The Wrong Hill to Die On: An Alafair Tucker Mystery #6 (Alafair Tucker Mysteries)

by Donis Casey

  She had started down the bare dirt path toward the front of the house when a movement by the back door caught her eye and she looked over to see Blanche eagerly gesturing at her. She altered her path to intercept her daughter and draw her back behind the corner of the house, out of sight of the people in the front.

  Chase Kemp

  “What’s happening, Ma?” Blanche demanded, before Alafair had a chance to shoo her indoors. Alafair smiled in spite of herself. It was good to see her darling girl so engaged and full of life after a long, alarming winter of illness.

  “Looks like some poor Mexican fellow may have had too much to drink last night and fell in the ditch and drowned, honey.”

  “Did somebody kill him?”

  Blanche’s question took Alafair aback. “No, nobody is suggesting that, sugar. It was just an accident. Now go back inside and check on Chase. That boy is too troublesome to be left on his own.”

  Chase Kemp was a cute, funny-faced boy with buck teeth and knobby limbs, long-legged and skinny. He had big dark eyes, long lashes, and even features. With Elizabeth for a mother how could he not be good to look at?

  Otherwise he was an unattractive little child. He had a shifty look about him, and a shifty manner as well. He was irritatingly busy as a gnat, too, either underfoot clamoring for attention or sneaking about looking for something to get into.

  Chase could not stay still to save his life, nor did it seem to Alafair that he was inclined to listen to anything his mother said to him. Alafair knew for a fact that he lied, and for no good reason that she could see. Just to see if he could get away with it, apparently. Not that he was a bad child. Just over-energetic and not properly saddle-broke. Nothing a bit of proper discipline would not fix, as well she knew, since she had had plenty of opportunity in the past few days to give him his due share of it. Alafair lived in a world where no one would hesitate to correct any child who needed it. Besides, Elizabeth seemed grateful for the assistance.

  Elizabeth did not have much of a handle on Chase. To tell the truth she did not seem that interested in making him behave. As long as he did not kill himself or someone else, that was good enough for his mother.

  “Chase is putting his shoes on.” Blanche was more interested in the action outside than in babysitting.

  Alafair seized the girl’s shoulder and firmly turned her back toward the house. “Chase is six,” she pointed out. “Go on and help him, now. I’ll be in directly and let you know what’s happening.”

  Blanche did not argue, but the return of her resentful pout as she headed for the back door was so familiar and dear that a lump came to Alafair’s throat.

  Doctor Moeur

  When Dr. Moeur arrived on the scene, Mr. Nettles stood back and turned the proceedings over to the medical professional. Dr. Moeur was a big, balding man whose gruff, offhand manner did not bother Alafair a bit, since it was more than offset by the warmth and kindness in his pale blue eyes. Moeur had spent fifteen minutes doing nothing but standing over the body and looking. He did not move nor did he touch anything, but his sharp gaze moved unceasingly back and forth over the body, the ditch, the surroundings. He still had not touched the corpse when he finally cast a glance at the two patient stretcher-bearers standing in the road next to the delivery-truck-turned-ambulance.

  “Okay, boys, you can pick him up.”

  The onlookers maintained a reverent hush as the men covered the late Bernie Arruda with a sheet and carefully lifted his body out of the mud and water, then loaded him onto the stretcher and into the back of the delivery truck. The neighbors watched the removal of the body but Alafair watched Dr. Moeur, who was still examining the place where the body had lain as carefully as he had studied the body itself.

  As unobtrusively as she could she took a step or two nearer to him. “Did he drown, do you think, Doctor?”

  Dr. Moeur’s looked up. “Perhaps. At first glance I would say no. I will know more when I get a chance to examine him back at my office.” He turned to face her and extended his hand. “I’m Ben Moeur. We met briefly last night at Elizabeth’s pot luck, though I spent most of the evening in the back yard. I talked quite a bit with your husband, however, and I read in the Daily News all about your trip out here. It sounded to me like your journey to Tempe was more of an odyssey.”

  Alafair did not know what that was but she took his meaning and smiled. “I surely remember you and your mighty pleasant wife Honor, Dr. Moeur. Yes, the trip was an adventure I could have done without. It is nice to finally get to see Elizabeth again, though.”

  Moeur nodded. “Indeed it must be. It’s too bad that your visit has to be marred by this unfortunate incident.”

  “A sad end to a young life,” she agreed.

  Moeur placed his derby back on his head. “I’m afraid I must take my leave, Mrs. Tucker, but it was lovely to see you again. I hope we shall see more of one another before you leave Tempe.”

  “Doctor…” She extended a hand to delay him. “One reason my husband and I made this long journey was because my daughter is ailing. She got to coughing this last winter during all the rain and never did stop. Our doctor in Boynton said a trip to a dry place might help her out.”

  “So Mr. Tucker told me.”

  “You must see this sort of thing all the time, Doctor. When next you get an opportunity, would you be so good as to have a look at her and tell us if there is anything else we can do?”

  “I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Tucker. I’ll come by this afternoon if that suits.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you. That suits just fine.”

