by Allen Kent
Joseph lowered her glass to the table and sat back in the booth, her expression puzzled. “And how did you get this little bit of information without a warrant? Library records are usually pretty carefully guarded.”
“We each have our sources,” I grinned back at her. “I didn’t ask to see any records. Just asked the right person if some old lady had come in five or six years ago asking about who might own Civil War gold if it were found. All it took was a simple ‘Yes, I remember her.’”
“And someone actually remembered that from five or six years ago?”
“Not only remembered, but could place the year. You don’t know librarians like I do.”
Joseph arched a brow. “Apparently not. And what did you learn about the coins?”
“I learned that the story in the letter’s true. Union forces did commandeer the Confederate treasury and started moving it by wagon train toward Washington. The train was bushwhacked in Wilkes County, Georgia, and much of the loot stolen.”
“Then I assume the coins have pretty significant value.”
I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Enough to explain why someone might have a motive for murder. My guess is whoever ransacked the house was looking for those coins, or for something like that letter that would point them to the money.”
“Valuable?”
“What do you think they’re worth? Take a guess?”
I could tell from Joseph’s flicker of a frown that she didn’t go for that kind of game, so I didn’t wait for her best shot.
“The two in the box are what they call 1861-D or Dahlonega dollars after the mint that produced them. They were the only coins struck exclusively by the South, using some re-purposed 1860 US mint dies. Sometimes they’re called Indian Princess dollars for the face of the woman on the front. According to what I read, only 1000 to 1500 were made, making them extremely rare.”
Joseph wrinkled her forehead in a way that said, “All very interesting, but what are they worth?”
I gave my own tea a stir with the straw for effect while Joseph took a sip of hers. “And get this. One in mint condition—and the ones Nettie has are primo—sold in 2014 for over $70,000.”
Joseph choked into her glass and looked quickly around to make sure no one had overheard me. “You’re kidding. The two coins in that vault are worth $140,000?”
“I’m just telling you what the one sold for.”
“Then she could sell one every couple of years and live pretty comfortably off the cash.”
“Which she probably kept in the house—or hidden nearby somewhere.”
“I’d say this changes everything.”
Since leaving the library, I’d been thinking pretty much the same thing, but wanted Joseph’s take on it. “In what way?”
“People around town knew she used cash for all of her purchases. If word got out that she might have a pretty sizable amount stashed in the house, no matter what the source, any lowlife could have come looking for it.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“So we’ve got at least four possibilities.” She ticked them off with her fingers against the tabletop. “One: someone knew she might have money in the house and came looking for it. Two: someone learned about the Confederate coins and thought they might be in the house. Three: somebody knew about the letter and wanted to get to the money before the valley gets flooded, so tried to force her to tell where it was hidden. Or, four: the Greaves thought she might turn them in for poaching her timber.” Her thumb still remained poised above the table. I reached over and pushed it down.
“Five, someone knew they might be inheriting the land, the trees, and whatever money Nettie had stashed away and wanted to get it before it lost value.”
Right on cue, Brenda Castoe wound her way through the tables toward the booth.
“I’ll tell you what I learned about coin sellers when we get back to your place tonight,” Joseph whispered.
“My turn to host?” I grinned over at her.
“Damn right,” she said, smiling back. “I want to be there in the morning when you go looking for that bag of gold.”
13
Brenda Castoe had not met Joseph in person and responded to the introduction with an interest and graciousness that convinced me she either had nothing to do with Nettie’s murder or was the coolest killer I’d ever come across, not that I’d run into that many in my short tenure as sheriff. After the waitress took our orders, she and Mara filled the time until our food was served talking about her work and the number of clients she had scattered throughout the hill country. “There are a number in the county,” she told us, “and almost all are women.” She glanced over at me with a wry smile.
“Older men who live by themselves don’t seem to feel the need to carry emergency alerts. Of the fifteen I check on down your way, eleven are women. Well, ten, now that Nettie’s gone.”
“How would you describe your relationship with Nettie?” I interjected. Joseph yielded the lead, turning to her salad.
Brenda’s face beamed. “Oh, we really enjoyed each other. She didn’t seem to have any family and, with the exception of her minister who I think stopped by about once a month, she didn’t have visitors. No neighbors close by, except for that good-for-nothing father and son who have the place behind her. She absolutely detested them. I always made sure I had a couple of hours to spend with her. Even then, I had to tear myself away. She was a very lonely woman.”
“You mentioned the Greaves. The men down the holler. Did she ever say anything about having a run-in with them? Or any trouble?”
Brenda shook her head slowly, looking down at fish tacos she was yet to touch. “No. In fact, I think she avoided them like the plague. When we talked about the valley being flooded, she once said she hoped it would happen when they’d drunk themselves into a stupor and just got covered over by it. Said it would be better for everyone.”
“Did she say what she was planning to do? I think she only had eight to ten months to find another place.”
“She’d talked to the people at The Oaks about moving in there.”
Joseph gave me an enquiring look and I answered as much for her as for Brenda. “The assisted living center in town?”
