Raked Over

by Linda Seals

  * * *

  There was a lot of work to do now, and I needed a clear head. Besides the daily maintenance work, I had the month’s accounting to do, invoices to send, and a new garden design project to research and prepare with Jorge Martinez, the heavy equipment guy I worked with, and the crew.

  But the more I thought about it, the more Barry Correda’s accident just seemed—fishy, maybe? Was it really an accident? Was it murder? The timing seemed too coincidental, and coincidences were patterns, and patterns suggested a guiding hand at something. But what? My head spent a lot of time in that loop, clouding my thinking with detours.

  One late afternoon after work, listening to a Rockies game as they continued their disappointing slide, I was at the office blackboard sketching out plant vignettes and the phone rang, my friend Isabelle McWilliams at the other end.

  “Hey, Lily! I know it’s spur of the moment, but wanna meet at Bangkok Thai for an early dinner? I’m in town tonight to help Aunt Gladdy tomorrow, and I’d love some Thai food!” she enthused. Isabelle and I had met through mutual friends at the monthly Lambda Center dances, and discovered we both loved dancing and Thai food. Even though she lived in Niwot, a community outside of Boulder, she regularly visited our town to help her aging aunt around the house. I’d expected to see her at a friend’s potluck the weekend before, but she’d been busy and not able to attend. I was happy she called, and I jumped at the idea.

  Thai food sounded like exactly what I needed, and I arranged to meet her after I got cleaned up a bit and could walk to the nearby restaurant. As I cut through the museum park on my way there, I mused that Isabelle McWilliams was a mystery fan; we’d even shared some of our favorite mystery books with each other. She’d love to talk about these strings of dead-end leads of a story that started with a mysterious trunk. How Nancy Drew sounding, I smiled as I walked on through town. The light was beginning to change for the season, slanting lower in the sky, dusty shafts of it silhouetting the heavy limbed elms lining the streets. It felt to be the perfect temperature, and one of those moments when all seemed right with the world.

  I’d been acquainted with Isabelle McWilliams for about a year, and although I didn’t know her very well, we seemed to connect at gatherings, and had plenty to yak about. I’d been instantly attracted to her personality, but I stopped myself from going down that road before I even started. Instead of acting on initial sparks of attraction, I was learning to be friends first—and for a very long time. Not an all together easy thing to do sometimes; but a practice needing doing, nonetheless.

  Soon we had greeted each other at Bangkok Thai, and were sharing spicy dishes that filled the table with chicken satay, cucumber salad, larb gai, phad thai, and Panang curry. We talked mostly about the food, although once Isabelle heard a whisper of a mystery, she was interested from the beginning of my tale.

  As we stopped to take a break in stuffing ourselves, Isabelle leaned back into the red booth and tucked a strand of dark hair away from her face. “So tell me more about all this, Lily. I know it sounds like a dead end now that Barry Correda’s dead but, you know? I don’t think it is.”

  “I’m feeling that way, too, Isa,” I admitted. “I guess that’s one of the things bugging me.”

  “I agree that there are too many things that don’t add up,” she said. “Barry meets Shannon in New Mexico, although there’re two different stories about that—his and Andrea Brubaker’s. They move here, both work for Binder Enterprises, again with two different stories—his and Andrea’s. They’re both reported as being successful there, and then suddenly, bright, engaging, and energetic Shannon mysteriously loses her will to live. Why?” We both thought about that question in silence until a large dump truck rumbling past on the street rattled the front window next to our booth. I mentioned the Facebook photos, but once again, that just seemed to cloud the issues. I was determined to figure it out, but we agreed to put it aside for the time being.

  “So maybe it’s only Barry’s sketchy story to back up Shannon’s decline,” Isabelle pointed out. “To others he appears to be the Golden Boy. To you he appears to be a liar with something to hide. And then, you think maybe Barry has some kind of a sordid past in New Mexico because Barry is Momo Morgan?” I could hear in her voice that she was trying to make this piece of information work in her head.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know how all this goes together, or have an idea what Momo Morgan looks, or looked, like. It was only Regina Baca suggesting that they possibly looked similar. She said she could tell because he looked so much like his cousin. I don’t know where it fits, or if it even does fit at all.”

  “And the CBI guy was not forthcoming,” Isabelle stated, leaning both arms on the table. She looked fit and tan in her sleeveless green blouse, and I admired her fashion sense to add a violet scarf round her neck, the detail that made the outfit.

