Cyanide Wells

by Marcia Muller

  “What about Gar Payne? Or Milt Rawson? They might’ve known.”

  “No, I’m sure neither of them has ever been in this house.”

  “Other friends of yours?”

  “Some of them may have known about the collection, although not many. Ronnie didn’t talk about it much; that would’ve been dangerous. Burglars go after firearms, particularly old and valuable ones. And I seriously doubt that anybody knew where the keys were kept. The only reason Ard and I found out was that during the last Christmas party here we were wrapping gifts in the office. Ronnie came in to get the keys because an old friend of his father’s had stopped by and wanted to look at the collection, thinking he might buy it.”

  “Was the friend with him?”

  “No. Ronnie was even uncomfortable that Ard and I saw him get the keys.”

  Though it was cool in the library, Matt’s face was filmed with sweat. He got up, felt his way across the room, and sank into one of the leather chairs. When he spoke, he barely recognized his own voice.

  “Why would Ardis kill Ronnie and Deke?”

  “Well, she did get a great series of stories out of their deaths.”

  “No one kills a friend to score a journalistic coup.”

  “Try this one, then: a rich vein of gold running under a house whose owner has just made you executor of his will.”

  All the way back to Carly’s house they argued about taking what they knew to Grossman.

  “Her killing Chase Lewis I can somewhat understand,” he said. “But this other—you can’t be willing to risk her getting away with it.”

  “I need time—just overnight, that’s all.”

  “Christ, Carly, you don’t know what else she’s done. Or what she might do next.”

  “Will ten or twelve hours make a difference?”

  “It might.”

  “She’s not some crazed serial killer. Besides, they issued a beon-lookout order for her days ago. What more can they do in the middle of the night?”

  She had a point. “All right, but we’re going to see Grossman first thing tomorrow.”

  “Agreed, Why don’t you come over at eight? We’ll drive down to Santa Carla together.”

  After he dropped Carly at her footbridge, he sped off, turning on the Jeep’s radio in the hope that some music would calm him. The only station that came in clearly was KSOL, easy listening out of the county seat. Not his first choice, but in his present frame of mind, anything would do. He’d just arrived at Sam’s when the announcer’s voice broke in; he left the Jeep running and turned up the volume.

  “This just in: Acting on an anonymous tip, Soledad County sheriff’s deputies stopped a car driven by Cyanide Wells Mayor Garson Payne and, in the process of investigating a routine traffic violation, seized a handgun from the glove box. Although ballistics experts have yet to confirm it, a department spokesman says they are ‘ninety-nine percent certain’ that the weapon, an old Austrian army revolver, was used to kill San Francisco musician Chase Lewis in his Westport motel room last weekend. In a related development, the spokesman said that technicians have matched the bullet that killed Lewis with those used in the three-year-old fatal shootings of prominent Cyanide Wells residents Ronald Talbot Junior and Deke Rutherford. Interviewed outside the Talbot’s Mills sheriff’s department substation, where Payne is being held pending arraignment, the mayor’s attorney, James Griffin, stated that his client has no idea how the gun came to be in his car. The case against the mayor will be thrown out of court upon arraignment, Griffin contends, because of the ‘illegal nature’ of the search…”

  Matt put the Jeep into a fast U-turn.

  Carly McGuire

  Saturday, May 18, 2002

  When she’d entered the house after Matt dropped her off, Carly had taken grim satisfaction at the sight of Ard’s stacked and strewn possessions. Earlier she’d allowed him to sway her about immediately disposing of them, but on Monday they were headed for the Salvation Army. Or maybe the county dump. She didn’t want to saddle anyone, no matter how needy, with the accumulation of Ard’s lying, cheating, murderous life.

  In the postmidnight hour she moved through the empty house. It felt as it had the night she’d moved in, a lonely twenty-eight-year-old who feared she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. How could she, who had lived in crowded, noisy cities since her late teens, adapt to such isolation and silence? What had possessed her to think she could grasp the reins of a failing country weekly and guide it to success?

  Well, you adapted, grasped, and guided. You created a successful life for yourself. You would’ve been fine if Ard hadn’t come into it. Moral: Never pick up hitchhikers.

  But for years the hitchhiker, and later her daughter, had brought joy to this house. In spite of the fights and Ard’s penchant for fleeing, there had been many good times.

  All behind you now, McGuire, the good and the bad.

  But can you ever really put that big a part of your life behind you?

  She tried to reconcile the woman she’d thought she knew with the woman who had killed their friends, but couldn’t. She thought back to the night they’d died, trying to find a shred of evidence that would prove Ard innocent. The coroner had put the time of death at around three in the morning. Ard was supposedly in bed beside her at that hour. But they’d had an argument, and Carly had taken a sleeping pill. Still, wouldn’t she have noticed if Ard had left for any appreciable length of time? Maybe, maybe not. And Ard was the only person besides her who had access to Ronnie’s gun collection…

  Suicide.

  The word loomed suddenly in her mind. Odd that the two men who had fixed things for Payne and Rawson had killed themselves. Could there be a connection…?

  The phone rang, shrill in the silence. She started, then rushed to the kitchen to pick up.

