Stranded

by Lorena McCourtney

  Back in Texas, she’d had to operate the tractor out on the farm, but Boone wouldn’t let her drive a regular car, so she’d never had a license.

  “Good idea. You need a license. Then you can drive the motor home too, when we’re on the road again.”

  “Do we have to take off again?” She gave me a hopeful sideways glance. “Maybe we could, you know, just stay here for a while?”

  “We might, unless the Braxtons or Boone locate us. But surely they’ll all give up sooner or later,” I added when she looked so crestfallen. I was certainly hopeful of that. “Can you take the test for a driver’s license here in Hello?”

  “Dr. Sugarman says I’ll have to go down to some other town, Hayward, I think he called it. He said I can use his pickup to take the test.”

  As an unimportant aside, she also mentioned that she’d gotten that bad tooth filled today and it wasn’t hurting anymore.

  Abilene spent the evening with her nose buried in the booklet. I went through an old phone book looking at the choice of churches available in Hello. Tomorrow was Sunday, and I wanted to attend somewhere. Whatever was closest, I decided, since I’d have to walk. Then I had a different idea.

  “Didn’t Kelli say Dr. Sugarman teaches Sunday school? I wonder where he goes?”

  “Mountain View Community Church,” Abilene answered, surprising me with her ready knowledge. I doubted she’d asked him, so he must have volunteered the information. Good for him.

  I found Mountain View Community Church in the listings in the yellow pages. It had an address on the hill on the other side of town. I changed plans about picking a church on the basis of distance. “That’s the one I’m thinking about going to too. Want to come along?”

  When we’re on the road, and I just pick a church at random, Abilene sometimes goes with me, sometimes not. I know she occasionally reads the Bible I gave her, and sometimes she asks hard-to-answer questions. But she’s never shown any sign of making a real commitment to the Lord, as I’ve hoped. Now she kept her finger on her place in the driver’s license book and looked off into space for a moment.

  “Sure,” she said, and went back to the booklet.

  I wasn’t certain how long the hike across town would take, or how slippery the sidewalks might be, so we started out early on Sunday morning. The day was brilliantly sunny but frigid, and a light layer of new snow had fallen overnight. No tire tracks had yet marked many of the streets. The hike was all downhill going down to the main street that wound through town, all uphill going the opposite way up to the church on the far side.

  I was delighted when I saw Mountain View Community Church. It looked as if it had jumped straight off a Christmas card. I guessed it was built in the same era as the McLeod house; it was a narrow white building with an old-fashioned steeple and a crisp frosting of snow clinging to the steep roof. Even a melodious bell that rang out as we approached. The parking lot was minuscule, and cars lined the sidewalk-less street on both sides. Peering back across the narrow valley, I could see the McLeod house on the opposite hill, looking rather grim and Gothic from here.

  Inside, an older couple was handing out programs at the door to the sanctuary, she in a pink polyester pantsuit, he in a slightly too tight dark suit. They weren’t nosy but, in a friendly way, wanted to know all about us. Their approving nods suggested Abilene’s job with Dr. Sugarman, and mine with the Historical Society, were excellent recommendations. There was one awkward moment when I said, “Kelli Keifer is letting us live in the old McLeod house.”

  The woman looked a bit taken aback by the announcement, but then, after exchanging a glance with her husband, she patted me on the arm and said, “It’s a grand old house. Everyone misses Hiram.” No comment about Kelli.

  There was no choir. The music, played by a young woman on a piano and a guy on a guitar, was unexpectedly lively, music that started your foot tapping even if you were in church. Halfway through an energetic chorus, Abilene nudged me and whispered, “There’s Dr. Sugarman.”

