A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) (26 page)

“Sure. Sure.” Hunter collected everything and stuffed it back into the envelope. “Sorry.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows.

“Virginia is staying here with us.” He smiled at the woman, who turned a relieved face to him.

“I promise I won’t break your trust . . .”

We thanked her for meeting us and headed out to Hunter’s car.

On the drive to Riverville, I went over everything in the envelope again and found a folded paper stuck near the bottom of the envelope that we hadn’t looked at yet.

“You see this lab thing?” I asked.

Hunter shook his head. “Private lab?”

“Wamsley Lab in Columbus.”

“Yeah, private. What’s it say?”

“They had a fingerprint. Listen to this.” I sat up straight, excited. “It says they processed a cellophane wrapper Jake Blanchard had supplied and found fingerprints on the wrapper matched a print from that Charlene Cooksey taken from her hotel room in Terre Haute.”

I leafed through the papers, back to the detective’s report, and scanned it for the Cooksey name.

“Your daddy gave the lab the wrapper with her fingerprints. That’s where the link between all of this comes in.” He thought hard. “So it’s somebody your daddy knew or met or suspected or something.”

A link. It was a relief to finally have something concrete to hold on to.

Charlene Cooksey. Nobody I’d ever heard of. My stomach dropped for just a minute. I would ask Mama, but I was willing to bet she didn’t know the woman either.

“That it?” Hunter asked.

I nodded.

“Amounts to almost nothing,” Hunter said. “Why did Amos pay five hundred dollars for it? Or even more important, why did your daddy pay a thousand?”

“Because he suspected this woman of something. The fact of the fingerprints is pretty clear.”

“Then why was the detective’s office broken into after Amos bought it from the man?”

Daddy was murdered and Amos was on the trail of whoever did it. Somebody needed to know what he bought from the detective but got there too late.

“Where’s all this leave us?” I asked, tired, sensing defeat.

“I don’t know. Your daddy knew this Charlene Cooksey and must have suspected her of something. He’s the one supplied the fingerprints.” He shook his head as if to straighten out his thoughts. “We’ve got Martin there in the hospital, so let’s get back to Riverville. This stuff in the report goes back ten years. Martin’s been with your daddy for a long time. If anybody knows what’s going on here, he’d be the one. And let me take it to Sheriff Higsby, see if he can come up with more on this Charlene Cooksey. Maybe something new on Harold Tompkins.”

I thought awhile. “First we’re showing all of it to Miss Amelia. If anybody can figure this out, it’s my grandmother.”

Hunter started to argue then thought better of it.

“Okay,” he said. “If you let me call the sheriff and have him talk to the Terre Haute Police in the meantime.”

A deal was struck on both sides. Not that I had much hope of anything coming of it. I couldn’t think of a single reason my daddy was investigating some Northerner who probably killed his own wife, or the girlfriend who killed her for him.

The thought that this report wasn’t really the one Daddy ordered was driving a nail hole into my brain. Some last trick Uncle Amos played?

I didn’t have an answer for any one of my questions.

As soon as Hunter finished calling Sheriff Higsby, I called
Miss Amelia. She was at The Squirrel, having a late supper with Mama. I told her to stay there, that we had Uncle Amos’s package and didn’t understand a bit of it.

“Bring it on over,” she said. “I’ll keep Emma here with me ’til you get here.”

When we got to The Squirrel, Meemaw was having Cecil’s English trifle and, from the look on her face, not enjoying it. “Tastes like paste.” She pushed the dish of mushy cake and runny cream away when I sat down next to her.

“Chauncey twins came in,” Mama said and handed me a scrunched-down paper lunch sack as Hunter moved in next to her. “They came all the way into town to bring you the rattles off the snake that was about to bite you out there the other day.”

Nobody was laughing, but I knew when I was the butt of a good joke. I didn’t open the bag and figured I’d leave it behind as a trophy for Cecil.

“You heard about Jake’s death?” Miss Amelia dropped down into dead seriousness. Mama looked away, tears gathering in her eyes.

“Hunter told me.”

