A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) (9 page)

We sat in that dreary place right into the afternoon. It was
close to three o’clock when Reggie finally told Mama she could go back to see Justin, but only for a few minutes.

When she came out, she wasn’t crying anymore, just looking resolute. “Justin wants to see you for a minute,” she said to Miss Amelia. “The sheriff said it’s okay.”

Emma pushed her short hair back from her tired face and laid a callused hand against her cheek. “Justin wants me to stop by Martin’s house. He’ll be running the whole ranch until this is over.”

She thought a minute, closed her eyes, and took a long breath. “Something about Martin doing a special job for him—if I can find out anything. Guess that’s about the fences those hogs tore up. Anyway I’m going on home. Anybody coming with me?”

Miss Amelia went back to see Justin. Bethany, saying it would be best to make the dreaded phone call to her newsman from home, went with Mama. I’d come to town with Miss Amelia, who wanted to get over to the Nut House, so I hung around to wait for her.

Miss Amelia was back in twenty minutes, not saying a word, only motioning for me to get up and follow her outside. We were in my pickup before she said a word. And then it was only an order to get over to the Nut House.

“Folks’ll be wondering why the store’s closed,” she said. “A Saturday, after all. One of my busiest days.”

“Don’t worry, Meemaw. They all know why by now.” I waited only a minute before asking, “What did Justin want?”

“I gotta think,” she said, snapping at me.

I knew when to leave my grandmother alone so I kept quiet, turned the corner, and parked in front of the Nut House. The two green and white flags with the family crest still flew in front of the building. Nobody’d remembered to take the flags down the night before, and anyway it looked right, like saying to Riverville: Don’t count the Blanchards out.

We sat looking at the store for a good five minutes.

“Why don’t you just go ahead and close it up today?” I said after a while.

She nodded, then nodded again. “Got a death in the family anyway. Think that’s only the right thing to do.”

She went on sitting. “Need a sign up on the door,” she said after a couple of long sighs. “Think I’ll call Treenie about baking off the cookies on Monday and opening up. But no pies. Not one damned pie. People sayin’ my baked goods don’t taste like they used to . . . well, let ’em put up with that mediocre stuff they sell down at the Pick and Run, or go askin’ Ethelred to bake ’em one—she thinks she’s so good.”

Miss Amelia was mad about everything at once. I didn’t blame her and got out of the truck as fast as she did, up the steps of the wide front porch, key in the lock, and into the shop.

“Anyway.” She turned once we were inside, blinking as if surprised to find me still behind her. “You and me have things to talk about. I made a list with Justin—people we got to go see. He’s been doing nothing but thinking . . .”

“You mean, like talking to Ethelred and the Chauncey girls and getting over to the Barking Coyote? I’ve got some ideas of my own. But, Meemaw, are you sure you’re up to taking on something like this?”

I got the most cutting, the most withering look my grandmother ever gave me. I wanted to disappear right down inside my white T-shirt.

“You hear news of my death yet?”

I shook my head, knowing better than to say one word.

She waited, fixing me with a look meant to reduce me to the size of a peanut. “Then I guess we’re all set. Gotta go after who did this to Amos. I just know in my heart it’s tied up to your experiments somehow, but who’d want to go after your trees? What you’re doing out there is supposed to benefit everybody, all the ranchers. That’s what you always said. So maybe not a rancher at all. Can’t figure that one. And what was Amos doin’ out at your greenhouse in the first place? If it wasn’t one of us who came on him in there, then it was Amos who came on somebody and died trying to stop them from ruining your experiments. How’s that sound to you?”

I thought a minute. “Or maybe he was meeting somebody there.”

“Why? He knew he wasn’t exactly the prodigal son coming home.”

“Maybe he was in on it with the person destroying my trees. I don’t know. If anybody wanted to see us fail, well, I’d say that person was Uncle Amos.” I shook my head hard, as if ideas could be made to line up better.

“When he came in the store earlier, I wouldn’t say he was belligerent, would you? He had that letter he wanted to give Emma. You think maybe he came out to see you about that?”

“Why didn’t he stop at the house and see Mama directly?”

She headed toward the front counter, straightening a tipped gift box here, a package of pecan turtles there. “This whole thing’s a mess,” she said over her shoulder. “Usually I can see a true path through things that happen. You know, the past leading right up to the present. Old hatreds and hurts are behind bad things most of the time. And there’s plenty of that here—with all Amos’s old rantings and ravings. I’m just not seeing a high road through what’s happened.”

“Don’t you think we’ve got to find out where Amos has been for the last two years? Seems like that’s got to come into this.”

She nodded as she rummaged through the drawers behind the counter, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. “So what we’ve gotta do is talk to everybody. Wherever he went, maybe this was a plan he’d hatched to get even with us, brought somebody in on it with him.”

