by Sheryl Lynn
In suit and tie, looking more like an accountant than a law-enforcement official, the FBI agent lugged a large box into Carson’s office. He set it on the floor.
“You must be Agent Lipton,” Carson said, shaking hands with the man. “Nice to put a face to the voice on the phone.”
“We appreciate your department’s cooperation, Chief Cody. You’ve been a big help.”
“Glad to hear it.” He tried not to look like an eager kid, but the box intrigued him. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”
“This is actually a courtesy call.” He nodded at the box. “And a delivery for Miss Shay. Hard as it to believe, the locker was untouched for four years. It got overlooked. Good thing. It’s given us our first real break.”
“What’s in the box?”
Agent Lipton chuckled. “Arts-and-crafts supplies. Shay left a note for his daughter. I brought a copy.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket and handed it over the desk.
Carson read aloud.
“Happy Birthday, baby. I’m out of time to pack up your present and mail it. By the time you get this I will be in prison. I’m not fighting the charges. I’m pleading guilty, baby, just for you, to prove I’m going straight. My life of crime is officially over. So you forgive your old man. I’ll be out in two years, three at most. Then we start over, you and me. With my lottery winnings we will have the kind of life most folks only dream about. I will write you every day. You make lots of pretty things. I want to see it all. I am so proud of you. Write me. I love you.
Daddy.
PS, if a man by the name of Jonas Wit ever contacts you, you don’t know where I am, okay? He thinks I owe him money, but I don’t.”
“Going straight, huh? Any idea who Jonas Wit is?”
“We’ll figure it out. In the meantime, Mr. Going-Straight tucked a packet of hundreds in the locker for Miss Shay. Five thousand dollars and he forgot to remove the casino wrapper. Step one in the money trail.”
“I’ll be damned. What about DNA results?”
“Not in yet. My boss wants to hold off searching Miss Shay’s property until we get solid proof placing Shay on the Worldwide plane. I have a hunch we’ll find what we’re looking for.”
“If the DNA doesn’t match, what then?”
Lipton stroked his chin. “My boss is conservative, but not even he can let the opportunity pass. Now I wonder if you would escort me to Miss Shay. I’d like to give her the box. I also have the personal items she provided with the letters.”
“It’s not evidence?” He pointed his chin at the box. “Isn’t that considered stolen goods?”
Lipton cleared his throat. “Our forensic team went over everything. We kept the letters and, of course, the cash. I made an executive decision. Miss Shay has been more than cooperative with us, so I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“Kind of you.”
“We’re not all heartless bureaucrats.” He flashed a smile. “Contrary to Mrs. Cora Shay’s opinion. Have you ever met her?”
“Haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Keep denying yourself. We presented a warrant to search her home and had to have the tribal police restrain her while we searched.”
“Find anything?”
“Nothing to do with Shay or the hijacking. We did find jars full of fingernail clippings and hair trimmings. Mrs. Shay claims she keeps them so her enemies can’t get her.”
The image that roused was downright ugly. “Did she say anything about Madeline?”
Lipton blew a whistle of amazement. “Oh, yeah, we got quite an earful. She talks like her husband and daughter are Hitler, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein rolled into one. She accused us of being her daughter’s henchmen.”
“She’s mentally ill.”
“I figured that out. Crazy or not, she’s got everybody down in Fort Apache convinced Miss Shay is sitting on a fortune. She’s smart to stay away.”
“Would you care to ride with me, or follow in your car?” Carson asked.
“I’ll follow.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m due in Flagstaff this afternoon.”
Carson offered to carry the box and Lipton let him. On the way down the back stairwell, Lipton asked, “Have you seen the insurance investigator around?”
“Can’t say that I have. Reckon he got mad and went home. I’ve been waiting for lawyers from Mutual Security and Assurance to call me, but so far nothing. Hope it’s a good sign.”
“Hmm.”
Carson didn’t like the sound of that. He stopped on the second-floor landing. “What?”
