by Alice Duncan
“Good-bye, Mr. O’Dell,” said Minnie, ignoring the part of his farewell speech that centered around the house.
Right before he slammed the door to his Hudson, I remembered something and hollered after him. “Don’t forget the dog!”
He waved his Stetson out of the window as he drove off. I hoped he’d heard me.
“What dog?”
“Mr. O’Dell said he’d bring Aunt Minnie a younger dog, since Jeepers isn’t much use at guarding the place any longer.” I knew Jeepers couldn’t hear me and take offense. He was in the kitchen staring at Libby at the moment, hope springing eternal and all that, even if it was only pickles.
“Oh. What was O’Dell doing here, anyway?”
“He wants Minnie to sell him the house.”
“He what?” Phil’s face screwed up. “What’s he want this place for?” He glanced at Minnie. “Not that it’s not a nice house and all, but . . .”
“It’s all right, Phillip,” said Minnie with a smile that made her look almost like a normal person. “I know what you mean. And I don’t know why he wants to buy it.” With a sigh, she said, “I’d better go on in and help Libby with those pickles. You stay here and talk to Phil for a few minutes, Annabelle.”
“Thanks, Minnie.” As much as I didn’t want Phil to get the wrong idea about my interest in him, which was strictly friendly, I wasn’t above taking advantage of Minnie’s romantic notions as regarded the two of us in order to pump him for information. And to stay away from Libby a little bit longer.
“Hmmm.” Phil’s long legs were stretched out in front of him and he looked as if he’d done a full day’s work already, although it wasn’t even noon yet and he still had all his chores on his father’s ranch to take care of. Poor guy. I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on him for craving some appreciation.
However, since I also didn’t want him to get swell-headed, I decided to let Minnie do any adoring of him that might need to be done.
“How the devil,” asked Phil to no one in particular, “did that guy end up dead beside your aunt’s chicken coop?”
“I don’t know. When I heard the strange noises, I thought they came from the cellar.”
Phil’s eyebrow rose over his right eye. He had nice eyes. Soft and brown and framed by thick lashes. “The cellar?”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
“Hmm.”
But to heck with our basement. I wanted information. And more help. “So what happened in town, Phil?”
He shrugged and drank the last of his tea. “Took the body to Dr. Hanks’ place and laid it out on a table there. Doc Bassett stayed there to take notes. You know, for when Dr. Hanks tells him the cause of death, Doc Bassett being the coroner and all.”
Heck, I could have told him the cause of death; they didn’t need a doctor, well, except for . . . . “I guess they need a formal death certificate, huh?”
“Right. And they’re hoping to find out who he was. Nobody seems to know him. Doc Bassett wrote down identifying information when Doc Hanks told him what it was.”
“What sort of identifying information?”
“Oh, heck, Annabelle, I don’t know!” Phil looked peeved. I only stared at him, and he sighed. “Height. Weight. Color of hair and eyes. Stuff like that.”
“What good is that going to do? Lots of men are medium tall, with brown hair and eyes. I mean, how do they aim to stick a name on him?”
Another shrug. “Put a notice in the paper, I reckon. Describe him. That sort of thing.”
Musing over my discovery of the corpse earlier in the day, I said, “I don’t think he had very many unusual characteristics. Although when I saw him, I couldn’t tell much beyond the fact that he was dead.”
“They were taking his clothes off when I left. Maybe he’ll have a scar or something.”
My nose wrinkled. It didn’t like the notion of taking off a dead man’s clothes to inspect his body any more than the rest of me did.
Phil put down his glass and eyed me thoughtfully. “Do you really think you heard noises coming from the cellar, Annabelle?”
“Yes. Well, I thought so at the time. I guess they weren’t in the cellar, though, because Sheriff Greene and Earl searched down there and didn’t find any evidence of people having been there in the night time.”
“How could they tell?”
My mouth opened, but since I couldn’t think of an answer to that not-insignificant question, I shut it again. “Good question. I don’t know.”
He shook his head, as if dissatisfied. “I don’t like this.”
