Stone Cold Case (A Rock Shop Mystery)

by Catherine Dilts

  “Maybe I had a case of the nerves, too. Plus, it’s actually relaxing here at the shop.”

  Coming to work to have a break from the kids. Morgan remembered those days.

  “When will he hear about the job?”

  Cindy shrugged. “Hopefully soon. I don’t want to keep you hanging.”

  “I don’t want you to leave,” Morgan admitted. “But you’ve got to do what’s best for your family.”

  Morgan tiptoed through the quiet shop, dusting shelves of fossils and crystals, and sorting out the wooden bins that held rocks. She quizzed herself on whether they were igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, trying to decide whether the time she had spent on the geology class had increased her knowledge. And now she would need to learn more new skills: interviewing, hiring, and training an employee.

  When her brother Kendall had abandoned the rock shop, Morgan had considered selling the place. Since then, she had formed an attachment to the land, her new friends, the donkeys, and the community. The people of Golden Springs made her feel at home, but her grown children were in South Dakota.

  Gerda’s loss had increased Morgan’s anxiety about being so far from her pregnant daughter. Sarah was due in June. Tourist season. Morgan might only have one employee by then, and Del couldn’t run the place by himself. She had to hire someone and get them trained, or there was no hope she’d be able to head to Sioux Falls for a week or more.

  The door opened with a creak and a thunk, not a cowbell clang, and Herb ducked under the low doorframe.

  “Ready to go?” he asked Cindy. “Kids are in the van.”

  After Cindy had been gone for over an hour, and Morgan had settled in for a long, boring afternoon, a new Dodge truck pulled up out front. The black metal-flake paint job gleamed in the spring sunshine. Two men hopped out. The driver was a man a few years younger than Del, while the passenger looked to be in his mid-thirties. There was something about their casual but top-of-the-line outdoors attire and styled hair that said they both had money to spend. Morgan watched through the shop’s front windows, hoping they were customers, and not the real estate agents that had been pestering her neighbors the Daltons to sell their ranch. A real estate agent could make a nice commission selling the valuable seventy-five acres the rock shop sat on.

  The younger of the two men browsed the ore carts and tables outside, poking around in displays of unopened geodes. Morgan had unstuffed the cowbell when Cindy left, and a loud clang announced the entrance of the older man. After a cursory response to Morgan’s greeting, he prowled the shop like he was taking inventory. His skin had weathered poorly from high-altitude sun. Chiseled might have described his face, except for the sagging jowls. The hard face of a man who had spent his career working outdoors, Morgan guessed.

  “I see you’ve got a little topaz in your display case.”

  “Yes, we do.” Morgan hoped he was in the market for the gemstone.

  “Local?”

  “We know the prospector,” Morgan said.

  “Where’s he get the stuff?”

  “I couldn’t tell you where his claim is,” Morgan said. “Prospectors don’t like to give out that kind of information.”

  “So is this it?”

  Morgan didn’t have an answer. What did he mean by “it”?

  He tried again. “Where do you keep the good stuff?”

  “That’s all the topaz I have in stock,” Morgan said.

  The man snorted. “I’ve got better quality in my junk drawer at home.” His sneer revealed teeth so straight and white they had to be dentures.

  Morgan squelched the desire to tell him to get out. What was his purpose in coming into her shop? To insult her?

  “Do you have any other gemstones?” he asked. “Raw or cut. Don’t matter.”

  Morgan moved to a display case. He followed, leaning close to the glass and frowning.

  “Colorado is second only to California in the variety of minerals.” Her words were straight from geology class. The man made her nervous. Or angry. Maybe both. So she kept talking. “The Rock of Ages has a nice collection of crystals and gemstones. On display in this case, we have aquamarine, some rhodochrosite, quartz crystals—”

  “Naw. Nothing I’m interested in.”

  “What are you looking for? We have more items in storage that I’m still in the process of sorting through.”

  “Like in your barn?”

