by P. B. Ryan
Kitty was still huffing from the exertion of climbing down the steps to meet Jeff and then mounting them again. I hope if I ever need Kitty to defend me that it doesn’t involve physical movement on her part or I’m as good as dead.
Cora Mae set cups of coffee in front of us and sat down herself.
“Why isn’t Bill living on some of his father’s property?” I asked. “All that land, it stands to reason he’d live there.”
“Bill and his old man never got along much,” Kitty said, between bites of stew. “Bill couldn’t be the macho man Chester wanted him to be. Bill’s little and skinny, and when he started doing office work for a living, Chester said it was a girl’s job. They’ve always been at each other’s throats. When he took up with the Southern blonde, Chester really went nuts.”
“I can’t picture Bill killing Chester,” I said.
“Nah,” Kitty said. “No way. Bill’s against guns, you know. Won’t have them around. Another reason his pa was ticked. Bill wouldn’t even hunt.”
“I wonder how we can find out if anyone had an insurance policy on Chester,” I said.
“Ask Blaze,” Cora Mae said. “Maybe he has some ideas.”
Oh, right, Blaze would tell me.
Kitty stayed to watch the news on television, then rocked herself up from the couch with help from Cora Mae and stood several feet inside my comfort zone. I instinctively backed up. She followed me.
“Jeff’s picking me up out front,” she said. “You stay in tonight with Cora Mae. No investigating without your bodyguard.”
After Kitty left, Cora Mae set her hair in big rollers and spread cream on her face while I unpacked my suitcase.
“Look what I found out at Chester’s blind,” I said, holding up the magazines.
Cora Mae clapped her hands. “Sex magazines! I’ve always wanted to look at one of those.”
We settled on the couch and each of us paged through a magazine. Every once in a while Cora Mae would giggle and show me a picture she thought was special. We weren’t interested in the women, but the men were butt-naked, too.
Suddenly Cora Mae screamed in my ear.
“Ouch,” I said, holding my ear. “That really hurt.”
“Cripes,” she said. “Look at this.”
She shoved the magazine in front of my face, too close to see. I took it from her and held it out. There, in all her glory, was Barb Lampi. Two full pages had been devoted to her. The staples binding the magazine together sliced through her belly button. She had the biggest boobs I’ve ever seen.
“Guess those weren’t falsies after all,” I said to Cora Mae, whose mouth was frozen open like the mounted trout at Herb’s bar.
“Implants,” she managed to mutter.
I searched the caption. “It says her name is Thelma Thompson.”
“Maybe that’s her stage name,” Cora Mae said.
“I doubt she’d change her name from Barb to Thelma. It’d be the other way around. No, I think that’s her real name, and I bet Barb is an alias.”
Cora Mae stared at the page. “Chester must have found these magazines and confronted her. Then she snuck out to the blind and killed him.”
“Women don’t shoot people,” I said, shaking my head. “They run them over with their cars or poison them. When’s the last time you heard of a woman murdering a man with a rifle?”
Cora Mae shrugged. “Maybe she hired someone.”
We paged through the rest of the magazines and found Barb in each one, although she received top billing only in the first one.
It was time for a little talk with Barb.
“It’s time for a little dint,” I said.
“Dint?”
“Dint.”
Chapter 8
Word For The Day
INCURSION (in KUR zhuhn) n.
A sudden, brief invasion or raid.
BRIGHT AND EARLY TUESDAY morning while we were enjoying our coffee and cinnamon rolls, Blaze pulled into Cora Mae’s driveway in his yellow sheriff’s truck.
I watched him from the kitchen window as he lumbered to the door and pounded on the frame.
“My, my,” Cora Mae said when she opened the door and noticed his truck, “what happened to your truck?”
“Got near a lunatic,” he said, nodding at me.
“You’ll regret calling me names once I’m dead and gone. You’ll regret a lot of things when I’m gone. But back to business. How are you progressing with the break-in?”
