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

  He curved his back and shoulders over the soup and commenced to eat as if hot or cold didn’t matter; what counted was getting food into his stomach.

  Mrs. Potter eased back down into her chair and watched him devour the snack. “I’ve been on the phone tonight, Ken, organizing a search party for tomorrow. Soon as the sun’s up. I want you to be in charge of it. Sheriff Lightfeather may be here to help, but I don’t think we ought to count on it. He says he’s got bank robbers to catch and he has to deal with some illegal aliens that somebody left to die in the desert. We can’t wait for him to take our missing persons report seriously. I don’t think he really believes anything has happened to Ricardo and Linda. I hope he’s right, but that didn’t stop me from rounding up a good number of volunteers to help look. I want you to map out this ranch, and assign sections for them to search, in some sort of organized manner that covers every inch of this place.”

  “You think they’re still here, ma’am?”

  “If they’re not, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  He wiped his mouth with the napkin. “Spread out over the valley, get people asking at gas stations, ranches, what-all. Find out if anybody’s seen ’em. Put up posters, I guess. Don’t know what else.”

  “Those are good ideas I hope we won’t need, Ken.”

  “We’ll find ’em, unless it’s hunters. Even then, they might’ve got scared and careless, left the bodies.”

  A feeling of terrible grief began to well up inside Mrs. Potter. Not again, she thought, not still other dear friends. “Oh, Ken.” She couldn’t get any other words out.

  “I’m sorry, patrona, I’m too tired to be tactful, I guess.”

  She stood up to remove his empty soup bowl and carry it to the sink, where she ran water over it. “I’ve arranged for an aerial search.”

  “How’d you find somebody to do it?”

  “Asked the sheriff for the name of a company. Arizona Aerials, out of Tucson. When you find Ricardo I am going to dock him for the cost of that.”

  “What?”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Potter laughed a little. “Nothing.” With her back turned, she dried her wet hands on a tea towel and then brushed her fingers under her eyes. “I’ve just thought of something the sheriff told me …”

  Mrs. Potter used the phone in the kitchen to dial Highlands Ranch, the home of Marjorie and Reynolds McHenry.

  “It’s Genia Potter, Rey. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I need to ask a favor in addition to the search party tomorrow. I do appreciate it so much that you and Marj are going to bring some of your men over to help us. I understand you have aerial maps of this valley, possibly even including this ranch, is that right?”

  She listened for a moment.

  “Oh, I can’t remember who told me, Rey, but the point is, do you have such maps and do they include Las Palomas, and may we borrow them to help us plan our search party?”

  Mrs. Potter was in no mood for his evasions or equivocations, but she wasn’t above using those tactics herself. The man was so secretive, she thought, that he would hedge before telling you the sun was up! Why, I ought to give him a piece of my mind for invading my privacy with his airplane and photographer! She decided instead to be grateful for unlikely blessings; the maps would help, if he’d ever admit he owned them, and then if he’d release them to her. She gave him no quarter.

  “If you’ll find the maps and leave them with your guard at your front gate, I’ll send Ken Ryerson over to pick them up on his way home tonight. Thank you so much, Rey.”

  Mrs. Potter was almost smiling when she hung up the phone.

  “I can’t think of anything else to do, can you, Ken?”

  He shrugged. “Pray, I guess.”

  “I’ve been doing that.”

  “Uh.”

  Mrs. Potter recognized that sound as the preliminary to something he wanted to say to her, and so she waited patiently for him to get it out. She had many years’ practice of waiting for cowboys to speak their minds. Finally, he seemed to do that: “Patrona, there’s something I want you to know. Nobody else does, except Linda. Her and me, we’ve got plans. To get married.”

