The Little Tombstone Cozies Box Set

by Celia Kinsey

  I took a dog treat from my pocket and called out to Earp. He started toward me. Apparently, he’d slaked his thirst for freedom and was feeling peckish after his unaccustomed exertion. I was just reaching out to attach the leash to his collar when Nancy started screaming bloody murder.

  Chapter Three

  I was startled by the screams, and so was Earp. I dropped the dog treat, and Earp skittered away around the corner of Nancy Flynn’s bunkhouse.

  Nancy came out the front of the bunkhouse and stood on the porch looking very shaken. It takes a lot to shake Nancy. She’s seen a lot of life—she’s well past sixty—and not much of that sixty-plus years has been pretty. In fact, during my first weeks at Little Tombstone, Nancy had shot someone. There were extenuating circumstances, but I mention it because when a woman like Nancy comes out of a doorway with her hands clasped over her mouth and shaking like a leaf, one tends to sit up and take notice.

  “What happened?”

  Nancy didn’t answer, she just pointed inside. I came up on the porch and peeked through the open doorway.

  It was a long, old-fashioned bunkhouse unaltered since the early days of the ranch except for the fact that someone had built a bathroom into one end of the long, narrow structure. The main room had eight bunks in it.

  They were unoccupied except for one, which had a cowboy lying in it, with his face to the wall.

  “Sleeping?” I said to Nancy in a hushed voice.

  She shook her head. He was not sleeping.

  I crept forward to look at the inert cowboy. I stepped back when I saw that his pillow was soaked with blood. He’d been shot in the back of the head.

  My hand was shaking as I reached into the pocket of my coat for my phone. I had a hard time dialing.

  “Who is it?” I whispered to Nancy, as I waited for dispatch to pick up. I don’t know why I felt the need to whisper; it was not as if we were going to wake him.

  “I think it’s Jorge.”

  While I was explaining to the 911 operator that the Flynn ranch had a dead man on the premises, Nancy went down to the other end of the room and gingerly nudged open the door of the toilet with the toe of her cowboy boot as if she was afraid she’d find a second body in the bathroom.

  She wasn’t far wrong.

  Nancy turned back from the doorway and motioned me over. I looked inside. There was no body, but there was blood: a little trail of blood across the black and white linoleum tiles. It couldn’t have been the man lying in the bunk who’d bled on the bathroom floor. He’d clearly been shot as he slept.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Nancy said and went out on the porch again.

  I followed her out and handed off the phone, so she could speak to the dispatcher, then picked up Earp’s leash from where I’d dropped it and went around the back of the bunkhouse in search of him. I called out, but Earp did not come. I passed the small stable, the barn where Nancy parked her tractors, and continued on to the pig shed.

  The pig shed was a recent development at the Flynn Ranch. Nancy had decided to diversify by branching out into porciculture. However, these pigs were not ordinary animals destined to end up as ham or pork chops. These were potbellied pigs for the pet trade.

  Nancy currently had two breeding sows, one of which had already produced a litter, and it was nestled in amongst the piglets that I found Earp.

  He was fast asleep, his head resting on one of the pint-sized pigs. Another piglet was futilely suckling on one of the ridiculous antlers which still encircled Earp’s neck. I would have found the setup highly amusing if I hadn’t been listening for the sound of sirens and trying not to think about the dead man lying on the blood-soaked pillow.

  I decided to leave Earp where he was. Even if he did wake up, I doubted he’d stray far from the litter.

  I returned to the porch of the bunkhouse and sat down beside Nancy. She informed me that the police were on their way.

  “How long has Jorge been with you?” I asked.

  “A little over a year.”

  “Any idea who might have—”

  “No.”

  “How many ranch hands do you have right now?”

  “Four. Besides Jorge, there’s Jasper, August, and Hugo.”

  I was about to ask if Jasper was the one she’d hired to be her pigman, when, at our feet, a phone began to ring.

  I looked over at Nancy. She shrugged.

