A Valley to Die For (26 page)

Thirty-five minutes later, Carrie was taking the first pan out of the oven when Susan appeared, carrying Johnny balanced on her hip. “Sure smells good in here,” she said.

Carrie explained what she was doing, and Susan said, “Can’t we have those for breakfast? Oatmeal is oatmeal, after all! Johnny’s trying oatmeal, too. We’ve started him on mushy things, but he’s not at all sure he likes them.”

Unwilling to wait for the bars to cool, Carrie lifted the foil out of the pan, turned the mixture over on a plate, and scooped off two large-sized portions. She and Susan drank orange juice and ate warm cookie bars with forks while Susan tried to convince Johnny that cereal from a jar was what he really liked best.

“Come on, son,” she said, poking a small spoon toward Johnny’s tongue-blocked mouth. “Yum yum. Oh, phooie, Johnny, you’re a real mess.”

Carrie took a tiny piece of cookie, checked it to be sure there were no nuts, and put it in the baby’s mouth. His eyes widened as he mashed the new something with his tongue, and both women laughed when he turned toward Carrie and opened his mouth again.

“Oooh,” Susan said. “We’ve got to get out of here before you spoil him. But,” she added as she took another bite of her own cookie, “I must admit he’s got discriminating taste. Have you ever tried that baby cereal? Yikes, it’s almost tasteless!”

Carrie cleaned up the kitchen while Susan finished packing Johnny’s toys and the portable bed, and they were ready by the time Henry returned. Carrie handed him a sack of cooled and cut cookie bars, and hid a smile as Susan informed him that Johnny liked them, so they should surely be appreciated by his grandfather!

It was clouding over and, as they went to their cars, Henry told them snow was in the forecast again.

“Too bad,” Carrie said, “but it won’t make any difference as far as the caves are concerned. They stay at fifty-eight degrees year round and will feel comfortable to us since we’ll be warmly dressed anyway.”

Henry had borrowed Carrie’s key to JoAnne’s house, and as soon as they opened the door, it was obvious he had been over earlier to start a fire in the woodstove. There was also a supply of split logs in the wood box for Carrie and Susan to add to the fire during the morning.

Several empty cardboard boxes were stacked in the living room. “They were left from when I moved here,” Henry said, “and I thought they’d help.”

He spent a few minutes playing with Johnny while the women began work. Then, after making sure Carrie locked the door behind him, he drove away.

The task was sad, but not overwhelmingly so, since Carrie wanted to remain cheerful for Susan and, she suspected, Susan was doing the same thing. They did talk about Susan’s birth and, after some thought, Susan agreed with Carrie that JoAnne probably never would have found the need to uncover their mother-child relationship.

During the morning Susan excused herself and went to JoAnne’s bedroom for another call to her office.

She must have a very important job, Carrie thought.

When Susan returned, the two of them puzzled about what had been stolen from JoAnne’s house. “All I missed,” Carrie told Susan, “was JoAnne’s address book, the picture of you with Putt and Johnny, and a birthday card JoAnne had ready to send me. They seem peculiar items to steal, don’t they?” Susan had no answers to that question but did explain the duplicate address book. JoAnne and her sister had address books alike. Susan’s mother never used hers, so Susan gave it to her aunt after her mother’s death.

At noon everyone, including Johnny, was ready to stop. After making sure the fire was burning down safely and the door was locked, the women got into the station wagon and went home for lunch.

While they ate, Susan brought up Evan again. “Carrie, it seems there have been questions about his honesty as a broker. Some of them go back ten years. His U-4 file, a record of complaints, has several incidents in it. So far, nothing has been proven, but it’s possible something could be very wrong. The National Association of Security Dealers keeps a pretty close watch on any evidence of cheating among brokers, no matter how slight, though lots of times people do make complaints that aren’t valid at all.

“There’ve been no recent incidents, and since I took over the Tulsa account I’ve been watching Evan Walters pretty carefully. I’m sure he realizes that, so he’s probably walking the straight and narrow.

