Sweet Masterpiece - The First Samantha Sweet Mystery

by Connie Shelton

  “It’s quite a commitment,” she said. “She’ll need more and more help as she gets older.”

  “I know. I think I can do it. And Beau kept saying we could ‘give it a try.’ He probably doesn’t know how his mother will react to having someone else around all the time either.” She went to the cupboard and found some peanut butter crackers, which she slowly unwrapped. “At least it’s something, some way for me to earn my keep until I find out what life holds next.”

  “As long as you are fair with them, Kell. You can’t take this job and then bail out when some high-salary corporate thing comes through.” Sam held up a hand. “I’m just saying. Be sure you’re ready to live up to the responsibility.”

  Kelly nodded. “Let’s see what they say about it today. They may have changed their minds.”

  A few minutes of silence passed. “Kell? I’m glad you’re thinking creatively about this. And I’m glad that you understand my situation and are willing to pitch in with expenses.”

  Kelly came over and gave her a warm hug. “Remember how it was when I was little? Just you and me. You gave up a lot for me, Mom. I don’t expect you to keep doing that. I hope things work out for you and Beau.”

  How’d she get to be so wise? A tear threatened Sam’s eye and she blinked it back.

  The phone jangled on the kitchen wall and they both jumped.

  “There’s Beau now,” Kelly said. “So, what do you think?”

  “It’s your choice. I know you’ll make the right decision.” Sam reached for the phone. “And how do you know it’s Beau?”

  Of course it was, and after talking to him for a minute she turned the call over to Kelly. While they discussed details, she busied herself taking inventory of her baking supplies.

  “I can start tomorrow,” Kelly said to Beau. Done deal.

  When she hung up she said, “Now I really better find some new clothing. Looks like I’ll be here for the winter.” She had a huge grin on her face.

  With Wal-Mart, one department store and a variety of expensive, touristy specialty shops in town, Sam gave Kelly the options and suggested she might rather drive to Santa Fe where there was a mall and some outlet stores.

  “I guess I could spend a day in the city,” Kelly said. “What about you? Want to come along? I didn’t even ask what you were doing when I walked in here.”

  Sam told her about the decision to find a new vehicle and, like the younger-thinking person she was, Kelly suggested looking online. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She busied herself at the computer while Kelly dressed for her shopping trip.

  “Don’t spend all your money in one place,” Sam kidded as she headed out the back door.

  “You either!”

  Back at the computer, Sam found a few possible vehicles of interest and sent emails requesting more details. While waiting for responses she figured that she better get her own truck cleaned up and ready to sell. She carried a caddy of cleaning supplies out and worked over the interior, detailing the dashboard with cotton swabs until the thing looked like it had just arrived from the showroom. Moving on to the backseat she came across the bag with the wilted stems that Zoe called deathcamas. She’d completely forgotten to mention it to Beau last night.

  She set the bag in the service porch and finished cleaning the truck, inside and out.

  By eleven she was more than ready for a break. If it were true that the little wooden box gave her some kind of magic energy zap, she was sure wishing she’d called upon it this morning. She put in a call for Beau, needing to tell him about the deadly plant, and then made a sandwich and flopped into a chair at the kitchen table while she waited for him to call back.

  As it turned out, he stopped by instead.

  “Hey, the truck sure looks spiffy,” he said, giving it an admiring look.

  She thanked him again for last night’s steak dinner and then told him about her plan. “As much as I hate to part with it, I need the other vehicle more.”

  She handed him the plastic sack with the plants in it. “You told me that some kind of plant toxin showed up in Pierre Cantone’s autopsy tests. I’m wondering if this might be it.”

  He glanced into the bag.

  “They’re completely crispy now, but when I first found them they seemed the same shade of green as that stuff that I found inside his house. Zoe tells me this stuff is poisonous.”

  He pulled out one of the stems and held it up. “Looks like deathcamas. She’s right. Livestock eats this stuff and it’s a horrible death. Never heard of a person eating it though. Why would they?”

  “It was growing near Cantone’s house. There were smears of something much like this in his kitchen. The man dies. The nephew inherits a fortune in paintings. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  Sam wanted to say ‘aha!’ She’d not liked that nephew much anyway.

  “But—” He held up an index finger. “But, to make any kind of accusation, much less a court case, we have to have some kind of proof.”

  “Lab tests. Can’t they tell if this is the plant toxin that was in Cantone’s body?”

  “We can have it tested and find out. And that’s a good start. But it’s still a far cry from proving that the nephew administered this. Or that he didn’t eat it accidentally.”

  “A poisonous plant like this—accidental?”

  “You’d be surprised how many people experiment with plants in their yards, Sam. Some of them are tasty and harmless, like dandelion greens. They’ll pick a bunch of unknown greens and make up a salad. Never put it together that they got really sick the next day.”

  “But day after day? Zoe said it would take quite a bit to kill a person.”

  “Hey, it kills horses and sheep.”

  Sam still couldn’t see it happening accidentally to a person. “There are other people who had grudges against the man. Have you questioned Mr. Trujillo, the neighbor with the lawsuit against Anderson?”

