All the Old Lions (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book One) Page 3

“So, you’re going to publish Minnie’s book, then.” It was a statement, not a question. The sparkle had died from his eyes, and his smile was as grim and cold as frosted iron. Not bothering to wait for an answer, he turned to Minnie.

  “Here’s my last lot of pictures, the special ones, I guess. Always kept them separate for some reason. You can take your time; I’m in no hurry to get them back.” With another arrogant nod, he replaced the magnificent hat and walked out the front door.

  “A nice man,” Minnie said. “Well now, come along to the kitchen, I’ve got to get dinner on.”

  The kitchen showed none of the efforts at renovation evident elsewhere. A fresh coat of apple green paint did its best to brighten an otherwise drab room filled with ancient appliances. The linoleum floor covering in front of the sink was worn to the board and showed enough layers of patterns to delight an archeologist.

  “Get yourself a plate and cup and saucer,” Minnie said indicating an overhead cupboard. “Sorry this kitchen’s such a mess, but as you well know, I can’t spend all my time painting and puttering.” She took a platter of meat from the refrigerator and began sawing at it with a large knife. The roast had been cooked to the last degree of doneness and broke away in strings wherever the blade touched.

  “You’ve done a beautiful job of decorating in the front rooms. I’m anxious to see everything.” Actually, I was more concerned with her comments about time spent. Had her writing suffered?

  I reached for the dishes, and fished silverware from a drawer. “How is your manuscript coming along? I’m hoping to take it home with me when I leave. But I am curious, how did you happen to buy Halfway Halt?”

  I sensed her stillness even before turning to find her hunched over the platter, the knife poised motionless in the air. I could almost feel the deep breath she took as she straightened her shoulders. Chin up, she faced me.

  “I didn’t buy Halfway Halt, I inherited it. I was born in this house. My sister Lil was the owner…the…the last madam here. She raised me from the time I was two.” Her cheeks were red and quivered with defiance.

  She was obviously disturbed, but before I could assure her I wasn’t going to faint from shock at her revelation, she rushed on with a flood of bright words.

  “There’s some beans on the stove, just set them on the table in the pan.”

  I went through the motions, wondering how delicately I’d have to phrase the questions I was dying to ask. Talk about primary source material! But what connection did Minnie’s sister have to the infamous Jersey Roo? They couldn’t have been contemporaries; Minnie’s sister had only recently died. How old could she have been? How old was Minnie for that matter? In her sixties, maybe. Mental math was not my forte, and besides, I decided, the connection between the two was irrelevant I wanted the story of Jersey Roo’s Halfway Halt before the turn of the century. Minnie could be as discreet as she wished about her sister’s background for all I cared.

  Minnie emptied a can of peaches into a bowl with an untidy splash. “Sorry I have to rush you like this, but I have a caller coming—interviewing him for my book, you know—and I want to be finished with all this when he gets here.”

  “An interview? Would you like me to sit in on it?”

  “No. Whatever for? I’m fishing for information and don’t want him scared off. I’ll tell you about it later.” She motioned for me to sit at the table and proceeded to fill her plate, passing dishes as she finished.

  “Don’t worry, Miss Darrow, I won’t interfere,” I said, rather taken aback by her bluntness. “Just let me know if I can be of any help.”

  “You can start by calling me Minnie.” She eyed me speculatively.

  I helped myself to an unappetizing portion of cold beans and peaches, and bypassed the dreadful looking meat. Cooking was obviously not one of Minnie’s interests.

  “You know,” she went on, “I haven’t exactly been welcomed in this town. The people around here are tight-mouthed snobs. I could use an ally. How long can you stay? A week or so?”

  “Hardly.” I chased a slippery piece of peach around my plate. “A couple of days at the most. What do you need an ally for?”

  She glanced at her watch and pushed away from the table. “Sorry, dear, but I’ve got to get ready.”

  Halfway to the door she stopped and turned on a sweet little smile that made her look like a cupcake.

