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

by Nancy Pickard

  “Love you.”

  But Emily, her middle child, sighed upon hearing of Louisa’s prediction. “Oh, Mom.” She sounded frantically exasperated. “Louisa has it all wrong, as usual. It wasn’t that arroyo at all, and anyway, if it was my secret place to hide, how would she know about it? I’ll tell you what it was, it was a cave—”

  “A cave?”

  “Don’t sound so horrified, Mom.”

  “But you were absolutely forbidden—”

  “Sure.” Emily laughed a little. “It was a little cave back in the hills, not exactly on the ranch—”

  “What do you mean,” Mrs. Potter said ominously, “not exactly on the ranch?”

  “Oh, dear, can I still get grounded after all these years?”

  “I’m not so sure you’re too old to be spanked!”

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say. Okay, true confession time. It was a cave off the ranch, on that property that’s owned by the Bureau of Land Management, you know? I can’t describe it exactly, but there was a high ridge to the left, and a trail to the right—”

  “To the left, Emily? Would that be east, west …”

  “I have no idea. It’s been a long time ago. Benji would know.”

  “I thought it was your secret hideout.”

  “He tracked me down. All I remember is, I’d run down that trail through some trees and up a hill and there it was, almost hidden by some other small trees. Which may be big trees by now. And the neat thing was, you couldn’t see it unless you knew where to look.”

  There was a sudden, appalled silence as both women comprehended what that might mean in regard to Linda Scarritt.

  “Ask Benji,” Emily advised.

  “And I thought you were such good children,” her mother said.

  “Love you,” her daughter replied. “Call me!”

  And so it was Benji who gave her exact directions, which she mapped out on the yellow pad in front of her.

  “You’ve got to find her, Mom,” he said. “I don’t mean you, personally, but Ken or somebody, somebody’s got to find her, and she’s got to be okay.”

  He was her youngest, and he took things hard.

  In her heart, as she hung up from talking to her son, Mrs. Potter knew that subconsciously Benji meant his words quite literally: she, Mom, had to find Linda Scarritt. As she’d found the children’s socks and their toys, their teddy bears and, later, their car keys. Mothers found things. Mothers were supposed to find things for their children, for anybody’s children, for everybody’s children. After a moment’s hesitation, Mrs. Potter flipped over a page in her yellow pad and began writing quite a few other things down on the paper. She did it as fast as she could, because now there was no time to waste.

  Afterward, she ran into her bathroom to put together a first-aid kit, even ripping up a clean sheet in case she needed bindings for wounds, putting in plenty of antiseptic spray and what pain medication she could find, which was a few old pills of codeine 3, probably leftover from the misery of old dental work. Then she raced to the kitchen to fill a Thermos with water and to stick some bland food—bananas, crackers, bread—into a plastic bag. It was while she was filling the Thermos that she realized that nobody had found Linda’s Thermos, the one her grandmother said she always made the child carry. It should have been attached to the saddle, but it was not. That seemed to Mrs. Potter to be the best news, perhaps even the only possibly good news, she had heard yet. Maybe there really was hope.

  If, that is, she hurried.

  By this time three days had passed, and a Thermosful of water wouldn’t last long in the desert, especially if somebody had been injured. Food she could live without for a long time, but not water, not for very long in this country.

  “Now …”

  Mrs. Potter stopped dead in her tracks in her kitchen.

  How was she going to get to that cave without anybody else being the wiser?

  Mrs. Potter set her supplies down on the kitchen table, and walked to the telephone in the kitchen. She thought for a moment and took a deep breath before she picked up the phone. Please! she thought, and then, Oh, yes! when she immediately heard voices talking.

  Mrs. Potter began to moan piteously.

  “Got to call the hospital,” she said, breaking in to the conversation between a woman and a man. “Ohhh …”

  “Who’s that? What’s the emergency?” a woman’s voice demanded.

  “Genia Potter,” she said. “Bit by scorpion, oh, it hurts so much …”

  “Mrs. Potter?” the man said quickly. “You stay right there, I’ll be right over to get you—”

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “Bit more than once, afraid I’m allergic, can’t wait, going to drive myself to the county clinic.… Call them, will you? Ohhh!”

