Body Brace (Caught Dead in Wyoming, Book 10)

by Patricia McLinn

  “You and Aunt Gee. Spoilsports.”

  “That’s me. You know, I could join your call with Mike and Jennifer from home, tell you what else I’ve found out.”

  “You could tell me now. If it’s more about an affair—”

  “Not fair to Mike and Jennifer.”

  “Fine. Thanks for the drives.”

  “I suppose you want me to get the scoop on Willa Rennant.”

  “It’s not what I want that matters,” I said sanctimoniously, “it’s what you want.”

  She snorted. “What about you? What are you doing between now and when they call?”

  It struck me in that moment — as it should have struck me earlier — that Clara Atwood was likely at the museum.

  It was open on Sundays during the summer, not to mention there was probably considerable work to clear up after the reenactment not happening yesterday.

  “I’ll swing by the museum, see if Clara’s there, ask a few more questions.”

  Chapter Thirty

  My trip to the Sherman Western Frontier Life Museum waited when I saw a figure pass the large window at the Nineteenth Century office building of the Sherman Independence.

  Needham was also working on a Sunday.

  I parked in front and knocked on the door.

  “Nice job last night,” he said, letting me in. “Especially fending off Thurston.”

  I sighed, my musings from first thing this morning streaming back.

  “What?” he asked.

  “How do you keep yourself fresh, chasing after the next story?”

  “By chasing after the next story. What’s this sigh about?”

  I hadn’t realized I’d sighed again. I told him about telling Mike I didn’t reciprocate the interest his Chicago station showed in me and my wonderings about becoming like Thurston and aging in place.

  He slanted me an amused look. “Just because you’re not chasing a big career doesn’t mean you won’t chase the story. Might mean that for some, not for you.”

  His amusement faded as he looked at me from under his bushy brows.

  “You can’t really be worried about that.”

  “Complacency is worth worrying about,” I said. “I was always driving when I was building a career. But if I’m staying here what’s to keep me from becoming Thurston Fine?”

  “First, you have a brain. In fact, you have the Wizard of Oz trifecta — brain, heart, courage. You also have a personality. Although at the moment, you’re not using the brain much. Look, when you work at a little paper like the Independence from first to last, you sort these things out early or you’re in trouble.

  “Career is an external way to assess how you’re doing, convenient for keeping score, but an artificial construct. Plum story assignments, better beats, awards, working for a bigger outfit. Rinse and repeat. Salary, too. That’s all somebody else telling you you’re doing okay. It’s not how you’re really doing. That comes from inside.”

  “You’re saying peel away the trappings of career and you have… What?”

  “What matters. Elizabeth Margaret Danniher will always chase after the next story. It’s the way some of us are built, including you.”

  “The Needham Bender Next Story Doctrine.”

  “Exactly. And right now, I’m working on the next story — for Tuesday’s edition. And, no, I’m not telling you the exclusive info I have for it. Although if you want to tell me more about the body found in the cave… No, I can see you won’t. Maybe later on, when each of us has used up what we have now and trading might help both of us.”

  “It’s so relaxing to talk with you, Needham, since you cover both sides of the conversation.” Actually, it was energizing. But he didn’t need to know that.

  He grunted. “Leave me alone now, but come to dinner — Thelma would love to have you — and we’ll gossip about what’s not fit to print or put on-air.”

  After insisting he check with Thelma — his wife not only said she’d love to have me come for dinner but insisted I bring Shadow — I accepted, left him to his work, and got on with my own.

  * * * *

  Yes, of course, I stopped in the museum shop first for a brownie.

  Vicky Upton and I exchanged please, thank you, and you’re welcome almost like normal acquaintances.

  This time I merely waved to Sandy — letting her think I had an appointment without giving Clara a chance to say she didn’t want to see me.

  Clara and Nadine were, once more, in Clara’s pod at the back of the office.

  I knocked on the pod wall before entering — serving as something between requesting permission and announcing arrival.

  The women looked up simultaneously, strengthening the impression of identical expressions of strain, worry, and lack of sleep. They had multiple computer screens displaying spreadsheets, plus stacks of sorted papers, and a yellow legal pad with a long list and only a few things crossed off.

  “How’s it going?” Might seem like an odd question when it was obvious, but sometimes giving people a chance to unburden themselves of their troubles brought unexpected dividends.

  “Just great.” Clara’s sarcasm added bite to the words.

  “Oh. Elizabeth,” Nadine said. Moisture sheened her eyes.

  “Don’t start again.” Clara’s tone was as unsympathetic as her words. But she did pass a box of tissues to Nadine. “Refunding tickets is not my idea of fun.”

  Nadine emerged from behind a tissue.

  “We’d sold more tickets than ever to the Miners’ Camp Fight.” Pride pushed through her other emotions for a moment, then subsided under them. “At least the camp was completed and we don’t have to reimburse those fees. And some people are saying to keep the money from the reenactment.”

  All business, Clara said, “Not enough. We’re assessing the damage.”

  I grimaced my empathy. “Good thing you have that insurance.”

