“And how can a decision to become deputy sheriffs be accidental?”
“Well, when I was working for the historical society and collecting family histories, I needed access to criminal databases to solve a murder quickly before a young man’s political career was ruined. Then later, when I became an undersheriff, Keith became a deputy to protect me. He was afraid I’d get hurt.”
Her large gray eyes widened. “And you both stayed in why?”
“I’ve stayed in just long enough to see a case through,” Keith said. “I didn’t want to abandon Sam. Or my daredevil wife here.” He shot me his look. “We had just finished recruiting enough reserve deputies to put the department on a sensible schedule, until Victor Diaz’s murder.”
“I understand Sam Abbot is seventy-six?”
“Yes, but don’t underestimate him. He’s the sharpest law officer around anywhere. He can no longer win footraces, that’s all.” I was always quick to set people straight about Sam’s abilities. “The KBI got involved immediately this time, though, so we will soon wind up our responsibilities in the investigation.”
“Good. It’s best to stay away from that family.”
“Why?” Zola was not a gossip, and consequently, I put a lot of stock in any information she passed on.
“They are so unhappy. It’s like a curse that hangs over them. They’ve all been quarrelling forever. I mean forever.”
“Over what?’
“Same thing everyone quarrels over out here. Land.”
“If I stayed away from families angry over landownership in Western Kansas, I would have to reconcile myself to a life of isolation.”
“The Diaz family’s lawsuit is different. Truly. It’s gone on forever. Suing and countersuing.”
“Over land?” Keith asked.
“I don’t know all the ins and outs.” She went to a cabinet, found a vase, and began arranging the marigolds before she continued. “Have either of you read Dickens’ Bleak House?”
“No.” I couldn’t imagine what an old English novel had to do with a man murdered in the twenty-first century.
“At the heart of the book is a legal case that went on for generations. Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. Same thing with the Diaz family. I hear they have all been suing each other or the government for time out of mind. My grandfather said things would start to die down, then some cousin would rile them up again.”
Keith was all ears. Then he glanced at his watch. “Guess we’d better start worming cattle,” he said reluctantly. I knew he would rather be in town telling Sam about this latest bit of information.
“Do you have everything under control for this weekend?” Zola was heading for the back door. “Anything extra I should be thinking about?”
“Just one thing. Keith and I want you to come as a member of the family. We insist. After the kids start arriving, you are not to turn a hand.” I smiled. “Let the girls take over. Needless to say, I’ll run you ragged until then.”
“With pleasure!”
“I’ll take over for Sam at about two.” I called after them. “What about lunch?”
“Don’t bother,” Keith said. “We’ll grab some sandwiches. You need to focus on anything the KBI discovers.”
Zola really was part of our family now, I thought as I went upstairs and changed into my summer uniform of a blue short-sleeved shirt and knee-length twill shorts. But things were a bit complicated between Zola and Keith’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth.
Zola and Elizabeth. Godzilla versus Tyrannosaurus Rex. Should make for a fun weekend.
Zola had majored in archeology at Montana State University. But after graduation, she answered an ad seeking a property manager for the estate of a wealthy film family. She left for California at once and landed the job. One day after she started working for me, she drove up in a brand new van and when I stood there admiring it, she said she was paying for it through her royalties.
She laughed at my astonished look, then explained that she had created a comprehensive checklist of estate managing techniques, organized all her routines, then wrote a book. It was exquisitely detailed down to applying the right fertilizer for irises, and the right way to polish silver.
It became an immediate best seller among a rather elite circle of readers. Frustrated actors and directors now had a tool by which they could judge the competence of their help. Zola’s Way was the bible for property management.
I’d never asked her why she hadn’t applied her degree in archeology to more lofty employment, but Elizabeth did. My ste-daughter was immediately suspicious that any woman with a superior education would stoop to doing the kind of work most people considered blue-collar.
Elizabeth hadn’t phrased it quite that blatantly, but she could have and usually did. Zola crisply informed Elizabeth that she was doing the work she loved, and that she found digging for bones under a hot sun quite boring.
When Keith married me—a woman twenty years younger—Elizabeth didn’t hold back her outrage. Of Keith’s four children, she is the only one who has not overcome negative feelings toward me. She sometimes refers to herself as “the suicide’s daughter” like she’s contaminated with defective genes. I think she hopes—prays—the wind and the isolation out here will get to me, too, but all her yearning is misspent.
For a historian, Kansas is the mother lode, and for someone who lives in Western Kansas, it’s paradise. No one else wants to write about this region of the state, yet it’s filled with enough people and stories to fill a million books.
So I gritted my teeth. No, darling stepdaughter, I’m staying. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. And yet sometimes I find myself loving the contradictions of Elizabeth, this turbo-charged girl, whose own education as a lawyer is not used to convict corporate scoundrels but to tackle horrendous women’s issues.