  I got up and crept down the steps and picked up the phone which lay on the ground. The screen was shattered but the phone itself appeared to be working just fine.

  I looked at the screen.

  A Janey was calling someone. I wondered if the Janey calling was the same Janey that Juanita had recently hired as a second waitress at the Bird Cage.

  I watched the phone until it stopped ringing and went to voicemail. Almost immediately, it started ringing again. The third time Janey called back, I could stand it no longer. I picked up the phone, raised it to my ear, and went out on the porch.

  “Who is this?” Janey asked.

  “This is Emma Iverson. From Little Tombstone. I’m up at Nancy Flynn’s ranch.”

  “Where’s Jasper?”

  I could hear Juanita singing at the top of her lungs amidst the banging of pots and pans in the background, so I had no doubts I was speaking with that Janey from the Bird Cage Café.

  “I don’t know where Jasper is. I just picked up his phone because it wouldn’t stop ringing.”

  “Where are you, exactly?”

  “On the porch of the bunkhouse.”

  “Did something happen?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. There was silence on the line for a few seconds before Janey spoke again.

  “I’m afraid Jasper is in danger.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Not exactly. He started to say something, and then the line went dead.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No.”

  I wondered why.

  “Well, you’d better come up to Nancy’s ranch,” I told her. “I think the police are going to want to talk to you.”

  “Jasper’s not—”

  “No.” Jasper wasn’t dead, that I knew of. I decided not to bring up that blood in the bathroom just yet. “Jorge is the one who got shot.”

  “Shot?”

  “In the back of the head while he slept, by the looks of it.”

  Chapter Four

  Shortly after I told Janey that one of Nancy’s ranch hands had been shot in the back of the head while he slept, the line went dead. I’d later find out that Janey had collapsed on the floor of the Bird Cage Café dining room, dropping her phone.

  I could hear sirens approaching from the highway. I wasn’t sure what to do with Jasper’s phone. I should have put it back where I found it, or given it to the police when they arrived, but I didn’t do either of those things. Instead, I put it in my pocket and went to stand beside Nancy.

  The police had a multitude of questions, none of which Nancy seemed to have answers for. Nancy had been gone from the ranch for the last three hours on an expedition to buy pig feed; she’d neither heard nor seen anything amiss.

  Jasper, to hear Janey tell it, might possibly have been in the bunkhouse at the time of the shooting. August had told Nancy that morning that he intended to ride the fence around the perimeter of the ranch, and she’d seen him departing on a quad shortly after breakfast. The remaining ranch hand, Hugo, was unaccounted for. He had not come up to the house for breakfast with August and Jasper, but there was nothing unusual about that. Hugo often skipped breakfast.

  Jorge had not come up to breakfast either that morning, which was unusual. At breakfast, both August and Jasper had told Nancy that Jorge had drunk heavily the evening before and when Jasper had attempted to rouse him for breakfast, Jorge had insisted that he wanted to stay in bed as long as possible before having to face the day.

  Nancy tried, without success, to call August and Hugo, but
her inability to reach them, she said, was nothing noteworthy. There were lots of areas around the ranch where cell service was unreliable.

  When Nancy tried to call Jasper, my pocket rang. I did not pick up.

  The police didn’t end up with much to go on. They hung around for a while, taking pictures of the dead man’s bunk and the bloody spots on the bathroom floor. The officer taking the photos in the bathroom pointed out that there wasn’t much blood, and the spots could easily have resulted from nothing more sinister than a bad shaving cut.

  Father Orejo, Amatista’s new priest, came and said last rites over the body. I wondered who had called him. When the priest was done, the ambulance, which had been standing by, took Jorge away.

  I told Officer Reyes that he probably ought to get in touch with a woman named Janey, who worked at the Bird Cage Café, but after that, I had nothing else to add, so I went back to the pig shed to collect Earp.

  When I called out Earp’s name, he stirred in his sleep and roused himself sufficiently to nip a neighboring piglet’s ear, which made the piglet squeal. This roused that piglet’s littermates, who let out a chorus of grunts and squeals of their own. I gingerly opened the gate to the pigpen and went inside.

