The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  I realized the whole goddamned thing right then.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Petey.

  I raced through the rain, which was turning to sleet.

  Kenner was standing, his jacket streaming water, in the little anteroom, his forehead pressed against the wall as if gathering himself for a difficult task. Or as if silently mourning something.

  Or both.

  He remained motionless as I stepped in, then looked up as I shut the door.

  “Hey Kenner,” I said real friendly-like, “whatcha doing?”

  He smiled. “Oh, nothing. I just wanted to visit with Gina for a minute.”

  “Visit with her?” I took up a position in the doorway to the bunk room.

  “Sure, what’s the matter?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  He feigned surprise, which I read like a book: the too-wide eyes, the lifted brows, the drawn-up posture, the finger curled in a huh? gesture.

  You can’t act innocent, I’d learned long ago. You’ve got to either be innocent or believe yourself so innocent that your mannerisms pass the fiercest scrutiny.

  I stared at him coldly, my jaw clenching.

  Indignantly, he said, “I’ve got a right to talk to her.”

  “You’ve got shit. Get out.”

  He smiled faintly.

  Then he leaped at me.

  Odd how ready I was.

  I sidestepped and tried to seize his broken arm but missed. He shoved me, and as my head snapped backward into the wall, I felt his hand on my throat. Because he was fighting with only one arm, I was able to bring my hands up. I raked his face with my fingernails, searching for his eyes. I scuffled for leverage.

  I guess he wasn’t ready for that much resistance. Hadn’t he seen me in action against Dendra? He recoiled slightly, and I considered for a nanosecond whether I wanted to do the groin grab-and-twist or try for his splinted arm again. I decided on the arm, and succeeded in seizing it. I moved with it, rotating my whole body, taking him with me. I yanked on the arm as if it were a scarecrow arm that I expected to rip clean off.

  His scream practically punctured my eardrums.

  He sank to his knees. I released his wrist as George burst in, Alger right behind him.

  Kenner retched with pain, clutching his arm.

  “She attacked me!” he howled, blood welling in the furrows I’d dug in his cheeks. “For no reason!”

  The guys looked at me.

  I commented, “Alger, you might have to straighten that arm again.”

  If George hadn’t been George, I really think he would have laughed.

  As it was, he cleared his throat and said, “Kenner, tell us what’s on your mind.”

  We had all spilled, more or less, into the bunk room, where Gina and Joey lay. Joey, for all the commotion, had kept pretty quiet. Gina was out of it again.

  Kenner, gasping, still on his knees, pointed at me. “Get her out of here. Aren’t you guys gonna do something about this?”

  I actually didn’t think I’d hurt him that bad; after all, his arm was braced by the splints, which I’d forgotten, or I would have gone for the groin. I never knew a guy to scream so loudly: way better than I could ever do, even in the ideal conditions of an audition. There was a slasher-flick director or two I could introduce him to. A guy who can specialty-scream like that could do well for himself in Hollywood. Mind you, we’re talking journeyman acting here, nothing big, but a living.

  He cradled his injured arm and gave me a baleful look. She hit me first.

  George folded his arms and waited.

  “Get her out of here!” Kenner insisted. Nobody reacted.

  Kenner changed tactics. “You wanna have it out?” He scrambled to his feet and tore down the canvas divider between Gina and Joey Preston.

  He pointed to Joey with a quivering, Dickensian finger. “Here’s the guy we need to have it out with!”

  “Yeah?” said George.

  Joey lay there tensely, his eyes wide, his good leg twitching under Daniel’s maroon sleeping bag as if it wanted to take off on its own and hop out the door.

  Suddenly I was sorry I’d hurt Kenner, because now I doubted my suspicions of him vis-à-vis Gina. I, too, was suspicious of Joey, had been from the get-go. I mean, really, who in God’s name would believe his story about just bumping into Lance in the middle of nowhere, trying to prevent him from falling into the deepest and most dangerous river gorge for miles around, but—oops!

  I mean, come on.

