Mild West Mysteries: 13 Idaho Tales of Murder and Mayhem

by Conda Douglas

  Kelly smiled at his attempt to mollify what he probably thought of as “her womanly feelings.”

  “Glad to help, Sheriff. Anyone you want me to start with?”

  He shook his head. “Any one of ’em could be the killer. They all had plenty of reason.”

  One of them must be the killer, too. Comprised of four houses, plus two barns, built in 1879 on several acres, the family compound stood good twenty miles outside of Starke, up a long winding dirt road. No one had reported hearing any cars coming into the driveway that circled around the homes. Perhaps someone could hike over the mountainous countryside from the main highway, but the only possible suspects, those with motive, lived here.

  Kelly considered the motive for killing the old man as she walked to the first log cabin of three surrounding the mansion.

  From the maid’s garbled tale, the old man had insisted his grown children occupy the much smaller cabins while he squatted in luxury in his vast house. He also insisted they attend his weekly dinner parties. The old guy loved to cook. This last dinner party, the maid had heard him announce he was “disinheriting his ungrateful children and giving my millions to my favorite cooking school.”

  His two daughters and one son sat stunned through the rest of dinner and then hastily made their departure to their cabins to “mull over the news,” as one of them had told the Sheriff. One of them must have returned moments afterwards and stabbed the old man where he still sat at the table.

  But who?

  In the first cabin, Kelly met the oldest daughter, Marie.

  Marie greeted her at the door wearing a formal silk cream pants suit. Kelly conducted the interview in a tiny sterile white living room, austere white carpet, gleaming drapes and furniture. The new deputy wondered if the decor was white to make the small room seem larger or if it only reflected Marie’s chilly personality.

  “When can we clean Father’s place?” Marie asked again and again.

  Kelly wondered why Marie seemed more concerned about the messy crime scene than her father’s death. A touch of OCD perhaps? Or a way of deflecting her grief? She left Marie with more questions than answers. The woman had related the events of the previous evening in a bored monotone and said, “Dad changed his will like he changed his socks, with tri-daily frequency.” A statement in direct opposition to the maid’s account of the amazed siblings, so was Marie’s tone a pretense?

  At the next cabin, the door flung open to reveal the youngest daughter, Tammy, wearing stained sweats.

  Kelly endured a few uncomfortable moments in Tammy’s even smaller front room. Or perhaps it only seemed smaller, Kelly thought, as she shared a sofa with books, magazines, dirty clothing and old pizza boxes with the requisite empty beer bottles. Tammy sat across from her on an old ragged floor pillow and sobbed about her “dear old dad.”

  Ah, a more normal reaction here, but no confession or damning evidence to be found, unless growing loads of bacteria could be construed as a criminal offense. And like her sister, Tammy’s emotional outburst could be an act.

  Sighing, Kelly escaped, and with heart sinking down to her tired toes in their regulation, pug ugly boots, she knocked on the final cabin’s door.

  Here, the old man’s son, Tom, bedecked in a clean apron, greeted her warmly with fresh baked, still warm, cinnamon rolls. Tom, who’d obviously inherited his father’s cooking passion, (the myriad and well-organized cooking utensils crowding the pristine kitchen proved his love), plied her with the baked goods but no new information.

  Like his sister, Marie, Tom appeared to be OCD about cleanliness, hovering over Kelly while she ate the roll and whisking the plate away as soon as she removed the last delicious crumb with her fingertip. Like his sister, he also talked of his father with a cold, clinical tone, a la “good riddance.”

  Headed back to the Sheriff to report, in her mind Kelly reviewed the interviews. She slowed when she realized they’d told her little or nothing. Or had they? She stopped when she realized the suspects hadn’t said anything that would lead to the killer, not a word, but they had shown her something new: how each lived at home.

  Her heart much lighter, Kelly reported to the sheriff.

  “Yes, I’m certain Tammy is the killer,” she told the older cop.

  “How could you know that?” the sheriff asked.

