On the Run (20 page)

“I don’t think so. I found part of an old newspaper just a couple days old.”

Not good. But there was still my main bright point.

“But however recently he may have been there, he
is
gone now. Right? So we really don’t have anything to worry about.” I also thought this departure eliminated a Braxton camper/skulker. The Braxtons, when they located me, tended to do something drastic about it.

There was only the barest hesitation before she agreed with my optimistic conclusion. “Right,” she said, and drained her glass.

Abilene went out to repair a loose place on the deck railing.

As I put a load of clothes in the washer, another possibility occurred to me. The sheriff’s nephew had been murdered, possibly because of a drug involvement. I’d heard of such things as movable meth labs, labs actually set up in a car or van.

Could that be what our camper/skulker was up to, perhaps with some connection to the murdered nephew?

But if that were true, why would he be sneaking around
here
?

Unless he knew something we didn’t.

21

We moved the rest of our stuff from the motor home to the house, and I fixed salmon patties for dinner. Cans of salmon were also in abundant supply, as if there’d been some great migration from the sea to the Northcutts’ basement.

I discovered a couple of peculiarities while looking around down there. One was the Northcutts’ apparent paranoia about a coming crisis in the world supply of toilet tissue. A veritable mountain of it reached almost to the ceiling in one corner. The mountain didn’t look too stable, and I stayed away from it. I didn’t want my obituary to announce that I was the first woman in history to be decimated by an avalanche of tumbling toilet tissue.

Koop, always interested in sticking his nose into new places, had followed me down the stairs. I wasn’t paying much attention as he wandered among big plastic cartons of beans and rice and laundry detergent, until I heard a muffled meow.

“Koop?” I called. “Kitty, kitty?”

Another muffled meow, this time sounding rather crotchety, as if he was not pleased at being wherever he was, but I still couldn’t see him. I was suddenly excited. The Northcutts were the kind of people who’d invest in a secret passageway or hidden room. Had Koop discovered it?

Another series of meows, these impatient, and I placed them as coming from a top shelf. I grabbed a step stool and planted it near the sound, which I had by then decided was regrettably too close to suggest Koop had wandered into a hidden room.

“If you got in there, wherever you are, can’t you get out the same way?” I grumbled. Unhappy yowl from Koop.

I climbed on the step stool and started removing cans. This was an area of true survival-type food, cans of powdered cheese and dehydrated fruits and vegetables and eggs, all packed, according to the labels, in “inert nitrogen” for long-term storage.

The surprise came when it didn’t take long to reach Koop because, although the top shelf looked full, it had only a single row of cans up front with a large empty space behind. A space that Koop had somehow managed to squeeze himself into.

I dragged him out and deposited him on the floor, then climbed up to inspect the space more closely. It could have been left because the Northcutts hadn’t yet acquired enough survival food to fill the shelves completely. Yet there was something so purposeful about the careful arrangement of cans around the empty space. For
what
purpose?

An obvious answer.

For hiding something.

Something that had never been put there?

Or something that had been there but was now missing?

After dinner I took Abilene down and showed her the odd space. Koop had gotten into it, we decided, by starting at the end of a shelf a good ten feet away and squeezing along the narrow space between the cans on the top shelf and the ceiling above. Once in the large empty space, pure cat self-importance had apparently made him demand help rather than squeeze back the way he’d come.

“Did Mikki bring anything up from down here?” Abilene asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Maybe Jock and Jessie were reserving it as a place to put something special.”

Given the Northcutts’ peculiarities, “something special” might mean anything from mummified emus to spare body parts. I decided I’d rather not speculate and headed for the stairs.

We tried the TV in the “great room” that evening. Frank had said that was what Jock and Jessie called the big room, and it did seem appropriate. This TV had a clear, sharp picture, no doubt due to the huge antenna atop the house, which went up much higher than the antenna on the motor home. Yet my eyes kept straying from Diane Sawyer on the TV screen.