Blaze was more grim-faced than usual this morning. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.” He sat down at the table with his winter jacket still on and wrapped his big paws around the cup of coffee Cora Mae set in front of him. “Do you want to do this in private?” He glanced over at Cora Mae.
“I don’t have any secrets from my friends.”
“What I believe happened, Ma,” he said, taking my hand in his and speaking slowly, “is that you vandalized your own home.”
“What?” I screamed. “Have you completely lost your mind?”
Blaze cut in, “I’m trying to understand. I really am. But you have to talk to me. Maybe you don’t want to live alone anymore and it’s your way of reaching out.”
I wanted to reach out all right and clutch Blaze by his cologne-drenched throat.
Cora Mae popped up and grabbed the coffee pot. “More coffee?”
I had my hands on the back of one of the kitchen chairs, squeezing hard. Blaze hadn’t even been looking for the person who destroyed my home. Was he completely dense?
“Convince me then,” Blaze said. “Give me a good alibi. Little Donny and George were at your house right before the card game. Right?”
“That’s right. They can vouch for me.” I couldn’t believe I had to defend myself against my own son. Again.
“But you didn’t come over for the game with them. In fact, we waited so long, at one point we thought you weren’t coming at all.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you implying? That I used the time to vandalize my own house?” When Blaze gave me a steady stare, I slammed my hand down on the table.
Blaze leaned forward and said, “I want you to pack up and move over with Mary and me until we sort this out. Until your place is cleaned up.”
“No thanks,” I said through a clenched jaw. “Think I’ll pass. As far as I’m concerned, it’s already sorted out.”
“I’m not giving you a choice, Ma. I’m going to stay right here until you’re packed and then I’m following you over to the house.” Blaze gave Cora Mae, who was listening intensely, a weak smile.
“Cora Mae,” I said. “I’m staying right here.”
“Of course, you are,” she said clearing her throat. “Maybe you two can reach a compromise. I hate to see you fighting. You’re family.”
“You’re better off without one,” I told Cora Mae.
“I have my date with Onni tonight,” she said, slowly. “And since I’m cooking for him here, and…”
“Okay, okay,” I said, her message coming through loud and clear. This was the night Cora Mae was going to grill Onni for information. “How about I come over and spend the night,” I said to Blaze, concentrating on slowing my breathing. “But only one night. We can have a nice talk.”
“It’s a start,” he said, sounding relieved. Was it possible that Blaze believed all the stuff he made up?
Besides, I reasoned with myself, I can’t give up Mary and Little Donny just because Blaze is acting like a jerk, and I’d have another chance to talk Blaze out of court. If I changed my mind before this evening, I could always stay at my house in spite of the mess.
“You didn’t tell him about the magazines,” Cora Mae whispered when he went into the living room to make a phone call.
“It’s like playing poker, Cora Mae. You put one card down at a time.”
o0o
“Blaze thinks I destroyed my own house for attention,” I said to Kitty when she arrived.
“And—”
; “And what? I didn’t do it. Do you realize how outrageous that is? Think about it.”
“Who knew you weren’t home?”
“My truck was parked right out front because I walked over to Blaze’s, so whoever did it might not have known I wasn’t home.” That thought sent shivers down my spine. “The only people who knew I wasn’t home were the guys at the card table—Blaze, Little Donny, and George.” A thought struck me. “You don’t suppose Blaze had my house vandalized to make me look bad for our court appearance?”
“No one’s that low,” Kitty said. “Not even Blaze.”
o0o
Kitty’s yard looked like the town dump. The neighbors had been trying to make her clean it up for years without any luck. They’d even had a meeting at the town hall and sent an official letter ordering her to clean it up. Nothing changed.
She lived on a side road right off of Highway 35, so everyone going into and out of town got to sightsee past Kitty’s. It was the perfect place for a rummage sale. The beauty of it was someone might haul off some of her garbage along with the actual rummage items.
