A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) (7 page)

Justin said nothing. He eyed first one of the officers and then the other. He came to Hunter last. When he spoke, disappointment was thick in his voice. “Never thought we’d come to this, Hunter. We been friends since we were little. Now, you turning like this . . .”

Hunter shook his head. “I’m no enemy to the Blanchards,” he said. “And you know I will never turn”—he looked around at me—“on any of your family. We’ll get the truth. You all just hang in there and let us do our job.”

On his way out the door, Hunter turned to me a last time. “Get somebody to protect your greenhouse, Lindy. You’ve got those seedlings that whoever did this didn’t get to. Better have Martin Sanchez put a man on watch.”

“They’ve got my best trees, Hunter. The rest don’t mean a whole lot.”

“Somebody murdered a man. Maybe it was all to get those trees, Lindy. I’d say everybody in this house better be careful from here on in.”

I nodded. Hunter was right. It seemed we were all targets in one way or the other.

When the police left, the house around us seemed emptier
than it had ever been. Empty and unfriendly. We sat huddled in the living room, wrapped in little bubbles of misery, each with no hope of tomorrow being any better than today.

It felt like the middle of the night, but when I checked, my watch said ten twenty-five. I thought it had stopped, or time had stopped. All that had happened to us, changed our lives—in the space of a few short hours.

Miss Amelia started fussing about no supper though everybody swore they couldn’t eat a thing. True to who she was, my grandmother said that was nonsense and got up to go see what she could rustle up in the kitchen. Mama and Bethany followed, offering help, maybe needing to do something other than sit there feeling bad. It was kind of like I felt, my hands between my knees, my face certainly set and angry. I was unable to move or think of a way to stop everything from happening.

Lamps burned low on the tables around the room. They cast trembling shadows on the ceiling. Justin and I sat across from each other, with me facing the big windows, where the black velvet of a Texas spring night beyond mirrored me and my brother and our misery.

We said nothing at first, letting the turmoil and anger and sorrow—all the emotions we’d been feeling—settle.

“The sheriff’s got his mind made up. You know that, don’t you, Lindy?” Justin looked up at me finally.

All I could do was shake my head. The weight I felt inside my chest was a mix of disappointment and fear and uncertainty. Might as well say our world was ending. Murder changed everything. For a split second, even I’d wondered if Justin caught Amos out there and flew into a killing rage. Maybe, deep inside, he thought the same about me. And who knew? If I’d come in on Amos destroying my trees, and another ax or hatchet had been around . . .

But damn it, I told myself. Not one of my plant stakes.

“What can we do?” I turned to Justin.

“All I know is that Higsby is looking straight at this house for his killer. Nowhere else. A lot easier to come after a Blanchard.”

“We don’t have the resources the police have. And, Justin, it could be dangerous. Some lunatic—”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got the feeling the sheriff’s coming after me. Something about when Hunter came in that last time. I think they found something else . . .”

“What was there to find? You didn’t—”

“Geez, Lindy.” Disappointment. I shrugged.

“What I’m saying is that we know people. We know our story inside out. It’s not one of us, so who could it be? What we’ve got to find out is who in town hated Uncle Amos more than we did. Then we’ve got to look at where he’s been for the last two years. One thing Uncle Amos did really well was make enemies wherever he went.”

I hated to say what I was going to say. “There’s Martin. After Amos broke up with Jessie, and that woman went into the library and told Jessie she was pregnant by him, I don’t think anybody hated Amos more than Martin did. Cheating on his only daughter like that.”

“You saw Martin on the mower this afternoon.”

I nodded. “But he could have done it before. If he saw Amos in my grove . . . well . . . you know how Martin feels about all of us. Daddy gave him a job to begin with and then made him foreman. He’d do anything . . . I swear it.”

He shook his head. “Not Martin.”

He added. “Gotta be somebody. You know I still don’t believe that ‘accident’ stuff about Daddy. Never will. Turn a mower over—okay. But fall under the blades, get that many cuts to his spine?” He shrugged. “First place, Daddy wasn’t dumb. He knew how to throw his body out of the way. Second—anybody ever check the cuts? See for sure a mower blade did the damage? Look at it that way, two Blanchards are dead.”

