Secret of Deadman's Coulee

by B. J Daniels

  Like her mother. And her grandmother.

  CARTER TOOK the small evidence bag Max Roswell handed him, his gaze locked on what was inside. “This was in the plane?”

  The hairbrush was small. A baby’s. The handle was yellow, the hair caught in the soft white bristles dark and resembling goose down.

  Carter looked from the brush to Max. “You aren’t trying to tell me that…”

  “There was a baby on board,” Max said as he took a seat across from Carter. “We also found what was left of a cloth diaper, a dirty cloth diaper.”

  Carter groaned. “The baby couldn’t have survived the crash.”

  “Depends on if the baby was strapped in some kind of carrying device. From the way the backseat belt was hooked up, I’d say the baby just might have been.” Max pulled another evidence bag from the plastic container and handed it across the desk to him.

  The small tube inside the bag was tarnished, but as Carter turned the bag in his fingers, he could still read what was printed on the bottom of the tube: Scarlet Red.

  “Lipstick?” he said, his attention shooting from the tarnished tube to Max. “You think there was a woman on board as well?” He tried to sound surprised, but all he could think about was the rhinestone pin and the story Eve had told him about finding it in the plane.

  “A woman and a baby,” Max said.

  Was it possible Eve was right about her grandmother being on the plane. But a baby? “You really think they could have survived? It was the middle of the winter, the closest ranch house miles away.”

  “I would imagine someone was meeting the plane,” Max said.

  “But there is no place to land in the Breaks—” Carter stopped, aware of Max’s focus on him.

  “The supposition is that the aircraft got off course,” Max said. “But not ten miles off course. This plane wasn’t headed for the Whitehorse airport.”

  Carter knew where Max was going with this and decided to beat him to the punch. “You think he was headed for the airstrip south of my family’s ranch? But in February?”

  “I checked. It was a mild winter. There wouldn’t have been much snow and when I flew over that old airstrip on the way here, I noticed that it’s along a ridgeline. Snow would probably blow off anyway. I would imagine that’s why your father and grandfather put the airstrip there to begin with, don’t you think?”

  Carter could say nothing as he recalled his conversation earlier with his father.

  “A snowstorm blew in late on the afternoon of February seven, 1975, a real blizzard,” Max was saying. “I think that’s when the plane went down. Missed the airstrip and ended up in that ravine.”

  “You’re sure it was February seven, 1975?”

  Max nodded. “I found a gas receipt stamped with that date. It was faded, but still legible.”

  Carter was having trouble breathing. He waited, afraid Max was about to tell him a Jackson had been flying that plane.

  “We found something else in the plane,” Max said, not sounding pleased to have to tell Carter this. “Evidence that drugs were being transported on the plane.”

  Drugs? Carter stared at Max, uncomprehending. A woman and baby and drugs were on the plane? No way was Eve’s grandmother involved in drugs. Nina Mae had always been outspoken, opinionated and danced to her own drummer, but she was straight-as-an-arrow moral. She wouldn’t abide drugs, let alone help transport and sell them.

  Nor would his father or grandfather be involved in running drugs.

  “Just because the plane might have been headed for my family’s airstrip doesn’t mean they were involved,” Carter said with more heat than needed.

  “No,” Max said. “It doesn’t. But it’s a good bet someone in your family knew the plane was planning to land there. I’m not saying they knew anything about the drugs. The woman and baby would have made good cover for bringing in the marijuana.” Max rose to his feet. “So it’s just a matter of finding out if the pilot and the woman and baby survived and where they are now.”

  Carter stared at the investigator. “You can’t seriously expect me to continue with this case. I’m too personally involved.”

  “Are you?” Max asked. “As you pointed out, we don’t know that your family knew anything about it.”

  “But even if that’s the case, there’s a good chance I know the people who are involved. If you’re right and someone was meeting the plane, the chances are it was someone local.”