  “Yes, thank heavens,” Nadine said fervently.

  “Not enough,” Clara repeated.

  Hard to tell if things were really that grim or if she was determined to see them that way.

  “I only stopped by to see how you two are doing and say it’s a shame the reenactment was ruined.”

  Clara narrowed her eyes. “No, you didn’t.”

  I returned her look. “No, I didn’t. I did stop by for those things, but also to ask if either of you knows if anyone — staff members or kids or simply someone you saw — was up by the butte where the body was found on Thursday or Friday.”

  “Not the whole week?” Sarcasm seemed to be Clara’s go-to stress reliever. “The deputies wanted to know about the whole week.”

  “That was before someone reported seeing him Thursday morning.”

  “Who?” Nadine asked, eyes wide.

  “Last person to see him,” Clara snapped.

  “Not necessarily. Don’t be surprised if that last-time seen changes. They’ll keep trying to pin down later sightings.”

  Nadine repeated her question. “Who was it?”

  I shrugged, as if I didn’t know. “Just be glad it cuts your questioning down from Thursday morning to Saturday morning.”

  “But we’ve already been questioned,” Nadine protested.

  Clara half rolled her eyes. “Tell her, Elizabeth.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “You’ll be questioned again. And again. The more time passes without the sheriff’s department pulling in the killer, the more the agains will pile up.”

  “And that, Elizabeth will tell us,” Clara said, “is why we should answer her questions. Because she and her friends at KWMT will figure this out faster than the sheriff’s department and that will prevent our misery from being prolonged.”

  “True.” I said it as if Clara had sincerely endorsed us. “Starting with what I already asked — see anybody up where the body was found before the riders went up?”

  “No. As I told Sergeant Shelton, when I was out there, I was too busy to even look in that direc
tion until the reenactors rode up. I didn’t realize something was wrong until someone else pointed out that O.D. Everett had started up that way with Mrs. Parens in the utility vehicle. Was that you, Nadine? I couldn’t remember.”

  The other woman shook her head. “Wasn’t me. It was either Anna Price-Fox or that young reenactor’s mother. I don’t remember her name.”

  “In other words, we’re no help at all. What are your other questions, Elizabeth, because we need to get back to this.” Clara flipped her hand at the screens and papers.

  “I understand you dated Palmer Rennant last year, Clara.”

  “Seriously, you’re asking about my romantic life again?”

  What did she expect when the guy showed up dead? But I was being tactful.

  I tipped my head at her reference to our first meeting. “Would you call your time dating Thurston Fine romantic?”

  I figured that period in her life was far enough in the rearview mirror that she’d see the humor, allowing me to take that approach. Besides, we’d first bonded over mutual disdain for Thurston. He had done some good in the world.

  She laughed. Short and harsh. “Fair point. Not romantic. Call it my dating life.”

  “Then, yeah, I am asking you again.” I watched her closely. The amusement faded, but didn’t disappear, so I kept going. “True you dated Palmer Rennant for a while late last summer?”

  “True. And not a big secret. Not a secret of any size. He told me I was the first person he asked out after the divorce. No reason to think that wasn’t true.” A skeptic after my own heart. “We went to some movies, had a few dinners. That was it.”

  I pulled my phone out and showed them each a version of my photo of the watch. If they recognized it from last year, Mrs. P and O.D. Everett and even Aunt Gee claiming they didn’t might lead … somewhere.

  “Recognize the watch?”

  “No,” Clara said.

  To her no, Nadine added, “Not one a young woman would wear.”

  “Palmer Rennant didn’t wear it while you dated?”

  Clara shook her head.

  “At those meetings you had with him?”

  Both shook their heads.

  Maybe the others truly hadn’t recognized it. Though I still thought they knew more than they were telling me.

  “Any insight into what kind of divorce it was from Palmer’s point of view?”

  Clara paused. “He didn’t badmouth his ex. More like they got bored with each other.” Uncharacteristically, her voice rose at the end as if asking a question. She shook her head. “Really, I had no sense of deep animosity between them. On the other hand, we didn’t date long.”

  “Why was that?”

  Her mouth stretched in a smile I wouldn’t want directed at me. “He was a pleasant enough guy about most things, but he was a jackass about the reenactors in general, and the Miners’ Camp Fight reenactment in particular, as well as, by extension, the Two Rivers Camp. Kicking us — them — off his property because he could. He actually bragged to me, saying it was his first move as a sole operator after the divorce papers were final. He’d looked for loopholes in the contract that would have let him block the events right after he bought, but his wife insisted he live up to the contract.

  “But the sales contract offered no protection after that one time. He thought he was hot stuff for having the power to shut us down — that’s what he said. He shut us down and he was proud of it. That’s when I stopped accepting invitations from him. And he acted like my decision came out of nowhere. I mean, yeah, I’m not directly in charge, but the museum backs the reenactment and is involved with it and the camp. And he had a few things to say about the museum, too.”

  “Did he fail to see what it meant to you? Or didn’t he care?”

