She was too far away for me to get a really good look at the earrings, but I was intrigued by them. Carousel horses are not a topic to which I’ve ever given much thought, but now carousel horses occupied my bedroom, and miniature carousel horses danced on the ears of this young woman. On impulse, when the waitress finished at the table, I motioned to her. “May I have a refill, please?”
“Sure.”
She came to my booth, big blue eyes, long legs, short skirt, silver ankle bracelet, perky yellow bow tied at the end of the thick braid. Her walk was athletic but feminine, her smile friendly. Up close, I could see that the earrings were beautifully carved and painted, perfect miniatures of the real thing. Probably real wood too, definitely not junk.
“Those are beautiful earrings. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
She smiled and fingered one of the tiny carved carousel horses. “Aren’t they cute? I’ve always had this thing about merry-go-rounds. A friend had the earrings specially made for me, and I wear them all the time, but—”
“KaySue!” a male voice yelled from a door in the rear of the room. “Someone just backed into the side of your pickup!”
“Oh no!” The girl whirled and took off through the back way, blond braid flying. A couple of the men from the table, apparently concerned about their favorite waitress, went out to see what was going on.
I waited several minutes, but the girl didn’t return. When I started back toward the DMV I peered into the parking lot. The back end of a Honda was still buried in the side of a red pickup, with curious onlookers, a tow truck, and a police car crowded around. KaySue and a young guy in baggy pants were squared off face-to-face, and then, to my astonishment, she hauled off and slammed a fist into his jaw. A real prize-fighter smackeroo, it looked like. He didn’t go down, but he definitely wobbled. The police officer stepped between them.
Not a good time to be inquiring about earrings, I realized regretfully.
I expected I’d still have to wait a while at the DMV, and I was surprised to find Abilene pacing back and forth by Dr. Sugarman’s pickup. Something in her expression told me she wasn’t out here because she’d finished the tests already. The pickup didn’t look as if it had been moved.
“Is something wrong?”
“I didn’t even get to take the tests. If you don’t have an old driver’s license from some other state to turn in, you have to have a birth certificate. You can’t get a license without it. And I don’t have one.”
“Oh, Abilene, I’m so sorry.” I knew how much she’d counted on this. “We’ll just have to get you one.”
“How?”
Offhand, I didn’t actually know. But … “We’ll talk to Kelli. She’ll know what to do.”
Abilene’s glum face brightened. “Hey, she will, won’t she?”
I parked in front of Kelli’s tiny office on a steep side street. A beauty shop occupied the other half of the stucco building. A discreet bell sounded when I opened the door. Kelli had said she’d let her receptionist go, but the computer at the reception desk was turned on, and papers were scattered as if the receptionist had just stepped out for a minute. Kelli came out of a room beyond this one.
“If you’re busy, we can come back later—”
“No, not busy.” She saw my glance at the receptionist’s desk and gave me a sheepish smile. “Stage setting, so it will look as if my busy receptionist just left the desk for a moment in case, wonder of wonders, a potential client wanders in. Is something wrong at the house?”
“Oh no, everything’s fine. We’re here to use your professional services. Abilene has a problem.”
Kelli looked surprised, but she motioned us into the inner office. She scooted the papers on her desk to one side and motioned us to a pair of chairs. It was pleasant but not what I’d call a power office. A robust jade plant stood in one corner. Kelli apparently wasn’t afflicted with the kiss-of-death thumb that I have. A couple of framed certificates hung on one wall, and several photos of old mining scenes, probably the Lucky Queen, decorated another wall. The carpet was generic tan. Abilene explained the problem with the birth certificate and a driver’s license.
Kelli’s eyebrows lifted. “You’ve never had a driver’s license? Most kids get them the day they turn sixteen. And you’re … ?”
“Twenty-three. I did drive, but it was only the tractor out on the farm, and I didn’t need a license.”
“Have you ever had a copy of your birth certificate?”
“My mom had it when they took me down to Texas to marry Boone. Afterward, I put it in a drawer with our marriage certificate. But there’s no way I could get it from there now.”
Right. Contacting Boone to ask for the certificate would be like lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite.
“What about your parents? Would they have another copy?”
Abilene shook her head, eyes lowered. She no longer had contact with her mother and stepfather. We both knew that if they knew where she was, they’d probably rush to tell Boone. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of people they were. They’d forced her into the marriage and then told her she should stay in it even when Boone was physically abusing her.
Kelli looked curious again, but she didn’t ask questions about husband or parents. Instead she said, “Getting a copy of the birth certificate shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll just contact the vital records department of the state in which you were born.” She went on to ask for the pertinent data about Abilene’s birth and jotted it down. “I’ll get right on it.”
Abilene opened her purse, but Kelli shook her head. “Wait until we see what costs are involved. It shouldn’t be much.”
I stood up, presuming we were finished, but Abilene cleared her throat. “I’m, uh, also wondering …”
“Yes?” Kelli prompted when Abilene just sat there nervously toying with the zipper on her purse.
“About a divorce.”
“You mean, obtaining a copy of a divorce decree also?”
“No, about getting a divorce.”
