Dead in Hog Heaven (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book Three) Page 9

  "Stay here," Max said. "I'm going to show myself. It doesn't matter if I'm caught out here. Besides, I want to see who it is."

  "I'll go with you."

  "Don't be a fool, Thea. After what happened to you this morning, you can't be found snooping around Opal's property."

  "Why?" Then I knew. My stomach churned. Accused of murdering Opal this morning, caught snooping on her property this afternoon. My credibility as an innocent outsider would quickly fly out the window.

  Chapter 10

  "Stay here," Max said. "I'll lure him as far away from you as I can. Just stay hidden." He loped off to the right, skidding on loose stones, dodging the big boulders, jumping the small. I tried to scrunch down in the shallow depression, but knew I was about as inconspicuous as an elephant.

  Several yards farther up the hill and maybe twenty feet away, two boulders hunched massively on a small, weathered ridge. There appeared to be a cave-like space between them that looked large enough to offer some serious concealment. Clearly, a much better hiding place. I eyeballed the climb. Not too difficult, except that I'd be totally exposed in the process.

  Cautiously, I stood and peered in all directions. Nothing. Max had disappeared around the far side of the hill and was presumably drawing the truck toward him.

  The silence was deafening. All I could hear was the drone and buzz of insects. What the hell, I thought, and made a dash for it, scrabbling hands and feet up the steep slope, cursing the prickly weeds that shot nettles into my fingers.

  I'd covered only half the distance when a dirt-encrusted truck slithered into view. I froze against the hillside, hoping my drab clothes would disappear into the earthy background.

  Caught mid-step, the pose was excruciatingly awkward with one hand on the ground bearing too much of my weight, and the other projected mid-air for balance. Within seconds my muscles screamed in protest.

  Warily, I looked down at the truck and wondered if I dared ease my hip to the ground. I couldn't tell where the driver was looking. All I could see was a bare hand resting on the open window frame. The truck rolled to a stop. The door opened and the driver stepped out, holding a shotgun. He wore a hooded robe that hung below his knees. What in the world? From my skewed perspective he looked like one of those small faceless creatures in Star Wars. He hadn't spotted me yet. Leisurely, he put the gun to his shoulder and pointed at the side of the hill considerably ahead of me. My legs twitched. The muscles of my arms and back burned and throbbed. I tried to concentrate on a lone wild-flower close to my hand. My nose itched. I couldn't hold the pose much longer. He swung the barrel around, up, down, side to side, as if trying to decide where to shoot. A few more yards to the left and I'd be directly in his sights like a beetle skewered on a display board.

  Then he chose his shot. The blast sprayed the dirt ahead of me and I collapsed in a heap. The gun barrel swung to the movement and caught me in its sights. I ducked, flung my arms around my head, and waited for a second shot. Instead, the roar of an engine tore through the silence. I peeked under my arm and saw the truck race into a wide arc and rocket back around the hill.

  I jumped to my feet. Now that danger was moving away, I wanted to get a look at it. And where was Max? I ran awkwardly across the uneven hillside, but the truck was long gone. All I could see was a billowing contrail of dust traveling toward the long butte. Max was racing around the base of the hill toward me.

  "Hey," I hollered at him, "up here." He saw me. I waved and began a slip-sliding descent.

  "You okay?" His shoulders heaved, and he was gasping for breath. I nodded and concentrated on getting down without mishap.

  He met me partway and grabbed my hand to ease me down the lower portion. "Did he take a shot at you?"

  "Not quite. He just shot into the hillside. He didn't see me until afterwards."

  "Thea, I'm sorry. When I heard that shot I about died." He threw his hat on the ground, pulled his shirttail from his jeans and wiped his sweat-drenched face with it. "The truck was already headed in this direction when I rounded the hill. I ran behind him like an idiot, waving my arms and yelling, but he was too far ahead of me to hear, and probably never looked back. Did he see you well enough to identify you?"

  "I don't know. I might have been flat on my face when he actually saw me."

  "Did you get a look at him?"

  "Hardly," I said, sitting gingerly on a convenient rock. "He wore a hood."

  He stared at me. "A hood? Like a parka?"

