Dead Broke

by Vannetta Chapman

  Tony nodded vigorously. “Exactly. Anyway, when Agatha was involved in that incident last year, it felt natural to step back into my old role as detective.”

  Henry didn’t have to ask. Tony offered a quick recap of the murder of Russell Dixon.

  “Now I’m tempted to do it again, in spite of the fact that I told Agatha we shouldn’t get involved. But if the Hunt PD won’t follow up on a solid lead...”

  He picked up the envelope, though he didn’t pull the pages out. Henry suspected he didn’t have to. He remembered well enough what he’d seen.

  “The boot print was good. They could have followed up on that...should have.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” The question popped out of Henry of its own volition.

  Now Tony turned to him, an embarrassed grin on his face. “I’ve put in some calls to local boot makers.”

  “Smart.”

  “There’s one more thing.” Now Tony sat forward and readjusted his cap against the mid-afternoon sun. “What’s really bothering me is that bullet. If it’s where your picture shows it is...”

  “Should we go and check?”

  Tony nodded, first slowly and then more vigorously. Finally he turned to Henry. “Are you game?”

  “Fish aren’t exactly biting.”

  “You don’t have a rod.”

  “Could be the problem.”

  “Take the kayak?”

  “Yes.” Henry realized he was curious. He didn’t question what he’d drawn, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were interpreting it correctly. If they found the bullet, and if it could lead the police to the murderer, it was worth an hour of his time.

  Fifteen minutes later they’d paddled across the river and climbed up the slope. The ground was still slick with mud from the rains the day before, but the crime scene tape was gone.

  “They finished up gathering evidence this morning,” Tony explained.

  It wasn’t hard to find the spot. If you’d known what you were looking for, it was easy enough to make out the outline of where Nathan King had died. Tony pulled out the drawing, and they stood there at the foot of Nathan’s outline and studied the picture.

  “Lots of trees.”

  “Probably why the property owner decided to use the goats. It’s hard to control vegetation along a slope and amongst trees. As you can see...” he pointed to a clump of brightly colored foliage—all with three leaves per cluster. “The poison ivy had become pretty thick in here.”

  “Not the best thing to have around large groups of young ones.”

  “Exactly.” Tony thrust the envelope and drawings into his hands. “Let me know if I get off course.”

  What followed felt like a child’s game to Henry. Two steps, move forward, three to the right. Now go straight. Left. No, back a step and left again. Surely he had played something similar as a child, and standing under the live oak trees on a beautiful November day, the memory made Henry smile. Even in the midst of a tragedy such as Nathan King’s death, there were bright moments, and Henry had found one.

  “Here it is,” Tony called.

  By the time Henry reached his side, Tony had pulled out his cell phone and taken a few pictures. Staring at the tree bark, Henry saw the end of something shiny—the end of a bullet, no doubt, though who could tell how long it had been there.

  Tony tapped a few buttons on his phone and waited.

  “We found the bullet. It was where Henry said it was, where he drew it.”

  Henry could make out the other man’s voice...argumentative and clipped.

  “I’m sending you the picture. If the perp was standing downhill from the victim, the bullet would have traveled through Nathan and up. The bullet would have traveled exactly where we found it.”

  He hung up on the call and pushed a few more buttons. Almost immediately his phone dinged and he received an answer. He typed in a reply and returned the phone to his pocket. “A forensic team is on their way.”

  Chapter Five

  Agatha had a busy afternoon. It was a little after lunch when she checked in Patsy and Linus Wright. They were recently retired, lived in Houston, and looking forward to some time in the “peace and quiet of the country,” as Linus put it. Agatha didn’t dare mention they’d just had a murder across the river. The Wrights would hear about it soon enough. No doubt Nathan’s death was the talk of the town, though one could barely call Hunt, Texas a town.