  “Come on!” Kenner said. “Alger, you know what his motive was! Revenge! We were all at summer camp right here, and Lance played some stupid pranks on Joey that he never forgot, isn’t that right, Joey?”

  Joey said, “Kenner, why are you doing this?”

  Kenner went on, “Lance humiliated him, over and over he humiliated him, isn’t that right, Joey, ya big baby? Alger, you were here!”

  “I know about that,” acknowledged Alger in his calm, low voice.

  Kenner went on, shaking his finger at Joey Preston like an infuriated headmaster, “You were a warped little kid even back then! Lance and Gina happened to come through town after all these years, and you saw your opportunity! You followed them, you spied on them, and you waited for a chance at Lance alone! You stayed patient for days, didn’t you, you son of a bitch. Then you got him. One little shove, at just the right place over that river. But he almost took you with him, didn’t he? Just by the grace of a blind, stupid God you got saved by these people!”

  “Fascinating accusations,” said George, “but—”

  “OK, I know it’s just an ‘accusation.’” One-handed air quotes accompanied by sarcastic chimp lips in case we missed it. “But it’s true! Look at him lying there like who, me?” Kenner was getting more and more amped. “I bet there’s evidence somewhere! You people found this guy clinging to a rock, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Well, did you search him?”

  I stood there remembering. “Daniel said he looked in his wallet for ID. The wallet’s over there. I actually don’t know whether Daniel thoroughly—” I broke off, looking at Joey’s cut-up jeans, still lying in a clump next to the wall, dark with dried blood.

  Kenner’s voice flattened contemptuously. “Well, don’t you think it might be a good idea to look? Maybe you could start there, you know?”

  George went to the jeans and nudged them with the toe of his shoe, as if prodding for mice.

  “Go ahead!” urged Kenner.

  George looked at Alger and me, then to Joey. Joey shrugged inscrutably.

  George picked up the jeans, which Daniel had scissored up the side seams. Gull-wing-stitched Levi pockets.

  He pulled out a pale-blue book of matches with a mustachioed chef on the cover, fifty-three cents in change, a wadded cash register receipt. “Four dollars and ninety-five cents, breakfast burrito.” He fingered the receipt.

  The last thing he extracted from the wrecked pants was an unusual-looking pocket watch. It seemed elegant and yet rugged at the same time, on a short fob of navy-blue cord, I guess nylon cord.

  George peered at it carefully.

  “That’s Lance’s watch!” Kenner yelped. With the blood from his scratches running down his face, he appeared to be crying blood, which I found a little unnerving.

  Joey looked stunned.

  George held the watchback to the light. “Engraved with a large S, flanked by smaller L, E. Lance Ellis de Sauvenard.”

  I knew it all along.

  “You bastard!” Kenner was beside himself.

  Yep, that was the catch, see? If Joey had simply come upon Lance and tried to help him, how did Lance’s watch come into Joey’s possession? He robbed him, that’s how. He mugged the guy in the woods, coming upon him by either chance or design, knocked him out with a rock, then threw him over the precipice. Or maybe there’d been a struggle. Maybe Lance was unconscious and came to at the last instant when Joey was heaving him over
the cliff and grabbed onto his killer, damn near taking him with him.

  The facts gave the lie to Joey Preston’s confused expression. George turned to me. “How much cash was in Joey’s wallet?”

  “I don’t know. Daniel checked it for ID when Joey was unconscious; he didn’t say anything about money in it.”

  “Well,” said Joey, as George picked up the billfold from a wooden box that was serving as Joey’s bedside table, “check it out. Ought to be about eleven dollars in it. Broke my last twenty a week ago when—”

  “One hundred,” counted George, “two hundred—”

  Joey made a sound as if he’d just lost his footing on a glacier.

  “—three hundred—”

  “Bastard!” shouted Kenner.

  “Be quiet,” said Alger. My nerves were shot too, with all this yelling.

  “—and eleven,” finished George.

  Kenner’s eyes were stark wild. “You killed my brother! That’s proof!”

  Joey stared at him, practically hyperventilating in utter terror. “You know that’s not true,” he panted. “Where’d that money come from?”

