Celia Kinsey's Blog

Tabbies and Turpitude is free today (or borrow with your KU subscription)! Get it here.When Ruby hears that Miss Hazel Potts, the biggest grump in Port Blanchet, has been rendered unconscious after being crushed under a deluge of newspapers at the PTA paper drive, Ruby questions whether the unfortunate event was really an accident.Could it be that Hazel's nephew, who aspires to become the next Mr. Elvis Presley, has finally gotten fed up with his aunt's interference with his debut into show business? What about those rumors Hazel has been spreading about the mayor and the beautiful Mrs. Minot being on a left-handed honeymoon? Could the illicit couple have decided to shut Hazel's yapper for good?The more Ruby digs, the more she realizes just how many people wish Hazel Potts ill. Then, when another unlikeable local ends up dead, Ruby is more certain than ever that something sinister is afoot in the sleepy town of Port Blanchet.This is a novella-length humorous cozy murder mystery set in the 1950s.

Mangos and Malice is leaving Kindle Unlimited on July 9, 20223

Tabbies and Turpitude is leaving Kindle Unlimited on September 2nd, 2023
Get the novella or borrow with Kindle Unlimited
When Ruby hears that Miss Hazel Potts, the biggest grump in Port Blanchet, has been rendered unconscious after being crushed under a deluge of newspapers at the PTA paper drive, Ruby questions whether the unfortunate event was really an accident.
Could it be that Hazel's nephew, who aspires to become the next Mr. Elvis Presley, has finally gotten fed up with his aunt's interference with his debut into show business? What about those rumors Hazel has been spreading about the mayor and the beautiful Mrs. Minot being on a left-handed honeymoon? Could the illicit couple have decided to shut Hazel's yapper for good?
The more Ruby digs, the more she realizes just how many people wish Hazel Potts ill. Then, when another unlikeable local ends up dead, Ruby is more certain than ever that something sinister is afoot in the sleepy town of Port Blanchet.
This is a novella-length humorous cozy murder mystery set in the 1950s.
About the Ruby Hobbs Mysteries:
Ruby Hobbs, the widow of the late Port Blanchet Chief of Police, is unwilling to spend her golden years simply volunteering with the township bookmobile, looking after her motherless grandchildren, and indulging her menagerie of cats.
Instead, she takes on all the unsolved cases that seem to crop up with regularity in her small town on the shores of Lake Huron, much to the chagrin of her son, George, who's taken up his father's mantle as Port Blanchet's new Police Chief.
This series of novella-length humorous cozies are set in the 1950s and feature a large cast of quirky characters and period detail.

 

Get the novella or borrow with Kindle Unlimited
When Ruby hears that Miss Hazel Potts, the biggest grump in Port Blanchet, has been rendered unconscious after being crushed under a deluge of newspapers at the PTA paper drive, Ruby questions whether the unfortunate event was really an accident.
Could it be that Hazel's nephew, who aspires to become the next Mr. Elvis Presley, has finally gotten fed up with his aunt's interference with his debut into show business? What about those rumors Hazel has been spreading about the mayor and the beautiful Mrs. Minot being on a left-handed honeymoon? Could the illicit couple have decided to shut Hazel's yapper for good?
The more Ruby digs, the more she realizes just how many people wish Hazel Potts ill. Then, when another unlikeable local ends up dead, Ruby is more certain than ever that something sinister is afoot in the sleepy town of Port Blanchet.
This is a novella-length humorous cozy murder mystery set in the 1950s.
About the Ruby Hobbs Mysteries:
Ruby Hobbs, the widow of the late Port Blanchet Chief of Police, is unwilling to spend her golden years simply volunteering with the township bookmobile, looking after her motherless grandchildren, and indulging her menagerie of cats.
Instead, she takes on all the unsolved cases that seem to crop up with regularity in her small town on the shores of Lake Huron, much to the chagrin of her son, George, who's taken up his father's mantle as Port Blanchet's new Police Chief.
This series of novella-length humorous cozies are set in the 1950s and feature a large cast of quirky characters and period detail.

Something Borrowed, Something Chewed is a novelette-length cozy and the fourth in the Little Tombstone Cozy Mystery Series.

Buy the EbookBuy the Little Tombstone Collected Short Stories in Paperback
Blurb
Hank Edwards, the proprietor of Little Tombstone's Museum of the Unexplained, is finally tying the knot with his longtime ladylove, Phyllis.

But when Emma tries to get Hank down the aisle on time, she discovers that someone--Hank won't say who--has attacked both Hank and his precious collection of taxidermied Chupacabras. Who has it out for Hank? And why? It's up to Emma to get to the bottom of this troubling turn of events before the long-suffering bride's big day is ruined by a mysterious stranger threatening to throw a wrench in the already-chaotic nuptials.

Join Emma, Earp-the-pug, Hercules-the-potbellied pig, and precocious six-year-old Maxwell as they cooperate with the whole Little Tombstone family in making sure that Hank and Phyllis get the wedding day of their dreams.

This novelette is a prequel to the next novel in the series, Tamales at High Noon, but features a complete stand-alone short mystery.


Read a Sample
Chapter One

When my Great Uncle Ricky first envisioned how Little Tombstone—a truncated imitation of the original old west town in Arizona—would age, I’m sure he’d imagined something quite different from the weather-beaten row of buildings fronting Highway 41 as it bisected the village of Amatista, halfway between the interstate to the south and the city of Santa Fe to the north.

In my late Uncle Ricky’s mind, I’m sure the gravel strip in front of the elevated boardwalk that tied the whole crumbling monstrosity together would be forever packed with massive American-made sedans overflowing with families of midwestern tourists searching out cut-rate kachina dolls and “Zuni” pottery of questionable provenance.

A tourist—on the rare occasions that we got one these days—could still purchase all manner of tacky southwest-themed tchotchkes at the Curio shop—but they rarely did.

The star attraction of Little Tombstone was no longer the Curio Shop, the Museum of the Unexplained, nor the under-renovation motel out back.

The reason people still came to Little Tombstone was the Bird Cage Café, where Juanita Gonzales served up daily lunches and dinners to a packed dining room. The food at the Bird Cage rivaled the finest Mexican cuisine north—or south—of the border.

Today, even though the gravel parking strip out front was crowded with cars, the café was closed.

A large cardboard sign hung from the front door of the Bird Cage. CLOSED FOR PRIVATE PARTY, it said. COME BACK TOMORROW.

It didn’t much matter that the Bird Cage was closed. Most of the regulars of the café would be guests at the private party, anyway.

It was no ordinary party; it was a once in fifty-years’ event that had come as a shock to the village of Amatista in general and the inhabitants of Little Tombstone in particular.

Sixty-something Hank Edwards—proprietor of the Museum of the Unexplained, proud owner of the worlds’ only complete family of taxidermized Chupacabras, and confirmed bachelor—was tying the knot.

Hank Edwards was getting married, and it was my job to make sure he got to the church on time, in a manner of speaking.

Phyllis, Hank’s intended, had initially lobbied for a wedding in the tiny, picturesque adobe chapel on the edge of Amatista, presided over by Father Orejo.

Hank, unlike Phyllis, was not a baptized Catholic. Hank was not a baptized anything, and when Phyllis raised the possibility of conversion, if only for the sake of a proper Catholic wedding, Hank wouldn’t hear of it.

And it wasn’t just Catholicism Hank objected to.

Hank is perpetually prepared to entertain the possibility not only of the existence of aliens in some galaxy far, far away but aliens who may at any moment show up on one’s doorstep and crave humanities’ assistance in saving their race from mass extinction. Hank enthusiastically embraces vast and untenable conspiracies involving collusions between all manner of disparate government and civilian entities collectively cooperating to deprive the American People of life, liberty, and happiness—not that Hank’s life, liberty, or happiness seems to have been affected in any way by these mass indoctrinations of the American Citizenry, just yet. According to Hank, this detracts nothing from his theories; disaster on an apocalyptic scale is always lurking just over history’s horizon.

Regardless of Hank’s multitude of other views requiring an abundance of blind faith, acknowledgment of the existence of a Supreme Being, according to Hank, required a suspension of disbelief too great for his whiskey-addled mind and bacon-clogged arteries to bear.

For years, Phyllis had ignored Hank’s bizarre views on the world and its workings and faithfully gone by herself to mass every Sunday and sometimes Saturday evenings, too.

Phyllis and Hank had maintained an amiable toleration for one another’s disparate viewpoints throughout their lengthy courtship but making their relationship official had brought a brewing conflict to a head. Phyllis was of the unshakeable conviction that so solemn a step as marriage ought to include an appeal to Divine Power for a blessing on the sacred union.

There’d been a great deal of arguing back and forth between Phyllis and Hank about the wedding. I heard this from Morticia.

Morticia is our resident fortune-teller on the premises of Little Tombstone, which means she knows more about other people’s business than the rest of us. Morticia is supposed to tell her clients what’s going to happen in the future, but more often than not, her clients tell her what’s already happened in the past. Also, Morticia’s mother, Hettie, and Phyllis had been best friends for years.

Morticia wasn’t privy to the outcome of the argument—Phyllis had simply said that she and Hank had reached an acceptable compromise—so I didn’t know what to expect regarding the sectarian nature of the ceremony.

