“Yeah. Tony’s a hard worker and a dependable guy.”
“Handy for you to know so many tradesmen to help out in a pinch, isn’t it?” It was also handy to know where I might find the crowbar I’d videoed Tony removing from the house, even if the rag had been disposed of. It was possible that, in his haste to clean up the crowbar, he’d missed a speck of blood, which I knew would be all the crime lab would need to get a DNA sample. To my knowledge, there’d been no soap or bleach on hand at the time, even though it looked as if someone had returned to scour the sink. I hoped Tony hadn’t used any bleach on the crowbar itself. Because the potential murder weapon was in his custody, he’d likely be less concerned about blood on it than on his victim’s sink.
Although I still couldn’t fathom a motive Tony Torres might have to eliminate Reilly, I couldn’t overlook the fact he’d been so diligent about removing evidence from the crowbar and then the crowbar itself. Returning to the scene to retrieve the rag he’d used to clean it, and to scour the sink with bleach he’d likely have had to bring with him to the Reynolds’ home, only added to my suspicion that the red stain was indeed blood, not paint.
I now had to come up with a way to get back inside Barlow Barnaby’s house without breaking and entering. Rip could be so persnickety when it came to his wife breaking the law. But first, I had to go take care of the little furball from hell. I’d never have guessed something weighing in at less than two pounds could scare the holy crap out of me. I wanted to get the necessary tasks accomplished as quickly as I could and keep as much distance between Rascal and myself as possible.
I wonder if Milo would consider it weird if I asked to borrow the neoprene chest waders he uses for wade-fishing so I can wear them while feeding the neighbor’s pet? If that rodent were to run up my pants leg the way it did Rip’s, my heart would stop mid-beat. I’d be the next person from Flamingo Road Chuck Beatty would be hauling away in a body bag.
Twenty
I stepped into the mudroom, also known as Rascal’s room, which was located near the rear deck door of Suzanna’s stilt home. The deck looked out over the bay and offered a beautiful view of the sunset and Rockport’s annual firework displays. Sure enough, as Suzanna had boasted, you could see the backside of George Strait’s house on Curlew Drive.
I froze when I saw Rascal had crawled up on the table where his food pellets, snacks, and dust containers were stored in airtight plastic containers. After a brief stare-down, Rascal looked away and purred, reminding me of Dolly when she was trying to manipulate Rip into giving her a handful of feline Greenies, her favorite snack. Dolly was nobody’s fool. She knew Rip was an easier target than me, and she was more apt to get what she wanted out of the weakest link. Animals were definitely smarter than we sometimes give them credit for.
In this case, I was easily manipulated by the chinchilla―out of fear, not weakness. I’d have been willing to hand over my wallet and the gold-and-jade ring Rip had purchased for me on our golden wedding anniversary if that’s what it took to protect myself from Rascal. I’d have even stripped down to my underwear and handed my clothes over to the varmint to keep him from putting me in the emergency room the way he had his owner. I was in no mood to have my ear bitten off, so I placed six raisins in Rascal’s food bowl to keep him occupied. While he gnawed on them, I refilled the water bottle, spooned pellets into his food bowl with the raisins, added more dust to the bathing box, and scooped minuscule poop pellets out of the litter box. The last thing I needed to do before departing was water the golden pothos plant on the window ledge behind the kitchen sink. I’d noticed the leaves were beginning to droop as they wrapped around the beautiful copper pot the plant was potted in.
I knew Suzanna’s houseplant, also known as “devil’s ivy”, could be hazardous to pets, like cats and dogs. I didn’t know if that held true for chinchillas, but I did recall from researching the animal that they like to chew on plants. To help ensure her pet didn’t die on my watch, I decided to place the copper pot on top of the refrigerator and would warn Suzanna about its hazards when she returned home.
When I lifted up the pot, I discovered a business card underneath. The card had “Bloomers Nursery and Landscape” on the front, a local nursery on West Fourth Street I was familiar with. There was a phone number scribbled on the reverse side that was different from the one listed on the front. I assumed the number was a direct line to the business from which she’d purchased the plant.
