The Double-Jack Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries) (6 page)

Lunch consisted of an exceptionally tender roast, potatoes, carrots, onions, and gravy.

“Looks delicious,” Dave said.

“Thanks. It’s my Crock-Pot special.”

Tully forked a piece of roast into his mouth and chewed it contemplatively. “I thought it was a bit dark for beef,” he said. “This is venison.”

“Right you are, Bo,” Agatha said. “We had our garden out back all fenced in, posts and wire six feet high, but even so, every morning when we got up a deer would be in there munching it. We raised the top of the fence by two feet and plugged every gap, but no matter what we did that deer somehow managed to get in. I swear, if we planted the garden on
top of the barn, that deer would show up with a ladder. Finally, Bernice had her fill of him. She grabbed her rifle and plugged him right in the middle of the garden.”

Tully glanced at Bernice. She appeared slightly uncomfortable. “According to my calculations,” he said, “gardens and deer season don’t occur at the same time.”

“It was a very late growing season,” Bernice said. “Please pass the butter.”

A car pulled into the yard’s driveway and sent a spray of gravel flying. Tully’s hand slid under his vest and he half rose to peek out the window. Then he relaxed and sat back in his chair. A minute later Bunny Hunter came through the door carrying a bag of groceries and a couple of other packages. She was wearing jeans, a blue work shirt, and leather boots. Some blond hair drifted across her face and she blew it back with a puff from the side of her mouth. “Aha!” she said. “I see I’m late for the festivities.”

All three men rose from their chairs as if on command, possibly in recognition of her startling beauty.

“Oh, please be seated!” she said. “Are you trying to embarrass me? Bernice and Agatha treat me like a ranch hand. I’m not accustomed to manners.”

“I set a place for you, dear, right next to Bo,” Agatha said.

“Has he displayed any of his charms?”

“None that I’ve noticed.”

“Well, okay then.” She sat down. “Good to see you guys.”

Tully introduced her to Dave.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Dave,” she said. “Well, actually,
mostly about your chicken-fried steaks. The House of Fry happens to be Agatha’s and Bernice’s favorite restaurant.”

“They obviously are ladies of impeccable taste.”

“Have you always been in the restaurant business?”

Tully and Pap were suddenly interested.

“No, this is my first restaurant. Before that I kind of kicked around the world, which was interesting, but then I got the urge to settle down. Famine struck me as the perfect little town.”

“Kicking around the world sounds wonderful!” Bunny said. “I wouldn’t be wild about living in Famine of all places, or any one place in particular. I would love to travel, though, but I can’t afford it.”

“It never used to be so expensive,” Dave said. “I lived on a beach down in Mexico for a while. It was wonderful and cost practically nothing. I made myself a little hut to sleep in and fished off the beach at night. The locals called the fish
pargo,
but they looked like red snapper. I coated them with coarse salt and roasted them on a stick over charcoal, just as I had seen a woman in a beachfront café do it. They were delicious! The café had a thatched roof and no walls, only posts, and sometimes the ocean would wash across the floor and I and the other patrons would lift our feet and go on eating, and then the water would recede and we would put our feet back down. I doubt a person could do that anymore, live down there in a hut on a beach. But just talking about it makes me want to go back.”

“I lived in Mexico for a while,” Pap said. “The people were great.”

Tully thought he should mention that was when the FBI was after Pap on numerous corruption charges, but he decided to restrain himself. Furthermore, nothing was ever proved on the corruption charges. He said, “Agatha, it’s time you filled us in on the mystery.”

“Oh, dear!” she said. “I know it’s a bunch of foolishness, but I’ve wondered about my dad’s disappearance my whole life. Did he just run off and leave us, or did something happen to him and his helper?”

Bunny and Bernice got up and cleared the table, while Agatha went on to tell them as much as she knew about her father, all of which came from her mother, some old friends and neighbors, and a few faded photos. She got a photo album off a shelf and opened it on the table. One picture showed her father, Tom Link, with a teenage boy. Both were dressed in jeans and work shirts. Neat handwriting in pencil on the back identified the boy as Sean O’Boyle, age 14. Another photo showed Sean posed with a pick over his shoulder. “What’s that white thing behind him?” Tully said.