“Our field agent in Las Vegas visited Mutual Security and Assurance. According to them, Mr. Bannerman took a month-long vacation. He is on a photo safari in the Far East. Not only was Mr. Bannerman not investigating the Worldwide hijacking, but that the case is inactive.”
Carson snorted, indignant. “Little squirrel is free-lancing. What do you want to bet that he worked out a deal with his so-called anonymous informant to split the finder’s fee? I should have checked him out from the beginning.”
“If you can spare a man or two to find him, I’m sure I can convince him to cooperate.”
“I’ll do that.” Mentally kicking himself for sloppiness, Carson continued down the stairs.
When he reached the house, with Lipton in a sedan behind him, he took a few moments to look around and make sure all was well.
He carried the box inside and called, “Madeline, there’s a gentleman here to see you.”
Silence replied. She wasn’t working on her beads in the kitchen. She wasn’t upstairs. Scalp itching in apprehension, he checked her bedroom. Her boxes were still there. If she was in the barn playing with Rosie, she’d have heard the cars. He went back downstairs intending to check the barn anyway when he noticed a note on the refrigerator.
“I took Rosie out for a little exercise. I’ll be back before dark. M.”
He crushed the note in his fist. He had a good idea where she’d gone and it had nothing to do with exercise.
IT WAS AN EXERCISE in futility. Try as she might, Madeline could not get inside her father’s head.
She gulped water then screwed the cap onto the canteen and hung it from the saddle horn. She patted Rosie’s sweaty neck. The trail along Crossruff Creek from Carson’s property to hers wasn’t difficult, but the mare was out of shape. Madeline loosened the reins and let Rosie take another sip of water. Rosie blew noisy bubbles in the shallow water. She hoped the horse didn’t have trouble going back up the trail.
If Carson turned her out for abusing his wife’s horse, she deserved it. She welcomed it. His hatred would make it easier to leave.
She sighed, wishing she could hate him for killing her father. But she hadn’t hated him or blamed him when it happened. She didn’t hate him now. Depending on his kindness churned her up inside. It made her self-reliance feel like the worst sort of lie.
She turned her attention to the creek. Her father had murdered Jill Cody and Billy Harrigan in the shade of the cottonwood trees. She shifted on the saddle and frowned at the junipers and piñons between this creek and where the house once stood. She smelled ashes. If Jill and Billy had talked loudly or laughed, her father would have heard them from the house. He could have approached them without fear of being seen. The murders happened in full daylight. He could not have mistaken them for law-enforcement officers.
She urged Rosie across the stream. Her unshod hooves clunked against the rocks. The creek offered little obstacle to the mare’s long legs and eagerness to reach a patch of grass. Madeline dismounted and left the reins trailing. She untied a spade from the back of the saddle.
She walked along the bank. She studied the creek, the trees and rock formations. She poked the ground with the spade. The topsoil was thin and sandy, held together with tough grasses and weeds. Cottonwood saplings and willows reached like greedy fingers for the sun.
She tried to imagine what her father saw. She sat on a fallen cottonwood trunk and res
ted her hands on the spade handle.
So her father buried a body under the house. He’s preparing to dig up thirty million dollars when he hears Jill Cody and Billy Harrigan down at the creek.
Madeline shook her head, unable to fathom why her father murdered Jill and Billy. Frank Shay had been many things in his violent life, but stupid enough to think a woman and boy were the police? Maybe he thought they were treasure hunters. Surely if he sneaked up on them and listened, he’d have heard them talking about looking for runaway goats, not hidden loot. So why not lay low until they went away? Nothing indicated that Jill or Billy got anywhere near the house. Nothing indicated Jill and Billy, or anyone in the area, had any idea Frank Shay was on the ranch.