  "More like a monk's robe. Brown, tied at the waist with a rope. Down to here." I indicated a mid-calf length on my leg.

  "What in hell..?"

  "Beats me. All I know is what I saw."

  "Are you sure it was a man?"

  "Not really," I had to admit.

  "What about the truck?"

  "Caked with dirt."

  "Color?"

  I thought a moment, tried to visualize what I'd seen. "It must have been dirt-colored," I said helplessly, "beige or light brown, or surely I would have noticed. Lord, Max. I wish I'd been more observant, but I was worried about the shotgun. I hope you got a better look at it."

  He shrugged. "Not much. It was dirty, all right, old and misshapen. I thought it might be Clyde's truck."

  "Clyde? He wouldn't be out here. He's in town with the sheriff."

  He shrugged again. "Could be his truck and somebody else driving it."

  "I don't know," I said, doubtfully. "Clyde's pickup was impounded with all the other vehicles out at Hog Heaven, unless the deputies are finished with everything by now. Besides," I added, "I think we're missing a point here. Whoever that person was, he seemed to be just as worried about being caught out here as we were. As soon as he saw me, he ran."

  "So that means it wasn't Clyde or Danny."

  "Max. You don't suppose... What if that was the truck Clyde said he saw leaving Hog Heaven? Maybe the driver was the person who killed Opal and he's been hiding out behind that butte."

  "But if Clyde's right about the truck, he saw it going onto the highway, not back into the country."

  "Aren't there other roads that would lead back in here?"

  "I don't know. My work has been west of town. I don't know that much about the back roads out here. I've been meaning to explore, just haven't gotten around to it yet." He tucked his shirttail back in and slapped his hat against his leg to beat the dust out. "But I'm betting there could be a road through Twila Pettigrew's place that would connect with Bodie's land. That, at least, is something we can find out about. All I really know is that I should be shot for bringing you out here. You're more tangled up in this mess than you deserve to be as it is, now I've made it worse."

  A grim expression darkened his face. He snugged the hat down on his forehead forcefully. "I'll have to tell Rusty I brought you out here today. That way if somebody reports us it won't seem so suspicious. He needs to know about the joker with the shotgun, anyway."

  "And your thoughts about the dirt work?"

  "Yeah, I'll tell him that, too. He's the sheriff, we'll let him figure it out. Come on." He gave me a hand up. "Let's get out of here."

  Once back at the truck we both heaved a sigh of relief. Max fished a large tepid bottle of water out from under the front seat. We emptied it in huge thirsty gulps before heading back to the straw bale house. Thirty minutes later, after Max gave some last minute instructions to the workmen and I took advantage of a workable powder room, we were on our way again.

  But we took one more detour. Spur of the moment, it seemed, as Max exited the highway on yet another country dirt road. "Monty Montgomery's ranch is only a couple of miles down this Spring Creek road. He's the biggest gossip in the county, as far as I can tell. If anyone knows what kind of excavating Dan and Ronnie were involved in, he will. Besides, he owes me some elk steaks. We can have them for dinner."

  We barreled down a sparsely graveled road, dodging potholes, bouncing in and out of ruts left from some long-ago rainfall. In a few miles, a clutch of buildin
gs came in sight.

  "That's Monty's place," Max said.

  As we got closer I could see that what I'd thought was a bunch of different buildings was just a hodge-podge of add-ons' attached to a weathered old two-story house.

  "Wow," I said, taking in the junk that littered the yard, or what would have been a yard if anyone had ever put one in. There were stacks of wood, a pile of bleached antlers that reached the roof, uncountable wagon wheels, and wrought-iron kettles in a variety of sizes, some large enough to satisfy a tribe of cannibals. Several bare-wood wagons with broken axles leaned tipsily against each other like a bunch of drunken soldiers. Max turned in the drive, bumped across a cattle guard and drove toward the barn, which was surrounded by an even larger assortment of stuff, none of which looked useful to me, but who am I to be a junkyard critic?

  "Look, Max," I said, as the field beyond the barn came into view. A small settlement of tents and tepees seethed with activity. People milled around the cars, trucks and horse trailers parked haphazardly among a more interesting array of wagons, buggies and a couple of rather precarious-looking stagecoaches. Rope corrals penned grazing horses, and two young boys carried a sloshing washtub of water to a half dozen mules in a far corner.

