Mistletoe Man - China Bayles 09 (20 page)

I smiled. "If
you can't tell me anything about the truck, Aunt Velda, what
can
you
tell me about what went on yesterday afternoon?"

The old lady pulled
down her brows in a ferocious scowl, signifying deep thought. After a moment,
she said, "Well, this is gonna get me in a passel o' trouble. But I guess
if I gotta tell the truth, I gotta."

"Please,
Aunt." Donna made an anxious sound. 'Tell China what you told us. What we
talked about. Remember?"

Aunt Velda put two cookies in her
mouth and munched for a moment She swallowed. "I remember lookin' fer the
cave."

"The
cave!" Terry exclaimed. "But that isn't—"

"Oh, Aunt!"
Donna cried. "How could you? You were very, very bad!"

"Whut'd I tell
you?" Aunt Velda said pathetically. "Now they're gonna yell at
me."

"You're damn
right we're going to yell at you!" Terry shouted. "It's dangerous for
you to go climbing around these ravines. You're too old."

"Anyway,"
Donna said, "there isn't any cave. We've looked and looked. If there were
a cave, we'd have found it."

"Well, the
Indians sure enough found it," Aunt Velda retorted in a petulant tone,
" 'cause there's plenty of arrowheads and skulls and stuff layin'
around." Her chin jutted out and she added, with a toss of her head:
"I found it once, and I aim to find it again, soon as I remember
how."

"But you don't remember what happened
to Carl Swenson?" I asked. "You don't remember hiding the truck, and
telling Terry and Donna about it when you came home for supper?"

The old lady rolled her eyes in
exasperation. "Truck, truck, truck," she said. "Is that all you
care about?" She yawned. "I think I'll just catch me twenty
winks." Her eyelids drooped. A moment later, there was a loud snore.

Chapter
Nine

Folklore had it that
one mistletoe berry down the gullet of a curious child meant almost certain
death. But a recent study done by three Denver physicians suggests that
mistletoe may have been getting a bad rap. The doctors found that 14 children
who ingested mistletoe suffered no serious toxicity. They also analyzed 318
cases of mistletoe ingestion reported to the Food and Drug Administration and
found no toxic symptoms or reported deaths.

D. Eicher "Mistletoe Tale
Deflated"
Denver Post
Dec. 15, 1986

Back on the road again, I had plenty to think
about. Before I left the flower farm, Donna and Terry had put the old lady in
her room and locked the door. They were going out, they said, to check the
three or four places they thought Aunt Velda might have hidden the truck, all
of them within a mile or so of the house—close enough that she could have
walked back home. I could come with them if I wanted to, or they'd call me as
soon as they found it.

More to the point, I told them, they should call
Sheriff Blackwell. I'd done my job. I'd advised them of the legal difficulties
they might face if they had helped to conceal the truck. The rest was up to
them, and to the sheriff. I completed my obligation by calling Blackie on the
cell phone. I didn't have any better luck than I'd had earlier, but this time I
left a message, saying that I'd talked to the sisters and they had agreed to look
for the truck. I'd be glad to give him my report in person, when he had time to
listen. And that was that. I had other things to do, and it was time I did
them.

But still, the
conversation stayed in my mind, and as I drove, I puzzled over the major ambiguities.
Knowing something about the old lady's erratic behavior, I might be able to buy
the goofy idea that she'd hidden the truck and forgotten where it was. But if
she had really told that story to Terry and Donna, why wasn't she able, or
willing, to repeat it to me? Was it sheer orneriness, or a stubborn and knowing
refusal to participate in a lie that her nieces had constructed for her? And if
it was a lie, what was the ugly truth it was designed to conceal?

I was equally
troubled by the sisters' contradictory alibis. Terry claimed that she and
Donna hadn't missed their aunt because each thought the old woman was with the
other, but Donna asserted that she and Terry had been together all afternoon.
Terry herself had caught that contradiction, and was worried that I might have
heard it too. Of course I had. Obviously, one of them was lying. Which one?
Why? I didn't envy Blackie the job of sorting the truth out of the tangle of
conflicting stories.

Heading north on Comanche Road, I
passed Clyde's disreputable house trailer. A couple of goats had gotten
through the fence and were browsing the cedars beside the road. The surly dog
was still lying in his oil-drum doghouse, waiting for his master. Nothing else
was changed.

At Corinne's house, the Camaro had not
reappeared and the gravel drive was empty. There was a light at the back of the
house, and if I'd had more time, I would have been tempted to stop and find out
more about Marvin's connection to Carl Swenson. But Brian would be home from
school soon, and it was my week to cook. I had to start thinking about dinner.

I
was
tempted,
however, to learn more about Swenson. I slowed as I passed the place where he'd
been killed. His mailbox was about twenty yards ahead on the right, next to a
gravel lane that presumably led to his house. A gate was closed across the
lane, but while there was a chain and a padlock on the gate, the lock hung
open. If it hadn't been so close to dinnertime, I would have opted for a trip
down the lane and a look around his place. As it was, I opted for the mailbox.

Stealing mail is a
federal crime, and I've never liked dealing with the feds, who tend not to
listen very well. But I wasn't going to steal anything. I only wanted to take a
look. I slid over to the passenger side, rolled down the window, and opened the
mailbox.

