A Dime a Dozen (24 page)

My conversation with Lowell Tinsdale ended up being fairly brief, since the police retrieved him for questioning as soon as they saw him standing there. But from our short exchange, I learned that the orchard had been in his family for generations and that he grew up, as he put it, “living, breathing, and sleeping apples,” though he’d never seen anything like this. He seemed like a nice enough fellow if you looked past the gruffness, but I felt certain he was in very poor health. He had the sunken cheeks and dark eyes of a man struggling with a serious illness.

I hung around the scene a bit longer, but the place was becoming a circus, packed with curious townspeople, reporters, and soon to arrive, according to rumor, a news crew out of Charlotte. June Sweetwater interviewed me briefly as a matter of course, just getting on record how it was that I happened to be here for all of this. Once the coroner began issuing instructions to remove the body from the bin, however, I decided to leave. While I had managed to keep a sort of professional detachment about the whole mummy thing, I didn’t know if I could handle seeing the body in its entirety.

I was just pulling out of the parking lot when yet another car came speeding up the driveway. When I realized who was inside, however, I pulled back into my parking place, turned off the car and climbed out.

It was Karen and Luisa. They jumped from their vehicle, but I had to stop them before they could get around the corner and see the horrible sight of the mummy being removed from the apples. If it was indeed Enrique, I knew Luisa would never be able to erase that image from her mind.

“Stop!” I called, and both women hesitated, looking at me. “Please, don’t go over there yet!”

To my surprise, they both waited as I ran toward them. I took Luisa’s ice-cold hand in mind and looked into her face.

“Is it him?” she whispered, her body trembling with fear and dread.

“What was he wearing the day he disappeared?” I asked.

“Jeans. A gray T-shirt.”

“Tell me what the T-shirt looked like,” I said.

A sob caught in her throat.

“It was…it was torn a bit, at the collar, here. I think it had a face of a bull on it, but the picture was faded…”

My heart sank. That was the shirt, all right.

“It may be him,” I said finally, tightening my grip on her hand. “But you don’t want to see him like this. Trust me, Luisa. You don’t.”

She tried to pull away from me, but then Karen grabbed her other arm and held on as well.

“Luisa, wait,” Karen said. “Callie’s right. Not here. Not like this.”

“I have to know!” Luisa yelled, jerking free.

She turned and ran. A moment later we heard her bloodcurdling scream.

“NO!”

“No,” Karen echoed, whispering, her face white, her hands to her mouth. She began sobbing, and then she closed her eyes and shook her head back and forth. “No. No. No.”

I didn’t know quite what to do. I thought I ought to go to Luisa, but I knew she was already surrounded by other people, and I didn’t want to leave Karen alone in such a state. Finally, I took a step closer and pulled her into an awkward embrace. She didn’t resist but instead broke down, sobbing against my shoulder. After a few minutes, she moved away and tried to pull herself together.

“He was a good man, such a good man,” she cried. “He worked so hard. He wanted so much for his children.”

“Where are the children now?”

“We couldn’t find Pepe,” she said, folding and refolding a tissue, “but Adriana is with Natalie.”

“Good.”

“Adriana doesn’t know anything’s going on yet, and Natalie said she wouldn’t turn on the TV or the radio until she heard back from us. Oh, Callie, is it really him?”

“The shirt Luisa described is certainly the shirt that’s on the body.”

“Danny said the body was mummified,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Looks like it spent the winter in an apple storage room.”

She looked dizzy, and I grabbed her arm for support.

“Do you know how those rooms work?” she cried. “They caulk and bolt the door and then they start sucking out the oxygen. What if he died like that, Callie? What if he died by having the oxygen sucked out of him?”

Before I could reply, a big van with giant letters on the side came barreling into the parking lot. Every conceivable spot was already taken, so the vehicle simply pulled onto the grass and parked near a mound of dirt. Moments later, several of the orchard workers came running around the corner, headed by Pete. He was yelling at the van driver, and from what I could tell, the man had driven right over some important new apple seedlings.

Karen and I watched the entire exchange, including the repositioning of the van. Then the reporters and the camera crew all got out of the vehicle and headed for the center of the action.

“We should probably go over there too, for Luisa’s sake,” I said. Beside me, I could feel Karen stiffen.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

I understood, thinking she was talking about not wanting to see the body. But then as Pete walked past, he saw us there in the parking lot and froze. His eyes met Karen’s. She stared back at him intently.

Finally, after maybe ten full seconds, he changed course and came walking toward us.

“Karen,” he said, his voice sounding strained.

“Pete.”

Feeling very self-conscious, I wished for a moment that I could simply evaporate into thin air.

“How is he?” Karen asked, surprising me.
How is he? He’s a mummy is how he is
!

“Not good,” Pete replied. “Not good at all. And now this…”

The three of us stood there awkwardly, and I began to wonder what I was missing. These two obviously had a history of some sort. For a brief moment, the air was so thick with tension that I wondered if perhaps Pete was Karen’s ex-husband.

“I’ll go check on Luisa,” I said finally, just wanting to get away.

“No,” Pete and Karen both said simultaneously.

“She’s with the police right now,” Pete said, turning to leave. “But I’ll go look in on her just to make sure.”

“Take care,” Karen said to Pete.

He looked at her, started to speak, and then he simply closed his mouth, shook his head, and walked away.

“How do you know Pete?” I asked once he was gone.