  In that dim storm-lashed cabin, the bunch of us were like some diorama of the human condition, one wounded man lying on his beggar’s pallet, immobile, shrinking from his accuser, helpless to flee, the other standing over him like a berserk prophet with that bony paper-white finger and bloody face, and the rest of us the witnesses, the chorus.

  All the guys had hunter-gatherer stubble, and the testosterone was so thick in the air that I thought I’d start growing a beard any minute.

  Kenner lurched at Joey, but George had already interposed himself between them.

  “I’ll kill you!” Kenner was intent on Joey’s throat.

  George fended him off, and Alger grabbed him carefully from behind so as not to hurt his mangled arm further. “Easy, friend,” muttered Alger. Kenner struggled in his grasp. “Easy.”

  I heard an effortful sound behind me.

  We all turned around.

  Petey had crept in and was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Gina’s bunk in his flat hat. His mouth was hanging open, and his hands clutched and unclutched in front of his belly as they did when he was trying to figure out something. His brain was working ferociously.

  His mouth snapped shut, his lips a rosy downcurve. He seemed to have to either pee or tell me something, some information he desperately wanted to express, but clearly, he didn’t know how.

  “You guys,” he said pleadingly. “You guys.”

  “What is it, honey?”

  George asked, “Are we not getting something?”

  Petey nodded vigorously but made only a distressed squeak.

  We stood there looking at him.

  “What, honey?” I said again.

  Suddenly his eyes flashed. “Wait a minute!” he shouted. “Where’s my pencils, where’s my pencils?” He jumped up as Gina gave a sigh, her eyelids fluttering.

  Alger knelt to her.

  “Her pulse is weak.”

  “Oh, God.” I jumped to her side and took her clammy hand.

  Kenner and George stood motionless.

  “Come on, Mom!” called Petey, stampeding out the door.

  “Go,” said George.

  I thought Gina made the slightest of nods.

  So I followed my wild boy through the sleet, the icy wetness collecting on his hat and running off in a little flume behind him.

  Something had to be carried through.

  But what?

  He skidded on the steps of Kitchen Cabin. Inside, dripping all over, he ripped open his sketch pad so hurriedly that he tore some pages out, scattering them on the floor. He took up his cross-legged position, dumped out his rainbow of pencils, selected the plain Ticonderoga stub that Daniel had given him, and began to draw. He sketched a few strokes, then lifted his chin, eyes closed, to visualize, then went back to it.

  I glanced at the scattered sheets. One picture caught my attention like a fishhook to the eye. I picked it up.

  A drawing of a gray-haired man in a tan shirt or jacket, with a mulberry-colored splotch on his face, standing in some bushes.

  “Who is this?”

  He glanced up in irritation. “I don’t know.” Skritch, skritch went his pencil.

  “But honey.”

  “It’s a guy I saw around here with my telescope. Give me, it’s not done yet.”

  “Is this the picture you didn’t want to show me before?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “The bushes still don’t look right.”

  “When did you see this man?”

  “A bunch of times! He was standing right there, I thought you guys saw him too, I thought you knew who he was.”

  “Did he talk to you? Honey—”

  “Don’t bother me for a minute, Mom!”

  I put the drawing of the man with the mark on his face inside my jacket and ran to Badger Cabin.

  Chapter 30 – A Dead Man’s Last Defense

  The guys were hanging in sort of suspended animation: a four-way impasse. George and Alger weren’t going to let Kenner at Joey, and I think George was trying to figure out a way to isolate Kenner to better get to the bottom of this Joey-vs.-Lance thing.

  Gina’s eyes were open now, watching steadily—and she looked somehow...stronger. I’d thought she was dying; was she dying?

  As much as I wanted to simply comfort her, I felt compelled to be part of this crazy situation with the men.

  “Look at this.” I displayed the picture.

  Alger spoke immediately. “Hey, that’s Truck Boyd. That’s your dad, Joey, scar on his face and all. I saw him hiking around here last week. He was up along the Quilmash. Not far from—” He broke off, thinking.

