On the Run (24 page)

“Wouldn’t it be fun to come out here and listen to rain on the roof in a storm?” Mac said, and I had to admit that a man who thought that would be fun appealed to me.

We were walking back to the house, talking about where would be the closest place to get the film developed, when suddenly Mac stopped short.

“Hey, what’s this?”

We were crossing the parking area behind the house, and I didn’t see anything until he toed a glint on the ground. He leaned over to brush the dirt and gravel aside. We both stared in astonishment at what lay there gleaming in the sunlight.

24

“It’s a gold coin!”

Mac wiped the coin against his tan shorts, then held it up between thumb and forefinger. A bearded man decorated one side, a horned animal, along with the date 1977, the other. Mac’s identification as he studied the coin was more specific than mine. “It’s a South African gold Kruggerand.”

“You mean it’s something someone would have in a coin collection?”

“No, I don’t think they’re considered collectibles. There’s a troy ounce of gold in each one, so I think they’re more like an investment. Some people prefer gold to bank deposits.”

An investment for people who feared the whole system of government and banking and paper money might collapse any minute. A description that fit Jock and Jessie Northcutt like a ski mask.

Abilene, on her way into the house, saw us standing there and came over to see what was going on. Mac showed her his find.

“Wow! But what’s it doing out here?” she asked. “And why didn’t we ever see it before? We’ve all walked back and forth across here dozens of times. And so have lots of other people.”

It did seem odd we hadn’t spotted the coin before. Yet . . . “Once, back on Madison Street, I found an earring I lost out in the garden at least a dozen years earlier. And I’d worked in that garden, never seeing the earring, every one of those years.”

Mac nodded. “I did a human interest article about a guy who lost his class ring on the school football field, and it wasn’t found until almost eighteen years later.”

So the coin may have been hidden there in the dirt and gravel for years. The 1977 date certainly made that possible. But the coin didn’t look as if that was where it had been all that time. The gold surface was still as shiny as if newly minted, neither dented nor scratched, the outlines of both the horned animal and the bearded man precise.

“Maybe someone just recently lost it,” I suggested slowly. “Someone who was carrying a large number of gold coins from the house to a vehicle and accidentally dropped it. Someone in a hurry . . .”

Abilene and I exchanged glances. Someone who’d just murdered two people . . . and stolen the coins from a hiding place behind cans of survival food in the basement?

“I’d better call Frank.”

Mikki answered the phone. When I asked for Frank she said he’d gone back to work today. She also said she was at home only because an electrical meltdown at the beauty salon had shut down everything from hair dryers to curling irons. “Last week it was the water system. Now
this
.” I could envision a roll of blue eyes. “Always something with that miserable building. I think it’s as old as the Alamo.”

Would she soon be holding a garage sale of antiques to raise repair funds? Or gritting her teeth until Jock and Jessie’s larger assets became available?

“I can take a message for Frank.” She laughed. “But if it’s about those dumb birds, my solution to any problem with them is simple. Stewed emu, emu fricassee, Southern-fried emu, or maybe if you’re feeling really fancy, emu cordon bleu.”

I’d bet she’d be all for emu-egg omelet too, which made me feel guilty for ever having considered it. I wanted to talk to Frank in private about the gold coin, but I could hardly say that to Mikki without ramping up her curiosity, so all I said was, “The emus are fine, and this isn’t an emergency. I’d just like to talk to Frank about some things when it’s convenient.”

“I’ll have him call.”

I tucked the coin next to the chunk of lead bullet in the drawer of the nightstand in the master bedroom for safekeeping. Mac went out to the motor home to look for his other photos of old barns, and I used the free time to dig into the file cabinets and boxes of files. Maybe I could have something useful for Frank by the time he called.

Finding files helpfully labeled “Gold Investments” or “Blackmail” or “Drug Deals” seemed unlikely, and it didn’t happen, of course. What I found was a jumble of information on survival techniques, everything from how to purify water to smoke meat, from reloading bullets to turning a semi-automatic gun into a fully automatic, from raising emus (which I set aside for Abilene) to worm farming (which I was grateful the Northcutts hadn’t yet gotten into). Then there were research files on an esoteric variety of subjects: sharks, Atlantis, polar caps, hypothermia, which made me wonder just what kind of script Jock and Jessie were working on. Such a script could be hidden behind the password barrier in the computer, but I strongly suspected the ever-suspicious Northcutts would also keep a hard copy tucked away somewhere.

Which made me think, like Frank, that there must be a home safe, probably fireproof, where all the items they considered really valuable were stored. Was it possible such a safe held not only a script and wills but also a cache of gold coins? Could the coin Mac had found simply be one Jock and Jessie themselves had accidentally dropped? It was a more pleasant thought than the one about a killer and thief that kept tromping around in my head.

The phone didn’t ring until I’d pretty well had it with files for the day. I was sneezing from the dust, had a paper cut on my finger, and was well frustrated by the Northcutts’ disorganized filing system. No doubt they were the type of people who could lay hands on whatever they wanted in the mess at any given moment, but certainly no one else could.

“Sorry I’m so late calling,” Frank said. “I didn’t have a chance to get back to you until now.”

Interpretation: he hadn’t had opportunity to call without Mikki around. I told him about Mac’s discovery of the gold coin. He leaped on the news with relief.

“So that’s it! All that cash had nothing to do with blackmail. They were just using it to invest in gold! Which is exactly what they’d do, of course, being so paranoid about everything from banks to the stock market. And all on the up-and-up.”

I was inexperienced in such matters, but so far as I knew, buying or selling gold was indeed legal. Dealing in cash could mean an attempt to conceal activities from the IRS, however, which was not legal. But it was definitely a logical explanation for all that cash.

