Ed Lynskey - Isabel and Alma Trumbo 02 - The Cashmere Shroud (19 page)

S
ammi Jo ranged up from the office chair, ambled over the carpet she’d vacuumed minutes ago, and shoved her way through the glass door. Late afternoon brought the longer shadows, but the air felt only a few degrees cooler. Slouching on the concrete stoop, she let her eyes gravitate to the security gate with its key pad and chain-link perimeter fence to safeguard the renters’ can’t-live-without treasures.

She’d counted a whopping three customers
tooling into the self-storage facility all day. Yeah, their business was booming. She decided to triple the number and call it nine customers when Wilbur phoned in and asked her for a status report. Keeping the boss pumped up and happy made her white lie permissible.

The
self-storage industry, according to Wilbur who had a good reason to do his homework, began in Fort Lauderdale by the Collum family during the late 1950s. The industry was as American as jazz, baseball, and barbecue were, and Sammi Jo had smiled through Wilbur’s history lesson. All she cared was her paycheck when deposited cleared at her bank, and she didn’t get socked with the bank charge for his frozen account.

She turned around
, shoved back into the stuffy office, and flumped down in the chair at the desk. She dragged over the column of manila folders. Her sore heart wasn’t into it. She wetted her thumb and riffled through the column, checking the folders’ tabs identifying the delinquent customers’ names. Most of them she didn’t recognize.

Th
e newcomers moving into the area comprised Wilbur’s largest customer base. Quiet Anchorage’s old timers were shrewd to never part with their hard-earned money to store a rat’s nest of junk inside a rental locker. They’d either auction off the junk, or they’d chuck it into the landfill on the other side of Warrenton.

“
Whoa, hold the phone, Sammi Jo,” she said. “What’s this little bombshell I’ve unearthed?”

She
pinched the manila folder and plucked it out of the column. She stared down at the folder’s tab. Written in blocky letters was the name GARNER, RAY BURL.

She tapped the manila folder on her
thumb knuckle while she delved into her recent past. Her father had never mentioned he’d rented a locker to stash his belongings. That was odd, considering he’d known she worked at the facility. What big secret did he keep from her? Or had he just been the same old close-mouthed dad?

Her pulse ramped up its throbbing
excitement. She felt enthralled over how she’d stumbled upon what the Trumbo sisters liked to call the key clue. Sammi Jo’s temptation was to grab her cell phone and spill the beans to them. On reconsideration, she held off. Suppose Ray Burl had just crammed the locker full of the cardboard boxes of his unfinished wood projects?

The key clue
became another letdown. She bit her knotted lip, mulling it over. She took out a lock pick kit—she didn’t want to reveal its origins—to undo the padlock any customer used to secure their locker. She darted from the office, pacing off to go track down Ray Burl’s locker number she’d picked off his manila folder.

S
ecurity cameras mounted on poles aimed down each aisle between the rows of storage lockers. The aisle widths between the lockers permitted the customers enough room to maneuver their vehicles up to their lockers for loading and unloading their possessions.

Ray Burl’s
unit sat near the front of the third row. She turned off the security camera so as not to record her act of nosiness and jimmied open the padlock he’d installed.

“
Piece of cake,” she muttered.

She
hoisted up his locker’s door like one does to open the garage door. She flipped on the light switch, hesitant to inspect the locker’s contents. She placed her hands on her hips, giving a slow nod, but no smile accompanied it.

“Well, well,” she said
to nobody in particular. “I’ve found the window into perhaps the clandestine side of my father’s life.”

He
’d squirreled away the usual men paraphernalia she found cached when she went to vacate a default locker. She’d retain the decent swag to be put up for bids and sold at the public auctions Wilbur held in order to recoup their losses. The steel weightlifting set of the bench, weights, and bar were odd. Ray Burl had never pumped iron. Also throwing her was seeing the used motorcycle—a Kawasaki 600 cc—parked on its kickstand in the center of the locker.

She
drew in a breath to sniff, and only the typical musty air like from old newspapers pervading the lockers filled her nose. Did he drain the gasoline from the Kawasaki’s fuel tank per the lease terms he’d signed? She doubted it. Few customers thought of doing it, and the lockers blew up in smoke and flames.

Wilbur and she had
yet experienced no locker fires or explosions. Any day now, she expected to smell the smoke or cringe at hearing the kaboom. That would be the last straw. She’d update her résumé and go knock on other employers’ doors again. Such pyrotechnics were only good in the dudes’ action movies.

H
er father storing his stuff in here perplexed her. She wondered if he’d guarded the other facets of his life. He’d been a cards-kept-close-to-the-vest man, and perhaps the personality trait gave him the cover to carry out certain other activities undetected. Thinking the worst things about him dismayed her. He’d been a stand-up guy.

Steeled by her new
found resolve, she marched into the dimmer locker space. The Kawasaki indicated where a portion of Ray Burl’s money had gone. The Kawasaki carried a dead inspection sticker and, its license plates had also expired. He’d probably intended to use it for an off-road dirt bike. Why his sudden interest in the dirt bike sport?

