Murder in the Boonies: A Sleuth Sisters Mystery (The Sleuth Sisters Book 3) (2 page)

I could see why Rose was attracted to him: dark good looks, a masculine, even macho outlook, and what my novels call a “brooding aspect.” Living with such men isn’t as romantic as one might imagine, I suspect. Though I liked Rose, I pegged her as the type of woman who’s unaware she’s allowed a personality and a viewpoint.

I think a lot about women and their views, mostly because my sisters and I see life so differently. Barbara Ann is a pragmatist whose method of dealing with people is to hold most of them at arm’s length. She has almost no social life, though in the last year she and the local police chief have become an item. Barbara’s really smart when it’s something she cares about, but mostly she cares about rules, even dumb ones like when to use who and whom.

Barbara shuts people out; Faye lets everybody in. While Barbara is financially comfortable in her early retirement, Faye had no nest egg and no safety net when she lost her job as an office manager. I think the detective agency is Barbara’s way of providing for Faye’s old age. Some people think it was an odd choice, but it suits them.

While I don’t need a lot of people around me, I don’t push them away like Barbara does. Once upon a time I was a perfectly content mother and wife. Then my husband was killed in the line of duty. Don’s death was a huge tragedy, but I overcame it with the support of my family and a determination to change things for the better. I spoke all over the state of Michigan about the need to better protect our police officers and even co-wrote a book about it with the help of a young journalist. As a result, I’m pretty well known in Michigan. I have lots of friends, male and female, a healthy bank balance, and an appreciation for nice things and nice people. I’d say my world view is pretty good for a small-town girl who’s never been outside the USA.

Returning to the problem of the farm, I took up the phone. Faye had given me the number for a guy named Gabe who, though he’d been a threat in their first case, turned out to be a decent enough person. Not the type you’d trust with national secrets, but fairly honest, fairly ambitious, and kind of sweet.

“This is Gabe.” His voice was thin, and I pictured the skinny guy I’d met on the ski trail last winter.

“Hello. It’s Margaretta Stilson, of the Smart Detective Agency.” I hate even saying that name, but Barbara has so far insisted it will remain. As she pointedly reminds me, the agency is hers and Faye’s, not mine.

Gabe’s voice brightened considerably when he heard it was me. “Hey, Mrs. Stilson.”

I explained that my tenants had moved, leaving their animals behind. “My sister Faye said you might be willing to go out there mornings for a few days and see to them.” I named a generous price, since Faye said Gabe was always in need of cash, being a convicted felon.

“I could use the money,” he said, “but I don’t know much about animals.”

I admitted I didn’t either, at least when it came to peafowl and reindeer. Ask me about dogs, and I’ll talk all day. “I’m going out there this afternoon. If you meet me, we can look things over and decide if it’s something you can do.”

“Okay. Where is it?”

From what I knew of Gabe, I guessed he didn’t have GPS. “You’re going to leave Allport going north, take Taylor Road west for a mile, then turn north again on Pratt until you come to Henning. About a half mile down, there’s a long driveway that runs between two wheat fields.”

There was a pause. “Can you start again from Taylor Road?” When I didn’t answer right away he explained, “Once I been someplace I can find it again easy, but I have trouble with north and west and stuff like that.”

Suggesting he write it down, I waited while he dug up a pen and paper. Then I began again, speaking slowly, using landmarks as guides and instructing him to turn right or left rather than using compass points. Once I finished, Gabe read them back to me, and I made a few clarifications. We agreed to meet out there at two.

CHAPTER THREE

Faye

The idea of my two boys living on the farm wouldn’t leave my head, no matter how many times I told myself it was just a dream. At lunch I talked with Dale about it, and he surprised me by suggesting I approach Cramer. “You’ll just go over and over it in your head until you find out,” he said. “If Cramer says no, you’ll have to give it up. If he says yes, you can take the next step and ask Bill.”

After an injury on a timbering job, Dale is incapacitated in some ways. Despite that, he has a down-to-earth way of looking at a problem and putting his finger on the simplest way to go at it.

