Black and Blueberry Die (A Fresh-Baked Mystery Book 11) (8 page)

Brian shook his head, saying, “No, not really. We took all the jobs we could get. With money so tight, you’ve sort of got to. Sometimes we got backed up and had to work late to get the cars finished by the time we promised them to the owners. If it takes longer than what they’re expecting, they don’t come back next time they need some work done.”

“You both worked late?” Phyllis said.

“Sometimes me, sometimes Danny, sometimes both of us,” Brian said. A frown creased his forehead. “All these questions are starting to seem a little funny. You’re supposed to be helping Danny by finding out who really killed his wife, right?”

“That’s the idea,” Phyllis admitted.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with the shop,” Brian said, spreading his hands. “She was killed at the salon. She hardly ever came down here. I don’t blame her. It’s kind of dirty and noisy and smelly around here, and that’s on a good day.”

“We’re looking at everything in Roxanne’s life, and in Danny’s, too,” Phyllis said. “Right now we really don’t know enough to suspect anything or anybody.”

“Well...I guess that makes sense. For a minute there, I just got worried that you thought
I
might’ve had something to do with her death.”

“Not at all,” Phyllis said—not because she believed Brian Flynn to be innocent, but because it was just too soon to know, like she had told him.

“You married, Brian?” Sam asked.

“No. I figure I’ll settle down one of these days...but that day’s not here yet.”

“How’d you and Danny wind up puttin’ in this shop together?”

“We knew each other over in the sandbox.”

“Sandbox?” Phyllis repeated.

“Iraq,” Sam and Brian said at the same time.

“Oh. You were in the army together.”

“That’s right.” Brian smiled. “Grew up twenty miles apart, him over in Weatherford and me here in Benbrook, and they had to send us to the other side of the world for us to meet.”

“From what my son said, I didn’t think Danny saw any combat.”

“He didn’t. Neither of us did. We rotated in and out of the place during one of the relatively peaceful stretches and spent all of our time working on vehicles. We used to hear mortar attacks and small arms fire and IEDs going off, but none of it ever came close to us.”

“You were lucky,” Sam said.

Brian nodded and said, “Don’t I know it. Anyway, after we got to be friends over there, we talked about going into business together when we got home. It seemed like a good idea, and this is the sort of work we knew, so...” He shrugged. “We’ve been at it for a few years now.”

“Has it been successful?” Phyllis asked. She already had a pretty good idea what the answer was, but she wanted to know what Brian would say.

“We’ve kept our heads above water,” he replied. “Just barely sometimes. It takes a while to build a business.”

“You made it past the first year,” Sam pointed out. “Most of ’em don’t, statistically speakin’.”

“Yeah, but now it’s just me. I don’t know if I can do enough work to keep the place afloat, and anybody I could hire for what I can afford to pay wouldn’t be any good.” Brian shook his head. “Right now I’m just doing the best I can and taking it one day at a time. It’s a cliché, I know, but what else can I do?”

“Well, we wish you luck,” Phyllis said.

“There’s something else you can do,” Brian said. “Find out who killed Roxanne and get Danny out of jail, so he can come back here and give a guy a hand!”

“Well, if you went in there thinkin’ that fella was a suspect,” Sam said as they drove away from the paint and body shop a few minutes later, “I reckon it didn’t pan out very well.”

“You don’t think there’s any chance he could have killed Roxanne?” Phyllis asked.

“Why would he? As far as I can see, Danny bein’ in jail hasn’t done anything except put him in a bind. He’s liable to lose his business. He doesn’t have any motive for hurting Danny
or
Roxanne.”

“What if it was a crime of passion?”

Sam glanced over at her but didn’t take his eyes off the road for long.

“You mean if there was somethin’ goin’ on between Brian and Roxanne?”

“He’s a good-looking young man, she was a good-looking young woman—”

“A good-looking young married woman.”

“If the past few years have taught us anything, Sam, it’s that a lot of people don’t take their marriage vows very seriously.”

“I always did,” he said.

“So did I. But we’ve seen plenty of evidence to the contrary.”

“That’s true, I suppose,” he admitted. “Depressin’ly so, sometimes.”

“Yes.” Phyllis nodded slowly. “But we have absolutely nothing to indicate that might be the case here. I suppose I could ask Danny about it...”

“He might not give you a straight answer,” Sam cautioned. “They might’ve kept it a secret from him, or he might not want to admit it, even to himself.” He frowned in thought. “I suppose I could drop in on some of the other businesses around there and maybe ask if anybody ever saw Roxanne over there when Danny wasn’t around. Once or twice might be a coincidence, but more than that...”