  He certainly was nosey. The cowbell sounded as the younger man entered the shop.

  “Hey, Dad, I found what I wanted.” He eased six geodes out of his arms and onto the scarred glass checkout counter. “You find what you were looking for?”

  “Naw, they don’t have anything here of interest.”

  Morgan could see a faint family resemblance now that they stood side by side. Their eyes were the same pale greenish blue, a shade like the turquoise in Lucy’s jewelry. That was where the likeness ended. A burn scar ran down the right side of the son’s face, but the undamaged left looked nothing like the cranky older man. Where his father’s face was coarse, the son’s features were refined. Signs of maturity etched gentle lines around his eyes, unlike the father’s sun-ravaged skin. His mother had to be a beautiful woman.

  The son rolled one of the baseball-sized geodes around on the checkout counter.

  “I love these things. You never know what’s inside till you bust them open. How much?”

  “They’re fifteen dollars each.”

  “I’m buying six.” The son aimed a smile at Morgan that told her he was accustomed to using his charm to get his way. “How about a little bulk purchase discount?”

  Morgan haggled with him until they agreed on a price. They had just completed the sale when the cowbell clanged. Del stepped inside and stopped in his tracks. He and the older man stared at each other like a couple tomcats ready to unleash claws and send fur flying.

  “Well, well, well, if it ain’t Delano Addison.”

  “You know I live here,” Del said. “What are you doing on my turf, Cooper?”

  Morgan had heard that name before, accompanied by a warning.

  “Shopping,” Mr. Cooper said. “From the looks of this dump, seems like you’d welcome customers, instead of running them off with your rude manners.”

  Del took a step toward Cooper, but the other man didn’t back up.

  “Seems like shopping’s what you do best,” Del said. “But when it comes time to pay the bill, you’re nowhere around.”

  “As it turns out, I didn’t make any purchases here today. My boy did, and he paid in full. I don’t see anything here of interest, so if you’ll move out of my way, I’ll be going.”

  There was a momentary standoff, Del’s mustache bristling and Cooper’s calm smirk belied by his clenched jaw, his jowls quivering with tension. Then Del stepped aside. Cooper brushed against Del as he passed.

  The son started to follow. He turned in the doorway. The scarred half of his face was expressionless, while the other half seemed to offer an apology.

  “You know my dad.” He nodded his head toward the doorway as he spoke to Del. “Sorry about the fuss. I should have known better than to let him come with me.”

  The cowbell clanged as the door closed.

  “What was that all about?” Morgan asked.

  “It’s all in the past. Never mind.”

  Whatever had happened between Del and Mr. Cooper might have been in the past, but the anger still seemed fresh enough.

  “What did he want?” Del asked.

  “The son bought geodes. Mr. Cooper didn’t find what he wanted, but he wouldn’t tell me what he was looking for. Cooper was pretty nosey. I hope they aren’t in the same business. He acted like he was checking out the competition.”

  “The man’s done some minor prospecting. Never found anything significant. He mostly buys stuff from miners who don’t know what they’ve got, then sells it to collectors who don’t have a proper sense of value. He’s a thief.”

  “Or an astu
te businessman,” Morgan offered. She thought she understood the situation. Mr. Cooper must have ripped off Del in a business deal.

  Del tugged thoughtfully at his mustache. “Seems odd. You find Gerda’s daughter in a dugout. Probably a prospector’s shelter. Might be a mine nearby. Then Cooper shows up.”

  “You think Mr. Cooper had something to do with Carlee’s disappearance?”

  Del shook his head. “I know I want to think the worst of the man, but I suppose that is a stretch.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the checkout counter. “Can I take another look at your photo? I couldn’t tell much from it the other night, but maybe something will come to me this time.”

  “I told Chief Sharp I’d send him a copy. We can look at the photo on my computer.”

  In a few minutes, Morgan moved the photo from her phone to a file on her desktop. Del watched her every move.