  Another hour passed as she finished early preparations for the evening’s dinner. Sometimes she cooked, other times Gina did, and occasionally they worked together in the kitchen which resulted in some excellent Southern Amish dishes. In fact, Gina kept insisting they should publish a cookbook. They could include fabulous pictures like a glass of sweet iced tea next to a piece of shoofly pie. Just the thought made Agatha’s blood sugar rise.

  They were going to have a rather full table for dinner with the Wrights, another couple still due to check in, plus the Hochstetlers, Henry and Emma, and possibly Tony. And what about Joey Troyer? Where was the young man? Who checked into a B&B, then never returned to stay there? She had the check he’d paid with in her desk drawer. Perhaps she should pull it out, look for a contact number, and give him a call.

  Then Fonzi brought a mouse into the mudroom, the sink in the kitchen backed up, and all thoughts of her missing guest vanished. The next hour passed consumed by the general bustle of running a B&B.

  Fortunately Emma had offered to help with dessert, though Gina protested that guests weren’t supposed to cook. “Isn’t that why you’re on vacation? So you can stop cooking for a few days?”

  Emma’s only reply was a laugh.

  It felt good to have three of them working in the main house. Gina cleaned with her customary vigor. Emma cooked, and Agatha checked in guests and responded to reservation requests. She had an old laptop as well as a landline in her office. Both were quite handy in the day-to-day running of a B&B. Most people stared in amazement when they saw the landline. Some even laughed! Agatha understood cell phones were more convenient, but she had no desire to carry a telephone around in the pocket of her apron.

  The B&B didn’t have electricity, but its solar power allowed them to charge various things—like the laptop. Of course, she’d sought and received approval from the bishop for both the laptop and the landline. They were only used for business, and she kept the phone ringer turned off so it wouldn’t be a constant interruption. It did, however, ring over to her answering machine.

  Since Englischers mainly used cell phones, it had become more difficult to actually find answering machines. Sometimes one could be found at a garage sale, which felt like stumbling upon treasure. In every community Agatha had visited, there had been phone shacks that were used by the Plain folk and those phone shacks always included an answering machine.

  Being busy on Wednesday morning helped Agatha push the question of Nathan’s murder to the back of her mind. It only intruded occasionally—as she paused to write out a list of suspects, when she saw the Hunt Police vehicles pass down the road, and when Henry trudged back from the river. He raised a hand to wave, and she thought the bottom of his pants looked wet. Had he been wading in the river?

  There was little traffic on the road as she swept the front porch and tidied the brightly covered cushions on the rocking chairs. She was proud of her little B&B, though she understood pride was a sin. Was it? Did the Bible say that? Or was it only that pride goes before a fall? She’d have to look that up.

  She decided to walk toward the road and dead-head the mums in the miniature horse trough she’d positioned next to her sign. The sign read Plain & Simple B&B, something Gina teased her about quite regularly. “As if the horse and buggy on the sign don’t provide adequate clues that you’re Amish.”

  She liked that about Gina. The woman was always practical and always able to see the humor in things, and she was straight shootin’ as Texans liked to say. Come to think of it, she’d seen Gina carry a shotgun and the woman probably
could shoot straight. Agatha pushed the memory away as Gina joined her in the little garden.

  “Becca called from her phone booth. Said you could come by any time this afternoon.”

  “Gut.”

  “Snooping around about Nathan?”

  “I am not.” One look at Gina’s face, and Agatha confessed. “A little, maybe. You have to admit it’s odd. Why would someone kill Nathan? Why kill him when he’s surrounded by his goats? What is the world coming to?”

  She waved with the garden tool she was using to prune the chrysanthemums, trying to punctuate her indignation at another murder happening so close to her B&B. But Gina wasn’t even paying attention. Instead she grabbed Agatha’s arm and nodded toward the road.

  “Isn’t that your missing guest?”

  “Missing guest?”

  “Joey Troyer.”

  A battered green truck drove slowly down the road, accelerating when it passed her property. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Was that Joey Troyer driving the vehicle? She hadn’t seen the man since he’d checked in the day before. It couldn’t be him. Could it?