It was my turn to be surprised now. Not that I didn’t think the divorce was warranted. In general, I’m opposed to divorce. Biblical teaching is against it, and I think most couples should try harder to work things out. But in Abilene’s situation, with the abuse and threats, plus the fact that she knew Boone had been unfaithful and had girlfriends while married to her, I had to think differently.
“How long have you lived in Colorado?” Kelli asked.
“About six weeks.”
Right. We’d spent some time in the Colorado Springs area before getting stranded here in Hello. We’d celebrated Abilene’s twenty-third birthday there.
Kelli shook her head regretfully. “Unfortunately, you have to be a resident of the state for at least ninety days to file for a divorce in Colorado. But we can certainly do it a little later on.”
“Can it be done without my husband knowing where I am?”
“That would be difficult.” Kelli tilted her head curiously. “Is that, um, important?”
“Extremely,” I put in.
Kelli glanced at me, then back at Abilene. Hesitantly at first, then in a rush of words, Abilene told Kelli what she’d once told me. How her stepfather and mother had yanked her out of school at sixteen, taken her from Kansas down to Texas, and shoved her into instant marriage with Boone Morrison, a man with three children from a former marriage.
“Why in the world would they do that?” Kelli sounded appalled.
“I think my stepfather figured it was a good way to get rid of me. I would’ve walked out the first time Boone hit me, but I didn’t know what he might do to the kids if I wasn’t there to protect them. So I hung on.”
“Even when he broke her arm,” I put in. The faint ridge from where the break hadn’t healed right, because Boone wouldn’t let her get proper medical attention, still showed near her wrist.
“Hung on for how long?”
“Six years.”
“Six years,” Kelli ech
oed, a kind of horror in her voice.
“Until the children’s mother went to court and got them back,” I put in.
“Then I took off. Except I wrecked Boone’s Porsche getting away, which made him kind of mad.”
Kind of mad. The understatement of the year. I put it in more specific terms. “So he tracked her down in Oklahoma and threatened to kill her. And would have done it, too, if we hadn’t run. Which is more or less how we wound up here in Hello.”
“Boone doesn’t quit until he … gets even with people,” Abilene said, her words broken with a hard swallow.
The ominous statement hung in the air. Kelli tapped the desk with a ballpoint pen. “Look, how about if I do some checking, very discreet checking, on the situation back in Texas, okay? After you have the proper residence established here, we’ll think of some way to handle this without endangering you. My working through another lawyer in Texas might be a possibility. Give me names and dates and places, okay?”
Abilene did this, and Kelli jotted the facts down alongside the information for the birth certificate. She slipped the paper under the edge of the phone. “In the meantime, I’ll get going on the birth certificate.”
“Thank you,” Abilene said.
I thought Kelli was going to shake hands with us, a formal conclusion to a business meeting, but instead she came around the desk and wrapped her arms around Abilene in a big hug. “I’ll help you,” she said almost fiercely.
At the door to the outer office, Kelli switched to a lighter mood. Her tone was teasing when she said, “I heard you and Norman had a romantic dinner at the Café Russo.” At my surprised look that she knew about my dinner with Norman, but before I could deny that any romance was involved, she smiled and added, “Victoria Halburton told Chris’s mother, and she mentioned it to me. There are no secrets in Hello.”
“Except for who murdered Hiram,” I murmured.
“True,” Kelli admitted. “Did you and Norman talk about that?”
“He assured me you didn’t do it, and neither did he.” I paused, reconsidering that statement. Actually, Norman hadn’t declared his innocence. I bypassed that now. “He also said that Hiram once told him never to put any money in a bank in the Bahamas. I’m wondering if that meant Hiram had some bad experience with a Bahamas bank.”
“The Bahamas?” Kelli looked surprised. “No, I haven’t seen anything in his records about that, although I’m still not certain I have everything.”
“It may have been a long time ago.”
Kelli nodded. “Hiram made a lot of investments over the years. In spite of his general shrewdness, not all of them were exactly blue chip. He told me once about putting money in a company that claimed they could turn seaweed into fuel for cars.”
“Did it work?”
“Apparently not. We’re still buying barrels of oil from the Middle East, not boatloads of seaweed. But he might have gotten into some investment in the Bahamas. Some of those offshore banks do promise very high interest.”
One other thought occurred to me. “Do you know anything about a secret room or passageway at the house?”
“No!” Kelli’s blue eyes sparkled with interest. “Did you find one?”
“No. I’ve looked a little, but it’s a big house.”
“What makes you think there might be a secret room?”
I didn’t want to tell her that ex-girlfriend Suzy had suggested it, so I detoured with, “Doesn’t it just seem like the kind of creepy old place that would have a secret room?”
She laughed. “Well, now that you mention it, I guess it does.”
“You don’t mind if I keep poking around looking for a room then, do you?”
“Poke away. After all, Hiram did own what was once one of the richest gold mines in the state. Maybe it’ll be full of gold bars or enormous nuggets or something.”
Her light tone suggested she didn’t think there was a high probability of this. I didn’t either, but that mutant curiosity gene wanted to know if such a room existed, even if there was no treasure in it. It might hold any number of interesting things, from more old books to old photos or clothes. Maybe an old skeleton! My imagination, cousin to the curiosity gene, is always busy.
