Chapter 2
In her fifty-two years, Sam had never been alone with someone recently deceased and standing by the bed gave her the willies. She stepped outside and dialed her USDA contracting officer’s number. She’d never met Delbert Crow in person but she imagined a gray-haired fussy bureaucrat who was a year or two from retirement. At times he was so by-the-book that he drove her crazy with details; other times she got the impression he didn’t want to be bothered, that he couldn’t wait to be out on his fishing boat on a lake a hundred miles from nowhere. Somehow she had a feeling that finding a dying woman at one of her properties would be something he’d want to know about.
“Have you called the police?” he asked.
“The Sheriff’s Department, actually. We’re just outside the town limits here. Well, I just dialed 911 and—”
“Fine, fine.” She heard papers rustling, as if he were looking in the procedures manual for an answer. What could this be listed under—discovery of dead body on premises? “Ms. Sweet, it will be all right. Just wait there until the authorities arrive. I’m sure they can handle it. If the sheriff needs to speak to me, I’m at my office all day.”
Sam paced the front porch, unable to make herself go back into the house with the dead woman. A Sheriff’s Department SUV, an ambulance and a private car arrived within minutes of each other. The man in the private car introduced himself as the county’s Field Deputy Medical Investigator before he bustled into the house.
The lean guy who unfolded himself out of the SUV walked over to her. “Ms. Sweet? Deputy Sheriff Beau Cardwell.” There was definite Southern in the accent and the way he said her name made it sound like an invitation to dance a waltz. The last guy she knew named Beau was way back in her teen years in Texas, but that was a whole other story involving a girl with lusty hormones and a football player whose kiss would send any good girl off the deep end. She firmly shut that image out of her head.
The deputy was staring at her.
Awkward moment. “Uh, yes. I’m Samantha Sweet. Just call me Sam.”
He sent a lopsided grin her way, as if he’d just read her mind.
“Okay. Sam.” He cleared his throat and flipped open a small notebook.
At the back of the ambulance, two EMTs snapped on latex gloves and yanked out a gurney, which they wheeled toward the house.
“The mortgage on the house was government guaranteed and was in foreclosure,” Sam told the deputy. She gave the basics of how she’d gotten inside. She told him the old woman had spoken to her very briefly and died while she’d stepped outside to summon medical help for her. Remembering the woman’s warning, she didn’t mention the wooden box although she felt a little funny about that.
“Do you know who she was?” Sam asked.
“Bertha Martinez. She lived alone.” He scratched notes as he talked. “We think there’s a grandson in Albuquerque. He may have been the one who talked her into signing a mortgage to get some cash out of the property. Can’t imagine why she would have done it otherwise. Place has been in her family for a couple hundred years. She refused to go to a care home when her neighbors recommended it. I’d been out here several times, but never could convince her. Last five years or so she used to chase me off. Met me on the porch with a shotgun a couple times.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. A real sad thing. Local stories ran wild. Some say she was a witch, some just held that she was crazy. Got old and sick but never would see a doctor. Just wanted to be left alone, I guess.”
“USDA sends me to clean out abandoned places so they can be sold. I’ve never had one where anyone was still living in the house. I’m sure they thought she’d moved away or already died.”
He wrote on his forms, filling out the address of the property and noting what she’d just told him.
The M.I. came out of the house, stuffing his stethoscope into the black bag he carried. “Natural causes, old age,” he said. “Albuquerque OMI will confirm that and issue the death certificate at the morgue.” He got into his vehicle and drove away.
“So, what should I do?” Sam asked Deputy Cardwell. “Ordinarily, the owners have taken away whatever they want and I just clean the place up.”
“Can it wait a day or two? Give us time to remove the body, do a quick check of the house to be sure nothing’s out of order. Make one more run at finding the grandson. Maybe you could come back on Thursday?”
“Sure, no problem. I’ll leave a sign-in sheet on the kitchen counter. Anyone who comes in is supposed to sign it and state what they’re doing here.” She hoped following that bit of protocol would satisfy Delbert Crow.
Cardwell didn’t look especially happy about complying but he nodded.
She retrieved her tool kit from the kitchen, found a house key in a dish near the front door and, after verifying that it worked in the lock, placed it in a lockbox and went out to her red Silverado.
The day was still young—not quite noon. Sam drove through town, past Wal-Mart and the movie theater and turned right on Kit Carson Road, at the plaza. Zigzagged a couple of blocks south and east to her little lane. Her house felt cool under the shade of the huge cottonwoods that grew everywhere in this part of Taos. She went into the bathroom and washed her face and hands thoroughly, eager to rid herself of the morning’s disturbing experience. A brush taken to her hair only made the graying, short layers stick out in all directions with static electricity. Giving up on that, she went to the kitchen and made a quick sandwich from leftover ham and decided she could still earn a little money today, even though one of her jobs was on hold.