  “I thought he was Amish.” Gina craned her neck to better watch the truck disappear. “Was he driving a truck when he checked in yesterday?”

  “Huh. I can’t remember. I was inside when he knocked on the front door. I didn’t actually see...”

  “If he’s Amish, he must have used one of the Uber drivers in town.”

  “We only have two.”

  “I’m aware.” Gina put her hands on her slim hips.

  Agatha knew she ate. So why didn’t she gain weight? Agatha was gaining a pound or two a year. She knew it by the way her dresses fit. It seemed to her that Gina was losing weight, and she was finding it. Not a fair exchange at all.

  “With only two Uber drivers it shouldn’t be hard to figure out who brought Joey Troyer here. Was it Justin? You would have heard Justin’s GTO. The engine is loud enough to rattle the glass panes in the windows.”

  “It wasn’t him, I don’t think. Maybe Serena?”

  “Did she come in to talk? Serena always comes in to talk. I don’t know how she makes enough money to keep going, what with all the visiting she does.” Gina rolled her eyes, as if the ways of women were beyond her, despite the fact that she was one.

  “I guess Joey could have driven a truck.”

  “Explain that to me.” Gina drummed her fingers on the B&B sign. “Buggies, Amish, Plain folk...yadda, yadda.”

  “Ya. Sure, but some Amish youngies do drive Englisch vehicles, especially if they’re dragging out the days of their rumspringa.”

  “Like that television show.”

  “Not like the show.” Agatha hadn’t actually seen it, but she’d heard details of the plot...Gina had described it to her at length. “Non-Amish folk have trouble understanding rumspringa.”

  “Running around time. If you ask me, it’s just another way of seeing they get a free pass. We’re all too easy on this generation.”

  Agatha didn’t challenge the we part of that statement. Gina had no children, though she had several nieces and nephews. And Agatha had never given her own children or grandchildren a free pass. Together the two women walked back toward the front porch.

  “I don’t begrudge them their running around time.” She pulled on her apron, attempting to straighten it. “There will be enough years in the future for them to settle down and follow the rules of their Ordnung.”

  “Humph.”

  “In my opinion, and believe me there are plenty who disagree on this topic, but in my opinion a few years straddling the Englisch and Amish world usually teaches them that they prefer the simple life of the Plain community.”

  “Doesn’t explain why Joey Troyer would check into your B&B driving a truck, then disappear, but cruise by the next day. What could he have been looking for?”

  What was he looking for, indeed?

  If it was even him.

  She didn’t know anyone who drove a battered green truck, and theirs was a small town.

  Hunt was in point of fact an unincorporated community. Their population had recently topped 1,500, a fact that brought much consternation to the locals. Just the week before she’d heard the butcher declare to a customer in line in front of her, “If we wanted to live in Los Angeles, we’d move there.”

  Agatha hid her smile by pretending to search for something in her purse. She’d read recently that with real estate prices rising in the cities, people were relocating to the rural areas of the Lone Star state. Still, she didn’t think Hunt had to worry about a massive population increase.

  But someone might know who the old green truck belonged to. She could ask around. In Hunt, everyone knew everyone else. They also knew who was just passing through. The fellow driving the old truck hadn’t looked like a tourist to her. Tourists usually drove vans or sports cars or motorcycles.

  She’d ask around later, while she was out making discreet inquiries about Henry.

  She needed to add old green truck to her list of clues. She also should call the list something else before she showed it to Tony. Hadn’t he warned her against getting involved? She didn’t want to find herself caught up in another investigation, but a person couldn’t help wondering about such things. The murder had been practically in her back yard. It was natural to keep a list of questions. She wasn’t trying to be Miss Marple. She didn’t need to hear any more Agatha Christie remarks. Maybe she’d keep the list to herself.

  She finished tidying, then she had just enough time to place a few phone calls. She absolutely had to get on the road soon if she hoped to be back to help with setting out an early dinner. Her plan was to harness up Doc, go visit Bishop Jonas, then stop by to see her friend Becca, and finally take a casserole by to Nathan King’s family.