  With a grin, she spread her hands and explained, “The killer attempted to clean up the crime scene, but still quite a bit of chaos and mess remained. Marie and Tom both inherited their father’s clean-freakiness. No way would they have allowed a speck of food or gravy smear to exist after the murder.”

  To the sheriff’s amazed open-mouthed look she added, “It just took a woman’s touch.”

  Conda’s note:

  Now for a different kind of a “mystery” story, one about the crimes that family members sometimes do to each other, sometimes to the point of total destruction. This story was inspired by my family’s events and history.

  Walking with the Idaho Dead

  The call came at night, as such calls so often do, and policeman apologized for the lateness of the hour.

  “Had to call, ma’am, I mean not that it’s anything we can prove, you understand,” the policeman, young by the cadence of his voice, hesitated.

  “Yes? Is my grandmother dead then?”

  “How’d you know?” he asked, the youth in his voice replaced by suspicion.

  “She was ninety seven, what’s the surprise?”

  “Well … the problem is, we’re not positive she’s dead. She’s just … gone.”

  “Gone? How can a 97-year-old woman with one bad leg, deaf and nearly blind be gone? Gone where?”

  “Disappeared, not around, so far as we can tell.” The policeman cleared his throat. “We suspect your uncle buried her.”

  I lay in my bed, the phone cradled in my hand, in the warmth beneath the covers, and thought of how mine is a family of long anger and no forgiving.

  “We think maybe she died. But your uncle’s not saying and since you’re the only other surviving relative …”

  * * *

  A day’s travel later to Star, Idaho, I found myself smiling at a man that all my childhood I glimpsed only rarely. He stood on the porch of my grandmother’s house, his arms folded over his chest. Since I was five at our last meeting I feared he might not recognize me.

  “Jane.”

  He knew me.

  “Come into the house, I’ll not turn a relative away, not like your father.”

  I remember grandmother always warning me, “Don’t go near your Uncle Henry, child.” In the back recesses of my mind, I still heard the echoes of his shouting that long ago day.

  * * *

  A hot sultry day in late September, the black walnut trees dropped their heavy load of nuts. We were all in the yard, gathering the nuts, hulling off the thick outer shells of skin and fiber that covered them. I tired of picking up the nuts and tried hulling them, but hated the sticky black fiber that stained my hands. So I stood, wanting to be helpful, as kids do, when my uncle yelled at my father.

  They circled each other like dogs, my uncle screaming, my father silent. I ran to my grandmother and grabbed her apron. She pushed me away, not wanting the touch of my black sticky hands.

  My uncle struck one blow, across my father’s face that knocked my father down. “Get up!” my uncle shouted. My father sat on the walnut covered grass and stared at his brother until Uncle Henry turned and stormed into the house.

  “A long time coming,” my grandmother said, “but I’m not surprised.”

  * * *

  Now, a quarter of a century later, I picked up my suitcase and followed my uncle inside my grandmother’s house. A farmhouse of wood and plaster, built in 1913, it possessed only two bedrooms, the front parlor and the kitchen. Older than my grandmother, but not by many years, there was not one corner, one alcove, one chair or bed that did not retain some mark of her personality.

  My uncle watched as I set down my suitc
ase and reacquainted myself with a house I thought of as a friend. In my high heels, I tottered over the wood of the front parlor floor. Uncle Henry watched my careful progress for a moment.

  “I reckon I’ll let you settle into it,” he said, and banged out the door.

  I took off my heels so I could wander.

  The wood floors, long stripped of varnish, buckled with years of summer heat and winter cold. Hand-woven scatter rugs, with no rubber backing, lay over the more worn parts, adding to the impression that the floor was like a terrain of tiny hills and slippery valleys. I learned early to go barefoot and let the soles of my feet tell me the way.

  Looking out the kitchen window, I gazed at the first telling signs of my grandmother’s death. The back garden, always exuberant, lay ruined. Though the tomatoes, her pride, stood staked, they were but dry rustling stalks, wasted effort.

