by Ann Myers
Dalia indulged my hypnosis attempt, shutting her eyes and pressing her palms together. “Yes, I can see him. He’s there,” she murmured. “In the garden. He asks us to sign his will. He’s brought a nice ink pen and says he’s getting paperwork in order. Has to set things right, he says. Has to make sure things are set right.”
She opened her eyes abruptly. “And that’s when I told him about the unfavorable celestial alignment, but he wouldn’t listen, and he refused a card reading too.” Her brow furrowed in vexation, which cleared rapidly. “Now, let’s poke around and look for that tarragon. It should be dormant right now, so no worries about anything dying.”
I shuddered at her words. The death of a pedigreed tarragon wasn’t what I was worried about. What had Victor meant about setting things straight? And where was this will?
Dalia made her way to the herb garden under Victor’s kitchen window. I followed. The raised beds, bordered by punched tin flashing, had overflowed with herbs and sugar-sweet cherry tomatoes in summer. Now, frost had withered most of the plants. Only a hardy, curly parsley stood up to the cold.
“Did you tell anyone else about this?” I asked.
Dalia, on her hands and knees, sniffed at frost-killed leaves. “I’m not one to gossip,” she said. She produced a spade from her pocket and aimed it at the earth. Herb pillaging, I suspected, had been her intent all along.
“Not gossip, but did you tell the police? Did anyone else see you signing the will?”
“Smell this,” Dalia said, holding up a clump of dried leaves in my direction. “Does that smell like oregano to you?”
I agreed that it did, and she rewarded me with a response. “I told the police, of course, when they came by. I thought they should know. It was that nice, fit policewoman and her sour little male partner. She said they’d search his place.”
Her description of Manny made me smile. I was also relieved that Bunny would be on the lookout for Victor’s will.
Dalia rummaged through some dead leaves. “Ah! There you are,” she said, addressing a leafless woody skeleton. “Don’t worry, my darling, I’ll take this little babe here . . .” She plunged her spade into the soil. “Perfect,” she said, holding up a twiggy stalk. “Now what were you asking me again?”
“Who else you told . . .”
Dalia flushed. “Okay, I confess, I came over here yesterday afternoon. I wanted to say a prayer to Victor’s aura. You and Gabriel were both out and I remembered the herb garden and started to look around. Well, it would be wrong to let his plants go unloved.” She had the grace to look sheepish. “That’s when I met Victor’s widow. Can you call an ex-wife that? I had no idea who she was at first. She came around from the back of the house with that yellow hair of hers and for a second I thought she was a spirit.”
If Jay-Jay was a spirit, she wasn’t a benevolent one. “She was in the house? In Victor’s house?”
Dalia shook her head in the negative. “That’s what she was after, Victor’s key. She said that this was her house now and she needed to get in. She waved some typewritten document at me, claiming it was Victor’s will. I’ll tell you, it made me break my anger-avoidance vow. I said that it wasn’t the will I witnessed and she shouldn’t be trespassing.” Dalia’s cheeks flared red. “I suppose I was trespassing too. Do you think I did the right thing?”
Had she done the right thing?
After Dalia left with the tarragon, I polished off two more brownies and chewed over the new information. Dalia had told me she thought Jay-Jay was surprised and angered by the news of another will. But where was the will? I had to find it before Jay-Jay did.
Buzzing from sugar and my spinning thoughts, I couldn’t stay locked in the cottage. I yearned to hug my daughter and share my new information with Flori and Cass, and I knew right where to find them all: Museum Hill, surrounded by skulls.
Chapter 25
I found Cass first. She stood at her display table in the museum foyer, demonstrating her amazing skill with a jeweler’s saw. In her hands, a tiny-toothed blade, barely half the width of angel-hair pasta, sliced through copper sheeting.
“See,” she said, holding out the resulting skull form to two admiring women. “Loose but firm grip, that’s the key. Let the saw do the work. Now, you pierce the interior with a drill to make the eyes and saw out the lines of the nose and cheekbones. Then buff the piece with the six grades of polishing I mentioned before. Forge it with a ball-peen hammer for a little texture, anneal with your torch, form some more for dimensionality, solder on a silver pin back, apply color with liver of sulfur or ammonium, wax, polish again, repeat the wax, buff . . .” Before she finished her list, both ladies were selecting premade pins to purchase.