She grabbed the wide platter of chocolate puppy-dog cupcakes she’d made earlier and headed out to Mysterious Happenings, the bookstore where the Chocoholics group met to solve mysteries, and gorge. They liked to choose a mystery novel, read up to the final chapter, and then meet to guess at the ending. They read the ending of the book together and then there was some kind of prize for whoever came closest to figuring it out. One of the members, a British born little slip of a thing, always seemed to come away with either the prize for eating the biggest quantity of the evening’s chocolate treats or for figuring out the mystery. As a female who had always carried about thirty pounds more than she wanted, Sam had no idea how Riki managed to stay barely above the weight of a Doberman.
A bell tinkled over the bookshop door when she entered, balancing the tray of cupcakes and squeezing past a display rack of jigsaw puzzles.
“Madame Samantha!” The bookshop owner, Ivan Petrenko, spread his arms wide and stepped from behind the counter. “Is looking most fabulous today!”
When he made statements like that, Sam was never sure if the flirtatious man was talking about the cupcakes or her.
She held up the tray. “Dogs. To go with this week’s theme.”
“Da, how tres bien!” Ivan’s curious mixture of English, French and Russian came—according to local legend—from the fact that he’d defected from the Soviet Union with his wife’s ballet troupe on a trip to Paris. The more outrageous versions of the story held that he’d worked in a diamond mine, apprenticed with a Cordon Bleu chef, waited tables in New York and finally come to New Mexico where he’d opened the bookshop ten years ago. As far as a timeframe for all this, Sam had no idea. He looked about forty, but that was a lot of living to cram into those few years. Although skeptical about a lot of Ivan’s story, she had to admit that he was a colorful guy.
“Thanks, Ivan,” she said as he handed her the check for the cupcakes. “Another treat for next week?”
“Absolutement. Using your judgment, please.”
She left the shop, careful to hide the fact that she was nearly laughing aloud.
Next on her list was a property north and west of town, somewhere off Highway 64 toward the little crossroads town of Tres Piedras. Her paperwork mentioned that the place might need mowing, so she stopped back by her house and hitched up her utility trailer with lawn mower and the assortment of rakes, hoes and other gardeni
ng tools that were a requirement for a lot of these abandoned properties. She cruised through town and found the place about twenty minutes later, where a collection of a half-dozen small homes sat on plots of scrubby land, no more than an acre apiece.
A short drive led to the weathered wood frame house, which she entered by drilling the lock. No messing with picks on this one—she had a spare lockset in the trailer and it was a lot quicker this way. Replacing the damaged lock took only a few minutes.
This place was clearly abandoned, for which she was glad, after this morning’s surprise. Although some pieces of furniture remained and there were papers and junk everywhere, the rooms had that hollow feel and neutral smell of a place that hadn’t seen human habitation in awhile. Lucky me, she thought. Sometimes the first thing that hit when she walked in the door was eau de rotten meat, especially in a place where the fridge was full and the power had been cut off.
Although the kitchen was messy, the power was still on—probably an oversight by the rural co-op—and a glance in the fridge revealed that it was empty but for a ketchup bottle and a chunk of fuzzy blue-green cheese.
Sam put the requisite sign-in sheet in the kitchen and spent a few minutes making a list of projects: gather trash, sort possessions, then start cleaning. She could probably fit the trash in her truck and trailer, avoiding the need to hire a rolloff. At the back door she scanned the yard. The half-acre property had mainly been left wild, native sage dominating. But someone had gone to the trouble of planting grass around the house, and there were flower beds against the walls, a garden of sorts. An ancient swing set, rusty and obviously unused, sat in the middle of the grassy area, and she could tell that one of her first duties would be to mow. The stuff was a foot tall in places.
A glance at the sky revealed clouds towering in the distance, over Taos Mountain. The area would likely be in for a shower, which might vary from a few sprinkles to a full-fledged downpour. Since lightning could also be a factor it would be smart to attend to the mowing first.
Back at the pickup truck and utility trailer that she’d left out front, Sam unloaded the lawn mower, topped off the gas, and rolled it to the back. Bless it, the mower started on the first pull and she worked her way across the yard, finding her zone, taking pleasure in the neat rows of cut grass in her wake. It wasn’t until she reached the far north edge of the grassy area that she realized part of the lawn was missing. Bare earth rose in a hump. A glint of white paint caught her eye and she stopped the mower. At one end of the mounded earth stood a small wooden cross with no markings. She walked over to it. A grave.
Chapter 3