All I knew was that the ragtag collection of chairs and strawbale benches set up on the patch of dirt and sagebrush out back of the trailer court behind the Bird Cage Café were full up with wedding guests. It was my job to make sure the groom made it down the aisle and stood under the whitewashed and fairy-light-festooned tumbleweed archway to await the entrance of his bride.

Phyllis was arriving in precisely twelve minutes with a multispecies entourage. She was to be transported to the wedding venue in style, sitting on a muslin-draped bale of straw in the bed of our mayor, Nancy Flynn’s, pickup truck.

I hoped none of the members of the bride’s party—small boy, elderly pug, or half-grown potbellied piglet—got over-excited by all the fuss and threw up on the bride. Fortunately for me, seeing to it that nobody threw up on the bride was my cousin Georgia’s job. She was in charge of the health, wellbeing, promptness, and presentability of the bridal party.

I’d gotten off easy. I only had to get the groom to toe his mark at the front of the assembled congregation, and my duties were done.

As I entered the front door of the Curio Shop, the bell on the door tinkled. I’d expected Hank to be ready and waiting for me to accompany him out back. I’d anticipated my duties to consist of tying Hank’s tie—which Morticia had picked out for him, along with his new suit—making sure Hank had combed his freshly-trimmed hair—courtesy of our friend and neighbor Ledbetter—and pinning a single white rose to the groom’s lapel.

Contrary to my expectations, the groom was not ready and waiting. I called out to Hank but got no answer. The third time I called Hank’s name, he finally replied, ”That you, Emma?”

“Come out and let me have a look at you,” I shouted into the open door leading to Hank’s tiny apartment at the back of the Curio Shop. “Morticia and Ledbetter said—”

Hank’s appearance was a shock.

I’d expected—per Morticia and Ledbetter’s description—an uncharacteristically clean and dapper Hank.

What I had not expected was an uncharacteristically clean and dapper Hank, who was also sporting an enormous black eye.

“What’s happened to you?” I demanded.

“What?” said Hank.

“Your eye,” I said, reaching up to touch my own face.

Hank’s eye was so injured; it was very nearly swollen shut.

“You need some ice on that!” I said.

“I don’t need no ice,” said Hank, glaring at me out of his one good eye before his gaze strayed to his feet as he stood in the middle of the Curio Shop.

It was then that I noticed that more than Hank’s eye was amiss.


Chapter Two

Someone had wreaked havoc on a display of desert-themed snow-globe-style paperweights. Several paperweights lay at Hank’s feet. When he bent to pick one of them up, I stepped toward him to help gather up the scattered souvenirs. As I stooped to collect one of the large glass globes, I noticed that there was a great deal more out of place than a few upset souvenirs.

A large, open archway connected the Curio Shop with the Museum of the Unexplained. The Museum contained, amongst other bizarre objects, Hank’s most precious possession: a family of stuffed Chupacabras.

According to everyone but Hank, the Chupacabras were the work of a talented and highly creative taxidermist. Hank, however, was utterly convinced of their authenticity.

Fortunately, the family of Chupacabras was still intact, but one corner of the plate-glass display case was shattered, and, resting at the feet of the leering Papa Chupacabra, was a hefty snow-globe paperweight.

“Who did this?” I asked.

Hank grunted, which was not informative.

I walked over to the case and started to reach through the hole in the glass for the paperweight. Inside the snow-globe was a pair of anthropomorphized red and green chili peppers who appeared to be dancing the bachata. Their googly eyes stared back at me as if I were some interloper in their romantic moment.

Then I caught the glassy stare of Papa Chupacabra, and I was not sorry when Hank interfered with my rescue.

“Stop!” said Hank. “I’ll take care of that later.”

“Later? After the wedding?”

It was a testament, I suppose, to Hank’s love for Phyllis that he was willing to allow his precious family of Chupacabra to remain exposed to the dangers of the open air, not to mention a pair of dancing chili peppers about to get amorous.

“Who did this to you? Who did this to your Chupacabras?” I asked again.

“Nobody did,” said Hank.

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Nothing to tell,” Hank insisted. “I was rearranging the paperweights when I noticed that the glass on the case was dirty.”

Hank does not rearrange anything. Ever. On the rare occasion he sells something to a tourist possessing such poor taste as to want anything Hank has on offer, he just leaves an empty spot on the shelf.

Hank also never cleans. He doesn’t even wipe down the Chupacabras’ case. For as long as I’ve been at Little Tombstone, the only change I’ve ever noticed to the Curio Shop and the Museum of the Unexplained is everything gradually becomes coated in a slightly thicker layer of dust.

“I was holding that paperweight in my hand,” Hank continued. “I dropped it and broke the glass. When I bent over to check for damage, I caught my eye on the corner of the case. Hurt like the dickens, but I’ll be fine."

I wasn’t so sure Hank would be fine, and I wasn’t for a second buying his story.

“You and Phyllis didn’t have a fight, did you?” I asked.

I couldn’t imagine Phyllis, or Hank, for that matter, becoming violent, but who besides Phyllis would have been in the Curio Shop that morning? Someone had obviously precipitated a heated argument with Hank that had spiraled out of control.

Hank snorted in answer to my question about Phyllis, which I took as his way of saying that the very notion of his betrothed having been the source of his black eye was the height of absurdity.

“Never mind,” I said, “let’s do something about that tie and get you down the aisle. All the guests have been seated for ten minutes, and we don’t want the bride starting to worry that you’ve gotten cold feet.”

I’d toyed for a few seconds with the idea of appealing to Chamomile, one of the waitresses at the Bird Cage, for a little foundation makeup to try and disguise the damage to Hank’s eye before I sent him down the aisle. I almost immediately dismissed the notion as futile. I could cover the bruising, sort of, but no amount of makeup was going to disguise the fact that Hank’s right eye had swollen shut.

I tied Hank’s tie and pinned the white rose to his lapel. Contrary to expectations, Hank’s hair was in pristine condition. Prior to Ledbetter and Morticia taking him off to Albuquerque—for what they only referred to as a “make-over” outside of his hearing—Hank had sported stringy shoulder-length gray hair that perpetually looked like he’d just woken up from a sound seven-hour nap.

Now, Hank’s hair looked like the “after” in a trendy barber’s photo gallery.

His formerly shaggy beard was also neatly trimmed. His suit fit. Aside from his conspicuous black-eye, I doubted Hank Edwards had ever looked better in his sixty-nine years.

For the first time, I had an inkling of what Phyllis saw in him.

“Ready?” I said to Hank.

He grunted, which I took to mean, “yes.” I hoped when the officiant asked Hank if he vowed to “Love, Honor, and Cherish” Phyllis Ford “’til death do you part?” he’d not merely grunt in reply. Wedding vows are one of those occasions which call for the use of actual, intelligible words.

“Did you write your own vows?” I asked Hank.

Hank just gave me the side-eye with his one good one. Clearly, Hank was of the opinion that only hippies and millennials wrote their own vows.

“Who is officiating?” I asked as we walked down the boardwalk in front of the Bird Cage on the way to the back where the guests were waiting for the entrance of the happy couple.

“Freddy,” said Hank.

I decided he must mean Freddy Fernandez, the devout barber who had a shop next to the Bird Cage. Most people referred to Freddy Fernandez as “Pastor Freddy,” although he wasn’t an official clergyperson on the payroll of any religious entity registered in the state of New Mexico.

Pastor Freddy was a lay preacher who held a nondenominational protestant service in the back of his barbershop on Sunday afternoons.

“I thought you and Phyllis agreed not to have a religious service?” I said.

“We did,” said Hank. “Freddy’s agreed not to mention the G word.”

“Is Freddy licensed to marry people?” I asked.

The last thing poor Phyllis needed, after being deprived of her church wedding, was to find out after the fact that the alternative ceremony she’d settled for wasn’t even legal.

“Freddy got some license off the internets.”

I hoped Freddy knew what he was doing.

I hoped Phyllis knew what she was doing, too. I supposed she ought to. She and Hank had been a pair for the past eight years.

Hank had not been in favor of marriage until he’d been convinced that his late mother was speaking to him from beyond the grave and urging him to “make an honest woman” of Phyllis. Hank’s mother had used the highly unusual method of piercing the veil by communicating with her son through the crossword puzzle in the Amatista Advance, our weekly community newsletter.

Hank’s mother, was, of course, safely resting in her grave up on the hillside overlooking Little Tombstone, oblivious to the machinations of the living, but I liked to think that the elder Mrs. Edwards would have appreciated the lengths to which Hank’s near-and-dear had gone to make sure that a gem like Phyllis didn’t slip through Hank’s grasp.

Fond as I was of Hank, I was well aware that Phyllis should have been out of his league. Practically any woman should have been out of Hank’s league.

We had just rounded the corner of the Bird Cage and were on the home stretch to get Hank down the aisle when I saw Nancy Flynn’s pickup in the distance tearing down the hill from the Flynn ranch.

I’d assumed that given Nancy had a bride of advanced years seated in the back of the truck, she would have driven in a more sedate manner. Instead, she raised a plume of dust as she tore down the gravel road.

“You’re late!” Morticia said, taking Hank firmly by the elbow and hauling him off to the starter’s mark: the end of a piece of aquamarine shag carpet our handyman, Oliver, had found in the cellar under the Bird Cage.