That wasn’t a bad idea, Phyllis thought. Sam might not be a veteran detective, but with his aw-shucks, friendly-old-geezer demeanor, he could get anybody talking about almost anything without them ever realizing he was pumping them for information.

“That’s worth a try,” she said. “In the meantime, let’s go take a look at the house.”

In a few minutes they were on Loop 820, heading north. Sam took the exit for Silver Creek Road and followed it on its winding path through the country. The tall buildings of downtown Fort Worth were visible in the distance, back to the east. Also in that direction but closer was the Lockheed-Martin aircraft plant.

In the other direction, though, lay rolling hills dotted with clumps of trees. Some of them had large, round bales of hay harvested earlier in the summer scattered across them. Horses and cows grazed here and there, and the pickup went past a couple of sheds built to give the animals shelter. Sam drove by a fenced-in area where a couple of natural gas storage tanks were located. Houses, most of them at the far end of long driveways, were few and far between.

It was a striking contrast. Turn your head one way and you saw a bustling metropolis. Look the other way and a peaceful, rural landscape was laid out before your eyes. That wasn’t really uncommon in Texas, though. Phyllis supposed it was that way in other places, too.

“I think that may be the mailbox coming up on the left,” she said to Sam. “You’d better slow down.”

Sam took his foot off the gas. When they got close enough for Phyllis to read the number painted on the side of the mailbox, she went on, “That’s it, all right.”

“No police tape blockin’ the gate,” Sam commented. “Of course, the murder didn’t happen here, and once the cops searched the house to make sure there was no evidence layin’ around, they would’ve been done with it.”

The opening in the fence that ran along the front edge of the property didn’t have an actual gate in it, only a cattle guard across the road. Sam turned in, bumped across that barrier made of pipes set horizontally into the ground, and started up the dirt and gravel driveway.

“How big is this property?” he asked. “I wouldn’t have thought they could afford much acreage.”

“We can probably find out,” Phyllis said. “From the looks of the surrounding countryside, this was a big ranch at one time. Whoever owns it may have sold just the house and the area around it and kept the rest of the acreage intact. Say, if the original owner passed away while living here, and the heirs didn’t want to keep the house but did want the rest of the property. If that’s the case, it’s probably only three or four acres.”

“Which still wouldn’t be cheap,” Sam pointed out.

“Remember, it was established at the trial that Danny and Roxanne had sunk all their savings into the place and gone into debt to buy it and fix it up. Those money problems are supposed to be what caused the arguments between them.”

Sam nodded as he brought the pickup to a stop in front of the ranch house. He said, “Yeah, that all makes sense.”

The house was obviously old but had been well taken care of, Phyllis thought as she studied the white-painted frame structure with dark green trim and shingles. A front porch with flower beds in front of it ran the width of the building. There were flowers in those beds, but weeds had popped up as well, because there was no one here to pull them. The St. Augustine in the small yard was unmowed and even taller Johnson grass had encroached on it in places.

Sam frowned and said, “I hate Johnson grass. Reckon it’d be all right if I got out and pulled some o’ that?”

“I don’t see why anyone would care,” Phyllis told him.

Both of them got out of the pickup. Sam started pulling up the Johnson grass by the roots and tossing it aside while Phyllis walked slowly to one side of the house. It had gotten a fresh coat of paint within the past couple of years, she estimated. The screens on the numerous windows were all in good repair. Two rocking chairs sat on the porch, and she could imagine Danny and Roxanne sitting out there on a pleasant evening.

“I wonder what’s going to happen to the place,” she said.

“You mean if Danny doesn’t come back to live here?” Sam said. “More than likely the bank will take it over. You said they borrowed money to buy it and fix it up, right?”

“That’s right,” Phyllis said. “Danny can’t very well pay off that debt if he’s in prison.”

Still bent over pulling weeds, Sam went on, “And if the bank doesn’t get it, the county will for unpaid taxes. They’ll auction it off, and somebody’ll get a good deal.”

“Not if we can prove that Danny’s innocent, though. Even if he doesn’t want to live here anymore—and I can understand why he wouldn’t—he could at least sell the place and have some money to make a new start.”

“That’s what we’ll hope for.” Sam straightened, putting his hands in the small of his back to help himself get aligned. He nodded toward the road and said, “Somebody’s comin’.”

The vehicle coming up the driveway toward them was also a pickup, but it was older and more beat-up than Sam’s. The driver didn’t appear to be in any hurry. When the truck came to a stop, the door swung open and a gray-haired woman stepped out. She wore boots, jeans, and an unbuttoned, long-sleeved flannel shirt over a t-shirt. The pickup had a gun rack in its rear window that held a pump shotgun and what Phyllis thought of as a deer rifle, although she was no expert on firearms.