  I looked in the direction her head tilted. Dr. Sugarman wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. He was medium height, brown-haired, comfortably plain-faced, with a hint of ruddiness to his skin. Farm boy, was my first thought. I think he’d started out in a suit, but he’d taken the jacket off somewhere, probably in the kids’ Sunday school class he taught, and now he was in a light blue shirt, sleeves rolled up, dark blue tie slightly askew. Even more or less dressed up, he looked as if he was ready to jump in and help birth a calf or colt. As I watched, he hastily rolled the sleeves down, as if he’d just become aware of their impropriety in the service. Then he tried to smooth a lick of hair that persisted in sticking out above his ear. Without success. His voice boomed out in the chorus with more enthusiasm than musical talent.

  I liked him.

  The sermon was from the Sermon on the Mount, solidly Christ centered. I spotted Ben Simpson, the garrulous guy we’d met at Nick’s Garage, but he didn’t see us. Dr. Sugarman came over to our pew right after the closing song. Abilene introduced us.

  “I’m so glad you both came.” He shook my hand and said, “Call me Mike.” Then he looked at Abilene. “You too.”

  We chatted for a minute about the old church, and then he said to Abilene, “I’m going to drive out to the Harmon ranch this afternoon. Jake and I have a Quarter horse we’re planning to race this coming year, and I want to see how he’s doing. How about coming along?”

  Then Dr. Sugarman realized what he’d just done. “Maybe you’d like to come too?” he said to me, and he actually blushed at what he apparently perceived as his own rudeness for not including me in the invitation to begin with.

  I could almost read Abilene’s thoughts as she eyed Dr. Sugarman warily. Was this a date-type invitation? For all the abuse Boone had given her, plus the fact that he had made plain he was willing to escalate the abuse to homicide, Abilene was much aware that she was still legally married to him. For her this meant the dating game wasn’t an option.

  She swallowed. “I guess not.”

  “If you’ve studied that booklet, you can practice driving out at the ranch, off the public roads. You really need a driver’s license for errands when I don’t have time.”

  Abilene’s face relaxed and brightened. A business trip concerning the driver’s license, nothing personal. “I studied the booklet last night, but I do need some real driving practice.”

  Good. I was looking forward to an afternoon alone to prowl Hiram’s now empty office/library. And take another look around up there on the third floor. I graciously declined when Dr. Sugarman repeated his invitation to me.

  Nothing like a quiet Sunday afternoon for a little nosy sleuthing.

  12

  Mike Sugarman drove us home. I invited him to stay for the pot roast I’d put in the oven before we went to church, and he ate with farm-boy gusto after first asking if he could offer the blessing. Afterwards Abilene changed clothes, and they took off for the ranch in his pickup, Abilene clutching her driver’s booklet.

  I put on old gray sweats, figuring whatever I did would involve dirt and dust, and climbed the stairs to the third floor. I examined the piece of plywood that had once blocked access to the third floor. Just an ordinary piece of plywood, as far as I could see, yanked off the opening without any particular care. I scrutinized every inch of the round tower room, up on my tiptoes to inspect window frames and down on my hands and knees to study shreds of carpet. I tried to open a window, but they’d long ago been painted shut.

  A few tracks showed in the dust on the ballroom floor, although it appeared the police hadn’t made any extensive investigation in that area. I made a brief excursion around the perimeter of the room, finding only a pile of beat-up chairs in one corner and a bathroom and a couple of small, empty rooms at the far end. The room gave off no nostalgic vibes of turn-of-the-century dancers twirling gracefully. It was just a big, dusty, long-unused room with a creaky floor. Although I did have a brief urge to take off my shoes and whiz acr
oss the ballroom floor in my stocking feet. I quickly squelched that. This was not playtime; this was murder.

  But if I thought there’d be an “ah-ha!” moment when I’d cleverly spot something the police had missed, I was wrong. My lone accomplishment was to do away with much of the fingerprint powder remaining in the tower room, which I did by transferring it to my sweats in big, dirty smudges.

  I gave up on the third floor and went down to Hiram’s office/library. What I really wanted to do was snoop, but as soon as I opened the door my conscience told me I should clean. Because what we had here was dust in all its elemental forms. Dust marks outlined where books had stood on the shelves. Dust bunnies dotted the floor like small, fuzzy creatures grazing on the carpet. Dust motes surfed merrily in shafts of sunlight.