I nodded. “Maybe they had a falling-out. Sounds most logical.”

She nodded. “So let me get this note on the door and we’ll get going.”

“Where?”

“Why, over to the Conways’. That’s where he was staying.”

“The sheriff and Hunter were already there. Remember? Last night Chastity said they were still there, going through Amos’s things?”

“Aren’t we Amos’s kin? You’re his grieving niece.”

“What about the sheriff?”

She made a derisive sound. “That man? You think Willard Higsby wants to come against me? I don’t think so.” She stopped, looked around, then went over to straighten drooping packs of spiced pecans in the cardboard dumps set off against the wall. “I don’t have a thing against him, mind you. But since Dora died, he’s lost a lot of his . . . what would you call it? Flexibility? So straitlaced and tight. People sayin’ he’s a real lawman now: The Law’s the Law, and all of that. I say you got a man like that, you’re buying misery.”

I nodded. “You’re right. But—”

“Hell’s bells and panther tracks, girl,” Miss Amelia chided. “I’d rather curl up in a corner and die right now than give in to somebody trying to hurt one of my kin. I don’t care if it’s the sheriff, a murderer, or some plant hater come to put an end to your evil messing with nature.”

I opened my mouth but knew enough to snap it shut again.

“And I’ll tell you something else, Lindy. Maybe you think I’m too old ’cause you don’t see me out running marathons. But the thing about getting old is you learn to use your head instead of throwing your body at things. You learn to look at people and figure them out. And if anybody knows the people in this town, it’s me. You got your mean ones, like Willy Shuck. That man hates people and dogs and all species in between. Willy brings me back cookie packages with one cookie left and demands his money back. Tells me they weren’t any good. I know what old Willy’s capable of, and I know what he’s not capable of. Then I know the nice people with nothing but good things to say about my pies. The Chauncey sisters are like that.” She hesitated. “Maybe I can’t go running down Carya Street after some bad guy. Not like I once coulda done. But I’ll do my share of asking questions and dropping in to visit folks who might help us. I’ll do my part, Lindy. Don’t you worry about that.”

She put up a hand, stopping me as I dared open my mouth. “And we’re gonna trust Hunter. So don’t go spouting off on me. I know it and you know it, too—he’s the best friend you’ve ever had and he’ll be there when you need him. What we gotta do is start digging into Amos’s past and those years he was gone. Then we gotta look into who he’s been seeing since he came back. Could be old enemies and could be new ones.”

“So like you said, we gotta get over to the Conway place.”

“That’s my girl. Now you got that overeducated head of yours thinking in the right direction.”

“Granny, whatever it takes. Let’s saddle up.”

She sniffed. Frowned at me and then laughed. “Now I got this picture in my head. Me on Old Paint, struggling out through the sagebrush, waving my empty gun at the long-gone back of a cattle thief.”

I laughed with her because the picture I had in my head, of me trying to stay on that horse, wasn’t much better than hers.

Laughing was a lot better than crying.

Before we left the store, Miss Amelia called Treenie Menendez,
who said she’d be right in to bake off the cookies. “But no pies,” I heard Miss Amelia telling her. “You tell ’em go someplace else for a pecan pie as good as mine.”

Treenie must have been laughing on the other end of the phone.

“Sure I’m getting even, Treenie. Never said I didn’t have a little darkness in my soul. Let’s see what they’ll be saying about me after a week or so eating Ethelred Tomroy’s pecan pies.”

On our way, Miss Amelia took time to post her sign.

Outside, standing in the heat of bright sunshine filtering down through the pecan trees and live oaks lining Carya Street, I turned back to read the handwritten cardboard sign that made Miss Amelia smile:

NO PECAN PIES FOR THE
FORSEEABLE FUTURE DUE
TO A VERY SAD DEATH IN
THE BLANCHARD FAMILY.
IF YOUR NEED FOR A PIE IS
GREAT, CALL ETHELRED TOMROY.
SHE MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP YOU.

After shaking my head at my grandmother’s duplicity, I took a minute, while she stepped back and folded her hands in front of her, admiring her handiwork, to cover my eyes against the sun and check the street to see who was watching us. Freda Cromwell, the queen of Riverville gossips, hailed us from across the street, hand up and waving hard as if she needed to talk. Miss Amelia signaled me from the corners of her eyes, then waved back as she whispered, “Let’s get outta here.”

With the bent woman still waving and bumbling across the street, we got in the car and drove off, leaving a wake of dust and a frustrated old lady behind us.

