Bait & Switch (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 1) (16 page)

“You didn’t let him go?” I hollered, startling a small creature that crashed through the brush to my left.

Clarice gripped my elbow, and I got the message. I should not be yelling in the woods tonight, of all nights. Stealth was our preferred mode, all things considered.

“’Course not.” Matt sounded disgruntled. “The judge agreed Leroy’s attempt to bribe a flight crew made his promise to be available for the next hearing questionable, so she denied bail. Leroy’s warming a cell and will be for a while.”

“So we’re waiting again.” I resumed walking, Clarice falling into step beside me.

“Afraid so. We’ll work the homicide angle with the San Leandro police, but these kinds of message-sending murders aren’t that uncommon, especially in organized crime and drug circles. One of many.”

“This one affects me.”

“Noted. You might want to install new locks.” Matt hung up.

I exhaled hard, but it did nothing to release my frustration.

“On a cheerful note,” Clarice said, “Art recrossed the border without difficulty and is home. Says Myrna is making traditional flatbread and venison stew and we should come for dinner.”

“I wish. The FBI might be the long arm of the law, but they sure aren’t making progress fast enough to suit me.”

“I imagine with all the terrorists and human traffickers and Coach luggage counterfeiters and whatnot running around that we’re pretty low on their priority list.” Clarice linked her arm through mine. “I might know a few things that would help Leroy pick details out of his fuzzy memory. Or I could just call his wife.”

CHAPTER 21

There’s nothing like a pile of stolen cash in the basement, the weight-lifting workout of the decade, the dismembered body of a revenge killing, and a desperate drug addict wandering loose on your property to ruin a girl’s beauty sleep. Walt didn’t look any better than I did.

“Rough night?” I asked as I reached to flick the stove knob to heat water for Matt’s French press. I stretched slowly and deliberately, wincing only when my back was turned to Walt. An agonizing burn spasmed all of my muscles in unison every time I moved.

Clarice had yet to make an appearance, and I was glad one of us was able to rest.

Walt sat at the kitchen table and scrubbed his few days’ of beard growth with a calloused hand. “He crashed about two hours ago. Dill’s sitting with him now.”

“Did you?” I smeared peanut butter on a slice of bread.

“What?”

“Sleep?”

Walt shook his head. “Been a long time since I’ve stayed with someone who’s tweaking. Pretty mild case, really.”

“Did you find out his name?”

“He mumbled some stuff. I think it’s Bodie.” Walt accepted a sandwich dripping with honey. I slid a paper towel in front of him as a plate and napkin all in one. My housekeeping standards had dropped considerably.

I returned to the sticky implements to make another sandwich for myself. “That’s an unusual name.”

“There’s a family about ten miles out, in the Dark Divide.” Walt tipped his head in the direction — maybe east? “The Ramsay family. Everything about them is unusual. If he’s one of theirs — and I think he is — I can’t in good conscience send him back.”

Walt always seems to have an underpinning of worry, but as his eyes searched mine, I realized this was more intense than usual.

“How bad?” I couldn’t sit without groaning, so I leaned against the counter and tore off a corner of my sandwich.

“Cultish. The father’s completely domineering and has bizarre ideas about end times. They’ve taken survivalism to an extreme level. No one’s sure how many kids they have, but some of them haven’t been seen in years, in particular two girls.”

The peanut butter stuck in my mouth, and I fought to swallow. “Bodie stays. Absolutely.” I wanted to snatch all his siblings, too, and spirit them to safety. “Can we do that, legally?”

“He may be close to eighteen. I doubt he has a birth certificate. When he’s coherent, I’ll see what information I can get out of him.”

“Where would he get drugs?”

“The family might be making it. Meth’s pretty easy to cook.”

The forest was full of illicit commerce — moonshine, methamphetamine — an entire black market under cover of rolling, wooded hills with neighbors spaced so widely you could get away with anything. All we were missing were anarchists. I shuddered at the thought.

“They sell it?” I asked.

Walt wiped his fingers on the paper  towel. “I suspect that’s how they support themselves.”

“Another fugitive,” I whispered.

“You mean Mayfield’s become a haven for a bunch of misfits?” Walt actually grinned. “She always has been. We’re just restoring her original purpose.”