End of Sample
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Blurb
When Earp develops a case of mange and requires treatment, the last thing Emma expects to find is Earp's new vet lying facedown on the floor of the clinic exam room in a pool of blood.

With only a bloodied rodeo trophy and a hateful message scrawled in lipstick next to the poor woman's head to go on, it's up to Emma to find out who hit Dr. Vance in the back of the head and why.


Read a Sample
Chapter One

Earp, the ancient and irritable pug I’d inherited from my Great Aunt Geraldine along with the dilapidated premises of Little Tombstone, was scratching himself again.

Earp’s daily activities generally consist (in equal parts) of dozing in the corner of my apartment kitchen with his head resting on the ample belly of Hercules, his pot-bellied pig companion, and—when not in repose—dogging the footsteps of ten-year-old Maxwell, the pug’s favorite human. Earp is waiting for crumbs to drop from the snacks the kid seems to be constantly consuming. Unfortunately, during the past week, Earp had added a third major activity to his limited repertoire. The pug had taken up scratching himself as a major pass time.

Something had to be done.

Earlier in the day, I’d taken Earp over to see Dr. Bagley at the vet clinic. Dr. Bagley had given Earp a once over and announced that the pug had mange.

“I’ll have to take a skin scraping and analyze it to know for sure what kind of mite is causing the infection,” Dr. Bagley had told me.

She’d then taken the sample, much against Earp’s will. He’d bared his teeth and growled at Dr. Bagley, but he hadn’t bitten.

He’s only actually bitten on a handful of occasions. One notable exception to Earp’s no-bite policy having been when my ex-husband, Frank, decided to land a hot air balloon in the street in front of the Bird Cage Cafe and declare his undying love for me because his mistress had left him. Frank’s I-can’t-live-without-you-speech hadn’t gone well. And Earp hadn’t been the only inhabitant of Little Tombstone who’d conspired to send my odious ex off into the sunset, but I digress. The salient point is that Earp is not a biter.

Dr. Bagley seemed unfazed by the pug’s ill-tempered outburst. I suppose she’s probably seen thousands of dogs in her long career. She can probably tell just by observation, which dogs will make good on their threats, and which will not.

“I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to look at this sample under the microscope,” Dr. Bagley had told me after she’d deprived Earp of a sampling of his infected hide.

The vet had then bundled us off so she could deal with her next patient, a four-year-old Persian cat named Polly. Polly’s owner had informed me as to the cat’s particulars while we’d all been stuck in the clinic’s tiny reception area together. Polly had yowled her head off inside her carrier throughout the wait, which had not pleased Earp one bit, although it probably helped that the pug was half-deaf.

I’d had no such luck. Polly’s proud owner referred to the cat’s vocalizations as “singing,” but it seemed to me that Polly lacked talent as a vocalist and ought to be brushing up on her skills as a mouser if she intended to earn her keep.

Our Friday excursion to the vet had been a trying ordeal, and it was only half-over since Dr. Bagley had only proffered up a partial diagnosis on the spot. That initial visit to the clinic had concluded at ten in the morning; it was now late afternoon, and my phone was ringing.

“It’s Sarcoptic Mange,” Dr. Bagley told me. “You’ll have to come back in for a tube of ointment. I’ll be out, but Dr. Vance will be here until five.”

Dr. Reba Vance was new to Dr. Bagley’s vet clinic, but she wasn’t new to Amatista.

According to Juanita, proprietress of the Bird Cage Café and lifelong resident of the village, Reba was something of a local celebrity. Back in the day, Reba Vance had been a rodeo queen and, according to Juanita, was still quite a beauty.

After quitting the rodeo scene in her mid-twenties, Reba had belatedly gone off to college and later to vet school. Now, at thirty-six, she was finally coming back to where she’d started: the sleepy village of Amatista, New Mexico.

“She must still have family in the area?” I’d asked Juanita.

“Sort of,” she’d replied. “Blake Vance is her ex-husband.”

I had never met Blake, but apparently, he’d also been big on the rodeo circuit a decade or so back.

“I’m sure Reba makes a very good vet,” Juanita had told me. “She was always so good with horses.”

I hoped she was equally good with geriatric pugs. I was curious to meet this aging-rodeo queen-turned-veterinarian and doubly eager to relieve poor Earp of his irritating skin condition. As soon as I got off the phone with Dr. Bagley, I leashed Earp up and headed over on foot to the Amatista Vet Clinic a quarter-mile away from Little Tombstone on the south side of the village.

Earp is not big on walks, but Dr. Bagley insists he needs the exercise, so I ignored the old pug’s grumbling. I set off with a pocket full of treats in case that’s what it took to coax Earp into motion and a bottle of water and a collapsible dog dish, just in case the heat got the best of us en route.

We finally got to the clinic after stopping half a dozen times. We paused once for water and five times for tantalizing smells. Three of the olfactory detours were for irresistible patches of earth impregnated with scents undetectable to the human nose. One was for a half-eaten hamburger, which I allowed Earp to approach, and the final delay was to investigate what turned out to be a dead rat in an advanced state of decay. I had the gravest difficulty convincing the pug to leave the cadaverous rodent alone.

In the end, I had to pick Earp up and carry him for the next block before setting him down again and coaxing him into action by tossing a treat into his path.

We both arrived at Dr. Bagley’s Clinic hot, panting, and a trifle out of sorts.

There was not a single vehicle in the small, graveled parking lot outside the old concrete block clinic building, which had originally housed a gas station. Years ago, the old filling station had been driven out of business by the truck stop that had gone in a few miles further north on Highway 14.

As I pushed open the front door, a bell tinkled, announcing our arrival. The front counter, once the domain of the gas station attendant, was deserted. Neither Julia, Dr. Bagley’s office manager, nor either of her techs, Artie or Candice, responded when I called out. For that matter, neither did Dr. Vance.

To the left of the counter was the door that once led into the old double bays of the garage. The old garage was now divided into three exam rooms, Dr. Bagley’s office, and a storage room, all connected by a central hallway. I walked to the door that led into the hallway and pushed it open. I called out again—still, no answer.

I wondered if there had been some miscommunication between Dr. Bagley and Dr. Vance, or perhaps the new vet, overwhelmed by adjusting to an unfamiliar work environment, had simply forgotten that I was coming to pick up Earp’s ointment.

If that was the case, however, Dr. Vance had also forgotten to lock up when she went home.

The doors to two of the exam rooms and to the office were open. I stuck my head into all three, but they were deserted. The door to the third exam room was closed, and as I approached it and knocked, Earp growled and backed away from the door. I knocked again and pulled a treat from my pocket in an attempt to calm him down.

It didn’t work. Earp kept backing away from the door, which gave me a case of the creeps. I let go of Earp’s leash, allowed him to wriggle backward into the empty exam room directly across from the closed door, and shut him inside. I knocked once more at the closed exam room door, then tried the knob, which turned easily in my hand.

It was silly to be so jumpy, I told myself, but my voice sounded small and shaky as I called out one more time for Dr. Vance as I pushed the door open.

At first, I thought I was alone in the room, but as I rounded the waist-high counter in the middle that served as the exam table, I spotted a teal-blue cowboy boot.

I could not have imagined a more improbable scene.

A tall, willowy woman wearing a white lab coat lay sprawled face-down on the linoleum floor, her long, blond hair matted with blood. She’d obviously been hit in the back of the head with something, and I didn’t have to look far to find the weapon.

A substantial brass trophy which featured a horse on top lay at the woman’s booted feet, and next to her head someone—and I could only suppose it was the same person who’d hit her on the head—had scrawled, “Die Reba Die” in bright pink lipstick. I knew the vile message had been written with lipstick because the abandoned tube lay next to the hateful words scrawled on the linoleum.

It was one of the weirdest scenes I’d ever laid eyes on, but I didn’t take time to examine the blood-covered trophy or the lipstick message. I was far too worried about the victim.

With shaky hands, I dialed 911 and held the phone to my ear with one hand as I approached the body sprawled on the floor. I was sure the woman was dead until she let out a moan.


Chapter Two

I’m afraid that the 911 dispatcher found me less than coherent.

“Someone tried to kill my dog’s vet,” I said as soon as the voice on the other end confirmed that I’d reached emergency services.

“Name, please?” the voice said.

“Emma Iverson. I’m afraid she’s in a bad way.”

“Where are you calling from, Ms. Iverson?”

“The veterinary clinic in Amatista. She’s moaning a little, but—”

“Do you know the street address of your location?”

The poor woman on the floor let out another moan. The bleeding on the back of her head seemed to have more or less stopped. I remembered hearing somewhere that head wounds often appear worse than they actually are because the head tends to bleed more profusely when cut than other parts of the human anatomy.

“I’ll have to go outside to find the address,” I told the dispatcher. “Shouldn’t I try and do something for the victim?”

“We can’t dispatch an ambulance until we have your exact location,” the voice on the other end of the phone informed me as if Amatista were big enough to get lost in.

It was like talking to one of those weird in-home voice-activated devices which, while privy to great swaths of the collective knowledge of humankind, is not necessarily at the ready with the particular bit of information you require.

I half expected to be offered a list of restaurants in a three-mile radius that offered delivery. Of course, there would be zero options on that list. We have only one restaurant, the Bird Cage Café, which does not deliver. If you blink as you pass through Amatista, you’ll miss it altogether.

