Sweet Masterpiece - The First Sweet’s Sweets Bakery Mystery

Chapter 8

  Sam locked the house and took the sketchbook with her, wishing she knew more about the life of the artist, Pierre Cantone.

  However, more pressing duties awaited. A quick call to Beau Cardwell got her the go-ahead to go back to Bertha Martinez’s place and finish the cleanup there. His investigators were unable to locate any next-of-kin for the old woman, he said. It took Sam about twenty minutes to get past the crush of tourists meandering around the plaza. Taos’s little town center really was pretty in the summer and autumn months, with lots of shady trees and hanging pots of bright flowers accenting adobe walls and freshly painted blue doors.

  Too bad Sam couldn’t say the same for Bertha’s home. At one time the yard must have been nice, with a large cottonwood behind the house and a pair of matching blue spruce on either side of the front door, set off by beds of colorful flowers. But the old woman’s declining health meant less time spent outdoors. Sam didn’t have the time or the budget to replant and tend the place back to its former state, but at least she could trim and haul away last season’s brown stalks and get rid of weeds that now sprouted in the driveway. She filled seven trash bags, and that was before she’d even unlocked the door.

  Stale air rushed past her as she entered. Thank goodness she’d been able to get the authorities out here right when Bertha died. She couldn’t even imagine what the place would be like, days later, if her body were still in here in the heat. She pushed that thought out of her head.

  Bertha certainly had not been a housekeeper. But then, who is when they are old and ill? Sam started at the front door and worked her way toward the back. The living and dining areas were basically just messy. Books, magazines and papers everywhere. She grabbed a box from her truck and stacked the books inside—mostly non-fiction, they would be great items for the thrift shop. Newspapers and junk mail went into trash bags along with the dusty old candles and bundled herbs; she put a few envelopes containing utility bills into a stack to be turned over to Delbert Crow. A dust cloth and vacuum cleaner, some straightening of the furniture, and these rooms were in good shape. The kitchen and bath were a little more intensive, but the bagging and scrubbing went routinely. She knew that she was stalling about going into Bertha’s bedroom but couldn’t avoid it forever. Finally, she strode in there and whipped open the dark, cumbersome drapes and opened the windows to the warm September day.

  Everything was just as she’d seen it on her previous trip, minus the dying woman in the bed. Beau said that the authorities had removed everything they wanted, so Sam approached the room with an exterminator’s vengeance. None of the clothing was in decent shape for resale; the old woman probably hadn’t bought a new item in twenty-five years. Into bags it went; the local quilting group might salvage some of the cloth that wasn’t threadbare.

  The medicine bottles weren’t the kind from the pharmacy. A tentative sniff into one of them suggested herbal remedies, probably homemade. She wondered if Zoe might know anything about them. The idea of actually dipping in and taking any of the smelly concoctions gave her the creeps. But she put the few colored bottles into a small box to take with her.

  By four o’clock she had to admit that she was dragging, wishing for another shot of yesterday’s limitless energy. No lunch, a pickup truck full of bagged and boxed junk—that probably accounted for it. Other than a quick peek, she hadn’t done anything with the second bedroom yet. Heavy drapes covered the room’s single window so she had little sense of what awaited in there. And she really wanted to finish the place today so she could submit her billing and get on with other things.

  She scrounged two granola bars from the glove box in her truck and consumed them with water in one of the freshly washed glasses in the kitchen. It helped some but, truthfully, she began to fantasize about the drive-through at Kentucky Fried Chicken on her way home. The image gave her enough umph to face the unopened second bedroom so she marched in there and flipped the light switch.

  The overhead fixture held a red bulb, which gave the room the odd glow of a darkroom and she knew that wasn’t going to be good enough to clean by. The heavy drapes were stuck in place with duct tape and it took her a couple of minutes to rip it away and pull them aside. Heavy clouds were again building outside and she heard a very distant rumble. Ominous. But nothing compared to the sight when she turned around.

  There in the middle of the dark wood floor was a pentagram, laid out in white stones. Black candles, bundled herbs, a lot of animal symbols painted in white on red walls. Sam thought of the rumors of Bertha Martinez’s involvement in witchcraft. Whoa—it looked like they were true.

  Goosebumps tickled her scalp and she edged toward the open doorway. Her foot hit something and she spun around. A snake.

  She shrieked and dashed for the door. Something clattered and she stared again at the reptile. It wasn’t alive. The snake was a taxidermied one, posed in a wavy curl, as if he were slithering along the desert sand, except that his head was raised a few inches off the floor, teeth showing and tongue darting out. She stared at it, hugging the doorjamb, heart beating a thousand beats a second. She blew out a pent-up breath and realized some of the noise was coming from thunder, much closer now.

