Pecos Valley Rainbow

by Alice Duncan

  “Criminy.” I think Phil bowed his head, although it was really too dark to tell for sure. “What I mean is that the man might have been betting on the horses and didn’t want his family to know about it.”

  “Do we have a racetrack in town?” If we did, I sure hadn’t heard about it, and a racetrack sounded too large a thing to hide in so flat a place as Rosedale. I mean, it wasn’t as if we had hills and dales. All we had was flat land, scrub brush, poisonous snakes, prickly plants and insects and heat. Except when the weather got cold, as it was that night. Morning. Whatever it was by that time.

  “No, but there’s one in Juarez, and I know guys who bet on the ponies there.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do they bet on horses in Mexico if they live in Rosedale?”

  “Have you ever heard of a telephone or a cable, Annabelle Blue? Christ, I can’t believe you sometimes! You’re going to get the both of us killed one day with your blasted investigations.”

  It was my turn to bow my head, only in shame. “I’m sorry, Phil. I honestly don’t like to make you go out of your way to help me.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  Very well, he didn’t believe me. Can’t say as I blamed him. It did seem as though I was forever finagling him into doing things he didn’t want to do.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, meaning it. “I don’t want to get mixed up in stuff like this, you know. But Phil, if we don’t do something to clear Richard’s name—”

  “I know,” he said harshly. “You don’t want your brother-in-law arrested for murder. Everyone knows you don’t want your brother-in-law arrested for murder. But most people are willing to allow the coppers to do their jobs and don’t think they know more than the police, for crumb’s sake. It’s not as if Chief Vickers has pointed his finger at your brother-in-law and said he’s the only suspect around. He’s looking at other people too, you know.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, my aunt Fanny! You know it’s true.”

  Oh, my. “But you found something they missed,” I pointed out.

  “You don’t know that. For all you know, they found that very same folder, looked inside it, and decided its contents weren’t worth their time.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “Christ.”

  We didn’t talk again until we got to my place. Then Phil left me to make my own way from the store to the house while he stomped off to his brother’s house. Although he wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told him, I loved him very much in that instant.

  My luck, if luck it was, held, and none of my family members heard me sneak back into the house. When I got to my bedroom, I heaved a sigh of relief, glanced at my bedside clock, noticed that it was one-thirty in the morning, and decided to look at the contents of the folder at work the next day. Or that day, I mean. I shoved it under my mattress where I’d shoved the note earlier, took off my clothes in the freezing-cold room, flung my flannel nightgown on, kept on my woolen socks, and snuggled under several quilts. I thought I’d be too wound up to sleep, but I think I was asleep in maybe a minute and a half.

  When Ma tapped on my door at six-thirty that morning, I groaned. I wanted to sleep for another day or so. But I couldn’t. Therefore, I got myself up and dressed and out to the kitchen, where I ate the nice breakfast Ma had prepared for us all.

  Jack, as usual, was obnoxious. “Gee, Annabelle, you look tired. Did you and Phil go out again last night?”

  Darn him anyhow! Both of my parents squinted at me narrowly, and I knew they too were wondering the same thing. And I had, but I wasn’t about to let them know it.

  Scowling at my horror of a brother, I said, “Thanks, Jack. I had trouble sleeping, so I read and stayed up too late. No, I wasn’t out with Phil, thank you very much. You don’t look so great yourself.”

  “That’s enough, you two.”

  Ma was totally impartial when dishing out discipline. Most of the time I didn’t mind. That morning, I wanted somebody to slap Jack out of his chair and tell him it wasn’t nice to tell ladies they looked less than perfect. Not that I was a lady, as you’ve undoubtedly already figured out.

  Jack stuck his tongue out at me, but I ignored him and took a bite of scrambled eggs. Jack piled his eggs on a piece of buttered toast, slapped another piece of toast on top of the eggs, and ate his breakfast as a sandwich, with bacon on the side. Stupid child.

  “Annabelle, you’ll have to mind the store again today,” said Ma. “I have more preserving to do. I’ll be so glad when it’s all done.”

  “That’s fine, Ma. I’ll just take a couple of books with me for the dull moments.”