  Max rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s any small town. I know you, Sheriff Jackson, by reputation. You’re not going to let personal feelings keep you from getting justice for that murdered man.”

  Carter wished he could be as sure of that as Max.

  “There’s some other evidence in the box you might want to take a look at,” Max said. “I’ll let you know what we find out about your victim once we get him to the lab.”

  EVE WENT HOME and changed into her paint clothes, determined to decide on a color for the living room. Right now she had three walls painted three different colors.

  The problem was, she couldn’t quit thinking about what her grandmother had said about her being adopted. It had been so strange to hear her grandmother say something that Eve had suspected since she was old enough to notice that she didn’t look like she belonged to this family.

  She opened the orange paint can and stared down at the semigloss. This house was never going to get painted. She had to know the truth. It’s why she’d come home. She’d had this stupid idea that her mother would be honest with her now that she was no longer a child.

  But her mother hadn’t been honest with her about anything. Not about Chester. Or Errol. Or the rhinestone pin.

  No, if Eve wanted to learn the truth, she’d have to do it on her own. She picked up the lid to the paint can, and hammered it back on. Changing out of her paint clothes, she dressed in the darkest clothing she had as the little voice in the back of her head tried unsuccessfully to talk her out of what she planned to do.

  What she needed was proof one way or the other—and not a birth certificate from her mother’s doctor. If Eve had been lied to all her life, then her mother wasn’t the only one who’d been in on it, she thought, as she drove back toward Whitehorse.

  It was late by the time she reached the city limits and late enough that there was hardly any traffic. The usual pickups in front of the bars along the main drag, but no cars near the small building that housed Dr. Holloway’s office.

  Eve made a pass through town. The sheriff’s patrol SUV was still parked in front of his office. She just hoped Dr. Holloway wasn’t working late as well.

  As she neared the doctor’s office building, she slowed. No lights on. There were no other lights on in the buildings around it. Everyone had gone home for the day.

  She parked three blocks away, picked up the cloth bag with the tools she would need and walked back to the doctor’s office building using the dark alleys. Whitehorse was only about ten blocks square to begin with, so it was a short walk.

  Dr. Holloway’s office was the only one in the small building. There were no outside lights in the rear. The alley was pitch-black and a minefield of mud puddles and toe-stubbing rocks. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face as she stumbled toward the rear of the building, feeling like the criminal she was about to become.

  She knew from all the times she’d come to Dr. Holloway’s as a child that the files were stored in the basement. Doc, as he was commonly known, had to be hugging seventy by now and hated computers so refused to have one in his office.

  Eve was surprised he hadn’t retired. But since he often took vegetables in lieu of cash for his services, maybe he couldn’t afford to retire.

  The back door was old, just like the lock. Eve stuck the crowbar between the jamb and the door and put her weight into it. The weathered wood cracked so loudly Eve feared the sheriff could hear it in his office blocks away.

  The door’s edge finally splintered, exposing the interior of the
lock. All she had to do was stick the screwdriver into the lock and turn.

  The door opened and she stepped inside, closing it behind her, tallying in her head the cost of a new door and lock, restitution for breaking and entering. Doc had always told her she was his favorite Bailey girl, although Eve suspected he said the same thing to each of her sisters.

  If she found what she suspected she would, there was more than a good chance Dr. Holloway wouldn’t press charges. Otherwise, she’d have to throw herself on the mercy of the court.

  Turning on the small penlight from her bag, she shone it down the stairs toward the basement door.

  She wasn’t surprised to find that the door to the basement was unlocked, but she was thankful.

  In the basement, she swung the small penlight beam around the room, looking for a window. There didn’t appear to be one so she turned on the light. The large room was full of boxes of nondrug medical supplies and boxes of who knows what. Doc got his drugs from the hospital so he kept little in the office. What few he did, he kept locked up in his safe upstairs.

  Eve didn’t see any medical records and for a moment feared he stored them elsewhere.

  At the back of the room she spotted another door, this one marked Archives.