  Unfortunately the second couple she checked into the B&B wanted to talk. She’d walked them down to their cabin, one of the two new ones she’d added in the last six months. Cabin five was her largest and most expensive. Unlike the smaller cabins, four and five had a separate bedroom and good-sized living room. Cabin four faced the hills, but this cabin—cabin five—looked out over the river.

  Valerie and Eric Thompson were from Los Angeles and were looking to relocate to the Texas Hill Country. Agatha tried to imagine the butcher’s reaction to that, but only got as far as his look of dismay and the slap of his cleaver against the cutting board.

  “What was that?” She tried to sound polite and unhurried.

  Eric Thompson was fiddling with his designer sunglasses and staring out toward the water. He was tall and thin and dressed in designer clothes. “We were wondering if you could tell us about the area. We’ve read the literature, of course.”

  They had literature?

  “We’ve heard this area is the Napa Valley of the south.” Valerie raised her boldly arched eyebrows, waiting for Agatha to confirm or deny that particular rumor.

  While Eric Thompson’s hair was long and reached his collar, Valerie’s was cut quite short. She’d used some sort of gel to cause it to spike all over her head.

  “Like Napa? I doubt it, though I’ve never been.”

  Valerie flicked her wrist and sighed, as if she’d expected as much.

  “It’s true that there are quite a few wineries in the area, especially in Fredericksburg, which is to the northeast, about an hour’s drive.”

  “Where the resort is going in? We almost booked there instead of here, but Eric wanted something quaint.” Valerie’s tone of voice conveyed her opinion on that.

  “Your reservation said you were flying into San Antonio,” Agatha recalled. “Did you take Interstate 10 or drive the back roads?”

  “Ten, if you want to call that an interstate. In California it would hardly be considered a highway. I can only imagine what your back roads are like.”

  “Smaller.” Agatha forced a smile. “Many guests enjoy a drive through the Hill Country. It’s beautiful to travel east through Kerrville then south
on Highway 173, or you could take the 16 Loop to the west which is also nice though less populated. Either way you end up in Bandera.”

  “How do you know so much about roads? I thought you people didn’t drive.”

  Agatha ignored the you people comment, though it did little to improve her opinion of Valerie Thompson. “It’s true that we don’t own vehicles, and I only use my mare Doc for short trips, but I try to know enough to inform my guests.”

  Eric looked as if he were still waiting for something. Agatha tried to remember his original question. Tell us about the area... “As you probably know, this portion of the state is known as the Hill Country of Texas.”

  “Capital letters?” Eric asked.

  Valerie rolled her eyes and offered, “He’s a novelist. Always thinking about words!”

  “As a matter of fact, locals do always use capital letters when referring to the Hill Country.” She emphasized the last two words, making a little joke, but Valerie and Eric didn’t seem to get it.

  “Unusual topography,” Eric waved his sunglasses toward the hills.

  “The hills are limestone. This area of the state separates the coastal plains, which lead to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Edwards Plateau.”

  “Ah,” Eric said.

  Valerie plopped into a rocker and pulled her hat down low to block out any sun that might leak onto the covered porch. Everything about her body language indicated she was bored by their conversation.

  “Have you been there?” Eric asked. “The Edwards Plateau?”

  “I haven’t. Texas is big—very big. I’ve actually only seen a small portion of it.”

  In truth, she’d been in the state for nearly two years, yet so far managed to see hardly anything outside of the Hill Country. Tony and Gina kept after her to take some time off, but when she did she usually went home to Shipshewana. There were grandkinner to cuddle and news to catch up on. She missed her family terribly, but not enough to move back. Nein, Texas had somehow claimed her heart in a very short time.

  And what wasn’t there to love about it?

  Eric popped his sunglasses back on. “From a preliminary study of the land for sale, I gather it’s quite expensive, though only by Texas standards. By California standards, everything here is a steal.”