The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

  “What did Walt think of it, Sally?”

  “Walt!” Sally made a dismissive, contemptuous gesture. “He took it, is what he did, just sat there nodding his head and looking humiliated and taking it, and letting that awful Gallway shake a finger in his face and lecture him about his own wife. I’ll tell you, I was shocked.” Sally straightened up and shook her head, smiling and looking as if she was having a great time. “Just shocked, that’s what I was. Aren’t you?”

  “Sally,” Mrs. Potter said with mock repressiveness, “do you have any rhubarb pie left for us?”

  “Oh, you.” The restaurant owner touched Mrs. Potter’s shoulder affectionately, and grinned at Jed. “Too nice, that’s what she is. But I love her anyway.” The smile grew a bit mischievous. “Don’t you?”

  “Pie and coffee, Sally?” said Mrs. Potter, emphatically.

  “Coffee too? Well, you are demanding! I might just have to give you some of the mud left over from Ken’s pot. Her hired man,” Sally said in an explanatory sort of way to Jed. “Ken Ryerson. Lives upstairs here. Bless his heart, he makes a pot of coffee every morning when he goes out, fills up his Thermos, but he always leaves me some. ’Course, as early as he goes, it’s usually sludge by the time I come rolling in.”

  “How early does he go out, Sally?” Mrs. Potter asked.

  “Crack o’ dawn, or even way before the dawn cracks.”

  Jed laughed, and Sally nudged Mrs. Potter as if to say, “See there? Got a sense of humor, he does.” Mrs. Potter fixed her with a penetrating stare and said slowly and with even greater emphasis than before so that maybe this time Sally wouldn’t miss the point: “I’ve told Jed all about your rhubarb pie, Sally, dear. He can’t wait to taste it. Neither can I. Sally. Dear. And coffee surely would taste fine too.”

  Sally nudged her again, and broadly winked.

  “Comin’ right up, madam!”

  It was a moment before Mrs. Potter could meet Jed’s eyes, and when she did, she was comforted to see that he looked quite as pink in the face as she was.

  On their way out of the café, Mrs. Potter recognized two of the McHenrys’ burly employees coming in. One was the guard who’d stopped her at the gate, the other was the muscular young man who’d accompanied Marj and Rey to the windmill the previous morning. She nodded to them in greeting, but they appeared not to recognize her, or even to be in the habit of being polite to strangers who were polite to them. She noticed that they both stared hard at Jed, however, and then exchanged quick glances. They were watching when Jed stopped Sally long enough to say to her, “It’s Harold.”

  “What?” Sally looked baffled, but then she burst out laughing.

  It was a marvelously invigorating sound that carried all the way out the door with them. In the car, however, Jed said quietly to Mrs. Potter, “That was our son’s name, too, only we called him Haj. He would have been thirty-seven in a couple of months.”

  This time, it was Mrs. Potter who reached over to grasp one of his hands, and to press it in silent comfort.

  CHAPTER 26

  Mrs. Potter drove the little brown Subaru onto the two-lane highway leading south to Nogales.

  “I hate this stretch of road.”

  “Do you want me to drive it?”

  Mrs. Potter laughed a little. “I don’t want anybody to drive it. Except me. I want it all to myself all the way to Nogales. No, thank you, Jed, that would hardly be fair. At least I know the road, and a little about how to play their game.”

  “Their game?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Those big trucks that you see barreling down on us? Tomato trucks. They come all the way up from Mexico with the sole intent of terrorizing innocent drivers on this highway. It’s even worse going this way, because they’re hauling empty, as they say. I call this the Nogales 500.”

  “Wait a minute then.”

  Mrs. Potter slowed a bit, and looked over at him.

  Jed had brought with him a tweed hat with a little red feather in it, and now he plunked it on his head. He smiled at her, looking quite debonair, she thought. “Just wanted to put on my crash helmet,” he said. “And make sure I had myself strapped in.”