  Near the back of the pen was a rough ladder going up into a sort of miniature haymow, but instead of containing hay, it contained sacks of hog feed. The ladder had been crudely nailed together, so crudely that someone had torn a chambray shirt on a protruding nail and left a bit of it behind.

  I looked around to see how Earp had managed to worm his way through the fence and found a pug-sized hole near the back corner of the pen. Since the piglets had already outgrown the hole, and although there were multiple boot tracks in the dirt outside the fence as if several people had been discussing what to do with the breach, it had gone unrepaired.

  The hole formed a perfect portal for pugs, and I hoped that Earp running off to fraternize with the porcine set was not going to become a daily occurrence.

  Earp made quite a fuss when I tried to tear him away from his precious piglets. I got the leash hooked to his collar without incident, but then he refused to allow himself to be led out of the pen. In the end, I was forced to pick Earp up and hug his struggling body to my chest, just to get him out of the pig shed.

  Once outside the shed, Earp calmed down, and I set him on the ground. After I freed him of the cockeyed reindeer antlers, Earp reluctantly allowed himself to be led past the bunkhouse, now cordoned off with yellow tape. A chill breeze had kicked up, and I noticed that someone had closed the small sash window in the bathroom which had been open earlier, probably to contain the warmth from the woodstove that provided the only heat for the bunkhouse.

  Earp trotted past the patrol cars. He paused only briefly to sniff one tire and mark another, and we headed off down the long gravel road back to Little Tombstone.

  Halfway back down the rough road, I could no longer resist the call of nature I’d been fighting off since shortly after I’d abandoned the Christmas tree back at the Bird Cage to chase down Earp.

  I spotted a large boulder just off the road where I could do my business unobserved, looped Earp’s leash over the branch of a substantial sagebrush, and went behind the cover of the rock.

  That was a mistake.

  I was rifling through my pockets for a tissue when I realized Earp was on the loose again. Refreshed from his nap, he’d wrenched his leash free of the sagebrush and was setting a fast clip through the cactus. I feared I was in for another protracted game of round-and-round-the-sage-brush-bush, when Earp abruptly pulled up short, just off the edge of the gravel roadbed, and sniffed the ground.

  Earp was so intent with whatever fascinating smell he’d found that he didn’t notice me sneaking up on him. I grabbed the leash and looked to see what Earp had found so intriguing.

  It was a single brown leather work glove, and it was covered in blood.

  I was looking around for a stick to poke at the revolting object when Earp picked it up with his teeth and shook it like he was trying to kill a rat.

  The blood looked fresh, and given the circumstances, that glove needed to go straight back to the police, but Earp had no intention of relinquishing it.

  I decided that I’d be forced to return the glove to the police, pug and all, but Earp was resistant. He dug in and refused to go uphill. He now seemed as set on returning to Little Tombstone as he had been on leaving it earlier in the morning, and I wasn’t about to pick him up and carry him, bloody trophy and all.

  I gave up the fight.

  I decided I could call the police—or drive the glove up to the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office—whenever Earp lost interest and relinquished his disgusting treasure.

  Chapter Five

  When I arrived back at the Bird Cage, the dining room was empty. It seemed Georgia had finished packing up the Christmas tree and its garishly festive accompaniments and had gone off somewhere, taking little Maxwell with her.

  I imagined the bloody glove Earp still clutched possessively in his jaws violated any number of health department regulations, although, for that matter, so did Earp.

  I hustled the pug through the dining room. He followed me upstairs to what used to be my Great Aunt Geraldine’s apartment but was now the home I shared with Georgia and Maxwell.

  When we got inside, I tried to coax Earp into giving up the glove in exchange for a dog treat, but he wasn’t having it. I could have tried to take the revolting object by force, but (a) I didn’t want to touch it, and (b) I had no desire to contaminate what might turn out to be a vital piece of evidence.