  “Wish I could read instead of going to school,” muttered Jack with his mouth full.

  Pa slapped him gently on the head. I’d been hoping for something of the sort, only harder. Oh, well. “Annabelle went through the twelfth grade, Jack Blue, and graduated from high school. She got better grades than you’re getting, too. She had good enough grades to get into college, in fact. She deserves to read when she doesn’t have work to do. You need to pick up your grades, young man.”

  Wow, that was a surprise. Pa had actually praised my scholastic achievement. Of course, he’d only done so in order to teach Jack a lesson, but I appreciated him for it. I had done well in school, so that was no lie. I kind of wished he’d left out the college part, since that was still a sore spot on my ego, but still . . . I wanted to stick my tongue out at my brother as he’d done to me, but naturally, being a semi-mature adult, I didn’t. I only made a face at him.

  “And don’t talk with your mouth full, Jack,” said Ma severely.

  Ha. Both parents were on my side—that morning, anyway.

  It was an exhausted Annabelle Blue who grabbed The Green Mummy, by Fergus Hume, and The House of the Whispering Pines, by Anna Katharine Green, and then lifted the mattress off her bed and slid a banker’s folder out from under it. I left the note from Herschel where it was, stuck the folder between the two books and headed for the store, calling out to Ma as I passed the kitchen. “Good luck with the preserving. What is it today?”

  Wiping her perspiring brow—although the weather remained cold out of doors, the kitchen had already steamed up from boiling water—she said, “More squash. I swear, I don’t think it will ever end.”

  “How are the pumpkins?” I asked, aiming for a casual note and feeling guilty about keeping my activities from my parents. That folder seemed mighty heavy to me that morning.

  “I think they’re going to be all right. The hail damaged a couple of them too badly to sell in the store for Thanksgiving, but the rest of them look good.”

  “Good. Well, see you.”

  I made my way to the store while poor Ma continued to steam in the kitchen. Boy, it was cold outside! I do believe the weather had dipped into the twenties overnight. November is an iffy month in Rosedale. Every now and then we’d get snow, but more often than not it was only windy, cold and bare, bare, bare. And then it would warm up and we’d bake for a few days before it got cold again. The only living green could be found some seventy miles west of us in the Sacramento Mountains, up near Lincoln, where Billy the Kid had made his name. Some name. Heck, speaking of Billy the Kid, Rosedale had once actually sported a hero of sorts. Pat Garrett had lived here a couple of decades after he’d rid the world of Billy, but then he’d been shot to death, too. Come to think of it, Rosedale and vicinity carried a reputation as iffy as the weather.

  But that doesn’t matter now, and it didn’t matter then. What mattered was that I had the folder somebody, probably Edgar Calhoun himself, had secreted in his home office, and I could hardly wait to find out what was inside it. Unfortunately for my wishes and wants, the store was busy that morning. It was getting on towards Thanksgiving, and folks came in for cans of cranberries so they could make cranberry sauce for their holiday meals. We had stacks of canned cranberries and even carried canned pumpkin, although most folks e
ither grew their own pumpkins and squash or bought either or both in order to make their pies. We had a whole pile of pumpkins outside on the boardwalk that morning. I presumed Ma and Pa had forced Jack to carry them out there and arrange them artistically before he went to school. They were pretty and colorful, making a nice contrast to the general beige color of the town and its buildings.

  The wind blew hard that day. I watched swirls and eddies of dirt from the windows as I walked back and forth, helping first one customer and then another with various demands. Lots of ladies came in for fabrics, including Mrs. Wilson. Ma always gave her a discount and told her not to pass it along to her customers, but Mrs. Wilson was such an upright, honest lady, I doubted that she took Ma’s advice.

  I felt sorry for Mrs. Wilson. At that time, she was probably about forty-five years old, but she looked a hundred and ten. That’s what a hard life will do for you, and if there’s a harder life than that of a widowed woman rearing a whole passel of children in a three-room house with the money she made as seamstress in Rosedale, New Mexico, I don’t know what it could be. She had a soft French accent, which was quite lovely. According to what her kids had told me, she’d come from Switzerland sometime in the 1880s. With a sigh, I measured some lovely light-blue georgette for her. It was one of the most expensive fabrics in the store, and Ma only stocked it because some of the wealthier ladies in town liked people to know what they were worth. Money-wise. Character-wise, they varied.

