The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

by Nancy Pickard

  The door on the passenger’s side opened and the high voice of another woman interrupted them.

  “A person could die out there!”

  Mrs. Potter turned her head, and Che craned hers to find Kathy Amory staring in at them with big, round eyes. “Anything could have happened to them! The desert’s just the most dangerous place! Why, they could have been bitten by rattlesnakes or attacked by mountain lions. I was wondering, Mrs. Potter, can you die from a scorpion bite?”

  It was Che Thomas who answered her, in a tightly controlled voice.

  “Not usually, Kathy. But maybe they got attacked by hundreds of scorpions all at one time.”

  “Oh, my God, can that happen?”

  “No,” Mrs. Potter said gently. “Che’s kidding.”

  Kathy and Walt Amory were relatively new to Arizona in general and to the desert in particular, and Kathy obviously had yet to accustom herself to the normal everyday hazards that natives took more or less for granted … scorpions lurking in the toes of bedroom slippers, Gila monsters sunning on rocks (or chaise lounges), rattlesnakes slithering across highways (or patios), stinging ants that built mounds as big as moguls on a ski slope, or black widow spiders, brown spiders, centipedes, and coral snakes, not to mention your run-of-the-mill bees, wasps, and four-legged predators. You learned to be alert and hope for the best—much as city dwellers kept their eyes open for stinging bullets and two-legged predators.

  Kathy shivered in her neon-orange ski jacket with matching waterproof pants and brimmed cap. “Maybe they got mauled by a pack of those awful javelina pigs. Gored to death, you know? Or coyotes. Walt says it could have been coyotes, although I didn’t know they’d actually kill a man.”

  “They don’t,” Che said in a voice as tart as a slice of lemon. “They only kill women—they prefer juicy young girls best, not scrawny old hags like Genia and me, well, like me, at least—so they might have gotten Linda, but Ricardo’s safe—”

  “Che!” said Mrs. Potter, under her breath.

  But Kathy was wide-eyed. “Really?”

  Che nodded, looking preternaturally wise. “Maybe you’d better not go out there, Kathy.” She arched an eyebrow. “What with being young and female, and all.”

  “I wish I could talk to Walt!”

  “Where is he?” Che demanded, as if she felt every able-bodied soul in the valley ought to be on hand and she wanted to know why this one wasn’t.

  “He’s not here,” was the reply, offered with a bright smile.

  Che exchanged a look with Mrs. Potter, as if to say, “Well, that’s a big help.”

  The young woman said good-bye quickly and slammed the car door, leaving Mrs. Potter to stare in mock disapproval at her friend.

  Che shrugged. “She looks like she got outfitted by a road maintenance crew … what the trendy young person will wear for her next search party. Oh, well, let’s look at the bright side. Maybe she will get eaten by coyotes.”

  “Che! What’s the matter with you?”

  “Lorraine Steinbach is my friend—and yours, may I add? And where the hell is old Gallstones this morning, I’d like to know?”

  It was Mrs. Potter’s private opinion that Lorraine Steinbach could only benefit from the loss of the execrable Gallway from her life, but saying it would be akin to telling a recent widow, “That’s all right, dear, you’ll find another one.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Che said, as she and Mrs. Potter both waved at Lorraine Steinbach, who now stood talking to several other women. “Or, I should say, the devil’s wife.”

  All the volunteers were climbing out of their cars and trucks by now and walking toward Ken, who stood waiting for them to gather around him. Mrs. Potter opened her own door. Che got out of the way and then the two of them walked over to join the gathering, where Ken was starting to issue instructions.

  “Got maps here that I made last night. Hope you can read ’em. They’re assignments. I’ve divvied the ranch up in pie slices radiating out from this point. Let’s see a show of hands, how many of you are actually goin’ out there …”

  He counted thirty-two hands, including himself, which was everybody there except Mrs. Potter. They were all going. Bless them. She swallowed a lump in her throat, and listened carefully to Ken.

