by Susan Harper
Pauline, on the other hand, had eventually taken control of the stick shift and had herded the cattle like she’d done it before. She later explained that she had grown up next to a small dairy farm, and on more than one occasion, she’d had to help her neighbor chase a couple of cows off her parents’ property. She had assured Kendell it had been a vastly different experience from what they had experienced on the ranch, but she had at least known how cows would respond to her.
Kendell had to wash her hair twice to get out what she was praying was mostly mud. “Ugh, the water is cold!” she suddenly yelped, recalling the number of people who had already showered before her. Frankly, she was surprised the shower had started out lukewarm at all. The water being freezing cold was not going to stop her, though. She was not about to go to bed with remnants of what might be manure in her hair.
Once she was finally washed up, she exited the shower, ran a towel across herself quickly, and then got dressed. She wrapped her hair up in the towel and headed down the hall in search of Laurie. Junior had managed to fix the hairdryer Laurie had destroyed, so it had been passed around all evening since arriving back from chasing the cows around. She was fairly certain that Laurie had been the last one to use it.
As she was about to round the hallway, she heard Laurie’s voice. “Yeah, I’m just glad I’ve managed to get a little cell reception, finally,” she said, and Kendell peered around the corner to see Laurie in a bathrobe, hanging out in the hallway with her ear up to the phone. “Junior’s dad called the police about Monica, but the roads are still blocked or flooded. They have no way of getting down here any time soon. The police told us not to mess with the body or the crime scene or whatever… Hello, can you hear me? Okay, good.”
Kendell hadn’t realized the Carsons had finally gotten some cell reception. It had probably happened while she had been waiting on the shower. “Ugh, no, I can barely hear you,” Laurie groaned. “You can hear me okay? Okay, I hear you now. I know, right? I can’t believe I hung around here so long that I got stuck! I could be here for another two days. Mr. Carson says it’s going to take them a while to clear the roads. We’re working from one end, and the local authorities I guess are working their way this way. This just blows. I mean, it’s bad enough that I’m stuck here with my ex and his family, but now I have to watch this stupid New York girl gawk all over Junior… Yeah, you heard me right. A New Yorker! It was weird enough when it was Monica. Yeah, I know. Well, at least Monica’s not flirting with him anymore…. No, I don’t mean I’m glad she’s gone! Geez, I’m not that morbid!” Laurie laughed, and Kendell decided to dip out rather than alert Laurie.
She headed back to the room she had been sharing with Pauline and Jesse, and she combed her hair and pulled it up in a wet bun before going downstairs. The family were all gathered around the fire again. “So, I heard phones are working now?” Kendell asked.
“Barely,” Junior groaned from his spot by Bo in front of the fire.
“I managed to get a call out to the police,” Mr. Carson said. “But the roads are so flooded that there is no way they can get out here. If it was an active emergency, they say they could send a helicopter, but there’s nothing they can do for Monica now, so they can’t stretch those resources. Sounds like a lot of people in the city are just as bad off as we are. They have the national guard rescuing people from rooftops in the suburbs, according to the operator I spoke to. I told her we could handle ourselves until they could get the main road cleared—that’s the only road that’s not flooded, but there’s so much debris and trees that they can’t make it out this way. They contacted Monica’s family for us, though.”
“Well, at least you were able to make contact with someone,” Kendell said, sitting on the floor next to the chair Pauline was in.
Everyone was present, with the exception of Laurie. “Laurie still up there babbling on the phone?” Mr. Johnson asked.
“Yeah,” Kendell said.
“Can’t blame her,” Junior said. “It’s got to be a little uncomfortable for her to be stuck here with all of us.”
“You’re not kidding,” Brenton grumbled.
The power suddenly went out again. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” Mr. Carson groaned.
“I’ll go check the fuse box,” Junior said, jumping up. “That’s probably all it is. The weather looks fine out tonight.” Junior grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen and went into another room. He called from a backroom. “We blew a fuse!”