“It was an accident,” I said again, as I’d said so many times over the last two years.

“Lindy, you live with your head in those trees of yours. Life’s not what you think it is. There are people out there who would kill for a few dollars. Maybe kill for a few hundred bucks.”

“You mean, like a hired killer?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

I wasn’t going there with him, like walking into a dark alley. I knew enough to let him alone once he turned back into his old, simmering hatred. He’d calm down, just needed time.

After a long, sad five minutes, I said, “I say we talk to people like Ethelred Tomroy. If anybody knows what’s been going on in Riverville, it’s Ethelred. Maybe Amos said something to somebody, or fought with somebody. She’ll know.”

“And Harry Conway—we gotta talk to him and Chastity. Amos had been livin’ there for the last couple of weeks. And the twins out at the Chauncey ranch. Amos worked for them before he left town, after the big blowup the night of Daddy’s funeral. I think Mama called and asked them to give him a job and keep an eye on him. Wouldn’t put it past her. Maybe the girls would know where he went when he left town. Could be it’s part of that—making enemies in some new place and they followed him back here.”

“And I’ve got those five trees of mine to think about. The sheriff said he’d better not find them on our property—make it look even worse for us. Like I couldn’t stand to kill off all my stock. Like we’re in this together.

“What I was trying to say,” I forged on. “That other woman was from over at the Barking Coyote Saloon. There was that boyfriend she threw over, hoping to get her nails into a Blanchard. Remember? He came to the house that one time, looking for Amos.”

Justin nodded. “Somebody else who wouldn’t want to see Amos back in town.”

“The way I see it, Justin, is if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, and it sure wasn’t Mama, then we gotta start looking into Amos’s past and where he’s been these last two years, just like you said.”

“I know the sheriff’s already got somebody going through his room at the Conways’.”

“We should be looking, too.”

“They’ll get everything.”

“What if there’s something they won’t recognize as being a part of Uncle Amos’s death?’

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. A book. A letter. Who knows? I think we should get over there and look for ourselves. Maybe we’d connect it up.”

There wasn’t much more to say. The thinking hard felt good. At least a path to take that didn’t lead us straight to jail.

When the doorbell rang, I got up reluctantly. The last thing I wanted was any more company that night. Well, maybe not the last thing. Hunter Austen, standing on the porch, a laptop computer in his hands, was even worse.

“Lindy.” Austen tipped his bare head. “We picked up your laptop at the Nut House. It’s been dusted for fingerprints. Need you to give us your fingerprints in the morning. For comparison. Tech says looks like only one set, though. A few are smudged. Probably all yours.” He shuffled his feet uncomfortably, then handed me the MacBook. “Morning’s soon enough.”

He hesitated. “I wanted to come back anyway, to talk to you. I . . .”

I opened the door wider. Without smiling, I took the laptop from him and nodded for him to come on in. He stepped into the foyer, looked over at Justin, tipped his head, then bent low to whisper toward me. “Could we talk somewhere . . .”

“I don’t think so, Hunter,” I said. “Your boss thinks one of us did that to Amos, and we know we didn’t. So that kind of leaves us on very different sides of this fence.”

He shook his head hard. “You know I don’t believe what the sheriff’s thinking. That’s one of the reasons I came back tonight. Just wanted you to know I won’t let anything happen to you. I asked to be put on this case full-time and the sheriff gave me the go-ahead. He sat me down first. He knows . . . um . . . what good friends we are. I told him I didn’t think any of you Blanchards had anything to do with this but that I’d look at the facts just the way things played out.” He shuffled his feet on the polished tile of the foyer. “I just wanted you to know.”

Justin got up slowly from the small sofa where he’d been sitting and made his way over to lean against the archway. “I don’t think we’ve got any options here, Hunter. In a way, we’re enemies until this thing is settled.”

“I’m not your enemy, Justin. Never will be. You know that.”

“That’s what I always thought.”

“Well, you can keep thinkin’ it. I swear, I’m going after who did this . . .”

Justin nodded. “Just to let you know—so are we. There’s no chance I’m sitting still and waiting to go to jail for something I didn’t do, though I’m still not sorry somebody did him in.”

