Map Skills Murder

by Leslie Langtry

  The house and garage were dark, so hopefully Penny wasn't there. She was a big lady, and even though I thought I could take her, it was best to avoid running into her. Hugging the back of the house, I listened for any sign of life inside. After I was satisfied that the house was empty, I pulled out my lockpicks and went to work on the back door.

  It took longer than I thought. Ike had a doorknob lock in addition a dead bolt a little further up. They looked new. That would take a while. For years I'd worked in third-world countries where locks didn't exist, but when they did, they were practically antiques.

  New locks were trickier. The tumblers inside were harder to move, because they hadn't been used much. Why did Ike install new locks just before he died? Because he'd found Mimi's gold! My heart beat a little faster.

  Had someone else noticed the new locks? People of Ike's age stuck to the simple doorknob button. They didn't like change, and those simple locks had worked for them all those years. Why switch now?

  If someone had seen the new locks, had that tipped them off that finally Ike had something worth locking up? And what about Penny? My guess was that she knew about the gold. If she was his girlfriend, Ike might have told her.

  Or he didn't. Maybe they were more like business partners than a romantic couple. And when he found the gold, he'd decided to cut his younger girlfriend out of the riches.

  This was all speculation, I thought, as the last lock popped. I quietly put the picks back in my bag and slipped inside the house. It was hot. Whoever took care of the house after Ike's death must've had the power shut off. But then again, old people didn't always use air conditioning.

  The only way to know for certain would be to flick the light switch, but that would alert neighbors to the fact I was there. The last thing I needed was Nels calling the police. No, I could work in the dark.

  It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust, but it was still very dim. The going would be very slow, but if I was patient, I just might find what I was looking for.

  What was I looking for? The gold would be nice, and it would make the map and its confusing clues obsolete. It wouldn't solve Mehitable's or Ike's murder. It was obvious that Ike was murdered. And I was convinced that Mimi had been.

  Even if I found the gold tonight, I'd still try to solve Mimi's murder. Rex had been busy lately and unable to put much time into it. But I was determined to keep going. It was one investigation he couldn't stop me from looking into, and now with possible family connections, I was becoming obsessed with the case.

  And then there was Edna Lou. I felt a pang of pity. I'd definitely solve Mimi's murder for her. And Ike's—if Rex didn't beat me to it. And if we found the gold, it was going to the Historical Society. Not one of the Peters was still alive. They would probably approve.

  A twinge of guilt pecked at the back of my throat. There was one thing Edna Lou wasn't going to get—the old Peters House. Her dream of turning it into a museum wasn't going to happen as long as my future sisters-in-law lived and worked there.

  Randi and Ronni wouldn't give up that house. It was a perfect business for them, and besides, they'd filled every single inch with dead animals. Once this was over, I could find another way for Edna Lou to use the money.

  I could see a little better. I started moving. Again I found myself in a kitchen. Only this one was much different than the one in his other house. The smell of rotting food turned my stomach. The counters and sink were overflowing with dirty dishes, and newspapers piled high on the table.

  Turning the light on my cell down, I scanned the headlines, hoping maybe they held clues. They didn't. Just a stack of current newspapers. Was Ike a hoarder? I quickly searched the cupboards and drawers but found very little. Most likely because everything was already piled in the sink.

  The dining room was next. Again, stacks of newspapers covered the table and each of the six chairs. He had several copies of the same day. Was he planning to move? There weren't any boxes. Instead, the floor was littered with books—westerns mostly. So Ike was a reader.

  I moved into the living room. Every piece of furniture had been upended, like the girls had said. A coffee table had been broken in two, and the couch cushions were torn to pieces, as their foam rubber innards lay all over the floor.

  Why didn't Penny tear up the kitchen or dining room? Was she looking for the gold? If so, had she found it? I poked and prodded the cushions but decided if they'd been here, they were now long gone.

  The hallway to the bedrooms were littered with broken picture frames. All the pictures were missing. Glass crunched under foot, and I froze. If someone was here, they might have heard that.