“Dang,” Mr. Carson groaned. “Replacements are in the cellar. Police told us not to go down there…”
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Jesse said, standing. “I’ll go nab it. I think I remember seeing the box of fuses while we were down there.”
“Thanks, hon,” Mrs. Carson said as Jesse headed outside.
Kendell sat, just enjoying the fire and the warmth and the light it provided. She was attempting to make sense of what little information she had regarding Monica when Laurie arrived from upstairs, complaining about the power being out. “Jesse ran to get a fuse from the cellar,” Mr. Carson said. “Junior’s working on it.”
“Oh, okay, good,” Laurie said, sighing. “I lost signal. That was incredibly short-lived.”
“Who did you call?” Mr. Johnson asked.
“I called a friend in the city and asked her to let everyone know I was okay,” Laurie said.
“Good,” Mrs. Carson said.
Junior came walking in from the back. He was sniffing the air and holding his flashlight. “Does anyone else smell smoke?”
“There’s a fire going right here, son,” Mr. Carson said with a laugh.
“No, I mean, like smoke-smoke. Like…something’s…” He sniffed, then shone his flashlight across the room. He raised a brow. “There’s smoke coming from the floorboards!”
Kendell jumped up, as did everyone else. Pauline walked over to where the light was shining. “The floor sure is warm here,” Pauline said, walking her bare feet across the floor.
“Just the cellar,” Mr. Carson said. It clicked for everyone at the same time that there was a fire in the cellar and that Jesse had just gone down that way.
Everyone darted out of the house. Mr. Carson and Junior and Kendell ran for the cellar while Mrs. Carson shouted at everyone else to grab buckets and fill them with water while she searched for their fire extinguisher. By the time they got to the cellar doors they could see Jesse at the bottom of the steps, struggling to stand up. Junior darted down the stairs and returned a moment later with Jesse, her arm flung over his shoulder as he helped her walk.
“Jesse!” Kendell cried and ran, giving her a hug.
“Ow! Ow!” Jesse moaned. She had a gash in her leg.
“What happened?!” Mr. Carson yelped as everyone started arriving one by one with buckets of water, and Mrs. Carson at last found the fire extinguisher. Mr. Carson took it from her and began spraying down the cellar, careful not to disturb Monica’s body. Thankfully the fire had been put out long before it had reached her.
“I don’t know!” Jesse cried. “I had just found the fuse you needed when I smelled smoke at the back of the cellar. I saw that there was a small fire and tried to put it out, but when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to, I spun around to run out of there and tripped over a stupid rake!” Jesse cried out again and pointed at her leg. Kendell saw the blood dripping down and painting the poor girl’s socks red. Jesse wailed, “Geez, this hurts!”
“Let’s get her inside,” Mrs. Carson said once the fire was under control.
Jesse held out the fuse. “I did manage to get this, at least,” she grumbled, handing the fuses off to Brenton, who ran ahead of them to try to get the power back on in the house.
Thankfully, by the time they got Jesse inside and sat her up on the kitchen table, her leg propped up on a kitchen chair, Brenton had managed to get the lights back on. “Oh, for crying out loud, Jesse!” Kendell cried when she saw the large gash in the girl’s leg. “What wa
s that from, the rake?”
“Yes!” Jesse cried.
“Oh, honey, I got some bad news,” Mrs. Carson said. “They’re not going to be able to get an ambulance out this way.”
“Oh, what am I going to do?” Jesse cried. “This is not just a little cut!”
Mrs. Johnson was rummaging through a hall closet, and she returned with what Kendell assumed to be Mrs. Carson’s sewing kit. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Kendell shouted on Jesse’s behalf.
Mr. Carson was already fetching alcohol from the kitchen. He poured some right on Jesse’s leg, which caused her to stiffen. Junior offered Jesse a warm smile. “My mom’s done this before,” he assured her. “She knows what she’s doing. Trust her, all right?” He held Jesse’s hand.
Jesse gritted her teeth as Mrs. Carson lit a match to burn the end of a needle. Mr. Carson handed Jesse the now half-empty bottle of alcohol. “What, do I need to pour more on my leg?” Jesse asked.