“Does that deer head over the fireplace bother you as much as it does me?” I asked finally.

Abilene glanced up at the impressive spread of antlers. “It is a little glassy eyed.”

“And crooked.”

“Um, well, yeah, that too.” Abilene didn’t sound particularly concerned, but she added, “If you want to fix it, there’s a stepladder out in one of the sheds.”

“I do.”

She got the keys again, and we trooped out to the survival-equipment shed. She grabbed one end of the ladder, and I took the other. We set it up by the fireplace, and I put a foot on the bottom rung.

“Oh no. I’ll do it,” Abilene said.

“I am perfectly capable of climbing a ladder—”

“You might be capable of dancing on the rooftop too, but that doesn’t mean it would be a smart thing to do.”

Abilene politely forearmed me aside. She climbed to the top of the stepladder and leaned over to straighten the wooden plaque to which the deer head was attached. “How does it look—” She broke off as she peered more closely at a point under the deer’s jaw.

“What?” I asked.

“Maybe you should look at this.”

“Okay, come down and I’ll climb up and—”

“No, I’ll bring it down.”

She lifted the plaque off the bracket holding it and wrestled the big antlered head down the ladder. She set it on the floor.

“There.” She pointed to a small, neat hole in the animal’s once-powerful neck. “What does that look like to you?”

I knelt and fingered the hole. It had clean-cut, distinct edges, hairs sliced with almost scalpel precision.

“It’s a bullet hole, isn’t it?” she asked.

With a certain reluctance, I stuck my finger in the hole. I couldn’t feel a bullet, but my finger didn’t go in very far.

“I suppose a bullet hole is logical. The deer probably didn’t die of old age,” I said.

But I knew we were thinking the same thing. Also doubtful that a taxidermist would leave an open bullet hole to mar his work. And besides, this hole looked sharp and fresh.

“So how did it get there?” Abilene asked.

“Good question.”

She knelt beside me and tilted the head so we could see the back side of the plaque. A splintered spot bulged outward, as if the bullet was still lodged in the wood.

“I wonder if it’s from the same gun that killed the Northcutts?” My gaze followed Abilene’s as she glanced the long length of the room to the bare spot where the sofa and bodies had once stood. “But I don’t see how a stray bullet could have come this way. Jock was facing the other direction when he shot Jessie.”

“And he certainly couldn’t have missed with a first bullet when he shot himself.”

Again I knew we were thinking the same thing:
If
he shot Jessie.
If
he shot himself. But then, as usual, I bumped into the familiar block wall: the note. How could anyone have forged the signatures so expertly that Frank didn’t doubt their authenticity? Unless Frank himself had counterfeited the signatures, and then neatly protected himself by identifying them as genuine . . .

I backed away from that thought. I didn’t want to go there. I liked Frank. I thought that whatever his messy wife/ex-wife problems and his differences with Jock and Jessie might be, he’d honestly cared for them.

But if his money problems went deep enough . . . I knew about Mikki’s pricey tastes, an expensive new house in the works, and the ex-wife hounding him for more support money. Maybe even larger financial difficulties I knew nothing about. And if Frank had thought all Jock and Jessie’s assets would conveniently flow to him if they were dead . . .

Murder had certainly been done for less. And I didn’t really know Frank all that well.

“Maybe we should contact Deputy Hamilton,” I said.

This time Abilene nodded.

I doubted we could get hold of the officer on a Sunday evening, and I was right. The woman at the sheriff’s office helpfully suggested I talk to a different officer, but I said no, I wanted Deputy Hamilton and left my name and number.

Much to my surprise he called only a few minutes later.

“This isn’t an emergency,” I said quickly. “We just happened onto something odd and would like to talk to you when it’s convenient.”

“Now’s as good a time as any. If you don’t mind some chewing noises in your ear. I picked up a hamburger on my way back to the office.”

