by Alice Duncan
And then we all said nothing for another little while. Eventually, after I couldn’t think of any probing questions to ask Mrs. Longstreet–and, after all, I didn’t really consider her anything but a snob–I began to feel kind of silly. “Well, I guess Phil and I had best be going. Nice to see you, Mrs. Clark. Mrs. Longstreet.”
“Take care, Annabelle,” said Mrs. Clark with a smile.
“Good day,” said Mrs. Longstreet, without one.
“Well, that was stupid,” I said as Phil and I made our way back to my family.
“I see what you mean about the doctor’s wife, though,” Phil said. I think he only said it only because he knew I was embarrassed. “She really is a snob.”
Ma invited Phil to come to supper at our house that night. So, while Minnie and Libby went back home with the Gundersons, he and I stayed in town until almost dark. Then he drove Pa’s pony cart back to Aunt Minnie’s place, with the agreement that he’d bring it back to Ma and Pa the next day when he and his father returned to town for supplies. I didn’t want to go. Which didn’t alter the fact that staying with Minnie was my current duty. Sort of like a really horrible homework assignment.
I restrained myself from pestering Phil until we were on our way home. “I love Ma’s chicken pie,” I said as a lead-in to more important stuff.
“It was really good. Can you cook like that?”
“I suppose. I cook sometimes, but my crusts aren’t as good as Ma’s.”
“Too bad. Maybe she can teach you.”
I eyed him slantwise, figuring I knew why he wanted me to learn. He expected me to be making him chicken pie with a flaky crust one of these days. Well, we’d see about that.
“So, did you talk to Mr. O’Dell and Mr. Copeland?”
As I might have anticipated, the question irked Phil. “Is that all you can think about, darn it?”
“At the moment, yes. I found a murdered man, for mercy’s sake! It was an awful experience, and I want to get to the bottom of it before anything else awful happens.”
“Oh, for . . .” Phil heaved about the biggest sigh I’d ever heard, even including those I’d heard issue from my brother Jack. “I couldn’t find Mr. Copeland. He wasn’t at home when I called. Which was a good thing, because I felt like a fool. And, yes. I talked to Mr. O’Dell. And I felt like a fool there, too. Are you happy now?”
I was, actually. “What did he say?”
“He wanted to know why I was asking, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“Why not?”
This was getting nowhere fast. “Well, then, what did you tell him?”
It wasn’t quite dark yet, being around eightish, and I was surprised to see Phil’s cheeks darken around his many scratches. “Are you blushing, Phil Gunderson?”
“Darn it, Annabelle, you get me in the darnedest situations!” He took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. “I told him I wanted to add Minnie’s property to mine.”
“Oh. Why do you want to do that?”
“I don’t want to do it, for crying out loud! And even if I wanted to, Mr. Burgess’s property is in the way.”
I’d forgotten about that, and hoped Mr. Burgess wouldn’t offer to buy Aunt Minnie’s house next. “Then why’d you say so?”
“Because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.” We both sat there, I thinking unkind things about Phil. I don’t know what Phil was thinking, but when he spoke again, he sounded embarrassed. “When he looked skeptical, I told him I wanted the land for when you and I got married.”
“You said what?” I screeched, aghast.
“You heard me.” Now he was back to being grumpy.
“Darn it, Phil, that was a stupid thing to say, and it doesn’t even make sense. I should have thought of a reason for you, since you’re so slow on your feet.”
“If you don’t like the way I do things, Annabelle Blue, you can darned well do them yourself.”
“You’re right. I should.”
“You’re an ungrateful so-and-so, you know that? I’ve tried my hardest to help you out lately, and all you can do is criticize. Well, I’m through! From now on you can do your own so-called investigating!”
We didn’t speak again for the remainder of the journey.
Phil’s desertion stung me, although I suppose I should have expected it. He wasn’t the most enthusiastic of confederates. Or the most imaginative. In fact, he was an old poop.