Well
, she mused,
guys and motorcycles went together like horses and carriages
.

She stopped at the
column of stacked cardboard boxes marked with a Florida grapefruit growers’ logo. She tilted her head while sizing up the cardboard boxes. Busting her bottom lifting the filled boxes wasn’t in her job description, and Wilbur wasn’t here to lend her a hand. Investing in or renting a forklift was getting to be a more desperate need.

He
’d resisted for as long as she didn’t balk at their doing the heavy lifting by hand. She wasn’t built like a muscle-bound stevedore and decided he was in for a few jarring surprises after he returned all relaxed and full of wisecracks. His “girl Friday” (she’d corrected his first usage of the slur) was going on strike for better working conditions like getting a forklift.

S
he noticed Ray Burl had left a larger-than-usual space of a crack between the cardboard boxes and locker wall. She stepped around the column and craned her head forward to eyeball in the narrow gap left behind there. She gasped, no words spoken out loud, at what she observed.

She reached
her hands into the narrow gap and grabbed the long, heavy artifact. It was a 12-gauge shotgun, a Mossberg pump model, she read from the inscription stamped on its steel barrel. She figured she’d laid her hands on the shotgun Corina had seen Ray Burl take from the hardware store. Just what that added up to eluded Sammi Jo.

Repulsed by
holding the shotgun, she returned it to its original hiding place when she noticed something else. A new hacksaw still in its shrink wrap packaging lay on the concrete floor.

She recalled Isabel’s remark on how gun owners used hacksaws to crop off their shotguns, and Sammi Jo wondered if Ray Burl had
intended to create a defensive weapon from the shotgun. Perhaps he’d felt threatened. She didn’t know.

Further speculation
seemed pointless. She exited and resecured the locker. She had a phone call to make. The ladies were, she gleaned, at last getting somewhere. The new adrenaline release she felt convinced her now was the right time for them to make the final push.

I
sabel and Alma’s return trip to chat with the lackadaisical Blaine at the hardware store proved uneventful since he’d closed up for the day. They were out walking Petey Samson, or it was more like he walked them by tugging on the leash Isabel grasped doubled over in her fist. He’d been waiting for them, the leash clutched in his teeth and blocking the doorway when they arrived home. His tail thumped on the floor like Alma did while tapping her toe in impatience.

Isabel
pealed out a jovial laugh, but Alma suspected Isabel had taught Petey Samson the latest trick. She was teaching him a lot of questionable habits.

This suspicion
was verified when Alma saw Isabel slip Petey Samson a doggie treat taken from the baggie kept in her pocketbook. He was getting more spoiled rotten by the day. At least this time Isabel didn’t play hide-and-seek with him, concealing herself by standing in the bathtub and counting off to ten. Petey Samson trotted into the bathroom and barked at his finding her. He also earned another treat to wolf down.

“Oh,
holy mackerel, Isabel,” Alma said in mock disgust. “You’re just ruining him more than he already is.”

“
Don’t get so out of sorts,” said Isabel. “Next time I’ll let
you
be the one who hides from Petey Sampson.”

“That’s more like it,”
Alma had said.

A
s a cooling summer breeze blew, they trooped by Mrs. Black’s white picket fence with a cluster of red-orange tiger lilies and lavender peonies blooming off-season this late in August. Mrs. Black was the oldest still living Quiet Anchorage townie. She refused to acknowledge her true age, but she did allow three digits wasn’t all that far away from it.

Entering her
distinctive timber-framed house was like stepping into the nineteenth century. Though she relented to use indoor plumbing, she outlawed turning on the electric lights. The soft glow of the kerosene lantern soothed her old, irascible nerves. She ruled as the grand dame at the Senior Folks’ Center. As far as Isabel and Alma were concerned, she could keep the tiara until its diamonds fell out. Neither of them had any desire to wear it any time soon.

Observing t
he lavender peony flowers poking out the gap between the white pickets nudged Alma’s memory.

“We
haven’t gone to the cemetery and raked up the leaves and clutter around the family gravestones,” she told Isabel.

“
Labor Day is our scheduled time to drive out there,” said Isabel. “The recumbent Trumbos as well as Max and Cecil won’t complain if we don’t hit it on the exact right day.”

“Do you have something in mind
for doing on Labor Day weekend?”

Isabel shrugged as much as she could manage with
Petey Samson yanking at the dog leash. “Maybe we’ll round up the usual suspects, fix some microwave popcorn, and throw a Scrabble Fest. How does doing that sound to you?”

“
Like a goat in a briar patch,” replied Alma. She stooped down and moved aside a kid’s razor scooter with pink tassels on its handlebars left on the sidewalk. Today’s kids have the neatest toys to play with, she thought, almost wishing she was a kid again. “Ray Burl and his murder have been on my mind a lot as I recalled the different things from the past.”

“You mean since we
’ve moved back to Quiet Anchorage?”

“Sure, that
time period but also the years we lived away from town. Every once in a while, we’d return and visit, catching up on old times. Coming home made for a nice change of pace and welcome diversion from the city’s rat race.”