  “Check,” Mrs. Potter said, and pushed her speed up to seventy miles per hour merely to keep from getting squashed by the monster on wheels that was right behind them. “Pardon me if I don’t talk much, Jed, but I can’t talk and drive this suicide trap at the same time. Don’t ask me about the scenery—I’ve never seen it. Don’t expect me to point out spots of interest along the way, because I don’t even know if they’re there. All I have ever seen on this road are taillights and yellow lines.”

  “That bad?” He sounded skeptical.

  A monster truck seeming to come out of nowhere suddenly passed them, blasting its horn as it drew even with them and leaving their little car rocking in the wind in its wake. It appeared to miss hitting another oncoming truck by all of ten yards.

  “I see what you mean,” Jed said, sounding a bit shaken.

  Mrs. Potter couldn’t resist asking, “Still want to drive, Jed?”

  “No, no.” He laughed as he tightened his seat belt. “You’re doing fine, Andy, you’re doing just fine.”

  “I’ll try not to kill us,” she said.

  It was a promise that would prove hard to keep.

  The day was developing in a typical Arizona spring way, with the nippy dawn passing into a pleasantly cool morning, which melted into a warm afternoon, which was already working its way up to “mighty hot.” Mrs. Potter knew that by the time they returned to the valley, she’d be ready for a long, cool swim in her pool, and she wondered whether or not to invite Jed to join her. It seemed to her that presenting herself in a bathing suit after forty years was displaying a great deal more courage than she probably possessed.…

  They were thirty miles down the road, and she was passing one of the trucks, when her steering wheel suddenly grew stiff and hard to manage in her hands, and the car began to ride roughly beneath them. She couldn’t hear anything amiss because of the roar of the truck beside them, but Mrs. Potter knew something was dreadfully wrong. Her palms were suddenly slick with sweat on the steering wheel and her heart was pounding. She suspected that Jed had no idea anything was amiss, but she wasn’t sure she could control the car long enough to push it past the truck and around the front far enough to pull safely off the road. She looked ahead and saw to her horror that a second huge truck had just crested the far hill and was speeding toward them.

  There was a third truck coming up fast from behind.

  Nevertheless, Mrs. Potter saw no alternative but to ease off on her gas pedal and to try to fit herself back in between the two trucks that were going south with her.

  The third truck driver blasted his horn and speeded up, narrowing the gap so that now she couldn’t manage to squeeze in. She would have sworn that he did it on purpose.

  Jed had straightened up in his seat.

  Out of the corner of her eye, and because everything was beginning to move in a strange sort of slow motion, she saw him look up at the truck beside them, then look up the road at the truck that was coming, and then glance in the passenger-side mirror on his door to check out the truck behind.

  Mrs. Potter made a split-second decision and drove the car off the side of the road on the left, moments before the truck heading north sped over the very spot in the pavement where she had crossed it. It seemed as if all the horns of hell were blasting, as all three truck drivers registered their indignation at the same time. At that moment, if she’d had a rifle hanging in her back window as practically everybody else in the valley did, Mrs. Potter would have happily taken potshots at all three trucks.

  “Whew,” Jed said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “We could have been killed.”

  “Are you sure we aren’t dead?”

  “You handled that marvelously well, Andy.”

  She held up her shaking hands for him to see.

  He g
rabbed them and held on tight.

  “Jed?” Mrs. Potter said hesitantly, softly.

  He looked deep into her blue eyes. “Yes?”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “Yes, Andy?”

  She squeezed his fingers.

  “I’m afraid we have a flat tire, Jed.”

  By the time they’d changed it, Mrs. Potter was a good deal more than merely dusty and Jed’s neat clothing was dirtied at the knees and elbows and his hands were reddened and greasy from manipulating the jack.

  As they got back into the car, and limped on into Nogales on the little emergency tire they’d found in the trunk, Mrs. Potter felt utterly depressed.

  Typhoid Genia, she thought, that’s what Jed must think I am.

  He was so nice about it, so sweet and patient and understanding, but good heavens! First, coming upon the body of her ranch manager slung over a horse. And then the search party for Linda. And then her chili—which he ate, too—which might have killed three men.

  And now this, near-death on the highway.