  “Man, oh man. Just a few years ago, a person had to shoot up a roll of film, then take it to the drugstore for developing. It could be a week or two before you’d get your pictures.”

  “It is amazing.” Morgan emailed the photos to Bill Sharp, then opened them on the computer screen. “I can enlarge them, make them brighter, whatever we want. But I can’t make a blurry photo come into focus.”

  Like the photo of the flowers with the tiny elephant heads. There was no salvaging the dark, blurry image, and no way to prove she’d seen the impossibly strange flowers. Instead, she demonstrated on the photo of the remains. Adjusting the contrast brought out details.

  “It’s like she was laid to rest.” Del seemed fixed on the idea that the remains were Carlee Kruger’s, even though they had yet to be positively identified. “See how she’s lying on top of something, like a sleeping bag, and there are blankets, newer blankets, on top. Is that yellow color a hat, or hair?”

  “I can’t tell, Del.”

  “A body doesn’t stay intact in the forest. The animals drag the bones around.”

  “Do you think that mountain man was guarding her?”

  “Let’s see the photo of him again,” Del said.

  Morgan brought it up. The phone’s flash had made his eyes look red. Demonic. Morgan zoomed in on his face.

  “Why would he guard her body?” Morgan didn’t wait for the answer she knew Del didn’t have. “Did he kill her? Was he hiding the evidence of his crime? Or did he just run across a body, and was too crazy to contact the police about it?” Morgan remembered her terror when he came inside the dugout. The fear that he would kill her, too. Then a less frightening memory came to her. Flowers in neat beds. Almost as though they were being tended. “Del, where’s that flower book?”

  “In the house, I think.”

  She rushed out of the office. Morgan unlocked the door at the back of the rock shop with the hand-printed “Private–Do Not Enter” sign thumb-tacked to its center. The door was all that separated the living quarters from the shop.

  “What’s that smell?”

  From the appreciative smile lifting Del’s mustache, Morgan could tell he enjoyed the savory odor.

  “Chicken soup. The church ladies are taking casseroles to Gerda tomorrow.”

  Del peered through the glass lid of the slow cooker.

  “Looks like a lot of soup for one person.”

  “I’m going to divide it up into one-serving containers. That way Gerda can freeze what she can’t eat right away. We’ll have the rest for our dinner.”

  “Not that I disapprove of being neighborly, but you know that gal’s not the type to enjoy being fussed over.” Del sat at the kitchen table on a wooden chair. “As long as you and the ladies understand that you’re taking Gerda food to ease your own grief, not hers, then go on ahead.”

  “That’s kind of harsh, Del.”

  He kneaded his forearm where a chainsaw had torn up his arm.

  “I’m not saying it’s wrong. No, it’s the right thing to do. Who knows? Maybe it’ll even draw Gerda out of her shell a little. But don’t expect her to be grateful for your concern.”

  Morgan noticed the spine of a book on the bookshelf. “Here it is.”

  She opened the dog-eared Rocky Mountain flower identification book. Morgan sat beside Del at the table.

  “The flowers outside the dugout looked almost like they’d been planted there.” She flipped through pages. “Since my phone photo didn’t turn out, I was hoping there’d be a picture of it in this book, but I don’t know how I’ll ever find it.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “This will sound crazy, but they looked like tiny purple elephant heads. Dozens of them, lined up on the stem.”

  “Sure. There’s such a thing as an elephant head flower. But they don’t bloom until summertime. They like high meadows with plenty of water. They’re not exactly rare, but you only find them certain places.”

  “Naturally growing, maybe not. But what if somebody planted them?”

  Del tugged at his mustache, a sure sign he was either baffled or agitated, or both.

  “We won’t solve this one easily.” Morgan threw her arms in the air. “What am I saying? I don’t want to get involved in this case at all.”

  “Small town,” Del said. “You can’t help but get involved, whether you want to or not.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Monday blended into Tuesday as Morgan enjoyed the rare treat of routine days. In between customers and donkey care, she swept floors in the living quarters and the shop. She was starting a load of laundry when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Mom?”

