The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery (8 page)

“
What?
”

“Wait,” he said, shying back in mock fear. “I know you think I’m being fresh, but don’t slap me. All I’m
referrin’ to is your dried-out face—
those
cheeks. Did you try the Bag Balm?”

“Not yet, Pete.” After hearing what Ann Evans said about this guy, she was puzzled. Exactly who was this Pete Fitzsimmons? He strode along, seemingly impervious to the strong wind, his beat-up felt hat jammed on his head without benefit of chin strap. She thought whimsically that this was the test. If those fabulous rugged eyebrows were only glued on, they’d fly away in this gale. They didn’t.

“Don’t wait too long to grease up,” he said with a grin. “Some people come out here to this dry climate and just plain dry up and blow away. I smear that stuff in whenever I’m goin’ huntin’ or fishin’.” Then he rustled around in the canvas bag on his shoulder. “But seriously, Louise, I got somethin’ spooky to show you. Look at these. I already hustled a set over to the sheriff’s office. I had to do some fast’taürin’ as to why I hadn’t turned this roll over to him. Told’im it got lost in one of my pockets.” They stopped on the path, and as tourists streamed by, he drew a packet of pictures from the bag and tried to hand them to her.

Still shaken about encountering a corpse, she was reluctant to look at them. “Pete, I’m not sure—”

He interrupted. “Don’t kid me, Louise. How long do I have to stand here in this chinook and convince you? I know darn well you’re interested.” He shoved the pictures at her, and this time she took them. Then he grinned, as if he had just played an enormous trick on her. “Even with these, I’ll bet you ten grand you could never solve Jimmy Porter’s murder—it’s just not as easy as those lil’ mysteries you solved out East.”

“I’ll do you a favor,” she said, “and not take you up on that bet.” Then she turned her attention to the photos. They included longer shots of the crime scene. Shots of the ranch, with its rugged rock outcroppings. The blacksmith
shop, the old sawmill, the wall of cow skulls. A photo looking down from the top of the steep cliff that backed the ranch property that gave Louise a renewed sense of vertigo. The picturesque gravestones. A glimpse of the back range.

Pete reached over and put his finger on the shot of the piney woods. It appeared to be a landscape shot, and nothing more. “See that white spot? That’s why the sheriff had to see this one. There’s a face in the pines—someone wearing a dark hat, with a bandanna or something pulled over the bottom of the face.”

“The murderer?”

“Who else?” asked the cameraman, challenging her. “Why would someone be standing in the woods when all of us were gathered in the ranch driveway watching the police do their thing? Why didn’t that person come over and join us to find out what was going on? Maybe Tatum is right and it was a poacher.”

Marty called to them to hurry it up.

“There’s no tellin’ what Tatum’ll do with this—probably nothin’. I’m busy as hell workin’ on a couple of specials for Channel Six, but I’ll have time pretty soon to make some big prints on fine-grain paper, and we’ll see better what we’ve got.”

“But I don’t really want to—”

“Yes, you do,” said Pete. “You want to know who did it as much as I do. Anyway, how are you goin’ to count on our goofy sheriff to find out?”

“Goofy is right. How did a man like that win the sheriff’s job in a place like this?”

“You’ve gotta know the county. It isn’t all Boulder sophisticates. There’s lots of farmers and down-to-earth working folks who
prefer
a guy like Earl. He campaigns really well. Has big barbecues and invites all the registered voters he figures punched a ballot for him one time or
another. And when it comes down to it, he knows how to do the job.”

As if transfixed, Louise continued to stare at the print of the figure in the woods. She didn’t need a blown-up picture. She could already see the person in the picture was staring right at her and Pete. Had to have known they’d been snooping and taking pictures.

Marty and the others were already far below them on the path. The producer turned around, gesticulated wildly, and called to them again, but his words blew away in the wind. He looked like an excited actor in a silent film. Louise waved reassuringly. Pete had shoved the pictures back in his bag. He grabbed her hand and they hurried down the mountain path together.

The wind subsided as mysteriously as it had risen, allowing them a less eventful shoot near a streambed in the wildflower meadow. It was so peaceful that Marty said he felt like lying down and taking a nap, like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. But Pete, arms akimbo, warned him, “It may be peaceful now, but there’s your warning.” He pointed to the dramatic cigar-shaped clouds floating in the porcelain blue sky. “We’ll have more heavy winds tonight.”

By practically burrowing into the ground, the cameraman got the clouds, the flowers, and the stream in the frame with Louise. “Streams are good,” he told her amiably, “but clouds are even better, better than everything—well, almost everything: old fences, barns, mines, tombstones, and rusting buggies also are good. But clouds, now, they’re one of Colorado’s endearing attractions. Gotta get ’em, even if you don’t get the talent in the picture.” A big grin, to assure her he was kidding.

The moist riparian land burgeoned with flower species, each more enchanting to Louise than the next. She and
Derrell walked among masses of rose crown, with its elongated pink flower clusters; eight-inch-tall white marsh marigold; brook saxifrage, whose loose, white flowers and red sepals were as delicate as dancing ladies; and mauve-colored elephant flower, whose curving upper petals resembled tiny, waving elephant’s trunks and gave the tall plant a decidedly frivolous air. The fluffy white flower umbels of the hairy-stemmed cow parsnip swayed in the gentle mountain breeze, along with other tall plants, yellow Gray’s angelica; and mertensia, with its nodding blue and pink flowers. Louise mentioned that she grew a similar species of mertensia in a totally different environment in her garden in northern Virginia, and Derrell nodded happily. Farther away from the stream they found clumps of paintbrush in rose, yellow, and scarlet; tall, dusky, purple-flowered beardtongue; and drifts of pink pussytoes and avalanche lilies.