Cramer’s a computer tech who works pretty much on his own, so I called right away. After I explained my idea, he thought about it for several seconds. “Actually, Mom, that might work for me. I’ve always loved Grandpa’s place, and where I live now doesn’t have many good memories. It would be nice to live somewhere else, and cheaper too.”

I tried to be objective “You might not think that come winter. The driveway is a half mile long.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but Bill has the Honda and I’ve got my truck. We should be okay if we get a plow blade for one of them.”

“So you’ll actually consider this? I mean, the animals are going to require a lot of care.”

“Bill would have to do most of it, but I don’t mind helping out on weekends,” Cramer said. “If I get my deposit back from here, I could pay Aunt Retta the first two months’ rent, which will give them time to figure things out. If the last renters sold eggs and peacock feathers and whatever, they’ll have a ready-made customer base, and I could set them up on Etsy or some other site where people sell stuff.”

I was almost holding my breath. Was this going to work? The thought of my boys taking over the farm made my chest feel full to bursting. I found myself wishing I could tell Dad. It would have pleased him.

Of course Bill and Carla had no idea of the plans I was making for them. Cramer volunteered to call them and present the idea. “That way, if they really don’t want to do it, they won’t feel like they’re disappointing you.” Cramer has a gift for sensing what will make others comfortable and providing it without expecting gratitude or even consideration. His ex-wife was a woman with no capacity for either.

I didn’t see that Bill and Carla had much choice, given their present situation. They both love animals, and Carla had grieved deeply a few months back when their Mastiff got hip dysplasia and had to be put down. Crossing my fingers, I hoped peafowl, reindeer, and chickens were also to her liking.

CHAPTER FOUR

Barb

I was out of the office all day, working on a robbery Faye and I were investigating. A midnight break-in had garnered attention from the press and the local police, at least at first. When the leads dried up, the owner asked Allport’s police chief, Rory Neuencamp, to recommend someone who could spend more time on the case than his officers could. Rory mentioned the Smart Detective Agency, probably because we have a good reputation for solving cases, but possibly also because he is, for lack of a better term, my boyfriend. He shared what he had on the case with me, admitting they’d done what they could and come up with nothing.

Faye and I were monitoring places we thought the robbers might try to sell the stolen goods. She searched Internet sites while I visited pawn shops in a widening circle—actually more of an arc since Allport lies along the shore of Lake Huron. Everywhere I stopped, I showed photos of the missing items.

My luck had been good. I located several items I was sure were from the robbery, and I even had a photograph of the guy who pawned them, thanks to the store’s surveillance camera. Turning the evidence over to Rory’s secretary, I went back to the office to report to Faye.

The Smart Detective Agency was Faye’s idea, and I had agreed to it mostly because I wanted her to have an income and a job that provided independence from petty bosses. There was also the fact I’d been bored silly after only a few months of retirement.

Faye has always known what I’ll be good at better than I do. It was she who told the high school debate coach that her sister would make a great addition to his team. It was Faye who assured me I should skip community college and go directly to the University of Michigan. And it was Faye who insisted I could use the talents I developed in the years I spent as an assistant district attorney to become a successful investigator. As usual, she was right. After a year as a private detective, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

As I told Faye the details of the afternoon’s discoveries, I could see her mind was elsewhere. From her comment about Bill, I thought I knew what was distracting her. Faye’s son considers himself an environmental entrepreneur, but nothing he’s done in that field has turned out well. After community college, Bill spent several years and lots of investors’ money trying to develop a disaster relief communication system, but it never worked as he hoped. Later he invested heavily in generating energy from wave motion in the Great Lakes, but his method proved too expensive to be useful. Most recently he’d formed a cooperative in Chicago, inviting people to live a minimalist lifestyle. It went well at first, but members began abandoning the project when the realities of living without modern conveniences set in. If Faye’s long face and lack of updates were an indication, Bill and his wife were stuck with an old apartment building they had taken a year’s lease on and a rapidly dwindling list of tenants. I guessed she was about to bail them out. Again.

Faye wanted the farm for Bill and Carla, but I didn’t see that working. Retta, an advocate of tough love, would never agree to more than a slight discount for a family member, and she’d require first and last month’s rent. Besides, would Bill and his sweet but city-bred wife want to live in a crumbling old house miles from the nearest fast-food restaurant?

“They might,” Faye responded when I asked. She continued working as we talked, printing off the paperwork for billing the jewelry store owner.

“And the rent?”

She took out an envelope and stuck an address label on it. “Cramer said he’ll take the bunkhouse. With his IT job at the factory and whatever Bill and Carla can contribute, they’ll manage until Bill gets something going.”

“I take it Justine left again?” Cramer is an overly-loyal type who had allowed his wife to walk over him time and time again. First she left with a man she met on the Internet; she returned because it didn’t work out. She left again when Handsome Stranger #2 came along, that time filing for divorce. She came back six months later, sad-eyed and repentant. Cramer, a truly nice guy, ignored the completed divorce proceedings and let her move back in. Cramer isn’t stupid, just really, really loyal.

“She took off last week after running up a ton of credit card bills,” Faye said, “but if he gives up the apartment, he can pay them off in no time.”

I considered the idea. “I’m guessing Retta would go for it if they can scrape together the deposit and agree to find homes for the animals.”

“I’ll pay the deposit.” Faye’s grin said she couldn’t help herself. “And both my boys love critters. They won’t mind taking care of them.” Peeling a stamp off the roll, she applied it to the envelope. “If they take over the farm, I’ll get something I want.”

“Which is?”

“Winston Darrow’s horses.”

An earlier case involved the death of a woman whose husband now had no use for the two animals she’d loved. Faye has always liked horses, but it seemed her feelings were stronger than I guessed. “You aren’t going to take up riding again in your fifties!”

“Probably not, but those horses saved my life.” She set the finished letter on the pile of outgoing mail. “Actually, I’ve always wanted to adopt retired draft horses. “Do you know how many of them are put down because no one will take them in?”

“Draft horses. You mean like Clydesdales?”

“That’s what a lot of people think when they hear the term, but there are other types: Shires, Percherons, Belgians—” She waved the current envelope to indicate there were others she couldn’t name at the moment.

“Like the cart horses on Mackinac Island?”

Situated in the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, Mackinac Island is known for its ban on automobiles. Horses do the bulk of the work, carrying goods, luggage, and tourists around its 3.8 square miles.

“Right. When they get too old to work, they have to go somewhere. I think they deserve a peaceful old age and people who are good to them. Bill and Carla could be those people.”

“What about finances? It costs money to keep horses.” I didn’t say out loud that Bill had never shown much talent for handling money, but Faye read my mind, as usual.

“Cramer will do the business stuff.” She grinned wryly. “He’s good with money as long as his ex-wife stays away, and I bet she will once she hears he’s living on a farm ten miles from town.”

I had to admit, Faye had thought it through. While I wasn’t certain it would work out as she hoped, it seemed worth trying. Faye would get her horses, her sons would get a home, and Retta would have one less thing to fuss about.

CHAPTER FIVE

Retta

When I went to meet Gabe at the farm after lunch, I took Styx, my big, lovable Newfoundland, along. He loves to ride in the car, loves exercise, and often serves as my protection. While I’m not afraid of Gabe, being a detective (auxiliary detective to be precise) has made me realize that even the world around Allport can turn threatening. Although he’s a real sweetheart, one look at Styx would make someone think twice about robbing me or stealing my car.

As Styx drooled onto a towel I’d placed on the seat, I recalled the agonizingly long bus ride the three of us had endured to get to school each day. I’d hated every minute of it, and once Barbara Ann got her driver’s license, I worked to stay on her good side so I never had to ride the Big Banana again. In my opinion, school buses are mobile torture chambers. Barbara and Faye never let anyone harass me, but it was hard, hearing big kids pick on little ones who didn’t have older siblings to protect them.

The last four miles of the trip was on gravel roads, which slowed me considerably. I finally turned onto the long driveway we’d once trekked to meet the bus. The fields on either side, rented and farmed by local agri-businessman Chet Masters, are flat and arable. Chet appreciates that; I appreciate the fact that his checks come in like clockwork. Hulking pieces of farm equipment lined the drive, waiting to be used. They might have done their work already. I don’t pay much attention to farm stuff.