I took a photo of the back of the card with my phone so I could call the number later and inquire about the plant’s toxicity, and whether or not it was dangerous to chinchillas. Chances were, I realized, the nursery was temporarily closed due to storm damage, but the direct line might be to a staff member’s personal cell phone, so it’d be worth the effort.
As I turned to leave the kitchen, the sound of ice dropping into the tray inside the freezer startled me. I was tense, worried that Rascal might decide to terrorize me. My mind quickly went from being ravaged by a crazed rodent to the ice I’d heard drop. The thought of ice reminded me of the ominous big black bag in the chest freezer downstairs. I glanced around for anything that resembled a security camera, nanny cam, or monitoring device of any type and saw none. Her newly installed “state-of-the-art security system” must have been less elaborate than Suzanna had let on. Either that or merely a fabrication to keep me from snooping around and possibly discovering something incriminating inside her home.
Praying I wasn't being monitored by some well-hidden recording device, I hurried down the stairs to the garage and made my way to the basement restroom. Luckily for me, the door was propped open with an old iron anvil being used as a doorstop. Suzanna must have become tired of having to punch in a security code to enter the room, which consisted of nothing more than an old chest freezer, non-working toilet, sink, and a tub full of tools.
Stopping in front of the freezer, I noticed the two boxes of MRE’s Suzanna had decided to hang on to and the oil-stained bedspread she’d lain over the top were gone. The unit no longer appeared to be running. I distinctively recalled a loud humming noise coming from it the first time I’d seen it, along with a thick layer of frost covering the black bag inside.
I lifted up the lid tentatively, not sure what I’d find inside. I was both surprised and disappointed to find nothing. Suzanna had been serious when she’d said she was going to get right on the task of defrosting and cleaning out the old appliance. Why had cleaning out the freezer been such a top priority? I wondered. Was there something inside it she was afraid someone would discover if she didn’t dispose of it immediately? And, if so, what was it? Scarier still, who was it, if the bag contains what I feared it had?
My number one suspect seemed to change with every rotation of the Earth, if not more often, and my list of people with possible motives to kill Reilly continued to grow. I wished I could begin eliminating a few of them. I was beginning to feel discouraged because I felt no closer to the truth than when I’d first decided to investigate the situation.
I went back upstairs in order to lock the front door, and as I walked down the front staircase to the driveway, I glanced at the pile of debris in front of the Panderos’ house. Their home had received remarkably little damage from the storm, but almost no one was completely spared. Their debris pile contained mostly broken lawn ornaments, a few uprooted bushes, the two boxes of MRE’s she’d decided not to donate at the last moment, and some banged-up guttering that had been ripped from the roofline by the extreme winds. That was pretty much the extent of the items in the pile, except for one thing I hadn’t expected to see―the ominous big black trash bag I’d last seen in the homeowners’ chest freezer! It was half-buried under the oil-stained blanket and a couple of dead hibiscus plants.
As I approached the debris pile, I could detect an unpleasant stench. I was surprised I hadn’t smelled it earlier. I was hesitant, but decided to check out what was in the bag. The closer I got to it, the more odorous it became. By the time I was
a few feet from the pile, I was afraid of what I might find. It smelled like something was not only dead inside the bag, but also overcooked in the scorching mid-September heat.
I stopped short of opening the bag because I was about to gag from the stench. I decided I needed Rip’s help to investigate what the stinky bag contained.
Rip was gone when I returned to the trailer, almost certainly helping Milo with a project. I made myself a cup of herbal tea and tried the phone number scribbled on the nursery’s business card. I still wanted to find out if Suzanna’s houseplant was dangerous to have where Rascal could chew on it, as rodents are wont to do.
“Hello.”
“Hi. I hate to bother you, but I just have one quick question.”
“Go ahead.” The male voice on the other end of the line sounded familiar. I must have dealt with the individual at the nursery on one of my many visits there in the past. As I had a black thumb and a tendency to kill every plant I bought with kindness, I was often buying new plants to replace dead ones. One thing I was a stickler about was not letting a live plant in my home make a dead pet out of our chubby tabby.