  “Haven’t had time. Padilla has me on another case that just came up this morning. He’s pushing hard to close the whole Anderson-Cantone file and get on to other things.”

  “But—” She pointed at the bag.

  “I’ll try. The first step would be to tie this to the victim. If I can get Padilla to agree, I’ll have it tested against the toxin the lab found in Cantone. See if that tox level was high enough to be fatal. Don’t count on getting a conclusive answer, though. Things like this really deteriorate with time. But we can see what happens and take it from there.” He gave her a quick kiss. “I gotta get back on the job.”

  She walked him out to the cruiser. “Thanks for what you’re doing for Kelly. The job is a big favor.”

  “Hey, it’s a bigger favor to me. I hope she likes being with Mama. I really was getting to my wits end about a solution to the problem. I’m glad Kelly is willing to do it.”

  She watched him drive away, then rummaged in the garage for a For Sale sign that she’d used years ago. Filled in the phone number and a couple of details about the truck and taped it to the window. She would miss the Silverado’s capacity for stuff that she had to haul away from the properties she tended, but it was time for a change.

  The day had warmed up considerably, as usually happened this time of year, and Sam suddenly realized she was way too hot in her sweats. She showered and looked for something else to put on. The handiest thing was the pair of slacks and blouse she’d worn yesterday. As she pulled the pants on something crinkled in the pocket.

  The envelope she’d taken from Bart Killington’s house.

  Chapter 22

  Sam pulled the envelope from her pocket and stared at it. So much had happened in the hours since she’d been there, she’d completely forgotten to mention it to Beau. Of course, telling him about it would open another set of questions about how she’d gotten it. Maybe better to wait.

  Beau’s comments about both tying the plant residue to the nephew and verifying it as the cause of Cantone’s
death made her realize that simply finding evidence did not prove a crime. She would have to find some kind of proof that the one-page will she’d located was not the real one. Something more than her own simple intuition.

  She laid the envelope on her dresser.

  Back at her computer, Sam saw that she’d received a reply to one of her emails about a van for sale. It turned out that one was in Albuquerque and while she didn’t relish a five-hour round trip drive to go see it, she didn’t want to rule out anything either. She sent a reply thanking them for the info and saying she’d consider it.

  Movement in the front yard caught her eye and she saw a man circling her truck. She stepped outside to talk to him and he readily offered about half of what it was worth. When she showed him the printout she’d gotten online with the values, he went away a little grumpy. Feeling somewhat discouraged she went back inside to find that she’d missed a call from Rupert.

  When she called him back he said that he’d heard from Carolyn Hildebrandt, the art rep in Santa Fe, wondering whether Mrs. Knightly was still interested in Cantone’s work. Although the painting they’d looked at was going out to New York today, she could show them some other pieces.

  “I’d say, considering what we spotted in Bart Killington’s house,” Sam said. She didn’t tell Rupert about her little breaking and entering caper the other day. You never knew what would end up in one of his books.

  “So, would you like to become Mrs. Knightly again and run to Santa Fe for the day?” he asked.

  She considered it for about half a second. The drive down to the capital was getting old. Plus, what would they really learn? She already knew that Hildebrandt and Bart were close, and she was pretty certain that Bart’s stash of Cantone paintings were the real thing, art that he’d taken from the artist’s Taos residence. She begged off, using her caretaker job as an excuse.

  Rupert grumbled a little and she suspected that he’d secretly wanted to take the day off from his writing. But like most professionals, he was pretty good about disciplining himself to devote a certain number of hours a day to his craft, and like it or not he sometimes needed for his friends to not enable his lazy streak. He said as much before ending the call.

  Well, thought Sam, I guess I could say the same for myself. Can’t very well nag Rupert about not working if I don’t do the same. As she placed her gold hoop earrings into the lumpy wooden box she had a thought. If the box seemed to give her an energy boost, why not use that to her advantage?

  She picked it up and held it in her arms, close to her body. Again, warmth surged from the wood and the yellowish surface began to radiate golden light. The stones glowed more brightly than she’d ever seen them. She quickly set the box back on her dresser, her heart pumping. The power of the thing unnerved her.

  She stared at it for a couple of minutes.

  You might be playing with fire, Sam.

  Shaking her hands to dispel the tingly feeling in them, she began to back out of the bedroom. Then something green caught her eye.

  The envelope containing the purported will.

  The entire surface of the envelope was covered in smears of the greenish, powdery substance. The same thing Sam had seen in Cantone’s kitchen, the stuff Rupert swore he couldn’t see.

  She picked it up and gingerly opened the flap. Inside, the single sheet of paper also had green marks on it.

  Bart Killington was definitely connected to the green dust now.

  She dropped the envelope on the dresser and grabbed up the telephone.

  “Beau, there’s something weird going on here.”

  While he went through a whole bunch of “are you okay?” kind of stuff, she gathered her thoughts. Working at sounding rational, she told him about taking the envelope from Killington’s house and how she’d found powdery green marks on it, just like those at the house that she suspected to be deathcamas.

  “It ties the nephew to the poisonous plant—don’t you see?” she insisted.