  “Okay, I’m going to hand these maps out to groups of you. I expect you all know this area well enough that you can tell who’s goin’ by vehicle and who’s going to have to go ahorseback. But if you’re not sure, check with me, and I’ll tell you how I think you ought to do it.”

  Che Thomas called out, “What if we find them, Ken?”

  Grim-faced and weary-looking, he turned toward her.

  “Make sure there’s a rifle among the group of you. Let off two shots if you find either one of them, give three shots if you find something you want some of the rest of us to come take a look at.”

  “Like what, Ken?” asked a cowboy from the valley.

  He shrugged helplessly. “Damned if I know, Shorty. But like a piece of their clothing, maybe, or some sign of their horses, some track looks like they been there, I don’t know. I guess if you find something, you’ll know it when you see it. And listen, I expect some of you got two-way radios or car phones, I want to talk to you, see if we can set up some better communication system that way. Oh, and another thing, folks, don’t y’all be doin’ anything dangerous, don’t y’all be takin’ any chances make the rest of us come lookin’ for you, you hear?”

  “Sound like a Kentucky boy, Ken,” teased another cowboy.

  “Ain’t no joke, hoss,” was the short-tempered reply, as Ken Ryerson began walking among the crowd handing out his hand-drawn maps. The offending cowboy muttered apologetically, “Didn’t mean nuthin’ …” But Ken ignored him, and the hapless cowboy got a few cold looks from some of the other volunteers. Mrs. Potter noticed that Charlie Watt winked at him in a kindly way.

  Tempers are already short, she noted, and the day has only just begun. It’s not a good sign. It means these people are already feeling hopeless and frustrated.

  Mrs. Potter stepped forward and raised her voice.

  “I just want to say how deeply Juanita and her family and I appreciate your doing this. I know that Ricardo and Linda are your friends every bit as much as mine, probably more in some cases, for those of you who’ve known Ricardo for so long.…” She nodded at Che Thomas and Charlie Watt, acknowledging their lifelong ties to Ricardo. She held Bandy Esposito’s glance for a moment, too, out of respect for his special relationship to Ricardo. “I’ll be praying that you find them.” She smiled and tried mightily to keep it from wavering. “When you do find them”—scattered applause broke out and a couple of “hear hears,” as her neighbors valiantly tried to help her cheer them on their way—“I hope you’ll come back to my house for chili.”

  Che Thomas said in a bold voice, “I know Rico loves chili, Genia.”

  “That’s right,” Charlie Watt answered in an equally strong and steady voice, “so make him a big hot bowl of it, Genia, ’cause he’s going to need it after this tomfool adventure of his.”

  Mrs. Potter nodded her agreement, because she was suddenly unable to speak another word. Lorraine Steinbach was quickly beside her, wrapping her in a warm hug, which she returned gratefully.

  As the volunteers formed themselves into small groups, according to Ken’s instructions, Mrs. Potter walked around shaking hands and personally thanking them. In return, she got clasps and quiet words of encouragement and sympathy, as well as firm instructions to transmit those same feelings back to “poor Juanita and her family.”

  Finally, feeling both bolstered and shaken, Mrs. Potter returned to her car and just sat still for a while, watching these good people begin the work of doing what had to be done. She stayed long enough to wave the searchers off and to watch them disperse over her fields. Then she climbed back into her car and drove home in the rapidly lengthening shadows of morning.

  CHAPTER 13

  On her way to the
kitchen to finally fix her morning cup of tea, Mrs. Potter detoured into the living room. She stood in front of the windows that looked toward Mexico and stared down the hill past the barn and corral, past the big garage where Bandy lived, to the two-story white frame Ortega home.

  There were cars she didn’t recognize in Juanita’s driveway.

  “Good, her family’s here.”