“I don’t, either.”
“I don’t like the notion of you three ladies staying here in this house if people are wandering in and out of the cellar and getting themselves killed.”
And I didn’t like the way he’d put that. “I found the key to the cellar, and I aim to see that it’s locked up tight at night from now on.”
“That’s good, but I still don’t like it.”
A trifle testily, I said, “Well, what do you want me to do about it? My mother said I can’t come home. I’m supposed to stay here and help Minnie and Libby. They won’t move to town even though Ma invited her to stay with us. Minnie doesn’t want to leave Joe.” I was feeling darned bitter about it all, too.
“Oh, boy.”
It was nice to know that Phil understood, even if he couldn’t do much about my problem, either.
“I’d feel better if I had a look down there myself, Annabelle.”
“Do you think you’d be able to spot something the sheriff didn’t?” I regret to say that my question was posed rather sarcastically.
“I’m sure I’ve seen Mrs. Blue’s cellar more often than Greene has,” Phil responded with some heat. Of course, everything that day was hot, but I sensed this had more to do with temper and injured feelings than the weather.
I relented, knowing he was right. “I’m sorry. I’ll go down there with you, and we can both look around. I stayed out of the sheriff’s way when he searched.”
“Good idea.”
So Phil and I explored the cellar. We found a lot of preserved fruits and vegetables from this year’s crop, several jars left over from last year, and about a dozen chickens that Libby had put up in jars before I’d arrived. Aside from assorted jars of jams, jellies, and pickles of all varieties, we found nothing.
“Nuts,” I muttered, as we trudged back upstairs.
“I’d better be going,” said Phil, picking up the straw hat he’d laid on the porch swing.
“And I have to help Libby and Minnie.” I made a face, Phil laughed, and he took off for home.
It was an altogether stupid day.
Chapter Seven
You would have thought–well, I had thought, anyhow–that whoever had bothered us in the night time the day before had done his worst and gone away. I mean, why would you stick around where you’d committed a murder? Unless, of course, you had a deep-seated desire to be locked up and hanged (I’d had to take a class in psychology my senior year in high school because Mr. Withers, the science teacher, was interested in such stuff. Therefore, I knew about deep-seated desires and so forth). Believing the worst to be over, I anticipated a night free of strange noises.
Shows how much I knew about anything. I swear to heaven, I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours before scraping noises wafted up to me from below. I sat up in bed, more angry than frightened, truth be told. Darn it, this wasn’t fair!
Needless to say, I was very glad I’d locked the cellar door. This time, emboldened by my anger and my forethought (I’d never have done it if I’d forgotten to lock the door) I got out of bed. The floorboards were chilly, even though the day had been sweltering. I put on the pretty bathrobe Ma had made me for Christmas and shoved my feet into the slippers my great-aunt Blue had embroidered with her own semi-aristocratic fingers (she lived in Boston) and sent from back East. Taking up the kerosene lantern that I’d turned down low, I tiptoed to the door of my r
oom.
Neither Aunt Minnie nor Libby gave signs that they’d heard anything amiss. From Libby’s closed door issued terrible noises that startled me into fearing someone was strangling her before I realized she was only snoring. It figured she’d do something annoying like that, since the whole rest of her was annoying. I couldn’t hear a thing through Minnie’s door, although I paused to listen.
So much for them. And where was Jeepers? Sound asleep somewhere, I supposed. Stupid dog.
In that assessment, I soon discovered that I’d wronged poor Jeepers. When I crept into the kitchen, I found him sitting up on his little rug beside the sink, his head cocked, listening for all he was worth. Poor dog. He was really quite deaf by that time, and I don’t think he could figure out where the noises were coming from.
For that matter, neither could I. Now that I stood before the cellar door–not, I assure you, entertaining any intention of opening it–I began to reassess my assumption that the noises had emanated from within the cellar. Odd as it seems, they now sounded as if they were being generated from somewhere even farther below the house even than the cellar.