“Good strategy,” I said after the women moved on.
“It’s all those DIY shows on TV,” Cass said, grinning at me. “People see a handmade item and think they can go ahead and make it themselves. Not that they can’t, of course. This skull pin is a few easy steps, like I told those ladies. Want to try?” She held out the saw.
The one time I attempted to use her tiny saw, I snapped three blades before moving it an inch. “Well . . .” I said, gamely taking the lightweight tool from her. What I wanted was to blurt out my new information. My silence gave me away.
Cass narrowed her eyes. “Something’s up, isn’t it? You’re not here for sawing demos and skulls. You look ready to burst.” Her expression turned to concern as I limped to her side of the table. “What happened?” she asked, pulling out a chair and demanding I sit in it. “You weren’t limping last night. Did you get hurt driving home? Did that man Broomer attack you? Parties are dangerous. We should never have gone. I knew it!”
Before Cass escalated her party-blaming, I broke in, starting with my first encounter with Tops and the ankle-spraining incident.
“You should have called,” my friend chastised, after I recounted twisting my ankle in the dark forest and the return trip with Linda. “And then you went looking for this creep again? You definitely should have called me.” She gripped a mallet in her hand, looking ready to defend me from the holiday shoppers.
“I had Linda as backup,” I said. “Did you know she carries a gun?”
Cass shuddered. “Hit the ground if she starts shooting. She and her sisters attended one of my soldering workshops once. Linda was so jumpy with the torch, she set a lamp on fire. A chandelier. To this day, I don’t know how she jumped that high.”
Cass’s torches could send me jumping for the ceiling, I thought, thinking also of Linda and her gun. She’d seemed pretty darned steady-handed back in the forest.
I was about to tell Cass about Victor’s will when a dozen ladies in red hats and purple shawls approached her table. They swarmed her ring display, gushing about the special skull rings and pendants she’d created for the event. I couldn’t keep her from her business.
“There’s more,” I promised. “A tip that Victor made a new will just a few months ago. Can you take a break for lunch?”
She looked at her watch. “I’m swapping lunch breaks with the lady at the next table. Maybe in an hour?”
“You pick the place.”
“Somewhere quiet, with no crowds or skeletons,” she requested.
Bones and crowds were unavoidable at the museum event. I went outside to the patio, where I spotted Celia holding a skull. Beside her stood Flori, bundled in her red coat, scarf, and hat. My daughter flashed me a smile as I approached. It was wonderful to see her happy, surrounded by art and appreciative buyers chipping away at her traffic ticket. Celia was busy talking up sugar skulls to a customer so I turned to Flori.
“Let me take over,” I said. “You can go inside and warm up.”
The fluffy scarf was wrapped over her nose, causing her glasses to fog. Although the temperature hovered in the high fifties, in high, dry Santa Fe under a sparkling sky, it
felt much warmer. That doesn’t matter to Flori. Once a weatherman utters a number below seventy degrees, she dresses for the Arctic.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded in a snappy tone I interpreted as concern. “I told you to stay home and rest.” Behind the foggy lenses, her dark eyes squinted into suspicion.
If Flori hadn’t heard about the police search for Tops, I thought, Mr. Hoffman must still be in the hospital. Only after Flori confirmed that her elderly friend was merely stuck in limbo waiting for a discharge doctor did I debrief her on my morning with Linda.
“Very interesting,” she said.
“Interesting?” I felt rather let down. Interesting was her array of painted sugar skulls or the neighboring booth’s skeleton dolls playing chess. The little food cart advertising chile-spiked chocolates was definitely interesting. I thought my adventure would count as “daring,” “brave,” or “exciting.”
“Very, very interesting,” Flori said, pressing her gloved fingertips together. “We may have a new prime suspect. Or a key witness, if your ex can manage to find him.”