  She was willing to bet that all the available Ortega children had hopped in their cars as soon as their mother called with the news. There was an unmarried son who was a social worker in Phoenix; in Tucson there were a married son who was an assistant grocery store manager and a married daughter who was an accountant; there was an unmarried daughter who owned a candy shop in Santa Fe; and there was Linda’s mother, the anthropologist, now in Brazil. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the various sons- and daughters-in-law, not to mention the grandchildren, had been packed up and brought along too. Ricardo and Juanita were the matriarch and patriarch of a close and loving clan; the children would drop everything to come help search for their father and support their mother. Not that Juanita would make it easy for them. Mrs. Potter shook her head in sympathy for all of them, mother and children alike. They’d see no tears from their mother and Juanita wouldn’t tolerate many from them, at least not as long as there was still hope. Seeing them reminded her to call her own three children, but then she thought: why worry them unnecessarily? Ricardo and Linda would show up any time now, and then she could write Louisa, Emily, and Benji nice long chatty letters all about these “tomfool” adventures. The voice of Louisa, her eldest and a psychologist, spoke in her ear: “That’s called denial, Mother.”

  She took a moment longer to draw strength from the view.

  “I call it hope, Louisa.”

  Now that the sun was fully risen, it revealed the beauty of the rangeland that stretched to the foothills of the mountains on every side. In the distance, she spied her favorite signs of spring: mother cows and their calves. Tears sprang to her eyes at her sheer pleasure and gratitude at seeing this favorite vista again. And may there be many, many more, she thought, for all of us. Red flowers were budding on the tips of the long, thin stalks of ocotillo shrubs, and she saw thistles that had sprouted white flowers looking as soft and delicate as a lotus. Pretty little yellow flowers, and purple ones, too, whose names she could never remember, dotted the range and softened it. At this time of year the native grass grew as tall and thick as it ever got in this part of the country, and this morning it looked like the thick and heavy platinum mane of a palomino horse. Some people preferred the greener month of June, but Mrs. Potter loved the way the long grasses of May undulated in graceful ivory waves. They seemed to be waving to her now … welcome home, Genia.

  “Thank you,” she whispered back to them.

  In the kitchen, she put the water on to boil for tea while she rummaged through her cupboards for something to eat until she could get to town for groceries. She found oatmeal, dry cereals, and biscuit mix, but there was no milk for them. At last she came up with pancake mix that required only water, no eggs.

  “Please, please let there be a sliver of butter …”

  Thank goodness there was, half a stick, on a plate in the fridge.

  Well! This was better than she’d any reason to hope it would be.

  Mrs. Potter drank a cup of English breakfast tea while she fixed “five bucks’ worth” of dollar pancakes and also put the water-logged pinto beans in big pots of water to simmer on the stove until they were tender. When the pancakes were golden brown—a hot-enough griddle was always the key to perfect pancakes—she slathered them with butter, poured on some maple syrup that she had brought back from a previous trip to Maine, and placed the plate on a tray. She added knife and fork, napkin and another cup of tea, and carried it all to her desk in the study off the hall. Mrs. Potter wanted to peruse her list of “things to do” while she ate breakfast.

  She lifted her yellow writing pad to make room for her tray.

  When she did, its top sheet fell over on top of the page on which she had listed her groceries. The first thing she recognized was that the writing on it was not her own. The second thing she realized was that it was Ricardo’s.

  Mrs. Potter sank down into her desk chair, pancakes forgotten.

  KR, he’d printed, and placed a check mark by it.

  Then Mrs. P., with another check.

  Under that, he’d written in a vertical line the letters J (with a question mark beside it), B (crossed out), CW, A, S, Mc. Included in that cryptic list was a capital C with a capital U written sideways.

  “C Lazy U,” Mrs. Potter deciphered.

  And then suddenly the rest of the list was easy too:

  Charlie Watt.

  The Amorys.

  The Steinbachs.

  The McHenrys.

  And Che Thomas from the C Lazy U.

  They were all of the folks who’d been in her driveway last night, the people whom Ricardo had summoned to a mysterious meeting at her house.

  KR had to be Ken Ryerson.

  And there was herself, of course, Mrs. P.

  He’d placed a check by every one of them.

  And the question mark beside the letter J? Mrs. Potter thought that might mean that he wondered whether to include Juanita. By crossing out the B was he eliminating Bandy from the guest list?

  Was this his calling list? If so, the check marks appeared to indicate that he’d successfully reached everyone he had telephoned.