Clearly, the officious voice on the other end of the line had never been to Amatista and didn’t know that there was only one vet clinic, it was visible from the highway, and any ambulance driver who’d ever been to Amatista, never mind the police, wouldn’t have any trouble finding it.

I decided to play along with the voice. There’s no use arguing in these situations.

I darted into the reception area and plucked a business card out of the little plexiglass holder on the counter.

“14378 Highway 14. The cross street is Calle Ocho.”

“Thaaannk you,” said the voice drawing out the a in an exaggerated show of exasperation. “I have dispatched emergency services to your location. They should be arriving in twenty to thirty minutes. Please stay on the line in case I need further information.”

That’s the problem with living way out in the middle of nowhere: when you need help, it takes ages to arrive. I decided that calling on local help was my best bet.

“I’m going to have to hang up on you, Alexa,” I told the impatient dispatcher.

“My name is not Alexa; it’s Cammie.”

“My apologies. I’m going to hang up and summon local help.”

“I’d advise you to stay on the line.”

“Can you tell me how to assist a woman lying face-down in a pool of her own blood?”

“Is the injured individual in any immediate danger?”

“Not unless her attacker returns,” I said.

“Do you know the identity of her attacker?”

“No.”

“Do you have any reason to believe her attacker might return?”

I wanted to say, “How should I know?” but instead, I just said, “No,” and walked to the open door of the exam room, pulled it shut, and activated the button lock, just in case.

The dispatcher’s question increased my urgency to summon assistance or at least company.

Earp, who’d initially howled his little head off and thrown his body repeatedly against the closed door of the exam room across the hall after I’d locked him in, had gone quiet.

He was too quiet, which made me worry that the pug had gotten into something in there and was currently consuming it, edible or not.

“Don’t move the victim and wait for help to arrive,” the dispatcher told me.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Don’t move the victim and wait for help to arrive,” she repeated as if reading off of a script.

That was not terribly helpful. I already knew how to do nothing.

“I’ll call back if there’s anything else you need to know,” I said and hung up before not-Alexa could repeat her instructions for the third time.

Unfortunately, we do not have a doctor living in Amatista. We do not even have a nurse. We have two vets, but one was currently incapacitated on the floor, and the only number I had for Dr. Bagley triggered a recorded message that I was pretty sure originated with the landline that rang a few times in reception before going silent.

We didn’t have a doctor. We didn’t have a nurse. We didn’t even have a vet available. So, I did the next best thing: I called a lawyer.

“Hello, Emma,” Jason Wendell said when he answered. “You ready for our date tonight?”

I was supposed to be going to see a musical in Santa Fe that evening with Jason, Amatista’s only lawyer and most eligible bachelor.

Mr. Wendell had gained the exalted status of most eligible on the strength of being under forty, gainfully employed, and possessing all of his original teeth and most of his original hair.

I had not been sure if our outing to see the Santa Fe Players perform The Music Man was supposed to be a “date” date or not. Our relationship was a bit ambiguous. I was 100% in favor of moving us out of the friend zone, but I was a little hazy about how Jason felt.

“There’s been a bit of a crisis. I could use some help,” I told Jason.

Calling a veterinarian lying prostrate on the floor of the Amatista animal clinic surrounded by a pool of her own blood “a bit of a crisis” was rather understating the case for Jason hurrying right over, but it turned out that he didn’t need a great deal of urging to come to my assistance.

“Where are you?” Jason asked.

I imagine he was expecting me to say that I was at Little Tombstone—the rundown roadside tourist attraction I’d inherited from my grandmother and late aunt. There’s a crisis at Little Tombstone every other week, but not generally of a violent nature. More often than not, it’s because some bit of the ramshackle premises has decided to detach itself from the rest, or a pipe has spontaneously sprung a leak.

I have never once summoned Jason to deal with carpentry or plumbing emergencies. Jason Wendell wears imported, handmade leather loafers and starched white shirts. His strengths lie more in the intellectual realm, and he was probably next to useless when it came to rendering first aid. However, as we’d been instructed to do nothing but wait for help, I felt it would not be asking too much to request that Jason provide moral support.

“I’m at the vet clinic,” I told Jason as I knelt over Dr. Vance’s head and tried to decide if I should even touch her. “Dr. Bagley’s new vet appears to have been viciously attacked.”

“I’ll be right there,” said Jason and hung up.

Jason Wendell’s neat, modern concrete office building—which sticks out like a sore thumb in the sea of old adobe and wood frame structures that make up the rest of the village—was only a block away.

While I waited for Jason, I made sympathetic sounds in the direction of the injured woman, not that I believed she was in any condition to take comfort in them. I also made a pass around the room but discovered nothing except the possible source of the lipstick which Dr. Vance’s attacker had used to scribble his, or her, odious epithet.

A purse, which I assumed belonged to Reba, had been knocked to the floor, and the contents, including a bright pink billfold, spangled with rhinestones, a bottle of perfume—which fortunately had not broken as it fell—and a hairbrush lay scattered near the prostrate woman.

I was loathe to disturb the woman’s possessions and contaminate the crime scene, so I left them where they were. Besides, everything I could glean from the victim’s scattered belongings about the motive for hitting Reba on the back of the head was already apparent. It hadn’t been to get her cash or credit cards; her billfold remained snapped shut, and it looked like nothing from her purse had been disturbed save the lipstick.

Whoever had hit Dr. Vance in the back of the head must have snuck up on her, but perhaps it had been more of an impulsive attack than it appeared. Snatching up whatever happened to be at hand and scrawling a hateful message on the floor as an afterthought did not indicate—at least to my mind—a significant degree of premeditation.

The only thing it did suggest was that whoever had hit Reba in the back of the head wasn’t terribly fond of her, to put it mildly, or at least that’s the impression they’d wanted to make.

I supposed that a particularly clever thief who’d impulsively attacked Reba in an attempt to prevent her from reporting his actions might have scribbled the words “Die Reba Die” in an attempt to make the attack appear to be the result of a personal vendetta, but as I stood there making vaguely reassuring sounds at Reba, I decided that scenario was highly unlikely.

Besides, unless the thief had been targeting something kept elsewhere in the clinic, nothing appeared to have been stolen. A row of rodeo trophies, which I assumed were a recent addition to the exam room since Dr. Vance had joined Dr. Bagley’s practice, were neatly aligned on the top of the cabinet above the counter that flanked the wall behind the exam table.

I was tempted to reach up and take one down to examine it in leu of disturbing the bloodied trophy that lay at Reba’s feet, but when I walked over, I discovered I couldn’t even brush the bases with my fingertips when I went up on tip toe.

I glanced at the framed certificates on the walls, which attested to Reba Vance’s professional bonafides. One of the certificates was slightly askew as if someone had brushed up against it, but I resisted the impulse to straighten it.

Less than three minutes had passed when I heard the bell over the front door of reception tinkle and looked at the time on my phone, even though it had felt like I’d been waiting for twenty.

The speediness of this arrival put me on high alert. It was probably Jason, rushing to my assistance, but I called out his name through the door just to be sure.

When he answered back, I unlocked the door of the exam room.

“What happened?” he asked as he joined me in crouching over Reba’s body.

“It appears someone hit her in the back of the head with one of her own rodeo trophies.” I pointed to the bloodied trophy that lay almost at my feet. “What do you do for a semi-conscious person with a head wound?”

“You leave them be until help arrives. Do you know when that will be?”

I looked at my sent calls and did a little math in my head.

“Another fifteen to twenty-five minutes.”

“What’s her name?” Jason asked me.

“It must be Dr. Vance. Reba Vance. She’s who Earp had an appointment to see.”

“Reba,” Jason said, directly addressing the woman lying on the floor, “Can you hear me?”

It was just then that Earp started barking again and resumed throwing himself against the door of the exam room where he’d been confined against his will.

“I’d better let Earp out,” I told Jason and left him there, squatted on the floor next to the presumptive Dr. Vance’s body.


Chapter Three

Earp was ecstatic to be released from durance vile in the exam room across the hall from where poor Dr. Vance lay. The problem was that as soon as I let the pug out of one exam room, he wanted to get a look at what was going on in the other. All his earlier hesitation to enter the room containing the injured woman seemed to have evaporated.

Although the pug was leashed, it seemed fundamentally wrong to allow him to sniff at the soles of the poor woman’s teal blue cowboy boots, and that was the best-case scenario if I were to allow Earp into the room with Dr. Vance.

“I’m going to take Earp outside,” I called through the door to Jason as I grasped the pug by his collar.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Jason asked as he opened the door a crack too small for Earp to wiggle through, although that didn’t prevent the pug from trying.

“I imagine whoever hit Dr. Vance in the back of the head is far from keen to get caught on the premises. I’ll keep watch for the police to arrive while I let Earp water a tumbleweed.”

I also intended to scope out the parking lot for any clues the brute who’d bludgeoned Reba might have left behind, but I didn’t tell Jason that.

Much like Earp, straining at the leash in my hands, my earlier terror had evaporated, and I was on high alert for indications to the identity of Reba’s would-be killer. Perhaps it was the fifteen pounds of geriatric canine valor that was straining at the end of his leash that emboldened me.

“I wish there was something we could do for her.” Jason gestured helplessly at the woman on the floor, who was still letting out a moan from time to time.

I was fairly certain that Reba was far too out of it to even acknowledge our presence in the room, but I supposed it was worth at least trying one last time to establish communication.

