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

  “Come on!” the pilot said, banking the plane so sharply that Mrs. Potter’s left shoulder brushed her right one. “I’ll show you.” Mrs. Potter looked toward the backseat and saw that Jed was pressed up against the window.

  For the next half hour they swooped over one ranch and then another.

  She flew them over the C Lazy U, where they spied on two of Che’s hired cowboys conducting a calf roping demonstration for the dudes. Several children spotted the plane and jumped up and down excitedly as they waved at it. Mrs. Potter thought it wonderful that a small plane could still evoke such a thrill in the young, whom one might expect to be jaded by air travel. But, no, even the grown-ups in the valley seemed to take pleasure out of the buzzing airplane.

  Charlie Watt was out in one of his pastures with his pickup truck, and he got out and waved up at the plane. Lucy waggled her wings in reply, which caused Mrs. Potter to grit her teeth and swallow hard again. She drew back from the window so that the man below couldn’t see her, figuring that if she could so easily identify him from this height, it wasn’t beyond possibility that he might recognize her when the little plane dipped toward him.

  “We’re coming up over the McHenrys’ ranch,” Mrs. Potter yelled back to Jed.

  “Oh, no, we’re not,” Lucy yelled back.

  “What? Why not?”

  “Because they’ve asked me never to fly over their property with tourists, that’s why. And they pay me a nice sum of money to keep my promise. My husband and I, we don’t ever fly over the Highlands. That’s the bargain, and I keep it. I’m sorry, but, hey, don’t worry. I didn’t fly your ranch manager over it, either, so it wouldn’t help you any to see it.”

  So instead of zooming over the huge McHenry spread, the little plane flew its boundaries for a short time and from a discreet distance.

  “Did you take some aerial photos for them, Lucy?”

  She grinned. “I didn’t.”

  Mrs. Potter got the message.

  “Did they tell your husband why they wanted them?”

  Lucy shook her head, giving the impression that she really didn’t know. She banked to the north and flew on toward Walt and Kathy Amory’s place, Saguaro Ranch.

  Mrs. Potter thought she could have counted with two hands the number of cattle she spied there.

  “Jed,” Mrs. Potter called back to him, and pointed out the window. “Look down here to the right. See that clump of tall cacti? Those are crested saguaros, and they’re a very rare sight to see. They’re the prize of this ranch, and they wouldn’t be there except by some fluke of luck or nature. Nobody knows if some early settler actually planted them, or if they just happened to grow up like that. But there are so few of them left, what with illegal harvesting, that those down there are literally worth tens of thousands of dollars on the retail market.”

  From the air, Mrs. Potter counted four of the impressive cacti.

  It saddened her that they should be a tourist attraction like this, when they ought to be common sights along the roadways of Arizona. Every time she drove anywhere in the state, whether up to the red-rock country around Sedona or over toward New Mexico, or west to Baja, she kept her eyes peeled for that distinctive fan-shape, but in all the years of living in the state, she had yet to come across one by happenstance. The only way she knew to see them was to go where the tourist brochures directed her to go to view them. Or to catch sight of one in somebody’s private garden and, ever after, to wonder and worry about how it got there.

  “You ought to get a picture of it!” Lucy shouted.

  “I wish we could,” Mrs. Potter said.

  “Well, maybe you can get a copy of the one your Mr. Ortega took. He must have had me circle them a dozen times until he got what he wanted. Ready to see your ranch, Mrs. Potter?”

  Mrs. Potter was.

  Oddly enough, for all the years she had resided off and on at Las Palomas, she’d never before viewed it from the air. And she was taken by surprise that the sight of it shining beautifully golden in the sunshine would move her nearly to tears.

  They spent some time swooping through the canyons, with Jed and Mrs. Potter keeping their eyes peeled for signs of Linda’s presence. They followed several different sets of searchers, viewing from above what those people could only see from below. The fact that the searchers were still there at all told Mrs. Potter all she needed to know about the search for Linda Scarritt.

  Once, Lucy started to buzz a small herd of cattle, which would have made them stampede in fright, but Mrs. Potter quickly stopped her by grasping her arm. “No, please.” Stress was no better for livestock than it was for human beings; Mrs. Potter remembered how Ricardo’s goal had always been to keep her cattle “fat and happy.”