  Hurrying to it, she tried the knob. Locked. She swore under her breath, that feeling of getting in deeper making her hesitate. In for a penny, in for a pound. Wasn’t that how it went?

  The lock on the archives room was a little harder to get open, but she finally managed to break it. She glanced at her watch, surprised twenty minutes had gone by.

  The archives room was musty and claustrophobic. As she stepped in, the door closed behind her, making her jump. She shoved at the door, terrified she’d just locked herself in.

  But the door swung open without any trouble. She gulped the not-great basement air, then propped the archives-room door open with one of the boxes and searched for a light. The moment she flipped the switch, the lightbulb made a popping sound and the room went dark.

  “Great.” Eve turned on her penlight again.

  The ceiling was low in there, the shelves and boxes stacked to the top. There were numerous rows of shelves with only a narrow walkway between each.

  As Eve moved deeper into the room, she noticed that there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the way the boxes had been arranged. “Would have been too easy to have filed them by last name,” she muttered to herself as she moved down the stacks.

  Apparently a number had been assigned to each patient. Eve swore again. Unless she had the codes, she’d never be able to find anything down here.

  But then she realized that at the very back, the patient files had been stored by year. She found the year of her birth, then narrowed it down to the month. February 1975.

  There was one huge box on the top shelf marked February 1975. She shone the light around, looking for something to stand on, and saw a small stool.

  Dragging it over, she put the end of the penlight between her teeth and climbed up to pull down the box.

  The box was heavier than it looked and she almost toppled off the stool. She dropped it. The box hit the floor hard, tipped and dumped a dozen files onto the cold concrete.

  She thought she heard a sound overhead and froze, listening. She could hear the steady drip of a faucet somewhere overhead, but nothing else.

  Hurry.

  She scurried to pick up the files, using the penlight to search for her name or her mother’s among them.

  No Eve Bailey. But she saw one for Nina Mae Cross. Treatment for a broken leg. Her grandmother had broken her leg? Eve had never heard anything about that. Then Eve saw the date on her grandmother’s medical record. February 7, 1975. The same date the plane had crashed in the Breaks? The time on the report was eleven at night! She scanned Doc’s scrawl. Apparently it had been a hairline fracture. He’d splinted the leg at her grandmother’s house.

  Eve stared at the report. Did this mean what she thought it did? That her grandmother had broken her leg in the plane crash? But then Nina Mae wouldn’t have been able to get out. Unless she’d broken it later, after she’d gotten out of the plane and the ravine.

  Eve put the file aside, determined to find one of her own. That’s when she saw a file for Mrs. Chester Bailey.

  Eve opened the file and scanned it. The word “infertility” leaped out at her. She slowed to read as best she could what Dr. Holloway had written in his illegible scrawl. Apparently Lila and Chester had been trying to get pregnant, but with no luck. Doc had suggested infertility testing. Lila said she would talk to Chester.

  Eve double-checked the date on the box, her heart pounding. Maybe the doctor’s visit had been misfiled. If her mother had given birth to her February 5, 1975, then she wouldn’t have been talking to the doctor about infertility tests any time in February of that year.

  The office visit was February 2, 1975. She stared at it, knowing she shouldn’t have been surprised, let alone stunned.

  Her mother had lied. Eve didn’t want to believe that her mother had lied to her again. How many secrets did her mother have, anyway?

  Eve clutched the file to her. She finally had proof. With this staring her in the face, her mother would have to tell her the truth now.

  Eve thought she would feel more elated than she did. She’d been right. But instead of elation, she felt numb. She really wasn’t the child of Chester and Lila Bailey. No wonder she’d always felt different. Incomplete. Never felt as if she belonged. So who did she belong to?

  She set the file down on the floor and reached to pick up the box to put it back. It was too heavy. She was going to have to leave it. It wasn’t as if the doctor wouldn’t know someone had been here, given that she’d destroyed two of his locks. She planned to call him in the morning, anyway. With the file, she thought she finally might be able to get the truth one way or another. It hadn’t slipped her mind that Dr. Holloway had signed her birth certificate which attested that she’d been born to Lila and Chester Bailey on February 5, 1975. Doc had been in on the cover-up. But why? Why hadn’t they just told her she was adopted? It made no sense.