  Why were the pictures gone? Were they sentimental? Were they of Penny? Maybe Penny didn't want anyone to connect her to Ike. She was holding first place on my suspect list. At last I decided no one had heard me, and I moved on.

  The flamingo skull was the first thing to go. I had to plant it somewhere. The map! I wondered if Penny had been looking for the map I'd found taped to the skull? It had been useless. Rex's yard didn't have anything as far as I was concerned.

  It seemed to me, if you planted a treasure map in my yard, the treasure wouldn't be a hundred feet away. Was it a fake? Mad Mimi was…well…mad. She could've planted all kinds of maps as red herrings. Or just because Tinkles told her to.

  I peeked into the bathroom, but it was completely trashed. The floor was slick with shampoo and soap as their crushed, empty bottles riddled the linoleum. The drawers were also on the floor, the shower curtain had been torn off, and the medicine cabinet had been emptied.

  I passed it by and stepped into the first room on the right. This was the main bedroom. To my surprise, it was clean. The bed had even been made. Alarm bells went off in my head. Was Penny living here? She hadn't trashed this room. If she wasn't living here, why make the bed?

  There were still two rooms across the hall. Both doors were shut. Was Penny in there? I pulled the telescoping baton from my bag and pulled my hat down a little more over my head to fully cover my short, curly hair.

  There was no point in retreating. I had to check out those two rooms. Laying the flamingo skull on the bed, I stepped up to the door opposite me and pressed my ear against it. I couldn't hear anything, but that didn't mean the room was unoccupied.

  Very slowly I gripped the doorknob and turned. When I felt the door give way, I stopped. If someone was in there, they might have seen the door move. Once again, I waited. Trickles of perspiration ran down the back of my neck over a field of goose bumps.

  No turning back now. I opened the door a crack and looked in.

  It was empty. There wasn't so much as a stick of furniture, a pillowcase, or even curtains on the window. I opened the door wide and stepped inside. There was nothing in here. Even the closet had been cleaned out.

  This was highly suspicious. The whole house was. Only a couple of rooms had been torn apart. So far one room was filthy, one clean, and one empty. Ike was gone, but there'd been a lot of activity in his house recently.

  I stepped back into the hall and listened at the last door. What would I find in here? Wigs? Animal skeletons? A stack of gold bars? I turned the knob and walked in.

  In the corner was a dresser covered with mannequin heads wearing wigs. In the middle of the room were the skeletons of small animals. And against the far wall was a small pile of gold bars. Was I psychic? Because that would be awesome. I could anticipate anything my troop threw at me. Literally. Would it work on pets? Philby wouldn't be very happy about that, but it would save me in broken dishes.

  I started with the dresser, which was more like a vanity table with a recessed area in the middle where the mirror would pop up. The faces on the heads looked a bit more lifelike than I was comfortable with (I could swear one of them winked at me), and I counted eight.

  There was a space behind the vanity, and I crouched behind it, feeling the back of the dresser for something that might be attached and hidden.

  Creeeeeeeeeeeaa
aak…

  Uh-oh.

  I knew that sound. That was a door opening somewhere. And since no one had been in the house up until now, I'd say it was the front door. Which now closed with a muffled thump. Footsteps stalled in the living room before heading down the hallway toward me.

  There wasn't enough room behind the vanity to hide me. And since there was a pile of gold in the room, I'd hazard a guess that this was the direction the other guy was coming. I grabbed one of the mannequin heads and took the wig off. Tearing off my stocking cap, I shoved the wig onto my own head and with the bangs low over my eyes, stuck my head up behind the dip in the vanity and froze.

  It wasn't my brightest idea. I'll bet you thought spies always outwitted everyone else, didn't you? Well, it wasn't true. Sometimes we just had to go with whatever was available. And tonight, this was all I could come up with. The bad news was that I was exposed. The good news was that I could see.