“No, honey, I was going to suggest you down the rest of it,” he said.
Jesse frowned, but she decided to take the old man’s advice. Kendell held Jesse’s other hand while Mrs. Carson stitched her up. Frankly, Kendell was surprised. Jesse had teared up a little bit at first, but she had grinned and bore it the rest of the way through. Once she was sewn up, Mrs. Carson had Brenton fetch some bandages from the downstairs bathroom cabinet. She put some medicine on the wound and bandaged her up. She also gave Jesse some of her personal stash of painkillers, which she had for her arthritis.
Kendell smiled at Jesse. “You did good,” she told her.
“I’m actually really impressed,” Junior told Jesse. “I cried like a little baby first time Mom stitched me up.”
“How did you know how to do that?” Jesse asked Mrs. Carson.
“Honey, I’m a veterinarian,” Mrs. Carson said with a smile. “Or I was in my younger years. It’s how I met my husband. I came out to tend to one of his father’s cows.”
Jesse smiled. “It really wasn’t that bad at all,” she said. “Thank you.”
Everything seemed to have worked out fairly well. They had put the fire out, and Jesse didn’t seem to be in too much pain. Only problem was, they had no idea what or who started the fire, but Kendell suspected she knew the why. Someone was trying to cover up their tracks by destroying the crime scene.
10
Once everyone had settled down a bit after Jesse had her leg sewn up, they all migrated back in front of the fireplace. They sat Jesse alone on the couch, propping her injured leg up on a pillow. Junior was kind enough to fetch extra pillows for her so she could sit up with ease, as well as a blanket. Mr. Carson never sat down, Kendell noted. He looked furious as he paced behind everyone, occasionally grumbling to himself about the fire. Kendell couldn’t blame him. It had been his property that had been destroyed.
“I’m going to go into the cellar and check it out,” Mr. Carson finally announced, his voice beyond irritated. “See if anything managed to not be destroyed by that fire.”
“You might want to take Kendell with you,” Pauline suggested, giving Kendell a wink. “The girl has a keen eye. She might find something you wouldn’t.”
Mr. Carson nodded, and Kendell followed him outside and around the house. She knew the real reason Pauline had suggested she tag along was to make sure no evidence was being scooped up. You never knew who the killer might be; Kendell had yet to uncover any possible motives for Mr. Carson or anyone apart from Laurie. Frankly, as suspicious as Laurie was, she didn’t seem strong enough to take Monica down with such ease and confidence with everyone else in the crowded room with them.
They each had their own flashlight, and Mr. Carson also brought what looked like a battery-operated lantern. “That’s interesting,” Kendell said, looking at the plastic lantern that he set down on the floor in the middle of the smoky-smelling cellar.
“Oh, it’s great for camping,” Mr. Carson said as he twisted a nob on the top, and it lit up the entire cellar with a bluish light.
“What do we even need flashlights for?” Kendell asked. “I should definitely order one of those things online. We get occasional blackouts in New York. That thing would probably light up my whole apartment.”
They began pulling things out of the cellar—anything that hadn’t been totally destroyed by the fire—and they set storage boxes and garden tools outside to air out. The hope was that the items would avoid smoke damage if they brought it all out of the cellar, which still smoldered a little. Mr. Carson pointed to a few different areas in the cellar, groaning as he spoke. “We need to probably dump some water on these hot spots. Make sure the house doesn’t go up in flames in the middle of the night.” He came to a half-burnt wooden filing cabinet, and he looked beyond annoyed. “Great. Let’s hope I don’t get audited anytime soon. Junior told me I needed to put all this stuff on a hard drive.”
“Oh no, is that all your records?” Kendell asked.
“It was,” he growled, sifting through the ashes of half-burnt paper. Then he spotted an empty gas container in another corner. He knelt beside them, shaking each of them one at a time. “This was full two days ago,” he hissed. It seemed they had figured out how the fire had gotten started. It seemed that this fire had been quite intentional. He stood up suddenly, his face turning red. He snatched the lantern, so Kendell followed him, spotting Mr. Johnson coming out of the house and looking as though he had planned to come help.