  Eve couldn’t wait to show her mother the doctor’s file. Too bad her mother was at a funeral in Great Falls. Eve would have to wait until Lila Bailey returned.

  She had started out the archives door when she heard a thud overhead. No mistaking it for a leaky faucet. Someone was up there.

  Eve hurriedly turned off the light and tiptoed up the stairs to the back door. She could hear someone headed toward the back of the building. Any moment the door from upstairs would open and she would be seen.

  She couldn’t get caught. Not with the file. There was no way whoever was coming would let her take this confidential file. And she feared the file might disappear. Her first real evidence.

  She ran for the back door just as the door from upstairs opened in a rush. All she saw was a large dark shape. He lunged for her. Without thinking of the consequences, she swung her sack of tools, catching him in the jaw. He missed the bottom step, thrown off by the blow, and tumbled down the short stretch of basement stairs to crash into a stack of cardboard boxes. She caught the smell of aftershave.

  Eve flipped on the light, afraid she’d killed Doc Holloway, although it wasn’t his usual brand of aftershave. But it wasn’t Doc who looked up at her from where he’d landed on the floor.

  Bridger Duvall. The same man she’d seen coming out of her grandmother’s room at the nursing home.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lila Bailey had planned to be gone long before this. She stood at the window, staring out into the darkness. She’d only returned to the house to get some clothing. Unfortunately, her daughters’ plans had changed and both McKenna and Faith were there.

  Both girls had viewed her announcement with skepticism. Lila knew that they had discussed Loren Jackson’s earlier visit and didn’t believe her story about a funeral in Great Falls.

  “Mom, it’s too late to drive to Great Fa
lls tonight,” McKenna said as Faith came downstairs dressed for the dance they’d decided to go to in Whitehorse.

  “Whose funeral is it, anyway?” Faith asked.

  “A woman doctor friend,” she said noncommittally. “You don’t know her. And I prefer driving at night. It’s cooler,” she said to McKenna. “I’ll be fine. You know when you girls are away at college I manage just fine on my own.”

  “Only because you choose to,” Faith said.

  “You don’t have to go to Great Falls alone,” McKenna said. “I could talk to Dad—”

  “No,” Lila said too sharply. “Thank you,” she said, softening her words. “But your father didn’t even know the woman and he has to work tomorrow.” She knew her daughters worried about her. She wished they wouldn’t. It only made it harder.

  “I know Dad would come back if you asked him,” McKenna said.

  Even if true, it was the last thing she wanted. “This is between me and Chester.”

  McKenna looked disappointed, maybe even a little hurt. Lila squeezed her hand and looked past her at Faith. Her youngest daughter’s expression chilled her to the bone.

  “She doesn’t want him back,” Faith said angrily. “She’s glad to be rid of him.” With that, Faith went out the front door, slamming it behind her.

  McKenna looked at her mother. “Is that true?”

  “Of course not. He’s your father. The last thing I want is a divorce.” Not even that was true.

  McKenna gave her a hug. “I know he loves you.”

  Lila could only nod.

  She stood for a long time after the girls left, listening to the emptiness of the house to the beat of her own heart like a drum. Or a ticking time bomb.

  She was just tired, she told herself as she headed for her bedroom to pack. Eve would show up next. She had to leave before that. She couldn’t face Eve. Not tonight.

  A warm wind billowed the curtains and she could smell the flowers the girls had planted outside her window. Tonight the sweet scent made her a little sick.

  The house was two stories, a huge rambling thing that had belonged to Chester’s family and been added on each generation. She’d loved the history in the worn wood floors, in the china that had been passed down for generations. All she’d ever wanted was to live in Old Town with the man she loved and have his children.