“Hold onto Earp,“ I told Jason.

As soon as I’d handed off the pug, who proceeded to bark excitedly from outside the doorway of the exam room, I came around to where Dr. Vance lay on the bloody linoleum.

The gash had all but stopped bleeding, but I could see that she had a nasty goose egg growing on the back of her head.

“Reba!” I said, gently touching her arm. “Can you hear me?”

All I got for my trouble was another moan.

“Can you hear me?” I repeated.

This time Reba’s one visible eye fluttered open, and she mumbled something that sounded like “go away.”

“Who did this to you?” I asked.

Reba moaned a second time but did not again open her eyes.

“Who hit you?” I tried once more.

I didn’t even get a third moan out of her in response to my appeal to identify her attacker. I decided it was fruitless to try any longer to get an answer out of Reba. The chances were good, seeing as she’d been struck on the back of the head, that she hadn’t even seen her attacker coming for her.

“I’m going outside,” I told Jason, taking Earp’s leash from his grasp.

“Call me if you see anyone hanging around. I don’t like you out there by yourself.”

“You’ll like standing in a puddle of pug pee even less,” I informed him and headed down the short hallway back through the reception area, where I noted the bell hanging over the glass swinging door which had tinkled on my arrival and later when Jason had come through it.

I wondered how easily the free-hanging bell might be disabled if one opened the door very gently from the outside. I was tempted to try opening and closing the door a few times to find out, but I didn’t want to disturb any prints that the police might be able to lift from it. I was careful not to touch the glass with my bare skin as I pushed the door open to go outside.

I could always come back later after the police had left the scene. Besides, I was fairly certain that since the building that housed the clinic used to function as a gas station, there must be at least one other way in and out.

The portion of the premises that used to house the double garage bay doors had been covered over with wood frame walls containing conventional windows. No one could have come in the front of the building except through the door Jason and I had used that opened into the small reception area. But what about the back? Was there another way in?

The back was where the tumbleweeds were anyway.

I crossed the graveled parking lot with Earp in tow. Right in front of the building, where the gas pumps used to be, was a concrete slab.

Earp was straining at his leash in an effort to go in the opposite direction I wanted to, which was around the side of the building to the back of the former gas station.

The pug was so insistent in wanting to go over to the concrete slab that I let him. It was fortunate that I indulged him because across the middle of the concrete slab was a set of bloody footprints.

I whipped out my phone and took a picture of the prints, then used my yardstick app to determine their size.

They looked like boot tracks—and the imprint looked much like what I imagined the footwear Reba was currently wearing would make—but I couldn’t tell if the boots had belonged to a small man or a medium-sized woman.

Whoever had been wearing the boots, however, had clearly fled the scene of the crime not long ago because the blood was still red. If the blood had been there long, it would have dried to a rusty brown in the hot sun.

The existence of tracks across the concrete pad in the parking lot opened a whole ‘nother can of worms. Why hadn’t there also been bloody tracks inside the vet clinic?

I hadn’t noticed a trail of bloody footprints leading out of the room where Dr. Vance had been attacked. Had whoever fled the scene immediately realized their shoes had become contaminated and taken their footwear off before they fled the building only to end up leaving a trail of prints after all when they crossed the concrete slab? Had Reba’s attacker only put their boots back on to cross the sharp graveled parking lot where the prints didn’t show?

Even this scenario failed to make sense to me. Could someone have gotten their boots that bloody and still succeeded in leaving no tracks in the exam room?

The bloody boot prints didn’t tell me much, but they did indicate the direction that the presumed attacker had fled. The footprints faded to near oblivion by the time they left the concrete slab, and there was no trace of them on the gravel between the slab and the highway. Had Dr. Vance’s attacker fled in a vehicle parked on the premises, or had he (or she) been picked up by an accomplice at the edge of the road?

It was impossible to know.

I decided not to walk out to the edge of the pavement of Highway 14 but instead took Earp around back where he insisted on lifting his leg not on a tumbleweed as I had hoped, but on the corner of the concrete block building.

Once Earp had completed his call with Mother Nature, we continued along the back of the building until we came to a heavy metal door.

It was the back entrance I had been hoping to find, and when I saw that the lock appeared damaged as if it had been forced open with the claw of a hammer, or perhaps a crowbar, I was confident that this was the way Reba Vance’s attacker had entered the building.

The brute might have left by the front, but it appeared that he (or she) had forced the back door open at some point prior to the attack. Had Reba’s attacker then lain in wait in the storeroom until the other members of Dr. Bagley’s staff had gone home? If this was the case, how had someone managed to pry the back door open without making so much noise they’d have drawn attention to themselves?

I didn’t like to think that it was my appointment to pick up Earp’s mange medicine which had meant Dr. Vance had remained behind at the clinic alone and vulnerable.

I checked the time on my phone to see how much was remaining before the expected arrival of the ambulance. They wouldn’t be there for another fifteen minutes, at the least, and unless there happened to be a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department deputy in the area already, it would be even longer before a member of law enforcement arrived on the scene.

I decided it was safe to snoop around without raising eyebrows.

The latch on the heavy metal door on the back wall of the clinic was so damaged that the door was already open a crack, so I gingerly opened it all the way by grasping the door near the bottom using a tissue from my pocket to avoid leaving any prints.

Were there any prints to be found on the back door, I decided, they would likely be up by the busted knob and the bent metal plate, which was supposed to have protected the latch from being jimmied open.

I got inside, still confident I had managed not to leave any additional human prints on the door, but I was not so sure about canine nose prints.

Earp found my actions fascinating. As I stood just inside the entrance to the small room, I kept a hand on Earp’s collar to prevent him from running amok. The only light into the storage room came through the open exterior door. One wall of the room was nearly obscured by cardboard boxes, but on the other wall was a row of locked cabinets. One of the cabinets had been forced open.

I picked my way around a few objects scattered on the floor to turn on the light, but when I flipped the switch, nothing happened. I used the light on my phone to peer inside the cabinet. It was half full of vials for injecting medication and a few small cardboard cartons containing bottles of pills.

The remaining items were tumbled, and a couple of vials lay broken on the floor. I wanted to get closer and read the labels on the vials, but I didn’t dare risk Earp getting cut.

Someone had clearly broken into the back door of the clinic and raided Dr. Bagley’s drug supply. My first thought was that Dr. Vance had surprised the thief in the act of absconding with his loot, but then I decided that theory didn’t hold water.

It was just as I was contemplating how the theft might have led to Reba getting struck in the back of the head with her own rodeo trophy that I heard a voice say, “What are you doing?”


Chapter Four

Officer Reyes and I have a history. It’s not that we have any personal connection or that there’s any bad blood between us; it’s just that ever since I inherited Little Tombstone from my Great Aunt Geraldine and took up permanent residence in the village of Amatista, I’ve seemed to have gotten tangled up in pretty much every occurrence of a criminal nature within a ten-mile radius of the town.

When Officer Reyes asked me what I was doing, I had an honest answer ready, ”Looking for clues.”

“Oh, it’s you, Ms. Iverson. Please remove your dog from the crime scene.”

I still had my hand on Earp’s collar, which was a good thing because the pug was growling softly to himself.

I was tempted to let Earp go roam the sagebrush behind the clinic on his own for a few minutes while I continued to poke around since Officer Reyes had not told me to remove myself from the crime scene, but my better judgment prevailed as Earp continued low-level verbal hostilities aimed in the officer’s general direction.

I know that Officer Reyes is one of the good guys, but apparently, Earp wasn’t so sure, or perhaps he’d not been growling at the officer at all. The following day, I would discover that despite my best efforts to keep him away from the broken glass, Earp had gotten a tiny shard from one of the shattered vials embedded in his paw. This required a time-consuming removal which was traumatic for us both.

“Go around front to the parking lot,” Officer Reyes told me as I crouched in the pool of sunlight coming through the open door onto the center of the linoleum floor of the storage room. “My partner will take your statement.”

“How’s Reba?” I asked as I stood to my feet, keeping Earp on a short leash.

“They’re loading her up in the ambulance.”

“They sure got here fast. I didn’t hear a siren.”

Officer Reyes made no additional comments; he just cleared his throat loudly and motioned me out the open door and into the blinding sunlight.

I went around front and, as instructed, gave my statement to an Officer Jones while the paramedics wheeled Reba out of the clinic and loaded her into the ambulance.

“Are you new to the force?” I asked.

“I’ve been working for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s department for three months. Before that, I worked ten years for the Albuquerque Police Department,” Officer Jones informed me. “Now, tell me exactly how you came to be at the clinic this afternoon.”

I told Officer Jones all about Earp’s mange and presented the pug’s unsightly coat as evidence. I then told her everything I’d observed from the moment I’d entered the clinic to the moment I’d stepped outside, leaving the injured Dr. Vance under the watchful eye of Jason.

I left out the trail of bloody footprints across the concrete pad in the parking lot, the smashed lock on the backdoor, and the raided medicine cabinet. If the combined powers of observation possessed by the two police officers investigating the crime scene couldn’t detect those major clues, then there was very little hope of ever bringing Reba Vance’s attacker to justice.

“You guys sure got here fast,” I said just as Officer Jones was wrapping up the filling in of her form and thanking me for my time and cooperation. “The ambulance, too. You all must have been nearby.”