  If I were he, Mrs. Potter thought sadly, I wouldn’t have anything more to do with me.

  * * *

  The people at the rental car agency felt so sorry for Mrs. Potter and Jed that they gave them a ride to the general aviation side of the airport and let them off right at the front door of the office of Arizona Aerials. But not before Jed had insisted that the mechanics at the agency check the flat tire to determine what happened to it.

  “Nail,” the mechanic finally said, and held it up for them to view. “Big sucker.”

  Mrs. Potter thoroughly agreed; she thought it looked long enough to fasten five thick boards together. Seeing it, and hearing the explanation, seemed to satisfy Jed’s need to know. He took the nail out of the mechanic’s hand and slipped it into his own wallet, as if it were a souvenir. Mrs. Potter thought of telling him that he could get ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the shape of cacti, if he really wanted mementos of his stay in Arizona. She wasn’t delighted at the idea of Jed walking around with a long, sharp, pointed reminder of just how hazardous she could be to his health.

  With the wallet tucked away in his pocket, Jed finally agreed to let a young woman from the agency chauffeur him and Mrs. Potter across the airport grounds to the little aviation company that had located Linda’s horse from the air the day before. Only a few minutes later they walked back onto the airfield behind their pilot, a woman named Lucy who was one of the two owners of the business. Lucy was a garrulous, thin brunette whose dyed hair and deeply tanned face hid her true age, which could have been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty. Considering that both she and her husband had flown planes in the Vietnam War, though, Mrs. Potter guessed they were both pushing the upper end of that age scale. Notwithstanding that she was middle-aged, Lucy seemed fairly to bounce on the soles of her feet with all evident eagerness to get up in the air. Mrs. Potter had taken off her sweater and Jed had shed his jacket long before, and now it was so hot that she felt as if her own soles might bake into the tarmac if she didn’t pick them up and walk fast enough.

  “Maybe you’d better stay safely on the ground, Jed,” Mrs. Potter suggested, “instead of taking another chance with me.”

  She secretly hoped he would laugh that off and squeeze her hand again to reassure her that he didn’t blame any of these misfortunes on her, but Jed didn’t reply. He seemed lost in thoughts that he apparently wasn’t going to share with her. Climbing in after him and the bouncy pilot, neither of whom appeared to show the slightest hesitation or awkwardness about putting a foot on the struts and pulling themselves up into the cockpit, Mrs. Potter felt hot and old and unattractive and clumsy. Sweat ran down her face, and she took a tissue out of her purse to dab it away.

  Lucy leaned over to inquire, “Need a hand up?”

  “No!” Mrs. Potter snapped. “Thank you.”

  “Can you make it all right, Andy?”

  “Yes!” Mrs. Potter said as she hoisted herself up into the cockpit. She tried not to glare at the two faces gazing at her so solicitously. “That was easy. I’m set. What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  Lucy opened the little window on her side and yelled, “Prop!” to warn any pedestrians to move out of the way. She started the single engine. The propeller blades came to life, with a jerk and a wheeze and finally, a roar.

  CHAPTER 27

  The little airplane lifted off just in time to clear the palo verde trees at the end of the runway. Mrs. Potter breathed again, and then watched as the pointer on the altimeter climbed to five hundred feet and then rose slowly to one thousand feet above the ground. The little plane bumped about in the air as if they were still racing down the dirt runway.

  “Thermals,” the pilot, Lucy Dermitt, yelled during one particularly rocky stretch when the altimeter jumped from one thousand feet down to nearly nine hundred and then up fifty feet again in the space of a few seconds. It was noisy inside the four-seat, high-wing airplane. “It’s the heat rising from the ground, makes the air a roller coaster sometimes. You folks okay? You’re not going to get sick on me, are you?” She twisted her head around a bit in order to holler into the back. “There are bags behind the seats, there, Mr. White, if you or Mrs. Potter need them. Me, I never get sick, but then pilots usually don’t. It’s you passengers who suffer, because you’re not in control, you don’t have anything to do but sit there and worry that I’m going to kill you. I promise I won’t. I think it helps, too, that I’ve got this wheel to hang on to, it kind of centers me, gives my equilibrium something to hang on to, so to speak.”

