’ve got a call in to Silas to pick up the eyewitness to the Bernard story.”
“But Klee…” Jack whined, but he was shot down immediately by her imperious stare. “Fine. Hey Matilda, you want to give me a ride to Mabel’s?”
“Sure. I have the keys to Boone’s truck.”
I had never been to Mabel’s house, so Jack gave me directions as I drove. It turned out that Mabel lived a little higher in the mountains than I did, right above the Giraffe Museum. Her house was a three-story adobe mansion with a six-car detached garage, which we passed as we drove up the long driveway.