  I marched out to the utility room where I’d spotted a vacuum cleaner and dragged it back to this museum of dust, along with a can of Pledge and a handful of rags from the discards room.

  I tackled the dust bunnies first. The big old vacuum cleaner was awkward as a battleship to maneuver, but it was also powerful enough to suck up everything in its path, including a large screw, several small chunks of rock, and a yellow something that disappeared before I could grab it.

  However, I quickly realized one unexpected benefit: snooping and cleaning are a compatible combination. Vacuuming the carpet, I snooped under an old leather sofa and felt around in its nooks and crannies as well, producing a penny and a paper clip. Fallen, or perhaps tucked, in a large crack behind bookshelves I found several letters from an irate tenant about some property Hiram had owned back in 1989, and in the corner of a picture frame was a printed receipt for a mining book he’d bought in 1991. Was tucking things in odd little places part of Hiram’s filing system, or simple carelessness?

  I shoved an upholstered chair aside and pounced on a scrap of yellow paper with a few words written on it. Jackpot? No, just a torn scrap with an enigmatic scribbling of “gget at 3:30, Tu,” the partial words and ragged edges suggesting it had been torn from some larger message. I didn’t see of what value it could be, but as a longtime saver of this and that, I tucked it in a pocket.

  I cleaned my way to a metal filing cabinet, empty, then to the big old rolltop desk where I conscientiously Pledged every surface. I opened all the drawers and found, not surprisingly, that they were also quite empty. The desk and filing cabinet were no doubt the first place Kelli had looked for Hiram’s records and papers. I removed desk drawers so I could look under and around them and check for false bottoms. I also inspected for discrepancies in size of pigeon holes and compartments that might suggest a hidden compartment behind one of them.

  I had no idea what I was searching for, of course, but what Kelli had said earlier certainly suggested she thought something was missing. But why, I now wondered, would Hiram bother to hide anything important? Who would he hide it from? He lived here alone, and as I understood it, the only people who came here in recent years were Kelli, Norman, and, rarely, Lucinda.

  Yet wasn’t it interesting that these were the same three people who had most opposed Hiram’s big plans for the mine …

  Ivy Malone, it’s a wonder you’re not suspicious of your own foot, I chided myself grumpily. I switched the vacuum cleaner on again. No suspicions, or even coherent thoughts, were possible with that monster running.

  The first-floor tower room on this side of the house opened off the library/office, but it was empty except for an oversized table and a long-dead plant in a Mexican pot. I was on my knees, vacuuming under the table and looking upward to see if anything was taped to the underside, when a touch on my foot made me jump.

  I backed out and discovered Lucinda standing beside me. I shut off the vacuum cleaner.

  “I knocked, but I knew you couldn’t hear me with the vacuum running, so I just came on in.” She peered around the room, then pushed a lace curtain aside to look outside. Here we were only a few feet from where Hiram had landed when he plunged. “Finding anything interesting?”

  “Just dust and more dust.”

  “You need a phone.”

  “We have one of those buy-minutes-as-you-need-them cell phones for emergencies.” While a regular phone here might be convenient, what we did not need was a phone listing that would show up for any Braxton prowling the phone listings on the Internet to see.

  “Since I couldn’t call, what I came over for is, there’ll be a rehearsal for the Roaring ’20s Revue tomorrow afternoon at the old Hello Hotel. I thought maybe you’d like to come since it isn’t a day you’ll be working. You might find it interesting.”

  “Sure. Sounds great. Would you like some coffee? I think it’s time for a break.” I felt my hair, and my hand came away cobwebby.

  “Love some.”

  We went out to the kitchen. For speed, I used the electric coffeemaker we’d brought from the motor home.

  “Abilene and I went to church this morning, over at Mountain Community Church. I was hoping you might be there.”

  “I used to go, but I haven’t been in several years.” Lucinda’s tone dipped into a remote, I-don’t-want-to-go-there zone. She crossed to the window and made a point of being engrossed in rearranging the feathers in the mayonnaise jar.