  She did encourage Lucy to circle the top of El Bizcocho several times, however. Mrs. Potter noted how one could, indeed, see all of the valley from way up there, and everybody’s fence lines. You’d feel like king of the mountain, she mused, or queen, as the case might be. If you took a stranger up there, you could point out every landmark for miles around, show him or her where everybody in the valley lived or worked, and all the roads and pastures, barns and houses, even the shops in the crossroads. If you turned around, to the west, your view would be blocked by the mountains leading into government land. You’d have absolute privacy up there, too, more privacy than perhaps anywhere else in the valley. You could see everything, but nobody could see you, especially if you parked your horses behind a couple of cacti or boulders.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Potter said, after Lucy had flown around El Bizcocho four or five times, “if we’ve seen everything that Ricardo saw, we can go down now.”

  The arrangement was that Lucy would land them on the dirt strip at the C Lazy U, where Mrs. Potter would hitch a ride home with one of Che Thomas’s young employees.

  As Lucy bounced in for a crosswind landing, she shouted over the noise of the engine, “Oh, how I wish I were a crook!”

  Startled, Mrs. Potter looked over at her. “Why?”

  Lucy throttled down and lowered the flaps and put the gear down and talked through her headset radio microphone to any other airplanes that might happen to be flying in the vicinity and kept the plane level and descending, all in seemingly simultaneous maneuvers that Mrs. Potter thought should surely require at least three hands. Plus, she managed to reply to Mrs. Potter’s question at the same time. “Because the country’s full of great smuggler’s airports, that’s why. Like this one. Dirt runways. Middle of somebody’s pasture. No cops for hundreds of miles around. Nobody lookin’. Nobody carin’. No lights at night. Just drop your load of cocaine or whatever, or pick one up, and off you fly, with nobody the wiser. A halfway decent pilot could make enough dough to open his own FBO in a couple of years.”

  Mrs. Potter clutched her armrest as the little plane bounced onto the dirt, then bounced into the air again, before settling to earth. “FBO?”

  “Fixed-base operation.” Lucy turned off the fuel and opened her side window and guided the little airplane to a coasting stop at the end of the runway. “What my husband and I want someday, our own little airport at the crossroads of Podunk and Plumbdamn. Hope y’all enjoyed your flight.”

  Jed stood with the door to the C Lazy U car open as he gazed down at Mrs. Potter in the front passenger’s seat.

  “Never a dull moment,” she said, and smiled up at him. “What time should I be ready tonight, Jed?”

  “I feel awful about this, Andy, but I’m going to have to cancel tonight.”

  “You’re not going to dinner at Highlands after all?”

  He shifted his gaze from her own for a moment before looking at her again. “I’m just not going to be able to take a guest, Andy. I’m awfully sorry. This is awkward, and I feel like an utter fool to be doing it. Please, I hope you’ll forgive me, and let me make it up to you. May I call you later today?”

  “Of course, Jed.”

  He closed the door gently, and she heard it click.

  Mrs. P
otter waved back at him, where he stood waving at her as one of Che’s young cowboys drove her away from the C Lazy U. But she was thinking of Jed’s last words: “I’ll call you.” They were, she knew, three of the most dreaded words in the lexicon of dating, no matter what the age of the man or woman. Mrs. Potter had many times dried her daughters’ tears over disappointments when that particular promise wasn’t kept by young men who had probably never intended to be cruel. She knew that much from her own son. “Hey!” he had protested when his sisters once accused him of leading a girl on in that way, “I didn’t know what else to say! What was I supposed to tell her, ‘Sorry, I’ll never call you, because you’re boring and I had a horrible time and I don’t care if I never see your ugly face as long as I live’?” “Just say thank you,” his sisters had lectured him. “Just say good night. Don’t make promises. She’ll get the picture.”

  Mrs. Potter suspected she had the picture.

  She felt as tired and sad and discouraged as she had ever been, and she couldn’t wait to get home. After everything that has happened in the last two days, she thought, as she rode silently beside the young driver, who could blame Jed if he never called me again? Mrs. Potter tried to convince herself that the absence of Jedders H. White from her life would be just one inconsequential little loss added to the larger, much more important ones. After all, I got along perfectly well without him for forty years!