“My two favorite people,” Clarice announced from the doorway. She strode into the room and plunked something heavy and metallic on the table — hair clippers. “I haven’t seen all your boys yet, Walt, but the ones I have seen are shaggy about the ears. I’m a good hand with these—” she wiggled the clippers, “as you may have just noticed, so bring them over this afternoon and we’ll have a barbering session.”

I grabbed the handle of Skip’s wheeled suitcase which I had repacked and propelled it toward Walt. “And these clothes, for whomever they fit best.”

Walt’s glance darted from the top of Clarice’s head to me and back again, but he had the grace not to comment on her makeover. He rose slowly, brushing crumbs off the table with the crumpled paper towel. “I guess that’s what we get for letting girls move in. You’re going to make us clean up.” But his eyes were sparkling.

I beamed at him and vowed to myself to do whatever I could to ease his heavy-heartedness.

Walt opened the kitchen door and jostled the suitcase over the threshold. Then he turned back. “You know you can’t burn wood pellets in a regular fireplace, right? Well, you can, but it’s dangerous. They burn super hot. I could weld you a contraption — a fireplace insert that would hold the pellets and allow for even oxygen supply. I need to clean the chimney before you use it, too.”

“Really?” I managed.

Walt nodded, his eyes narrowed.

“Thanks,” I whispered. My voice had deserted me.

When the door clicked closed behind Walt, Clarice whooshed as though her lungs had been punctured. “How much did Eli see?”

“And how much did he tell?” I added.

oOo

I placed a call to my new friend Josh Freeney, another person whose life had been turned upside down by Skip, and left a message. I wasn’t surprised that he wasn’t answering his phone. I wouldn’t be either, in his shoes. Clarice had a long, juicy chat with Leroy Hardiman’s wife, Josie.

Our cajoling and sleuthing had turned long-distance, but in my current condition, I much preferred a day of a phone pressed to my ear versus a day rattling down the highway in Bertha.

Clarice sat, twiddling with her phone, after the call with Josie ended.

“Talk to me,” I said.

Clarice sighed. “While she had numerous tales of his personal infidelity, she didn’t present her husband as particularly intelligent.”

“Not surprising. I could tell from across the room that she’s furious. She’s not likely to be in a mood to compliment him.”

“But maybe Skip selected Leroy as his gopher for his questionable morality to start with. Hen-pecked,” Clarice grumbled. “Does exactly what his wife tells him to do, so I suspect he acquiesced to Skip too. Much as I hate to admit it, maybe he doesn’t really know anything.”

“Except how to call a lawyer.”

“Oh yes. He’s very good at that.”

“Makes sense. Skip kept the journal. Skip handled the accounts. Skip claimed financial bamboozlement when he clearly had an extremely organized and detailed accounting system.” I poured the dregs of the coffee into my mug and set the French press in the sink. My wedding ring still rested on the window sill, dull in the gray morning light. I balanced it in my palm for a minute and returned it to banishment. “I guess I’m finally ready to admit Skip lied — he lied a whole lot.”

“Kiddo, I’m sorry.” Clarice stood and slipped an arm around my waist, pulling me in for a hug. “But if we assume everything he said is false until proven true, we might make more progress.”

I nodded, a tear sliding down my cheek. “And what are the odds that I never receive a ransom phone call?”

“You know what I want to do?” Clarice said abruptly. “Now that we’re wealthy? Feed those boys. How long do you think it’s been since they’ve had a proper Christmas dinner? We need to go shopping.”

“Christmas is a couple weeks away yet.”

“I need to get a few practice rounds in first.”

And so we went shopping — since shopping solves everything, or at least somehow makes the inevitable more tolerable. Actually, I knew what Clarice was doing — there was less chance of my slipping into morose solitude and depression if she kept me hopping — and I was grateful for her bustle.

oOo

We returned from town with the station wagon loaded to the gills and a fair bit of gossip from Etherea about the Ramsay family including a rough guess at Bodie’s age, which matched Walt’s estimate. I’m sure she suspected why we asked, but she seemed more than happy to pass along all the details in her possession, especially after I settled our tab and paid cash for our newest purchases.

I had a few nervous flutters in my stomach about my law of separation being violated by our hosting Walt and all the boys at the mansion, but I shoved them away. It was hard not to want to toast our successful run toward the border for cash, even if Clarice and I couldn’t tell anyone why we were celebrating.

