by Linda Seals
I needed some time alone. I needed to recharge, think, muse, reflect. The days were getting shorter, and the change in seasons usually had a melancholy effect on me. I was tired, and had allowed Barry Correda’s misdeeds to give me a huge dose of resentment against people as a whole. I missed the dogs.
The house seemed empty without them, even though they’d only been gone for a few days. I puttered around the house aimlessly, stared at the studio blackboard filled with old hypotheses, wandered out and in from the back yard, picked at a plate of the last of the tomatoes I had harvested. I changed from shorts to long pants for the first time that season, since I could feel that it could easily frost that night. I’d already covered my garden to protect it, and had seen to my clients’ susceptible plants, as well. The gardens were prepared for cold weather, but I wasn’t. Hardly ever was.
Organic vegetable seeds were a good thing to research when one needed hope for the next season, and the online images tempted me to order every variety right from the convenience of my own computer. I had already drifted into the xeric perennials section when I had an idea. Henry Wade said that Barry had reported that Shannon’s account discrepancies were discovered a month before her death, right after they had returned from a business trip. It must have been on that trip that Shannon revealed that she knew something to set the tragic process in motion. A business trip had to be real estate related, right? A quick trip to the Binder Enterprises website didn’t show any out of state listings. Some kind of conference, then?
I entered some key words into the Web search window on the screen. After a few dead end sites I came up with the Intermountain Executive Real Estate Association, an organization for “exclusive property experts in the Intermountain Region” of Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. There was copy extolling the business acumen of the IEREA members, and a list of quarterly executive meetings that rotated among the states. The first meeting of the year had been in Jackson Hole; the second one in Park City, and the last one in Santa Fe, June 30 – July 2. A month before Shannon was murdered. Bingo. Binder Enterprises and Brubaker Distinctive Properties were listed under the Gold members. Double bingo.
Something had happened in Santa Fe, and therefore I knew Andrea Brubaker was involved, despite her claim that she hadn’t seen Shannon since she had moved. Why had she lied? I couldn’t see much happening in the Santa Fe real estate scene that Andrea Brubaker didn’t participate in, so I was sure that she, and now Shannon and Barry, and probably the Binders, had all been at the last IEREA meeting, and that something had happened.
I thought I should talk to Andrea Brubaker again, and find out, if I could, what happened. She didn’t kill Shannon, so maybe she wouldn’t be on her guard, and would casually talk? At least it seemed unlikely that she had somehow come up from New Mexico to stage Shannon Parkhurst’s suicide. She was a realtor, not an assassin. I thought she may know something about why Shannon died. I’d have to figure out how to handle it, since I knew that I couldn’t just call her and expect to have a chat. There had to be another way.
I went outside the office to sit on the wide back steps just as a slip of a crescent moon appeared in the eastern sky, showing a sliver of white against the pink alpenglow of early evening. The night air was chilling down quickly. Huge flocks of geese sailed over and past the house, honking their way in the dusk to lakes in the center of town. They crowded the sky and their backlit formations looked like the monkey bats filling the screen in The Wizard of Oz. There seemed to be thousands of them. It was soon quiet again, and the night had a damper smell to it. Surrounded by stillness, I looked for guidance about what I should do. An answer was not immediately forthcoming, of course.