  Every August, as a child, I had escaped the end-of-summer heat by sitting in the garden, the cool from the moist ground rising around me. Surrounded by the heady scent of ripe vegetables, I’d feast. The tomatoes, heated by the sun, would burst warm and sweet in my mouth.

  Now I pressed my hand against the window, wishing the ruined garden to disappear, and when it did not, turned away.

  As I joined Uncle Henry on the porch, a police car pulled into the dirt driveway. Three men got out, two carrying shovels. They stood next to the car, looking embarrassed. The third man, older, came up to the porch and introduced himself as the Sheriff. He didn’t waste his time with Uncle Henry but spoke to me.

  “He tell you where he put her?”

  I looked at my uncle. He stood rangy and lean, like beef jerky, all muscle and no fat, his knees locked back, legs braced apart, like he stood braced against a wind. My father, before disease bowed his legs, stood that way and the wind blew and never moved him an inch.

  “Uncle Henry?” I tried to think of a way to get through to this man who long ago made himself a stranger. “Where’s she gone?”

  “Man’s got a right to bury his dead,” he said.

  “That’s true,” said the sheriff, “but you can’t just bury somebody without any preliminaries and in an unknown spot.” The sheriff spread his hands, entreating reason from my uncle, whose reason fled years ago.

  “Don’t you want her to be buried with a proper funeral?” I asked.

  Same as my father, Uncle Henry tilted his head to one side, his eyelids half down. “Why?” he said.

  I shrugged at the sheriff, who signaled the two men with the shovels to come forward. They came, dragging the shovels.

  The sheriff shrugged back at me. “Sometimes this happens, miss,” he said. “On account of there being these old family cemeteries around the old farmhouses. Aren’t any new burials allowed because sometimes, with Star growing, the bodies just have to be moved. But they try to bury ’em—sentimental, you know. Is there a family plot on this land?”

  “Not that I know of—” I looked over at my uncle. He’d turned his back. I didn’t envy the officers their job, grandmother owned five acres, all that remained of the 2800 acre ranch my family once owned, and out behind the garden it was all overgrown, with an irrigation canal running through it.

  The sheriff sighed. “Okay men, look for disturbed ground first.” They moved toward the back.

  “You take what you want from the house now,” my uncle said. “I don’t care what you take, but take it now.” Uncle Henry followed the men.

  As he walked away, I saw the slump in his shoulders. Grandmother must have been a heavy burden for him, for she was far from being a little old lady.

  * * *

  Over six feet tall, Dora Elizabeth Wylie towered over me even when I was grown. Raw boned, no one called her pretty, with her long horse face, but attractive with her grey eyes, that turned the length of her nose into an asset, the long face into an elegant counterpart to those eyes. She told me about an argument with my grandfather, a bitter fight that culminated in her asking why he ever married her.

  “Figured if the mule died, you’d do to pull the plow,” he answered.

  First time she went out with a man, she went with my grandfather. She wouldn’t have gone at all, being only fifteen; save that her older sister was sick and my grandmother went in her place.

  My grandfather Harry took her to the dance in a sleigh that he borrowed for the occasion. Her fifteen years angered him. This grown man of twenty-five who muttered under his breath as he checked the horses’ reins frightened Dora until he saw she shivered and he took up a bear rug and placed it around her, tucking it under her feet. They set off, through the early darkness of the winter night, with the bear skin tickling her nose.

  At the dance all the other girls watched as she danced with him, this tall strong girl, homely save for her eyes, dancing with the handsomest man in the county. He danced most of the dances with her and she looked at the other girls and liked what she saw in their faces.

  On the way back they shared the bear rug. He stopped the sleigh outside the fence that led onto her grandfather’s ranch. It snowed light as feathers and she’d drawn the bearskin up around her face again. He looked out over the winter fields, saying nothing with her waiting, before he drew the bearskin down from her face and kissed her once.

  Her older sister never forgave her.