  “Oh, and if you’d like to help, would you mind cleaning these things up a bit?” She gestured vaguely at the table. “I have to get ready.” She hustled off into the hall, steely curls bouncing like a halo around her head.

  Touché, Minnie, my dear, I thought with a laugh. It was going to be dog eat dog out here in the wild country, I could tell. But I didn’t mind. It was a simple job and took only a moment, even with time off for a trip to the bathroom I discovered off the hall. I’d finished stacking the plates on the drain board to dry when I heard the sound of a car approaching.

  Curiosity, or maybe a growing awareness of isolation that had been building all day, sent me through the other door leading out of the kitchen. A room that appeared to be Minnie’s office separated the kitchen from the Victorian parlor. I crossed both and headed for the front window, where I peeked through the lace curtain with the anticipation of a child waiting for Santa Claus.

  An old man lumbered up to the porch while the silly dog humbled himself all over the ground at his feet. The dog must have gotten too close, for the man turned on him. Aiming a vicious kick at the poor animal’s ribs, he used words I didn’t have to hear to understand.

  “Why, you old reprobate.” I flounced into the hall ready for battle, but Minnie beat me to the door with the eagerness of a teenager.

  “Well, Potts,” she simpered. “Good to see you. Come right in.”

  He was a great hulking person with a florid face and jutting jaw. His pugnacious look was not in the least softened by too-short overalls that showed a considerable stretch of white work socks. His hands were huge with fat, finely lined, banana fingers clutching a limp cowboy hat.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t get here earlier, you could have joined us for dinner,” Minnie said, not indicating by even a blink of an eyelash how madly she had hurried to avoid just such a thing. “And I want you to meet my…uh…helper.”

  I felt my status slipping, but assumed it was for good purpose.

  “Thea Barlow, meet Parson Potts. Thea’s just in from Chicago,” she added.

  I mumbled something in acknowledgment and turned from the man’s small piercing eyes.

  “Come in the front room, Potts,” Minnie said, taking his arm. “I have all kinds of questions for you…Thea?”

  Whatever it was going to be, invitation or dismissal, I cut her off with a suggestion of my own. “Don’t worry about me, Minnie. I’ll take a look around,” and slipped out the front door. I didn’t want anything to do with that awful man.

  Rover, or whatever his name was, crouched under my car. His tail thumped on the hard ground when I called, and though he moved forward a bit on his stomach he couldn’t generate nerve for anything further. I met him more than halfway, muttering vile things about the character of a man who would kick a defenseless animal, and revived him with silly words only a dog would appreciate. He joined me for a tour of the grounds.

  Here his courage came to the fore; he was much braver than I. The barn was empty, but an acrid odor witnessed it wasn’t always so. I stood at the door content to watch light sift through loose boards. The dog snuffled in the stalls.

  “Hello!”

  I whirled, and cried out as my foot caught on a loose board. A hand shot out and grabbed my arm, preventing a nasty spill.

  “Sorry,” he said with a rueful laugh. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I thought you heard me drive in.” His lean patrician face might have looked arrogant in a different situation, but was softened now by well-used laugh lines that defined his eyes and sharply molded mouth.

  In his thirties, I guessed, as we eyed each ot
her with the lightning assessment that seems to be a ritual greeting between male and female. He was of average height with an interesting air of careless confidence, and that kind of slender, whippy build that somehow indicates a great deal of strength.

  “No, I didn’t hear you,” I said, wishing I’d taken time to change my clothes and done something more than brushing to tame my hair; it was still in a state of astonishment from the trip.

  I could see the tail end of a sleek Lincoln parked beside my Escort and Pott’s pickup. The place was beginning to look like a parking lot.

  “Just wondered if my Dad was here. Thought he might have parked around back. I’m Jim Enright.”

  “Hi. I’m Thea Barlow, wandering Chicagoan, taking in the sights.” I gestured at the decrepit barn and surroundings. The dog had come to the door, eager to greet the newcomer, undaunted by previous bad experiences. Not real bright.

  Jim laughed. “Your dog?”