Mr. Carson put the lantern down, turning it back on and standing upright. He looked like he was ready to pounce.
“You two need an extra set of hands?” Mr. Johnson asked in a friendly tone of voice.
“Oh, I think you’ve done enough,” Mr. Carson hissed, causing Mr. Johnson to stop in his tracks.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“You heard me,” Mr. Carson snarled. “My files! They were covered in gasoline, and they’re all gone!”
“Why would I want to destroy your files?” Mr. Johnson asked.
Kendell stood back, quite ready to hear Mr. Carson’s answer if it would be another clue to solving Monica’s murder. Surely the arson and the murder were related and not some coincidence?
“You did this!” Mr. Carson shouted, pointing an accusing finger at Mr. Johnson. “What files did you take that you didn’t want me to notice? I know you did it! I know it! That land dispute was settled in court five years ago, and you can’t let it go!”
“Ooh, you are out of your mind, you old coot!” Mr. Johnson shouted, stepping toward him.
“Am I?” Mr. Carson questioned. “Who else would want to destroy my files?”
“Mr. Carson, to be fair, I’m pretty sure there was gasoline in other parts of the cellar,” Kendell said softly, but the two men did not hear her as they had started a serious shouting match. A land dispute? She imagined something like that would cause some serious tension amongst ranchers.
“You and I could have handled it like men!” Mr. Johnson claimed. “But, no, you had to get the law involved. Had a bunch of state officials traipsing all over my property! One of them left my gate opened, and I lost a calf to a coyote!”
“That’s on you!” Mr. Carson declared. “You’re the one who was trying to build on my land!”
“My family had been on that land for generations!” Mr. Johnson argued.
“It was owned by my family! Your father paid rent to my grandfather when he used that land!” Mr. Carson shouted.
“No, he didn’t!” Mr. Johnson roared, shoving the man. Carson shoved back, and suddenly fists were flying.
“Oh, are you kidding me! Knock it off!” Kendell shouted, and she could hear people rushing out onto the porch. “Would you two stop it?” She attempted to get between them, but she wound up being pushed flat on her back. It stopped the fight immediately.
“Hon, you all right?” Mr. Carson asked, reaching a hand down to help her stand.
Kendell refused the hand and stood up, making sure they both knew how irritated she was. �
��You two are ridiculous!” she shouted. She looked down at her elbow, seeing that it was incredibly cut up and bloodied from her fall. “I’m going to go clean up!” she snapped, storming past everyone who had gathered on the porch.
Once inside, Kendell cleaned her elbow off at the kitchen sink and then used some of the medicine that had been left out from stitching up Jesse to dab on her elbow. She found a bandage in the first aid kit and went ahead and slapped one on before going and plopping down in front of the couch where Jesse was still seated. Pauline was sitting in the same lounge chair she seemed to claim each time they all sat down by the fire, and Dot was on the floor by Bo.
Even from across the kitchen and living room, they could all still hear the Carsons and the Johnsons shouting at each other out on the front porch. The missing window covered up by just the tarp made it perfectly easy to hear every word. Evidently, there had been a land dispute a few years back when Mr. Johnson tried to rebuild a barn that had blown down during another serious storm. According to Mr. Carson, his grandfather had allowed them to build a barn on that piece of property for a fee. According to Mr. Johnson, the land belonged to his family and he need not pay a rental fee to build a barn on it. They had gone to court, and ultimately, the courts ruled in favor of Mr. Carson. Mr. Johnson never rebuilt the barn, unwilling to pay Mr. Carson a dime.
“So, what happened to your elbow?” Pauline asked, her head turned to where she seemed to be listening to the fight outside more closely than she was listening to Kendell.
“Their little fight out there turned into a fistfight for a second, and I got in the middle and got knocked over. Hit my elbow on some rocky ground,” Kendell griped.
“This place is hazardous,” Jesse joked, shaking her head.