Reba’d been right about my having trouble believing it. I nibbled on the right-side droop of my mustache, something that always set her to frowning because she didn’t like the habit. Didn’t like my mustache at all, any more than Tess had; according to Reba it made me look like a walrus. I’d shaved it off for Tess, grew it back when she died. A man fortunate enough to raise a fine crop ought to show it off when he’s able, particularly if it helps ward off predatory females.
I said finally, “Who would do such a thing?”
“An evil person bent on cold-blooded murder.”
“Murder? Why would anybody want to kill Hannah?”
Reba stepped up close. She had a way of doing that, occupying a man’s space and staring into his eyes with her big brown ones, that was discomfiting. “Not Hannah,” she said. “Me.”
I backed up half a step and just looked at her.
“Yes, that’s right, that poisoned buttermilk was meant for me. It is only by the grace of God that I didn’t drink any of it before Hannah did.”
“I thought you didn’t care for buttermilk—”
“I don’t, but the poisoner doesn’t know that.”
“Reba,” I said, “why would anybody want to kill you?”
“Why, indeed. There is only one person it could possibly be.”
“Who?”
“Grace Selkirk.”
It took me a few seconds to digest that. Grace Selkirk, who’d only been in Peaceful Bend a short time and worked for Titus Bedford as his housekeeper and helper in his undertaking parlor. Kept to herself and wasn’t well thought of, but I’d never heard a complaint against her until now.
“What makes you think she wants you dead? You have some sort of trouble with her?”
“We had words the other day.”
“Words about what?”
“Her spying on me.”
“Spying?”
“I caught her skulking around out front, watching the house. Naturally I gave her a piece of my mind.”
“Why would she be spying on you?”
“Titus Bedford. She has designs on him and his money.”
“Oh, now. What makes you think that?”
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Spends all her time with him, day and night, doesn’t she? She may have already enticed the poor man into her bed.”
“That sounds like jealousy talking, Reba. You wouldn’t have your eye on Titus again, would you?”
She sniffed and stomped her foot. “Of course not! I never did have my eye on him.”
Not so. Titus Bedford is a reasonably handsome and available gent in his late forties. Reba had set her sights on him for a time, and it was when he kept refusing to rise to her bait that she switched her campaign to me. Lucas Monk, second choice in the great Reba Purvis third marriage hunt. I sorely wished she’d give up on me soon, too, and pick on somebody else.
“Did you accuse her?” I asked.
“Of spying? Yes, I just told you—”
“Of having designs on Titus.”
“… Not in so many words.”
Meaning she’d implied it. “What makes you so sure she was spying on you?”
“She was standing under the hawthorn tree out front, staring at the house.”
“When was this?”
“Two days ago. Hannah had just come back from the mercantile, and I happened to look out through the window while I was helping her with the groceries. The Selkirk woman claimed she was just passing by and stopped a moment to rest, but I know spying when I see it.” Another sniff, another foot stomp. “The woman is a witch, an evil witch.”
“You didn’t say that to her face?”
“No, but I should have.”
Probably implied something along those lines, too. Reba and her testiness and sharp tongue. But whatever the confrontation, no matter how spirited, it was hardly provocation enough to warrant dosing a bottle of buttermilk with potassium cyanide, and I said so.
“Obviously it was sufficient provocation for the likes of Grace Selkirk,” Reba said through pursed lips.
“Well, that remains to be seen.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned. I want her arrested and charged before she can make another attempt on my life.”
“Can’t be done just because you think she has it in for you. Did Hannah overhear the words you had with her?”
“No. She was in the kitchen and there was no one else around.”
“So then there’s no proof—”
“Do you want to see me dead? Of course you don’t. Well, then, you just go and find some and put that woman in jail.”
“Me? My jurisdiction is the county, the town is Sam Prine’s—”
“Pshaw! Sam Prine is nothing more than a glorified watchman, and not very bright. I want you to handle this matter.”