“Do you know if golden pothos plants are hazardous to chinchillas?”
“No.”
“No, they aren’t, or no, you don’t know?” I asked.
“Lady, if this is a joke, I don’t find it particularly humorous,” the man sharply replied.
“I’m not kidding. I need to know what I should do with―”
“Wanna know what you can do?”
He told me what I could do and ended the call before I could respond. As you can imagine, I can’t repeat his suggestion. Suddenly, I realized why I’d recognized the voice. It wasn’t an employee of the nursery. It was Walker Reynolds. At first, I was baffled about why Walker would be answering the phone at Bloomers Nursery. Then I realized I hadn’t called the nursery at all.
Clearly, Suzanna had scribbled Walker’s number down on the first thing she could find. I guess she’d thought his professional services might come in handy when trying to determine if her husband was having an affair with Reilly. Or perhaps she had formed an alliance with Walker. After all, their spouses were both cheating on them with each other’s spouses. How far they’d take that conceivable alliance was anybody’s guess.
“If you recognized Walker’s voice, then he might have recognized yours, as well.” Rip looked at me pointedly after I told him about the phone call.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. And now that he’d brought it to my attention, I was worried. “I don’t think he did though. Hope not, anyway.”
“Why’d you call him in the first place?”
“I didn’t call him intentionally, Rip. I thought I was calling the nursery advertised on the front of the business card and was surprised when he answered the phone instead. You see, I found the card under a potted plant.”
“You must have been doing some heavy-duty snooping to find something under a pot.” Rip sounded disgusted with me, and for good reason.
“I wasn’t snooping at all. I was moving the plant to the top of Suzanna’s fridge because I recognized it as one that is toxic to animals and didn’t want Rascal to get sick.”
“After the traumatic experience he put me through, I’d have chopped up a few leaves and fed Rascal a golden pothos salad for lunch.” Rip clearly felt no affinity for the chinchilla.
“Oh, hush, Rip! I have no real fondness for Rascal either, but I need to keep the damned thing alive until Suzanna gets home. That’s why I called the nursery. I wanted to find out if the plant was dangerous to chinchillas as well as cats.”
“Why would she hide the phone number under a potted plant?” Rip asked.
“We can’t know for sure she intentionally hid it.”
“What do you mean?” Rip asked. “Of course she hid it. Under a pot is not a normal place to keep a business card with a phone number written on it.”
“Nor is a sugar canister a normal place to keep a grocery list under.”
“Huh?” Rip looked at me as if I’d just told him I stored live grenades in the undercarriage storage compartment of the Chartreuse Caboose.
I walked over to the kitchen counter, lifted up the orange, brown and olive green ceramic canister shaped like a mushroom that I'd been gifted in the seventies, and exposed a piece of paper with brown sugar, paper towels, and malted milk balls written on it. I set the canister back down before Rip had time to read it. The last thing on the list was not intended for his consumption. It was exclusively for mine when my sweet tooth was too powerful to ignore. If he thought I kept my grocery list in an unusual place, he should see where I hid the candy. I knew the very last place he’d ever look was behind the laundry basket.
“I don’t get it.” Rip looked both hurt and confused. “Why do you keep your grocery list hidden under the sugar? Are you afraid I’ll look at it for some reason?”
Yes, I am, but that’s beside the point. “Of course not, sweetheart. Don’t be ridiculous. Why should I care if you looked at our grocery list? It’s just that women sometimes sweep the dirt under the rug, so to speak. The list isn’t hidden there, it’s just that we have a limited amount of counter space in this trailer. I keep it under there so the kitchen doesn’t look messy. It’s the same reason I leave the can opener in the cabinet, despite the fact I have to get it out nearly every single day to use it. Perhaps Suzanna put the card under the pot so it’d be handy without cluttering up her counter, or not be accidentally pitched out with junk mail or blown off the window ledge by a gust of wind.”