I went back to the original thought of treasure in a secret room. “Maybe the killer knew about a secret room full of something valuable, and that’s why Hiram was killed. So the killer could take what he knew was hidden.”
“But who could know about a secret room? Unless it was one of the old wives, and we’ve pretty well eliminated them as killers, haven’t we?”
Yes, old wives would be the ones most likely to know about a secret room, if it existed. But were there other possibilities? Unless Hiram had simply told someone about the existence of a secret room, the person would have to be someone who had spent enough time in the house to discover such a room. Which led right back to people I didn’t want to consider as potential murderers. Norman. Lucinda. And Kelli herself.
Another thought occurred to me. There wouldn’t necessarily have had to be some valuable treasure hidden in the room. If someone simply knew about a secret room and thought something valuable was hidden there, and was willing to kill for it …
Since we had the pickup, we drove out to Nick’s Garage to check on the motor home. Nick had dragged it around back of the shop, more out of the way. It looked the same as before, dejected. We went around by the post office before heading home. A few things had been sent on from the Arkansas mail-forwarding outfit. A letter from niece DeeAnn and another from grandniece Sandy, and one from old friend Magnolia Margollin too, with a Phoenix postmark. She and Geoff had been living full-time in their motor home since selling their home across from mine on Madison Street back in Missouri.
Oh, and a postcard sent direct to general delivery here in Hello. I didn’t have to turn it over to know who it was from. Who else would send a postcard with the picture of a giant sponge—a giant sponge wearing giant sunglasses—on it? But I waited until we got home to read the message, savoring the anticipation.
15
Back at the house, I turned up the thermostat on the heat pump and read the postcard. Pleased as I was to hear from him, I still felt a twinge of annoyance. Mac MacPherson, the Postcard Man, has never written me a real letter.
This message was brief, as usual. It said he’d be leaving Florida soon. He had an assignment from a travel magazine for an article about an unusual theme park in Texas, and then he might head up to Colorado. Not a statement that he was definitely coming to Hello, of course. Mac tends to be very cagey about pinning himself down. But maybe he’d be here before long.
My first impulse was to call and tell him how to find us if he came to Hello. He did say he was very much looking forward to seeing me again, which, from Mac, qualifies as a fairly strong commitment. But on second thought I decided to leave finding me in Hello to Mac’s ingenuity. If he wanted to find me, he certainly would. I wanted to see him again, but I wasn’t going to look as if I were panting and drooling with expectation. (I wasn’t, was I? Well, maybe just a tiny increase in respiration rate.) Then, after reading Magnolia’s letter, I instantly grabbed our cell phone and punched in the numbers she’d provided.
“Ivy, it’s so good to hear from you!” Magnolia exclaimed. I could see her in my mind’s eye. Her formidable, Victorian-style figure enveloped in yards of gauzy swirls that always seemed to have a life of their own. Her changing hair color. Insulation Pink. Raspberry Red. Rainbow. And her accessories—earrings or hair decoration or necklace—all magnolias, of course. “Are you going to tell me where you are?”
I’ve been cautious about that. The Braxton mini-mafia surely knows about my relationship with Magnolia and Geoff, and I wouldn’t put it past them to try to get to me through these friends. That wouldn’t be easy, given that the Margollins are also often on the move, but they’ve had a couple of suspicious encounters. I’ve always figured it would be easier for them to keep the secret of my whereabouts if they didn
’t know where I was.
“Why don’t you just tell me all about your new home? You’re actually going to give up RVing and settle down in Phoenix?”
“Oh, Ivy, we love it here! Right now there’s one of those roadrunner birds out in the yard. He comes almost every day to eat the hamburger balls I toss out for him.” Magnolia gushed on about their southwestern-style home with tile roof, built-in barbecue, and a yard full of saguaro, cholla, and ocotillo. “And Geoff is going to try to get some magnolia trees started for me too.”
Back home in Missouri, their lush stand of her namesake trees had been almost famous, and I figured if anyone could grow magnolias in the desert, it would be Geoff.
“So, what about your genealogical studies?” I asked. Magnolia has long been involved in researching her family’s history and happily claims connections to everyone from American Indians to French royalty. “Have you made any new family discoveries?”
“Oh my, yes. We have these wonderful Hispanic neighbors, and I do believe I’ve discovered a family connection from when one of my French ancestors married a Spanish adventurer. We may make a trip down to Mexico one of these days for further research. We aren’t giving up the motor home just because we have a house now.”
“You’ll probably locate some distant cousins.” Sometimes I wonder just how distant a connection can be and still be recognized as a cousin. Is there such a thing as a thirteenth cousin? Or a twenty-seventh?
“But that trip will have to wait. First we have to go back to Missouri to do something with all the things we left in storage there.”
“When will you go?”
“Quite soon, probably. Although it depends on the weather.”
I pulled up a rough mental map showing Phoenix, Hello, and Missouri. Connecting them didn’t exactly make a straight line. “You know, if you didn’t mind making a detour up into Colorado—”
Stranded Page 14