“Yes. The last time I visited, she’d just been in to look at a one-bedroom unit and was complaining about how little space it would give her. But she seemed resigned to making the move.”
Joseph laid down her fork and jumped back into the conversation. “Did she say how she was going to pay for the place? We’ve found that she wasn’t registered with Social Security, didn’t have Medicare or Medicaid, and had no bank account that we can find.”
Brenda shrugged. “When I asked her about possible Medicare or insurance help with her alert plan, she said she had a regular source of income that would take care of it and paid me in cash for a year in advance. I had the impression she would prefer not to discuss the details, so I didn’t ask.”
Joseph cast me a glance that said, “You get to tell her the big news” and turned back to her salad.
“What would you say,” I began, “if I told you Nettie has named you in her will as her sole beneficiary?”
Brenda’s face tightened into a troubled frown and her hands dropped into her lap. She sat in silence for a few moments, then stammered, “Why, I wouldn’t know what to say.” The surprise struck me as completely genuine.
“That appears to be the case.”
“Well, I’m completely flabbergasted. And I think the agency might be concerned. They are very clear with us that they don’t want to ever hear that we might be taking advantage of a client.”
“Do you think you took advantage of Nettie?”
The woman’s eyes flashed. “Not in the least. I tried to be a friend. And she really had absolutely nothing to covet.”
“Three hundred acres for which she will probably receive almost a million dollars in the buyout. Plus, the value of the timber.”
Brenda’s indignation caught fi
re. “I had no idea her property would have that kind of value. It was going to be turned into a lake that would bury an old, beat-up mobile home.” She stared daggers at Joseph. “Are you two insinuating that I might have had something to do with Nettie’s death?” She shifted her glare back at me. “I called you about being concerned something was wrong, in case you’ve forgotten.”
I lifted a calming hand. “We aren’t insinuating anything. We simply wanted to know if you were aware that you are named in her will as her sole heir. Apparently, the answer is no.”
“I wasn’t aware, and I am completely shocked.”
“Hmm,” I grunted. “Well, the will hasn’t been filed yet. We saw it only because of a warrant. But I’m sure you’ll be notified fairly soon. What would you do with that kind of money?” I saw no reason to mention the Confederate coins.
“I have no idea whatsoever.” She slid from the booth, looked at both of us with what appeared to be genuine confusion, then down at the untouched tacos.
“One of you can take those with you. I don’t think I can eat a thing. I need to go somewhere and think this all over.”
Joseph handed her a card. “I do have one more question. The pathologist estimated that Nettie died two days before you called Sheriff Tate out to the house. Do you recall what you were doing on that Wednesday?”
Focus returned to Brenda Castoe’s eyes. “And you aren’t insinuating anything?” she said sharply. “That sounds like quite an insinuation.”
“We’re asking the same of everyone associated with the woman,” Joseph answered evenly. “Do you recall?”
Brenda dug a small notebook out of her handbag. “I can tell you exactly.” She flipped through the pages, looking for the date, then held it out to Joseph. “There. Those were my appointments and times. I was up around Willard all day. And you will note that I had an evening meeting of the Friends of the Library. I can copy these pages and send them to you if you like.”
“I’d appreciate that. We’ll probably be getting in touch with you again. In the meantime, if there’s anything you think might be helpful or if you’d like to just talk, give me a call.”
The woman cast us each a more resentful look, then turned and quickly left the restaurant.
I had only ordered a drink and reached over to take one of the fish tacos. “So . . . what do you make of that?”
Joseph pushed her salad aside and took the other taco. “Either stunned or an Academy Award performance,” she answered.
As we drove to her apartment to pick up some creek clothes and get her car, she briefed me on what she had learned about gold and coin buyers in and around Springfield. Including pawn shops and jewelers who bought precious metals, she’d developed a list of twenty-four. During the morning, she had managed to visit seven.
“I started with the actual coin shops,” she explained, propping a list on her knee. “I figured Nettie would know enough to realize the coins were worth more than the gold content and would get a better deal from a dealer than from a pawn shop. And from the fact she was living off the sales, I think we can assume she was getting a pretty decent price. Your library visit this morning suggests she knew the value of what she had. The first guy I talked to confirmed that a jeweler or pawn broker would call one of the people who knew old coins before making an offer on something like that. All of them were pretty certain none of the dollars surfaced around town.”
“Because . . . ?” I prompted.
“Well, like you said, these are pretty special coins. They didn’t give me a price. In fact, two of them said they wouldn’t even guess without seeing one. But all agreed that if one was circulating, it would have been big news in their tight little circle.”
“Maybe she did just sell them for the value of the gold.”
“I don’t think so. When I asked one dealer, he said a person couldn’t live long on the gold value in one or two. And even a pretty inexperienced pawn broker would know they had something pretty unusual and would try to get more information. There are a couple in Nixa we can check with on the way down, but I don’t think the old girl sold them in the Springfield area.”
“Had any seen them for sale recently?”