“I suppose.” Rip sounded dubious. But then I realized it wouldn’t bother him if every pot, pan, dish, utensil, and small appliance we owned was out in the open, stacked halfway to the ceiling on the kitchen counter, table, and stovetop, where they’d all be handy when needed. What I considered clutter, he considered a convenience. Rip shook his head. “I guess I’ll never understand women.”
“No, probably not. And we’ll never understand you men, either.”
“Well, I need to go help Milo install a couple of new windows in their sunroom pretty soon. Let’s go check out the contents of that trash bag and we’ll continue this conversation later.”
“All right.” As I agreed to his suggestion, I thought, While he assists Milo, I need to find a new hidey-hole for my grocery list, like maybe inside my box of Swiffer duster refills or under an unopened container of hummus in the refrigerator. If he knew I was buying one of his favorite candies and hiding it from him, he’d be tearing the trailer apart looking for it. And malted milk balls are definitely not on his diet these days.
“Since you couldn’t locate the rag used to clean the crowbar, I guess taking it to Chuck to see if he can get it tested for blood is out of the question,” Rip said as we exited the trailer.
“It’s not entirely out of the question, but we’ll discuss that later too.”
“Okay, although I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
I just smiled at Rip in response. I had a feeling the window project might get delayed after we discovered what was in the black bag in the debris pile, and I was right. The reason for the delay, however, was not at all what I’d anticipated.
Twenty-One
With wet rags held up against our noses, Rip slashed open the black garbage bag with his pocketknife. When the contents spilled out onto the ground, we both jumped back in shock—and a bit of fear, as well. The last thing we expected to find was a passel of venomous snakes. Dead, but still alarming.
“There must be two dozen rattlesnakes in this bag!” Rip exclaimed. “Why in hell would Suzanna’s husband hunt and freeze rattlers?”
“Beats me. But at least it isn’t something that’d put one or both of the Panderos behind bars for the rest of their lives.”
“Maybe not for the rest of their lives, but a few years is not beyond the realm of possibility,” Rip said.
“What do you mean?”
“These are timber rattlesnakes.
They’re the only venomous snake in Texas that’s protected and illegal to hunt, kill, sell, or have in one’s possession. I’ll need to notify Sheriff Peabody right away. Take a couple of photos with the phone in the meantime.”
“Okay.” I snapped two pictures as requested. For about the zillionth time, Rip had impressed me with his knowledge. For a guy who’d never been much on reading, he seemed to be well-versed about a lot of random things. “Will Suzanna be in legal trouble if she was aware of what was in the bag?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. It’s referred to as ‘aiding and abetting a criminal’.”
I suddenly felt awash in emotions―mixed emotions, to be precise. I was certain Percival was behind the bag of snakes, but not so certain Suzanna was unaware of his gruesome hobby. She’d definitely acted as if she didn’t want me to know what was in their freezer. I was appalled that Percival would kill a protected species, even though I’ve always maintained the only good snake was a dead snake. Was he aware the species was classified as protected? Or like me, was he totally in the dark about the subject? Either way, he should have used his phone to research the topic before killing the snakes. I wasn't sure ignorance would carry enough weight in a court of law, and who doesn’t carry a wealth of information in their back pocket these days?
Along with disgust, I also felt remorse. The neighbor I’d bonded with was trusting me to take care of not only her pet but also her home, a major investment. Instead, I was responsible for potentially getting her estranged husband incarcerated, or at the very least, in deep doo-doo. Suzanna’s fate was up in the air, as well, depending on how much she knew about Percival’s illegal activity. On the bright side, their beloved rodent was still alive and kicking.
While Rip was busy talking with the sheriff in front of the Panderos’ house, I hoped I could find a way to track down Tony’s crowbar. With any luck at all, there was still enough of the red substance left on it to be tested. Bruno had said earlier that morning he and Tony were working on Barlow Barnaby’s house as a favor to the deceased man’s family. Chances were I could find the two men still there, trying to get as much done as they could. With so much rebuilding going on around town, time was definitely of the essence.
Ripped Apart (A Ripple Effect Cozy Mystery, Book 5) Page 19