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

  Mrs. Potter felt a swelling sense of relief upon hearing his words.

  “Well,” she said, “it was yours if you wanted it.”

  He rose to his feet and looked down at her. “Like I said, I do thank you, and I’ll be glad to help out same way as always, long as you need me.”

  “Until you get your own ranch.”

  “Exactly,” he said, with an air of such fierce determination that Mrs. Potter had no trouble believing him. “Excuse me, now, but I got to get on to my other chores.”

  She watched him stride off to where his own pickup truck was parked down by her front gate. An ambitious young man, that one. But not so ambitious that he would kill his boss in order to take over his job. All day long, Mrs. Potter had known that she had to offer Ken the job so that she might see for herself the awful eagerness with which he took it. And now he’d turned it down.

  Mrs. Potter sat a moment longer, savoring the relief she felt, before she got up again. She had to take the wallet to show Juanita and Linda’s aunts and uncles.

  But Juanita’s home was dark, everyone was gone.

  Mrs. Potter suspected that if she had taken time to stop at her own house, she might have found a message on her answering machine, telling her that the Ortega family had gone into Tucson, where Ricardo’s funeral would be held, because that was where his parents were buried. Mrs. Potter would have liked to see him buried in the valley, but she felt it wasn’t her business to say so. On that day, she knew there would be a long line of cars and trucks traveling to the city so that the residents of Wind Valley might pay their last respects.

  After only a moment’s hesitation, Mrs. Potter let herself into Juanita’s house with her own key. While I’m here, she thought, there’s something else I may as well get done.…

  She knew right where to go to dig out Juanita’s photo albums, and she hoped that would also be the place to find the pictures that Ricardo had taken while he was up in Lucy’s airplane.

  “Eureka,” Mrs. Potter said, upon spying a new-looking yellow envelope that was thick with developed photographs. After a glance to confirm that it did, indeed, contain aerial pictures that were labeled with times and dates, she took the package with her and traveled back up the hill to her own home.

  CHAPTER 29

  Mrs. Potter was quick to switch on the lights—a lot of them—in her house, because as she walked up her front walk she became acutely aware of how completely alone she was now on her own property. Ricardo was gone, Bandy was gone, and Juanita and her family were gone. There was no one in the house down the hill, nobody in the barns or corrals, in the pastures or the garages, no one; except her, all by herself in the big house. Mrs. Potter had grown accustomed to relative solitude since Lew’s death, and even before that when he traveled on business, but this was different. That had felt like privacy—sometimes it had felt good, even luxurious, to be alone with her own thoughts and needs and wants and with nobody else’s to consider—but this did not feel like privacy.

  It felt lonely, and not quite safe.

  In her front hall, Mrs. Potter slipped off her dusty walking shoes and shoved them into the closet, where she picked up her favorite sewn-leather moccasins. She was just starting to slip into them when the phone rang, and so she hooked a finger over the heels of each of them and carried them in with her as she trotted to her office to answer the phone.

  “Hello?” she said rather breathlessly, as she dropped her moccasins on the floor beside her, grabbed the telephone receiver, and tossed the envelope of photographs onto her desk. She sank down into her desk chair. “Hello?”

  “Andy, is that you? You sound out of breath.”

  Hearing his voice, her shortness of breath seemed to worsen. Mrs. Potter inhaled deeply to calm herself. I always seem to have to do this when he calls, she thought wryly, and put a hand on her chest where her heart was playing at being a teenager again. But, oh, she was so glad he’d already kept his promise to call her. “I was just coming in, Jed, and I ran to the phone.”

  “Mrs. Thomas tells me there’s no word about Linda.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m so sorry. And Andy, I also called to say that I’m sorry about this evening …”

  “It’s all right, Jed …”

  “No, it isn’t, it was unforgivable …”

  “Well, maybe not that bad.”

  He laughed a little. “Thank goodness you feel that way. Andy …” She noticed that suddenly he seemed to be picking his words with great care, and the unexpected thought came to her that Jed was feeling inhibited by the party line. What was it, she wondered, that he would have said if he’d felt free to say it? She was greatly surprised by what he did say next. “Have you had dinner yet?”

  “Supper, Jed,” she said, stalling while she tried to adjust to this new, odd tack of his. “When you’re west of the Mississippi, it’s dinner at noon and supper at night.”

  “What ever happened to lunch?”

  She smiled as she said, “I think they still serve it in schools.”

  “And to ladies?”

  “No, those are luncheons.”

  “Of course, I should know that.”

  There was a pause, a most comfortable pause, and Mrs. Potter could almost literally feel the two of them falling back again into the happy companionship they seemed to share so naturally. But then she realized they had digressed considerably. “No, to answer your original question, I haven’t eaten yet.”

  “May I take you to dinner, Andy?”