“One of the coin dealers said he saw an Indian Princess in mint condition advertised for auction on one of the trade websites. He thought the seller was a dealer in Mexico. In his mind, that raised question about the coin’s authenticity.”
“Yeah, it would,” I agreed, but made a mental note to check out sales of 1861-Ds from south of the border.
14
That night with Mara Joseph curled up in the spare room down the hall was the most restless I’d had in a long time. She had followed me down in her own car. We made a couple of fruitless stops at pawnshops and jewelry stores in Nixa, then a more productive one to buy tomato sauce, ground beef, and a loaf of French bread at Family Market as we drove through town. Jerry winked at me across the meat counter when I picked up the hamburger, nodding knowingly at the state patrolwoman.
“Gotcha quite a new partner there, Tate. I talked to her yesterday and I approve.”
“Working on the Suskey case,” I defended.
“That’s what she said. But you two look good together.”
I glanced over to see if Joseph, who was scanning shelves in the bread aisle, was close enough to hear. “Better keep that comment on your side of the counter,” I begged, knowing he wouldn’t.
When we got to the house, Joseph tossed a salad while I made meatballs and mixed up a panful of my mother’s favorite pasta and topping. Mara moved around the kitchen like she knew instinctively where everything would be. When we carried our plates and a bottle of wine out onto the deck, I was thinking I hadn’t had such a perfect evening since losing Adeena.
The sun was low in the west end of the valley and the air was cool without being chilly. A heron strutted in the shallows of the creek below, and somewhere in the woods north of the house a pileated woodpecker drummed on a dying oak. I didn’t want to talk business.
“So,” I said, lifting a steaming helping of spaghetti onto her plate, “you got the thumbnail on my past last evening. Tell me about how a Jewish girl from University City ended up as a state patrol investigator?”
She shrugged as if there weren’t much to tell. “College up at Truman State. Law school at Washington U. I did an internship with the FBI in Miami between my second and third years and was introduced to the human trafficking issues we face in this country. Everywhere, including out sheltered Midwestern state. So I decided to skip the practice of law and go into enforcement.”
“But not with the Bureau?”
Her smile was the first sign of shyness I’d seen in Mara Joseph. “I guess I’m actually a bit of a homebody,” she confessed. “I didn’t want to be moving all around the country and thought I could do the most good close to home.”
“I think I know the feeling,” I agreed, and we spent the rest of the evening admiring the heron and watching barn swallows begin to swoop and glide over the creek.
During the night I made two trips into the kitchen for a drink. Maybe she’d hear me and come out—give me just enough encouragement to feel like I wasn’t being too presumptive if I pulled her close and kissed her. But even with a little extra noise filling a glass, nothing stirred in the spare room. And today’s climate is no time for a man to be initiating anything without some pretty obvious encouragement.
I was up and had coffee steaming and omelets on the stove when she came into the kitchen. She’d dressed in the clothes I’d suggested for the morning: a pair of old shorts, T-shirt, and tennis shoes with a decent tread. The outfit did nothing to dampen my admiration. A body that had looked compact under a pair of jeans and a state investigator’s shirt now showed itself to be trim and finely muscled. I couldn’t resist a comment.
“You look like you must be a runner.”
Her laugh was bright enough to show appreciation. “I hate running. But I’m a stationary bike fanatic. The gym
I go to has the kind with the screen that lets me ride through the French countryside or up over the Alps if I feel up to it.” She looked at me critically. “You don’t look like you dressed for the wading you told me to be ready for.”
I’d slipped on a loose pair of sweatpants and a St. Louis Cardinals’ T-shirt. “It’ll take me about two seconds to change. If we eat out on the deck, you might want some repellant on your legs.”
“I’m fine inside this morning. The omelets smell great. Have you had coffee yet?”
“Waiting for you.” That earned another appreciative smile.
She helped me clear and wash as if each of us had well-rehearsed assignments, then put dishes away while I stepped into the bedroom and changed into an old knee-length pair of black and yellow swim trunks and a T-shirt from the town’s last charity 5-K for the high school softball team. Joseph was standing at the door when I came out with keys to the Explorer and a couple of old beach towels. She gave me her own onceover. “It looks to me like you’re the runner.”
“Not really. I heat the place with wood in the winter and spend a lot of time cutting and splitting. And I like to jog the back trails around here in the morning.”
“It seems to work.” She held out the keys.
We parked again at the end of Nettie’s path where yellow crime scene tape still stretched across the front of the trailer. I led Joseph around back and along a faint trail that crossed an acre of meadow, then cut through the woods toward the bend where the creek swept against the bluff.
“Watch for poison ivy” I cautioned. “You look like you escaped the last round, but with shorts on, you won’t be so lucky.” I pointed at a patch of the low, three-leafed plant and guided her around it.
The path exited the woods where the creek first brushed the rocky cliffside. Between us and the place I thought Nettie’s letter had described, a deep pool had been swept from the gravel bed. This late in the year, the water ran slow and clear as poured glass.