Which was absolutely nuts. There wasn’t anything farther below the house than the cellar. Did we have moles in New Mexico? I couldn’t remember ever hearing about moles. I knew that gophers burrowed. Maybe it was a gopher, although it would have to be a mighty big one. Maybe a fox had burrowed under the house. Or a family of jackrabbits. Jackrabbits were champion burrowers.
Making sure nobody outside could see me, I pulled the kitchen curtains aside, one by one, and peered into the yard. The moon wasn’t quite at the full, but there was plenty enough light for anything that might have been lurking within a few feet of the house to be visible. I didn’t see a single solitary thing. Yet I continued to hear noises.
“Nuts, Jeepers. Now what?”
Curiosity warred with cowardice in my bosom. Was it worth it to go outside and search around the yard? Was I so avid to resolve this puzzle as to risk ending up like that man I’d found this morning? Dead? With a knife sticking out of my chest? With a bashed-in head and blood caked in my hair? And swarms of flies feasting on my remains?
No, I was not.
Eventually deciding that my reluctance wasn’t prompted by faint-heartedness, but rather prudence, I checked to make sure every single door in the house was locked and turned to go back upstairs. Before I left the kitchen, I tossed Jeepers a piece of cheese as an apology for having misjudged him. He really was a good watchdog still; he was only having trouble finding whatever it was he was supposed to watch. And, since I had the same problem, I allowed as to how I couldn’t blame him for it.
Not for one second did I entertain Aunt Minnie’s notion that Julia Gilbert’s ghost was haunting us. Foxes and rabbits I could feature. Even big gophers. Ghosts, no. And especially not the ghost of a sweet little girl.
Aunt Minnie, clutching her robe to her bosom and looking scared, met me at the head of the staircase. “Did you hear it, Annabelle?”
I nodded. “I didn’t find anything, though. I looked everywhere.” Except outside. I didn’t say that.
“You won’t see it,” Aunt Minnie whispered portentously. “You’ll only feel a cold vapor. I told you, didn’t I? I told you that evil had come to us.”
Oh, brother. “I don’t think it’s evil, Aunt Minnie. I think it’s probably a fox or a rabbit.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong. Joe’s told me so. Anyhow, foxes and rabbits can’t stab people.”
“You have a point, I guess.” Although I couldn’t feature a ghost stabbing anybody, either. How could a ghost hold a knife? Or lift a rock? I didn’t feel up to asking.
“You have to get rid of it, Annabelle!” Her voice trembled with passion.
I stared at her. “How the heck am I supposed to get rid of a ghost?” I didn’t even believe in ghosts, for Pete’s sake.
Tears welled in her eyes and began slowly gliding down the wrinkles in her cheeks. I felt awfully sorry for her right then, but I still didn’t have a single clue as to how to solve this problem for her. “I had hoped you’d think of something,” she said, sounding pathetic.
The only things I’d thought to do so far were going home and/or getting a younger dog. “Um . . . I don’t know, Minnie. Maybe we should ask . . .” Ask what? Ask whom? A brilliant notion struck me. “Ask Phil!”
She blinked at me and drew the back of her hand across her cheeks to catch the tears. “Ask him what, dear?”
“Ask him to stay here overnight. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out what’s going on.”
Again she shook her head. “I know what’s going on. What we need is someone who can stop it.”
Right. “Well, but maybe Phil can think of something to do. You know, when he hears the noises for himself.” According to Minnie, what we needed was one of those priests who drove spirits out of churches and haunted buildings and stuff like that. What did you call them? Exorcists? It was a thought . . .
Minnie interrupted it before I could put the thought into words. “Well, perhaps you’re right. It’s warm enough these summer nights for him to sleep on the sun porch.”
“True. And I’m sure Mr. Gunderson won’t mind as long as he does all his chores on the ranch.” Poor Phil. He already had enough to do without sitting up nights with a couple of old ladies and me. On the other hand, Minnie probably wouldn’t go for the priest idea, since she was a staunch Northern Methodist. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”
“Very well.”