  “Who’s this going to be for?” I asked in order to make some kind of conversation.

  “Mrs. Shenkel. It’s for her daughter’s wedding.”

  “Oh, yes. I ran into Mae the other day, and she told me she was marrying.”

  “Yes, indeed. A happy time for the family come spring.”

  Yeah, maybe. However, Mae was different from me. She was so . . . well, not bright, that marriage was probably the best she could hope for out of life.

  Speaking of which, Mrs. Wilson’s oldest daughter, Marie, was attending college at that very moment. I guess she got a scholarship, because the good Lord knows Mrs. Wilson couldn’t afford to pay tuition at Missouri University. Probably Marie also had a job up there in Missouri. She’d always worked hard. Most of the Wilson children did. They had to. Perhaps I should have applied for a scholarship, but I hadn’t thought about it when it would have done me any good.

  “Here you go. Do you need any notions to go along with the fabric?”

  “I’ll take some mercerized thread in the same color, please, and some white bias tape.”

  Ma’s fabrics corner was very well organized, and we found Mrs. Wilson’s sewing notions in no time flat. Ma was a wonder with the ordering and stocking of merchandise for the store. For instance, she never bought a bolt of cloth without also thinking of the notions that might go with it.

  Mrs. Wilson paid her bill, from which I deducted the twenty-percent discount Ma always gave her, and I found myself saying the same thing Ma always said. “Don’t pass this discount along to Mrs. Shenkel, Mrs. Wilson. She can afford to pay full price.” Then I added on impulse, “And please help yourself to a pumpkin for your Thanksgiving dinner from the display on your way out.” What the heck. Ma wouldn’t mind, and a free pumpkin was a free pumpkin.

  To my utter astonishment, Mrs. Wilson smiled and patted my cheek. “You’re a good girl, Annabelle.”

  I was? Tell my folks that. Or Phil. I only said, “Thank you, Mrs. Wilson. Coming from you, the words mean a lot.”

  She hobbled out of the store—I think she had corns on her toes—and I wandered back to the counter, thinking to myself that if ever there was a good reason never to marry and have children, Mrs. Wilson’s story was it. I’d hoped to be able to glance inside the folder then, but Mrs. O’Dell and Mrs. Lovelady entered, and I had to wait on them. Before they left, more people walked into the store. Why the heck was everyone so eager to shop for groceries and dry goods that day, of all days?

  It was beginning to look as though I’d never have a chance to go through that wretched folder when a lull finally hit about eleven o’clock. I grabbed a pickle from the barrel and munched on it as I took the folder from where I’d stuffed it under the counter, along with the two books in case I had to plop them on top of the folder to hide what I was doing if a customer arrived. Then I sat myself on the high stool behind the counter, untied the tidy bow, unwound the string and opened the folder. Papers lay within, and I took them out in a clump.

  The first thing that struck me as I gazed at the top-most paper was that Mr. Calhoun was a meticulous record keeper. Columns of numbers, my least favorite things, met my eyes, and each column was as straight as a soldier standing at attention. My own personal columns generally head to the right or left of a paper unless the paper has lines to help me. Not Mr. Calhoun’s. They were as straight as straight could be. The headings at the beginning of the columns at first appeared extremely esoteric to yours truly: MT, GF, FM, RB, DC. Underneath the headings were what looked to be dollar amounts: 125.00, 2,500.00, 500.00, 75.00, 800.00.

  Whew! What did it all mean? Well, I imagined it meant that Mr. Calhoun had received certain sums of money from certain people, but who were the people and why were they giving Mr. Calhoun all that dough? I’d especially like to know who GF was and how he’d got his hands on twenty-five hundred dollars, a sum that boggled my mind. Also, where had Mr. C. stashed all the moola? It hadn’t been found at the bank or at his home—although, thanks to Gladys Calhoun, Phil hadn’t had the opportunity to grab more than the one folder. Maybe there was money concealed behind that ceiling plaster too. Or did Sadie Dobbs have some of the loot? All of it? Any of it?