“When I called my office yesterday, I asked the Compliance Department to look further into his accounts and tell me more about your and Amos’s account. They told me this morning that your husband’s name was in Walters’s U-4 file. Amos McCrite had registered a complaint on behalf of an estate he was representing just before he died. He never followed through, and the matter was dropped. I asked about the dates. It’s possible he never followed up on the complaint because he was killed before he could. Our office didn’t know he’d died and assumed the matter had been settled to everyone’s satisfaction when they heard no more.

“They’ve found no irregularities in your own account up until the time your husband’s assets were transferred to you. It looks like Walters could have cheated you then. Do you remember anything about the papers you signed for him at that time?”

Carrie was finding it difficult to take in what Susan was saying. “No, he just put a stack of papers in front of me, and, since I knew—well, thought—that Amos had trusted him, I did too. I didn’t ask about anything. And, of course, Evan himself was tied up in the mess of proving Amos’s death was accidental, and everything was so awful.”

Susan sighed. “Yes, I can certainly see that. One of the forms you signed may have been a third-party release. It would have given Evan Walters control over at least a portion of your holdings and allowed him to put them in a fictitious account. Nothing is definite yet, but I’m sorry to say this is possible, and I wondered if you have ever had any reason to question his handling of your money, or if you remembered your husband saying anything about the mishandling of funds in the estate he was representing at the time he died?”

“No, I don’t,” Carrie said, remembering how little Amos had talked about business matters. “But I can’t believe Evan would cheat me. In fact, Shirley just said Tuesday the man acts like he’s in love with me.”

Susan was quiet for a minute, then asked, “How did he feel about your move to Arkansas? Did he approve?”

Carrie thought about it. “No, maybe not, but he’s been very protective since Amos died, so that didn’t seem odd.”

“Carrie, you couldn’t stay in Arkansas if you didn’t have enough money to take care of your expenses, the building of this house—all that. It’s possible Walters thought of that. It’s none of my business, but how did you manage?”

Carrie shrugged. “I had money from selling my Tulsa house, and I got a job after I moved here. There was a little money from Amos, and I had some savings. After Rob was in high school, I went back to work at the Tulsa City-County Library. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was all my own. Oh, after Rob went away to college, I did send him money now and then, but I saved some too. There’s Social Security to help, of course. I’m doing okay.”

“Well,” Susan said, “we’ll keep an open mind about Evan Walters, but I thought it was time to tell you about all this and make sure he wasn’t some kind of, uh, special friend. You know, if he did cheat you and we prove it, he will have to pay you back, and it may be a lot of money.”

“Oh, my,” Carrie said. “I’ve felt sorry for Evan for years. He’s always been so alone.” She frowned. “But I wonder now if there’s more under the surface with him than I suspected.”

The two women sat in silence. Carrie had no idea what Susan was thinking, but, almost before she could fit information about cheating together with what was going on in her own mind, some intuition about what Evan had done, and might be doing now, made her feel dizzy and sick.

Susan noticed at once. “Are you all right?”

“Um... you say Evan realizes you might suspect... are keeping a watch on his financial transactions?”

“Yes, he’d be awfully stupid if he didn’t know the company was keeping an eye on him.”

Now Carrie began to put her thoughts into words and was barely aware she was speaking aloud. “And he knows you’re JoAnne’s niece. And, when he calls, and I can’t think of things to talk about, I’ve talked and talked about JoAnne, and all of us, and the quarry. Oh, dear God!”

Susan was staring at her. “Are you thinking... Carrie, it can’t be. You’re scaring me.”

“Maybe... maybe... evil people aren’t always ‘the other.’ Maybe they’re someone we know. Or someone we thought we knew.” There was another space of silence before Carrie continued, still thinking aloud. “But then, what if I’m leaping to conclusions? How do we find out for sure? What am I going to do about that? I could be all wrong, very, very wrong!”

Susan’s eyes were wide and frightened. “You must be thinking of something else, something more than this cheating, even if that could mean big money for you and serious trouble for Walters. You can’t decide he’s a murderer on that alone, can you? So, what is it? What else is it?”

“There’s the pottery bowl,” Carrie said as her door knocker banged, “and the fact I’ve known Evan for almost thirty years.”

For another minute of silence, both of them ignored the knocker, then Susan said, “We’ve got to ask Henry’s help, find out what to do about this.”

