Mild West Mysteries: 13 Idaho Tales of Murder and Mayhem

by Conda Douglas

  I hesitated. Should I tell the sheriff and his men? Surely Uncle Henry had some reason for burying her there, in that manner. Or did he? Looking at my uncle standing stiff and silent, I wondered whether it was a final act of rage against his parent.

  I stepped to the back porch and called out, “I know where she’s buried.”

  Uncle Henry raised his hand, as if to stop me, maybe even strike me.

  “You had no right, doing that, she’s my family too,” I said to him. I turned to the sheriff, “She’s out at the old Star cemetery.”

  It took us longer than I figured to find the grave. One of the men spotted the fresh earth next to an old tombstone and called us over. The sheriff and his men left us, to go get the medical examiner.

  My uncle and I stood, regarding each other over the fresh earth. The double headstone, with my grandfather on one side, and my grandmother’s name and her real birth date already carved on the other side. Though the carving was done decades ago, the letters still stood clear. Someone had cleaned the stone and tended the plot, ringing the fresh earth round with marigolds, my grandmother’s favorite flower.

  “You’re just like your father,” Uncle Henry said, “never belonged to the family. Now they won’t let her be buried here like she wanted. Guess this is about the only funeral she didn’t miss. Didn’t even get this one right.”

  Those were the last words my uncle ever spoke to me. He was wrong; she was buried next to my grandfather, after I renewed the plot lease and made all the proper arrangements. She had a proper funeral too, with a coffin and flowers, not iris, but I was the only one who came.

  I would have liked to have a storybook ending, with my discovering a warm-hearted man in my uncle, hidden by the exigencies of fate. That we became friends and I found redemption in his likeness to my father. I wished that the family pattern might shift, somehow. I never saw Uncle Henry again.

  I took the photo albums. Sometimes I stare at the old photos and then search my face for my grandmother’s lineaments. Sometimes late at night, I wonder if a knock shall come. I will go and call her name.

  I wonder if she will answer.

  Conda’s note:

  In my Starke Dead cozy mystery series my main character, Dora, is a Buddhist. She’s a Buddhist because I’m a sorta, kinda, semi-Buddhist. Or a person with Buddhist leanings who eats meat. Or something. My favorite thing about Buddhism is it’s okay to be confused about Buddhism.

  Enjoy this riff on karma.

  Bad Basenji Karma

  An injustice and unjustified, I gotta tell ya—me coming back as a Basenji, the worst behaved of all the dog breeds. Sure, I used to beat up people, but that was my job. And didn’t I get killed for refusing to break that old guy’s legs? There was no reason for me to reincarnate as this horrid dog breed. How’s a guy supposed to get a break, get on the path to something better than a Basenji, when I have to act like one? Almost anything would be an improvement. Pit bull, even.

  And now I’m in jail. For doing nothing. Nothing. I stood on the kitchen table? Basenjis love high spots, my people know that. I didn’t eat anything, not even the sugar out of the sugar bowl. Amazing restraint, but do they notice? Noooo … they tried and convicted me and sentenced me to this horror.

  I poke my pointy nose through the bars of my crate and sniff. The stew smells better than my once-favorite aroma, dollars in a cash wad of ill-gotten gains. My instincts kick in and I dig at the floor of the crate and whine, an eerie Basenji screech, before I force myself to stop. I gotta do better.

  The bedroom door opens. Free at last. I’ve had an eternity, ten minutes, of cruel captivity.

  A pair of pink-jeaned knees plunks down in front of the crate. “Barkly, Barkly,” the three-year-old daughter, Debbie, cries in that so-annoying cute-little-girl voice. My people had a Basenji before. They know the rule: “Basenjis: never with children.” Jeez, I was never that dumb as a human.

  And naming me Barkly? How gaggingly cute.

  “Play, Barkly,” the little girl says. She claps her pudgy hands.

  Yeah, right, kid.

  I squeeze into the corner. The little monster crawls in. I’m trapped. Maybe if I peed—nope, I gotta be good.

  Gotta time my escape, or else—

  “Barkly, dinner,” the woman calls from the kitchen.

  I shoot from the crate, claws scrabbling on the plastic. I’m not quick enough. The girl reaches and grabs my double-curled tail. And pulls.