Officer Jones looked at me strangely before saying, “Officer Reyes and I came from all the way down by Cedar Grove.”

“That’s not possible,” I said as I pulled out my phone and checked my call history. “I called this in twenty-five minutes ago, and you have already been here ten.”

“Are you sure?” said Officer Jones.

I held up the screen for her to view.

“Well, someone must have called it in before you because we were dispatched forty-five minutes ago,” the officer insisted.

I would have liked to quiz Officer Jones about this 911 call that had apparently preceded my discovery of Reba Vance alone on the floor of the clinic exam room, but it was just as I’d opened my mouth to speak that Dr. Bagley arrived.

Roberta Bagley came to a halt so abruptly that her pickup sent up a hail of gravel that hit the police cruiser parked in front of the clinic with enough force that I could hear a series of tiny pings as the bits of rock hit the paintwork.

“That’s Dr. Bagley,” I told Officer Jones. “She owns the clinic.”

Dr. Bagley is a weather-beaten woman of indeterminate but mature years. She could be a twin to Amatista’s mayor, Nancy Flynn, who is also over sixty, but no one seems to know by how much. Both Roberta Bagley and Nancy Flynn have the same wiry build and no-nonsense toughness.

“What happened?” Dr. Bagley hollered across the parking lot as she was still striding over to where I stood with Officer Jones.

I opened my mouth to answer, but Officer Jones beat me to it.

Earp, who has mixed feelings about Dr. Bagley, retreated behind my legs until he realized that, unlike every other encounter he’d had with her, he was not presently the center of attention and was in no immediate danger of being subjected to painful and humiliating procedures.

On some level, I think Earp realizes that Dr. Bagley invariably has his best interests at heart, but on another level, there’s nothing he’d like more than to clamp onto her wrist with his teeth and refuse to let go.

By the time Officer Jones had finished explaining the situation to Dr. Bagley and had informed the vet that she’d have to wait outside her clinic until the police were done “processing the scene,” Earp had fallen asleep with his chin resting on the toes of my shoes. It seemed that the combination of the walk over to the clinic from Little Tombstone and the tantrum he’d thrown after being imprisoned in the exam room had him completely tuckered out.

“I’m so sorry, Emma,” was the first thing Dr. Bagley said after Officer Jones walked away.

Jason was coming out the front door of the clinic, and it appeared that he had not yet made his statement. I cringed as I watched him leave his prints on the glass door leading out of reception, but I belatedly realized it was probably fruitless for the police to bother with trying to lift prints off the door. Amatista might just be a hamlet, but on an average day, scores of people might have gone into the vet clinic.

“There’s nothing to be sorry to me about,” I told Dr. Bagley. “It’s poor Dr. Vance—”

Half of me wanted to confide in Dr. Bagley the whole gruesome scene, but the other half wanted to spare her the trauma of knowing all the gory details. It was enough that Dr. Bagley knew that her colleague had been struck in the back of the head and rendered unconscious; she didn’t need to know about the blood or the vile message scrawled in lipstick next to Reba’s head.

“Juanita told me Reba’s ex-husband still lives here. Does Dr. Vance have any other friends or family in the area?” I asked.

“She does,” said Dr. Bagley. “Reba grew up here as an only child, and both her parents live in Phoenix now, but she has several old friends from the rodeo circuit in the area.”

“Are Dr. Vance and her ex-husband on good terms?” I asked.

It was a bit cliché, but there is a reason that whenever someone gets murdered, the first person to get scrutinized is the significant other of the victim.

True, Reba Vance hadn’t been murdered, but I couldn’t help thinking that had likely been the intention of whoever had hit her on the back of the head with that trophy.

“Reba’s ex-husband has remarried,” Dr. Bagley told me, “and even though Crystal, his new wife, has been Reba’s best friend since high school, and you would think that would be hard to get past, all three of them seem to be on good terms with each other.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Reba was just telling me yesterday that Blake helped her move into her new place.”

“Blake?”

“Reba’s ex-husband.”

I couldn’t help wondering how Crystal, wife number two, felt about her husband helping Reba, wife number one, settle into her new home.

“Did Reba say anything to you about feeling threatened by anyone since her return to Amatista?” I asked Dr. Bagley.

“Not a word. She seemed excited about having a fresh start.”

“Did you know that your supply closet in the back was also broken into?” I asked, changing the subject entirely. “Someone busted up the medicine cabinet, and there are broken vials all over the floor.”

Whoever had called Dr. Bagley to the scene had clearly not disclosed that bit of information because she took it big.

“Not again!” she said.

“This has happened before?”

“Yes, but not for quite some time. Every couple of weeks for a while, there’d be a vial here and there go missing, but for the last six months, that’s all stopped.”

“This time, it looks like someone pried the backdoor open and broke the lock,” I said.

“Oh, that’s been like that for years,” said Dr. Bagley. “That’s why I had a barrel bolt latch installed on the inside of the door. Don’t tell me they managed to bust that from the outside.”

I was regretting that I hadn’t taken the time to examine the inside of the back door into the storeroom. I’d taken for granted that the damage to the door was recent, but apparently, it was old news that someone had pried the door open ages ago.

“I didn’t notice the latch on the inside,” I admitted. “So maybe whoever broke into the storeroom cabinets actually came in through the front and then escaped out the back.”

“I may already know who the culprit is,” said Dr. Bagley grimly. “You don’t need to bust the locks when you have access to a key. I’m going to have to change the locks again, not that it will probably do much good.”

“Who do you think is doing it?”

Roberta Bagley pressed her lips together.

“You have no proof?” I asked.

“Not exactly, and besides, it’s complicated.”

This was intriguingly vague.

“You don’t think whoever broke into the medicine cabinet was the same person who hit Dr. Vance on the back of the head?” I asked.

Dr. Bagley shrugged but said she’d be shocked if it was, although you never could be sure what a person was capable of given sufficient motivation.

“Is it someone who works for you?” I asked.

Roberta didn’t answer, but the fact she suspected one of her employees of stealing drugs from her was written all over her face.

I let the matter drop. Besides Reba Vance, Dr. Bagley employed three others: Julia Throckmorton, who was the receptionist and office manager, and Artie Fuentes and Candice Wright, who were techs.

It seemed that Dr. Bagley suspected one of the three of stealing drugs from the premises. I couldn’t help wondering if it was one of those three who’d also struck Reba Vance on the back of the head, although to what aim I was unsure.

I was pondering whether or not to quiz Dr. Bagley further on her employees when Jason finished giving his statement to Officer Jones and started heading our way.

End of Sample

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Chapter One

Mrs. Ruby Hobbs, the widow of Orville Hobbs, Port Blanchet’s police chief for nearly forty years, sat in her rocking chair draining the dregs of her second cup of coffee for the morning as she watched Dickens, her old gray tabby cat, soak up the sun as he lay luxuriously sprawled on the dark green boards of the front porch.

As Ruby rocked and listened to the chirping of the birds and the faint purr of the contented Dickens, she was overcome with a wave of ennui.

Chirping birds, purring cats, and cloudless spring mornings were all very well in small, regular doses, but this spell of tranquility had been carrying on for far too long.

The last exciting incident Ruby could recall was a Thursday afternoon in early March when Floyd Vaughn, the feckless boy who drove the bookmobile, had gotten them stuck in a snowdrift. Ruby, who had turned seventy (two springs ago), had been required to get out and help dig them free with her own mittened hands.

It had been a good day. The memory of it had sustained her through the vicissitudes of a rainy March spent indoors listening to records on her ancient Victrola and rereading the collected works of Robert Louis Stevenson.

It was now the middle of April, and Ruby had run out of Stevenson and moved on to Marie Corelli.

Back when Orville was alive, the phone had rung off the hook day and night in the rambling old farmhouse Ruby still called home. For thirty-eight exciting years, Ruby had been privy to every incident of a criminal nature that had occurred inside Port Blanchet Township and some that had occurred well beyond.

Alas, no more.

True, Ruby’s son, George, had taken up his father’s mantle as the chief of police, but George lived on the other side of town and was annoyingly reluctant to fill his mother in on the intricacies of the activities of the criminal classes.

Now, whenever Ruby’s phone rang, it was usually one of her sisters, Opal or Pearl.

This morning was no exception. Just as Ruby was stepping around the still-slumbering Dickens en route to return her empty coffee cup to the kitchen, the telephone in the hall rang.

“It was ghastly!” were the first words out of Pearl’s mouth.

“What was ghastly?”

Probably, Pearl had found a particularly obnoxious slug in her strawberry patch, or perhaps, William Finch, the milkman, had left muddy footprints on Pearl’s front walk yet again. Possibly, Reverend Murphy’s sermon of the previous Sunday had contained what Pearl considered to be unsound doctrine. Pearl was particularly sensitive to unsound doctrine.

The possibilities were endless. Pearl was of a nervous, excitable disposition. After Pearl had been ejected from their mother’s womb, a trifle prematurely, it must be admitted, Pearl had wailed nonstop in her bassinet for the first three months of her life, or at least that was how Ruby remembered it.

“Hazel nearly died!” said Pearl on the other end of the line, her voice rising to a register that was undoubtedly prompting every cat in Pearl’s neighborhood to put its paws over its ears.

“Nearly died? Hazel Potts?”