  “Carly?”

  The sound of her name, spoken in the old familiar way, jolted her. She drew in her breath, a combination of surprise and anger threatening to choke her. It was a moment before she could respond.

  “Ard. Where are you? Where’s Natalie?”

  “Carly, I need your help. Chase…It’s been on the news. Everybody thinks I did it.”

  Get her back here, McGuire. Make her turn Nat over to you.

  “Look, Ard, why don’t you and Nat come home? I’ll hire a good attorney; we’ll get through this together.”

  “I can’t. It’s over between you and me. It’s been over for a long time. But Nat…she’s sick. She caught cold and then her asthma flared up, and now she’s out of medication, but I don’t dare go to the pharmacy for a refill. And I think the cold’s turning into pneumonia. I want her to be with you, where she belongs. Our…your place is the only home she’s ever known.”

  “Of course I’ll take her. I’ll see she gets what she needs.”

  “Thank you. I can’t be responsible for her anymore. She’s been sick for a week—so sick I haven’t been able to move her—and it’s all my fault.”

  “Then bring her here right away.”

  “No, I can’t come there. It’s the first place the sheriff’s department will expect me to show up. They’re probably watching the house.”

  “They were, but not anymore.”

  “Look, will you quit talking and come get her?”

  “Okay—where?”

  “At the Knob. We’ve been camping out in my rental van near that lookout point—the one Ronnie showed us.”

  “I can be there in half an hour.”

  “Good. And one other thing…could you bring me some money? My credit cards’re maxed out, and I’ve run through all my cash.”

  Demanding a ransom, are you?

  “How much do you need?”

  “A few thousand. Whatever’s in your emergency stash.” Nearly three thousand dollars in a Jiffy bag in the office-supply cabinet. Ard must’ve snooped. She’d never respected anyone’s privacy.

  “I’ll bring it.”

  “Oh, Carly, thank you. I know you’ll
take good care of my little girl.”

  Chase Lewis’s little girl, who has now become excess baggage.

  “Half an hour,” she said, and replaced the receiver.

  Carly pulled her truck into the parking area at the trailhead and got out. The national forest was an eerie place at night: chill even after the hottest of days; silent but full of dangerous, prowling life. She took out her flashlight and began walking along a familiar path that was altered by darkness, keeping a wary ear out for sounds in the underbrush. A dry winter had brought mountain lions and bears down from the higher elevations in search of food and water; coyotes and wild pigs also inhabited these foothills.

  She followed the trail slowly and cautiously, but her thoughts moved at a furious pace. Something had occurred to her before Ard’s call, and she was now linking previously unrelated bits and pieces of information, discarding others. If she could only make the final connections—

  A thrashing overhead, then a scurrying in the underbrush. The scream of a small victim.

  Owl, probably a great horned, catching his dinner. I hate that sound.

  She was nearing the Knob now, but still there was no sign of Ard’s rented van. She’d probably driven in on the fire trail to the far side. How she’d eluded the forest rangers while camping in territory that was closed to all but official vehicles, Carly couldn’t imagine. Or why, after Nat fell ill a week ago, she’d continued to stay here, where nighttime temperatures were always frigid. Her treatment of the child had become criminally negligent.

  The trail began angling uphill, around boulders and over rocky ledges. Soon she spotted the ramshackle building that had once held the cyaniders’ equipment. Slag heaps rose to either side, and where the trail split, her flashlight picked out the boarded-up entrance to the old mine, now covered in a wild pattern of graffiti. She turned to the left and started around toward the lookout point.

  The terrain was rougher now, and bulky shapes lurked in the darkness—a dumping ground of broken equipment and metal drums that had once contained cyanide, abandoned by the mining company and allowed to remain by the forest service as a memorial to the place’s history. Some people thought the area should be cleared, but Carly preferred it this way; to beautify and sanitize it would be denying the reality of what had occurred here…

  She stopped, staring at the shapes without really seeing them.

  As a memorial…

  Reality’s starting to interfere with the writing…

  He was a proud man…

  This is so nice. I wish it could go on forever…

  Suicide…

  The connections were made.

  She began walking faster.

  “You’re ten minutes late. I thought you weren’t coming or had called the cops. So I hid up here.”

  Ard’s voice came from a ledge above her. Carly shone the flashlight upward; she stood with her arms folded, legs planted wide, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that were insubstantial for the chill night. Even at a distance she looked tired and unkempt. There was no sign of Natalie.

  “You know I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “Did you bring the money?”

  “Yes. Where’s Nat?”

  “In the van. Leave the money there on the ground where I can see it. Drive back to the entrance, and I’ll deliver her to you.”

  “You’re not getting the money till Nat’s safe with me.”

  Ard was silent for a moment. “Well, it seems we’re at an impasse. If I don’t get the money, you don’t get the kid. If you don’t get the kid, I don’t get the money. How’re we going to work this out?”

  “Maybe we can strike a deal.”

  “What?”

  “You answer a few of my questions—truthfully, for a change—then the money is yours.”

  “Done.”

  “First question: When you got to Ronnie and Deke’s that morning”—no need to explain which—“what did you find?”