Agatha said, “It’s so out of focus I’ve never been able to make it out. It’s odd, though, because those rocks on the edge are sharp. It could be a patch of snow on a steep hillside.”

“Can I take that picture with us?” Tully said.

“I had a copy made for you,” she said. She handed Tully the copy wrapped in plastic and then went on with her report, as methodically as if she were giving a lecture. Having read over her mother’s diaries numerous times, she had by now all but memorized them.

Tom and Sean had camped out in the Snowies all one spring, panning for gold in various streams. One day they found a stream with bits of gold in it. Some of the gold had white quartz still clinging to it. They followed the gold upstream and found a small outcropping of white quartz. Upon close inspection, they found thin veins of gold threaded through the outcropping. They began blasting away the outcropping and following the gold. They worked all that summer on the mine, and the veins of gold grew thicker the deeper they blasted into the mountain.

“As a matter of fact,” Agatha said, “I have a piece of quartz my dad brought home shortly before he and Sean disappeared.” She went into her den and returned carrying a white rock the size of a baseball. She handed it to Tully.

“Holy cow!” he said. “Look at this.” He handed the rock to Pap. Dave stood up and looked over Pap’s shoulder. “They was getting into a major strike,” Pap said. “If anyone ever found that mine, people would have heard about it.”

Agatha explained that Tom and Sean blasted a very small opening to the mine, just high enough to get their wheelbarrow through to dump the tailings from inside. Whenever they left, they covered the opening with brush and pieces of driftwood. Once they were a few feet inside the mountain, they blasted a tunnel large enough to stand up in. When they hit the main veins of gold, Tom started talking about filing a claim. A few days later they disappeared.

Agatha said, “There’s one big gold mine over in that area of the Snowies, but it’s been shut down since the 1940s. Now
with the price of gold going through the roof, you would think someone might try to open it up again, but I guess the shaft and tunnels are all rotted and caving in. I hear it would be just too dangerous and expensive to open them to mining again. But no one has ever found a single sign of my dad’s little mine. It’s just as if it vanished from the face of the earth.”

“How did Tom and Sean supply their mine?” Tully asked. “They had to haul in blasting powder or dynamite, food, tools, camp gear. They didn’t haul all that in on their backs.”

“No,” Agatha said, “they hauled it in with a team of horses and a wagon. Then Sean drove the team back to the ranch, because there was no place to keep the horses near the mine. Then he walked back to the mine.”

“Sean do all this in one day?”

Agatha thought for a moment. “Mama kept a lot of it in her diary, but I never paid much attention to the details.” She went into her bedroom and returned with the diary. “Here’s what she wrote about a month before Papa and Sean disappeared.” She read a passage that said Tom and Sean had taken a wagonload of supplies to their mine that morning, starting right after Tom had milked the cow. The boy had returned with the wagon late that afternoon, eaten dinner with Agatha’s mother and the baby Agatha that evening. He spent the night at their house. In the morning, he milked the cow, ate breakfast, and walked back to the mine.

Tully stared at the ceiling. After a bit, he said, “Anybody know how fast horses walk?”

Bernice said, “I can Google it for you.”

“That would be great. While you’re running your computer, Bernice, I’ll go get a topographical map I have in the truck.”

By the time he returned with the map, Bernice had finished Googling.

“How far to the base of the Snowies from here, Agatha?”

“Exactly fifteen miles. We’ve checked it on the car speedometer. The road runs straight from the ranch over to the Snowies. It intersects there with Hastings Road, which runs along the base of the mountains.”

“I know Hastings Road,” Tully said. “I’ve fished those creeks many times. Did Google know how fast horses walk?”

“It said five, which I assume means five miles an hour.”

“Great!” Tully spread the map out on the table. He drew a square on it. Dave stood up and peered over his shoulder.

“Okay, here’s the ranch,” Tully said. “It’s fifteen miles over to the base of the mountains. That would take three hours, with the horses pulling the wagon at five miles an hour. After they reached the base of the Snowies, they could have turned either north or south at Hastings Road.”