  She hung up.

  Immediately, the phone rang again and kept ringing.

  “Get off my phone,” she said to it, “and start calling everybody else around here!”

  Mrs. Potter wanted everybody to know she was leaving her home and was on her way to the county health clinic many miles away from Wind Valley, and she couldn’t think of a more efficient way to do it than through the “dad-blamed, goldarned, infernal” party line, as the locals were wont to call it. Before the man on the line had a chance to make good on his threat to drive to Las Palomas and pick her up, Mrs. Potter grabbed her supplies again and stuffed them into a backpack that she found in the hall closet. She was just about to race out the door when she thought of one more thing …

  What if she needed a weapon?

  There was no rifle in her back window.

  But sometimes, just when you needed the miracle of a brilliant idea, there one was. Mrs. Potter hurried back to her kitchen and created a most ingenious weapon, if she did say so herself, on the spot. She slipped it carefully into the backpack, put on a jacket and a pair of cowboy boots, stuffed gloves and a hat into the pockets of her coat, and then she ran to the carport to get her four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  She was going to need the power of all four wheels, and more, where she was going.

  CHAPTER 31

  The desert had never seemed emptier, the night had never seemed blacker to Mrs. Potter as she turned north out of her own front gate and drove off as if she were, indeed, going to the county clinic. She didn’t even have to hide her hurry, but could drive like the proverbial bat out of hell. She tried to remember that she was supposedly in agony, and swerved the car a bit now and then, as if she were having trouble controlling her pain, just in case anybody was watching. In truth, she only had less than a mile to go, and she wanted that short distance to be utterly convincing.

  For that brief, frightening ride, she saw no headlights, no taillights, no sign of any other vehicle on the road.

  Too bad horses don’t have headlights, she thought as she slowed the car ahead of the unobtrusive gate that was her immediate goal. Too bad they don’t wear reflective saddles at night. Because if anybody was observing her from the vantage point of a horse, she’d never know it. Mrs. Potter’s left hand moved automatically to her signal indicator, but she stopped it just in time. That’s all I need to do, she told herself, announce to the world which way I’m turning and where I’m going.

  She was going to have to get out of her car to open the gate.

  Feeling exposed and vulnerable, she scurried to accomplish that. She drove on through, and then had to get out and close the gate again. There were cattle in these pastures, and just because it was a matter of life or death didn’t mean she could leave the gates open. That would have been a good way to have cattle wandering across the road where somebody might hit them, and even die doing it. She didn’t want to be responsible for the death of any living creature on this strange night.

  Mrs. Potter had never driven through her own pastures alone, at night.

  She could only see as far ahead of her as her headlights shone.

  The car bumped up and down, so she was forced to go much slower than she
wished, and there were still other gates to open and close. At every moment, she was afraid of coming upon a big cow in the road too suddenly, of hitting it, of plowing off into a ditch. She was afraid of boulders she might strike. But more than anything, Mrs. Potter was afraid of getting there too late.…

  She glanced quickly up at the sky. Oh, if only I could turn up the wattage on the stars. If only there were a celestial rheostat so that I might shine their lights brighter on my path! But any light that illuminated her road would show her, as well, to anyone who happened to be looking for her.…

  Mrs. Potter drove on, having once or twice the strangest feeling that she was not alone, that there was somebody else along for the ride. Shivers ran along her spine, and her hands grew ice cold. “Ricardo, is that you?” she whispered. Or was it Lew?

  Or was it simply a haunting feeling of being watched by a thousand eyes, of being quietly observed by the creatures of the night and the desert and the mountains, of attracting the silent, watching attention of the wolves and coyotes, the desert rats and mountain lions, the rattlesnakes and owls, the scorpions on the ground and the hawks in the air?

  She only knew that the closer she got to the mountains, the stronger the feeling grew that she was not alone.