  Don’t snap.

  She tugs.

  Don’t snap.

  She pulls harder.

  Don’t—I yelp and whirl around, jaws open.

  I stop short. Whew, another karma strike adverted.

  Giggling, Debbie releases my tail.

  I bolt for the kitchen.

  In the hallway, I pass a discarded used tissue. Tossed by Debbie, for the adults know the Basenji love for all paper products, especially used tissues. Yum.

  I pause, one paw raised, drooling. Just one tissue? I shake my head. It’d be like an alcoholic with one drink. I’d be in the bathroom trash all night, eating paper products, being true to my base basenji appetites.

  Behind me, I hear the pitter-patter of three-year-old feet. Urgh. I sprint into the kitchen to my bowl and gobble. The kid sometimes joins me for dinner. Her parents think it’s adorable when she “pretend eats” my kibbles. Yuck.

  I finish and trot out to my favorite spot before the fireplace. It’s part of my bad karma that my adoptive family lives where there’s winter. Hey, I’m an ancient Egyptian breed, bred for the desert.

  The living room, even with the fire, is freezing. I smell outside, strong and inviting. I follow the scent to the front entryway. The front door stands wide open. Since it’s dinner time, everybody is rushing home. Car after car goes by.

  Don’t chase a car, becomes my mantra. I’m a sight hound. I chase. My legs quiver, but I force myself to stand. I won’t give into my baser nature. Then I see her. Debbie. She must have opened the door. She heads toward the street.

  “Daddy’s coming home,” she sings as she goes.

  She’s almost to the busy street with the tired, hurrying-home drivers who may not see a tiny toddler in the evening gloom.

  I give a warning yodel, my first Basenji cry ever. I tear down the driveway and bump full body into Debbie just as she reaches the curb. She tumbles to her knees on the sidewalk and starts howling.

  My momentum carries me forward. The last thing I see is a close up of a tire.

  * * *

  My eyes open. I’m in a box with other puppy bodies pressed close. I stare down a pointy nose. Oh no, I’m a Basenji again.

  Sigh.

  I force my eyes to focus on my brother next to me. He’s fat and black with a long straight tail and floppy ears. Could it be? Am I a breed known to be gentle, good and well behaved?

  Yes! I’m a Labrador!

  Conda’s note:

  This short paranormal mystery story is the inspiration for my upcoming novel, Never Blink. It’s set in one of my favorite towns in Idaho, the capitol city of Boise, where I was born and now enjoy living and writing.

  Still Life

  The word, “thief,” spoken by my boss’s wife, Jennie, echoed round the all-angles-knife-cutting-edges of the art gallery. My newest photo album slipped from my fingers to thump upon the knee banging low table. It fell right where I’d been about to sneak it into position while I cleaned. I’d arrived this evening a few minutes early so the staff of J&J Gallery wouldn’t suspect it was me leaving the albums.

  Oh no, my greatest fear—that I’d be caught in the act of placing my albums. Wait, no, couldn’t be, Jennie had said “thief.”

  What was Jennie doing here? Although she was the owner’s wife, Jennie almost never visited J&J Gallery. When she did, she made no secret of how the gallery took the precious time and attention of her decades older husband. I knew she meant away from her. I looked at the gorgeous young woman standing next to a square display pilla
r upon which was…nothing. On flanking pillars, two hideous matching statues of deathly gaunt naked women stood, enhancing the emptiness of the center pillar. Behind Jennie stood a police officer, shaven headed, his head the only thing rounded about his square muscular body.

  “We caught you in the act, too,” the cop said.

  I glanced over my shoulder. The cop couldn’t be talking to me. But no one, not a customer or even one of the gallery’s two clerks, stood behind me. I always made sure I was invisible. I always dressed in dark colored baggy sweats and made sure my dullard brown hair obscured my face. People forgot that I exist, which I adored. I made sure that they didn’t first notice me, and if they did, they forgot the drab cleaning lady. I turned back to my accusers.

  “I didn’t steal this,” I tried to say. The words flooded into my mouth and stopped, dammed by my teeth. I wasn’t good with words, I was good with photos. If I spoke, I didn’t want the next question to be asked, “If you didn’t steal it, where did you get it?” A question I didn’t want to answer.

