All of which meant nothing on that particular day, when his buyer had sent him word to stop next week’s shipment, and maybe the one after that, too. Leo felt sure that this was the beginning of the end. The news only compounded the soul-sickness he felt over the deaths of Carmen and Jimmie. He headed out into the chill morning to find Jorge. He didn’t know what he would say to Ronya.
He headed along the path to the clearing where Jorge ran his drum kiln, hoping to find him there. But the clearing was empty, and the fire was cold. Just as well, he thought, and turned down the path to Jorge’s house. He hadn’t gone far when something caught his eye a few feet into the woods: an orangey-red patch of disturbed soil. Something had been buried there, and it was the work of five minutes for Leo’s long arms and big hands to unearth it.
It took a moment for him to recognize the misshapen hunk of metal. It had been an aluminum briefcase before Jorge had crammed it in his kiln and tried to obliterate it. Leo knew that Adam Strahan had been looking for the dead woman’s briefcase ever since the fire. The whole settlement knew it. And anyone with half a brain knew that if Adam was looking for something stolen from a dead woman, then the odds were good that the thief was the one who had made her dead. Leo stalked through the woods and across Jorge’s back yard without troubling himself to use the footpath. Jorge met him in the driveway.
Leo hefted the chunk of aluminum and threw it at Jorge’s prized pickup. It bounced off, leaving a sizeable scrape in the metallic red paint job. Then he wrapped one raw-boned hand around Jorge’s neck and used the other hand to grab him under an armpit, lifting him up to his own eye level. “I would have never pegged you for evil, Jorge, but you killed a woman. You burned her to death, then you took…that. Why?”
Jorge’s red head sagged onto Leo’s hand. “I didn’t kill her, Leo. I didn’t do it.”
“Why should I believe that? Adam says somebody started that fire. He’s smart and he ain’t never learned how to lie. If somebody did it, then it might as well have been you.” He lifted Jorge higher, so that even the toes of his dangling boots didn’t touch the ground.
“I took the briefcase out of the burned-out building the day after the fire. I waited until the firemen went home, then I slipped under the yellow tape and took it.”
Leo dropped him to his feet, but he didn’t release his grip. “Tell me why you’d do something that stupid.”
“She had some potsherds in there. I saw them when she opened her briefcase at Hanahan’s the day before she died. I don’t know where she got ’em. Probably picked ’em up off the ground back behind the store. Some of them sherds were lustered. I just wanted to get rid of them, like the others. I didn’t think anybody’d notice.”
“Looks like you didn’t think at all.”
“I can’t risk losing the money! Can you?”
A shadow, tall and broad, spread its coolness on Leo’s back. He looked over his shoulder and saw Ronya standing behind him, her fists on her hips.
“The money’s already gone. They’ve found us out. It’s over—for better or worse, I’m not sure which. I’m sorry, Leo.”
“Don’t be,” said Leo, releasing Jorge’s throat. “In a way, I already knew.” In a few words, he told them about the buyer’s decision to pull out. Ronya, in her turn, told them how Faye Longchamp had put the pieces together—literally.
“Has she told anyone yet?” asked Leo, when she was finished.
“Not yet. She’s a good woman. I’m sorry I ever tried to cross her. We should have been friends.”
“Then we’ve got to get rid of the drum kiln and the merchandise we have on hand,” said Leo.
“Look what’s in front of your eyes!” Ronya pointed at the briefcase, lying by the truck. “We’ve been interfering with a murder investigation. Faye will tell them, and if she doesn’t, I will.”
“You’ll do no such thing. There’s got to be another way. Think of Zack!” Leo hardly recognized the woman in front of him. He had never noticed the frown lines running from her nostrils to her jaws. The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises. “Who’ll take care of him if we both go to jail?”
“I guess we should’ve thought of that before,” she said as she turned to walk away.