  “Nah, I guess I didn’t really expect him to be,” I said, bringing my thinking back to the discussion.

  “Well, one thing I think that is significant is that it seems Barry kept Shannon isolated, and controlled her story, and I think that’s a red flag. We don’t need the CBI to tell us that.” She speared a piece of shrimp from the curry and popped it in her mouth, and then passed the larb gai to me. I piled a second helping onto my plate and dug into the minced chicken. The mix—mint, lime, cilantro, onion, hot chiles, nam pla—was addictive. Isabelle noted that the Thai royal couple, whose large wall portraits hung in an honored position in this distant and dim dining room, and probably Sonchai Jitpleecheep as well, would have been pleased with the authentic selections.

  “So what do you think about Barry’s accident, then?” I mumbled, chewing through a mouthful, as I started on another piece of the mental puzzle.

  “Well, that just throws everything into a heap, doesn’t it?” Despite the dead ends, she was enjoying the pursuit of the mystery, I could see.

  “That’s just how my brain feels—all in a heap! The information just goes round and round,” I groaned.

  Isa looked at me and smiled again, “You know? I liked what you told me before about using your blackboard to allow yourself the space to muse and create. What do you say? Do you have time? Let’s go back to your house and chart this out.”

  I had thought of this idea for the board in the studio, but had gotten sidetracked by other projects, as usual. “Let’s do it!”

  “My treat this time,” Isabelle replied and signaled the server for leftover boxes. She paid the bill as I gathered the dinner remains, and thus deliciously ladened, we headed out.

  She drove us back to my house, and Patsy Cline sat waiting for us outside the front gate.

  “What is she doing out?” Isabelle asked. She knew I didn’t let the dogs to run loose.

  I sighed. “She decides she’s been waiting too long, and digs out.”

  “Waiting for what? Where’s Pecos?”

  “Oh, he never comes with her, thank god. He’s a homebody. But I think he worries about her; he’s always hyper-vigilant until she returns. She used to dig out way more often from my place outside Santa Fe, when I worked the night shift. I’m home more now, and she usually stays in.” All I could do was shrug. No matter how many different ways I’d tried to keep her contained, the Houdini Patsy could escape as she pleased. More than a couple of times Jake Biccam down the street had brought her home, and I always felt like a terrible parent when she misbehaved. She hadn’t been doing it recently, but now it seemed that her bad act was starting again. She got bored, and that was one of the reasons that she and Pecos mostly stayed out at the ranch.

  I opened the gate, and Patsy Cline trotted up the drive in front of us, a grin on her face and her black curled tail doing a high wag. Pecos Bill was jumping at the gate in the backyard, delighted to see us all.

  Isabelle and I climbed the steps to the studio next to the office, where I turned on a row of track lights to illuminate the board, and Isabelle opened the door to enjoy the late September evening air. Pe
cos ran in to see me and Patsy, and check out Isabelle, before he settled down in his usual spot by the screen door. I could hear a train whistle in the distance, and the train rumbling across town as I returned with mugs and a pot of decaf from the kitchen. I put on some upbeat Salsa Celtica for our background soundtrack.

  “Okay, how do we start?” Isabelle asked, strolling around the room.

  I stood at the board, chalk in hand. “Well, you know, I just kinda let things flow, I guess. I don’t try to edit ideas; I just put it all up there. And end up making arrows linking one thing to another, or boxes, or stars for ‘special’ ideas, or circles to indicate inclusion of things with each other. And then, frankly? I usually end up daydreaming and doodling on the board,” I confessed, laughing.

  Isabelle laughed, too. “Sounds like a great process!”

  “Works for me!” I guffawed. “Okay, let’s start with a time line, with the stuff we know, grouping like with like, if we can. We can start with Shannon, and her aunt Bernice Thorton and Nephew/Daryl, and of course, the trunk.” I drew a long line on the board, and then returned to the beginning to draw three boxes.

  “I’ll put the trunk in its own little circle up here. I don’t know how it connects except for things alluded to in Barry’s eavesdropped conversation.” I also made a “Barry Correda” box and added “Barry talking with guy in hat” box, circling it a couple of times, remembering their vicious attitudes.

  “And we don’t know if what you found in the trunk—the list of numbers—was what Barry was talking about wanting to find. But I think it was. It was too odd of a thing hidden in too odd of a way for it not to be significant, don’t you think?” asked Isa as she bent her tall frame to look at one of my collages on the wall. She had a distracted smile on her face, her hand toying with a leather choker at her neck, when she turned back to me.