“No, we can’t! I mean, I’m not sure... what can we really tell him? I have no facts yet. It’s just that what you said fit with other things, and all of a sudden I wondered... ”

She spoke rapidly, rushing her words over Susan’s protests. “I’ll call Evan tonight. Remember, I was going to tell him about the bowl—ask him if he could help me identify it? I’ll start with that. He’ll have no idea I suspect anything. I’m sure I can guide the conversation and learn something more. Besides, I need time to think about this logically and sort things out. We can’t involve Henry, at least not until after this evening! If I am wrong, well, Evan has had enough trouble in his life already.”

“Yes, I see,” Susan said, “it would be bad to make a fuss if what you suspect turns out to be wrong. And, if you think you can find out something tonight... ”

They looked toward the hall with a start as they heard the door open and Henry’s voice saying, much too loudly, “Carrie? Susan? Everything all right?”

Carrie had forgotten she’d given him a door key.

“Yes, we’re in the kitchen,” she said, then whispered urgently to Susan, “We can’t say anything yet. I might be making a terrible mistake. I have to be sure.”

Susan hesitated, then nodded slowly as Henry’s heavy hiking boots clumped into the room.

* * *

After they left Johnny with Shirley, Carrie directed Henry toward the end of the valley away from the old farm. For a while, his car climbed steeply, then they turned back along the plateau above the valley, bumping along a barely discernible two-track lane.

A light snow was beginning to fall when, carrying flashlights, they left the car and walked through an area of the plateau that was filled with sharp outcrops, sink holes, and scattered boulders. Finally, the three of them stood together at the edge of the bluff.

“What a beautiful picture,” Susan said as they looked out over a valley frosted with snow.

“Are you still game to go?” Carrie asked Henry. “Will your car be a problem if the snow gets heavy?”

“Shouldn’t be,” he said. “It’s done fine in worse weather than this and, besides, they didn’t predict much accumulation.”

“Careful, the paths may be slippery,” she said as she led the way over the top of the bluff. “There are several cave openings here, and JoAnne believed they were all probably connected somewhere deep underground. I thought we’d try the largest one first, the one JoAnne called Carrie’s Cave. Many of the passages get too small to squeeze through before you go very far, but there are some interesting things we can see anyway, and the going isn’t that difficult.”

The path wasn’t slippery, just a bit wet, since the ground was still warm from yesterday’s sun. In a few minutes, they reached the opening Carrie had chosen and, leading the way, she stooped and went in. “Careful of your heads,” she directed. “It’s pretty tight for about twenty yards after we get past this first room.”

The air in the cave felt warm after the cold outside. They crossed a plain rock room, then the passage narrowed, and before long they came to a small underground lake which filled the bottom of the oval tunnel. “Watch me,” Carrie said, as she spread her feet on either side of the water and, steadying herself with her free hand, straddled the two-foot-wide pool and moved forward.

“How lovely,” said Susan, who was just behind Carrie. They had reached an area where the beams from their flashlights showed delicate dikes and terraces growing out of the water between their feet.

As they moved farther back in the tunnel, they could see where human hands had broken off the points of stalactites that had once dripped, icicle-like, from the ceiling.

A little further along, Carrie said, “Remnants of the Ugly American,” indicating a discolored beer can.

“Slob,” Susan said.

Henry’s voice came from somewhere behind. “Did you say this opened up soon?”

“Just another few yards,” Carrie promised.

The tunnel turned and, after climbing over a pile of loose rock, they slid down an incline and finally stood erect in a circular room about thirty yards across. Thin sheets of calcite hung above their heads like delicate cream-colored draperies. Henry pointed his flashlight up into what looked like unending space.

“Wonders underground,” Susan intoned solemnly as the three of them looked up. Henry’s flashlight showed that in places the deposits were thin enough to be translucent, and fold after fold seemed to glow from within. “It’s incredibly beautiful,” Susan went on. “This can’t be destroyed. Johnny must be able to bring his children to see this someday! Oh, Carrie, what are we going to do!”

“This is part of what our fight against the quarry is about, and I wanted you to see it first. I think it’s one of the prettiest places in all the caves here. Look over there. There are tunnels leading off this room in several directions. JoAnne and I never went farther than this. We were afraid we’d get lost, but maybe we’ll want to explore some of the tunnels now, especially since there are three of us.”