“Now, Reba—”
“You, Lucas, and I won’t take no for an answer. You’re the only law officer qualified to deal with a devilish matter like this. You know that as well as I do.”
Well, she had a point. Sam Prine was a good man, but he had zero experience in criminal investigation. And I had to admit that Reba was right about his limited smarts; brawn was his main qualification for the town marshal’s job. I could overlook the fact that Peaceful Bend wasn’t my jurisdiction—Sam wouldn’t mind and neither would anybody else. But I didn’t like Reba ordering me to do her bidding and arrest somebody without proper evidence, the same as Henry Bandelier had, and I said so.
She sniffed again, in a hurt kind of way. “I am frightened for my life. You can see that, can’t you?”
Oh, hell. She wasn’t exaggerating about being scared, that was plain enough. “All right,” I said, “I’ll do some investigating. And talk to Grace Selkirk, but unless she confesses to malicious mischief—”
“Malicious mischief!”
“—or attempted homicide, that’s all I can do. Meanwhile, you be careful of what you eat and drink.”
“I certainly will. And if you don’t arrest that woman and she comes skulking around my property again, she’ll find herself on the receiving end of a bullet. I have already loaded Fred’s old pistol and I know how to use it.”
There wasn’t any use warning her against going off half-cocked. Maybe later she’d be in a frame of mind to listen to sensible advice, but sure not right now. I said I’d best be tending to business.
Reba went with me to the door, where she stepped up close again and laid her hand tight on my arm. She had fingers like a clamp when she was upset. “You’ll come back after you’ve spoken to the witch?”
“I’ll be back,” I said, but what I didn’t say was how soon.
FOUR
THERE WASN’T ANY use in canvassing Reba’s neighbors. The nearest ones on the side where she had her dairy products delivered were the Eldredge sisters, a pair of elderly spinsters who minded their own business and weren’t likely to be up and peering out their windows at 5:30 a.m. Besides which, Reba’s side yard was thick with caragana, rosebushes, and other plantings. Her front yard was on the jungley side, too, not that whoever had put the poison in the buttermilk bottle would have risked going onto the property from Tamarack Street. Out back was a carriageway lined with cottonwoods that’d be ink-black at that pre-dawn hour.
I took a look around the side porch area. Didn’t expect to find anything, didn’t find anything. Easy as pie for somebody to slip up there after the delivery was made, take off the bottle cap, put the potassium cyanide inside, close it up again, and slip away in the dark. Wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes.
Wasn’t any use in talking to the milkman, either. The would-be poisoner would’ve been careful not to be seen lurking. So I went instead to the marshal’s office, in a separate building behind the courthouse. Sam Prine sleeps in the back room, which is what he was doing when I got there. Just as well. I’d had it in mind to tell him about the poisoning and then swear him to keep his lip buttoned, but there really wasn’t any need
for him to know. It’d just fluster him. And he wouldn’t welcome the confidence any more than he would the responsibility of investigating. So with my mind changed, I left without waking him up.
Doc Olsen had his office above the Merchant’s Bank two blocks north. Doc was in and treating young Tyler Fix, whose brother, Grover, owned the Fix Mercantile Company, for something or other in what he calls his surgery. Doc is a funny old bird, thin as a rail with big knobby hands and what Reba calls a caustic sense of humor. I remember him saying once when asked what a particular patient had been suffering from, “The cortex of the brain was unnaturally flushed, the neuronic synapses extended enough to inhibit the nervous impulse from axon to dendrite in such a fashion as to make his muscular articulation erratic.” I memorized that when he explained it meant the man was drunk.
Doc finished with Tyler and sent the kid on his way with a tube of skin ointment. While Doc washed up, I quizzed him about the poisoning.
“No doubt that it was potassium cyanide,” he said. “You can’t mistake that bitter almond odor. Or Hannah’s symptoms—rapid breathing, dizziness, nausea, headache.”
“Enough to have killed her if she’d swallowed a full glass?”