  “No, a stray, but I guess Minnie’s going to keep him, if nobody claims him. Unfortunately, I think he’s adopted me.”

  He shrugged. “People are always dumping dogs off in the country thinking someone will take care of them; more often they starve. Come here, boy.”

  The dog performed his duty as ice breaker very well with a ludicrous display of waggling and tongue lolling, then ran off to continue his investigations. We strolled after him.

  Thinking I caught a resemblance, I turned the conversation back to where it began. “If your father happens to be a delightful vision from out of the past, then I can tell you he was here earlier.”

  “Delightful!” He threw back his head with a burst of laughter. “I can’t imagine anyone using ‘delightful’ in connection with Helby Enright.”

  I was right then to recognize the slight arrogant tilt of the head and the blue eyes, though there was nothing sharp or frosty about Jim’s. He seemed genuinely amused by my description.

  “Well,” I conceded, “delightful might not be the right word, but he looked very other-worldly. I was quite enchanted.”

  “The hat, I bet. He must have been wearing that gawdawful antique. Dad’s a bit of a showman and it’s no secret he prefers life the way it was lived fifty years ago. I suppose he and Minnie were hashing over old times again?”

  “I guess so. Apparently he brought some pictures and things for her to look at.”

  “Not another scrapbook!” He chuckled and shook his head. “They go through those things like they were the Dead Sea scrolls.”

  “Not a scrapbook; treasures in a cigar box.”

  “Well, that’s a twist, but whether it’s a scrapbook, or a cigar box, don’t let either one of them get you cornered or they’ll show all that stuff to you. It takes hours. You have to hear how Digger Bill stole the neighbor’s slicks to build his herd and how old Maudie Brown rose from her birthing bed to shoot a buffalo. It’ll fry your ears and make your eyes roll with boredom.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, sounds like it might be interesting.”

  “A lot of it is, if you can get past the begats and Aunt Tillie’s sister’s cousin’s boys. I’ve heard it all too often, I guess.”

  I liked his droll delivery and also the strong sense of tolerant affection beneath his words. It reminded me of my grandmother and her velvet-covered memory book stuffed with frilly valentines. Granny knew the story behind each card and loved to tell me about them.

  We followed the dog, strolling in a wide path past a collapsed shed and a small storage building of some kind, and ended up in back of the house.

  The rear of Halfway Halt was as bleak as the front. Great slabs of peeling bark hung from a gnarled and twisted cotton-wood that shaded the back entry to the kitchen.

  “Now there’s something that’s really out of the past,” Jim said, pointing to a large grassy hump beyond the tree. He took my arm and led me to it. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen a dugout before. There aren’t many left.”

  I stood on the edge of a bank and looked down into a sharply eroded ditch. Someone long ago had taken advantage of the feature and dug a room into the hillside. Four crude wooden steps stuck in the side of the ditch led down to the entrance. The door itself was made from rough planks and opened directly into the hill, if it opened at all.

  “It’s over a hundred years old.” Jim jumped into the gully with the dog close behind. A lizard, basking in the sun, darted under the door. Yuck.

  “Want to look in?”

  “No thanks,” I shuddered and turned away. “There’s probably a colony of those things hiding in there.”

  Jim threw me one of those satisfied male smiles and climbed the bank. I gazed across the gentle slope of land beyond the dugout where it rolled into an immense, softly-colored panorama that disappeared into the purple haze of distance. Stark and forbidding, but with its own compelling beauty. Off on the horizon a curl of smoke drifted against the pale sky.

  “What’s that?” I asked lazily, “a fire?”

  “Where?” Instantly alert, he followed the direction of my finger, then just as quickly relaxed. “Oh, that. That’s an underground coal fire, been burning for weeks.”

  “A what?”

  “Coal underlies most of this country. In the old days a lot of the ranchers mined their own. In some places the coal is so close to the surface that lightning or a brush fire will start it burning. Sometimes a good rain will douse the fire, otherwise the deposit burns out and leaves a hole in the ground.”