“Now all we have to do is find where they’ve stashed all this gold!” Frank sounded excited.

We discussed how large a safe it would take to hold however many coins several hundred thousand dollars in cash would buy. He said he hadn’t looked in the sheds and now wondered if a safe could be hidden among the survival gear out there.

I hated to bring up this other, far more grim possibility, but it had to be done. I told him about the odd space behind those survival food cans in the basement. “It’s empty now, but a lot of
something
could have been hidden there.”

“Surely Jock and Jessie wouldn’t hide gold in a place as insecure as that,” he scoffed.

“You knew them better than I do.”

It was a long few moments before he said, “Actually, I suppose it would be just like them to hide something valuable in a place like that. I remember a movie they wrote once, about a crook who stole a fortune in diamonds and rubies and hid them right out in the open in a ‘treasure chest’ in his fish aquarium.”

Another silence as his thoughts worked through some mental filtering system. He finally arrived at the bottom line, where I was waiting for him.

“So, if gold was hidden there, in that space behind the cans, and it isn’t there now, what happened to it?”

“Good question,” I agreed.

“The obvious answer is that it was stolen, of course. And the thief accidentally dropped this one coin as he was making off with the bags or boxes or whatever it was in.”

“I think that’s a likely possibility.”

“Maybe not just a thief. Maybe a killer. I’ve been assuming the authorities were right when they said Jock shot Jessie and then himself, but maybe . . .” Then, more as if talking to himself than me, he said, “I wonder if Ute knew about the gold?”

Exactly what I was wondering.

25

We had mystery-meat stew for dinner, but the following evening Mac barbecued steaks over a charcoal grill.

The steaks were excavated from the freezer, supermarket packaged and nicely identifiable as filet mignons. The grill and a dozen sacks of charcoal came from behind three large garbage cans holding sealed sacks of wheat and rice in one of the sheds.

Following Frank’s thoughts that Jock and Jessie might have hidden a safe out there, we’d all three spent most of the day digging through the clutter of survival supplies and gear. Hiding a safe away from the house seemed a logical possibility, but logic, I was becoming more and more convinced, was not one of the Northcutts’ more prominent traits. (Was having a stainless steel pot big enough to cook half a bear logical? How about owning enough water purification tablets to sanitize the Mississippi?) And though we found no safe, Mac did discover the paintball guns. I doubted Frank would object to the expenditure of a few paintballs, so I showed Mac how the guns worked.

He took several experimental shots, getting that foolish grin that paintball splatting seems to bring to grown men. Okay, grown women and LOLs too. I confined myself to a few sedate shots at an uncomplaining tree, but Abilene experimented with an Old West, quick-draw style. And managed to splat her own feet and legs with an assortment of colors that we termed “Paintball Chic.”

Mac turned out to be a barbecuer extraordinaire, and the steaks were deliciously charred on the outside, juicy on the inside. Abilene and I voted him “Grand Master of the Barbecue” and crowned him with a tiara of aluminum foil.

Afterwards, well-fed and content, we sat on the deck as the sun went down and the evening cooled. Mac, in his ergonomic chair, didn’t have a satisfactory lap, so Koop draped himself around Mac’s neck and purred in ergonomic satisfaction. Occasionally adding a tongue swipe at Mac’s silver beard, to which he seemed to have taken quite a liking. The radio in the kitchen, tuned to a “Golden Oldies” station, played dreamy old Johnny Mathis songs.

Murder and suicide, drugs and gold and blackmail all seemed far, far away.

Later, there was even a good-night kiss. I’d never been kissed by a man with a beard. All I can say is, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Koop knows a good thing when he sees one.

The next day Abilene hiked through the woods to the campsite and—good news—reported it appeared unoccupied since the last time she’d been there. That afternoon we took turns cranking the handle on an old ice-cream maker Abilene dragged in from the shed, and we consumed the product of our labor in considerably less time than it took to make it.

On Sunday morning Mac figured out the workings of hose and nozzle on the big gas storage tank and filled the tank of my motor home. Then he surprised me by going back to his own motor home and returning to the house dressed for church in dark slacks, pale blue dress shirt, and tie. Wasn’t there some singer they used to call the Silver Fox? Mac and his elegant beard definitely qualified for the title today.

I briefly thought Abilene would come too. She asked some questions and seemed to be considering it. But eventually she backed out, with the excuse that we were, after all, caretaking here, so someone should stick around.

The people at church were friendly and curious. I introduced Mac as a friend up from Hugo, no further explanation. The pastor’s message was about the Israelites’ forty years of wandering before entering the Promised Land, relating this to how many of us do our own years of wandering before finding our way to the Lord.

“I suppose he was talking to me,” Mac grumbled on the way home.

I’d also been thinking this message definitely applied to Mac. He’d been physically wandering the country in his motor home since his wife’s death, spiritually wandering considerably longer than that. But I was a bit startled that a God-light had immediately clicked on in his head and spotlighted the connection for him.

“Could be,” I agreed, very low key. I figure it’s better for God to trickle a message into the cracks of someone’s thought processes rather than my trying to jackhammer it in.

“I’ve been reading a chapter or two in the Bible now and then.”

“That’s good.”

“I make notes about what I find doubtful or hard to believe.”

My reaction was half groan, half laugh. The statement was so
Mac.
Mac the Doubter. Mac the
organized
doubter. Though not necessarily Mac the Total Unbeliever, I was fairly certain.

“Do you make notes about what you do believe?” I inquired.

He tapped fingers on the armrest. “I suppose, to be fair, I should do that, shouldn’t I?” He sounded grumpy about that too.