“I felt likewise,” said Isabel.
“What point are you making?”

“
Did you remember if Ray Burl was ever mentioned?”

“Now that you bring it up, no, he wasn’t the topic of
many conversations I had with the townies. He never garnered a lot of attention, so he must’ve went about his personal business in his low-keyed manner.”

Alma
nodded as they stopped at the intersection. The dynamo of energy Petey Samson tugged away on the leash, but Isabel restrained his exuberance to dodge out in front of an oncoming farm use truck.

“
Here’s a different take I’ve been mulling over,” said Alma. “Ray Burl’s low-keyed manner may’ve been done to shield his leading a second criminal life that he kept hidden from his family and friends. Even Sammi Jo wouldn’t know what the chameleon was up to while she was growing up in the same house.”

“Criminals
can lead second lives,” said Isabel. “It’s done in many our read mysteries, but we’re talking about small, tame Quiet Anchorage, not a hotbed of criminal activity like New York City or Las Vegas.”

“Small towns ha
rbor their share of crooks,” said Alma. “I don’t like to badmouth Sammi Jo’s dad or speak ill of the recent dead, but what if he wasn’t the stand-up fellow he wanted us to believe he was?”

“As distasteful as I find it to consider, I suppose Ray Burl could’ve been killed by one of his criminal associates,” said Isabel.

“It’s still just a possibility at this point,” said Alma.

The intersection clear
once again, Petey Samson towed them across the street to its sidewalk. The school-age kids had drawn a hopscotch grid in blue chalk, the left behind Mexican peso coin had been used as their tossed marker.

On this hot
summer afternoon school-age kids swam at the community pool, not the Coronet River as the young Trumbos had done when not working on the farm. Either place for either generation made for good, clean fun.

“Are you up for
playing a game of hopscotch?” asked Isabel.

“
No, I believe I gave up my hop, skip, and jump when I lost half my foot,” replied Alma.

“Of course you did.
Sorry.”

They
headed downtown on Main Street instead of making the turn around the block and returning home.

“What
bad stuff might have tempted Ray Burl?” asked Isabel.

Alma
didn’t want to speculate. “I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward it tells us why he got murdered, and who did it to him.”

“Oh drats,
Petey Samson drawing us along like a kite made us miss taking our turn.” Isabel halted, pulling on the leash, and refused to let Petey Samson advance another step.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw his mistress had a different way
in mind than to keep on following his keen beagle nose. She reversed their field, and they found the right street for making the home stretch.

The white
sequentially numbered hash marks they passed on the street pavement marked where the entrants in each firemen’s parade lined up. It was held on the first night the annual carnival hit town, always a big festive ado, climaxing with a well-attended drawing for a new car giveaway.

Alma
and she only lived two houses down from the parade route. They along with their guests Phyllis and Sammi Jo cheered and clapped on the front stoop by the American flag. Shiny red fire trucks, high-stepping blonde majorettes, and brassy marching bands playing Sousa from the neighboring towns like Warrenton, Culpeper, and Colonial Beach composed the parade’s procession.

Alma
realized their gait had picked up steam with Isabel now in front of the reluctant Petey Samson who trailed along behind them. Elms and oaks lining the street offered the walkers some welcomed shade.

“Here’s a different question
for us to bat around. Why did Ray Burl feel compelled to work so many hours?”

“I’ll bite. Why
did he?” said Alma.

“Maybe because he found it a convenient
excuse to use while he was off living his second shady life. Do the foremen usually stay late and work on weekends by themselves? Yes, and Mr. Barclay didn’t care how many hours Ray Burl slaved away. It could’ve been his perfect cover story.”

Isabel scrounged inside her
pocketbook, found a doggie treat, and tossed it ahead of them.

Petey Samson
, seeing it, loped to their front and gobbled it down. He got with the new program they were now homeward bound. Alma heard a blue jay scolding them and saw it was in a pyracantha bush. Petey Samson’s ears perked up until he realized he was on a leash, making any pursuit of the blue jay impossible.

“
Let’s assume our theory is correct,” said Alma. “Let’s say Ray Burl was off doing these bad deeds when everybody thought he was so diligently working. We’re forced to find the evidence of his bad deeds.”

“
The evidence gathering is too often exasperating, and my least favorite part when I read an old time mysteries,” said Isabel.

“That’s the easy part,” said
Alma. “The tough sledding comes when you have to tell Sammi Jo her late father was a criminal. I don’t envy you doing that task.”

“Funny,
sis, but here all along I thought this was a joint venture you and I had undertaken. Now I’m hearing this malarkey from you.”

Alma
had to laugh. “Sammi Jo is a big girl who might take it better than we fear she will.”

“
Remind her she’s her own person, and whatever bad guy he was is no reflection on who she is.” Isabel renegotiated Petey Samson’s wrong turn at the foot of their driveway, and he understood their adventurous walk had reached its end until the next time. He wagged his tail for his reward, and she accommodated him.

“No reminder
will be needed because I’m certain the well-grounded Sammi Jo knows who she is,” said Alma.