But that was unfair. He’d sacrificed his head in the cause of discovery. I probably shouldn’t be so hard on him. Nevertheless, that night as I lay in bed, I berated myself for not having approached Mr. O’Dell, Mr. Copeland, and Dr. Longstreet myself–and not merely to find out the real reason they wanted Minnie’s house. I also wanted to ask Mr. O’Dell about the dog he’d promised to bring us. However, I felt a keen disappointment in my childhood chum Phil Gunderson.
My disappointment turned to fury, although not against Phil, when I was awakened in the middle of the night by strange noises that sounded as if they were coming from the cellar. Darn it, I was getting sick and tired of this!
Minnie and I met in the hall. She clutched her robe to her throat and looked scared. I probably looked irate, because I was.
“Annabelle, it’s the ghost,” she whispered. “Do you hear it, too?”
“I hear it, but it’s no ghost, Aunt Minnie. It’s a person, and I’m going to figure out why he’s bothering us.”
She grabbed my arm. “Don’t go outside! Whatever you do, don’t go outside, Annabelle. Remember that man!”
How could I forget? “I’m not going outside. I’m going downstairs to the kitchen to make some hot cocoa and think. You want some?”
“Cocoa?” Minnie said doubtfully. “But . . . there’s a ghost on the loose.”
“I’ll make it some cocoa, too.” I was really aggravated.
“Don’t scoff, Annabelle. This is serious.”
“You’re telling me.” I set off down the stairs. I guess Minnie didn’t want to be alone in the hall because she followed me in spite of the ghosts. Nuts.
Once we’d settled ourselves at the kitchen table with a couple of cups of cocoa and a couple of pieces of cinnamon toast, with Jeepers at our feet trying to pretend nobody had fed him in several days, I said, “All right, Minnie, what’s going on?”
“I already told you. It’s the ghost of that child.”
Eyeing her over my cocoa cup, I said, “I’m sorry, Minnie. I know you really believe that, but I don’t. There’s something else going on here. Help me think of what it might be.”
“I already know what it is.” Now she was getting peeved.
“Help me out anyway, all right? Are there any old gold mines on your property? Any turquoise mines? Any old Indian ruins?” As soon as the words left my mouth, Aunt Minnie stiffened, and I remembered something I’d forgotten. “Indian ruins!” We goggled at each other for a minute. “Where’s Dr. MacTeague working?”
“Just this side of Black Water Draw, I think.”
“You must know, Minnie, because it’s on your property.” I gave my aunt a stern look, which didn’t seem to faze her any.
She answered me anyway. “All right. I gave them permission to work at a old ruin just this side of Black Water Draw. Personally, I didn’t know there were any Indian ruins there, but Dr. MacTeague seemed very excited about them.”
“Probably an old camp site or something. I don’t think the Apaches or Comanches had permanent lodging places.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” Minnie frowned. “But why would archeologists be working at night, Annabelle? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“True, but neither does anything else. I think I’ll take a little trip to the dig today and have a chat with Dr. MacTeague.”
“He won’t like that. He’s very fussy about his work.”
“And I don’t like being awakened by noises every night,” I said, extremely cranky now. “Anyhow, I won’t step on any of his precious pot
s.”
“I don’t think he’s found any pots.”
I rolled my eyes.
Aunt Minnie finished her cocoa, and we both went back to bed. I even slept. Eventually.
Dr. Cable MacTeague and his crew were doing something I’ve always considered fascinating: excavating sites where ancient (and not-so-ancient) people lived. Only I always wanted to do it in Egypt.
Anyway, Dr. MacTeague taught archeology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque during the school year. During the summer months, he’d set up what he called a “dig” somewhere or other, in order to search for Indian artifacts and ruins and so forth. In this way, he added to our understanding of Indian cultures now that we’ve pretty much destroyed them. He never put the matter in exactly those terms, but I knew what he meant.
Truth to tell, there are more promising sites in New Mexico than the Rosedale area. There are cliff dwellings up north and to the east of us, for instance, which seem to me would be more interesting than our ugly desert. But Dr. MacTeague claims a fascination with the nomadic Apache and Comanche tribes.