When they were done for the day, they said good-bye to Derrell. Marty gave the ranger an effusive slap on the back and the promise of a tape of the program. Then they dispersed, Pete and other crew members to their homes, she supposed, and Marty to the Hotel Boulderado where his wife Steffi awaited him. Steffi Corbin was the other spouse invited on this trip, and unlike Bill, she had shown up. Louise pressed her lips together and tried not to think about it.

She also declined her boss’s invitation to join them for dinner, for she knew this was a second honeymoon for Steffi and the workaholic Marty. They had had their share of marital trouble in recent years, none of it helped by an affair he had had with Louise’s predecessor at WTBA-TV. They needed time alone, which apparently they didn’t find much of while at home in Washington, D.C.

Louise had been left alone in the house in the foothills all weekend, and after finding a dead body, too. Oh, well,
it was probably a growing-up experience. She threw her cowboy hat and her backpack into her rental car and headed toward Lyons.

Lyons, population 1,250, had a peculiar charm, with a river running through it, and a welcome sign made of a huge slab of the town’s trademark red sandstone. Louise looked up into the foothills lining the approach. She had read that stonecutters had worked in those mountains for one hundred years, bringing out the red rock that was used for New York City’s and Chicago’s popular brownstone houses, in addition to some of Colorado’s most famous buildings. And that included the trendy decor in Coors Field, which was one of the newer jewels in Denver’s crown. She smiled. How many cities revered rocks in this way?

Locals liked to call this unassuming town the gateway to the Rockies, for a person almost had to go through it to get to Rocky Mountain National Park, just as she and her TV crew had done today. As they were passing through, Pete had given her the name of a good restaurant. She had to search to find it, but not very hard. It was on High Street, but this High Street barely resembled the Old World atmosphere of High Streets she had become acquainted with when she and Bill lived in England. Lyons’s High Street had its own Old West charm. A nineteenth-century red-stone museum, and two turn-of-the-century churches stood in lonesome splendor, with a few desultory trees surrounding them, waving their scraggly tops victoriously in the wind as if to say, “See, we’ve made it.” Trees had a hard time existing in this harsh climate. A string of unassuming red-stone and frame buildings were given over to gift shops and antique stores. Then came a rambling old
blue house with redstone trim and a faded ANTIQUES sign out front. Finally, there was the Gold Strike Café.

It was only a small log cabin—probably once a miner’s home—now painted dark red, with a peeling white-lettered sign proclaiming THE NEW HOME OF THE PIE PLACE. Louise smiled. New, but when?

She went in and found the six or so tables and most of the counter seats occupied by customers talking a mile a minute, creating a pleasant babble that made it sound like a crowd twice as large. It was a mix of tourists in bright sporty pants and shirts, and locals in faded ones. Every windowsill and nook burgeoned with geraniums, begonias, and spider plants—both mature blooming ones, and glass jars full of new slips with plump white roots. Someone around here was mad about growing things.

She slid into an empty stool at the counter, and as soon as she did, a short woman with curly white hair turned around and gave Louise a big smile.
She must he eighty if she’s a day
, Louise thought. “I guess you must be new here,” the woman said, in a low voice with a golden twang. “Welcome. I’m Ruthie Dunn.”

“I’m Louise Eldridge. Just a visitor to these parts.”

“Well, you’re plumb welcome no matter how long you decide to stay,” said Ruthie.

As if she were talking to an old friend, Ruthie batted the conversational ball back and forth with Louise, at the same time directing the waitresses and flipping meat on the grill. Louise, while downing the pork special, told her briefly why she had come to Colorado. Upon hearing this, the white-haired proprietor said politely, “My gosh, you’re some kind of celebrity, with a TV show of your own.”

Louise smiled. “Not too much of a celebrity. And how about the name of this restaurant? I didn’t know they’d found gold in Lyons.”

“Naw,” she said, “not here. Jamestown had gold. Gold
Hill. Cripple Greek. But Lyons’s gold is
red
”—the “red” could have had three
e
’s in it, the way Ruthie said it. “That red sandstone. That’s our main strike.”

Ruthie admitted she had never watched Louise’s weekly garden show; Louise realized it was because she was too busy doing real-life things like running a café and propagating plants. She got up at four in the morning to start making pies. “Not bad, huh, for an eighty-three-year-old?” she asked with an infectious grin.

The crowd thinned, but Louise lingered, well fed, elbows on the counter now, booted feet slung behind the supports at the bottom of the stool, sipping good coffee and feeling like she used to at her grandmother’s house—except Ruthie Dunn was considerably heftier than her skinny little grandmother. As she finally broke down and ordered a slice of butterscotch pie for under two dollars, she smiled and thought of all the pretentious, second-rate desserts she had ordered at Washington restaurants for three times the price.

Ruthie eventually asked the question Louise thought she might. “Doin’ any of your programs up at Porter Ranch?” The ranch was a next-door neighbor to the little town of Lyons.

“Not yet—but we hope to, if things settle down after that murder.” Louise shuddered.

The woman propped her elbows on the counter and looked across at Louise. She had lively blue eyes that didn’t show her age. She didn’t even wear glasses. “That’s baloney, y’know, that story of the sheriff’s. That wasn’t any poacher.” A small shake of the curly head.