  “Oh, Ken!” Two young people, working together for months at a time, it was perfectly natural. But poor Ken, she thought, feeling fresh compassion for the tired cowboy seated at her kitchen table. Not only his boss was missing but his fiancée as well. He dug his wallet out of his jeans and removed from it a tiny photograph that he slapped down onto the table. “Haven’t told anybody yet, like I say.” He stared down at the picture as he spoke. “Thought we’d wait to tell her parents till they get back from Antarctica or wherever the hell they are. Haven’t told Ricardo or Juanita yet.” He glanced up at her, but his glance was quickly pulled back down to the little photograph. “Don’t know if they’ll approve, me not being Mexican and all.”

  Mrs. Potter thought it far more likely that they’d disapprove if marriage meant postponing college for Linda, or if they were concerned about the disparity in the ages of the couple. Ken and Linda both seemed very young to Mrs. Potter, but she recalled that there could be a vast chasm of experience lying between an eighteen-year-old and a thirty-year-old. The older people got, the closer they drew together in maturity; at those ages, however, a difference of a decade could make a difference.

  But, Mrs. Potter thought, I guess it doesn’t to them.

  “I know my folks won’t like it, but I don’t plan on ever goin’ back to Kentucky, so that don’t matter much.” Ken ran out of words, and just gazed down at the photograph.

  “Ken, I’m so sorry.”

  She was suddenly acutely aware of just how many impending tragedies were in the making here, affecting so many lives. The outlook for the morrow seemed bleak at that moment, especially when she looked at the picture of dejection and frustration sitting across from her.

  Mrs. Potter straightened her spine and her resolve.

  “We’ll just have to find them safe and sound, that’s all there is to it,” she said as firmly as she could, as if that could make it come true. A friend’s sarcastic voice echoed in her head: “Clichés are such a comfort, aren’t they?” To which she silently rejoined, “Oh, do be quiet.” They would all take their comfort wherever they could find it right now, even in bromides.

  Ken pushed back his chair, which creaked as he stood up.

  “Yeah. Thanks, Mrs. Potter. I’ll stop by Highlands for the maps. Where should I be at sunup?”

  “You’ll be lucky to get any sleep. I told everybody to meet at the old windmill.”

  “What do you want me to do about the regular chores, Mrs. Potter?”

  She slapped her forehead. “Oh, Lord, Ken. Life does go on, doesn’t it, with cows to check and calves to be born? Well, you obviously can’t be organizing a search party and doing ranch work at the same time. Bandy can’t manage it. I guess that leaves me, Ken.”

  It seemed to her that he made a manly effort not to look skeptical.

  “Tell you what, patrona. When I’m divvying up the ranch for the search, I’ll assign myself those pastures that need to be checked for new calves. As long as I’m looking behind rocks for newborn babies, I might as well look for Ricardo and Linda too.”

  Mrs. Potter nodded her agreement. “Yes, that’ll do for tomorrow, but then you’re going to have to have help.” Aghast at the implications of her own statement, she stared up at the tall cowboy. “Oh, Ken, how would we ever manage without him?”

  “Won’t have to,” he said, tightening his jaw.

  “Yes, of course, that’s right.”

  She followed him as he walked out of the kitchen, his spurs jangling, back through the dining room and into the hall, where he put his slicker and hat back on. “I hope this won’t inconvenience your other employers too much, Ken.” She was referring to people like the McHenrys, who shared his services with other ranchers in the valley besides herself.

  “They’ll just have to understand that I’ll get to them later.”


  “I’ll make up for any lost pay, Ken.”

  He turned a less-than-friendly stare on her, and Mrs. Potter stepped back a bit. “This is Ricardo,” he stated flatly. “And Linda. Don’t want no pay for it.”

  “All right, Ken. It’ll be a long day for you.”

  He shrugged.

  This is what Wind Valley is all about, Mrs. Potter thought as she watched him button his rubber coat: being neighborly, doing for one another as we might need done for ourselves one day. The wheel had turned her way this time; now it was her turn to take hold of the strong, helping hands that reached out to her. She attempted an encouraging smile for him. “Maybe Ricardo and Linda will show up tonight, Ken, as Juanita keeps saying they will.”

  “Juanita says a lot of things.” He tipped his water-stained hat to her. “No disrespect intended. Thanks for the soup. Sorry about the mess. Good night, ma’am.”