  Could Mr. Calhoun have been blackmailing all those people? Good Lord, what a thought! Or . . . wait a minute. Perhaps these were private loans Mr. C. had made outside the bank. That made more sense. Kind of. Bother. I wished I knew more about financial matters.

  Placing that first paper under the stack, I looked at the second piece of paper and blinked. It was a handwritten note: “Damn you, Calhoun, if you don’t stop demanding money, I’ll tell the police what you’re doing. I don’t care what it costs me or my family.” Underneath the profane note, Mr. Calhoun had written in his precise script: “Bluff.”

  Shoot. Maybe he had been blackmailing folks in town. I didn’t know so many of Rosedale’s citizens had dark secrets they’d pay to keep covered up, but I was relatively innocent in the ways of the world. I didn’t like admitting it, even to myself.

  I slid that note underneath the rest of the pile and glanced at the third piece of paper. It contained more columns of figures, only with different initials heading the columns. Boring. Well, they were boring to me, but that’s only because I didn’t know what purpose the columns served or why the money had been paid or from whom it had come. Darn it, the only reason I’d gone through that awful man’s office, nearly being discovered in the process and scaring myself to death, was to find answers, not more questions!

  I looked at another piece of paper. This one was more interesting. In a different script from the first note I’d found, I read: “You don’t want to do this, Mr. Calhoun. Trust me. You don’t know with whom you’re dealing.” I stared at the writing, which was even more precise than Mr. Calhoun’s, straight up and down, tiny and spiky. Unusual, at least to my eyes.

  Beneath that note, Mr. Calhoun had written a snide “Sez you.”

  Hmm. I thought that particular note might be of real interest when viewed in light of Herschel Calhoun’s own note about mobsters. Could both Calhoun men have made the mistake of trying to blackmail a real, honest-to-goodness bad guy and managed to get themselves killed for their efforts? Plausible. Maybe even probable.

  It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder why Mr. Calhoun had kept the nasty notes. Then again, what could he have done with them? I suppose he could have burned them. Or torn them into shreds and tossed them into a wastepaper basket. But either of those options were iffy. A member of his family, or Betty Lou Jarvis, might h
ave wondered at him burning papers. And remember what happened in The Hound of the Baskervilles? The butler had been able to read a note even after it had been burned. Same went for tearing up stuff you didn’t want people to read. If something could be torn apart, it could be pasted back together again. If Mr. Calhoun was truly the crook I believed him to be, he probably figured it was safer to keep all his unwanted papers in one place until he could safely rid himself of them. Maybe he’d planned on taking the incriminating paperwork with him on his next trip out of town and burning everything in a convenient hotel fireplace.

  Why ever he’d kept the notes, I’d have to show all this stuff to Chief Vickers. He’d be mad as fire that I’d managed to find the folder and its contents, and I’d have to think of another lie to tell him about how I’d come to possess them. I sighed, thinking what a tangled web one wove when . . . well, you know the rest of it.

  Myrtle came in about then, and I plopped The Green Mummy on top of the Calhoun papers.

  “Hey, Annabelle. Whatcha doing?”

  “Hey, Myrtle. It’s been a busy morning. The store’s finally empty for a few minutes, so I thought I’d read until the next mob comes in.”

  “The drug store has been busy, too. I guess people are buying things for Thanksgiving.”

  “What would they be buying for Thanksgiving in a drug store?”

  She shrugged. “Perfume and powder from me. I don’t know about the rest of the store. So have you heard anything else about the Calhoun case?” She settled her elbows on the counter and leaned toward me. I slid the book aside, making sure the papers went with it, and leaned toward her. “Not a thing. I want to visit the chief again today and see if I can’t find out more about the case. He can’t still be thinking of Richard as a murderer. Shoot, the same person must have killed both Calhoun men, and why would Richard have killed Herschel?”

  “I’m sure Richard didn’t kill anybody, and I hope you’re right about it being one murderer. I don’t like to think there are two murderers cluttering up the town.”