“Shouldn’t talk that way . . . folks’ll think—”

“Yeah, well, Hunter, that’s where you and I are different. I don’t care what folks think. I care about what really happened, and about whose got it in for my family.”

Hunter frowned. “What do you mean, ‘got it in for’ your family? I don’t see—”

“I know you don’t. That’s what worries me. I see somebody coming after Lindy’s work. Then I see them killing a man who hates all of us, who’s let it be known for years what he thinks of us. And who we hated, just as bad, right back. No secrets about the Blanchards in Riverville.”

“I gotta work with what is.”

Justin pulled in a deep breath. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Hunter put his head down. “I can’t say I’ll work with you, but I won’t work against you.”

He turned directly to face me. “This is murder, Lindy. Whoever did this won’t stop at doing it again. If you get in his way . . .”

“I don’t have a choice. Neither does Justin.”

“Just give me your promise—don’t get yourselves in so deep you’re in trouble.”

“We’ll see,” Justin said. “We’ll be protecting our family first. Whatever that takes. But . . .” He looked hard at me, a slow kind of worry spreading into his eyes. “If it appears like we’re on to something we can’t handle, or if we need your help, I promise you, Hunter, we’ll come to you.”

Hunter was gone with only a single nod. Our roles in Amos Blanchard’s murder were clear-cut now. Maybe our goal was the same, but it sure seemed the paths we had to take would be different.

We picked at platters of scrambled eggs and ham and
thick toast, which Miss Amelia had set on the round table. Justin washed his eggs down with a very small shot of Garrison Brothers Texas Straight Bourbon Whiskey. I joined him, thinking if there ever was a time for courage in a bottle, this was it.

“Just for keepin’ spirits up,” Miss Amelia, who didn’t believe in hard liquor—usually—had said when she set the bottle down in the middle of the table.

My trouble was whiskey made me sleepy, which I was thinking might be a good thing. I was staying the night in my old room, not willing to go back to the Nut House by myself, at least not in the dark. I started to get up, telling myself how tired I was and how I’d probably need a lot of strength for the morning, when another sharp ring of the doorbell sounded from the front hall.

Bethany, sitting across the table from me, tapping furiously at her computer, dropped her head lower and ignored the bell.

Justin wrote on sheet after sheet of a pad of paper as he shoveled food into his mouth, took small sips of the Garrison Brothers, and went on as if the doorbell didn’t exist.

I’d logged on to the computer Hunter’d brought from my apartment with high hopes that all my files would be there. But there was nothing. I’d figured: two computers, backup hard copies, backup disks—that would handle any problem. What did I have to worry about?

Now I knew and felt more than bad. A totally blank screen. Not a single icon.

And I couldn’t tell anybody. I looked around at the worried faces of my family and knew I had to keep this new disaster to myself.

I didn’t want to register the sound of a bell ringing either. Not at eleven thirty at night. Maybe some reporter. We’d been getting phone calls all evening from newspapers as far away as Dallas. So we were going to be famous all over Texas. Us and the Alamo, I thought.

Perfectly rotten day and evening . . . and future.

And about to get worse.

Miss Amelia, who’d gone to answer the door, came back with her face a mass of warning smiles, leading the couple behind her, preceded by an ill wind of overpowering perfume and shaving lotion.

Chastity Conway burst into the kitchen with her hands in the air, shaking them like a sinner in church. Her bright red hair was electrified, a mass of charged fuses. The red cowgirl boots she wore tap, tap, tapped across the tile floor. At the table she bent forward and threw her arms around Mama, grabbing her from behind, pulling my surprised mother back into a generous pair of bosoms and hugging her. Mama’s eyes got huge. She held herself still until the hold on her head was loosened.

“Lord! Lord! Lord!” Chastity wrung her hands together. “Me and Harry know it’s late, but we couldn’t stay away. Not when our good neighbors are in trouble like you people are. Nope, couldn’t just sit there in that big house of ours and think about all of you over here. Miserable. Saw your lights and figured we’d come on over and tell you . . .”

She smiled a wide, bright smile at each of us around the table. Red lips. Red cheeks. Red, dangling earrings. She jingled and she swished—her stiff cowgirl skirt brushing behind our chairs. Chastity was colorful and loud and smelled good.