Gooseflesh rose on her arms and she scrubbed the bumps away. Poor Carson. She couldn’t imagine how he maintained his sanity after seeing his wife and a boy gunned down. Her chest ached and her eyes burned. Tears she could not shed for herself fell for Carson. Bent over, her face in her hands, she turned her emotions free, shedding guilt, grief, pain and sorrow as she sobbed and wept until she was drained, her chest and throat sore, her energy sapped. She wiped the tracks away with the back of a hand.
She turned her face to the dappled sunlight and waited until she could breathe without her chest hitching. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried like that.
She picked at the log. The wood was silver with age and pieces crumbled into dust at a touch. A lizard darted past her fingers, startling her before her brain registered it had legs and was therefore not a snake. She watched it slither into the trunk.
The hole was about a foot long and four inches wide. Madeline poked a willow switch into the hollow trunk. She considered sticking her hand inside, but where a lizard could go so could a snake.
She stepped away to better see the log in its entirety. Alive, the tree would have been a giant specimen of a high-desert cottonwood, sixty or seventy feet tall and perhaps eight feet in diameter.
She sniffed, wishing for a handkerchief. She struck the hole with the spade. Splinters and dust flew. She dug and worried the brittle outer wood and spongy interior, peeling away chunks until the hole was big enough to look inside.
Nothing except for agitated bugs.
She overturned rocks and peered inside hollow logs and shoved the spade deeply into any place in the earth that looked soft. She searched the trees for any suspicious bundles stashed in the woody forks.
“Two tons of cash,” she muttered. “How in the world do you hide two tons of cash?”
In a great big hole, that was how. He’d have needed dynamite to blast a big enough hole in the bedrock.
Unless… She turned her attention on the water. Spring fed, the creek ran low in the baking heat of summer and high with snowmelt in the winter. She sat to pull off her boots. Jill’s boots, she thought with a wave of pure hatred toward her father. A woman who should have lived to be a hundred, loving her good husband and being loved in return. She waded into the stream.
She had to find the money, end this madness, and get out of Carson’s life.
Compared to the sun’s heat, the water was icy. A thin squeak escaped her. Smooth rocks, rough sand and gravel, and slime made the footing treacherous. She shoved the spade into the sandy bottom. The water clouded with silt.
Digging a hole in a creek should be easy, but when she scooped out a spadeful of gravel and sand, the water pushed sand and gravel into the hole. She set the spade on the bank and used her hands to pile rocks in a clumsy dam. She dug again. A few inches down, the gravel ended, leaving only slippery sand that seemed to bubble up from the center of the world. She dug faster, sending small rocks flying and splashing and banging against rocks sticking out of the water. She shoved and lifted and flung until sweat streamed into her eyes and soaked her neck. Her shoulders ached. Other than muddy water and a lot of noise, she had little to show for her efforts.
She did not see how it was possible for her father to have created a hiding place under the creek. He’d have had to dam the water then use some kind of machinery to scoop through the wet sand, and figure out how to waterproof the hole.
She turned for the bank. Mossy rocks were as slippery as wax. She felt her foot slip, but no amount of arm flailing and jerking for balance stopped the fall.
Water rushed past her elbows and wicked up her shirt. She spit dirty water out of her mouth and wiped it from her eyes. She fished out her locket, checking to make sure it wasn’t wet. Water beaded on the aluminum, but it wasn’t waterlogged. The end of her braid curled like a snake, undulating downstream with the current. Sand and silt seeped inside her clothing.
She lost the spade. She struggled from the hole and the sucking, squishy sound made her laugh. She groped for the spade.
Rosie nickered low and welcoming. Madeline followed the mare’s line of sight.
Carson walked from the trees, sunglasses shielding his eyes. His mouth was a grim line. His hands clenched and relaxed with the rhythm of his pace. In all her splashing around she’d failed to hear him drive onto the property.
Madeline saw herself through his eyes. Soaking wet while his old horse—his wife’s horse—stood in the very place where his wife was murdered.
Excuses wouldn’t cut it. Nor would apologies.
“Madeline? What the hell are you doing?”