As we stood there, more scraping sounds came from below. I swear, for a minute there I had the fanciful notion that the devil and his minions were burrowing up from hell in order to snatch us and take down below. The idea was so frightening, I shook myself and told myself to stop thinking it or I’d never get back to sleep.
Minnie clutched my arm. “Oh, Annabelle, I don’t like this!”
I didn’t like it, either. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to town for a few days, Aunt Minnie? Just until we figure out what’s going on?”
She looked at me as if I’d suggested she take off her clothes in public. “Never! I won’t let that spirit drive me out of my own home!”
Okay, then, we’d stay. Darn it! “All right. I’ll talk to Phil tomorrow. Will that be all right?”
She hesitated, her fervor wobbling as a faint crash wafted up to us from . . . wherever. “Very well. Thank you, Annabelle.”
I sighed heavily. “You’re welcome.”
So, after yet another disturbed night, I called Phil the next morning. He wasn’t around, so I left a message with Mrs. Gunderson.
“Terrible what happened at Mrs. Blue’s yesterday, Annabelle,” she said eagerly. She didn’t get into town a lot, so she was avid for any gossip she could get her ears on.
I resigned myself to a retelling of the saga, and wished I could be in town. It was fun working at the store when there was something exciting to talk about. Sooner or later, everybody I knew would come in. We’d trade stories and ideas and come up with resolutions to darned near any problem you could name. Oh, well. I could hardly wait until Sunday, when Minnie, Miss Libby, and I would go to town for church.
Mrs. Gunderson tsked and said, “Has something else happened, Annabelle? Is that why you want to talk to Phil? I can send Davy out to find him if it’s important.” Davy was Phil’s younger brother. He and my brother Jack were best friends, although I liked Davy better than Jack, probably because we weren’t related. Phil was always complaining about him, so I reckon younger brothers were just generally a pain in the neck.
“No, no, it’s nothing very important.” I hesitated, thinking about those sounds in the night. They seemed important to me. Would they seem so to Mrs. Gunderson? Minnie thought so. Of course, Minnie also thought they were made by ghosts. “Just have him call when he can. Thanks.”
And I went on about my work. That day I was helping Libby preserve onions. You’ve probably never thought about preserving onions, have you? Well,
you’re lucky. When you lived on a ranch in those days, you had to preserve pretty much everything if you wanted food to last through the winter and spring (some of our coldest weather comes in March and April, so you can’t start growing anything until close to summer).
I didn’t mind making braids of onions and garlic. It was kind of fun, and they were sort of pretty, hanging from the rafters in the cellar and decorating the walls in the kitchen. But braids weren’t enough for Libby. She not only had to make piccalilli, which was a cucumber-and-onion relish with a little chopped chili pepper thrown in for good measure, but she had to pickle onions, too. And I was the one who got to prepare them. Lucky me.
The screened-in sun porch comes in especially handy when you’ve got to peel a couple of bushels of onions and mince half of them. That’s where I was, crying into my bucket and wishing Libby to perdition, when I heard the sound of a carriage being driven into the yard. Back then not that many people had automobiles, and most Rosdaleans still used a horse and buggy to get around in the countryside since the tires on buggies weren’t as sensitive to debris, rocks, cacti, and so forth as were those of automobiles.
Grateful for any sort of reprieve from the onions, I left the sun porch to see who had come to call, wiping my burning eyes on my apron. That didn’t help much, and I was still crying when I realized the occupants of the buggy were people I’d never seen before. The buggy, however, was one of those that used to be driven by all the doctors in Rosedale–probably in the whole world, actually–which brings up an interesting point.
In the early days of the Twentieth Century, there were more doctors per capita in Rosedale, New Mexico, than anywhere else in the nation! True story.
The abundance of medical men was due to the over-abundance of tuberculosis in various parts of the country. New Mexico’s dry climate was deemed healthy for people suffering from the so-called “white plague,” so almost every doctor in town had a little clinic in back of his house where tubercular folks could come and spend several months. I don’t know if our weather helped them with their disease, but it sure helped the local economy–not to mention the medical men, most of whom were quite well off.