“Well, if there’s anything me and Harry can do . . .”

She reached a hand with long red nails around and pulled Harry up to stand at the table beside her. He’d been hanging back in the middle of the room, thumbs stuck in the wide leather belt he wore with a buckle on it the size of Houston. He nodded to each of us around the table. “Evening,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry to come over so late, but it’s like Chastity says. Just couldn’t sit there and not be neighborly enough to offer a hand. Whatever y’all need.”

Something about Harry’s “y’all” always made my scalp itch. Harry and Chastity had come to Riverville only seven years before from someplace in the Midwest. They bought the neglected ranch next to ours, tore down the old ranch house, and built something that looked like a manor house: big stones and blocks of granite. People in town forgave them their otherness, though, when they got the pecan groves going again. My daddy was the one who got them into the Pecan Co-op and introduced them around. That made all Blanchards friends with the Conways—like it or not.

“This is just awful! Awful! Awful! Awful!” Chastity collapsed into an empty chair. “Our place is crawling with cops. Amos dead! Why, I can’t bring myself to believe it. And right out there in your greenhouse, Lindy! Ain’t this the most awful thing? And Harry here . . .”

The thing was, I liked Harry Conway. He’d stepped in after Daddy died, offering any help we needed out in the groves. He had extra men, he’d said. Even offered to fill in over at the co-op. Daddy’d been president and got Harry nominated to the board. He was there when we needed him.

I never warmed to Chastity though there wasn’t anything about her I could point to as annoying—unless it was the phony cowgirl image, or that cloud of perfume she went around in—like Pig-Pen’s cloud in the Peanuts comic strip. Or maybe because she tried too hard and the one thing Texans didn’t care for was people pushing themselves forward the way she did.

Harry came over to put his hands on my shoulders and hug me. Next he moved to Bethany, who tried to pull away. Then it was Mama, then Justin. He turned to grab Miss Amelia but she’d been smart enough to arm herself with a tray of sweet teas.

“None for me, Miss Amelia.” Harry threw his hands in the air. “Be up all night as it is. Me and Chastity talking about getting a new burglar alarm. After this, why, it seems none of us are safe in our beds.”

“Harry’s just been a wreck since he heard.” Chastity took a glass of tea as she assured us again what a wreck Harry was. “I mean, if he didn’t take in Amos like that, well, maybe Amos wouldn’t’ve hung around Riverville and maybe he’d still be alive.”

Harry sat down between Justin and me. “Hope y’all know I only did it to keep him out of your hair.” He turned a worried face to Mama. “Thought I was helping.”

Mama smiled a smile that fell somewhere between a grimace and a yawn.

“For Christmas’ sakes, Lindy.” Chastity wriggled in her seat, turning to me. “Heard about your trees. All that work up in smoke. Well, you never know . . .” She leaned across Mama and patted my knee. “Heard they took off with five of ’em trees. That right?”

I nodded, miserable again at the thought of my trees in enemy hands.

“Why’d anybody do such a thing? You got any idea? Seems kind of . . . odd.”

“Not the only thing odd,” Justin muttered, reaching the very limit of his patience.

“What I’m saying is, why take any of ’em?” She turned back to me. “Think your trees got a chance of living? Special, is what I heard. Like you was coming up with something new any rancher would give her eyeteeth to have. Lucky you . . . but, oh my, now they’re gone.”

Bethany spoke up. “Sheriff says if he finds Lindy’s trees around here, it’ll look even more like one of us did that awful thing to Uncle Amos.” She shuddered.

“If they get the right water and whatever it is you give them, maybe they’ll still be okay when they catch this man,” Harry said.

I sighed. “Maybe.”

“Hope they get who did this pretty fast,” Harry said. “By tomorrow morning Riverville’s gonna be up in arms.”

“Me, too,” Chastity spouted, flouncing in her chair again, the smell of her mega-strength perfume wafting around the table. “That’s just how I feel. Murder, right next door to us. Maybe somebody’s got it in for all us ranchers. Harry, here, says there’s nothing to worry about but you know Harry. Ain’t been around Texas that long.” She poked at that enormous pile of unmoving hair. “’Course, Amos coulda brought this back with him from wherever it was he went away to. Don’t need to tell you folks about Amos’s temper.”

