Cast Iron Cover-Up (The Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries Book 3) (12 page)

Chapter 20: Pat

A
s Annie drove us to her cabin in the woods in her pickup truck, I still didn’t feel any easier about our plan. There were so many things that could go wrong with it, and very few that could turn out right, that I decided that the best thing I could do was not to think of it at all. We’d be ad libbing a lot, and most times I preferred a solid plan. As things stood, we had to dance a pretty fine line between being too aggressive with our questioning and being too timid. We’d either alienate all of them, or they’d leave in the morning without us learning a thing that might help our investigation.

“What’s our plan again?” I asked Annie as we neared her driveway.

“We need to get them to open up to us,” she said as she suddenly veered her pickup off the road and up a narrow grass lane that looked all too familiar.

“Why are we going back to the crime scene?” I asked her as we bounced up the narrow path.

“Didn’t you spot it? The tape has been torn down,” she said as she pointed to one edge, tethered to a tree on one end, while the other end fluttered in the breeze.

“Kathleen could have released the land,” I suggested.

“Without taking the crime scene tape with her? Seriously?”

Annie was right. That didn’t sound like our big sister at all. Kathleen wouldn’t sleep in a bed that was unmade, she was so precise about her life. Leaving something as significant as crime scene tape behind was completely out of character for her, and I knew that her officers would have collected it themselves for fear of our big sister’s wrath.

“Somebody’s back here, then,” I suggested.

“That’s what I want to find out,” Annie said as she slowed her progress for a large ditch that crossed the path.

“Shouldn’t we go back to the main road, call Kathleen, and see what she has to say?”

My twin sister shook her head. “What if it’s nothing? Do you really want to give her a reason to change her mind about allowing our little slumber party tonight? I have a hunch she’s just looking for a reason to cancel it.”

“Why should that matter?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t, but you weren’t the one who talked to her. She was on the edge about allowing us to do this. If we give her the slightest reason to back out, she’s going to do it. I guarantee it.”

“Fine,” I said, finding it hard to argue with my sister’s logic. “Just take it easy, okay?”

“Relax. There’s only one way in or out of the dig site, and it’s down this road.”

“You call this a road?” I asked her as she hit another bump and sent me flying upward.

“It will do until something better comes along,” Annie said, the grim determination evident on her face.

“You don’t happen to be armed, do you?” I asked her.

“No. How about you?”

“No, ma’am. Do you at least have a tire iron or something stout like that banging around in the bed of your truck?”

“I took it out two days ago,” she admitted.

“To change a flat tire?”

“No, I grabbed it to use as a weapon myself, and then I forgot it on my front porch.”

“So, we’re defenseless,” I said.

“Not as long as I’ve got this,” she said, patting the dashboard. “This pickup will protect us. Just wait and see.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” I said.

“You worry too much, Pat,” Annie told me as we rounded another corner, getting closer and closer to the site where the students had been digging.

“Somebody has to balance out the fact that you don’t worry nearly enough,” I said with a weak smile. “Can you at least pull over so I can find a tree branch or something?”

“Too late. We’re here,” she said, and with that, with one more turn, we were back to the murder scene.

“What are you hoping to find?” I asked my twin as we looked around the empty clearing.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is there anything we might have missed before?”

We both got out of the truck and started walking around the site. While Annie studied the holes that had already been dug, I looked at the old stone foundation where a house had once stood. How had they managed to carve a home out of the woods so long ago using nothing but the natural resources around them? If the same task were to be put to me to achieve today, I was fairly certain that I would die of exposure, starvation, or predators, whichever finished me off first. Then I looked at the small cemetery and realized that the life expectancy back then was nothing to brag about, either. All of the remaining tombstones were hand-carved stone, the wooden ones having rotted and faded into the ground long before. The names read like a history book, full of birth and death dates far too close together. There were plenty of Blankenships represented, but there were other names as well. Harding, Bless, Davidson, Cash, Jenkins, and Parsons were contributors, too. How many deaths had this land seen over the centuries?

“Pat, why are you standing there reading tombstones?” Annie asked me as she approached.

“I’m not quite sure. They just caught my eye for some reason.”

“What we need to find is something a little bit more recent,” Annie replied. She walked several yards to the tight circle of rocks that had to be where the well had once been, supplying all of the water the homestead had needed. The opening was now covered by a mossy board lying across its top. “Do you think there’s any water still down there now?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Let’s check and see,” Annie answered as she started to lift up the homemade lid.

“Do you honestly think anyone would hide their money down there?” I asked her.

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Annie answered. “I’ve been reading up on old homesteaders, and I discovered that they liked to keep their wealth close by. Why should Jasper Blankenship be any different?”

“When have you had time to read up on anything like that?”

“I had trouble sleeping last night,” she admitted as we pried off the top together. It had been there so long that the grass and weeds had grown up around three edges of the board, making it difficult to dislodge it without a pry bar. “I finally gave up trying, so I started doing some Internet searches. It’s really pretty fascinating.”

“I bet,” I said. “Did you happen to stumble across anything more specific than that?” I asked as we finally managed to free the lid.