  “Ally didn’t steal anything,” my boss, Joe, stepped out of the stock room. I ducked my head at his destruction of my name, Albion. I’ll take Al for short, but never Ally. That is, unless Joe called me that.

  The rest of his harem, Marian, his senior clerk and ex-wife, and Libby, the other, much younger, clerk, followed right behind. Whenever I cleaned Joe’s Arts, I struggled not to join those two adoring groupies. I worked to not adjust my drudge look, wear better clothes and tie back my hair. In his early sixties, Joe still retained his famous actor’s good looks. But he’d never allowed his fame to destroy his good and generous nature. Instead, he’d parlayed it into his passions, an art gallery in his beloved “new hometown” of Boise, Idaho.

  Marian stepped around Joe to point a French-nailed finger at my new work now resting on the table. “If Albion’s not the thief, then what is she doing with the album?”

  I worked as hard to not hate Marian as I did to not love Joe. Yes, without Marian’s hard-natured and incisive eyes, the gallery would not have survived. Without her loyalty and service to her “best friend Joe,” there wouldn’t be the paltry money to hire me as a cleaning lady. Then I wouldn’t have an opportunity to leave my “anonymous” albums, my art, my love, my life, in the gallery.

  I chewed on a strand of my ragged hair. My album rested on the table, radiating my hope. Unlike my other albums of random, altered photos, my art photos, this album was crammed full with photoshopped pictures of a customer crowded gallery. The album would save the gallery, flood it with customers. Yes, it sounded nuts, even to me, but I believed my photos possessed the ability to shift reality. What an image showed became what was. It had happened before and I hoped it would happen again. If it helped Joe, it needed to happen.

  New wife Jennie stared over at old wife Marian, amazement in her unlined face. It was rare the two wives agreed. Although Jennie shouldn’t be surprised, they often agreed about anything around money matters, and theft was a matter of money lost.

  “Al’s the cleaning lady, she picked it up to clean,” Libby said, her shyness making her voice lilt in a singsong. I recognized that lilt. My voice, the few times I spoke, possessed the same, with an overlay of rust. I looked over at my defender. She ducked her head, her mousy bland hair falling forward to cover her face. I knew that move too well, too. I winced as I wondered if Joe hired her and me out of charity.

  Now, Libby stared through her curtain of hair, eyes wide and imploring, at Joe. She was a few years older than my twenty-eight, but around Joe she acted an annoying lovesick sixteen. I vowed to never act that vulnerable around anyone, ever.

  “It’s not Anony’s album we’re talking about,” Jennie said.

  I wished that nickname for the anonymous artist (me) had never been thought of, spoken or stuck.

  “That’s right,” the policeman said. He stepped close to me and reached for my arm. I flinched away, not caring if it made me look guilty. I hated being touched.

  The cop grabbed my arm. But his clutch was gentle, as if he feared I was as fragile as the gallery’s art works. He may have been right; sometimes I feared I’d shatter.

  “You need to come with me.” He pulled a pair of handcuffs off his belt.

  Images flashed through my mind, of the police officer vanishing in an overexposed photo, disappearing, his handcuffs with him.

  “Those aren’t necessary,” Joe said.

  “S.O.P,” the cop said.

  “Albion won’t try to get away,” Jennie added. “She’s too frightened.”

  True, but I found it odd that Jennie, my accuser, expressed any concern for my state. Jennie, Joe’s mid-life cliché trophy wife, treated me as moving furniture at best, an idiotic slave at worst.

  Fear made me speak. “What proof do you have?”

  “We have photographic proof,” the police officer said.

  My knees collapsed. Oh no, no. Had they found my camera? I’d secreted the small but powerful digital camera away, high in a vent. There it took a photo of the gallery floor every minute. When I retrieved the camera, I’d take the images and add customers to the often empty gallery. All to help Joe’s flagging business flourish.

  The cop held me upright and snapped on one handcuff bracelet, then the other. The sound cut into my spirit, sliced it apart.

  * * *

  “It’s easy to manipulate images,” I said, my anger making it hard not to sound patronizing. I rubbed one wrist with one hand and then switched to the other wrist.