All of Keith’s children would be home for the Fourth of July parade. It was Gateway City’s biggest event. Keith and I have been married eight years and although my sister Josie had been around Keith’s three daughters, Elizabeth, Bettina, and Angie, her exposure to his only son, Tom, consisted of a hasty “hello, pleased to meet you” when he had been passing through.
Tom is a geologist who spends a lot of time overseas searching for oil. He’s an independent contractor and if there ever were an adored older brother, he’s it! His three sisters flock around him like they’ve never heard of women’s lib. They court his approval by bringing him beers, baking him cookies. If darning socks were still in vogue, they would do it.
The first time he showed up after Keith and I were married, we both stopped in our tracks and stood studying each other. He’s the second-born after Elizabeth and only a couple of years younger than I. For an instant, I thought he looked like a red-headed reincarnation of the ill-fated movie star, Jimmy Dean. Tom had stood at the edge of the patio door, carrying a duffel bag and his guitar case. I’d heard all about him. It was Tom this, and Tom that. I knew he had Keith’s musical ability and also his father’s carefulness. But his pictures couldn’t capture the something else. A winsome achy-breaky heart that came from what I knew about his mother’s legacy.
Although any mention of Keith’s first wife’s death was taboo, once in a while her life comes up in the form of “Mom used to string popcorn for our Christmas tree…. Mom used to braid my hair…. Mom used to embroider. Have you seen her handwork?”
It would have been unthinkable to live anyplace but Fiene’s Folly—as our homestead is called—but after so many “mom used to’s,” one night I fled to the patio. Keith followed and put his arms around me and patted me like I was an injured little animal. He didn’t speak and I didn’t explain. I sat there seething until I got a grip.
But it was only through Tom that I had a glimpse of this hidden side of Regina. Tom and the few paintings she had actually finished. She had a unique style yet one reminiscent of impressionists. Tom
was an engineer grounded in science, but there was a brooding quality about him that unsettled women. Made them want to fix him.
He bought things at variance with the Fiene family’s behavior. Just because he could, I suspected. There was a bright red Corvette carefully housed in one of the machine sheds. Keith didn’t hold with show, so his son’s extravagance surely hadn’t set well with him.
When Tom first uncased his guitar I gasped at the intricate veneer and the mother-of-pearl inlays. Team that blatantly showy instrument with rundown boots, jeans that were not fake torn and dirty but came by their wear the hard way, and you have one complex human being. Outwardly, Tom was funny, witty, whereas Keith was solemn, a problem-solver and a worrier.
I supposed I owed it to Josie to call and tell her that this weekend might be a little stressful. She needed to know that while neither Keith nor I would be officially on duty, we were still on call in case of emergency and she might have to fend for herself among the siblings.
But I was in no mood to be lectured by my disapproving Eastern Kansas twin.
Josie is a registered consultant for our tiny county and had become involved with more crimes in Carlton County than most large towns experience per capita in a year. She didn’t hesitate to remind Keith and me about the toll stress was taking on our lives.
In the beginning, my sister had not been in favor of my marriage. To put it mildly. But last spring she had a change of heart. Her acceptance of Keith came because both are incredible musicians. Tolerating Kansas, the land, the prairie was harder. The wind, the emptiness came harder yet. Her adjustment was helped along by Tosca, who was Mistress of the Universe out here and She Who Must Be Obeyed to the zillions of rabbits who lived in our windbreak.
Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, the horror of another murder to deal with, or the challenge of dealing with a collection of difficult personalities, but the thought of Josie meeting Tom made my stomach roil.
Chapter Five
Wednesday morning I was back in the historical society office taking advantage of the peace and quiet to lay out pages. Our office manager, Margaret Atkinson, had taken a well-deserved day off. It was pleasant to work when there was no one else around. Last spring all of the Fiene family’s systems had undergone a major upheaval. The first move had been to hire Zola. The second step was to put Margaret in charge of organizing everything but the county history books. She now kept track of volunteers, ordered the supplies, did the bookwork, and helped with research requests.
When I let Margaret start bossing people around she stopped criticizing everything I did. We had even managed to come up with enough money for her to have her own part-time secretary. The hired girl was still in high school and couldn’t spell “cat” without using Spellcheck, but Margaret gained a new spring in her step after she was able to drop “my secretary” into conversations.
As I cut and pasted stories and inserted little newspaper clippings for fillers, I suddenly realized we had no immigrant stories in our books. How had I been that unaware? Victor Diaz’s death had set me thinking about the impact of groups coming into Carlton County.
Inspired, I began a time line of events. Carlton County was organized in the 1880s. There had been a bitter county seat fight as there was in over half the counties in Kansas. However, there had been no bloodshed—just an exchange of inflammatory rhetoric among newspaper editors. The biggest issue had been the location of the county seat, because there were only two surefire ways to create lasting towns on the prairie: attract a railroad, or establish a town as the county seat.
Restless, I got up, walked outside into the hall, and gazed out the window at the end of the corridor. Below stretched a patchy carpet of drying grass. My office is technically a windowless vault once used to store old county records. In summer, the door is open to the main air-conditioned part of the courthouse, and with the help of a strategically placed fan, enough cold air filters in to keep the room comfortable.