It wasn't a big haul.
Just a single nine-by twelve-inch glossy envelope, a high-class, expensive
mailing piece. But the stamps caught my eye—Brazilian—and the return address:
Rio de Janeiro. I turned the envelope over. From the photograph and the
information printed on the back, it looked like somebody had sent Carl Swenson
a brochure for a posh high-rise condominium called the Pousada do Gramado,
overlooking Guanabara Bay. I turned the envelope over again and saw that it
was addressed to Mr. Charles Seymour, 921 Comanche Road. I glanced at S
wen-son's rusty mailbox. It bore the ragged numerals 921.

Charles Seymour, Carl
Swenson. The initials were the same. Coincidence or design?

I stared at the envelope for a moment, now sorely
tempted to break my rule and steal a piece of mail. After all, it was only an
advertisement, and it wasn't even addressed to the owner of the mailbox—who
wouldn't be going to Rio anytime soon and could hardly file a complaint, in
any event. I'm sure that Kinsey Milhone or Sharon MeCone would have stuck the
envelope in her bag and driven off without a second thought. But I am basically
a law-abiding person, which under some circumstances is a curse. I found an old
credit card receipt under the car seat, located a pen, and jotted down the
address of the Pou-sada do Gramado and the name Charles Seymour. Then I put the
envelope back in the mailbox, slid back under the wheel, and put the truck into
first gear. A hot, hearty soup would be nice on this chilly day, with garlic
bread and a salad.

Portuguese sausage soup, maybe. Don't they speak
Portuguese in Brazil?

Dinnertime is Brian's time, when
McQuaid and I catch up on our son's daily doings—school, friends, hobbies,
pets, and so on. Usually, we restrict the conversation to pleasant topics,
since it is my theory that the human body handles digestion better when it
isn't stressed. But tonight it was my sad duty to tell Brian that a pair of his
lizards had gone for a swim in the washing machine, and that one of them had
made a dive down the laundry sink drain.

"And if there
are any more loose lizards," I added sternly, "we are going to have
to make some changes in the zoological accommodations." I picked up the
ladle. When we're not having company, I put the soup pot on the table and serve
directly out of it. "Who's ready for seconds?"

Beside McQuaid's chair, Howard Cosell thumped the
floor urgently with his tail, reminding us that he hadn't had firsts yet.

Brian frowned.
"It went down the
drain!
Why didn't you stop it?"

"I'll take some
more," McQuaid said, handing me his bowl.

I smiled at McQuaid and frowned at Brian.
"Give me a break, kid. I was trying to rescue lizard number two from
drowning in soap suds. I wasn't keeping tabs on lizard number one." I
filled McQuaid's bowl and passed it back to him. "Anyway, those lizards
should have been in their lizard hotel, not lurking in a towel on your bathroom
floor."

"Was it the horny toads or the green
anoles?" Brian asked.

"Not the horny
toads," I said. "But they weren't green, either. Tannish brown, sort
of. We didn't introduce ourselves." My favorite among Brian's animals is
a fat and lazy tarantula named Ivan the Hairible, who fits neatly into the palm
of one's hand—not
my
hand, though. I admire Ivan from a distance.

"The green anoles change
color," Brian said. "Like chameleons. Their real name is
Anoles carolinensis,
if you want to know. They were probably in the
bathroom hunting for crickets."

"It's a little late in the year for
crickets," I said. "I'm sorry about the drain, Brian, but if they'd
been where they were supposed to be, it wouldn't have happened."

"We could take the pipe apart," Brian
said to his father. "Like we did that time your girlfriend lost her
diamond earring in the bathroom sink. He's probably still in that elbow
thing."

"What
girlfriend?" I asked. "What diamond earring?"

"That was a long
time ago," McQuaid said. "Before you and I got serious." He
looked at Brian. "If the lizard went down the drain, he probably drowned.
The elbow is full of water."

"Drowned!"
Brian pushed back his chair. "Can I go look? Maybe he climbed out of the
sink and is hiding somewhere."

Howard Cosell clambered expectantly to his feet,
hoping that Brian was going to put his soup bowl on the floor for a lick.

"Don't beg,
Howard," I said. "Okay, Brian, you can go look, but don't get your
hopes up." I raised my voice as Brian dashed out of the room. "And
put the other one in the terrarium, where he belongs."

McQuaid glanced up
from his bowl. "Good soup," he said. "What's in it?"

"Sausage. A couple of onions, lots of garlic,
a can of chopped tomatoes, etcetera." I didn't tell him that it also
included two cleverly camouflaged zucchini. McQuaid will not eat squash of any
description. "Why would Carl Swenson be getting mail under the name of
Charles Seymour?"

"I'll have some more of that
garlic bread," McQuaid said. "How do you know what names he's getting
mail under?"

"Because I
looked in his mailbox." I handed him the bread basket, which contained
only three more slices. Garlic bread goes fast at our table. "The only
thing in it was an expensive advertising brochure."

"Junk
mail," McQuaid said dismissively. He tore off a chunk of the bread and
dropped it on the floor. Howard

Cosell put his paw on it to keep it
from getting away, then began to lick it. Garlic is one of his favorite herbs,
or maybe it's the butter he likes. "It could have been sent to the wrong
address. Or maybe this Seymour guy used to live there."

"It was the right address,"
I said. "And it wasn't junk mail. It looked more like a real estate sales
solicitation. From an expensive condominium unit in Rio de Janeiro. With a view
of Guanabara Bay."

That
got McQuaid's attention. "Rio de Janeiro?"

"Yeah. Charles
Seymour, Carl Swenson. Same initials. I don't think it's a coincidence. I'd
bet—"

There was a loud
crash upstairs. "Brian!" McQuaid and I yelled in one voice.

"It's
okay," Brian called. "I caught him!"

"I'd better go see what that noise was,"
I said, standing up.