I felt a bit more affirmed. “That’s not all.” I nodded for her to follow me to an unpopulated spot. I didn’t want anyone to overhear us talking about Victor’s will.
When I was done, she clapped her hands in relief. “Thank goodness. Victor surely came to his senses and got his priorities straight. This Dalton woman, she’s sure it was a will?”
“Dalia,” I corrected. Flori has the memory of an elephant for everything but names. “Yep, it was most certainly a will, witnessed about three months ago.” A new worry struck me. “I wonder if it’s valid? She said it was handwritten.”
Flori had her back to me and was looking out over a dry arroyo dotted with puffy pines and silvery sage. Somewhere in the hills to the north was Gloria’s mansion. Was Armida mixing up their bread of the dead dough right now? It was a wonder that Flori didn’t have her binoculars out.
“You get to be my age, you know the answer to that one,” she said. “Handwritten’s fine for a personal will, as long as witnesses see you sign it.”
“Jay-Jay must be worried,” I said.
Flori agreed. “From what I hear, she’s running around town saying she’s the heir to Victor’s estate. She’s waving around that old will too, saying she’s going to file it as soon as the probate courts open tomorrow. It would be her lifeline. Word is, she’s deep in the hole. Her house is up for sale and her business isn’t doing well either.”
“So, if there’s a new will, the old one wouldn’t be valid, right?”
Flori turned to me and pushed up her glasses. “Probably, but the new one has to be found first. We have to get into Victor’s place.”
She started talking about her lock-picking set, and I knew I had to come up with a new plan. Fortunately, I had a perfectly reasonable one, as I tried to explain to her. After lunch, I’d simply call Gabe and ask him to let us in. “Or you call Linda and ask her to ask him,” I said when Flori didn’t respond to my reasonableness.
In lieu of an answer, she elbowed me, not at all reasonably or gently. “Look at that!”
“Ouch! Look at what?” I looked around, seeing shoppers delighting in skulls and other death-themed art and trinkets.
“Over there, at our table. Look who Celia’s helping.”
My daughter was gesturing to the skulls like a Wheel of Fortune hostess turning over letters. Although the customer’s back was to me, I recognized the slim figure, the wispy strawberry-blond hair, and the air of arrogance. “Broomer!” I exclaimed. He turned sideways and, to my maternal eyes, looked more interested in Celia than the skulls. “That’s it! I’m going over there and run him off.”
“Wait!” Flori held me back. “Now this is interesting. Look who’s come to chat him up. Gloria the Cheater.”
Flori was right about the chatting-up. Gloria leaned on the edge of Flori’s table, her tight-skirted derriere perilously close to a stack of miniskulls. Her arms were tucked in close to her sides, bolstering her balance and her cleavage. Broomer said something and she threw back her head and laughed. Celia scowled from behind the table. That’s my girl, I thought, proudly. She can spot fakery when she sees it.
“She’s worse than Jay-Jay,” I muttered.
“Worse for me,” Flori agreed. “Rita, this is an emergency, what do you have on under that coat?”
I had on a sweater with a widening hole in the left armpit. If I took off my coat, my plan was to keep that arm down. This seemed a whole lot safer than doing the laundry to obtain a clean, non-holey sweater, and easier than darning the sweater.
I informed Flori that I was wearing my orange chenille sweater.
“That one with the hole in it?”
Clearly I’d overworn the sweater and forgotten to keep my arm down.
“That won’t work,” Flori declared. “What do you have on under it? Anything in the sexy lacy top category?”
“No.” I didn’t like where this was heading. “Why?”
“One of us needs to go outflirt Gloria,” Flori said. “Or trip her.”
Gloria was obnoxious, I agreed, but I told her I didn’t see why a flirty intervention was needed.
Flori pushed back her hood. “I’ll tell you why. According to my sister-in-law’s cousin’s niece, Mimi Davis got kicked off the Day of the Dead committee until she’s off probation for fixing parking tickets. Laurence Broomer is her interim replacement.”
