"Oh, thank you," I gushed. Should I get her opinion on Craig Litchfield's mode of stealing clients? No: what I really needed to know had to do with a murder, not any kind of theft. "Listen, Sylvia, I called for some historical background, if you don't mind. I'm doing catering out at the Merciful Migrations cabin today. I've become so fascinated with Charlie Smythe," I raved as Tom rolled his eyes, "I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about him. Do you have time for that?"
"Well. I suppose. Of course, I'm always glad when Aspen Meadow people want to know their roots. It certainly is more important than adding extra lanes to the highway, which seems to be the main area of interest anymore. What do you want to know about Charlie?"
"Everything," I said as I hit buttons on my espresso machine to fuel myself with more caffeine.
"I presume you know that Charlie Smythe was the grandfather to Leah Smythe and Weezie Smythe Harrington, yes?" When I mm-hmmed, she went on: "Charlie Smythe settled at the cabin after the War Between the States, which is what he called it, as a member of the losing side. Like a lot of restless army men, Charlie came west, but only after he'd scammed ten thousand dollars off his aunt in Kentucky. Ten thousand was big money in 1865, my dear." Julian was peeling kiwi. Tom dumped the sun-yellow pineapple chunks into the big blue bowl we were using. He picked up a cantaloupe and began slicing off the ribbed skin. I reached for the bananas. "He stole ten thousand from his aunt? The creep."
"Yes, I'm sorry to say, and the story is that the poor woman died of grief. And Charlie was no one-time scam artist. He became addicted to thievery. It kept life interesting, I suppose." She sighed deeply, as if she were discussing a piece of lovely china that had been carelessly broken.
"Back up, Sylvia, okay?" I sipped the foam from the espresso. "What about this aunt? She had ten thousand dollars in cash?"
"Oh, no," Sylvia said sternly, as if I'd flunked a history class. "She'd buried a strongbox of gold coins before the war, but after Appomattox she was afraid the victorious Yankees would find them. Charlie promised to deposit the coins in a bank, and that was the last anyone in Kentucky saw of him! Next thing you know, it's 1866 and Charlie and his wife, Winnie - grandmother to the two Smythe girls - are buying land in Colorado with a whole lot of gold coins. They purchased a thousand acres in Aspen Meadow and twenty-seven hundred in Blue Spruce. Wait a moment while I pour myself some tea would you?"
"Sure." I was the last one to deny folks caffeine.
"Where was I?" she asked a moment later. "Oh, yes, Charlie's land. The Aspen Meadow acreage was to be an investment. The Blue Spruce land was where Charlie was going to have his ranch and his timber business, according to his boasts. He cut down trees, built the cabin, and got bored. So he abandoned Winnie and their small son Vic, the story goes. Charlie turned to crime, alas. He stole horses in the early years, then robbed stagecoaches in the later ones. He ended up trying to rob a bank. That's how he was caught, in the end. He was in his sixties, if you can imagine. And then he died," she concluded sadly, "at the age of seventy, in Leavenworth, during the flu epidemic of 1918."
Puzzled, I stopped slicing. Something wasn't right. "In the letter to his wife, he waxes euphoric about the rural life they shared."
"You don't need to tell me the contents of that letter, Goldy. Perhaps he honestly repented, and missed his family. Prison does that sometimes. Now I must go."
Prison brings repentance? I wondered as I replaced the receiver. I thought of The Jerk, and shook my head.
"So what's the deal?" Julian asked impatiently, eyeing the clock. We had a little over an hour before we needed to be at the cabin. As I was giving the two of them a summary of what Sylvia had just told me, the doorbell rang.
It was Sergeant Boyd, a half hour early, no less. "Escort service," he said cheerily when I opened the door. His black crew cut stood up in short, clean spikes. He was wearing a white shirt and dark pants. A white apron hugged his huge belly.
"Nice getup, Sergeant."
"We aim to please, ma'am."
With assurances from Tom that he would put in the first batch of kitchen Windows in our absence, we packed up the foodstuffs for coffee break and lunch - formerly Weezie's birthday dinner - and took off. I had written refund checks for Weezie and Edna; when I dropped them into a mailbox on Main Street, I murmured a prayer for that elusive psychological phenomenon, perspective.