  “Good night, Ken.”

  He turned back. “You won’t say anything about Linda and me?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “We want to be the ones to say.”

  “Of course you do. I won’t breathe a word of it. But I’ll be praying for both of you.” And for your future grandfather-in-law, she thought.

  Ken Ryerson stepped outside onto her ramada and then walked down the flagstones into the darkness beyond the wall. Mrs. Potter’s heart ached for him as she listened to his steps fade. The rain drummed on the plastic cover on the swimming pool. Her hanging plants rocked in the wind. Mrs. Potter breathed deeply of the sweet scent of rain in Arizona. Moisture blew in at her through the screen, forcing her to close the door. After locking it, she returned to the kitchen to clean up Ken’s dirty dishes and there she noticed that he’d left his little photograph behind.

  Mrs. Potter sat down at the kitchen table.

  She held the picture in the cup of her right hand, and stared at it.

  Linda “Ortega” Scarritt. Daughter of Francesca and Les. Les’s Anglo blue eyes and her mother’s Latino dark hair. It wasn’t a very good picture of her, didn’t begin to do her justice. She had the high-planed cheeks of her Indian ancestors, but also the thinner nose and lips of her European forebears. It was an odd combination of features, not pretty exactly, but interesting. An intelligent child, if not as academically inclined as her family would prefer. Quick to laugh, even quicker to learn anything that had to do with a horse. Mrs. Potter sighed. She was very fond of Ricardo’s granddaughter and felt deeply concerned about her. The child was young for an eighteen-year-old, almost naive in the way a horse-struck adolescent girl was, not sophisticated at all. It was probably a good idea to keep her out of college for a year. Could this sweet child, she wondered, survive any truly rough encounter with the world? Mrs. Potter folded her fingers carefully over the little face, intending to return this treasured memento to Ken Ryerson in the morning.

  “Find her, Ken,” she said as she got up and switched off the lights in the kitchen. “And please do it soon.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Mrs. Potter padded in her moccasins to her small office/study off the foyer and sat down at her desk. There was a telephone there and one of the ubiquitous yellow pads with which she organized her life. (And everybody else’s, too, her children, Louisa, Emily, and Benji, claimed.) She spent the next few minutes engaged in listing the activities for the morrow: they included inviting the volunteers back for supper, which meant shopping for groceries, which meant selecting a menu so that she could make a list of things she needed to purchase.

  “What can I fix,” she asked herself, pencil eraser tapping her chin, “that’s easy and can be expanded to serve a lot of people, will satisfy both the men and the women and maybe even take their minds off their troubles for a while?”

  The answer came in a flash, literally, of lightning outside her windows: 27-Ingredient Chili con Carne.

  Perfect.

  Not only was it delicious and filling, but the riddle of the ingredients kept guests happily occupied in competing with one another to guess all twenty-seven.

  Quickly, from memory, she jotted down her shopping list, starting with ground beef.

  The telephone rang at her elbow.

  Her heart in her throat, she picked up the receiver, hoping to hear Ricardo’s voice, saying, “I’m so sorry to have worried you, patrona.”

  “You promised you’d call me,” accused a contralto voice.

  “Oh, Che! I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry, I forgot.”

  “Understandable,” said her old friend. So vivid was Che Thomas, so full of enthusiastic life, that Mrs. Potter could practically smell her signature perfume wafting through the party line. Surely all that anybody in the valley had to do was pick up their receiver and sniff. “It’s Che Thomas on the line,” they’d declare, “talking to that Genia Potter again.”

  “Well?” Che demanded.

  “No news.”

  “I don’t like this, Genia. What are you doing about it?”

  Mrs. Potter told her about the arrangements for the next day, and got in response a heated protest because Mrs. Potter had not called Che to request her participation in the search party.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Potter said rather sharply, she feared; but then, she was awfully tired. “I don’t expect you to get out there on horseback, any more than I expect to get out there myself. I don’t think we’d be much help, Che, darling.”