“So we gonna get whoever did this?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said and meant it.

I set the manila envelope on the table and briefly gave them a run down of what we knew: the man, Harold Tompkins; the woman, Charlene Cooksey; the murder of Tompkins wife; the jewelry they got away with.; the fingerprints my daddy gave the detective.

Miss Amelia pulled the papers out and began to read to herself.

“Well.” I looked over at Hunter since a lot of what we’d decided on the way home had been his idea. “Everybody over there at the co-op has been hunting for those missing books Daddy was supposed to have, right?”

Mama nodded.

“What we were thinking was that Daddy came across the problem first and it had something to do with that. Maybe looking over the books and finding things that didn’t add up. He’d been president for almost two years by then. All those men on the board were Daddy’s friends: Bill Hoagley. Jim Pritchard. Fulton Sampson. Who else?”

“Harry Conway. Daddy got him on the board when he first took over as president. Chastity, too. Did a lot of work for the co-op,” Mama said.

“So maybe this Harold Tompkins was a buyer, cheating everybody . . .” I said.

Mama frowned at me. “Never heard of him.”

“Well, Mama, maybe he’s from before you took over. I mean, from before Daddy died.”

She shook her head. “I would’ve known. I always dealt with buyers.”

I was getting exasperated with her. “Let me finish . . .”

“This a photograph of Harold Tompkins?” Miss Amelia held up the picture from the file.

I nodded fast. I wanted to get my point across to Mama and not be interrupted.

“Mama. Just listen a minute. Me and Hunter figured out that if Daddy knew these people and you didn’t, it had to be through the co-op. This is a pair of murderers—killed the woman for her jewelry. So the worst kind of thieves. If Daddy knew ’em, he had to have met them at the co-op. Maybe a buyer, like I said. Maybe some kind of insurance salesman and his wife. You know how the co-op’s always getting these men coming through with surefire plans for selling more pecans, for worldwide markets, crop insurance. All kinds of things.”

“So how’d they get their hands on the missing fifty thousand?” Mama demanded, giving me a skeptical look.

“Can’t even tell who the man is,” Miss Amelia interrupted. “Not from this picture. Who’s the woman?”

“They think she’s that Charlene Cooksey. Hunter’s got the sheriff asking for better photos, if they’ve got them, from the Terre Haute . . .”

I turned back to Mama. “If Daddy found out about the missing fifty thousand, he could have gone to the co-op men for an explanation. Maybe checks stolen and cashed—something like that.”

“Okay, Lindy. That might be the truth behind the missing money. Even why they killed Jake. But what about Amos . . .”

“Same thing,” Hunter put in. “Amos found out, too.”

“And my trees?” I asked, seeing where Mama was going. We were chasing our tails back into the same old circle.

Miss Amelia, still staring hard at the photo, made a noise in her throat. “I’d know this woman anywhere,” she said, tapping the woman in the picture with one blunt fingernail.

I snapped my mouth shut. Hunter and I looked across the table at each other.

“Who?” Hunter asked.

“Just take a look at her,” Miss Amelia said. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize that wide be-hind?”

I pulled the photo from her hands. Nothing rang a bell.

“I don’t see—”

“Lord! Lord!” Miss Amelia was up and pushing me out into the aisle. Her face was white. She grabbed her purse and was on her way across the restaurant and out the door. We all scrambled after her as Cecil called after the disappearing back, “But, Miss Amelia, you didn’t finish your trifle!”

The four of us crammed into Hunter’s police car. Once
Miss Amelia was settled in the back, she started berating herself for being “so stupid.”

“How’d I miss so much?” she was going on. “Should’ve seen it from the beginning. I pride myself on knowing people—”

She interrupted herself to poke Hunter in the back. “Get on that radio of yours, Hunter. Call Sheriff Higsby. Tell him to get as many men as he’s got over to the hospital right away. Tell him, if I’m right, Martin Sanchez could be in big trouble.”

He did as he was told, asking no questions. And kept his siren off because Meemaw asked him to.