“What did you bring?” Kitty said as we unloaded boxes from the back of the truck and added them to the junk heap.
“This and that,” I said. “Some of the boxes are filled with Barney’s things, books mainly. I didn’t look through them. You can do that.”
“Gertie, you should keep them if they were Barney’s.”
“I haven’t needed any of this in the last fourteen months, and I won’t need any of it now.” Barney was an avid reader and would reread the same books. I’m more of a one-time reader. There are so many good books waiting to be read, I’ll never go back and read one twice.
I spotted a notebook lying in the pile and picked it up. I smiled. It was Barney’s writing notebook. “Think I’ll keep this, though.”
“See,” Cora Mae said. “We better go through the boxes and make sure you really want to get rid of the things in them.”
“You do it. I don’t want to.”
Cora Mae and Kitty lugged the boxes into Kitty’s living room, which was an extension of her junky yard, and sat on the floor and began sorting. I settled into a recliner and paged through Barney’s notebook. Every once in a while, Cora Mae held something up for my examination and each time I said the same thing, “Sell it.”
Halfway through the notebook entries I turned a page and a loose paper slid to the floor. Kitty picked it up and handed it back.
I couldn’t believe what I held in my hand. I shot up straight in the recliner.
In my hand I held the mineral rights to Chester Lampi’s property, and the owner, the name appearing at the bottom of the document, was my deceased husband, Barney. He’d signed it and had it notarized.
“I think I just figured out why someone vandalized my house,” I said, showing the paper to the rest of my investigative team. “They were looking for this.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you owned the rights?” Cora Mae said, not quite behind the eight ball yet.
“I didn’t know until right this minute. Why would Barney have the mineral rights and keep it from me?”
“Maybe he didn’t think it was important,” Kitty suggested. “Maybe he forgot. And if this was what the burglar was looking for, why didn’t he find it?”
“Because I had already boxed the notebook up along with the other things for the rummage sale and put them in the shed. The shed wasn’t touched.” I read the fine print one more time. “We checked at the Register of Deeds and according to their records, Onni owns the mineral rights. This is getting messier by the minute.”
Kitty struggled up from the floor. “If I remember right, the deed we looked at in Escanaba showed Onni’s ownership going back a good fifty years. The date on this document is from two years ago. Onni must have transferred the rights and Barney never filed the new ownership papers.”
I thought hard. “If Chester died because of the land and if the mineral rights had anything to do with it, the logical suspect is a family member. Do you think Barb searched my house?”
“A lot of what-ifs going on here,” Kitty added.
“If Barb searched your house,” quick-witted Cora Mae said, “she would have taken the magazines.”
“What magazines?” Kitty demanded. “What’s going on? If I’m going to protect you properly, you have to keep me informed.”
“You’d think,” I said, ignoring Kitty and waving the document in the air, “this piece of paper is as valuable as gold.”
o0o
The snow started falling in the early afternoon, not slow and lazy, but thick so it stuck to my eyelashes and wet my face. After a few hours of rummage prepping, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I ran for the truck at the first opportunity. Kitty gave chase once she figured out what I was up to, but I pulled away before she even got off the front porch.
I hated deceiving Cora Mae, but I needed a break from Kitty’s overbearing bodyguard strategies, and it was the only way I could think of to do it.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Kitty stomp her foot and heard the blast from the whistle she wore on a rope around her neck, the same one we had bought in Escanaba. A steady scream from the whistle assaulted my poor ears until I pulled away. I made a mental note never to buy Kitty another present as I turned right at the corner and breathed in the sweet smell of freedom.
After finding no one home at Blaze’s, I parked in my own drive. Pulling my shotgun from under the seat, I trudged through the gathering snow to my hunting blind.
I was tired. Up until last Tuesday the most excitement I had to look forward to was the afternoon paper’s crossword puzzle or bingo at the Indian casino. All that’s changed. Chester’s murdered, I’m driving for the first time in my life, and an intruder searched my home. Pretty exciting stuff, but I was tuckered out. And the mineral rights that Barney owned, and that I now owned, had me baffled.