  Beau took a long breath. “It ties a green substance to both the envelope and the kitchen of the house, Sam. First, we’d need a lab analysis to verify that the green is from deathcamas. And, we still don’t know that the uncle didn’t pick those plants himself and carry them into the house. He might have sat at that kitchen table to write out the will.”

  Sam bristled. How could she explain the feeling she got when she touched that envelope?

  “Sam, it doesn’t prove any kind of foul play by the nephew. Don’t you see that I wouldn’t have anything at all that I could take to a prosecutor? I’m in my office today,” he said. “Bring me the envelope with the will and I’ll see what kind of tests we can run on it. Maybe we can get someone to analyze the signature, if nothing else.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she’d hopped in her truck and was on her way downtown to the Sheriff’s Department. All the way there, she debated what to say. In the end she decided the whole truth was the only way.

  “Can we talk privately?” she asked as soon as he appeared.

  “Sure.” He ushered her out into a small courtyard. They sat on concrete benches in the shade.

  She laid out the whole story, starting with the day that Bertha Martinez had given her the wooden box. “The rumors you heard about her being a witch. I’m beginning to think maybe they were true,” she said. “How else can I explain the weird stuff that’s been happening to me ever since I got that box?” He leaned back, letting her finish the story.

  She told him that she’d not noticed the green marks in the Cantone house that first day—probably because she’d hardly touched the box—but on other occasions when she’d actually rubbed her hands over the box she’d been almost hyper-aware, seeing the green residue.

  “That’s what happened this morning, Beau. The day I found this envelope I hadn’t handled the box. Today, after I touched it, the marks became as clear as anything.”

  “And you still see them now?” he asked, holding it up.

  “Yes! They’re almost brilliant green.”

  To his credit, he didn’t laugh and he didn’t freak out and leave her sitting there. He shook his head slowly and she felt disheartened. He noticed her expression. “Sam, it’s not that I don’t believe you. I know you to be honest and sincere. It’s just that this isn’t something we can use to build a case. The prosecutor would laugh me out of his office, if Sheriff Padilla even let me go that far. And even the worst defense attorney would tear the case to shreds.”

  He was right of course. She knew that.

  “But you could build a case based on lab proof that the poisonous plant toxin was in the house and on the will. And I’ll bet it’s the same plant toxin the lab showed in Cantone’s body. Please, Beau, please come out there with me. I’ll show you where it is and you gather the evidence.”

  She felt his hesitation. “What?”

  “I’m supposed to be working on this other case now.” He lowered his voice. “Padilla is already hassling me about this. It’s an election year. He’s a political animal and he knows his chances of being re-elected hinge on people’s perception that crime is under control. If a death can be ruled an accident and quietly filed away, that’s how he wants it. If a case gets sent to the prosecutor, it better be a damn strong one—something that makes Padilla look good.”

  “But surely he doesn’t want people getting away with murder! If we could get the evidence . . .”

  He gave a thin smile. “It would be a start. But as I’ve told you before, we would have to prove that the nephew administered the poison and we’d have to prove intent to kill his uncle.”

  “But at least it’s something,” she said. “I can’t stand the idea of that poor old man dying such a horrible death and this greedy nephew burying him in a hidden grave and walking away with a fortune.”

  “I agree about that,” he said. “The whole thing really stinks.”

  He stood up and they walked back to the office. “Okay. An hour, tops. I’ll say it’s my lunch break. Let me ge
t a lab technician to come with us. The other thing we have to do here is make sure that there are more than just the two of us gathering this evidence. You’re already going to have some explaining to do about how you got that envelope from Killington’s house. And if all the evidence comes from my girlfriend, that’s another thing a defense attorney will jump on like a dog on a bone.”

  Girlfriend?

  He’d picked up the phone and punched a two-digit intercom extension. “Lisa, can you take your lunch break now? I need you to bring your lab kit and come with me. Five minutes, my office.”

  While they waited for Lisa, Beau stared at the envelope Sam had handed him.

  “You still see green all over this?” he asked.

  “You don’t? Nothing at all?”

  “It looks like a white envelope and the page inside looked like plain old paper,” he said. “Sam, I’m so sorry I can’t verify it for you.”

  She gave a dispirited shrug. What else could she say? She didn’t want this ability to see and feel things that no one else could experience, and she knew they couldn’t be expected to believe her just because she said so. She suddenly realized that her life would never be the same, as long as she possessed that damned wooden box.

  Chapter 23

  Beau followed her red truck out the county road and up to the Cantone property. Sam waited as he and Lisa got out of his cruiser, then she unlocked the front door and led the way into the house. The place smelled of loneliness. She tried to imagine how it must have been when Cantone first moved in. Had he immediately set up his work area and begun some new paintings? Had the house held a vibrancy because of the old man’s creative energy? If so, it was gone now.

  “Take your time and tell me each place we should test,” Beau said.

  Sam wondered how much of her story he’d explained to Lisa on the way out here. The tall girl with cropped dark hair and pale skin didn’t comment on anything. She set the lab kit down on the living room floor and opened the lid, busying herself by pulling out some bottles and swabs. A stack of small evidence envelopes went in one pocket of the apron she’d put on.