  "Monty's reenactors must be gathering."

  Laughter drifted on the wind from a bunch of kibitzers shouting encouragement to three men, and a woman dressed in a long calico dress, who struggled to pull a flapping canvas over the curved frame of a Conestoga wagon.

  "There's Monty," Max said, pulling up to a small cinder block building that sat off by itself between the barn and an old windmill that was dribbling water into a rusted horse tank. A hand-made plaque hanging above the door had the words, Keep Your Powder Dry, burned into the wood.

  The big man stood in the doorway with a small wooden keg under each arm. Yesterday's leather breeches and moccasins had been exchanged for jeans and boots, but he still wore the huge fringed leather shirt. His grizzled beard fuzzed out of control, much as my hair tended to do with too much heat, sweat, cold, or whatever it took alarm at.

  "Max! Good to see you," he said, as we got out of the truck. He set the kegs on the ground and shook Max's hand.

  "I think you met Thea yesterday, Monty."

  He nodded and gave a mock bow. "Couldn't forget such a pretty lady," he declared gallantly, engulfing my hand in his big paw. "Come on in, I'm just getting my gear ready, we're going to do a bit of black powder shooting. Care to join us?" He didn't wait for an answer, just ushered us into his cramped workspace, plucked cellophane packets from a well-stocked pegboard and tossed them in a wooden box with rope handles. "Look at these new flints I found." He tossed a packet to Max. I tried to read the labels while they talked. Patches, primers, flints, and innocent-looking, pale green coils of cannon fuse. Whoa, I thought, cannon fuse? Then my eye was caught by a couple of contraptions on a bench against the back wall. I sidled behind them.

  "What are these?" I asked. Monty and Max turned to see.

  "Reloaders," Max said, stepping to my side.

  "Modern-day stuff." Monty snorted, dismissing it with a wave of his hand.

  "The one on the left is for reloading different caliber ammunition using brass casings," Max said, "and the other is a shotgun shell reloader. If you do a lot of shooting it's much cheaper to reload your own ammunition rather than buy new all the time."

  "You can make your own ammunition?"

  "Yeah, I guess you'd say that."

  "But isn't it dangerous?"

  "Not if you follow instructions. Here, let me show you." He took an empty red plastic shotgun shell with a short brass bottom from a box, and sat it in a round depression on the machine's circular base. "The first pull of the lever punches out the old primer, then you move the shell to the next depression, pull the lever and it sets a new primer in the bottom. Move it to the next mark, move this handle over," he pointed to a bar that ran under two upside-down bottles on top of the machine, and pushed it over," that drops the powder from the bottle into the shell. Then you get a wad," he pulled a funny-looking plastic thing from another box on the table, and put it in the shell. "Move it to the next mark, pull the lever and it seats the wad and drops the shot from the other bottle. The last two positions and lever pulls put the crimp on the top of the shell that holds everything in. See? Easy as pie."

  And it was. It also looked like fun. "I saw one of these in the back room of the Hog Heaven store, I wondered what it was."

  "Black powder shooting is much more fun," Monty insisted. He took a red and black tin from the shelf above the pegboard and poured a stream of fine black powder into a gracefully curved, beautifully polished horn container. "And my apologies to you for making a dad-blamed fool of myself yesterday. I don't usually make mistakes with my black powder, but that damned Chet Overbeck sure knows how to get me all riled up. Being mayor has gone to his head in a big way."

  I got lost in this statement, until I remembered that Monty shooting his tamping rod into the City Hall's ceiling had been, more or less, the shot heard round the world; at least, the catalyst that set off the string of horrible events that began with Ronnie Mae's death.

  Max saved me from having to respond by gesturing at the activity in the field. He said, "Looks like you're getting your show ready to go."

  "Yeah, the Montana crew came down early to help. We're getting some more prairie schooners put together. Folks'll be coming in all week now. Gonna have the biggest damned encampment you've ever seen. We're gonna parade through town, and lure all the mayor's business fair customers out to Hog Heaven." He threw his head back in a great guffaw.

  "Hog Heaven? I thought the Rendezvous was going to be in the fairgrounds."