“No,” said Leo, determination showing in every inch of his weathered face. “We’ll think about it now. Jorge, get that truck of yours started up.”
***
Back at her office, Faye had only her unsettling thoughts for company. Joe was still nowhere to be found. Laurel was at the church, working with a student. And the other members of the project team were ensconced in their offices, doing whatever it is academics do.
She tried to cipher out who would have wanted Carmen dead. Was it one of Ronya’s co-conspirators, worried that Carmen would reveal their crime? Had Carmen uncovered the forgery ring? Or did she stumble onto something else? She had bounced around the settlement, talking to just about everybody.
What else might she have discovered? What was worth murdering for?
Faye turned to the interviews for guidance. Carmen had been in contact with all the conspirators shortly before her death, with the exception of Jorge. In her notes were documented conversations with Leo on October 26 and with both Jimmie and Irene on October 30. Also on November 5, the day of the fire, Carmen and Faye had gone together to talk to Ronya, before their uncomfortable visit to DeWayne and Kiki Montrose’s house. At the time, Ronya’s surliness had surprised her. Now she understood it. But what was DeWayne’s excuse? Ronya hadn’t mentioned him as one of her conspirators. DeWayne made an attractive suspect, but she could see no evidence pointing his way, other than his general bad attitude.
She wondered what Carmen’s colleagues knew about her last days. Bingham and Amory used another of Jenny’s converted storage rooms for office space, so Faye knocked on their door.
“I’ve been reviewing Carmen’s notes one last time,” she said. “Trying to get an idea of what she was doing in her last days. Do either of you know of any research she might have done, other than her interviews?”
Amory shook his head, but Bingham yanked open a file drawer and shuffled through his folders. “Yes. Yes, she and I talked the day before you arrived. I gave her a document that I found intriguing. It looked like an ordinary enough deed, but the marginal notes were fascinating.”
Faye went to his side. “I saw a mention of that in her interviews.”
“Yes. It seemed that two branches of a family were scuffling over a tract of land, and I wondered whether any stories about the conflict had survived in the oral tradition. She said she’d try and find out. I made her a photocopy, but here’s my original. Of course, it’s not the original. That’s in the library where I found it. But this is a very good copy.”
He handed her a legal-sized sheaf of paper. It was obvious that larger pieces of paper had been reduced in photocopying to fit the modern size. The first page was a will, with all the traditional declarations of the maker’s soundness of mind, that distributed the maker’s personal items between his two children. The second page was a map and a hand-written property description. Notes apparently written by several different people were scribbled in the margins. They had been faded and blurred by time and the limitations of the photocopier, but the gist seemed to be that everybody thought they’d gotten the short end of the stick when the property was divided.
The name of the will’s maker jangled in Faye’s head. Sam Leicester. There were no Leicesters in the settlement now.
“Why does the name Leicester make me think of Queen Elizabeth? The first one,” she mused aloud.
“Because she gave one of her favorite courtiers that particular earldom,” Bingham said. “Except you’re pronouncing it wrong, like an American—Lye-chester. The queen would have called her sweetheart the Earl of ‘Lester.’”
Faye hands tensed, nearly tearing the paper in two. The Lesters—also known as the Leicesters, apparently—had first settled in this
valley when people didn’t trouble themselves much with spelling anything consistently, even including their own names. Regaining her composure, she carefully smoothed the deed out, squinting in an effort to make out the details of the map. Amory handed her a magnifying glass.
“It’s dated 1845,” she said. “And take a look at this property description. The life of a property owner must have gotten a lot simpler when someone finally opened a land surveying business in these parts.”
She scanned the description quickly. Beginning on Leicester’s Hill at the source of Leicester’s Creek, travel downstream along the creekbed past the Leicester homestead until reaching the Injun mound that stands alongside said creek. Skirting the mound and the homestead so that they are contained within the property being surveyed, along with a fifty-foot right-of-way, travel due south until reaching Raccoon Branch and follow said branch upstream to the southeast corner of the fence marking the Leicester family cemetery. The source of Leicester’s Creek is visible by line-of-sight from this fencepost and the final boundary of the property deeded to Edwina traces this straight line. The remainder of my property shall pass to my daughter Mary Alice.