  At the base of the Rimstone Mountains there was a rocky path winding up, over rocks so large they looked as if no car could pass them, and between cacti whose thorny arms grasped anything within their reach. Mrs. Potter kept her windows rolled up, and her car in first gear all the way. The route wound up and up, just as Benji had directed her, until it simply ran out at a point where a massive oak tree, the last and farthest up the mountain, stopped the trail.

  At that point, again as directed by her son, Mrs. Potter got out.

  She slipped on the backpack and her canvas hat with the brim that hung down. She zipped her jacket to the neck, pulled up its collar, and put on a pair of leather gloves. She shoved her pants legs down into her boots.

  Benji had no idea I’d be doing this alone, she thought, and if he had, he wouldn’t have wanted to tell her, but at the time, she didn’t know she’d be doing it alone either. Mrs. Potter would have given nearly anything not to be doing this alone.

  The going from there was rough and taxing, and sometimes so vertical that she pushed herself up—by shoving against huge boulders—as much as climbed up. She had to stop many times to catch her breath. Her clothes got snagged on cactus thorns, her feet slipped painfully, even in their thick shoes, on the jagged rocks that lined the way. But she kept going, breathing ever more raggedly as she climbed. “I’m too old for this!” her mind protested more than once. “That’s all in your mind!” her heart retorted. Nearly laughing at that, feeling a bit hysterical for a moment, she nevertheless kept climbing.

  Benji’s directions were good, clear ones.

  But it was night, and she’d never done this before.

  Stop the car by the oak tree, he’d said. You can’t drive any farther than that. Climb straight up. You’ll get to a fence. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY on the other sign. Posted on the other side. Their side. NO TRESPASSING—on our side. Climb the fence. Easy for you to say, my dear son! It’ll get a little easier for a while. Go north from the other side of the fence, maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll come across a little path. Should still be there, because it was an animal path, probably deer and elk. And where there are deer and elk, she thought, there are wolves and coyotes. Where there is prey, there are predators. Finding the trail, she plunged into an even darker thicket of tall ocotillo shrubs. New and tiny cacti sprouted from the ground, as hard to walk on as rocks. “Thank goodness I thought to wear boots!” she murmured.

  And suddenly she was face-to-face with a rock wall.

  Mrs. Potter was also suddenly so afraid, she thought her knees might collapse on her, sending her tumbling to the ground upon the rocks and baby cacti, causing her to lose her balance, and go rolling violently down as Ricardo must have done. Then she realized it was just the sheer dreadful darkness of the rock wall that so unnerved her, and the fear of what might be lurking in its holes and crannies.

  But its holes and crannies were what she had come to explore.

  Mrs. Potter prayed to find the right one the first time.

  Turn south at the rock wall, her son had said. South? she’d asked. Does that mean right or left? Right, he’d said, laughing at her a little. Turn right and walk along the face of the rock cliff. Go about fifty paces. Children’s paces? she’d asked, or grown-up paces? Good question, Mom, he’d agreed. Well, just consider that we were teenagers when all this chasing and hiding was going on, and I was taller than you by then, so grown-up paces, I guess. Mrs. Potter murmured “Mother, may I?” under her breath, and walked off fifty paces along the face of the cliff. It was difficult, for things had naturally sprouted during the intervening years. More cacti. Scrub brush. Rocks had fallen, blocking her path. Mrs. Potter climbed over and around, blessing her boots and gloves and long pants and sleeves with every rugged step. The route took her into the shadows, to what surely, she thought, must be the darkest side of the mountain.

  Fifty paces in, there was no mouth of a cave.

  Her heart, which had beat so strongly throughout the climb, caught for a moment on a snag of hopelessness, and took its time kicking back in again. Feeling utterly desperate, Mrs. Potter called out softly, “Linda? Linda?”

  She heard nothing but a rustling in the brush that made her mouth go dry, so dry that she had to moisten it before she could repeat her call, and make it even louder this time.

  “Linda! Linda Scarritt! It’s Genia Potter! Can you hear me!”

  The rustling in the brush stopped.

  All time seemed to stop as well.