Tully frowned. He tugged on the corner of his mustache to help him concentrate. “Okay, let’s assume they turned north on Hastings. They get to the drainage where the mine is located and unload the wagon. They can’t leave the team alone on the road and they can’t leave supplies stacked in view for somebody to come along and steal them. They have to haul them back into the woods and out of sight. Tom then
packs the supplies up to the mine while Sean drives the horses and wagon back to the ranch.”

Pap got up from the table and walked over to look out a window. “I can’t stand this,” he muttered.

Dave said, “Let’s say it takes three hours to drive to the mountains at five miles an hour and an hour to unload the wagon. That’s four hours. It takes Sean three hours to drive back from Hastings to the ranch. That’s seven hours. Sean is gone a total of about ten hours. So he spent a total of three hours going and coming on Hastings. Divide that in half. It took them an hour and a half to drive up to the drainage where the mine is. At five miles an hour, that’s seven and a half miles from the intersection with Hastings.”

“That’s about what I calculate,” Tully said.

“Me, too,” Pap said. “Of course, they could have turned south.”

Tully put his finger on the map. “Don’t complicate things, Pap! This will at least put us in the ballpark of where to look for the mine. The mine was either within a range of seven and a half miles north of the intersection with Hastings or seven and a half miles south.”

He ran his finger along the road on the map. “There are two small drainages and one big one in that seven and a half miles north of the intersection. Deadman Creek flows out of the big one right at the end of that section.” He tapped his finger on a symbol. “Look, there’s a mine symbol on top of the ridge above the second drainage. I’ll bet it’s a gold mine, too.”

Agatha looked at the map. “Yes, it’s the Finch Mine. It’s
owned by Teddy and Margaret Finch. I know both of them well. The family shut the mine down over fifty years ago, but all the buildings are still up there. It was quite an operation.”

“Yeah, it was,” Pap said. He walked back to the table and looked at the map. “When I was just a mite, my daddy worked there for a couple of years. He’d bring me home pieces of rock and I’d pound it up with a hammer and get bits of gold out of it. I put the gold in an empty ketchup bottle. I must have had a couple ounces of gold in that bottle, but when we moved away I forgot all about it. Every once in a while I think about going back up to the mine and seeing if I can find that bottle. But they’ve got a heavy chain and a lock on the road and No Trespassing signs all over the place.”

Dave laughed. “You let No Trespassing signs keep you out, Pap? I find that hard to believe, given a person of your character.”

“Actually, I usually forget to bring my bolt cutter when I’m up this way. Fortunately, I had the good sense to bring it along this time.”

“About what I figured,” Tully said.

“I suppose I could have parked my truck at the chain and walked in but the road is pretty steep from there on,” Pap said. “Now that we’ve got the area narrowed down to seven and a half miles, we should turn up Tom’s mine in no time. How long are we going to spend looking for this mine, which may not even exist?”

“Who knows?” Tully said. “I’d be glad to leave you here with Agatha and Bernice. They could find some chores for you, right, Agatha?”

She put her hands on her hips and looked at Pap. “Oh my, yes, we certainly could use an old reprobate to pull some knotweed for us. We’ve been getting a terrible infestation of it the last few years.”

Pap straightened up and stretched. “Too bad, Agatha, but this old reprobate has got to go help these boys find a lost gold mine.”

Tully folded up his map and looked at Agatha. Somehow in the past few moments she seemed to have shrunk. Maybe it was a change of light in the room. Her wrinkles seemed to dominate her face, even framed as it was with a halo of white hair. “What’s wrong, Agatha? You look worried.”

“Bo, I just thought about that madman that’s after you. And I noticed you reached under your vest when Bunny’s car drove into the yard. You have to be awfully concerned about that monster. So, here I am, asking you to go off on a frivolous goose chase just for me. Kincaid could be out there in the mountains waiting for you.”

“Agatha! Agatha! Agatha! The last thing I ever want to do is cause you the slightest worry about me. As far as Kincaid goes, we’re getting that problem taken care of. I’ve got Pap and Dave with me, and you know they’re a whole lot more dangerous than Kincaid. If the three of us can’t handle that nut, I’d better look for another kind of work. I may not have mentioned this to Pap and Dave but I’ve got one of my best deputies concentrating on Kincaid and we’ve worked out a little trap for him.”

Pap looked surprised. “We have a plan? Don’t tell me it involves Pugh! Our lives depend on Pugh?”