The map included the area of her new dig site, which was discouragingly far away from all the important landmarks like the family cemetery and the homestead, not to mention the mound she had heard so much about. Still, something didn’t add up. The description seemed to say that the mound and the homestead were both on the same property, but she knew from Amanda-Lynne and DeWayne that they were not. And if there was one discrepancy, there might be more. Wills were a good place to look to find out if there was money to be had anywhere, and, if so, where it had gone. And money was always a good motive for murder.
“Well, this’ll give me something to do with the rest of my day,” she told the two doctors. “I think I’ll take a trip to the property assessor’s office in Alcaskaki.”
***
Joe prowled from one of Faye’s haunts to another—from office to bunkhouse to Hanahan’s to excavation and back. He had something to tell her.
Adam had been so pleased when Joe brought him Jimmie’s cell phone. He would surely tell Faye the good news as soon as he saw her, but Joe wanted to get there first. Faye had been the one who knew that Joe could find it, and he planned to be the one who told her she was right.
Maybe she was with Brent, talking about medicine or genetics or world politics. Joe didn’t feel like interrupting such an intellectually high-powered discussion, so he decided to just lurk in the basement of the church where Brent ran his free clinic.
Twenty minutes passed with no sign of Faye, but the door to the left of Brent’s clinic opened and Laurel stepped out. She was leaning far forward, struggling to balance a torso weighted with an overstuffed backpack over her crutch tips.
Joe was incapable of letting this situation continue. He rushed to Laurel and stood in front of her, blocking her path. “You’re not going anywhere until you give me that backpack,” he said, holding out both hands.
Too smart to argue with him, Laurel leaned first on one crutch, then another, as she slipped the pack off her shoulders. “Come inside,” she said, turning back toward her office door. “I finished scoring your diagnostic tests and I want to show you the results.”
Joe would have preferred for her to say, “Come in here and wrestle this gator for me,” but he followed her, because she asked him so sweetly.
They sat beside each other at the table where she taught the children. Joe didn’t even try to force his knees under it. He just scooted his chair away from the table and cocked it back on two legs, like he did when he was nervous. Laurel spread several papers out in front of them, and every one of them was covered with tiny type that spelled out words like “auditory processing” and “dysgraphia” and “language-based learning disability.” This didn’t look good.
Laurel squinted her eyes at his face and swept the papers into a folder, tucking it into a desk drawer. “Never mind these,” she said. “What they tell me is that you are a very smart man whose brain is wired differently from other people’s brains.”
He let the chair’s front legs drop to the floor. “I don’t know much about the ‘very smart’ part, but I sure do know I’m wired different from regular people. Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Your eyes and ears don’t communicate with your brain the same way mine do. I’d guess you use a whole different part of your brain to do some things. Maybe that’s why you’re more aware of things like birdsong and weather signs than the rest of us, but letters and numbers make you nuts. We can work with that, Joe.”
“Sometimes I just feel so stupid.” Hell. He hadn’t really meant to speak of the hateful thing that nested so close to his heart.
“That word—‘stupid’—makes me angry. You’re an intelligent man with a fine mind. You can’t help being put together differently.”
“I can read quicker since you gave me this,” he said, reaching in his pocket for the piece of paper he used to cover the line of type underneath the one he was trying to read.
“I know some tricks that will help you with math, too.”
“I thought of you this morning when I was making biscuits,” he blurted.
She looked at him with a question on her calm little face, but she didn’t ask him what in the world he was blathering about.