  And then Mrs. Potter heard another sound, a low moaning, as though from a terribly wounded animal. She plunged on through the scrub and over the rocks, following the sound, calling out its name …

  “Linda, Linda, Linda!”

  The sound was coming from inside a dark hole in the cliff. Mrs. Potter swallowed hard, pulled her flashlight out of her packback, and pointed it into the mouth of the cave.

  Linda Scarritt lay curled in a fetal position on the rocky ground, uncovered except for her own clothing, with her saddle blanket rolled under her head. The beam of Mrs. Potter’s flashlight caught a flicker from the young woman’s eyes as they opened the merest slit, and then quickly closed again. The moaning began again. Mrs. Potter had to bend over to run to the girl’s side, where she knelt and nearly wept, both in relief and in pity for what she saw. Linda had been wounded, like her horse, gored by the same animal that injured Taco, and her jeans were ripped where the tusk had gone through. Mrs. Potter lay her own hand on Linda’s face and found the skin to be terrifyingly dry and hot. The wound was infected, Mrs. Potter was sure, and the child would have died soon from thirst, hunger, and infection.

  She quickly took off the backpack and lay its contents on the ground to her left, moving the flashlight over them as she worked. First, she twisted off the Thermos lid and held it gently to Linda’s lips, managing only to wet them at first. But then she maneuvered well enough to lift Linda’s head and lay it on her own lap so that she could slip a little water between the parched lips. Mrs. Potter stroked the girl’s head, murmuring the comforting endearments of a mother to a precious child. She would make Linda as comfortable as possible, she decided, try to get her to swallow some pain medicine, and more water, and then she would go as quickly as she could for assistance.…

  Now that she’d finally found her.…

  “Good work, patrona.”

  Mrs. Potter jumped at the sound of the voice at the mouth of the cave. She couldn’t see the face in the darkness, so she swung her flashlight around until she could.

  “Put that damn thing down,” Ken Ryerson said, and when she saw the gun in his hand, she did as he told her to do. Mrs. Potter lay the flashlight on the floor of the cave, so now all three of them were together in the darkness.

 
; “I led you right to her,” Mrs. Potter said sadly.

  “Yes. Too bad in a way. She’s hurt, isn’t she? Probably gored by the same javelina pigs that got Taco. If you hadn’t found her she’d have just died here without anybody ever knowing, and I wouldn’t have to do this.”

  Kill us, Mrs. Potter thought. That’s what he “has to do.”

  “Why did you have to do any of it, Ken?”

  “Ricardo found out I’ve been borrowin’ pastureland and equipment, even a few head of cattle to build up my own place. When the owners are away, the help will play.” Mrs. Potter heard, though she couldn’t see, the cynical smile on his face. She already knew all that he was saying, because the proof was in Ricardo’s pictures, but she didn’t say so. She didn’t say that she’d seen photos of cattle with Ken’s brand on them in the Amorys’ pastures, where he was using their grass to fatten his own livestock. She didn’t say that she’d seen a photo of a fancy air-conditioned tractor that she knew for a fact belonged to the Steinbachs being driven onto Ken’s property. She didn’t say that she’d seen hay being transported that she suspected Ricardo could have shown belonged to somebody else besides the man who was driving it down the roadway. Not all of the pictures had been taken from the air; some of them had been taken during those “random” drives around the valley that Ricardo had taken, with his granddaughter tailing him on Juanita’s instructions. Mrs. Potter didn’t say that what she’d seen had led her to come to the same conclusion that she suspected Ricardo had come to: Ken Ryerson was using his position of trust—of helping out around the valley, of overseeing ranches in their owners’ absences—to “borrow” his employers blind. Hay, equipment, pastureland, it all added up to great expenses for the owners and great savings for Ken Ryerson himself. No wonder the Amorys were going broke; they were probably the biggest victims of all, because they were the newest, the least knowledgeable, the most likely to take the advice of a trusted and experienced hired hand like Ken Ryerson. Anybody could be a rancher, Mrs. Potter thought, if he used other people’s land and equipment to do it!