A breeze stirred the trees as Boyd, Julian, and I headed out to Blue Spruce in my van. The air was balmy, the sky porcelain blue. On the far mountains, a breath of early autumn gold stained the swaths of aspen trees. Time to start over, I told myself.
I asked Boyd if he could tell me anything else about the department's interview With the cabdriver who'd brought Andre to the shoot Monday morning. Boyd replied that he'd told Tom all there was to tell. He himself had never officially been on this case. If he had, he wouldn't be able to come out to help today. Under- cover, more or less, he concluded solemnly, so that no one recognized him. Well, great, I thought as I frowned and tried to process what Sylvia had told me.
Charlie Smythe built the cabin and got bored... became a thief; died in Leavenworth.... But what could any of this have to do with Gerald Eliot, really? How could it affect what Rustine had told us, that weapon, that unknown something Gerald had found that was going to make him rich? What had happened to the land and the cabin after Charlie Smythe died, before Leah and Weezie inherited it? And what did any of this have to do with Andr‚ burning himself, overdosing on his medication, and dying of hypotension? As we pulled up to the dirt road to the cabin, I realized I had no more clue to what was going on than I'd had when I'd broken into the Homestead yesterday. So much for amateur sleuths. But I was not going to give up. I was going to be in the cabin where Andr‚ died, and I was going to poke around and ask some questions. Even if I had to be obnoxious or bribe people with cake. Preferably the latter.
At the gate, Rufus Driggle greeted us with a wave. He was wearing worn cowboy boots, torn jeans, and a misbuttoned red-checkered shirt. A jaunty scarlet bandanna was tied around his neck. It didn't match his scruffy red beard. He peered into the van.
"I see you have a new helper."
"Boyd the Baker," the fat sergeant replied matter-of-factly. Julian suppressed laughter. "At your service."
"Rufus?" I asked sweetly when he'd closed the gate and squeezed into the van, "when we finish up the coffee break, could we chat for a few minutes? I'm looking for people to taste some poppy seed cake I made for another assignment."
His cheeks flooded with color. "Uh, sure. I love poppy seed cake."
We parked in the lot, lifted the first of our boxes, and headed past the elephant-shaped boulder, across the rushing creek, and up the stone steps to the cabin. As he heaved up one of the boxes, Rufus informed us that only two models would be working that day. Neither had arrived yet. The independent contractors - a stylist and hair and makeup people - were already in place. This was good news. If we were lucky, Rufus went on, the day's shoot should end soon after lunch. I smiled, thanked him, and told him not to forget about being a taste-tester.
While Boyd and Julian unloaded supplies, I made a large pot of coffee, set out sugar and cream, and eyed the uneven, dusty wooden floor. This, presumably, was where Andr‚ had clutched his failing heart one last time, and fallen. There was no blood or other sign of what had happened. I opened all the old wooden drawers and cabinets: they scraped, stuck, and yielded nothing more than rusted spatulas, broken knives, mismatched measuring cups, and a few dented pans. Next I eyed the stove: it ran off a propane tank, as was common in the mountains. The burners all faithfully produced circles of knobby blue flames. What had burned Andr‚? I didn't have a clue. Finally, I examined the sink and the wall above it. I ran my fingers over the rough edges of glue and plywood, Gerald Eliot's legacy of yet another unfinished job. Something looked different about the plywood from the time we'd catered here before....
The sudden commanding voice of Hanna Klapper made me jump. "Looking for something?"
I turned. Carrying a black briefcase, Hanna was a vision in black: T-shirt, jeans, bandanna, and black tooled cowboy boots. The Pony Express meets Polo, at a funeral parlor, Only Hanna wasn't in mourning; she was being chic. With her free hand, she hitched precision-cut dark hair behind one ear. I said, "No, just looking at the mess. Gerald Eliot worked for me, too."
"Well, then. You must be very familiar with his inability to get a job done!" Her voice was as severely clipped as her hair. I sighed: No matter what Hanna said to me, even when she was trying to be jovial, I felt an edge of criticism. It wasn't my fault I'd hired Gerald, was it? Hanna went on: "I need to talk to you about the schedule for the day."