  “Didn’t care.” The words shot out of her, then her expression changed. “Maybe a mix. I mean, we ran into each other on the street right after Nadine and I signed the papers for the new site and I was quite pleased about it. I told him, not rubbing it in — at least not blatantly — but letting him know he hadn’t defeated us. And he still didn’t get it. Started back in about reenactors and spurious history and how he was saving the world from these horrors. And I got quite sharp with him that he hadn’t done anything except shake up the event for the good and make himself look like a mean-spirited prick.

  “And that’s where the fail to see comes in. He was surprised — I think genuinely surprised that anyone wouldn’t agree with him. Including me. Despite what I do and what I’d told him multiple times. But once you pushed back against his failure to see, I do think there was also a level of not caring.”

  Nadine was shaking her head.

  “What is it, Nadine?” I asked.

  “Some people are so … close-minded. Living history is like everything else. It can be done well or not. You don’t say close down Broadway forever because someone puts on a bad play in their basement. And it doesn’t have to be Broadway to be good, to grab people’s attention, to expand their interests. It’s so… so ignorant to dismiss all reenactments, all living history.”

  “What do you say to those people who dismiss reenactments or living history as leaving history in the hands of non-professionals?”

  Clara took up the job of answering. “Nadine’s being tactful. The self-appointed critics say far harsher things than that. Which is interesting, because they proclaim there are inaccuracies especially arising out of broad-brush approaches, yet then these same critics use the broadest of brushes and often decry reenactors as racists, rednecks, and a number of other derogatory terms, as if it’s obvious just from the fact that they are reenactors.

  “Here’s what I say to those people: We could all sit in museums waiting for people to come to us. Or, perhaps, writing scholarly papers for the historical quarterly of our specialty. Or even mount a display for fellow historians on the changes in military tents in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. But none of that reaches the people who are not already interested or already experts in a narrow, narrow slice of history.

  “Not only that, but it misses out on serving — in fact, actively recruiting — those who learn best by seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, and doing, rather than reading.”

  Nadine smiled wanly. “What she said.”

  Clara presented a much sharper portrait of Palmer Rennant and his views on history than Willa had. Did his ex-wife sidestep to protect him, his memory?

  “I take it you and Palmer didn’t agree on that.”

  “You could say that.” The edge to Clara’s voice softened. “The strange thing is he wasn’t like that when I first met him. That was about five years ago when he came in looking for some ancestor. Didn’t have anything direct for him, but gave him resources to follow here, at the library. Didn’t he talk to you, Nadine, about the Miners’ Camp Fight?”

  “He did. I pointed him to the copies of the survivors’ accounts at the library. Never heard from him again.”

  That didn’t seem promising. I tried another angle. “How did you come up with the new site?”

  Clara shot me a quick, assessing look with an odd edge of … sympathy? That was a guess, never having seen an expression from her before that I’d describe that way.

  “The owner wanted to stay anonymous, but approached Tom Burrell, who brought the idea to us. That paved the way. James Longbaugh drew up an agreement that protected the owner and us, and donated his time doing it.”

  “Great. I’ll get with them for whatever background you can’t answer.”

  I did that well. Lots of experience not showing personal reactions to sources.

  “There’s really nothing more to tell you. Nadine?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about the owner of the property you moved the events to?”

  Nadine smiled. “A lifesaver.”

  “No idea who it was?”

  Two head shakes. Nadine echoed Clara’s earlier words. “Wanted to stay anonymous.”

  “I�
�ve never heard of that before. How did—”

  “You’d have to talk to the lawyers,” Clara said. “They handled that. Now, we really have to get back to work.”

  That sound you heard was the door slamming on me, since Clara knew as well as I did that one of the things lawyers did best was not talking.

  Didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I let the neighbor girl know she could stand down from dog duty. I fed Shadow, gave him a walk, then loaded both of us in the SUV for the drive to the Benders’ house.

  With a minor detour on the way.

  Any detour is minor in Sherman, but this one truly was only a block out of my way. The block it took to get from the front of Courthouse Square to the back, where the Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department had its offices, along with the fire department and the tiny Sherman Police Department.

  In case something was happening there, something like a suspect taking the perp walk inside.

  Nope.

  Instead, I saw Deputy Lloyd Sampson walking out of the building, looking like he’d been rode hard and put up wet — a vivid phrase I learned from Tamantha and have been waiting to use.

  I rolled to a stop at the curb and lowered the driver’s window as he reached the main sidewalk.

  “You look tired, Lloyd. Rough day?”

  He gusted out a breath. At the same time, he rubbed both wrists against the side of his uniform pants, then twisted them around to rub the backs.

  “Sitting in front of a computer for hours and hours. Wasn’t what I expected when I got into law enforcement. Plus, this dam— darned rash.”

  Below the unbuttoned cuff of his uniform sleeve, I saw raised, red bumps that ran together to form welts on his wrists and lower forearm.

  “Checking out the records of desperados?”

  “Truck keys.” Either his literalness urged him to set me straight or he wanted to assure me there were no desperadoes in Sherman. “General Motors used to have different designs for keys. I mean before the electronic kind we use now. But even the old-fashioned flat metal keys changed up.”