I struggled to make sense of the sister-in-law’s cousin’s family branches and how one fixed parking tickets. Most of all, I couldn’t see why this would involve me flirting with a slimy murder suspect. Then I realized. “Wait, that’s the committee that judges the food contests, right?”
Flori glared at Broomer and Gloria. “That’s the one, and I know someone who’ll be awfully happy about this.” She assessed me again. “Too bad about that sweater. Is that what you had on when Jake showed up at your door this morning?”
“Yes. Along with sweatpants and a bag of frozen peas wrapped on my ankle.” I said this with defiance.
Flori chuckled. “You’re as stubborn as Linda when it comes to batting your eyelashes at handsome men, Rita. At least Linda’s being friendly to Gabe.” She grabbed my arm. “Come on. We have to do something about this.”
Gloria smiled when she saw us approaching.
“Rita, how nice to see you! You all ran off last night before the raffle. I put names in a hat and seven lucky winners got to taste my famous pan de muerto. I was telling Laurence that he was one of the lucky winners.”
“You’re not bribing a judge, are you?” Flori demanded, scowling behind her spectacles.
Gloria, towering in high-heeled boots, looked down at Flori. For her sake, I hoped she didn’t do anything foolish, like pat Flori on her pointed red hood. Flori has an elbow jab that goes straight for the gut.
“Now, Ms. Flori, there are no rules against sharing goodies with friends,” she drawled. “Especially those as discerning as Mr. Broomer.”
Broomer had spent this discussion glaring at me. I yearned to have an assertive drawl like Gloria’s. Manners, I’d tell him. Watch your staring and stop your glaring. I didn’t have Texan confidence or an accent, but that didn’t mean I’d let him intimidate me.
“So you left the party early last night, Mr. Broomer?” I asked. “Didn’t you notice all the police cars at Victor’s place last night?”
He snorted. “I noticed them. I noticed them this morning too when I was trying to meditate. You people are a nuisance. When I tear down that ugly coyote fence, I’m going to build a concrete wall to block out your noise.”
My heart clenched. “I won’t let you do that!”
“You, eh? You sound like Gabriel. What are you going to do? Tie yourself to a tree? My bulldozer guy can work around that. He likes a challenge.” H
e leaned in so close I could feel the heat of his breath. Remembering the night in the kitchen when he stalked by me, I shuddered. Throngs of people milled around, yet I felt vulnerable and alone.
Broomer leaned even closer, his lips at my ear. “You want to help? I won’t budge on the fence, but come by and visit my hot tub tonight and maybe I’ll put in a good word for your old friend’s bread.”
I froze, squeezed between Broomer and the table. No one else knew what he was saying. Gloria was yammering on to Flori about her cupcake prizes. Celia was plugged into her earphones. The latter was a relief. I certainly didn’t want her hearing him. What would someone like Gloria do in this situation? I wondered. She’d flirt right back, I thought, or throw a drink in his face. Tough Texan socialites probably carried around drinks specifically for throwing in lecherous men’s faces.
When I didn’t say anything, Broomer continued, a coyote’s grin on his face. “Interested, are you? Divorced ladies always are.”
Just then, red splattered across his face. For a horrible moment I thought he’d been shot. I tensed, ready to spring across the table and throw Celia to the ground.
My daughter looked up and said in a deadpan voice, “Ooops. Sorry dude, guess I squeezed this pastry bag too hard. My bad.”
Bright red icing oozed from the bag in her hand. Broomer wiped a hand across his face, smearing the icing. It clung to his wispy hair and stained his tan jacket all the way down to his pants. “Stupid kid! Watch what you’re doing,” he fumed, and stomped off toward the museum.
As he disappeared, I caught Celia’s eye and the faintest hint of a conspiratorial smile.
Chapter 26
Cass declared our lunch venue perfect. “Lovely,” she said as I relocked the front door of Tres Amigas.
It was lovely. Rays of sunlight glowed across the Saltillo tile floor and the air smelled intriguingly of baked goods.
Cass chose the bench seat by the fireplace and removed her leather boots. Stretching out her socked feet, she said, “I love it in here when no one’s around.”