  Sure enough, the door swung open and a figure entered. It seemed to be a woman. My guess was that Penny was back. The woman didn't turn on the lights, reminding me that she wasn't supposed to be here. I was relieved by that because in a lit room, it would be obvious I wasn't a disembodied head.

  The woman's eyes played across the room, scanning me along with the other mannequins. How well did she know these wigs? My heart stopped, and it took all of my strength not to blink.

  After what seemed like an hour, but was more like a minute, the woman turned away and I was able to look directly at her. It was Penny alright. Same frizzy hair, same angry, middle-aged scowl. She kicked over the skeletons as she walked over to the stack of gold bars.

  I watched as she stuffed the bars into a duffel bag. The gold clinked heavily as she dropped them in. It was clear she thought she was the only one in the house. When she finished, she turned toward the vanity, and I barely had time to resume my glassy-eyed pose before her eyes fell on me. I couldn't see them, but I felt the weight of her stare.

  And this time, she didn't look away. What was she doing? I breathed slowly through my nose, eyes staring into space, and hoped she couldn't tell that I wasn't made of plaster.

  To my horror, she walked straight over to me. This was it. I tightened my grip on the baton under the dresser and waited. I wished I could look at her, but I was pretty sure that even in the dark, she'd notice a wigged head staring straight at her.

  Penny reached out and touched the hair of the wig next to me, while humming a song I didn't know. Crap. This was too close. The baton in my hand was extended. It wouldn't be easy to get out and use right away. I should've brought a stun gun.

  Oh wait…I didn't have one anymore. That was because several months ago Philby stunned me with it. I'm still not sure what possessed me to have it on the bed, or to leave it on. But Philby came racing into the bedroom one night and pounced on me, which knocked me down onto the fully charged weapon. As I lay there twitching, she had the most curious look on her face. That was when I'd decided to get rid of it.

  Penny was touching all the wigs now while humming "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Her hand was coming right for me and just about touch the curly red mop, when her cell went off.

  She roughly tore the wig off my head, and as I prepared to strike, took it and ran out of the room, while fumbling with the duffel bag of gold bars and her cell. I stayed where I was in case she came back, because I couldn't decide if she'd notice that the head she took the wig off of had hair underneath, or if she'd notice that the head was now gone if I'd ducked down behind the vanity.

  "Yes!" I heard her shout as the footsteps moved down the hall. "Yes, I've got them. No, not yet. But I should have the rest soon."

  The door closed behind her, and seconds later I heard a car roar off into the distance.

  I slowly got to my feet and stretched. Now I had two suspects in Ike's murder and the theft of Mehitable's fortune. Because now it was obvious that Penny wasn't working alone.

  There was something on the floor where the gold had been. A card of some sort. I scooped it up and hightailed it out of there. I hit the back alley in minutes and shook out my sweat-soaked curls.

  In a few moments I was home. I closed and locked the door behind me, leaning against it with my full weight. Philby trotted into the living room, and when she saw it was me, turned and left. I could swear that she was disappointed.

  After a quick shower and putting my lockpicks and everything else away, I sat down on my bed and looked at the card I'd found. In careful cursive, it said,

  Lucky Penny, Tinkles awaits…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rex was sitting at my breakfast bar the next morning. Wrapped in a bathrobe, I kissed him on the cheek and sat down next to him. He'd brought donuts. I swooned.

  He stared at the newspaper he was reading. "We had a report of a break-in at Ike Murphy's house. The one near here. The neighbor, Nels Larson, said a woman was fleeing the front of the house."

  Relief washed over me. Penny had gone out the front door. I'd used the back.

  "Really? Did you look into it?" I shoved a blueberry donut into my mouth and blinked my eyes at him.

  Rex put the paper down. "When we got there, the place was empty." He was looking directly at me.

  "We were running a scavenger hunt yesterday, and the girls went to that house. A woman answered and gave them a ball of twine." I kept going so he wouldn't have time to ask. "Nels came out to ask the girls what they were doing…" A lie… "And told us that Ike had a girlfriend."