She didn’t answer but simply pursed her lips and shook her head. I waited a beat and then I told her I needed to be on my way.

“Okay. See you,” she said vaguely. Then she walked over to her car and sat on the hood, staring off into the distance, her posture that of someone who has settled in to wait.

Walking to my car, I couldn’t help but feel miffed. Karen was a bit reserved, but I thought the least she could do was answer an honest question.

As I drove away, my mind turned to the sight of what was probably Enrique Morales, four months dead and shriveled up inside a bin filled with apples. Many people had misjudged the situation, picturing him as a deadbeat dad on the run. In fact, the only place Enrique had run was straight into the arms of death. Once the mummy’s identity was confirmed as him, then one question remained.

Was it an accident, or was it murder?

Twenty-Two

Poor Harriet. By the time I finally drove out of Tinsdale Orchards, it was nearly 8:30 p.m., and I had no idea where she was or what she was doing. My best guess was that she was either at the Webbers’ house or at a hotel or a restaurant in town. Unfortunately, Greenbriar didn’t have a line dancing club, or I’d know to look for her there.

Using an earpiece and my phone’s vocal commands, I called around and finally found her at the Webbers’ house. Natalie had just invited her to unpack her car and stay the night.

“I’m so sorry!” I said. “You can’t imagine what’s been going on.”

“Don’t worry about it. We know what’s been going on,” Harriet said. “We’ve all just been waiting to hear from you.”

I told her to leave her things in the car and I would come there to lead her up the mountain to the cabin.

“Up the mountain?” Harriet asked a little nervously. “It’s not too high, is it?”

“Just a steady incline,” I said, knowing that in the dark she wouldn’t realize exactly how high we were.

My cell phone battery was running low, so we hung up and I drove the rest of the way in silence. Despite not having done anything athletic today, I felt as though I had run a marathon. Every muscle ached and every joint throbbed. More than anything, I just wanted to get back to the cabin, get into my nightgown, and curl up on the couch with the telephone. Tom didn’t have any idea of what had been going on here, I realized guiltily. I needed to go back to square one and fill him in.

Of course, once I got to the Webbers’, I had to give them a play-by-play of the entire afternoon. Adriana was engrossed in a video in the back bedroom, so we were free to talk. I explained the sequence of events from my point of view, and when I was done I suggested that they plan on having Luisa and her children spend the night there, since I had a feeling they would be in no condition to be on their own.

“What about Pepe?” I asked. “Where is he?”

“Dean and Ken are out looking for him,” Natalie said. “They’ve checked all of his usual hangouts, but so far they’ve come up with nothing.”

“That kid has too much freedom for a fifteen-year-old,” I said.

“Luisa’s been on her own, Callie,” Natalie replied. “I’m sure she’s doing the best she can.”

By the time we left, I really felt as though I had just enough energy to drive to the cabin and crawl into the house. It started to drizzle halfway up the mountain, and I glanced in my rearview mirror to see Harriet’s windshield wipers springing to life.

I flipped the switch for my own wipers, but after about 30 seconds, smoke suddenly started pouring out from under the hood! Blinker on, I drove to the narrow shoulder and Harriet pulled in behind me.

“Is your car on fire?” she cried as she ran up to me in the rain.

“I don’t know!” I said, debating whether or not I should try and get the hood open. I had seen one too many movies of exploding cars to be comfortable doing that.

Finally, steeling my nerve, I ran to the front, felt for the latch, and got the hood up. Billows of smoke came rolling out into the night, and Harriet and I held on to each other as we stood a few feet away, wondering what to do now.

“You shoulda rented a Mustang, like me,” Harriet said through the rain. “You’re always cutting corners, trying to economize, and now look where it’s gotten you.”

Harriet screamed and jumped back as I stepped forward, ready to defend us. A man was standing beside the car, wearing only the bottoms of a pair of pajamas.

“That’s my house there,” he said, pointing across the street.

We looked to see a woman in a babydoll nightgown standing in the doorway. She gave us a small wave and Harriet waved back.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” the man continued. “I jes’ came out here to see what smelled so bad. I thought maybe my house was on fire.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my car.”

Now that he mentioned, it
did
smell bad!

“Want me to take a look?” he asked. The rain was coming down harder, and we were getting soaked.

“Do you know anything about cars?” I asked.

“A little,” he said. By now most of the smoke had dissipated, and he leaned down to look but almost immediately stood back up straight. “Don’t need to know much to figure out the problem here, though.”

I stepped forward to see what he was talking about, and what I saw sent a chill down my spine. There, wired to the wiper motor, was the charred remains of something that looked very familiar.

“Somebody’s playing a trick on you,” he said. “Look here. They had your windshield wipers rigged to ignite this thing when you turned ’em on.”

“Is it a stink bomb?” I asked, swallowing hard.

“Yep, that’d be my guess.” He stood up straight and called to the woman. “Hey, honey, what’d we hear about stink bombs in the news?”

“At the church concert,” the woman called back. “Where that guy was killed.”

“Oh, yeah,” the man said, and he began to tell us the story as it had been reported in the news. When he was finished, Harriet’s eyes were wide, but I wasn’t even listening. My cell phone was dead, and I asked Harriet if I could borrow hers.

“Who are you calling?” she asked as she handed it to me.

“The police,” I said. “I’m calling the police.”

Twenty-Three