  “But I thought—”

  “I can’t offer a fancy French dinner, I mean, supper …” He interrupted her so quickly, almost rudely, that she had the definite feeling that he was trying to keep her from saying what she had been about to say, which was that she thought he was going to dinner at Highlands Ranch as the guest of Marj and Rey McHenry. Was that what he didn’t want the party line to hear? “But if you don’t mind eating at Sally’s Café again, I thought I could drive by and pick you up and we could—”

  She wondered why, if he wanted to take her someplace nice for dinner, he didn’t take her to the best restaurant in the valley, the one right there in the big lodge at the C Lazy U.

  “Jed, I’m sorry, I’d love to, but—”

  “I understand,” he said, so quickly that she knew he didn’t.

  “It’s just that I’m so tired, Jed,” she said with utter truthfulness. “And I have to get some things accomplished around here,” she added, with equal truthfulness, if not quite candor. She also didn’t want to divulge to the party line exactly what it was she needed to get done at home, such as go through Ricardo’s photographs of the aerial views of the properties of the very persons who might just happen to be causing the many clicks on the line this evening.

  “Yes, of course, I understand.”

  But she thought he sounded disappointed, and a little hurt.

  Well, there wasn’t any way for her to cure that, Mrs. Potter thought with a touch of inner asperity. He was the one who’d originally broken their plans, after all, not she. And now she was too tired and dirty to even think of getting ready to go out, and she really did have things to do. She wasn’t about to allow herself to be whipped about, first one way and then the next, by his whims. Still, she felt in herself the same dissatisfaction she thought she heard in his voice when they said good night to each other after only a little more conversation. “May I call you tomorrow?” he said.

  “I hope you will,” she said.

  But will you? she wondered as she hung up.

  Her glance fell on the yellow envelope, and she opened it.

  At first, she couldn’t make any sense of the contents.

  It seemed that Lucy the pilot was right: Ricardo had snapped pictures of cows and pastures, flora and fauna, fences and farm equipment. She recognized certain properties by the buildings or landmarks: there was Charlie Watt’s pickup truck apparently parked in one of his pastures on Section Ranch, and there were some of the
far cabins at the C Lazy U, just beyond the dirt runway where she and Jed had disembarked that afternoon, and there was the guardhouse at the front of Highlands Ranch, and the saguaro cactus patch at the Amorys’ place, and even the roof of Sally’s Café, and she recognized the brand of the Lost Dutchman on a few of Gallway and Lorraine Steinbach’s cattle. He’d gotten a great picture of the crossroads, good enough for framing, she thought, and lovely vistas of the valley as seen from some vantage point toward the eastern end of the valley. “El Bizcocho?” she wondered, and peered more closely at those particular photographs.

  There were multiple pictures of things, single pictures of others, and pictures of things she couldn’t imagine why he wanted to photograph … trucks going down country roads, and tractors entering gates and just plain clumps of cattle in fields. They were things that Ricardo Ortega had seen every day of his life, nothing to get excited about, surely nothing to want to catch on film when he could see it all “up close and personal,” as they said on the sportscasts on television.

  It was all color film, and each individual picture had printed on it the date and time that Ricardo took the photo. There appeared to be five rolls all together. After thumbing quickly through them once, and then again, Mrs. Potter felt nearly despondent. But then, as her eye began to skip over the obvious landmarks in the photos, certain other, smaller, less noticeable things began to catch her attention.

  She didn’t, at first, understand what she saw.

  It was so unexpected, so out of place, that her mind couldn’t at first compute it. It was like seeing an apple falling up. “No,” one’s mind declared, “this is impossible, therefore I’m not really seeing it.” But there it was, the apple falling up. Again and again, in photo after photo. She even counted the objects in one picture, touching each one with the tip of her finger, until she comprehended the meaning of them. Then it became easier for her eyes to see and her mind to accept. It was not nearly as easy for her to reach the only obvious conclusion and to accept it emotionally.

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Potter heard herself say, exactly as her own grandmother might have murmured when she was the most distressed by some heinous moral failing on the part of someone she knew, and of whom she had expected something better, although that counted nearly the entire population of Harrington, Iowa. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

  Mrs. Potter slid the photos back into the yellow envelope.

  “I’ve got to stop saying ‘oh dear,’ and start notifying the sheriff,” she chided herself. But how to do that, with the party line? She couldn’t risk calling Sheriff Ben Lightfeather, that was clear, so she’d have to get into her car and drive the many miles to see him. “Oh dear,” Mrs. Potter said again, as she realized that meant another run on the Nogales 500, and this one at night when she was frightened and exhausted. But what else could she do? And then it came to her: she didn’t have to drive all the way to him, all she had to do was get out of the valley, to a phone that was off the party line. “Thank goodness!”

  She pushed her chair away from the desk, and felt stiff in body and sore at heart as she did so. And cold, oh, she suddenly felt so cold. Her face, her hands, her feet, her whole body was so cold that she was shivering.

  Mrs. Potter swiveled her chair toward her fleece-lined moccasins and started to bend over to put them on to walk back into the foyer to get her walking shoes again.