“Looking for a shovel—oh, found it.” Madeline held up the dripping spade. Arms crossed, big shoulders squared, he glowered down at her. She sloshed out of the creek. Wet denim clasped her legs. Sand chafed her skin. Physical discomfort paled next to the weight of his hard perusal. She felt like a little kid caught in a prank.
“I don’t appreciate you taking Rosie without permission. She isn’t shod.” He put a shoulder against the mare’s shoulder and lifted her left front hoof.
“I kept to the trail and let her choose the pace.”
He checked the mare’s hooves, then slipped a hand beneath the saddle blanket. Rosie’s big ears flopped and her eyelids lowered, as if his attention felt as good as a massage.
Madeline wrung water from her braid. “I wouldn’t hurt Rosie. I’d never do that.”
“She’s blind in her right eye.”
His concern went beyond the mare. The very air around him shimmered with anger.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “That wasn’t my intent.”
“I was scared,” he snapped. “What do I have to do? Lock you up for your own protection? Put a chain on your ankle?”
She curled her lips between her teeth. Pressure was building, and it grew difficult keeping her temper in check. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it!” His voice boomed across the creek. “People want to hurt you. Do you get that? Do you understand? I’m doing my best to keep you safe, but you have to act the fool? Woman, are you stupid?”
Her spine turned to steel. “You’re the stupid one! I didn’t ask for your help. You know what will happen when people find out I’m in your house and you do it anyway!”
“I should let you live in a burned-up house with no food, no transportation, no clothes? You might think it’s pride, sweetheart, but it’s just plain idiotic in my book.” He kicked a stone, sending it skittering into the creek. “This old horse has more sense than you. Chickens have more sense.”
It wasn’t bright to take off when there were so many hostile people in the area. On the other hand, nobody else yelled at her as if she were a naughty child.
“I deeply, sincerely apologize,” she said, each word solid ice. “I will return Rosie to the barn. I won’t even ride. I will walk her back up the trail.” She snatched up the boots and the spade. “I will rub her down and clean her hooves and give her a handful of molasses mash. I will rub liniment into her knees and hocks. Then I will never, ever, for as long as I live, touch anything that belongs to you!”
Rosie turned her head because of her blind eye. She looked as if she watched a tennis match.
Madeline’s wet feet c
ollected debris. They were too dirty to put on the boots. Refusing to look at Carson she slung the boots by their laces over the saddle horn, tied the spade behind the saddle and picked up Rosie’s reins. With as much dignity as soaked, squeaking jeans allowed, she led the mare back across the creek and up the trail.
“Madeline, do not walk away from me.”
Head high, with warm horse breath wafting over her arm, she kept walking. She was too mad, too upset, too heart-wounded to acknowledge what the rough, sun-baked trail did to her feet. Her ancestors had walked barefoot. She could, too.
Carson jumped the creek. Rosie balked. Madeline tugged lightly on the reins and the mare resumed walking.
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” Carson said.
“Stupid and ridiculous,” she said. “The things a girl can learn.”
The trail meandered through the scrubby piñons and skirted wind-worn sandstone formations. The dirt was hot as a pancake griddle, but Madeline kept walking.
“Will you at least tell me what you were doing?”
“Looking for the money,” she flung over her shoulder. “I thought maybe he buried it under the creek. It’s stupid, but what do you expect from a woman like me?”
“Stop.”
“And when I find the money, I’m getting out of your hair. I don’t want the finder’s fee, but I’ll take it for no other reason than because you are too damned pig-headed to protect yourself.”
The trail narrowed. Along with the sharp rocks and stickers, she risked Rosie stomping on her feet.
“I am sick and tired of you dreaming up motives for me.” He was right on Rosie’s heels and didn’t raise his voice. “I am thirty-nine years old and the chief of police, for God’s sake. You don’t think I know what I’m doing?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think you do. Admit it, you blame yourself for Jill’s death.”
“Has it ever occurred to you, just once, that maybe I care about you? That it has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with the fact that you need help and I can give it?”