  How strange…and wonderful. I felt as if I’d been dropped on another planet instead of another state.

  The sun was fading and a crisp breeze took the bite from the heat. The knots bunched in my neck and my arms began to loosen and ease.

  “Look,” Jim said, with a sweeping gesture. “That’s our land as far as you can see. Awesome, isn’t it?”

  “What about Minnie’s?”

  “She only has a couple of sections. See that line of fence down there?” He put one arm across my shoulder and tried to aim my sight down his other arm. “The one with the well in the corner.”

  I squinted gamely and nodded, though it all looked like hen scratchings to me.

  “That’s the end of Minnie’s land. All the rest is ours. It always amazes me when I can look out on it like this. Makes you understand what the fever must have been like for the old guys—dad and Grandpa—when they were putting these spreads together. Those days are gone though, and the big places are breaking up. Divided up among families or sold to the coal companies.”

  “Who are letting their assets burn merrily away,” I said, fascinated with this new tidbit of information.

  “If you’re really interested in that stuff, I could show you a large burn-out pit on our place. Dad keeps it as a curiosity; he likes to have the school kids out now and then for show and tell.”

  He was an easy person to be with. Too bad there wouldn’t be time to explore the friendship further.

  “Well, Thea Barlow, now that I’ve given you the two-bit tour, do you mind if I ask what you’re doing here? Are you a friend of Minnie’s?”

  “I hope we’re going to be friends, but I’m here for work.”

  “Work?”

  He loaded the word with an incredulous amusement that immediately put my back up. I answered stiffly.

  “I’m an editorial assistant with Sweeney Publishing Group. Minnie’s doing a book for us.”

  “So it’s true then; she’s got a contract and everything? I’d heard she was writing a book, but you can hear anything around here. What kind of book is it?”

  “History; Western history. She’s quite good, you know.”

  “Local history?”

  I nodded. There was no secret about what Minnie was doing, but suddenly I felt reluctant to go into details. Something had raised my antennae, some kind of electricity that seemed to indicate he was more interested in my answers than he appeared to be.

  “So, old Minnie’s going to rattle some skeletons, is she?”

  “I hadn
’t thought about it that way, but yes, maybe she is. Does that bother you?” I asked, trying to appear as cool and casual as he.

  “Not in the least,” he said. “Believe me, in a community like this there are no secrets. Everyone knows everybody else’s business, and has for the last hundred years. There might be things people don’t want talked about, but it will do the buzzards good to have somebody shake their tails a bit.”

  He seemed to relish the idea and I could detect nothing other than amusement in his words.

  “What exactly does an Editorial Assistant do?” His eyes had a warm and flattering way of traveling over my face, lingering on my lips, but always returning to capture my glance and hold it. Perhaps the tension I sensed was merely the good old pull between the sexes.

  “This is Minnie’s first book and she’s a little unsure of herself,” I said with a bit of improvisation. “I’m just checking on progress, ready to provide some direction if she wants it.”

  He glanced at his watch, took my hand, and said reluctantly, “Well, I better get going. Sorry I missed Dad, and I hope you’re going to be around a while. I’m on my way to Cheyenne, have some glad-handing to take care of.”

  “Politics?”

  “State legislature. You’ll still be here when I get back?” His clasp was warm and firm.

  “Probably not. I’m only staying a few days.”

  “I’m sorry.” He loosened his grip, but didn’t drop my hand. Again his eyes searched my face. He started to say something, hesitated, then settled for, “Well, goodbye then. Say hello to Minnie for me.”

  He strode off to his car, turning once for a final wave. A very attractive man.

  I stretched and yawned, feeling the weight of the day descend in full force. The dog bounced around and followed me to the front door, but I was too tired to pay much attention to him. The time had come to get settled in. Like it or not, I would interrupt Minnie’s interview long enough to find out where my room was. I eased backward through the door and shut it in the dog’s face. I hoped he wouldn’t feel too rejected. Turning, I rammed right into Parson Potts.