  They lay in a shadow cast by the desk, out of the illumination of the room lighting, so she almost didn’t see the small movement in the heel of one of them.

  She almost stuck her fingers inside both moccasins.

  Almost slid her feet into them.

  Instead, the small movement registered, and she drew her hands back and both her feet up into her chair, gasping as she did so.

  A scorpion arched its tail in the soft fleece of the heel of her right moccasin.

  Without even stopping to think, Mrs. Potter grabbed the closest heavy object she could find and dropped it square on the shoe. When she could bear to open her eyes again and look down, she saw that she’d squashed a scorpion with Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary. After a few more moments, during which she worked up her courage, Mrs. Potter reached down and lifted the huge book off the floor.

  The scorpion was still moving a little.

  She dropped the book a second time.

  This time, when she picked it up, bits of the scorpion clung to its cover. I cannot deal with this, she thought with a shudder. If my kids were here, I would pretend it was nothing, I would be brave and I would scrape that scorpion off this book as if it were cake crumbs, but with nobody here to test my courage, I haven’t any! She simply dropped the dictionary down on the floor, in a different spot, and vowed to clean it up later. Next week. Next year.

  But the moccasin was another matter.

  She had to make sure the scorpion really was dead and not just maimed.

  Mrs. Potter took from her desk drawer the longest thing she could find, which was an old wooden ruler. She hooked the end of it into the shoe, and shook. The squashed scorpion’s body started to fall out, she thought, but then it just dangled there from the shoe. Mrs. Potter shook harder. Yes, it was definitely dead. But still the scorpion dangled, and so she was forced to bring it closer to her face and look again.

  What she saw was a thread, tied around the scorpion’s tail and pushed inside the shoe and then wound around and knotted to one of the leather bindings that sewed the sole of the moccasin to its top. Mrs. Potter dropped the whole thing, scorpion, shoe, and ruler, into her wastebasket under her desk, and leaned back in her chair, feeling very, very shaken.

  Who?

  After studying the photographs, Mrs. Potter knew who.

  Why?

  She had to think for a while on that one, because there didn’t at first seem to be any logical reason, only malicious, vicious, and irrational ones. But then she remembered something that had very recently been said to her, and she suddenly realized that she probably had the awful answer to “why,” as well. She didn’t have to give the question of “how” any time at all; her “secret” housekey was the obvious answer to that … everybody who knew her, and probably a good many who didn’t, had easy access to her hall closet or anything else they wanted. The only question remaining was what to do about this new event, and the answer to that seemed easier than anything else she’d had to think about all day: Sheriff Ben Lightfeather.

  Mrs. Potter walked very carefully, in her stocking feet, to that same hall closet, where she peered into her walking shoes first, and shook them out well, before starting to put them on, just as parents in the Southwest—land of scorpions and brown spiders and other stinging, crawling things—always instructed their children to do.

  The children, Mrs. Potter thought with a sudden flash of insight. She jolted up straight, her shoes still in her hands. The children!

  CHAPTER 30

  Mrs. Potter had phoned each of her own three children right after the discovery of Ricardo’s body and before the discovery of the other three men. They didn’t know that Linda was still missing.

  She had to call them.

  Not because they knew Linda Scarritt at all—she being considerably younger than they, and they having spent their teenage summers on the ranch before Linda was even born, and then, while she was still just a baby living with her parents, in university towns … and not merely to keep them informed, either, as Mrs. Potter knew they were concerned about her, their mother, and about the situation … but to ask them something very specific that she hadn’t thought to ask before. A simple question and an obvious one, and they were the perfect, perhaps the only people she could ask.

  Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Her very own children!

  She dialed her eldest, Louisa, first, and pulled her yellow notepad toward her to make notes.

  “Darling,” she said, “where are the best places to hide on this ranch?”

  “Mother.” Louisa laughed. “The questions you ask! Well, n
ow that I’m all grown-up, I’ll confess, there’s a little hidden arroyo a couple of miles south of Bandy’s apartment. If you ask Emily, I’m sure she’ll tell you it was her favorite place to hide from Benji and me. Do you think Linda might be there?”

  “I don’t know, darling, but it occurred to me that you children would know this ranch better than any of us grown-ups. And Linda spent a good part of her own childhood here, so if she had to hide out, maybe she’d go where none of us could find her … but maybe you three would know where to look.”

  “Oh, Mom, what can have happened to her? And poor Bandy. I’m just shocked, but you can’t think it was your chili that killed him! I don’t believe it for an instant. I mean, we are talking about the same mother who wouldn’t put mayonnaise on my salami sandwiches for school for fear it would spoil and kill me before recess!”

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  “Not my mother, not in the kitchen.”

  That left, Mrs. Potter thought, a rather wide world in which to make other errors. “I appreciate your loyalty, dearest.”

  “Will you call me as soon as you find her?”

  “Yes, Louisa, of course.”