Walt arrived in the early afternoon, herding his reluctant flock. He must have warned them what was coming. We set up an assembly line on the patio, complete with kitchen chairs, bed sheets, clothespins and an extension cord Clarice found in the basement.

The younger boys submitted somewhat willingly, especially when I let them pick out yarn for their new hats. It would be a terrific way to learn all their names, I realized, as I made a list and noted their favorite colors.

But the older boys had a few determined opinions about their future appearance, and when Thomas announced his intention to have dreads, Clarice rolled her eyes and stomped into the kitchen. I scowled at his mischievous smirk and decided to pull out the big guns.

“Nora, how are you?” Sidonie panted with a kind of breathless happiness as if I’d caught her in the middle of a physically demanding but enjoyable task. Given her size, just getting to the phone probably required planning.

“Do you know anything about hair? Boys’ hair in particular?”

She must have sensed my desperation, because Sidonie said curtly, “We’ll be right there,” and hung up.

“You’re in for it now,” I muttered to Thomas, but he just settled lower in the chair with a satisfied glint in his eyes and laced his fingers over his skinny middle.

Amazing smells were starting to waft from the kitchen — cinnamon, yeasty warmth, pot roast, and if I wasn’t mistaken, lemon. Clarice had set several of the boys to food preparation jobs after she’d supervised their hand washing efforts. The rest lounged around loose-jointed, forming a constantly morphing peanut gallery for the temporary salon on the patio or getting underfoot in the kitchen as only boys can do, poking each other, teasing, talking loudly, and showing off a little.

Bodie loitered apart from any groups, so weak he couldn’t seem to stand upright but leaned against the wall, with black circles under his eyes, his narrow shoulders hunched inside one of Skip’s jackets. The noise and activity seemed to overwhelm him. Clarice slipped him an apple which he devoured in just a few bites.

The Gonzales family — all five of them — arrived in their beat-up blue pickup which could have been Bertha’s twin. I was learning that nobody wasted money on nice vehicles in May County because the roads wreaked havoc on their chassis in short order. Sidonie propped open her door and slid out, cradling her belly with both arms on the descent.

Walt hurried over to offer assistance, but instead Sidonie turned, hoisted a giant, foil-covered casserole dish off the seat and thrust it into his hands. Hank came around the cab with CeCe in his arms. The men, equally laden, nodded to each other.

Sidonie pulled a massive, hot fuchsia, faux alligator carryall from the pickup’s floorboard and hitched the straps over her shoulder. “Where’s the fire?”

I pointed at Thomas whose smug look had been replaced with a sudden nervous shiftiness. Sidonie marched straight up to him and stood, her belly inches from his shoulder, scrutinizing his budding afro. She made clucking noises and started prodding his scalp while Thomas slouched even lower.

I spun to hide my grin and found Walt turning a pretty shade of pink from trying not to laugh himself. I peeked under the foil  — tamales! — and relieved him of the casserole dish. Clarice made room for the tamales in the warming oven.

I finished trimming the hair of the boys who didn’t need Sidonie’s expertise and returned to the warm, steamy kitchen. The  boys had settled down and were hovering closer and closer to the table, motivated by the increasingly good swirl of odors in the large, but currently cramped room. I waded through them and found Walt and Hank in a corner, deep in quiet conversation.

CeCe clung to her dad’s side and peeked up at me shyly. Eli knelt beside her, trying to interest her in a bracelet made of knotted string and a few pinecones. I gave him an encouraging wink. In a few minutes, I was pretty sure he’d win her over.

The men paused at my approach.

“Thank you for coming,” I said to Hank.

His dark eyes were serious but kind. He was not the sort of man who smiled often, and he spoke even less. But when he did smile, his whole face lit up, and I knew instantly why Sidonie had fallen in love with him. They were perfect opposites. “Glad to.” He rested his hand on CeCe’s head, a gentle caress.

I touched Walt’s shoulder. “It’s your turn.”

“For what?”

I lifted my eyes to his stocking cap, from under which poked shaggy tufts of hair.

Walt grimaced. “I was hoping to avoid that.”

“To what good purpose?” I grinned. “Come on. Set an example, even if you are last.”

Walt and Thomas, his dreads coming along nicely under Sidonie’s deft twisting and gelling, shared a look of commiseration as Walt took a seat on the spare chair.