  That wasn’t all, however.

  He’d written the number 7:30, and circled it.

  And in an upper corner, he’d written Elb: 5, and circled it.

  Mrs. Potter wasn’t so curious about the actual notes—she guessed that 7:30 merely indicated the time that last night’s meeting of the neighbors was to take place, so Elb: 5 was the only thing she couldn’t immediately decode.

  But she was awfully puzzled about something else.…

  “Why did you call us from here, Ricardo?”

  From her desk, she meant, from her house, her private domain, while she was away. It gave Mrs. Potter an uneasy feeling to think of someone besides her sitting at her desk, looking at her papers, which were scattered on it, staring at her pictures in her study. Even if that person was Ricardo, whom she trusted implicitly. Still …

  “Why?” she asked him.

  With no answer to that easily forthcoming, Mrs. Potter ripped off her own list and drove to the grocery store with it.

  They were lucky, she thought, to have a grocery store at the crossroads, which was just that, and not even a real town at all. Without Ryan’s Grocery, she and everybody else in Wind Valley would have had to drive as far as Nogales in one direction or Tucson in another for anything fancier than the packaged bologna, potato chips, and candy bars that were sold at the corner gas station at the crossroads. Besides Ryan’s and the gas station, there was Sally’s Café, and a tiny shop that sold locally made crafts, and a rambling, messy, greasy, absolutely indispensable garage for repairing cars, trucks, tractors, and just about anything else on wheels, including the bicycles of the children of Wind Valley.

  Outside Sally’s, where Sally herself made the best rhubarb pie in Arizona, Mrs. Potter noticed a silver Mercedes with California license plates parked in the dirt. It was Walt Amory’s car. And now that she thought about it, Mrs. Potter remembered that Walt Amory hadn’t been at the windmill this morning. Kathy had been there to endure Che’s tormenting, but not her husband. And there he was, seated at a window table inside Sally’s, with …

  Conveniently stopped at the crossroads stoplight, Mrs. Potter stared, and very nearly rubbed her eyes in disbelief.

  With Gallway Steinbach, the very man with whom Kathy Amory was rumored to be having an affair? She squinted in spite of herself, in an unabashed effort to get a good look at the expressions on their faces. Why, Gallstones was shaking a long, bony finger at the younger man, who was looking abashed. This was not at all how one might ha
ve expected such an encounter to proceed.

  My goodness, she thought, this was sufficiently intriguing gossip to keep valley tongues busy! Mrs. Potter, no friend to mean gossip, had to admit that she would love to be a fly on that particular windowpane. Not, of course, that Sally ever permitted any such thing as a fly to darken the interior of her immaculate café—as immaculate as a place could be, that is, where the customers regularly trooped through in cowboy boots.

  Mrs. Potter glanced up at the second floor of Sally’s, where the curtains were pulled against the sun. That was where her own part-time hired man, Ken Ryerson, rented a single room with a bath down the hall. Or so she’d been told by Sally, who also informed anybody who asked, and a few who didn’t, that Ken wasn’t any too neat, and he wasn’t always on time with the rent, but by gracious, he didn’t cat around or take women upstairs with him. Sally, who was a mainstay of a local church, seemed to think that was “right proper” behavior for a man of thirty-odd years, and Mrs. Potter was glad to hear that Ken wasn’t, apparently, behaving irresponsibly in this sexually dangerous age. She had wondered however, whether a young man like Ken might be working too hard and playing too little. His room at the crossroads put him right in the middle of all his many odd jobs, making it convenient for him to get to the ranches where he helped out in the owners’ absences. But Mrs. Potter worried that by feeding his ambition with lots of hard work, Ken might also be starving his heart, which was how her own grandmother used to describe the type of man who found all of his pleasure in making money. Type A’s, we’d call them now, Mrs. Potter thought. She’d been glad, really almost relieved, to hear from Ken himself that he was engaged to Linda Scarritt.

  Mrs. Potter, curious though she was about the two men in the window, virtuously drove on to the grocery store when the light turned green.