  All this thinking going on.

  Slowly, Alger said, “You and him are the best trackers in the county. Kind of a coincidence that...” He trailed off.

  I cast a fearful glance at Gina, who watched, her bum shoulder swaddled, the bruise on her cheek deepening. She was covered with my sky-blue sleeping bag, her massive mane flowing back like spilled silk.

  At home she liked to use a real tortoiseshell comb that had come from Gramma Gladys’s dresser top. “You girls go ahead and take that stuff now,” Gramma Gladys had told us as she lay dying of liver cancer, her ice-blue eyes gleaming with secrets until the end.

  Had Daniel made it to his car yet? I pictured him striding through the forest. Go, Daniel, go.

  “Boyd?” said George. “Petey drew that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Boyd?” he said again. “Is Truck a nickname?”

  The answer came from Joey Preston. “Yeah.” Slow and resigned. “His name is Gilbert Boyd. He’s my father. I got my stepdad’s last name.”

  George silently took that in. I remembered Lydia at the garage-cum-grocery saying of the broken gas pump, “Truck or Joey could fix it.” There was something of significance to George about Joey’s dad. “Gilbert Boyd,” he said to himself.

  Joey went on, “Truck left when I was born, and my mom married Bill Preston. He adopted me, then he died when I was ten. Truck showed up after a while, Mom took him back, and he bought the garage. I’d been Preston too long to change it.”

  “I see,” George said, then muttered something I didn’t catch. He was talking about something else entirely, I saw, talking to himself.

  Believing, however, that George was really listening to him, Joey bit the cuticle of his thumb, then mused, “Actually, I didn’t want to change it, I guess I wanted my father to remember that he’d abandoned me. Just a little somethin’ in the background, you know? He tried to work himself back into my life, you know, I don’t know what for, really. Try to live his life through mine. He was always on me to do my homework, saying, ‘Practice makes perfect.’

  “That was something about him: practice. He’d never do anything new just right off the bat; he’d always make a dry run first. Like if he g
ot new fishing tackle, he’d take it out to Lake Quish first, actually put his halibut boat in that dinky little lake and try out the tackle, rig it different ways, run it up and down, before going out to saltwater. Not gonna catch anything in Lake Quish with a halibut rig, I’ll tell ya! Not unless the Loch Ness monster’s in there!”

  Petey burst in. “It’s snowing!”

  Everybody’s heads swiveled. It certainly was snowing, fast-dropping icy flakes swirling in the strong wind. Petey, little California boy, had seen frost and snow once or twice on trips to our ancestral Wisconsin and the mountains in California. He still found it exotic.

  The sound in the cabin had changed; now instead of the car wash-like thrumming of the sleet against wood, there was the haunting, spirit-world scouring of wind-driven snow.

  Petey handed me his sketch pad.

  “I held it upside down through the snow.”

  I flipped it over to find a (nice dry) sketch.

  Hastily done, but unmistakable:

  The interior of this cabin, Joey’s bunk, Joey asleep in it—muscled pink arms, eyes two tiny crescents—the clump of bloody jeans. The jeans were being held up in one hand by a thin, tall man. The man’s other arm was slung tight against his body, and that hand was dropping something small and circular, with a dial and hands, into the pocket.

  The object was clearly falling into the pocket, with speed lines trailing it.

  The only color in the picture was a fast-scribbled hatching of bright blue on the tall man’s jacket.

  The drawing had been done from an odd perspective, and I realized Petey had been looking in the window, peering through the fresh-air opening Alger had maintained.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  I looked at Kenner, whose face above the collar of his bright-blue jacket had developed exactly the glazed oh, fuck expression you’d expect.

  George remarked, “Good picture, Petey.”

  “It isn’t really done,” said my boy, scuffing the toe of his wet sneaker on the floor.

  “Petey!” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me, why did you go to all the trouble of drawing this?”

  He opened his mouth and shouted from the pit of his tormented little gut, “BECAUSE YOU SAID NOT TO TATTLE!”