  I barged ahead anyway. “I miss it when I don’t go for a while. I know God is everywhere, but I start feeling disconnected from him if I’m not in church.”

  “I am disconnected from God. Permanently,” she stated with harsh finality.

  All those losses, I knew without being told. Husband, daughter, son. “I lost my only son and my husband too. God was all that got me through those bad times.”

  She looked briefly surprised but then shrugged, although I had the impression the indifference was more pretended than real. “God got me through the first couple of losses. But I guess I’d just … had it with God by the time he took my son too.”

  “I’m so sorry. Do you mind if I pray for you?”

  “Pray away. In my experience prayer never makes any difference one way or the other. I did enough of it that never had any effect.”

  I cringed when I heard that, but I sent up a small prayer right then and there anyway. Because I do believe prayer makes a difference. God listens. Lucinda, however, perhaps afraid I was going to plunge right into a sermon, changed the subject abruptly.

  “Have you had a chance to look around town yet?” she asked.

  “No, but I went out to the mine with Kelli yesterday.” The coffee was ready, and I poured a cup for each of us.

  Lucinda scooted a chair up to the card table. “Ah, so you met our local character.” She smiled, and I sensed a real fondness for old Norman. “He still has his chickens?”

  “Oh yes. I didn’t get the names of all of them, but I met Marilyn and Ginger. Julia died.” I didn’t mention how Norman was, as Kelli had put it, “smitten” with me. I’d just as soon that didn’t become public knowledge.

  “Hiram’s death hit Norman as hard as any of us, I think. People call him Nutty Norman, you know, and everyone thought he was definitely ‘nutty’ when he brought that jar filled with chicken feathers to the funeral and put it beside the flowers around the coffin.” She nodded toward the jar on the windowsill. “But Kelli and I understood. Hiram always loved the fresh eggs Norman brought when he came to town. The two of them might eat a dozen of them for breakfast after drinking tequila half the night.” Her gaze lifted again to the feathers on the windowsill, and she blinked back tears, but she also shook her head with a hint of exasperation. “Stomachs of iron, both of them. Stubborn as old mules too. And they liked salsa on those morning eggs. I sometimes thought Hiram could eat Mexican food morning, noon, and night.”

  “No health problems for Hiram, then?” I remembered Kelli had taken blackberry balsam out for Norman, so maybe the iron in his stomach was rusting a bit. Or maybe he wasn’t getting enough salsa these days to keep it tuned up.

  “His eyesight was slipping a little, and he was getting more forgetful and putt
ing on a little weight. But basically, no, he wasn’t having any health problems.”

  Would forgetfulness on Hiram’s part result in a misplacement of papers and explain why Kelli hadn’t found everything she thought should be there?

  I leaned forward at the table. “Lucinda, I’m pretty sure you don’t think Kelli killed Hiram any more than I do. So who do you think did it?”

  “I’ve spent many hours pondering that question.”

  “Someone who didn’t want the mine reopened? Someone with an old grudge? Or a new grudge? A business matter? Or something personal?”

  Lucinda drew check marks in the air with a finger. “Any of the above.”

  “Norman?”

  “I don’t like to think it, but the possibility has occurred to me. They were old friends, but that tequila is powerful stuff, and they both got pretty hot under the collar when they drank and argued.”

  “But it was apparently a planned murder, not an impulse thing.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked with a sharpness that surprised me.

  “For one thing, the fact that the murderer brought along a weapon rather than just using whatever was available to hit Hiram over the head with.” I assumed the police had noted that point as readily as I had, but probably they hadn’t stressed its importance when releasing information to the public.

  “That’s true, I suppose,” she agreed. She sipped the coffee reflectively. “I’m inclined to think it must have been some outsider, someone who was bitter about some business deal with Hiram in the past and wanted to settle the score.”

  That sounded reasonable, and Lucinda was certainly in a position to know as much about Hiram’s business affairs as anyone. “Someone such as that would most likely come prepared,” I agreed.