  The young man let her off at her own front gate.

  Normally, the sight of it would have lifted her heart, but on this late afternoon in May, Mrs. Potter’s heart felt terribly heavy as she lifted the latch.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mrs. Potter didn’t even walk all the way through her front gate before she changed her mind and her course. She looked in at her swimming pool and saw that it was still covered. The meaning of that hit her hard: there was no Bandy to pull the cover off and neatly fold and store it. Mrs. Potter glanced at the nearest rose garden and spied a dead head, which had been a yellow flower. Bandy was no longer there to snip it off. She’d used firewood last night, and today there wasn’t any Bandy to replenish the baskets in the house.

  Because she suddenly couldn’t bear to face her empty home, not just yet, she turned around and headed up to her carport instead. There was something she had to do, and she might as well use this time to get it over with. Something unpleasant. Something she dreaded. Something she’d been thinking about off and on all day. And she decided that she might as well do it while she was already feeling miserable, since not even a shower or a change of clothing, not even a swim, was likely to put her in a better frame of mind.

  But once in the carport, she found she had to change course again.

  There, dumped hear her car, was Linda Scarritt’s saddle.

  “So this is where Ken put you last night.”

  Mrs. Potter walked over and crouched down beside the saddle. The fabric of the seat felt wooly and perfectly dry in spite of its drenching, but then nothing but a cactus could hold moisture for this long in Arizona. She ran her hands along the saddle, feeling the fine tooling of its leather, thinking of the horse that had worn it and of the woman who owned it. This saddle had been a high school graduation gift to Linda from Ricardo and Juanita, if she remembered correctly. Mrs. Potter wished she had psychic abilities, that she might touch the saddle horn and receive vibrations or some such, telling her what had befallen its owner.

  “Charlie’s right, this saddle has nothing to tell us.”

  She started to grab it at both ends to move it farther back into the carport and in so doing she lifted one stirrup, meaning to throw it over the saddle seat. When she did, she glimpsed something lodged under the strip of leather that connected the seat to the stirrup. Mrs. Potter didn’t attempt to touch the object until she had pulled a tissue out of her purse and wrapped it around the fingers of her right hand so that her fingerprints wouldn’t contaminate the surface of the object.

  Only then did she tug at it, and out came a wallet. It was thin, made of some sort of synthetic fabric, folded over into thirds, and closed by means of a Velcro strip. The wallet was a greenish brown with darker stains; the black trim around the edges looked frayed, as if this wallet had resided in somebody’s back pocket for many months. Careful to employ the tissue as a shield, Mrs. Potter pried open the Velcro and saw that the wallet had narrow compartments for cards, photos, or cash, but there was no coin purse. In the cash compartment, she found a five-dollar bill and three ones. The card compartment held only two items: a tiny photograph of two adults and a girl, and an Arizona driver’s license. Mrs. Potter recognized the adults as Francesca and Les Scarritt and the girl as Linda Scarritt only a few years ago, when she was maybe about fourteen years old. The driver’s license carried a more recent photograph of her, perhaps only a couple of years old.

  Although she carefully looked through the rest of the wallet, Mrs. Potter found nothing else in it. So she was left with the question of how the wallet got stuck up in a crevice of the saddle, who put it there, and why.

  “It had to be Linda who slipped it in there,” she whispered in the still, shadowy heat of the carport. “There’s no reason anybody else would do it. She could have stuck it up there to keep somebody from stealing it, but I doubt that, because there’s not enough in it to worry about. Eight dollars and a driver’s license, I don’t think she’d go to this trouble over that.…”

  Then why would she go to the trouble?

  “To let us know …”

  Mrs. Potter’s eyes filled with tears.

  “That she’s alive!”

  Then. She was alive then. If I’m right, Linda hid this wallet in her saddle. But is she still alive? Mrs. Potter suspected the dark stains that had soaked into the fabric of the wallet were blood. She raised it to her nose to sniff, but couldn’t smell anything except the scent of horse and leather. If it was blood, only a lab would be able to detect if it was animal, perhaps from Taco’s wounds, or human.