Bethany looked up from her laptop, blond hair springing out into a curly halo. “I’m sure hopin’ the news doesn’t travel all the way to Houston.”

“What’s going on in Houston, hon?” Chastity asked.

“I’ve got a huge wedding planned for here. Two weeks. Don’t want him canceling on me.”

“Who you got, honey?” Chastity asked, giving Bethany a sweet smile.

Bethany hesitated. She knew better than to give out too much. Though the Conways were good family friends, Chastity was putting up an event tent of her own and they’d soon be competitors. Beth, the youngest in our family, was proud of the niche she was carving out—big, expensive weddings and maybe a few political events. I watched her figure the angles and then smile sweetly at Chastity, as if she didn’t understand the question.

“Somebody from around here?” Chastity pushed.

Bethany shook her head.

“How many you got comin’?” Chastity zeroed in.

“Not many.”

“You getting doves and all that stuff? I’m getting doves for my weddings. I should be up and running by next week. You need to move your wedding ’cause of this murder, don’t forget about my place.”

“Things’ll be fine by then. And yes, Chastity, I am getting doves and the biggest cake ever. My newscaster wants the best of everything.”

“Newscaster?” Chastity’s eyes lit up. “From Houston? Must be important.”

Bethany shrugged, hugging her secrets to herself, though her face lighted briefly at the thought of the doves she had already ordered, and the cake looking like that TV station in Houston. And many, many flowers.

“Well, I truly hope he don’t cancel on you. You call ’im since this happened? Saw it on the eleven o’clock news. As I say, Bethany, you can always send ’im over to me, it comes to that. I mean, if the couple don’t like the idea of a murder right where they’re getting married.”

Bethany bit down on her bottom lip. She looked to Miss Amelia for help.

“I don’t think Bethany’s up to talking business right now, Chastity.” Miss Amelia cleared her throat and snatched Chastity’s tea glass from the table. She was giving the signal it was time to leave.

“Well,” Chastity finally said as Miss Amelia stood at the middle of the room, waiting to usher them out. “Me and Harry didn’t come over here to add to your family’s misery. Last thing we want is more strain on you. I can see yer all tired out. Especially you, Miss Amelia. If I was you, I’d close that Nut House down tight ’til this was all over. How much can a woman of your years be expected to take, I’d like to know?”

Miss Amelia’s eyes went dark, almost like shutters coming down. I knew that face and squirmed just seeing it come over her. She drew her mouth into a tight line. “Well, bless yer heart for worrying about me, Chastity. But I’m doing just fine.”

I knew Meemaw’s “Well, bless yer heart.” Four little words that could barely hide the knife of steel at their center. A few more minutes of Chastity and my grandmother was going to have steam coming out of her ears.

I stood before my grandmother went after the woman and “snatched her bald-headed,” as Meemaw liked to warn, when her patience was tried beyond her ability to maintain the cool look she turned on most people. “I’ll say good night,” I said. “It’s been a rough day. I’m sure you and Chastity understand . . .”

I waited expectantly in the archway leading to the living room and out the front door.

“Sure thing.” Harry motioned for Chastity to get moving. “Not a night for chitchatting anyway.”

“Remember, Bethany.” Chastity leaned back from the doorway. “You need to send your wedding to me, I’ll be ready. Gettin’ my flyers printed now. Gonna be a beautiful place. Not that yers isn’t. Just that mine’s newer, you know.”

Bethany didn’t look up, just bit down hard on her full bottom lip. Justin was on his feet, pushed beyond his endurance. “Ya don’t mind, we gotta get to bed,” he said.

“And thanks for coming over,” Miss Amelia threw in for good measure as she put a hand on Chastity’s back and steered her down the hall.

They were gone. We listened for the outer door to close, then all sighed our gratitude.

Miss Amelia finally rubbed at her nose with a finger. “I think Chastity’s lost her sense of smell. All that perfume. Skunks can’t smell themselves either. You know that?”

She looked around the table, from one to the other of us, as we burst into laughter.

“That’s not true, Meemaw,” I said when I could talk. “Skunks hate the smell of skunk oil.”

“Well”—she waved a dismissive hand in the air—“you take my point.”