In spite of the fact that the Mescalero Apache Reservation is up in the mountains near Ruidoso, he approached Minnie by mail before the school year ended and asked if he could work at what he called a “promising site” near Black Water Draw, which is a fairly large arroyo on the west side of her property. Minnie gave her approval willingly, since she didn’t have any plans for so useless a piece of land.
Until now, while I’d wondered if any of his workers might be involved in our mystery, I hadn’t doubted Dr. MacTeague himself. Those wretched night noises, not to mention the dead body, had made me suspicious about darned near everybody, however, and I was going to investigate MacTeague’s operation. Since Phil was mad at me–and I was a little irked with him, too–I decided to go it alone.
“Put on a sunbonnet, Annabelle,” Libby said as I headed out the door, clad in trousers, a plaid cotton shirt, and sturdy walking shoes. “Don’t you have any more sense than to go out on a day like this without a hat?”
Darn it! “I don’t need–”
”Here,” said Minnie. “Use this. It’s an old hat of Joe’s.” She thrust a straw cowboy hat at me. It was probably twenty years old, but it was in pretty good shape, and it was better than a sunbonnet.
“Thanks, Minnie.” Without another word–or a glance at Libby, who was glowering down at a dozen or so heads of cabbage and getting ready to cut them into little pieces as, no doubt, she’d like to do to me–I slapped the hat on my head and left the house.
It wasn’t a long walk to Black Water Draw, maybe three-quarters of a mile, and the day wasn’t hot yet, so I was still feeling pretty chipper by the time I got to the dig site. Dr. MacTeague had hired some of the kids I used to go to school with to help him and his associates. I found them sitting at a long table under a canvas awning, brushing and dusting dirty things with what looked like toothbrushes and little paintbrushes.
“Hey, Annabelle!” called Ward Mayberry. He waved his toothbrush at me.
I ambled over. “Hey, Ward. Whatcha doing? Hey, Mike. Hey, Joe.”
“Hey, Annabelle,” the other two said in chorus.
“We’re cleaning artifacts,” Ward said, gesturing at a pile of stuff in the middle of the table. His tone held pride.
“Ah,” said I. “Artifacts.” I nodded and smiled. The pile of rubbish on the table might indeed have been artifacts, although it looked like it was comprised of ordinary pebbles and rocks to me. It was probably a good thing I wasn’t an archeologist. “What are you going to do with them?”
“They’re going to a museum in Albuquerque when Dr. MacTeague and his staff have ‘em classified and labeled.”
“Ah.” I looked from the pile of trash to the big hole in the ground where I could see a couple of people bent over peering at a bunch of dirt. “Do you guys ever work at night?”
“It’s dark at night, Annabelle,” Ward pointed out–with, I might add, a degree of sarcasm I didn’t think my question deserved.
“It’s also a lot cooler,” I pointed out right back at him. “And there are such things as flashlights, you know.”
“Not for this work. This work is too important to take chances with.”
He sounded so pompous, I nearly laughed. Since I was on an important mission, however, I merely tried to appear impressed. “How much stuff have you guys found?”
“Lots. Look at this.” Ward held up what looked to me like a little pointy rock.
“What is it?”
“An arrowhead.”
“Oh.” That was kind of interesting. “May I look at it more closely?”
He handed it over, and I squinted at it. I could see now that it had been hacked to a point. I could tell where someone had chipped flakes of rock to shape it, too. “Wow, this is neat, Ward. Can you tell what tribe made it?”
“Apache,” he said smugly. “We’ve learned a lot since we started working for Dr. MacTeague.”
“It must be interesting work.”
“It is. Most of the time.”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “The rest of the time it’s boring as heck.”
Gee, now that I knew what an arrowhead looked like, I suppose I could look for some on my own and start a collection. Maybe Phil would be interested in the two of us doing a little exploring together if he ever got over being mad at me. If I ever got over being mad at him.
“This is pretty interesting, Ward. Say, is that where Dr. MacTeague’s finding all this stuff?” I pointed at the hole in the ground.
“That’s it.”
Something occurred to me that might be vitally important and that had totally slipped my mind. “Say, Ward, did the Indians ever use the caves around here to hide out in?”