  “Yeah, the list goes up here, too, whatever it is. I have some ideas about it. But wait; let’s go back to what do we know about how Shannon and Barry were connected. You already started talking about that at the restaurant,” I said.

  “Okay, Barry meets Shannon in New Mexico; they move here, and both work for Binder Enterprises. They’re both reported as being happy and successful there, and then suddenly, on-track Shannon mysteriously loses her will to live. Why?” Isabelle walked over and stopped next to me as I wrote on the board. “Why?” she repeated as she looked at the chalk marks. “What happened?”

  “Did she lose her will to live? Or, did someone want it to look like that?” I asked. “But why would anyone want her to die?”

  “Put that up there,” Isabelle said, indicating the blackboard. “Why did she die?”

  “I feel pretty strongly that she didn’t commit suicide but I don’t know who/why/what killed her. The stories are conflicting and nonsensical,” I said, dutifully chalking up a box with a big question mark in it.

  “I agree. From all you’ve told me, I don’t think Shannon committed suicide, either. That was Barry Correda’s story. You feel he was hiding something about Shannon, and trying to make her look bad in the process.”

  “Yeah, and then there’s the whole part of Shannon and Andrea Brubaker working together in Santa Fe even before Barry came on the scene. Somehow Barry and Shannon met because of Andrea, I think. And I feel that Andrea somehow has a bigger role in this than just Shannon’s former employer. Why would she invest so much money in Shannon’s career in Colorado?” I went over to let Pecos out the screen door where he had been patiently waiting, his tail thumping on the wood floor.

  “Put Andrea up here, too, and her non-profit in Santa Fe,” Isabelle said, indicating a space at the beginning of the time line “And Ghost Ranch with it. How does that place fit into any of this? Or Brubaker’s, or Binder?”

  “How does Binder Enterprises fit into any of it?” I wondered as I went back to the board and wrote “Binder Enterprises” in its own box. “You know, I have nothing to base this on, but I wonder about Phillip Binder. He’s running the company now that Cowboy’s retired, and he’s made a great success in a very difficult market. He’s gobbled up smaller firms like candy, and the company seems flush with cash, if the papers can be believed to get it straight.” I’d circled the box about five times in frustration, so I put down the chalk and went over to the door to let Pecos back in, and stayed for a breath of fresh air. Pecos turned around and started out the door again. At this rate, I’d be letting him in and out every five minutes; he was not interested in our talk and was bored.

  “It was at his company that Shannon supposedly got into enough trouble to ‘commit suicide’ and he would have had to have known something of the accusations of her wrongdoings, don’t you think? Anyway, he’s the one who hired Barry, and he seemed to have a more personal relationship with him, too.” I told Isa about the scene with Barry and Phillip Binder, the last time I had talked to Barry Correda.

  Isabelle’s dark eyes were wide in thought. “Do you think Barry had done something wrong and was afraid of Phil Binder?”

  “I don’t know. It just seemed that Phillip was not pleased with something as he stepped out of the building.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t pleased seeing Barry talking to you.” Isabelle walked over to join me at the open door to savor the breeze, and leaned against the door frame.

  “Why would that be? He doesn’t know who I am. And who am I anyway but just a friend of Shannon’s talking to her boyfriend?” I pondered, looking out into the dark back yard.

  “Don’t know. Just a thought. Just thinking about the Barry-Phillip connection. Didn’t you say that it was Phil Binder who ID’d Barry’s body?”

  “Yeah, but I guess there wasn’t really a body, just charred pieces. Phil Binder confirmed the ID based on them finding Barry’s cell phone, which had Phil Binder’s number in it, at the scene. That’s what Liz told me. We need to add ‘Phil ID’ to Barry’s circle, though,” I said.

  The studio phone rang and as I saw that it was Betty Huckleston calling, I excused myself and answered it in the kitchen. At first I couldn’t take in the information Betty told me and asked her to repeat it. Shaking my head in anticipation, I told her Isabelle and I were reconstructing our information in the studio as we spoke, and laughingly suggested that she come up and help us tie it all together. Actually, I knew if she possibly could have come up she would have; Betty Huckleston loved a good story that she could speculate on for hours. Disappointed at being left out of the brainstorming, she wished us luck and rang off.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN