Baylin House (Cassandra Crowley Mystery) (27 page)

After breakfast Saturday morning, Cassie went to a bookstore
near the campus and picked up a South Texas map that included Victoria County.

Then she stopped at Cordell Tire Co. on Bayside Boulevard to
verify the condition of her tires, just to be safe.

Three hours later she turned off a paved county road onto
shell-gravel, and followed the gritty path nearly a quarter mile around a grove
of trees with tall canopies and dried up Spanish moss waving in the breeze.

At the final bend, she could see what looked like a restored
homestead from an old Civil War movie. The House and barn were plank sided,
silver with age and blackened in the grooves. Between the buildings was rich
green grass shaded by three large trees.

Sydney sat in an oversize wicker chair at the far end of a
picnic table, propped in a valley of pillows. Her right leg, cast from thigh to
heel, rested on a plastic patio chair. Her right arm, supported on yet another
pillow, was wrapped in white gauze. She waved with her free arm and pointed to
a wide rectangle of gravel next to a white Taurus, a dark green Chrysler sedan,
and a mud spattered red pickup.

Cassie parked and climbed out of the Santa Fe, and took a
deep breath of fresh air mixed with something wonderful. Somebody was cooking
outdoors, and it had a predictable effect on her stomach.

“You didn’t have to do all this just to get out of meeting me
at IHOP,” she teased as she came to the bench closest to Sydney, and sat down.

Sydney shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Cassie, I should have
called back and let you know I had to leave right away. I did try to call a
couple days ago, but your number was out of service. I was afraid you went home
to Las Vegas already.”

“Not yet.”

Cassie pulled another business card from her bag and wrote
on the back. “I picked up a new cell phone to use here in Texas. This one is
good for now.”

Sydney read the hand-written number, and slid the card into her
shirt pocket.

A screen door near the back of the house squeaked open. Cassie
watched a very thin older woman, wearing an apron over jeans and a faded yellow
shirt, carefully navigate two steps down to ground level with an obviously
heavy tray in her hands. She settled it on the table, and set out five pint-size
canning jars filled with ice, and a two-gallon pitcher of sweet tea.

Sydney introduced Cassie to her mother, Alice Waller.

“That’s so sweet of you to drive all the way up here to
visit Sydney,” Alice said in the voice Cassie recognized. “I hope you’re
hungry, Sugar. We’ve got pork stew on the fire just about ready to pull off,
and fresh bread in the oven.”

“Yes ma’am, thank you,” Cassie answered with relief. The baking
bread aroma wafting from Alice’s apron was heady enough to make Cassie want to
chew on the apron strings.

The screen squeaked again and a much younger woman came down
the steps carrying another tray to the table.

“Cassie, this is my daughter Alice Ann. We call her Annie.”

The young-twenties girl and Cassie shook hands genially
before she and her grandmother went back to the house for another load.

A man in overalls and tee-shirt came from inside the barn
and went straight to a pile of gray dirt near the back edge of the grass. At
least Cassie had thought it was a pile of dirt. When he brushed it aside she
realized it was a layer of ash.

He shoved a 3-foot metal pipe into the space and wiggled it,
and raised a cast iron pot from the coals. Then he brought it to an iron cradle
at the other end of the picnic table.

“Daddy, this is my friend Cassie from Las Vegas. Cassie,
this is my dad, Shorty.”

The two smiled and dipped heads. Shorty concentrated on
straightening the pot in the cradle, and removed the heavy lid.

“Glad to have you here, Girl,” he said with a big grin as he
coaxed the lid into a rack on the side of the cradle. Then he sat down across
from Cassie. Alice was already filling plates that Annie distributed around the
table. Shorty reached over and opened a quilted fabric bag holding fist-size
dinner rolls that smelled so good they made Cassie’s eyes water.

They talked genially between bites throughout the meal, and
Cassie enjoyed listening to their relaxed melodic drawl that didn’t have an
ounce of phoniness. Mostly small talk about life on a ranch compared to life in
the city, and life in Texas in general – Shorty and Ann were devoted Texans who
couldn’t imagine living anywhere else on earth. They laughed often with great
affection for each other, and could have made a great TV commercial for the
state.

When everyone was too full to eat another bite, Shorty
headed back inside the barn and Alice began collecting leftovers to take into
the house. Cassie insisted until Alice allowed her to carry one tray full of
dishes up the steps for her. As instructed, Cassie left the tray on the inside
counter and came right back out to sit with Sydney while Alice and Annie took
the remaining items inside.

“I hope I didn’t insult your mom, Sydney. I sure didn’t mean
to.”

“Don’t worry about it, that’s just old south. She doesn’t
know you well enough yet, but next time she’ll just tell you to sit your butt
down because she wouldn’t dream of letting anyone wash a dish in her kitchen.
It’s too crowded in there anyway. That’s the only thing that would embarrass
her.”

Cassie shook her head with a relaxing deep breath. “I envy
your childhood, Sydney.”

“I can’t imagine that.”

“Growing up here? Sure! My parents have a million-dollar
house in Las Vegas, and it could never come close to feeling this full of love.
And peaceful.”

“Yeah, it is peaceful,” Sydney sighed heavily. “And bore-ing
. . . I’m going to die of monotony up here if I don’t have something besides
soap opera TV to think about. How much trouble are they giving you down there?”

“You need to concentrate on healing--”

“My body is healing. It’s my brain that needs more. Come on
. . . tell me.” Sydney’s tone said she had expected something to go wrong when
she was gone.

“The 30-day extension was reversed,” Cassie admitted.

Sydney opened her mouth to say something, but just then the
screen door squeaked open and she quietly turned her head in that direction.

Annie and Alice both came down the steps. “I want to be home
before Brock gets there,” Annie told her mother.

Alice explained to Cassie, “Her husband works on the
offshore rig all week.” Then she gave her granddaughter a hug. “Mind what your
grandpa said, Annie. Make sure you get a bag of ice on that food when you stop
to get gas.”

“Yes Ma’am, I’ll do that first thing.” She returned the hug
to her grandmother, and then bent down and hugged her mother, too, but with
less enthusiasm. “Let me know what you need me to bring back, Mama. I’ll see
you in a few days.” Then she climbed into the white Taurus and drove away.

When the car disappeared around the grove of trees, Alice
said, “You girls have a nice visit out here in the fresh air now. I’m going to
watch my soap opera before I worry about the dishes. Cassie you come holler
through the door if you all need anything.”

“Yes ma’am,” Cassie and Sydney called back in unison. Sydney
smiled, watching her mother climb the steps and go inside.

Then she turned back, and growled in a low voice, “Fozzi?”

Cassie nodded. “Baylin House has been posted to vacate by
the end of the month.”

“That little shit. He wouldn’t get away with it if Andrew
Porter was there.”

“Where is Porter?”

“On vacation. He was about to lose three weeks if he didn’t
use them, and I think he’s taking a couple more so he and his wife can tour
somewhere up in Canada while it’s warm season.”

“And left Fozzi to run things?”

“That wasn’t Andrew’s choice. Somebody owed somebody a favor
and giving Fozzi a job was part of the deal.”

“So now he’s an ego with a badge along with . . .” Cassie
hesitated, deciding not to involve Sydney in what she found in Skolnik’s files.

“Along with what?”

Cassie forced a smile. “Along with trying to get hold of you
about those docs you gave me. I understand the plumbing complaint is pure bull,
and I can guess that’s Fozzi’s version of throwing his weight around. Is that
what you wanted me to find?”

Sydney shook her head and glanced at the house again, and
kept her voice low. “You haven’t been here long enough to know the
Cozier
name on the Deed was a red flag.”

Sydney pronounced the French name
‘Coz-ee-aay’
. It
tickled Cassie’s memory somewhere, but the only thing that came to mind was a news
item about a lady celebrating her 100
^th
birthday last week.

“What about it?”

“The family is part of Cordell Bay history. The original
Cozier
was actually a pirate who some believe was doing business in the bay during the
Civil War.”

“But how does that connect with Rosalie Baylin’s property?”

“After four or five generations it’s a big family and a lot
of them are still in one kind of business or another. I didn’t pay attention
until Fozzi tried to block me from printing those docs. I had to key in the
information from your Power of Attorney and your photo ID to take off the lock.”

“And my ID had my Nevada address,” Cassie filled in.

“Exactly. That’s why he followed me out to get a look at you.”

“But what’s his connection with the pirate’s family?”

“He’s married to a Thornton, and that’s a branch of the
Cozier
descendants. She’s also--”

“Thornton . . . as in David Thornton CPA?” Cassie broke in.

“That’s his father-in-law, yeah. The wife is a close cousin
with the one who filed the first complaint last year.”

“Linda Ramos?”