Hazel Potts was a supremely disagreeable woman, and it had long been Ruby’s belief, based on a lifetime of observation, that the more disagreeable a person was, the longer they were likely to continue inflicting their existence on the community. Perhaps, it was Hazel’s shear disagreeableness that had saved her from whatever dire fate had nearly befallen her.

“That’s right! Hazel Potts was nearly killed!” Pearl said, her voice going up another octave. At this rate, she’d soon be speaking in a range only dogs could distinguish.

“What happened?

“She was crushed at the paper drive, and now she’s in a coma!”

At least once a year, some civic organization or another in Port Blanchet would put on a wastepaper drive in support of a good cause. As far as Ruby was concerned, the work involved in collecting mountains of old newspapers, bundling them neatly, and hauling them off to whatever rag and bone man in the region willing to take them off one’s hands wasn’t worth the pittance one got for one’s troubles.

“The PTA paper drive? Ruby asked Pearl. “What in the world happened to Hazel? Did Floyd back over her by accident?”

Floyd Vaughn was a terrible driver; Ruby should know. Floyd drove the Port Blanchet Township Bookmobile Thursdays and Saturdays hither and yon up and down the rutted back roads of the countryside surrounding Port Blanchet while Ruby bounced around in the passenger seat with broken springs. While she tried to avoid the broken springs, Ruby would clutch at the handle of the glove compartment, repeatedly jabbed her foot into the running boards where the brake ought to be, and belatedly remember Reverend Murphy’s admonition to never neglect one’s morning prayers.

“Floyd had nothing to do with it,” said Pearl. “It wasn’t anything like that. Well, not exactly like that. Oh, it was ghastly!”

This return by Pearl to her original motif had Ruby suspecting that her youngest sister might be drawing the story out for dramatic effect. Pearl had never thought very highly of Miss Hazel Potts, an opinion shared by nearly everyone who knew Hazel, and although Pearl might be expressing horror at the circumstances of Miss Pott’s near demise, she didn’t seem awfully heartbroken about it.

It occurred to Ruby that after spending decades of being herself the first one privy to nearly every bit of local news of a dramatic nature, her sister might be rather enjoying the experience of having the tables turned.

“What was the exact cause of Hazel’s injuries?” Ruby asked to get Pearl to her point.

“The stack of paper fell on her.”

“Hazel was buried under the pile of wastepaper collections?”

“Yes,” said Pearl.

Ruby tried to picture how one could contrive to nearly meet one’s maker by being engulfed in a cascade of newspapers tied together with bits of old twine, but her imagination failed her.

“The whole stack of papers just toppled over on Hazel, and that’s what’s put her in a coma?” Ruby asked just to be sure she had the story straight.

“Yes, it was only that she somehow ended up with her head underneath an old footstool that saved her. She was out stone cold when they finally dug her out. Opal says Dr. Rigley thinks she’ll fully recover.”

Opal was Ruby and Pearl’s middle sister. Even though Opal was sixty-eight and could have retired ages ago, she still assisted Dr. Rigley on occasions when his new, younger nurse, Pauline Reese, wasn’t available. Now that Pauline had just birthed the fourth little Reese, she was unavailable rather often.

“Hazel still hasn’t come to,” Pearl added. “Opal says she just lays in bed and moans.”

Ruby couldn’t help thinking this didn’t make much of a change for Hazel. Miss Potts had spent most of her sojourn on earth moaning about this and that.

“A mountain of wastepaper spontaneously fell over on Hazel?” Ruby asked. She knew she was repeating herself, but the whole incident was almost unbelievably bizarre.

“It did,” Pearl insisted.

Ruby supposed anything was possible, but it seemed the volunteers must have done a very poor job of stacking those newspapers if the pile might be accidentally toppled.

“Poor petulant Hazel,” Ruby said because it was the only thing to say that seemed both appropriate and truthful.

“Poor petulant Hazel,” Pearl echoed, then remembered that she was a good churchgoing Methodist and added, “God rest her soul.”

“Hazel isn’t dead,” Ruby pointed out.

“Yet,” Pearl added darkly.

“Yet?”

“Alma says she has a dark premonition,” Pearl said.

“Alma Finch has a dark premonition about Hazel?”

“No, Hazel had the premonition.”

“What kind of premonition?”

“Hazel thinks she’s going to die soon.”


Chapter Two

“Hazel told Alma she was having a dark premonition that she was going to die soon?” Ruby questioned her sister.

“Something like that,” said Pearl. “I was going to ask Alma more about it, but she was more interested in talking about how her grandson Johnny won the regional spelling bee. Apparently, the winning word was oryzivorous. Alma says it means rice eater. Did you know that?”

Ruby conceded that oryzivorous was a new word to her.

Pearl, after further revealing that she had not actually been inside the Leonard P. Blanchet Memorial Elementary School gymnasium the previous morning at the time of the tragedy but had arrived on the scene after Miss Potts was already engulfed in the cascade of papers and subsequently extracted and had further admitted that she could not, with any degree of accuracy, provide an accounting of everyone who had been present at the time of the accident, she breathlessly signed off.

After Ruby’s coffee cup was washed, dried, and returned to its hook on the china cabinet in the dining room, she’d fried up a pan of kidneys and distributed them evenly between Dickens, Poe, Bronte, and Chaucer, her four cats. After Ruby had refereed the consumption of the kidneys (Chaucer had a tendency to bolt his share and then shoulder Dickens out of the way and eat his food, too), Ruby returned to the phone in the hallway.

She asked Minnie, the girl in charge of the switchboard on Wednesdays, for the residence of Minnie’s aunt, Mrs. Alma Finch.

Alma was the type who meant well, but she was far too enamored with the sound of her own voice. Alma’s favorite subject was the accomplishments of her grandchildren, of whom she had seventeen, each more brilliant than the last, or at least that’s the impression she liked to give.

“What’s this I hear about Hazel?” Ruby said as soon as she’d been put through to Alma.

“Isn’t it too awful?” Alma said. “I hear Hazel still hasn’t come around, poor thing. Still, she’s no spring chicken.”

None of them were spring chickens, but Ruby personally saw no connection between one’s age and infirmity and the likelihood of getting crushed under a cascade of wastepaper.

“What hap—” Ruby started to ask before Alma forgot all about Hazel and moved on to the wondrous accomplishments of one of her seventeen grandchildren, but it was already too late.

“Did you know that my granddaughter Hettie is going to be homecoming queen?” Alma said.

As a matter of fact, Ruby did know. She also knew that Hettie’s younger sister, Lettie, had been selected to serve on the queen’s court, but the intricacies of the social strata of the local teenage set failed to fascinate Ruby. She ruthlessly cut Alma short by asking, “What’s this I hear about Hazel Potts having some dark premonition?”

“Oh, that! It was the strangest thing. Just last week, I happened to run into Hazel as she was coming out of Mayor Prill’s house, and Hazel said—” Alma broke off as if to confirm that no one was listening in before continuing. “Hazel said, and I quote, ‘If something happens to me, it’ll be those two who did it.”

Hazel Potts ran a small rooming house for young single men—Floyd Vaughn was one of her lodgers—but providing two indifferently prepared and frugal meals a day for half a dozen young men left her plenty of time to take on other jobs around town. Hazel came in to clean for the Prills—Mrs. Prill wasn’t very skilled, domestically speaking—four afternoons a week. Hazel had been taking care of the Prills’ heavy cleaning and laundry for years now.

“Hazel thinks Mr. and Mrs. Prill have it in for her?” Ruby asked.

“I don’t think she was referring to Mrs. Prill,” Alma said, lowering her voice even further. “I shouldn’t be spreading gossip—”

If there was one thing Alma Finch enjoyed nearly as much as bragging about her seventeen grandchildren, it was dispensing a tidbit of juicy gossip. Normally, Ruby was not one to encourage this unsavory tendency, but in this case, she was prepared to appreciate Alma’s loose, although not always reliable, tongue.

“It’s a real shame,” said Alma. “After all Mrs. Prill has been through, for her husband to take up with another woman like that.”

“Another woman? Are you saying that Mayor Prill has another woman?”

Alma clicked her tongue and sighed with the bone-deep weariness of a soul burdened down with the weight of human fallibility, but she was apparently not quite yet ready to name names.

“If Hazel wasn’t including Mrs. Prill when she said, ‘those two,’” Ruby persisted, “who did she mean?”

“I think she meant that Minot woman,” Alma said.

“Catherine Minot?”

“That’s right,” said Alma.

Ruby was a nodding acquaintance with the Minots. Catherine Minot was an extraordinarily pretty blond woman in her early thirties with a handsome brunette husband of the same age, three pretty blond children, and four pretty brunette ones. They all sat together three pews ahead of Ruby every Sunday morning in a well-behaved line like little ducks in a row.

The impression Ruby had always gotten of Catherine Minot was one of extreme self-containment. Mrs. Minot had a brittle smile and eyes which betrayed nothing when they looked at you. Ruby found Catherine Minot a trifle unsettling, but she couldn’t articulate why.

“Are you trying to say that Catherine Minot and Julius Prill are on a left-handed honeymoon?” Ruby asked Alma.

Ruby found it a little hard to fathom that if Catherine Minot had been looking to grope for trout in a peculiar river, she’d have chosen Port Blanchet’s mayor as her catch. Julius Prill might carry considerable weight in the community, but he also carried considerable weight around his middle. And not only was Mr. Prill well past his physical prime he was also what Ruby’s grandson Ferris would describe as Dullsville. Julius Prill was a real snore.