  "Well, I changed my mind. Me and Clyde Bodie—"

  "Umm," Max cut him off uneasily, "haven't you heard about Opal?"

  "Opal? No. What happened? Old Rydell whap her with a shovel, finally?" He chuckled again and threw the horn and a can of powder into the box.

  "She's dead," Max told him bluntly.

  Monty lurched as if struck by one of his own shots. "No shit," he breathed, clutching his chest. His eyes slid nervously between us, then steadied on Max. "What happened?"

  Max put his arm across my shoulders. "Murdered," he said, keeping it mercifully brief. "This morning, out at Hog Heaven."

  "Who?"

  "They don't know."

  Monty shook his head as if to clear extraneous debris. "My God, you don't suppose the mayor..."

  "The mayor? What about the mayor?" Max snapped impatiently.

  "I know you like Chet, Max," Monty began apologetically, "but you saw him yesterday after the town hall meeting. He was madder'n piss at Opal. She stepped on his turf; stole the institute away from him."

  "Actually, I didn't see the mayor after the meeting, and I don't believe he'd have anything to do with murder," Max said, wearily. "Look, I'm sorry to bring bad news, I guess I thought you would have heard of it by now, the way news travels around here."

  "Nobody's been to town today."

  "Well, I just stopped by to get some of those elk steaks you promised me. We've got to get back to town."

  "The steaks are up to the house. In the freezer." He spoke absently, staring at us with unseeing eyes. "Poor Opal. Murdered. I can't believe it." He shook his head in disbelief. Then, with a touch of curiosity he added, "I heard they got a bunch of land posted No Trespassing out by you."

  "Yeah," Max said, priming the pump. I knew this was the opportunity he'd been looking for. "Dan and Ronnie Mae put them up, as far as I can tell. They're doing some dirt work out there. Clyde say anything about it?"

  "He didn't say nothing about any work going on, just that Dan was tired of people driving around on the land without permission."

  "It's not important. I was just curious."

  "I heard tell that Pussyfoot Aguire's been squiring people around looking at this piece of land and that piece of land." He shook his head again. "That's what you get with a bu
nch of foreigners hanging around. First Ronnie Mae and now Opal; a tub full of sorrow for them folks."

  I felt enormously uncomfortable. I couldn't face any more talk about murder, death, or worse, think about my part in it. What would this gentle bear of a man think when he heard that I was a major suspect? I wanted out of there.

  Monty stood stolidly in front of the door, blocking it. I squeezed behind him, then gave a little yelp of surprise when I bumped into two men standing in the doorway. Monty whirled at the sound. The older of the two, a small, balding man with a round pug-nosed face grabbed my arm to steady my balance.

  "What's up, mate?" he said. "We're waiting on ya." The words were directed at Monty, but his eyes were busy with all of us. He knew he'd stepped into the middle of something and was wild with curiosity.

  Monty didn't enlighten him. He grabbed some paper targets from a pile and tossed them in the box. Then as if remembering his manners, "Wiley, this is Max Holman, an old friend of mine. Wiley Colton."

  I had recognized the thick Aussie accent. Yesterday he had been dressed as a French voyageur and paraded into City Hall with Monty. Now, in jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out, he seemed very ordinary.

  Max grinned and shook his hand. "Been in this country long?"

  "Years. Once an Aussie, always 'un," he answered good-naturedly, as if references to his accent were common. He glanced at me, and Max picked up on it.

  "This is Thea Barlow, Wiley, my fiancée. She's a real foreigner. From Chicago." They all grinned fatuously. I gave Max a dirty look and moved toward the door.

  The younger man stepped aside for me to pass. He was short—not as tall as I—and wore his hair in a buzz cut that didn't seem to go with the blousy home-spun shirt and knee-length britches he wore. The coarse-textured shirt was caught at the waist with a cord belt. It reminded me of the monk's robe I'd so recently seen.

  On impulse, I flashed him a smile, not sure what I was after. "Hi," I said. "Have you been doing this long?" I indicated his costume and the bustling activity going on in the field behind us.

  "'Bout two years." He had a shy smile, but bold, hormone-driven eyes. He couldn't have been much more than twenty.