"Sure. How about some coffee? I brought you a cup and saucer." Hanna accepted a china cup of coffee - with a matching saucer I had brought specially for her, since I remembered from my docent days that she would decline any hot drink brought to her in a mug - and ladled in sugar, then poured in cream. "Hanna? Before we get into the schedule, there's something I just have to ask you, I mean if you don't mind. It's sort of in the social life department."
Her facial expression became coy. "Well, Goldy, what kind of problem are you having? I am probably not the one who can help."
"Well, really, it's about Gerald Eliot," I said hastily, as I got out the buttermilk and flour mixtures for the girdle cakes. "Did Leah really fire him for having an affair with one of the models? You see, my assistant, Julian Teller, is interested in one of the young women, and I didn't want Julian to get into trouble..." I let my voice trail off Hanna sighed. "Yes, that is why he was fired. He was a lustful, secretive man. Of course, he did not confide in me." She put down her coffee and swung her briefcase up to the counter. I was surprised to see strong, rippling muscles in her arms, quite a different appearance from her modest blouse-of-a-pioneer-woman look during her time at the Homestead. "I tried to be his friend, which is what I told the police. But I think I made him nervous. You know, there are some people you can joke with, some you cannot."
"Ah," I said, trying to imagine anyone who could joke with Hanna. "How far did he get before he was fired? And what was he doing with this wall, anyway?" I pointed to the plywood.
She motioned to her cup, which meant I was supposed to pour more coffee into it, which I did. She sipped some of her drink, then clinked the cup down in the saucer. "Just outside where that window was situated, there used to be a small stand of pine trees that obscured the view of the mountains. In the late seventies, the pine beetles destroyed them. So Leah had the trees taken out. Then Bobby Whitaker had the bright idea to put in large windows here, so a person in the kitchen could see the mountains. Leah hired Gerald to tear out the wall and put in windows. But he was fired once he'd torn down the wall."
I fingered the edges of the wood, where dried glue protruded roughly from the edge next to the old plastered wall. "Why was the old wall plastered instead of being made of logs?"
She sighed impatiently. "Don't you remember the exhibit we had on log cabins at the museum?" I shook my head. She said, "It's all that butter clogging up your mind, Goldy!" I smiled brightly as she continued: "These old cabins are just made of trees, laid on their sides, stacked, and plastered. Inside the cabin, for some living areas such as the kitchen, the early builders would cover the logs with homemade two-by-fours. Then they put up diagonallath strips, and covered the strips with three coats of plaster. Eliot pulled it all out. He made a terrible mess." She touched her temple as if the thought of Gerald Eliot had brought on a sudden headache.
"A terrible mess," I repeated, staring at the plywood. Finally I saw what I seemed not to have noticed the week before. Or had something changed since then? Along the corner nearest the stove, the wood was compressed and broken, as if Gerald had glued the plywood over the opening, then decided to pry it open to do something else. Near the corner, he'd hammered in a finishing nail.
"What happened here?" I asked. "It's like he glued the plywood in place, then decided to move it."
Hanna peered at the place I was indicating. "I don't know what stage of construction Gerald was in when he was fired," she said, "and I told the police that." She waved her cup dismissively. "Gerald became secretive after he found what Leah's grandfather hid in the wall."
"What?"
"Oh, yes," said Hanna calmly. "One day I was out here with Ian and Leah, planning this shoot. Gerald found the gun that Charlie Smythe had hidden in the wall before he put up the lath strips and coated them with plaster."
"Gerald pulled out a hidden gun?" I asked, nonplussed.
Hanna's fingers waggled at the wall. "In there. Can you imagine? How was he going to get a weapon out quickly, if he actually needed it to protect his family?"
Something flickered in Hanna's dark eyes. "It took Gerald a week of destruction just to find that antique rifle. Although I was impressed, of course, that that old criminal Charlie Smythe had taken such care to wrap his rifle so well in oilcloth. It was ready to go out and shoot somebody with! I mean, if that's what you wanted to do."