“Probably. Have to have the buttermilk analyzed to be positive.”
“You have the bottle, Doc?”
“In my refrigerator.”
“Good. Can you do the analysis?”
“I don’t have the equipment. Have to send it down to Missoula.”
“No need yet, I guess. Just hold it for evidence.”
“Naturally. Unless I decide to drink some of it myself, put an end to all my sorrows and annoyances.”
“Hah. Reba tell you she thinks the poison was meant for her?”
“No,” Doc said, “but I gathered she did from the way she carried on. She can be difficult, we both know that, but who’d want to kill her?”
“She’s got somebody in mind. She tell you who?”
“No.”
“Well, she told me, but I don’t want to say who until I do some investigating.”
He shook his big shaggy head. “Poisoned buttermilk. Last thing I’d have expected to happen in Peaceful Bend.”
“Makes two of us.”
“I wouldn’t have expected anybody to steal that cigar store Indian, either,” he said as I started out. “You find it on the reservation?”
“Not yet.”
“Henry Bandelier’s pretty worked up about the theft.”
“Not half as worked up as Reba is,” I said, “with a whole lot more cause.”
* * *
TITUS BEDFORD HAD been the only undertaker in Peaceful Bend for some while, but the town was growing, if growing slow, and Titus took to fretting that some other mortician would move in and open a fancy establishment and take away a good portion of his business. So he decided to build his own fancy establishment first, in a better location than the rented building down near the train depot—a new place big enough for embalming and viewing, and to show off and store his caskets and plain boxes.
The spot he picked was on the Cherry Street side of his property east of Main, his house facing on the next street over, Anaconda. The new building had a plate glass window in front so folks walking or riding by could look in and see the trimmed display coffins with their satin linings and feather pillows and shiny brass fittings. He also put in a brick driveway wide enough to accommodate his new Cunningham carved-panel motor hearse.
Titus bought all his rough pine boxes and fancier coffins from a casket maker in Missoula. Used to have the more extensive coffins trimmed by his wife, Maude, before she passed on and then by the widow Brantley until she died sudden of a coronary; he bought the caskets without linings on account of it was thriftier that way, and Titus is nothing if not thrifty.
He hadn’t been open for business long in the new location when Grace Selkirk arrived in town. No one knew where she’d come from or why she’d picked Peaceful Bend to settle in. Just came in on the train one day and took a room at the Valley Hotel while she hunted for a job. Didn’t have to hunt long, since Titus had put an ad in the Sentinel for a seamstress. Wasn’t long before Grace Selkirk was not only working in the widow Brantley’s stead at the funeral parlor, but living in one of Titus’s spare rooms and keeping house for him.
Tongues started to wag right off. Gossip’s a major industry in any small town, and in Peaceful Bend the women, especially Reba Purvis, and the male members of the Hot Stove League that hang out at the Commercial Club work the hardest at it. More gossip comes my way, I reckon, than just about anyone in town, most of it from Reba.
Grace Selkirk looked to be a couple of years past thirty and was not hard on the eye, in a chilly sort of way. Before long, folks had her and Titus sharing a bed. Some even went so far as to claim he’d met her on one of his casket-buying trips to Missoula and brought her back with him on the sly so they could live together in sin.
I wasn’t sure I believed any of it. I’ve known Titus for a lot of years; there’s not many more morally upright citizens in Peaceful Valley. Not that that necessarily prevented him from being interested in Grace Selkirk as more than an employee, but it’d be an eyebrow-lifter for me to find out he was. All he’d ever said about her in my hearing was that she was a good cook and housekeeper, and a better coffin trimmer than Maude or the widow Brantley. An artist with silk and satin, according to him, taking pains to get the folds in the lining and the fluff in the pillows just so. Her finished caskets were what he called funerary works of art.