“One source said that common hiding places were in the basement, in and around the well, near big trees that served as landmarks, or places like old gardens, cemeteries, even their barns.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said as I looked down into the pit. It wasn’t very deep; in fact, it appeared that at some point in the distant past, someone had filled a great deal of it up with rocks and other debris. “There’s nothing here.”

Annie looked over the edge with me. “Not that we can see, at least. Why would anyone ever fill in a well? Could Jasper’s treasure be down there?”

“More likely it went dry at some point, and they filled it in to keep their kids from falling down into an empty hole,” I said as I put the cover back in place. “It sounds as though there are too many places to look in such a limited amount of time, and I doubt Timothy would appreciate us being here, let alone taking a shovel to his land.”

“We’re not digging up anything,” Annie said. “I just think the college expedition may have been a little too restricted in their search before.”

“Be sure to tell them all that tonight,” I said with a grin. “I’m sure they’d be delighted to get your constructive criticism.”

My sister stuck her tongue out at me, something that never failed to make me chuckle.

“If we’re not going to do any digging, then why are we here?” I asked her.

“We’re looking for something like this,” she said as she squatted down near the old foundation of the homestead. It was on the back, well away from the clearing, and I wondered if Kathleen’s people had even searched there. I joined my sister and looked at the spot she was checking out.

“What do you think, Pat?”

“It’s just another hole, as far as I can see,” I said.

“It’s more than that,” Annie replied as she reached down into the gash in the earth and pulled her soiled hand away. “Check it out, Pat. It’s fresh.”

“Are you sure?” I asked her as I got a closer look for myself.

She pointed to a circle of grass that had recently been uprooted and was lying off to one side. “Look, the blades are still green. Now check out where they dug the day before.”

I looked over at the closest other hole and saw that she was right. The grass that had been removed the day before was already browning at the tips, whereas this bit seemed just as lively as the grass that surrounded us. “I see what you mean.”

“Who was out here digging today?” she asked. “They had to go through the police tape to get here, so it’s obvious they were ignoring Kathleen’s warning not to cross the line.”

“I know you’re not going to be happy about what I’m about to say, but Timothy could have done it, Annie.”

She looked long and hard at me before she answered. “You heard me before, Pat. He’s off the table as far as a suspect for murder is concerned.”

“Even if he dug this hole, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a killer,” I said quickly before my sister could build up a head of steam.

“Why do you say that?”

“If we’re right, and Bones found at least part of the money that was buried out here, why would anyone dig over here?” I pointed to the spot a hundred yards away where Peggy had claimed to have discovered the college student’s body. “Doesn’t it just make sense that if someone killed him for gold and silver, they’d keep looking for more where they found him in the first place? This is an entirely different dig site over here.”

“Okay, I see what you’re saying. That implies that whoever dug this fresh hole
isn’t
the killer, since they wouldn’t know where Bones was actually murdered.”

“Or even spoke with Peggy,” I added. “That would make me believe that it had to be Timothy or Carter. Do you think there’s one chance in a hundred that Peggy hasn’t already recounted every gruesome detail of her discovery to the people she’s here with? If one of them came back to investigate on their own, they’d dig over there.”

“Even if the killer wasn’t one of them, they’d do the same thing,” Annie said.

“I don’t follow.”

“What if whoever killed Bones only got part of the loot, as you just suggested? They might sneak back looking for the rest of it, but they wouldn’t be searching over here, either.”

“There’s something else we haven’t considered,” I told her.

“What’s that?”

“The four students have been with Kathleen most of the day, and I have a hunch that if they haven’t, they’ve at least all been together. When could one of them have had the time it must have taken to break free from the group, come back here, and start digging again?”

“We’ll have to ask them that tonight at dinner,” Annie suggested. “In the meantime, let’s assume that it wasn’t one of the four of them. That leaves Carter.” She looked hard at me again, daring me to bring up Timothy’s name again. I wasn’t about to say it, even though I felt that this time, it would be a good thing. At the very least, it would imply that her boyfriend hadn’t had anything to do with Bones’s murder, and as far as my twin sister was concerned, that should offer her welcome relief from the direst of the possibilities we’d been considering.

“So we can assume that Carter didn’t kill Bones, but he’s looking for the gold and silver coins nonetheless,” I said.

“And if that’s true, it means Timothy has a right to be upset with him, but it clears Carter Hayes of murder.”

“Based on that line of reasoning, it also means that Carter left his apartment because he was afraid for his life, which leads us back to Marty, Gretchen, Peggy, and Henry.”

“Then it’s a good thing that we’re going to have complete access to the four of them until morning,” Annie said. “We just have to make sure that we make our time with them count.”

“Then we should get busy at your place, shouldn’t we?” I asked her.

“Yes, but I want to get a few shots of this first with my camera phone. You could make yourself useful and take a few photographs of some of the other landmarks around us while you’re waiting on me.”

“Why would I want to do that?” I asked her.

“Because we never know what’s going to be useful to us or not.”

I shrugged, took a few shots of the covered well, and then snapped a few random images of the headstones just for fun.

“Are you ready?” Annie asked me just as I took another photograph.

“Yes,” I said as I put my own phone away. “I don’t think whoever dug that fresh hole found anything.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t believe they had time to,” I said. “That hole wasn’t nearly as neat as the others were. I have a feeling that we interrupted someone before they could find what they were looking for.”