“Linda ‘C’ Ramos -- as in Linda
Cozier
Ramos. She
bought two adjoining lots behind your address a month before she filed that
complaint, and I know of at least three more lots in that block that changed
hands this summer. Probably more that I don’t know about.”

“But isn’t that normal turnover in an old neighborhood?”

“Not when some of the buyers are corporate straws. They’re all
part of a single group buying up the whole block in small pieces.”

Cassie didn’t have to ask why. It was to keep prices down. If
the property owners saw a big corporation buying everything around them, they’d
hold out for more money.

“What do you think they want to build? It’s not much of a
location.”

“Apartments would be my guess. Three major complexes in town
are licensed to companies with Cozier & Thornton somewhere in their names.”

“Apartments . . ,” Cassie reflected out loud. “Is Bayside
View one of theirs?”

“The newest gem in the collection. Why?”

Cassie shook her head. The more she heard, the more she
wanted to avoid getting Sydney involved. “Let’s change the subject. Why did you
have to leave early last Friday?”

“That was the strangest thing. I got a call that Daddy was
sick and I needed to come right away.”

“Shorty was sick?”

“No, he was fine. But the man on the phone said he was at
the Auction Barn when Dad was put in the ambulance, and somebody told him to
call me at the county office in Cordell Bay. I didn’t even get his name. All I
could think of was getting up here to be with my mom because she’ll go out of
her mind if anything ever happens to him.”

Cassie didn’t doubt that. “Have you told anybody else about
that phone call?”

“Yes, I told the ambulance crew that brought me in, and a
couple different people at the hospital. I was worried some other man had
gotten sick and his family still didn’t know. But they all said nobody was
brought from the Auction, so I guess it was a false alarm.”

Cassie didn’t think so. “So you headed straight up here from
work?”

“Yes. I called Annie and told her I had to leave. Then I
told my supervisor what happened, and I left right away. I didn’t even go home
for a change of clothes. I was only five miles from Victoria city limits when
the damned tire blew.”

“You made it that far . . .”

“Yes. And thank God for the car half a mile behind me,
because it was dark by then and they noticed my headlights bouncing around off
the road. Otherwise I might have been trapped in that pile of junk until
daylight Saturday.”

Cassie shuddered.

Then Sydney told her, “It was really weird when it happened.
I’ve had blow-outs before, but not like this.”

“How do you mean?”

“I heard a really loud bang, like a giant firecracker, and
right away I was air born off the pavement and rolling in a gulley.”

It was after three o’clock when Cassie headed down the long shell-gravel
drive toward the County road. When she was sure no one could see her, she
stopped to dial Rob’s cell phone.

“You finally ready to take a break?” he asked.

“Not exactly. I need to talk to you about something
important.”

“Want me to come over there?”

“No, that’s part of what I have to tell you. I’m not in
Cordell Bay right now. I’ll be th--”

“What do you mean you’re not in Cordell Bay? Did you go back
to Las Vegas?”

“No, I’m still in Texas. I drove up to Victoria.”

“You what?” Rob’s voice boomed so loud Cassie had to pull
the phone away.

“I . . . need . . . you . . . to . . . let . . . me . . .
talk!” she shouted back with the phone several inches from her face. “Can . . .
you . . . do . . . that?”

She brought the phone back to her ear and listened. Silence.

“Can I talk now?”

“I’m listening.” His volume was controlled, but his tone was
razor sharp.

“Sydney Owen was in a car accident on her way up here to
visit her parents. I’ve spent the afternoon here with her.”

Still quiet on the other end. “Rob, are you there?”

“Yes. I know about Sydney Owen’s car accident. It was a
one-car roll-over caused by a blown tire. What else?”

Cassie bit her lip to remain calm no matter how much she
wanted to rip off his head for what he didn’t bother to tell her.

“It wasn’t just a blow-out, Detective Baxter. Sydney told me
about a deep firecracker bang just before the car rolled. It didn’t skid to the
side like a normal blowout, it immediately flew off the pavement. I’m asking
you . . . begging you . . . please have that wheel looked at for the same gunk
that blew up my apartment.”

Silence again. Damn him!

Tears of frustration clouded her eyes; she was convinced she
was right. Fozzi, or someone, had tried to kill Sydney Owen! She swallowed hard
to clear her voice of the frustration clawing at her throat.

“Rob?”

His tone coldly underlined the new distance between them. “I’ll
look into it. Let me know if you decide to come back to Cordell County.”

“I’m on my way now,” she said into the phone.

He didn’t say anything, but it was several long beats before
she heard the phone disconnect.