Who cared about the mineral rights? What good were they? Whoever wanted the document, wanted it bad. Part of me wanted to run right over to Escanaba and file it, another part wanted more time to think. I stuffed the paper into the cushion of the La-Z-boy before I sat down.
Starting the heater, I kicked back for an afternoon snooze, feeling my problems drifting away.
The afternoon light was fading when I woke up, and the snow still fell, blowing against the blind. A doe and her half-grown fawn grazed on the apple pile.
I waded through a foot of snow, wiped off the windshield of my truck with a plastic scraper, and headed to Blaze’s for supper.
o0o
The mobile home smelled like wet socks. Little Donny was lying on an afghan-covered couch with his feet propped up on the armrest.
“Get yourself up and change those socks before the fumes kill us all,” I said, swatting him gently on the head. “Move it.”
Little Donny lumbered down the narrow hall. I looked around. Everything was neat as a pin. Each piece of furniture was covered with squares of wool in every imaginable color, left over from Mary’s afghan craze. She sure was a whiz with crochet needles. Mary spent way too much time on housework and handiwork instead of working on interesting things.
Blaze looked up from the Tamarack Reporter he was reading. “Saw your truck parked at the house and looked around for you. Figured you were hunting at the blind. See anything?”
“Not a thing,” I said, remembering my nap.
Ten minutes later we sat down to fried chicken, canned creamed corn, and mashed potatoes.
Mary was warm and friendly when she told me I could sleep in the sewing room. “The couch pulls out into a bed,” she said. “It’s already made up. Little Donny can sleep in the living room.”
“Maybe we can all have a talk about this court thing tomorrow morning. I won’t be around much tonight,” I said, spooning creamed corn onto my potatoes. “I’m working on a case.”
“No, Ma,” Blaze said in a controlled voice. “I’m working on a case. Remember, I’m the sheriff. That’s
my job.”
“Yes, I know, but I’m assisting.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going to hunt deer out in your blind a little and take nice naps in the afternoons, and keep out of my business. It’s time to retire.”
I didn’t say anything, just went on eating. I never listened to Blaze my whole life and wasn’t about to start now.
I remembered I needed to use my word for the day and rummaged in my pockets for the scrap of paper. It wasn’t there. This word-a-day idea sounded good at the beginning but was quickly becoming a chore. I couldn’t remember yesterday’s word or the day before’s word. I couldn’t even remember today’s word without a cheat-sheet, and now I’d lost it.
“And just to keep you safe and honest,” Blaze said, interrupting my thoughts. “I’m assigning you your own private bodyguard.”
I smiled. “I already have a bodyguard.”
“And who would that be?”
“Kitty’s taking care of me.”
“Kitty couldn’t protect a three legged dog. Little Donny’s going to keep an eye on you. Day and night, he’s going to know right where you are. Isn’t that right, Little Donny?”
“Geez,” Little Donny whined. “Do I have to?”
Blaze glared at him. Little Donny looked away first. I thought this was a fine arrangement. The thought of Little Donny hanging around was appealing. He would be easy to lose if I wanted him lost, and he might even be helpful. I wish I’d thought of it first. Kitty could share the job with Little Donny, a great excuse when I needed time away from her.
“Little Donny,” I said, “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
Poor Donny laid his head in his hands, defeated.
After supper clean-up, Blaze and Mary went to visit Grandma Johnson with a plate of chicken, and Little Donny, my new personal bodyguard, fell asleep on the couch.
Snow was still coming down thick and heavy when I started the truck and pulled out. I waited until I drove out onto the main road before I put on the lights.
I noticed after the first mile that I’d picked up a tail. By the second mile I figured out who it was. I pulled over, rolled down the window, and motioned the trailing car over to the side of my truck. The car crept up on the left side and stopped, the window sliding down. “Might as well make yourself useful,” I said to Kitty.