The woman didn’t smile, but she seemed friendly enough as she said, “Hello. Is this place gonna be for sale?”

“I don’t have any idea,” Phyllis said.

“I was in the field over there across the road—” The woman jerked her head in that direction. “—feedin’ my horses, when I saw you folks pull in here. Thought you might be real estate people. The young fella who owns the property is in jail, and I figured he might need to sell it to help pay his legal bills.”

“In jail?” Phyllis said, deciding on the spur of the moment not to reveal who she and Sam were and what they were doing here.

“Yeah. He killed his wife.”

Phyllis let her eyes get wide. “How terrible!” She cast a nervous glance toward the house. “Did it happen...here?”

“Oh, no,” the woman said with a shake of her head. “It was over in town somewhere, at the beauty shop where the wife worked. You might’ve seen somethin’ about it in the paper a while back, but I suppose you wouldn’t have any reason to remember it, or connect it up with this property, even if you did.”

“I like to paint scenes of old farmhouses and ranch houses,” Phyllis said, still improvising. Sam, bless his heart, stood by looking like he was in total agreement with everything she said. She went on, “I thought maybe I’d ask the owner if I could take a picture of it, so I could do some sketches later on and maybe turn it into a painting. It sounds like there’s no one here, though.”

“Nope, the place is pretty much abandoned now.” The woman waved a hand at the house. “You can go ahead and take as many pictures of it as you want, though. As far as I know, nobody would care.”

With the woman having said that, Phyllis figured she had better keep up the fiction. She took her phone from her pocket, opened the camera function, and started taking pictures of the house from various angles. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, she told herself. Given everything she had learned so far about the case, she didn’t expect the house to turn out to be important, but you never knew. It didn’t hurt to have as much information as you could gather.

To that end, she said to the gray-haired woman, “You keep horses in the field across the road?”

“Yeah. The acreage has been in my family for close to eighty years. I live a couple of miles away in White Settlement. Name’s Estelle Prentice.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miz Prentice,” Sam said. “I’m Sam, and this is Phyllis.”

The woman didn’t press him for last names. She said, “It’s Mrs. Prentice. I’m a widow.”

“Sorry. I was sayin’ M-I-Z, though, sort of slurrin’ the Missus, instead of M-S.”

Estelle Prentice laughed and said, “I should have known. You’re an old-timer like me and don’t have enough time left to be politically correct.”

Sam just shrugged. Phyllis knew the last thing he wanted to do was get involved in a political discussion of any sort.

“How many horses do you have?” he asked.

“Four. Don’t really need ’em at my age, but I’m used to having them, I guess.”

“Did you know the couple who lived here?” Phyllis asked.

“Danny and Roxanne? A little. My shed’s by the road, and they stopped once when I was out there and introduced themselves to me. Roxanne, she liked horses. Said that one of these days she might get one. They have enough acreage here around the house to support one.”

“They just own the land around the house?”

“Yeah. All the land on this side of the road for a mile or more used to be the old Chamberlain ranch. Ben Chamberlain settled here in the 1880s and built that old stone house you can see over there.” Estelle pointed to a hilltop about half a mile away to the south. “From what I’ve heard, it used to be the first stagecoach stop west of Fort Worth. They’d switch teams every eight to ten miles.”

“That’s fascinating,” Phyllis murmured.

Sam said, “Does the Chamberlain family still own the rest of the land hereabouts?”

“Some of it,” Estelle replied. “If you came from the direction of town, you passed a little side road to get here. That side road leads up over the hill and on the other side the family’s been breaking up the acreage and selling it to housing developers.” She frowned. “You can’t see ’em from here, but they’ve started building and in a few years there’ll be hundreds of houses not half a mile away. Reckon it’s only a matter of time until the family breaks up the whole place.”

“Why’d they sell off this house, then?” Sam asked, nodding toward it.

“That’s the first thing they sold. The ranch foreman used to live here, back in the old days. I think they planned to break up this side of the property first and develop it themselves, but then there was some talk about how it was easier to connect up with the utilities on the other side of the hill...” Estelle shook her head. “I don’t know the details. But they changed the plan and started in from the other direction. It’s inevitable, though. Whichever way they go about it, sooner or later this’ll all be covered with those damn brick houses that all look alike, crammed together like a rat’s nest.”

Sam nodded in solemn agreement.

“They won’t get my land, though,” Estelle went on. “My kids’ll probably sell it when I’m gone, along with my horses and everything else, but I’ll be too dead to care then.”