Leaving town, I sped up where the road widened flat and dead-on. Tiny heat waves, like a faint mirage, played across the pavement. I was hot and wanted to put on the air-conditioning, but Miss Amelia frowned on air-conditioning unless the thermometer read at least one hundred and one. We had the windows down, my limp ponytail flapping against my damp back, sweat pouring down my face, while Miss Amelia sat beside me, cool and untouched by the hot sun or the cloudless sky or much of anything beyond her own deep thoughts.

“As I was telling you before,” she said after a while, “there’s the mean ones and the kind ones and there’s the liars and there’s people so poor they come in for one pecan sandy though most of the time I make it at least two, telling them I got a special going. And there’s rich people with a hundred-dollar saddle on a ten-dollar horse; don’t pay their bills on time begging me for credit, which, as you know, is against everything I believe in.”

She thumped her hands in her lap. “And I know who’s having a little too much fun with another man’s wife, and I know the lady who comes into the store smelling like whiskey at ten in the morning. I know who’s having a fight with this one or that one ’cause they can never learn to keep their mouths shut. You just wouldn’t believe the things you learn about people when you run a store, Lindy. There’s that Tommy Johns, you know, the boy living down by the river in town with his daddy who’s so sick. Comes in asking for work all the time. Give him what I can. And that Wright boy from over by the old railroad tracks working three jobs to get himself to college. That one girl pregnant . . . I’m not saying any names. Why, baking pies for people seems to come with a kind of trust you don’t usually get from human beings.” She nodded hard along with her own words.

“And I can tell you other things. Like about those cheaters at the county fair, wanting to take home the pecan pie prize so bad you just wouldn’t believe what they’d do to win. And then I had thieves—well, one, who will remain nameless—trying to steal my recipes. Caught her back in the kitchen at the store one day. Riffling through my recipe boxes and telling me she was only looking for a blank card ’cause she had to write something down right then. And her bragging all over town that her pecan pie’s just as good as mine.”

I had to smile, knowing my grandmother’s continuing feud with Ethelred Tomroy, even though they’d been friends since the first day Miss Amelia came to the ranch.

“You’d just be surprised at what pie envy brings out in people,” Miss Amelia said, talking almost to herself.

“One thing I learned, though, is you don’t judge too harshly. Everybody’s got their story, you know. Wish you coulda known your grandfather. Darnell Hastings. A fine man. Would’ve made a great governor of this state. He believed in Texas values. The real values—like taking care of your family and yourself and still sharing this country with others. My Darnell would never’ve stood for the kind of raw violence some of these politicians stand for today.” Miss Amelia took a long breath. “The man died way too young. Then there’s your daddy Jake’s death and Justin so sure somebody killed him. After a while you get so you don’t feel sorry for yourself so much as you just get plain mad at the world. That’s what I’m feeling right now . . . so gosh darned mad.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and sat up even straighter. “So I’m saying the two of us can take on anything. We got you with your college smarts and me with my people smarts. Good combination, I’d say, for finding a murderer.”

She glanced over, catching the big grin on my face. For maybe the first time, I had a true picture of the young woman behind the tired, older face. I recognized this different woman, one who could be a friend, not only a grandmother. I reached over and squeezed her hand.

“So, to Rancho Conway?”

Miss Amelia nodded. “Giddy up,” she said. “Time’s a wastin’.”

• • •

I turned in under the huge, square sign spelling
RANCHO CONWAY
and slowed to drive up the long paved road to the Conway house, bigger than our house. Actually bigger than anybody’s house. A real showplace. Like something straight out of the English countryside. Not exactly Texas, but surrounded with old pecan trees, branches lazily swaying in the hot afternoon breeze.

There was a white swing on the lawn and white wicker rockers with bright chintz cushions. This part of what they’d done with the place looked Southern, a place for ladies in long dresses and big bonnets to gather of a hot afternoon and sip their mint juleps while gossiping about their neighbors and declaring they hoped Davy Crockett was doing all right for himself over there at that Alamo.

The neatly trimmed lawn swept around the house and down toward the Colorado on one side, back to brand-new barns on the other.

I rang the bell, listening to a big gong sound inside the house. Chastity answered the door looking from me to Miss Amelia as if bowled over at the sight of us.

“Well, well, well. What do you know? I never expected Blanchards at my door this morning.”

She made it sound as if Miss Amelia and I were a pair of twos in a high-stakes poker game, but then I wasn’t happy either, coming here.

She stepped back and gestured grandly, inviting us into the high-ceilinged front hall with a huge crystal chandelier overhead.

“Harry’s out. You know, business, business, business. But why am I tellin’ Blanchards about that? You folks been here how long? Hundred years or so? Seen all kinds of things come and go, I’ll bet. Like Harry says, if it ain’t drought, it’s scab or some other leaf-browning thing.”