  “At our age, you mean?” was the indignant response. “We’ll see about that, Eugenia Potter. Maybe you think you’re too old to be of any earthly use to anybody, but I certainly am not. I’ll be there, four-wheel drive and all, and I’ll have as many guests and employees as I can roust out of bed in the morning. If they can get up before dawn to go out on hunting parties to shoot poor defenseless little mountain lions, they can darn well get up to go look for Ricardo.”

  “Che, this is very good of you.”

  “Ricardo,” was the tart reply, “has been very good to all of us here in the valley. He’s always there with the wisest advice this side of Solomon, and always ready to help out with everybody else’s roundups—”

  “Which everyone repays by helping us—”

  “Makes no never mind, Genia Potter. He’s a special man. And that grandchild of his is the apple of his eye and he’ll never forgive me if I didn’t go look for her myself. I’ll be there with a crowd, count on it.”

  “Thank you, Che,” was Mrs. Potter’s humble answer.

  “Now. I promised you something too. A surprise.”

  “And I asked if it could please, possibly, wait?”

  “No, it’s waited long enough, and if this chance goes by, it may not come again. Hold the phone, dear, your surprise is coming on the line.”

  “Che!”

  She wanted to find out if there’d been a C Lazy U hunting party out on the morning when Ricardo and Linda disappeared, but it was no use. Mrs. Potter couldn’t call her friend back to the phone. She could only wait in weary frustration, kicking her moccasins off under her desk and raising her feet, one at a time, to massage her toes. She wanted with all her heart to plod off to a shower and then to bed. Morning could not come soon enough—

  “Is this Mrs. Potter?”

  “This is she.”

  It was a man’s voice, eerily familiar. Had that been a hint of Boston accent as he began, asking for Mrs. Pottah? He started to introduce himself just as the thunderstorm took momentary charge of the telephone lines, so she missed his name.

  “I’m sorry, who did you say?”

  “Andy? Andy? Is that you?”

  No one called Mrs. Potter Andy anymore. Christened Eugenia Andrews, known generally to family and friends as Genia, no one called her Andy.

  Except, except …

  Could it be … after forty years? Jed? Jed White? He was Che’s surprise?

  Mrs. Potter took a deep breath and tried to manage a cordial, social response, the proper response due a friend of one’s youth. Not the answer of her sudden
ly eighteen-year-old-again heart. The answer, instead, of respectable middle-aged widowhood.

  “Yes.” She took another breath. “Yes, Jed, it’s me.” And then another breath, until she felt quite dizzy. “It’s just that I haven’t been called Andy for so many years, and we’re having a bit of a thunderstorm, and I couldn’t quite hear you. But then I guess you know it’s storming, if you’re at Che’s. My word, you’re at Che’s!” She paused, scrambling for composure again. “How are you, Jed?”

  There, that sounded quite calm and friendly, she hoped, with no betrayal of her quickened pulse.

  “I’m fine now that I have you on the phone. When I couldn’t reach you yesterday, I began to think I wouldn’t manage it—”

  “I’ve been in Maine—”

  “So I hear. When I told Mrs. Thomas I have an old college friend living in the vicinity, she told me she knows you very well, and she was kind enough to let me know you got in tonight.” He paused. Mrs. Potter suddenly wondered if he, too, might be having trouble finding sufficient composure and just the right words. “I’m spending a week or so here, Andy. It seemed like a good idea to call you to say hello.”

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea, Jed,” she said warmly. “But what in the world is an Eastern boy like you doing there at a dude ranch?”

  His voice, deeper and more authoritative than she remembered it, held great warmth, too, and his reply had a friendly, teasing quality that instantly bridged forty years and made her feel like a girl again. “I’d like to say I came out here just on the off chance of seeing you again, Andy.”

  She laughed lightly. “But the truth is …”

  “But the truth is that I have business here as well.”

  Mrs. Potter wondered what sort of business could possibly bring him to Wind Valley, where the only commercial enterprises that she knew of were ranching and the mom-and-pop cafés and shops in the town at the crossroads.