“I needed to make a lot of biscuits to feed all those people, but I didn’t have quite four cups of flour,” he explained, “so I couldn’t multiply the other ingredients by four. I had to figure out how much shortening to use with three-and-two-thirds cups of flour, and how much milk. I’m not sure I did the math quite by the book, but the biscuits turned out all right.”
She smiled. “They were delicious. They didn’t even need butter. Would you show me how to make them sometime?”
“If you’ll let me take you to a movie.” Joe was flabbergasted to hear the words come out of his mouth. He didn’t even know if Alcaskaki had a movie theater.
“I’d love that. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Is that good for you?”
Joe had been thinking of that very night, but he could probably use the extra twenty-four hours to locate the nearest theater. It had also occurred to him that neither he nor Laurel had a car and that he, himself, didn’t even have a driver’s license. Perhaps the extra day would give him time to figure out a way to get them both to Alcaskaki while still retaining his dignity. There was no way he was going to ask Faye for a ride.
Laurel put her left palm on the table, pushing herself toward a standing position as she reached for her crutches. She kept her eyes on Joe, rather than looking at what she was doing, and her fingertips barely brushed their metal shafts. Both crutches clattered to the floor. Laurel, thrown off-balance, nearly went with them, but Joe stretched out a hand and grasped her by the waist.
She clenched her fists. “Oh, what a stupid thing to do. I—”
“I thought that word ‘stupid’ made you angry. You can’t help it if your feet are crooked, and I can’t help it if my brain’s wired up wrong. We do the best we can.”
She looked up at him with eyes as innocent as a fawn’s. He had no choice but to lean down and kiss her. Her breath was as fresh as a sea breeze playing through the trees of his island home on Joyeuse.
Chapter Twenty-five
It wasn’t the first time that Faye had found a treasure buried in public records, and it wasn’t the first time that she’d looked around a shabby county office and wondered what skeletons would turn up if somebody took the time to go through every last file, page by page. But she had a specific task at hand that afternoon.
The clerk had located what she was looking for with only the usual amount of talk and flourish. Faye sat now at a small desk alone with her findings. Attached to the deeds for Amanda-Lynne’s and DeWayne’s properties were identical photocopies of Sam Leicester’s will. At the bottom of both copies was a gorgeous nineteenth-century signature. T
oday’s stylishly illegible signatures would not have gone over well in those days, when the ability to write was a mark of breeding.
The distinctive curl of Mr. Leicester’s capital “L” caught her eye. Patting herself on the back for remembering to bring a magnifying glass, she admired the man’s penmanship for a moment before recognizing the obvious. This signature didn’t match the one on the will she’d gotten from Dr. Bingham.
She laid the three wills side by side: Bingham’s version, Amanda-Lynne’s copy, and DeWayne’s copy. The differences were subtle but real. Bingham’s photocopy was different from the other two, but that wasn’t so surprising for a document written by a man without access to a photocopier or carbon paper. He had probably written out several copies of his will—one for his records, one for each of the children, and one for the court that would settle his estate. Faye steeled herself to do a line-by-line comparison.
The first page tracked perfectly. The same words were on the same lines. At first glance, they were nearly as alike as photostatic copies, until Faye’s magnifying glass teased out the inconsistencies that were the hallmark of anything made by a human hand.
The second page, however, was a different matter. The handwriting on Bingham’s copy took up more of the page, which seemed unlikely since it said the same thing, word for word. Or it should have. Shifting her magnifier back and forth between the pages, she quickly determined what part of the text was missing. All references to the “Injun” mound, the homestead, and the cemetery had been removed. Instead, the reader was instructed to Begin at the source of Leicester’s Creek, travel downstream three hundred feet, then travel due south until reaching Raccoon Branch.
Faye pondered the consequences of removing all references to landmarks other than bodies of running water, which were notorious for changing their course. This could explain why Amanda-Lynne and DeWayne both thought that the property line ran between the homestead site and the mound, when one of the original wills clearly stated that it didn’t. The current property boundaries were almost certainly wrong.
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