  A Bad Winter

  Blanche was the eighth of Alafair’s ten children, a beautiful, delicate girl whose black-fringed eyes were the most startling gold-flecked green. Blanche was an inspired name for her as well, perfectly suited to her milky white, rose-tinged complexion that contrasted so fetchingly with her dark hair. She was the only one of Alafair’s sturdy brood, though, whose constitution was not as strong as her will. Since she was a baby, Blanche seemed to come down with whatever was going around and take longer to get over it than any of the others.

  And this had been a bad, cold, wet winter, with so much rain that Alafair and Shaw had jokingly talked about building their own ark. It had not turned out to be such a joke. The heavens opened up in December and stayed open through January, and nearly every river and stream from the Mississippi to the Pacific shore had broken its banks. The flood damage all over the western United States was without precedent. Millions of dollars of damage in Southern California alone, dozens of people drowned in Arkansas, and in some places between the two hardly a road, railroad track, or bridge left in place.

  Alafair had never seen anything like it. She had lived through torrential rains and overflowing creeks before, but this had been relentless. Day after day of one downpour after another.

  But their problem had not been loss to flooding, though it had been a daily fight to prevent it. The worst problem had been that everyone in the family had come down with the grippe, one after another and sometimes two or three at once. Alafair had spent her entire winter nursing feverish, coughing, cranky youngsters. The older girls had only come down with the sniffles. Charlie had developed a bad cold but Gee Dub had not gotten sick at all. The younger girls, Ruth, Sophronia, and Grace, had been wildly ill for a couple of days then suddenly well and impatient to leap out of bed and be on with it. But all had gotten through their illnesses and returned to ruddy health. Except Blanche.

  Her cough would not go away and no amount of slippery elm bark, hot lemon tea, boiled rice, chicken soup, horseradish, ginger, hot oatmeal or mustard poultices, turpentine wraps or pennyroyal tea would shift it. Her raging fever abated, but then every day around sundown her temperature would rise enough that Alafair could see the red stain of it across her cheekbones. Alafair had spent each evening since the turning of the year feeding her listless girl a remedy of beaten egg white, lemon juice and honey, spoonful by spoonful, and bathing her limbs with a damp clo
th until she fell asleep.

  When winter wore on and Blanche did not improve, Alafair grew alarmed. Was it the white sickness? Tuberculosis. She could not say the proper word aloud when she finally raised her concerns to Shaw.

  Doctor Addison’s Diagnosis

  “I don’t think it’s tuberculosis, Alafair.” That had been Dr. Addison’s diagnosis after Alafair had finally called him out to the farm. But her relief that her baby was not suffering from a deadly, incurable disease had been short-lived. “Bronchitis most likely. Her little lungs are inflamed. She needs to dry out. Pneumonia is a real risk in her weakened state. The best thing for her would be to go somewhere sunny and dry for a spell. Rest and breathe some clean air. Colorado is good for that sort or thing.”

  Alafair’s hair had stood on end at the suggestion she send Blanche so far away to recuperate among strangers. She could not. She would not. She would take Blanche to her sister in Arizona and stay with her as long as she could. Elizabeth was a stranger to Blanche but at least she was blood kin.

  What a horrible choice to have to make. Take your sick child a thousand miles away and abandon her in order to heal her, or keep her close and endanger her life.

  Alafair seriously doubted she would be able leave the girl once they arrived in Arizona. But she needed to be home. She had never been away from her three-year-old, Grace. Her second-eldest, Mary, was getting married in May. Mary’s fiancé had bought a parcel of land just to the south of the Tucker farm and was building a house that required quilts and linens, curtains and rugs. The two married daughters, twins Alice and Phoebe, were both expecting. Ruth was about to celebrate her seventeenth birthday. She would be going away to Muskogee to study music in just a few months and needed new clothes. They all needed their mother. All of them. But for the moment Blanche needed her the most.

  All Alafair could think of was the Bible story of the lost sheep. What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? “What else can I do?” she asked Shaw. “I have to take her away. I have got to save my girl.”

  Go, Shaw said, and I’ll make the journey with you.

  Go, I’ll take care of things here, said Martha, their eldest at twenty-five, engaged to be married but for the moment still living at home and perfectly capable of running a tight ship.

  Quite a Trip

  The journey to Arizona had been a nightmare. An endless train trip with a sick little girl. All along the route floods had washed out bridges and portions of track. They had had to change trains twice as often as planned and ended up going through strange, out-of-the-way, backwater towns that neither Shaw nor Alafair nor anyone else who did not live in them had ever heard of. The trip they had expected to take ran from their home town of Boynton to Oklahoma City, then a change of trains and straight west through Amarillo, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff. One more change in Flagstaff to carry them due south through Prescott and Phoenix and then right in to Tempe.

  But that was not how it had worked out. They did manage to get to Amarillo after a couple of delays and a very odd detour through Elk City, Oklahoma. But after that the journey took so many strange twists and turns that Shaw had begun to wonder if they would ever get where they were going, or if they were going to end up stranded in some collection of shacks with an unpronounceable name somewhere in New Mexico, sitting on their luggage beside the tracks during a dust storm while Blanche coughed her lungs out.