Back at my desk, I loaded microfilm and started at the county’s beginning. There had been five towns vying for the county seat and one of the critical issues was a good water supply. Digging a well was a terrible ordeal and a regular cause of accidental deaths. Wells were dug by hand. Sometimes men died from the deadly methane gas at the bottom, or the sides collapsed, or rocks became dislodged and crushed their heads. That is if they knew where water was to begin with. And there was only one way for pioneers to find out. A sure and revered method.
They used someone who could witch wells.
Wells. Still a charged issue out here.
At the beginning of summer, my very scientific husband wanted to drill a new well to water his cattle. He had hired a geologist who traced all the logical water sources and picked the most likely spot. The only question was the drill depth before he found water.
The evening before the drilling team was to arrive, I had been sitting on the patio reading, when an ancient pickup rattled up our lane. Keith was working in the machine shed. He hollered a hello and wiped his greasy hands on a shop rag, then walked over to the vehicle. An old man climbed out, along with the ugliest brown-furred three-legged mongrel dog I had ever seen. I stared. I knew who this man was.
Old Man Snyder.
Last spring, he blew my gifted twin sister out of a fiddle contest. She hadn’t thought it possible. I used my research skills to dig up what I could about him. He lived alone on a hardscrabble farm with land that didn’t look like it could produce enough to feed a chicken during its best years. Since childhood he had been tugged away from work by fiddles and footsteps. Deep down, I wondered if he hadn’t chosen the best life of all. He went where he pleased and showed up when he’d a mind to and the Gods of Commerce stopped in his presence. He floated above our lives, dipping, swaying, and playing that old wrecked fiddle.
He and Keith walked over to the geologist’s well site. Keith gestured and waved at the equipment already in place. The old man nodded and went back to his pickup and took out a little forked tree branch and carried it over to the site. Then he grasped the two sides of the branch with the single prong in front and began to walk back and forth.
He shook his head. Keith threw up his hands.
Then Snyder moved further away from the geologist’s spot. The stick suddenly dove toward the ground. Keith shoved a stake into the spot and tied a bandana around it. He took out his wallet and peeled off some bills. The old man took the money, shook Keith’s hand, and whistled to his dog who obediently jumped onto the bed of the pickup.
Snyder spotted me and lifted his battered old fedora in acknowledgment, then off he drove.
“What was that all about? ” I asked, when Keith came in for supper.
He looked sheepish. “Old Man Snyder can witch.”
“Witch?”
“Water,” he said. “Some people can find water.”
“How?”
“They use a willow stick. For some folks if they hold onto a forked willow branch with both hands and walk out, the stick just naturally turns down over water.”
“And we paid a thousand dollars to a geologist, why? And you gave Old Man Snyder how much?”
“One hundred dollars.”
“And that stick he put in the ground is supposed to be where we can find water?”
His mouth quirked into his little half-smile. “Pass the mashed potatoes.”
I couldn’t. I excused myself from the table and went into the bathroom, laughed until I cried, then composed myself. When I came out, Keith looked at me as though I were a misbehaving child.
“Don’t believe in well witching do you?”
“Ahem. Well, I’ve never heard of it and your believing in it just surprised me.”
“How do you think early settlers found water, Lottie? They couldn’t just dig a hole and expect water to bubble up.”
That stopped me. “I guess I’ve never stopped to t
hink how. From a historical standpoint, I’ve cared more about who found water, not how.”
“Well, witching is the how.”
“But now? Surely there’s a better way? Something more reliable?”
“There is. That’s why I hired a geologist. But scientists don’t know everything.”
“Hey, that’s my line.” In fact, it was nearly always Keith who resorted to stone-cold logic.
But the better way wasn’t. Two days later, the drilling teams sank a dry hole, and Keith asked them to try again before they left. He led the men over to the little red flag and they set up their equipment one more time, and struck water at a depth of about twenty-five feet.
I sensed there was some sort of weird connection between this old man’s affinity for music and his ability to witch water.
“Oh boy,” I whispered. “I absolutely, positively, do not believe anyone has the ability to witch water.”
Taking myself in hand, I consulted the few notes on my time line, beginning with the county’s first failed water well, then the decision to relocate Gateway City to lower ground where a well was dug at a reasonable depth.
I thought about Old Man Snyder as I read about the furious attempts to dig a well for the Carlton County seat. It was never stated, but a well witcher had surely been brought in.
I glanced at my time line and jotted down locating the water well as an important event in county history. Then I began to focus in earnest on the arrival of immigrants. Western Kansas had usually been settled in colonies. The state’s reputation as The Great American Desert was enough to keep all but the hardiest of souls away. The English, Zola’s people, didn’t last long as a group.
They were followed by the Volga Germans—Germans from Russia. Keith’s people. They were ideally suited for the prairie. When they arrived and stepped off the trains, they took one look at its expanse. It was just like Siberia.
Hidden Heritage Page 4