  “I have to get this to the sheriff …”

  And she had to get down the hill to the Ortega house to show Juanita this one and only piece of evidence, and do it without raising a desperate grandmother’s hopes too high.

  “Mrs. Potter?”

  She jerked around, her heart pounding.

  “Oh, Ken, hello, you startled me.”

  If she felt dirty and worn, the tall cowboy standing in the shadows looked even more so. He ducked his head apologetically. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to. I came to get Linda’s saddle, and then I saw you was up here. I thought I ought to tell you what’s been going on and how the search went today. We haven’t found her yet, Mrs. Potter.”

  “I was so afraid of that, but look, Ken, at what I found!”

  She held out the wallet, in the tissue, for him to see.

  “That’s hers,” he confirmed, his tanned face growing pale. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Tucked in under the saddle seat.”

  “My God. I don’t get it …”

  “Well,” Mrs. Potter said gently, “she was alive to put it there.”

  “If it was her who did it.”

  Mrs. Potter felt almost guilty for having shown it to him, because he seemed to take it so hard, as if he just couldn’t believe it meant anything in the way of good news. And she had to tell him that there wasn’t anything in the wallet, either, to point them in the right direction.

  “Was that you,” he asked, “flying overhead a while back?”

  “Yes, I knew the bad news when I saw all of you down there.”

  “I don’t know what to do next, Mrs. Potter. We got the vet in to look at Taco. She says he got gored, maybe by javelinas. That could mean Linda got hurt, but where is she?” His face twisted with emotion, as he glanced down at the wallet in her hands. Mrs. Potter wished she could put it away, out of his sight. “Why can’t we find her?”

  “What about Bandy, Ken? Do we know what killed him?”

  The cowboy shook his head. �
�No word yet. I don’t think it was your chili though, I mean, all those poisons he had around the place, fertilizers and bug sprays and all, hell, he coulda got confused and thought he was pouring vinegar into the chili, when he was really pouring poison. Coulda used those bowls for mixing chemicals, then served the chili out of them. You know?”

  “That thought has occurred to me, too, Ken.”

  She walked toward him, and gestured toward a bale of hay outside the carport. “Come on, let’s sit down.” As long as he was already here, she thought unhappily, she might as well get the next job over with. Mrs. Potter had thought she was going to have to go looking for Ken Ryerson—that was why she had gone to the carport in the first place—but here he was, ready or not. While his back was turned, she took the opportunity to place Linda’s wallet on the driver’s seat of her car.

  When they were both seated on the hay, Ken with his back slumped up against the side of the carport and one long leg bent so that his right cowboy boot rested on top of the bale, she began the speech she had rehearsed in her mind throughout the day.

  “Now that Ricardo is gone,” she said, “I have to look for someone to take his place. Ideally, that would be a person who is already familiar with our operation, and one who has many years of experience with cattle and who is ready to move up to a responsible, permanent position as ranch manager.” She paused, and only the sound of the hot wind moving through the grass reached her ears. “You’re the obvious candidate for the job, Ken. Do you want it?”

  His answer came quick and ready.

  “Nope.”

  “What?”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Potter, really, I do thank you a lot, but it ain’t the job for me.”

  “But you and Linda—”

  “Oh, I know it would give us a mighty lot of security, and maybe that’s what I ought to be thinkin’ of, but it ain’t what I want, exactly. What I want—and Linda’s with me on this—is a spread of my own. I guess you know I’ve been building my own little herd over west of here, a cow at a time, you might say, and one of these days, I’m going to have a decent herd can support me and a family. That’s what I’m aimin’ at, Mrs. Potter, that’s why I work all these different jobs, to make enough money to keep buying land, a little piece at a time if I have to, and everything else that goes with ranchin’. Like a hay baler.” He laughed shortly, ruefully. “Right now I’d sell my soul for a good used baler—hell, I’d take one ten years old and near total rusted out. I got a beautiful couple ten acres of sweet grass just beggin’ to be cut and baled. But everything costs money, which I got to earn before I can spend it. Can’t even expect to borrow stuff like that, ’cause I don’t have anything to trade for it except my time, and I need to get paid for that. A full-time manager’s job, hell, I’d make a better living in the short term, but I wouldn’t have any time for my own little place in the long run.”