  I gave up on getting the glove, shooed Earp into the bathroom, and locked him inside.

  When I went downstairs, the dining room was still empty, but I could hear Juanita and Chamomile talking in the kitchen.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard what happened,” I said as I walked in.

  “Not really,” Juanita told me. “Janey said something terrible happened up at Nancy’s ranch, but that’s about all we got out of her.”

  “Janey was talking on the phone to her brother, but the call dropped, and then she said that she was sure that something was wrong,” Chamomile said.

  Brother. Jasper was Janey’s brother. That made more sense than Jasper being Janey’s love interest. I had been suspecting, ever since Juanita had hired Janey shortly after Thanksgiving, that she (Janey, not Juanita) had a thing for our handyman, Oliver.

  I could see why. Oliver, despite being about the skinniest human I’d ever laid eyes on, was also one of the best looking. When I’d first met Oliver, he’d sported sufficient facial hair to make Sasquatch grow green with envy, but after he (Oliver, not Sasquatch) had shaved it off, I’d experienced quite a revelation. That man was truly a thing of beauty. Not that I, too, had the hots for Oliver. On the contrary, I hoped he and Janey would be very happy together.

  “Did Janey go home?” I asked.

  “I sent her home a little while ago. Not long after she arrived this morning, she got the call from her brother,” Juanita said, “Maybe half an hour later she tried to call him back, but she got some woman instead. While she was talking to whoever answered Jasper’s phone, Janey collapsed. I called Oliver to take her home. She seemed so upset I didn’t want to ask any questions. What happened?”

  “I was the woman on the phone with Janey,” I said. “I was up at Nancy Flynn’s ranch.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Earp ran away, and that’s where he ran to.”

  “And?”

  I wasn’t dragging the story out for dramatic effect. I was too traumatized by the whole thing to relish telling the tale. I’d have rather not talked about it, but Juanita and Chamomile were looking expectantly at me, waiting for me to go on. It was about then that I noticed a buzzing in my ears. I felt like my knees might buckle under my weight.

  “I think the shock is wearing off and the horror of it all is sinking in,” I said as I lowered myself to the floor. “I’m no
t feeling very well.”

  “What in the world happened up there?” Juanita asked again. “We heard sirens.”

  Chamomile was at my elbow with a glass of water. I took several sips before I went on.

  “One of Nancy’s ranch hands was murdered in the bunkhouse.”

  “Which one?” Chamomile asked. She was looking a bit pale.

  I hadn’t been aware that Chamomile knew anyone up at Nancy’s ranch. I’d thought she had eyes only for Jason Wendell: Amatista’s most eligible bachelor, wearer of handmade Italian leather loafers, and, incidentally, my divorce lawyer.

  “Jorge was the one who got shot,” I said.

  “Good riddance,” said Chamomile.

  I’m not easily shocked, but her reaction surprised me.

  Chamomile is honesty personified, a hard worker, and generally gets along with everyone. Aside from her propensity to bat her eyelashes at Mr. Wendell and touch his arm with an irritating familiarity whenever she takes his order, I’ve always thought Chamomile to be a thoroughly decent human being. Even the excessive flirtation could be excused by her relative youth. She wasn’t going to turn 21 until February.

  “Why do you say that about Jorge?” I asked. “Why do you think it’s good riddance?”

  “He’s a horrible man,” Chamomile insisted.

  Was a horrible man.

  “He and Janey used to live together,” Juanita said.

  “I was under the impression Jorge lived on Nancy’s ranch,” I said.

  “He does now,” said Juanita, “but he used to live in the village with Janey.”

  “Jorge beat Janey up all the time,” said Chamomile, her voice growing hoarse and high. “He’d get jealous and accuse Janey of cheating on him, but I don’t believe for a minute she was, not that it makes any difference. He had no right to beat her.”

  “Janey kicked him out for about the eighth time shortly before she hired on here, but she was dead serious this time,” Juanita added, more calmly than Chamomile. “She got a restraining order, but that man broke it constantly.”