“That’s pecan ranching, Chastity.” Miss Amelia smiled and tipped her head to one side as she stepped across the grand foyer, in a hurry to get on about our business. She held her hands together at her chest, giving the impression of a spritely old lady just dying to talk ranching with this woman who came from who knew where . . . but with so much on her mind . . .

“Well, don’t I know it?” Chastity threw her hands in the air as she led us from the white-tiled front hall into a cold and darkly paneled living room with the windows firmly shut and covered by gold drapes. Lights burned everywhere and air-conditioned air blew hard enough to ruffle the frilly doilies on every table. “Now we got us this drought. Harry’s so worried. If we don’t get rain soon . . .”

She interrupted herself to see to her hostess duties. “You two have a seat here and I’ll go get Bessie to bring us some sweet tea . . .” She turned in her high-heeled, nail-studded boots, to make her way out to the kitchen. “It’s about time the three of us sat down and had us a good chat.”

“Bless your heart, Chastity,” she called after the woman. “Me and Lindy don’t need a single thing. We just came to take a look through Amos’s possessions. I’m still so distraught . . .”

Miss Amelia put a hand up, toward the direction of her forehead, then stopped and let the hand fall languidly to her side. “I’m sure you understand, Chastity. Some other day we’ll drop by and spend hours chitchattin’ . . .”

“Well, I don’t know.” The woman hesitated. “Harry’s not here. Maybe I shouldn’t let you go back there. It’s out in the big barn. That’s where he stayed. I woulda had him here in the house but Harry thought . . . well, since Amos was just a worker . . .”

I heard a rumble starting in Miss Amelia’s throat, and I hurried to step in. “Still, the man’s our kin.” I pulled out my best drawl. “You understand. Me and my meemaw here, why, all we want to do is see where our Amos was livin’ here at the last.”

Chastity stayed confused a minute more, before giving in. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with you two going out there. Family’s something I understand, coming from a fine Texas family myself. If y’all just follow me . . .”

We were off, out through the large, unused kitchen, where a uniformed woman stood watching TV, and out the back door into heat like liquid fuel. Once we were through the clipped-short grass of a yard filled with lounges and tiny white tables, and out under the tall trees, Miss Amelia gave a sigh of relief, which I understood.

The Conways’ barns were bigger than ours, and newer, and surprisingly empty. Even off-season, when we weren’t packing, our barns were filled with mowers and sprayers and tractors and workers preparing for the picking and packing and shipping season in November. Here, Harry’s pecan bins looked almost untouched. All neatly lined in rows, the wood pale and unused.

“Wow.” I couldn’t help myself.

Chastity preened at what she took to be a compliment. “Whole place is like that. Harry just came in and tore down all that old stuff. Took him one winter to go through everything. Now he’s got the heavy equipment back in the old barn. Wants to keep this one so visitors can see the kind of clean operation he’s running. A really tight ship. Not like some. You know.” She smirked. “These old ranches with everything looking so rundown and all.”

I watched Miss Amelia, one of those “old” ranchers herself, bite her tongue.

“Well, you’ve got a nice clean business going,” I said. “I suppose you’ll be packing this year. Trees okay?”

Chastity shrugged. “Well, of course they are. But that’s Harry’s department. I keep my hands off the nuts. I’m more interested in our new pavilion. You gotta come see it. I’ll be handling the social side of things. You know, like your Bethany does. Weddings and such. Then we’re thinking of opening a store of our own just like yours only right down by the road, not in town. We won’t be in competition with you folks, or anything like that.”

She stopped talking and turned her large, black-ringed eyes to us. “Not that I’d be much competition for you all anyway. Why, you’re known just everywhere in Texas. I mentioned your name once at a big ‘do’ in Houston and a man said he heard good things about you.”

“Could we see Amos’s . . .” I decided I’d better break in or we’d be standing there in that big empty building forever. “We’ve got so much to do today . . .”

“I heard. Me and Harry were thunderstruck. The sheriff went ahead and arrested Justin! Now what led the man to do a thing like that? You got any idea?”

She peered closely at me.

“Not a clue. Probably be just a short time. Ben Fordyce is working on it. Some mix-up. The sheriff’s got to do what he’s got to do, but he made a mistake. It’ll all be straightened out soon. Now . . .” I looked around like Amos’s room was going to appear out of nowhere.

“Well, me and Harry said, when we heard, what a shame it is. And we’re both just hoping against hope he didn’t really do what people are sayin’ he did.” She stopped to give me a look then stepped over very close. “Harry was saying . . . about Ben Fordyce. You’d better watch ’im. Got a kind of past with Amos himself, is what we heard.”

Miss Amelia moved up beside me. I recognized the icy smile and stayed back, out of her way. “Can we please see Amos’s room?” she asked.