“We’re closest to the hospital,” Hunter said over his shoulder. “We’ll be there before the sheriff gets the men together.”

“Then it’s up to us,” Miss Amelia said. “You got a gun, Hunter. I’m thinking we’ve got surprise on our side.”

I turned back to Meemaw. “What’s going on? We’ve got to know what we’re getting into. You sure don’t think Martin had anything to do with any of this. And sure as heck it’s not Jessie or Juanita.”

“You take a good look at that picture?” She reached down into the manila envelope, brought out the papers, riffled through them, and pulled out the photo of Tompkins and Cooksey.

“Add a bunch of hair on that woman’s head,” Miss Amelia challenged me. “Slap a thick layer of makeup on her face.”

I looked again. “Finula Prentiss? I kind of figured she was in it somewhere. But Finula’s skinny.”

I pulled the photo up to the end of my nose. “And Finula’s got almost no rear end on her. This one’s—”

“Now put her in a cowgirl outfit. Color that hair red as a monkey’s butt.”

Hunter and I looked at each other. In the backseat, Mama gasped.

“Chastity?” I said.

“You’re darned right. Told you I know people. Chastity Conway. No mistaking that behind for any other behind. I’m not an expert but . . . Anyway, take a close look at that blurry face. Plain as all get-out unless you add the hair and makeup.”

“Throw in a phony drawl wide enough to dam the Colorado,” Mama said, sitting up, excited. “And they’re deep into co-op business. That’s how the books got lost.”

“Came here with that million and more from killing Harry’s second wife . . .” Miss Amelia, almost breathless, said, “From the size of their house and those new barns—that money’s long gone. Stole the fifty. What better after that than to steal Lindy’s trees, patent them, and hold the rest of the ranchers hostage—not able to compete with him and his new trees.”

“Or,” Hunter threw in as he sped around corners, over to Carya Street, and then toward the hospital. “Or sell the trees. Asking anything he could get for them.”

“But they hid those five in our shed,” I protested. “I thought it was to make one of us look guilty.”

“Don’t think so.” Miss Amelia was holding on for dear life as Hunter took another corner. “More to it. I think those trees got hid because whichever one of them killed Amos—and I’m betting on Harry—got scared when he heard sirens coming and stuck ’em in the shed.

“When one of them, probably Chastity, came back for the trees Martin was there. She had to do something about him. Killing a man wasn’t as easy as killing an older woman. And this time nothing was planned. Chastity didn’t come to our place with a weapon on her but when she saw somebody down at the shed she picked up that wrench in the barn, snuck down there, hit him, and ran.”

“And all that stuff about him doing the same things I’ve been working on. Him and those grafts he said he was propagating. Learned from some online video.” I was spitting mad. “Uncle Amos never offered to steal my trees and files to hurt my work. All Harry’s doing. Going to use the trees to make himself another crooked million.”

“So where it started here was with that fifty thousand from the co-op. Jake must’ve known they took it,” Mama said.

“That’s why he hired the detective,” I put in.

“If he confronted them, he would’ve mentioned the report he was waiting for,” Mama added. She pulled in a long, painful breath. “I’ll bet anything—knowing Jake—he made a deal with them to pay the money back and he’d keep it quiet.”

“They decided to kill Jake instead. Didn’t have the money or weren’t about to pay back anything,” Hunter put in from the front seat as he swung into the hospital’s emergency entrance. “Had to be one of them who broke into that detective’s office looking for the report.”

“By that time Amos had the report. They found out somehow and went after his copy,” I said.

“Chastity, I’ll bet,” Miss Amelia muttered as she unbuckled her seat belt and threw the car door open. “Snooping,” she called back over her shoulder at us. “Thank heavens she didn’t find Virginia’s letter.”

“And who knows Rancho en el Colorado better than your fine neighbors?” Hunter loped along beside me. “Knows the back roads in and out. Had access to your barns . . .”

“Those damned killers!” Mama almost stopped running, realizing what Hunter was saying. “That’s how they got Justin’s belt buckle. Not enough to murder my husband. They went after my son . . .” She sped up, rage pushing her.