  Rex rubbed his eyes. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  I shrugged. "I was so busy with the scavenger hunt, I forgot." He was not going to buy that. "The girls all thought the word stake was snake, and Kelly freaked out at the sight of three garter snakes. Then Betty's team turned all of their items into weapons. It was a bit nuts."

  No matter how well Rex knew my girls, he was always surprised by the things they did. I totally understood. I felt the same way.

  I pulled my laptop over and opened it up. "I was here all night. Mom called back on the photo of Mehitable. She didn't think I was related to the Peters but gave me Dad's mother's name and maiden name." I opened the website and logged in. "See? I was doing ancestry stuff."

  I looked and gasped. I had several twigs both on Grandma Wrath and Grandma Czrygy's names! With a squeal, I opened the profiles and clicked on Adelaide Wrath first.

  "Whoa!" I pointed at the screen. "Grandma was married three times! I did not know that!"

  Rex narrowed his eyes at the laptop. "Your dad's mom was a McMurtry?"

  I nodded. "I just found that out last night…when I was here…all night…doing this." Philby sat in the corner staring at me. Her eyes said liar. "Her name was Colleen McMurtry. Coincidence?"

  I left Adelaide's profile and clicked on Dad's mom. The first hint said her parents were Thomas and Cindy McMurtry. I saved that information to the file and sat back to wait for another branch to appear.

  "Peggy McMurtry couldn't have been Thomas's mother," Rex explained. "She would've taken her husband's name."

  "Maybe she had him out of wedlock?" I grew impatient and clicked back onto Adelaide Wrath's profile.

  "That could be true," Rex agreed.

  I helped myself to another donut. "It says here that Grandma Wrath was married to a Murphy through her first marriage."

  "Small towns." Rex shook his head. "Did they have any children?"

  "I doubt it. Mom was an only child. I think she'd know if she had half brothers or sisters running around."

  Still, Mom had never told me that Adelaide had been married before. Maybe she didn't know?

  "I think we're going to have to wait awhile for more hints," Rex said.

  I agreed and closed the laptop. I really wanted to tell him about the gold bars at Ike's house. And I wanted to ask why he hadn't seen them when he searched it. Was it possible that Penny found them yesterday when she was tearing the house apart and left them there?

  But telling him this would tip him off tha
t I'd been breaking and entering. I'd have to come up with another way to talk to him about it without incriminating myself.

  "Since it's Saturday and I'm free," Rex said with a smile, "I thought we'd nose around Mad Mimi's murder a little more."

  "That's a great idea! What are we doing?"

  "You mentioned that Edna Lou had the original axe at the Historical Society. Why don't we have a look?"

  I got dressed in record time while Rex called Edna Lou and set things up. Twenty minutes later we were in the log cabin, huddled over a long, stained cardboard box that held an axe. The metal head was chipped and starting to rust. The wooden handle looked like it had been worn smooth over more than a century. It seemed solidly connected to the axe-head, and had a little hole at the other end.

  "They used to put holes in all the tools to hang them up in barns and such." Edna Lou beamed at the gruesome weapon.

  I looked closely at the handle. A few stray fibers were stuck to the hole. That must have been hung up with rope. Other than that, the weapon was clean as a whistle.

  "It's been in this box since the murder," Edna said. "It was donated to the Historical Society after the funeral. Someone cleaned off the axe-head. They didn't have forensics back then, but it was pretty obvious that there were traces of blood."

  "How did you come by it?" Rex asked. "We found some photos of the crime scene. But you don't need to see them."

  The elderly woman answered. "Eustace donated it and a lot of other things after the case was closed. There's nothing else directly connected to the murder."

  "I'm so sorry," I said.

  Rex got up and patted her shoulder, visibly chastened. "I wasn't thinking."

  "No, no." Edna blew her nose. "It's okay. Ike and I always wanted to solve this. He would've been excited to see the photos."