  Morgan felt a flood of relief at the sound of her son, David’s, voice. He rarely answered his phone, and ignored her repeated messages for him to return her calls. He seemed to avoid talking to Morgan. Then she felt a tug of panic as another thought occurred, that he or Sarah were in trouble.

  “Yes, this is Mom. How are you?”

  “Fine. I’m just returning your call.”

  Calls, Morgan thought.

  “Sarah said I should let you know I’m okay,” David said.

  So his sister had to prod him to call. Morgan’s heart sank a little.

  “How is school going?”

  Here his voice picked up a little vigor as he talked about his classes, and that he was on track to graduate next spring.

  “I’m so proud of you.” Morgan wanted to add, after all you went through, losing your father at such a critical age, your sister marrying, your mother frantically trying to hold together the family, a career, and a home, and not doing a very good job at any of them. Instead, an awkward silence stretched. The elephant in the room, Sam’s death, loomed. “I don’t know how much Sarah has told you about the rock shop.”

  “That’s all she talks about. That and the baby.”

  “Cindy’s husband applied for a promotion. If he gets it, I’ll need to hire someone new. It just won’t make sense for Cindy to try to juggle childcare when her husband gets a raise, and his hours are less flexible.”

  Morgan was explaining too much about a person her son had never met. She was babbling, trying to keep a conversation going, to keep David on the line.

  “That’s not a bad thing, right?” David asked. “For a mom to stay home with her kids?”

  Before Morgan could consider whether David’s comment was an indictment of her working full-time as soon as both kids were in elementary school, David dropped a bombshell.

  “That’s what Sarah’s hoping, since the doctor made her quit her job.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, maybe I wasn’t supposed to mention that.”

  “Quit her job? For medical reasons?”

  “Working at the library, she was on her feet too much.”

  In an era when women regularly worked, maintained their physical fitness routines, and in general carried on until their due dates, quitting a job she loved must have meant Sarah’s pregnancy was in trouble. She wasn’t due for another month and a half.


  “It’s not that bad, Mom. I know she wouldn’t want you to worry.”

  Telling a mother not to worry was like asking a fish to breathe on dry land.

  David was suddenly anxious to end the phone call, and Morgan was anxious to call Sarah. But she hadn’t spoken to David in over a month. Every word was precious.

  “Are you taking classes this summer?” Morgan asked.

  “No, I’m planning to work full-time and save money for fall semester.”

  “What do you think about spending the summer in Colorado? I’ll need help during tourist season, and with Cindy possibly leaving, I have to hire someone. Why not my son?”

  There was a pause. Silence.

  “You don’t have to give me an answer right now,” Morgan said. “Think about it. You used to love it here.”

  “Yeah. I remember.” Another pause. “No promises, but I’ll keep it under consideration.”

  As soon as David hung up, Morgan dialed Sarah’s number. It went to voice mail. If she was in Sioux Falls, she could drop by Sarah and Russ’s house. If she were back home, her son wouldn’t have more information about Sarah’s pregnancy than her own mother.

  Morgan called back and left a message. She attempted patience, waiting for a return call. Unlike her brother, Sarah always retuned Morgan’s calls.

  She tried to distract herself with work, and to calm herself with a prayer for Sarah’s health and safety, but Morgan’s heart raced as all the what-ifs forced themselves through her mind. When they all tumbled together in a brain-clogging clot of worry, Morgan dialed her son-in-law’s number.

  “Hi, Morgan.”

  It irked her that Russ called her by her first name. Perhaps it was his way of asserting his equality as an adult, along with his refusal to accept financial help or advice from Morgan.

  “I’m sorry to bother you at work, but I tried calling Sarah’s cell, and she didn’t pick up.”

  “I’m sure she’s resting. She’ll call you back when she gets up.”

  “In the middle of the day?”

  “That’s when people usually take naps,” Russ said.

  “It’s so unlike Sarah—”