He didn’t say back from where, but I could guess that the sheriff was still keeping everyone hopping on his nephew’s murder. I identified myself and my relationship to the Northcutts’ deaths, in case he didn’t remember me, but he broke in to say, “I know who you are, Mrs. Malone. And Ms. Morrison too.”

I thought about correcting that to the Tyler name Abilene had reverted to, but I decided it would be better to stay away from irrelevant distractions. So I just told him we’d stayed on as caretakers at the Northcutt place and had found this bullet hole in the deer head.

“And you think this may have some . . . ah . . . significance?” He sounded puzzled.

“Possibly. A third shot, in addition to the two that killed the Northcutts, might suggest some . . . irregularities in the situation as a suicide.”

He didn’t need diagrams. Probably he remembered both Abilene’s and my imaginative excursion into the possibility of faked suicide. “As in a double murder, you mean, not a mutually decided upon homicide/suicide?”

“Possibly.”

“All the evidence points to suicide. The note—”

“I don’t suppose a handwriting expert was called in to verify that the signatures on the note were genuine?”

“I don’t believe it was even considered. The son did personally identify the signatures, you know.”

So, back to that. Did I want to start accusing Frank?

“And there is the fact that gunshot residue was found on Jock Northcutt’s hand,” Deputy Hamilton added. “They tested for that.”

“Oh. Well, that’s . . . good.”

Suddenly Deputy Hamilton laughed. “Look, I know finding a stray bullet hole might be disconcerting. It isn’t the norm for your average suburban home. But, you know how Greeks celebrate by breaking plates?”

“I’ve heard of that, yes.”

“It sometimes seems to me that what Oklahomans do instead of breaking plates when they want to celebrate or let off steam is drag out the ol’ six-guns and blaze away
.
A holdover from the Wild West days, maybe. One cowboy out at a local ranch celebrated getting a new pair of boots by putting his old ones on top the hood of his pickup and using them for target practice. Making quite a mess of both boots and pickup, I might say, since he was a lousy shot. Another time, some new people were concerned about all the shooting at a neighbor’s house, and I found it was an old guy celebrating his birthday. He said he always shot off as many rounds as he had years. Since he was ninety-two, it made quite a commotion.”

I smiled. So it wasn’t all murder and drugs in a cop’s life. “I get the picture.”

“And the Northcutts,” he added, “were known to be, well . . .”

“Trigger happy?” I suggested.

“There’ve been rumors about war games in the woods out there. So maybe they were just . . . who knows? Playing some strange indoor game. Or one of them may have been cleaning a weapon without checking if it was loaded first. They did keep a lot of guns around. Perhaps you’ve heard about the confrontation between Mrs. Northcutt and a visitor?”

“Yes, but she didn’t actually fire the crossbow. Or whatever it is you do with a crossbow.”

“True.” Pause, with chewing and gulping noises. “Look, Sheriff Howell has me pretty busy on this murder and drugs case, but I’ll try to get out your way in the next couple days. We’ll have a look, okay?”

“Thank you. We’d appreciate that.”

Abilene set the mounted deer head in a corner where it would be readily available to show Deputy Hamilton, and we carried the stepladder out and parked it on the rear deck.

Next morning we plunged into housecleaning. All the packing and moving had left a trail of dust balls and debris. I vacuumed and Abilene mopped, and we both tackled spider webs and dust. Koop kept out of the way and tried out various pieces of furniture for their level of snoozing comfort.

About midmorning we took a break. Abilene went out to water the emus, and I made an impulsive decision to call good friend Magnolia back on Madison Street in Missouri, where we were neighbors for so many years.

I used my prepaid phone card, punching in the long string of numbers to do it. I was pleasantly surprised when Magnolia actually answered, because she and Geoff are so often on the road in their motor home. Magnolia is deep into genealogy, and they’re frequently off investigating genealogical connections. (Rattling the family tree to see what nuts shake out, as Geoff puts it.)