  A flash of lightning lit every window, putting her in the middle of a strobe-filled maze of rooms. Her heart rate ratcheted up again. This can’t be healthy, she told herself. She dashed for the front door and straight out to her truck, soaked by the downpour in the few seconds it took. She reached for the ignition before remembering that she’d left her keys on a table in the living room. She would have to go back in there.

  Okay, Sam, calm down. She breathed slowly. What’s scaring you about this place anyway? Well . . . symbols and witchy things and a snake . . . Okay, the snake wasn’t dangerous and neither was the other stuff, was it? Really, some stones on the floor and some painted figures on the walls. Red walls. Pentagrams. Who does that?

  Dammit, Beau, why didn’t you warn me about this room? She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed his direct number.

  “Ah, the Martinez place.”

  “Yes, dammit. The one filled with a bunch of scary shit. How could you have forgotten to mention it?”

  “Calm down, Sam. I didn’t actually see it. One of the other deputies went in there, said he didn’t find anything related to the woman’s death. He just described it as a weird room. Lot of old dusty stuff in there he said. I pictured something like an attic full of junk. Got another call and left. I’m sorry I didn’t think to tell you about it.”

  Sam felt a little stupid. It really was just a room full of dusty old junk, when you thought about it.

  “Can you handle it on your own?” he asked. He sounded genuinely concerned. “I could come out there later, if you want me to.”

  Now she really felt dumb. Nothing like being such a girl that she had to have the big old deputy sheriff with her before she could face down a dead snake. “No, that’s okay. I was just startled. I can do it.”

  She put the phone back in her pocket and noticed that the rain had already slowed. I can do it, I can do it. She kept saying it as she walked back inside, convincing herself as much as anyone.

  Sunlight broke through the clouds, giving a whole new perspective to the house, as she walked through the living room. The rooms she’d cleaned were nice and bright, and the main bedroom felt quite benign now that Bertha’s personal belongings were gone. With a square of late-afternoon sun on the floor, even the red room showed itself to be what Beau had described, a dusty collection of old things. Sam took up a broom and swept the white stones and bundled herbs into a harmless pile. The stiff snake went into a garbage bag. It was a little creepy, picking it up, but she handled it just fine. She dropped the black candles—so dusty that they were nearly gray, in the clear light of day—into the same bag with the snake. All of it went out to the bed of the pickup.

  A stack of books in one corner showed titles pertaining to native American symbolism and beliefs, herbal treatments and s
uch. Two of them specifically addressed witchcraft but even they didn’t seem nearly as ominous now. She whipped the dust off of them with a cloth and carried the stack out to join the other books in her truck. There. All done. Alive to tell about it.

  Alive and hungry. She locked up and headed off to meet her destiny at KFC.

  Zoe stopped by around seven. Sam had showered off her coating of dust and whipped up the batter for her special lighter-than-air white cake. With raspberry and truffle cream filling, and her secret fresh-coconut frosting, the triple layer torte would be the highlight of the ladies luncheon for the Taos Heritage Foundation tomorrow. The three layers went into the oven and she sat at the kitchen table tallying her hours for the two properties she’d cleaned this week. It would add up to a decent amount and she hoped to bank at least half of it in her special account for the opening of Sweet’s Sweets.

  “Hey there! Knock-knock.” Zoe called through the screen door and opened it at the same time. “Any more weird things happen today?”

  Which? The artist’s sketchbook hidden in the wall at the Anderson place, or the witchy room at Bertha Martinez’s? Sam started to give the condensed version when Zoe spotted the carved wooden box at the other end of the table. Life had been nothing but weird this week.

  “Oh, is this it?” Her eyes grew wide and she reached for the box.

  “Careful. That thing is . . .” Sam wasn’t sure quite how to describe it.

  “Possessed?” Zoe joked.

  “I don’t know. It’s got something.”

  She turned it over in her hands but didn’t open it.

  “I brought you some more strange stuff. I’ll get it out of the truck in a minute.” Sam hadn’t bothered to deliver any of the collected junk from today’s haul. “Some antique bottles with herbal whatever in them, some books on herbs and even a volume or two on witchcraft.”

  Zoe set the box down as if it was suddenly too hot to hold.

  “Sam . . . do you really think that old woman was a bruja?”

  “Never thought about it until I came across that red room at her house. I don’t . . . I don’t know much about any of that stuff, but aren’t the brujas of Spanish tradition more . . . um . . .”

  “They were often consulted for their healing powers.” She raised a foot and wiggled her toes.

  “No. Forget it,” Sam protested. She did not get hexed somehow by that old lady.

  “The stories go every direction,” Zoe said. “A lot of them seem to combine tales from all sorts of tradition—shamanism, Catholicism, voodoo. Many people believe brujas are shape-shifters. They can become an animal like a coyote or an owl.”

  “Or a snake?”

  Chapter 9