  Eight years later, Dora sat in the front parlor, seven months pregnant with her second son, waiting for them to come back from Harry’s funeral. In seclusion, she sat in the front parlor with her swollen feet up and waited. Iris filled the parlor. She hated the sight and smell of it forever after.

  At breakfast the day before, they argued. Harry sat at the kitchen table, his face grey in the early morning light.

  She told him not to go to work on the rail line running from Meridian to Caldwell and then beyond, all the way to the Pacific. “They’re dying on the line, dropping as they work, Harry, from that Spanish flu,” she said.

  “Have to, baby’s coming, where we going to get the money?” he answered.

  He left her sitting there. Two men carried him into the house later that day, unconscious from the moment he’d collapsed on the line. The doctor wouldn’t let her near him.

  “If I’d been able to see him, to touch him,” she later said, “I would’ve made him stay, he wouldn’t of left me then. But the doctor didn’t want me having the flu that was killing so many, and me dying and the child in me, so they kept me away. Even so, he didn’t die till the next morning. He waited for me to come and save him. They didn’t even let me come and see him after he was dead and somebody, I don’t know who, closed his eyes for him, not me. That ain’t right.”

  Fifty years later, my grandmother did not attend my father’s funeral either. “I don’t approve of his being cremated, you should of asked me, I was his mother. It’s wrong. I’m not going to watch some grotesque display of scattering his ashes.”

  * * *

  Now, from around the corner of the house I saw the men moving out into the field, the sheriff and his men going first, Uncle Henry following. I went back into the house.

  In the parlor I half expected the lingering scent of iris. I tried to decide what to take. Most should be left for Uncle Henry; he needed it more than I.

  Stacked in the bookcase were old photograph albums. I sorted through several, remembering.

  My grandmother never denied me my family’s past. Every night I stayed with her, we lay together in the big bed, my head pillowed on her arm, her stories opening a window into her life.

  But one story grandmother never told. She robbed a bank and took her son as a hostage, holding a gun to his head and threatening to kill him when the police surrounded the hideout.

  Only five at the time my father remembered it all. How the police captured his mother. At the police station, having no place to put a 5-year-old, they locked him in the garage while they interrogated his mother.

  My father never forgot huddling cold and hungry in one of the police cars. Above, in the station,
he heard them yelling at his mother. He stared at a penny bubble gum machine all night long, but lacked a penny for a piece of gum to still his aching belly.

  Grandmother spent two years in the Women’s Prison, just outside the walls of the Idaho Penitentiary, while her young sons became too familiar with Boise’s one orphanage. Every Sunday, my father and his brother Henry visited the prison, traveling in the back of an old wagon drawn by an obstreperous mule for the five miles between Boise and the prison. Although my dad picked long splinters from riding on the cracked and warped wagon boards, he loved those visits. The women inmates reached through the bars and stroked his chestnut curls saying, “Sweet little man, poor little man.” He said it was the only loving he was ever to know as a child.

  “That’s why I didn’t go crazy like my brother,” he often said, “because I never knew what I missed, but before my dad died Henry knew about being a family.”

  For the deprivation of his childhood, my father never forgave my grandmother, until he ceased speaking to her altogether. As cancer raged through my father’s body he turned away from any comfort she might give. She never forgave him this and told me about her recurrent dream.

  “He comes on his birthday, he comes home,” she said. “Always late at night, when I’ve been sleeping, he knocks on the door. He’s got to knock, so’s he can apologize, so’s I can let him come home. I wake quick, move quick when I hear him knock, but I’m grown too old and when I get to the door, he’s gone, lost again. I call, but he don’t answer. Someday, someday, I’ll get there on time.”

  I wonder if my father finally answered.

  * * *

  Now, setting aside the albums, I wandered out to the kitchen. Looking out the window, I saw the men returning from the back acres, one of them shaking his head, another glaring at my uncle. Standing there I remembered how my grandmother dreamt of my grandfather as well. He arrived for her in the sleigh and they went dancing, much as they had that first night. She awoke in the morning with the tickle of bear hairs about her nose. I knew then where grandmother must be buried.