  The tracks just west of Amarillo had been damaged by floods. They would either have to wait in Amarillo for days until the route was opened again or catch a train south to El Paso, then west to Deming, New Mexico, and south again to someplace called Columbus, where they could pick up the train into Tucson and northbound to Tempe.

  When Blanche first became so ill early in the winter, Alafair had in turn become so single-minded, so wholly concentrated on her sick child, that she had little attention left for anything else. When they had decided that there was nothing left for them but to take Blanche to Arizona for the dry air, Alafair’s first suggestion was that she alone would take Blanche to Elizabeth. No one was more competent or able to handle herself than Alafair, but Shaw had been unable to stomach the thought of his wife and little girl on their own so far from home. When he told Alafair he wanted to come with her, he could see the relief plain in her face.

  She had abdicated all responsibility for the trip to him. He took care of everything while she cared for Blanche. When they were detoured because of washouts or stranded in strange towns he found accommodations and meals, arranged new routes, handled their luggage, updated the family by wire. When Blanche had a setback in Columbus, New Mexico, Shaw found a doctor and a comfortable room in the hotel so they could rest overnight. He held Blanche in his lap so that Alafair could eat, dress, and sleep. Otherwise she never took her hands off the child.

  As they neared Arizona, it did occur to Shaw that he had not thought about his farm once during the trip. That was odd, since the farm had been his entire existence for over twenty years. But then he had left it in many very good hands, and at the moment he was infinitely more needed on this journey. He did not think much about the farm again.

  When they finally, finally arrived in Tempe late in the afternoon of March 6, it was 79 degrees, blindingly sunny, and blessedly dry.

  Elizabeth

  Elizabeth was Alafair’s youngest sibling, only six years older than Alafair’s eldest daughter Martha. Alafair had honed a lot of her mothering skill on Elizabeth, though she expected that Elizabeth barely remembered a time when Alafair lived at home with her parents.

  Alafair and Shaw had moved from the Arkansas hills to the Indian Territory when Elizabeth was eight. In fact, though they wrote to one another regularly, the two sisters had seen little of each other since then.

  But family was family. So when her eldest sister had wired asking if she and Blanche could stay with her a while, Elizabeth Kemp would never have thought of saying no.

  The evening that they had arrived on the train at the Tempe railroad station was the first time Alafair had seen Elizabeth and Webster Kemp since they had left Arkansas for the Arizona Territory nine years earlier.

  Webster himself had picked them up in his Hupmobile and driven them the few blocks to the house. They had arrived just after the sun had just sunk below the horizon and the sky was still the color of new buttermilk.

  The Kemp house was a long, eye-catching two-story affair built half way up of round gray river rock topped by light gray wood frame. The pitched shingle roof sported frame dormer extensions jutting out on either side. A deep, roofed porch surrounded by a low rock wall stretched across the front of the house.

  Shaw leaned toward her as the auto rolled to a stop. “Yonder is Elizabeth.”

  Alafair’s heart picked up a beat when she caught sight of the woman standing at the gate next to the road. Elizabeth had changed. The last time Alafair had seen her, Elizabeth had been a lanky twenty-one-year-old newlywed fresh and eager for the adventure of starting a new life in the untamed West.

  She was not a teenager any longer. Tall, willowy, and graceful, she had their mother’s features—the high cheekbones and large, dark, almond-shaped eyes. At first Alafair thought her sister had cut off the long hair she had always been so proud of, but on closer inspection she could see that only the top and sides were shorter, parted on the left, covering her ears and sweeping forward to cup her cheeks like wings. The bulk of her softly curling, dark hair was twisted into a loose pile at the back of her crown.

  Alafair was out of the car almost before it came to a stop. Before she quite knew how she got there, she and Elizabeth were standing with their hands clasped, drinking in the sight of one another.

  “Oh, my, my!” That was all Alafair could manage to say. “Oh, my, my!”

  The White Lady

  Elizabeth greeted them with many hugs and exclamations of delight before leading them throug
h the honeysuckle-draped trellis that arched over the front gate. But not before giving her husband Webster an imperious order to fetch the luggage out of the car.

  Webster was a pleasant man with pleasant features, dark blue eyes and brown hair neatly trimmed and parted on the side. He was average-sized for a man, well dressed and solid, with a square face and a ready if somewhat self-satisfied smile. He had always been friendly and easy to talk to, though without substance, Alafair thought. Lots of surface but not much depth. Was that a good quality for a lawyer? He was successful, so at least it was not a hindrance. When he and Elizabeth were first married, Alafair had told Shaw that Webster reminded her of a steer standing in a field ruminating on the nature of the universe, smug and well content with his lot in life.

  Webster complied with Elizabeth’s order with his familiar good humor, and Alafair suppressed a smile. It had not taken her long to ascertain who was the engine on this particular marriage train.

  As they walked up the path toward the house, Alafair took a deep breath. The air was perfumed with a scent so sweet and heavy that it almost had a texture. This must be what heaven smells like. Not the honeysuckle. Wrong time of year. “Law! What is that flower I’m smelling?”