There were lots and lots of caves in the area, carved out by the underground rivers that abounded. The largest one, the Carlsbad Caverns, had been discovered several years prior. I’d been down there once with my school class, and it was very interesting. Heck, you could hide an army inside the caverns, they were so big. The ones in our area weren’t as extensive, but they might be useful to a villain for something. I couldn’t think what.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Dr. MacTeague isn’t looking into the caves. Want to ask him?”
Did I? Hmmm . . . “Sure.”
“I’ll take you over to him. He’s kind of touchy sometimes when people just barge in on his dig.”
“Thanks.”
So Ward introduced me to Dr. MacTeague, I asked Dr. MacTeague if the Indians ever used the caves in the area, and he said he didn’t know although they might have, and that was that. It was a most unsatisfactory outcome to my trek out there, although I’m not sure what I expected.
It seemed unlikely to me than an archeological expedition would be carried out after the sun set. Also, if anybody in Dr. MacTeague’s party was doing something illegal or immoral in one of the caves during the dark of night, whoever it was sure wasn’t going to tell me about it.
That did not, however, mean that I couldn’t explore a cave or two during the daytime by myself. Maybe it wasn’t Dr. MacTeague or one of his workers who was doing something awful in a cave. Heck, it might be anybody, although I couldn’t quite think of any reason to be using a cave for anything that might require a man to be murdered.
I started back to Aunt Minnie’s house feeling vaguely dissatisfied, but still determined.
Chapter Eleven
“Darn it, Annabelle, I’m sick of running around doing harebrained things for you.”
Obviously, Phil was still mad at me. “This isn’t a harebrained thing, Phil Gunderson! If the noises aren’t coming from the house, maybe they’re coming from near the house. I completely forgot about the archeological excavation going on around here until last night. So I went to talk to Dr. MacTeague.”
“What the devil did you talk to him for?”
“He’s working close to Minnie’s house, at Black Water Draw. I thought maybe the noises were
coming from him or his men.”
“I doubt that he’d explore anything at all at midnight, Annabelle.” I don’t think I’d ever heard Phil sound so caustic.
I gritted my teeth. “He might if he was doing something he didn’t want anybody to know about.”
“Nuts. The man’s a doctor, for Pete’s sake.”
“There’s no law I know about that says doctors can’t be crooks.”
“Are you out of your mind? First you blame poor Mr. Burgess for murdering Julia Gilbert, and now you’re accusing a distinguished archeologist of murdering some stranger next to your aunt’s chicken coop!”
“I’m not accusing anybody of anything. Well, except for Mr. Burgess. I know I’m right about him.”
“Oh, brother.”
“Oh, brother, my foot! Are you going to help me or not?”
“Listen, Annabelle, I don’t have time to play any more of your stupid games.”
“They’re not games!” His accusation stung.
“They are, too. Pa’s getting peeved that I’m spending so much time on your problem that I’m not doing my chores. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Fine, then. I’ll just go explore the caves by myself.”
Phil’s startled, “What caves?” assaulted my ear the second before I slammed the receiver back into its cradle.
“No need to break the telephone,” said Libby, pulling jars of pickled cabbage out of a deep pot.
“I didn’t break the darned telephone,” I muttered sourly. I was so sick of her carping at me. If Ma didn’t let me go home pretty soon, I might do as Phil clearly thought I already had done and lose my mind.
By that time it was after noon and hot enough to boil water, and that was outdoors where Libby wasn’t. Inside, in the kitchen, it was like a steam bath. Not that I’d ever seen a steam bath.
Nevertheless, I truly believed that those caves off of Black Water Draw warranted investigation. I also truly believed that it wouldn’t be much fun to walk to the caves, a two-mile hike, on foot. I didn’t forget that besides the killing sun, there were other things out on the desert that weren’t much fun. Snakes, scorpions, millepedes, ticks, coyotes, not to mention hundreds of varieties of prickly cacti abounded, also not to mention the fact that there might well be a murderous fiend lurking out there somewhere.