  After the uncomfortable trip to the police station, I found my knowledge of police procedure horridly expanded and my sympathy for accused innocents engaged. When we arrived at the ultra-utilitarian, cement block station, I guess the cop decided I wouldn’t escape and took off the handcuffs.

  “Especially electronic images,” I added. Which you as a cop should know, I didn’t add.

  The cop, whose name was Brown, I’d found out on the trip over to the station, hit playback on the computer. Perhaps he figured showing me the tape over and over would get me to confess. I watched the cheap camera images jerk along the screen. A great many dropouts made the video run almost like a slide show. It showed a hideous sculpture of what appeared to be a naked anorexic woman on the square plinth, the matching women on their pedestals on either side, then a confusion of images. A few grainy shots of me cleaning followed, and then more lost information. The tape ended with an image of me gone along with the skinny sculpture.

  I grabbed the mouse and reversed the footage.

  “Hey,” Brown protested.

  I paused the video between the footage of me cleaning and the end. “There,” I pointed to the blur, “that could be a cut to another time, another day, after someone else stole the sculpture.”

  Brown leaned back an office chair three sizes too small. “Why would anyone go to the trouble of doing that to security footage?”

  I stared down at my tattered trainers. “I don’t know.”

  I heard the cop sigh and raised my head. “I didn’t even know things were being stolen,” I defended myself.

  Officer Brown looked at me as if I’d just confessed to bringing art into the gallery. “What did you think was happening to the stuff?”

  “I thought the art was being sold,” I answered. I bit my lower lip as it occurred to me that I should have known. J&J Gallery appeared too “California” for much of small-town-attitude Boise and sales were few and far between. I’d noticed things disappear, but had never suspected theft. It was too much for me, someone who leaves things, to imagine someone taking away those same things. I wondered if any of my albums had been stolen. I wondered what would happen to a thief who stole my albums. Nothing good.

  At the officer’s raised eyebrow I added, “I’m the cleaning lady, not a clerk, not in sales.”

  “Which, with your lowest pay rate gives you the biggest motivation for theft,” Officer Brown countered.

  I snorted, forgetting my fear and anger in the
absurdity. I grabbed the computer mouse and ran the video back to the too-thin nudist. “And where does a cleaning lady sell something like this? At a yard sale?”

  Where would anyone sell J&J’s quirky art? I wondered. Unless the thief had no intention of selling the art—a glimmer of a suspicion flared in my mind. Remembered snatches of conversation strengthened it. I needed to get out of here and back to the gallery and get my camera from its hiding place. I needed to see what images I’d captured and what I could do with those images.

  Officer Brown laughed, his face transforming to from cliché cop to friendly guy. I leaned back. I didn’t want any friends. I wanted to be left alone to do my art.

  “That’s right, it’s laughable my sister’s a thief,” my baby brother’s voice came up from behind me. I hunched my shoulders. It’d been my hope to get out of this predicament before Adam found out. I hated what he’d think almost as much as what he’d say.

  “And you are?” Officer Brown, back in full cop mode, asked.

  “Adam Door, of the Doors of Old Boise,” Adam replied.

  “The Doors,” Officer Brown echoed, but without the pompous inflection, “You mean, The Doors, that big honking house off Hill Road?”

  Adam drew himself up to his full height of five foot five inches. “That’s right, The Doors, built by one of the richest founding families of Boise.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Us.”

  I twisted in my chair to look up at my brother. He stood with his skinny arms crossed over his thin chest. “Jeez, Adam, could you be any more portentous?” I asked.

  Adam ignored me and said to Officer Brown, “So you might consider, Officer, that my sister has no monetary motivation for stealing.”

  I turned back to Officer Brown. “Sorry, my brother’s about to take the Idaho bar. Guess he’s practicing his pompous lawyer.”

  That earned me another chuckle from Officer Brown and a glare from Adam.

  “Let’s remember who’s here under suspicion of theft,” Adam said.

  I should have kept my mouth shut, as I normally did. Being accused of theft had destroyed my usual pragmatic and reclusive self. I wanted to shout my innocence, but figured it’d be far better to catch the thief.