  “Will it stay like this?” Mrs. Potter asked, raising her own voice.

  Lucy shook her head. Mrs. Potter could see now why she wore a sleeveless T-shirt and shorts with sandals; it was beastly hot inside the little plane. “Nope. Might get worse, once we get close to the mountains, ’cause then we’ll have updrafts and downdrafts to worry about in addition to these thermals. But listen, you’ll be so busy looking out the window that you’ll forget you have a stomach.”

  Mrs. Potter doubted that very much, but she swallowed hard and vowed not to disgrace herself during the flight. She glanced back at Jed, who sat behind Lucy. He was staring out the small triangular-shaped window beside him. As if reading Mrs. Potter’s mind, the pilot said, “It’s worse for Mr. White back there, ’cause in the back you get more slipping and sliding, more drift in the air. Us, we’re flying pretty straight, but he’s going side to side as well as up and down. Be glad you’re sitting up here with me, Mrs. Potter.”

  Actually, Mrs. Potter was glad. Despite the heat, despite everything, she was beginning to feel the adventure of their little flight; the sheer joy of seat-of-the-pants flying began to infect her and to help her to ignore her feelings of physical and emotional discomfort. She turned her face toward the rear seats.

  “Are you all right, Jed?”

  He glanced up and smiled at her. “I’m fine.”

  “So,” said Lucy, with the air of an exuberant child, “where we goin’?”

  They wanted to fly wherever Ricardo had flown, that was the plan.

  And so Lucy swooped them down over the southern range of mountains into Wind Valley, where Mrs. Potter and Jed learned exactly why it had been so named. The little plane was buffeted in every direction, as if there were gods stationed in the North, South, East and West, blowing their powerful breaths into the valley where they collided in a maelstrom above the ground.

  “You got wind comin’ off those mountains,” Lucy explained, pointing at the Rimstones, “and those,” pointing toward Mexico, “and those goin’ up toward Tucson, and those over there,” pointing west. “And we still got those thermals comin’ up off the desert floor. It was like this in Vietnam, which is why it doesn’t bother me, I guess. You know how mountainous that country is. You ever been there? No, well, I guess you’ve seen pictures, all those mountains, and it’s a hot sucker, like here, although the air’s a lot dryer here, of course, an
d the nice thing about flying here as opposed to flying there is that nobody’s going to shoot us from the ground. And if the engine gives out or we lose oil pressure I got a million places to glide us down to a safe landing. And there aren’t any snakes in the trees, hell, there aren’t any trees to speak of, and once we get down, there also aren’t any little men in cone hats, carrying rifles, come to take us prisoner.” A particularly strong thermal lifted them and then violently dropped them again. The top of Mrs. Potter’s head brushed the ceiling of the plane. She tightened her seat belt. “This is a picnic, really,” Lucy assured her with a big grin. “This is a ride in an amusement park. This is Disney World, compared to ’Nam. Okay, Mrs. Potter, if I remember correctly, this is about where we started, Mr. Ortega and me, here on the edge of the valley, and he directed me to fly toward that little crossroads settlement.…”

  Lucy Dermitt took her plane down to five hundred feet, which increased the turbulence even more, but which also made it possible for her passengers to see the lines of wire strung between fence posts, the faces of people in pickup trucks, many of whom waved out their windows as the plane flew over, and to see dogs and cattle, children in the schoolyards, and clothes hung out to dry in backyards.

  “He had me just basically fly back and forth over mostly this part of the valley while he took pictures.”

  “He had a camera with him?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m surprised you didn’t bring one, most people do when they come up for one of these rides. It’s a wonder to me they can shoot anything, what with their camera riding up and down in front of their faces. But, yeah, he took lots of pictures, mostly of scenery, it seemed to me, pastures and cows and stuff.”

  Mrs. Potter remembered that Juanita had mentioned a new camera, a fancy one that printed the date and time on each photograph.

  “What else did he take pictures of, Lucy?”