  “Jesus, Carly, can’t you think of anything better to ask? You know what I found: our friends murdered in their bed.”

  “I don’t think so. You found Deke murdered in their bed, but not Ronnie. He killed himself. It was a murder-suicide pact.”

  Ard was silent.

  “Second question: What did you do then?”

  No reply. “All right, let me tell you what you did. You removed the gun from wherever it was and replaced it in its case in the library cabinet—where it stayed until you took it out to kill Chase. You removed Deke’s medications and inspirational book from the nightstand so no one would know he had AIDS. And you probably removed their suicide note from wherever they’d left it.”

  “There wasn’t any note—” She broke off, realizing her mistake.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Silence.

  “A yes?”

  “All right! It’s a yes!”

  Carly crossed her arms, gripped her elbows with iron fingers. “And then what did you do?”

  More silence.

  “What did you do to their bodies, Ard?”

  Ard continued to hesitate. Carly sensed what was going on with her: the trembling lips, the filling eyes, the silent weeping.

  After all she’s done, she still thinks that will work with me. “What did you do to their bodies?”

  “Carly, it was awful. They were wearing their fancy Japanese kimonos, and they’d been drinking champagne, and I guess they thought they’d look peaceful and released from all of it, but they didn’t. Neither of them knew what gunshot wounds to the head can do, but Ronnie found out and—God, I don’t even want to think about how it must’ve been for him. Still, even our inept sheriff’s deputies would’ve been able to figure out it was a suicide pact, so I had to kind of…rearrange things. That was the really horrible part—touching them.”

  Carly was shaking now—sickened and enraged both by how Ard had desecrated their friends’ deathbed scene and by her self-pitying whine. She said, “Last question: Why? Why did you do those things?”

  “I didn’t want anyone to know about the AIDS. Ronnie only told me about it when he gave me my copy of his will. He and Deke were so private—”

  “Bullshit. You wanted a story. The murder-suicide of a gay couple was good but not great copy. An unsolved murder of a gay couple was. You did those horrible things for a story.”

  In the flashlight’s beam Carly saw Ard’s eyes narrow and her mouth firm. “All right, so what if I did? You’re a newspaper-woman. You ought to understand. Besides, why should you complain? It was your paper that got the Pulitzer, not me!”

  “And you resent me for that?”

  “For that and a whole lot of other things. You ordered me around at work from day one; you were so convinced you were the better journalist. And at home it was always your house that we lived in, your money that put food on the table. You even tried to tell me how to raise Natalie. It’s always been about you, you, you. That morning I saw my chance to have something of my own, make a name for myself—but then your paper won the Pulitzer.”

  Carly stared up at her, unable to believe the depth of the woman’s anger. Had she really treated her so badly? And if so, why hadn’t Ard confronted her at the time rather than let her resentment fester?

  “Then I got my book deal,” Ard went on, “but I couldn’t write the damn thing. That morning at Ronnie and Deke’s had finally caught up with me, and I just couldn’t get past it. And then Chase showed up, claiming he wanted Natalie, even though he didn’t give a shit about her. All he wanted was money to keep him from going to the cops about me kidnapping her. Kidnapping! I saved her life. At best she’d’ve become his punching bag; at worst…But I didn’t have any money; I’d spent the whole advance for the book.”

  “You could’ve come to me for the money. You didn’t have to kill him.”

  “Oh, sure, I could’ve come to you. And spent the rest of my life enduring your holier-than-thou attitude.”

  Am I really that bad a person?

  No, I�
��m not perfect, but I’m not the monster she makes me out to be. I’ve taken measure of myself in the past ten days, and I can live with what I’ve seen.

  I can do good things—especially for Natalie.

  She said, “That’s enough, Ard. Come down from there and take me to Nat.”

  “Look, this stalemate isn’t doing Nat or me any good. She’s sick, she needs help. And I’ve bought some time, but not much.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gar Payne was arrested tonight. Seems the gun that killed Chase, Ronnie, and Deke was in the glovebox of his car.”

  “You planted it there. And made an anonymous call to the sheriff’s department.”

  “What if I did? It’ll keep them busy till I can get out of the county.”

  Was there no end to what Ard would do? “Maybe the charge against Payne will stick. Then you could stay here. You’d still have control of the Talbot estate—and the gold.”

  “Gold? What gold? The mine’s not part of the estate. Anyway, there hadn’t been any gold there since the thirties.”

  Faking, or does she really not know?

  Carly said, “Gold is the reason Payne and Rawson want that land. A rich vein of it runs through there.”

  “…You’re lying. They want it for a development.” She doesn’t know. But what about her notes on Noah Estes, Denver Precious Metals. Wells Mining?

  Of course—simple reminders to research the history of the area where the murders took place. She’s always been big on history.

  “I’m not lying. If you’d done your homework, you’d’ve known.”

  Ard stood, hands loose at her sides, perplexed. Then she shook her head. “Well, gold, whatever—none of that matters now. Payne will wriggle out of the charges, and then they’ll be looking for me again. I’ve got to get out of here. Just give me the money, will you?”