Nobody liked Grace Selkirk much. She never made any effort to be neighborly and little enough to be civil. Stayed close to Titus’s home and the undertaking parlor. Old Ben Downey, one of the Hot Stove League, passed a remark about her one day that I happened to overhear; it caused hoots of laughter and got told all over town for days afterward. Ben spit against the hot side of the cast-iron stove in the Commercial Club, waited for it to sizzle, and allowed as how he knew for a fact that those rumors about her and Titus were false. One of the other loafers asked him how he knew, and Ben said, “Titus is still alive, ain’t he? First time he stuck his tallywhacker in that woman, him and it would of froze solid.”
As I trod the brick walk to the mortuary entrance, I thought about Reba’s accusation that Grace Selkirk had her sights set on marrying Titus and viewed Reba as a rival. But even if that were true and they’d had words over it, it seemed like a mighty thin motive for attempted homicide. Unless of course the Selkirk woman was as crazy as a laying hen with a half-stuck egg.
The little bell over the door tinkled discreetly when I stepped into the empty reception room. My nostrils pinched up at the lingering smell of flowers mingled with the strong pickle-like odor of formaldehyde; you weren’t supposed to smell the formaldehyde in this part of the building, the embalming room being at the rear, but I’ve got a sharp sniffer and I always could. Didn’t like the combination one bit. It made sitting through funerals, Tess’s funeral in particular, even more of an ordeal.
Titus came in wearing his usual black suit and solemn expression, but his face smoothed out some when he saw me. “Good afternoon, Lucas. What brings you here?”
“I’d like a few words with Miz Selkirk, if she’s available.”
“She is, in the sewing room.”
“Been here all day, has she?”
“Yes, since eight o’clock.”
“You’re an early riser, Titus. Up at the crack of dawn, as I recall. She happen to leave your house between six and seven this morning?”
“Not as far as I know, she didn’t.”
“Not even for, say, ten minutes or so?”
He said, “I suppose she could have left for that long, while I was, ah, occupied.” His brow wrinkled up. “Why all the questions? Has something happened?”
“Something has,” I said, “and you’ll hear about it soon enough. Right now I’d like a word in private with Miz Selkirk. Ask her to step in.”
Titus is not a m
an to argue with anybody, much less the law. He went out without another word. I paced around for two or three minutes, smelling flowers and formaldehyde, before Grace Selkirk came in alone.
She wore black, too, a plain dress with white lace at the throat and on the sleeve cuffs. Like every other time I’d seen her, her black hair—dyed black with shoe polish, the way it looked—was braided and tightly coiled around her head. Her ice-blue eyes and pale face showed no emotion of any kind. Cold woman, for a fact.
“You wish to speak to me, Sheriff?”
“I do. Mind telling me if you had occasion to leave Mr. Bedford’s home early this morning, around the time the man from Miller’s Dairy makes his deliveries?”
“I did not.”
“You know where Reba Purvis lives?”
“Reba Purvis? No.”
“But you know who she is.”
“Yes.”
“Get along with her?”
“I’ve only spoken to the woman once. Why do you ask?”
“Her housekeeper was poisoned this morning. Poisoned buttermilk that Mrs. Purvis thinks was intended for her.”
I thought that might shake the woman some, or at least produce a twitch or two. Nothing. She stood there same as before, straight as a stick, her frosty eyes flat-fixed on mine. They hardly ever blinked, those eyes. Gave you a creepy feeling when you looked into them long enough.
“What does that have to do with me?” she said.
“Lucky thing Hannah Mead didn’t drink a whole glass or she’d be dead now. Pretty sick as it is. Doesn’t seem as though you much care.”
“I don’t know Hannah Mead.”
“Person ought to have sympathy for anybody poisoned with potassium cyanide.”
“Are you suggesting I put the poison in the buttermilk?”
“Did you?”
“Certainly not. What possible reason would I have to want to harm Reba Purvis?”
“Maybe on account of she once set her cap for Mr. Bedford and might still want to marry him.”
“Why should that matter to me?”
“It would if you have similar intentions.”
The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave Page 3