Still, Alma seemed sure of her information.

“It’s not for me to suppose what Mr. Prill and that woman get up to when Mrs. Prill goes off to her bowling league on Friday evenings,” Alma told Ruby, “but I see Catherine Minot skulking around to the back door at a quarter past seven every Friday night, bold as brass—”

Alma lived right across the street from the Prills. There was no question that she was in an ideal position to observe the comings and goings of the Prill household.

However, this observation of Alma’s was not quite as cut and dried as it might sound. Alma’s eyesight was so poor that she might have mistaken anyone for Catherine Minot. In fact, it might just as well have been Reverend Murphy or the Fuller Brush Man going around to Julius Prill’s back door every Wednesday evening at a quarter past seven if Alma was going solely on what she thought she saw from her vantage point peeking out behind the lace curtains in her front room in the house across the street.

Unfortunately, Alma was terribly sensitive when it came to her eyesight, so no good would come of questioning her powers of observation.

“You think Hazel knew about Julius and Catherine? You think she knew they were carrying on?”

“I’m sure she did,” said Alma. “Hazel told me herself that she caught Mrs. Minot and Mr. Prill canoodling on the divan in the Prills’ front room, but she made me swear not to tell a soul.”

Either Hazel was a very poor judge of who she ought to be divulging secrets to, or Hazel had told Alma precisely because she knew Alma could be relied upon to blanket the story across Huron County.

“Still,” said Alma, abruptly changing gears, “if there’s anyone Hazel ought to have been worried about causing her harm, it’s that nephew of hers.”

“Sylvester?”

“That boys a ne’er-do-well.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He wants to be like that Mr. Presley.”

“Mr. Presley?”

“That vulgar fellow who was on the Milton Berle Show the other night. The one who sang about his hound dog accompanied by so-called dancing. It was indecent. I had to switch off the set.”

Ruby pleaded ignorance to the existence of this Mr. Presley’s appearance on the Milton Berle Show. No good would come of admitting to Alma that Ruby herself had not turned off the television during Mr. Presley’s performance, and not only that, Ruby had found herself rocking back and forth to the beat. She’d amused herself at the time by wondering if the impulse was why this new style of music had been christened Rock and Roll.

“I think many young people of today enjoy the music of Elvis Presley, but what makes you think Sylvester might be any danger to his aunt?” Ruby asked.

“Sylvester wants to run off to Nashville and go into show business.”

“But how does that pose any danger to Hazel?”

“Because Hazel won’t let him. She’s supposed to be making sure he keeps out of trouble. Hazel won’t let Sylvester have the allowance his parents send him, so he can’t use it to run off to Nashville.”

Sylvester’s father, Hazel’s brother, was an army officer stationed in France, and his wife had gone abroad with her husband. Colonel and Mrs. Potts had left Sylvester to stay in Port Blanchet with his Aunt Hazel while he finished High School.

Sylvester, who’d recently turned seventeen, had dropped out the day of his sixteenth birthday much to the chagrin of his near and dear and gone to work at the local soda fountain ever since.

“But Sylvester must be saving up his wages,” Ruby said. “Won’t he eventually be able to run off to Nashville no matter what Hazel does? And how would putting Hazel in a coma help his cause?”

“Sylvester doesn’t like his aunt,” Alma insisted.

“Lots of people don’t like Hazel, but that doesn’t mean—”

“You must not know what Sylvester said to Floyd?”


Chapter Three

Ruby told Alma she didn’t know anything about any suspicious communication between Sylvester and Floyd, although considering both young men were tenants of Hazel’s shabby boarding establishment, it was certainly reasonable that Sylvester might confide in Floyd about his frustrations with his aunt.

“What did Sylvester tell Floyd?” Ruby asked Alma.

“Well, Sylvester said if Hazel didn’t stop stealing his money, he was going to—” Alma’s doorbell started ringing in the background. “I’m sorry, I have to go. There’s someone at the door. It’s probably the Eureka man, and I don’t need a vacuum, but I’d better see to it anyway.”

Ruby let Alma go. Alma might pretend to be annoyed by the intrusion of door-to-door salesmen, but Ruby suspected that door-to-door salesmen provided the perfect captive audience Alma needed. No itinerant seller of encyclopedias or shoes or household gadgets would dare cut off an elderly lady in the recitation of her grandchildren’s accomplishments. Not if he wanted to walk away with a sale, although Alma probably never bought anything.

Eventually, Ruby wondered, would the salesmen who canvased the county place a marking in chalk on the sidewalk in front of Alma’s like the down and out men who wandered the country during the Great Depression? Ruby had read somewhere that if a house was marked with the drawing of a cat, it meant a kind lady lived within.

If Alma’s house was ever marked in a similar manner, it would undoubtedly be with an empty circle, which meant “nothing to be gained here.”

Ruby was not discouraged by Alma cutting short their conversation. She preferred to go straight to the source, anyway. She’d simply ask Floyd if Sylvester had made threats against his aunt. Alma often got things wrong.

Ruby acknowledged to herself that she’d been burning up the wires and tying up her party line for far longer than was considerate, but she couldn’t resist making one more call. She rang Minnie, the operator, once more and asked for the Port Blanchet police station.

After Minnie put her call through, Ruby found she was speaking, not to her son, George Hobbs, the chief, but to his most junior underling, Joe.

By Ruby’s estimation, Joe Sprackling was a callow youth. At twenty-four, Joe might be a father of three but compared to George’s nearly thirty years on the force, Joe had little life experience to draw upon in the face of adversity and intrusive questioning.

This suited Ruby just fine. She was happy to speak to Joe. Sergeant Sprackling was so much easier to get information out of, and Ruby wasted no time getting to the point.

“What’s all this I hear about Hazel Potts getting crushed under a pile of wastepaper?” she asked Joe.

“It was a regrettable accident.”

Regrettable, perhaps, but Ruby couldn’t help wondering just how much genuine regret was being felt in Port Blanchet due to Hazel Potts’ untimely near-demise.

“Are you absolutely certain it was an accident?” she asked Joe. “Isn’t it an awfully unlikely thing to have occurred? How would a stack of old newspapers just fall over out of the blue like that? Do you think Miss Potts saw it coming?”

Sergeant Sprackling hemmed and hawed until Ruby was certain he wasn’t so sure himself, then George, who must have taken the receiver right out of Joe’s hand, came on the line.

“Chief Hobbs,” he said. “How may I help you?”

“You can bring the twins over for supper tonight,” said Ruby.

Ferris and Franny, Ruby’s eight-year-old grandchildren, were the light of her life.

George had married very late largely due to congenital shyness. At the ripe old age of thirty-nine, he’d married a much younger woman but had experienced only a decade of wedded bliss before the twins’ mother had passed away. Amelia had died the previous May of complications from tuberculosis, leaving George to raise his two young children on his own.

Ruby tried to do what she could, and George had never been known to turn down an opportunity to forgo reheating TV dinners, which was what Ruby feared his little family was subsisting on.

“I’ll make an apple pie with a jar of those Winesaps I put up last fall.”

George grunted, which Ruby took as acceptance of her invitation to supper, then he asked, “Why were you interrogating Sergeant Sprackling?”

“I wasn’t interrogating anyone,” Ruby protested. “What a thing to say about your own mother.”

“Well, leave the police work to the police,” said George. “I’ll come over for supper, but I don’t want to be subjected to hours of questioning about that bank robbery over in Saginaw.”

“I have no intention of asking any questions about that bank robbery over in Saginaw,” Ruby told her son.

It was true; she had no interest in bank robberies forty miles away. What Ruby was very much interested in, however, was the near-fatal accident that had occurred at the PTA paper drive.

That evening, as promised, promptly at seven, Ruby, George, Ferris, and Franny gathered around Ruby’s kitchen table for a succulent pot roast with potatoes and carrots, a green salad that the twins declined to touch until threatened with deprivation come dessert, and a delicious apple pie made from Winesaps Ruby had canned the previous autumn.

“Mother, you outdid yourself,” George said when he finally pushed his chair back from the table.

The twins were in the living room. Through the open door, Ruby could see Ferris teasing Chaucer with a feather on a string and Franny attempting to wrap up Bronte in an old shawl of Ruby’s, probably with the aim of treating the cat as if were a baby doll.

Poe had sought refuge on the top of the old upright player piano in the corner, and Dickens had wisely withdrawn under the divan. The only evidence of his presence was the tip of his twitching tail.

This, Ruby decided, was the ideal opportunity to grill her son on the Hazel incident.

“Poor Hazel,” she said. “What a strange way to end a paper drive.”

“It was a tragic accident, Mother,” George said, standing to his feet. “Nothing more.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t be sure,” George admitted, “but until I’m presented with a shred of evidence to suggest it wasn’t an accident, I’ve got more pressing matters to attend to.”

“And if someone presented you with evidence, you would look into it?”

“Of course,” George said. “But please don’t go stirring up trouble where there is none to be found.”

“If there’s no trouble to be found, then I won’t stir up any,” Ruby said.

“Good. Glad we have that settled. You won’t go poking around for a crime where there isn’t one.”

George didn’t look very glad, though, and nothing was settled because Ruby had no intention of letting the matter rest. Decades of assisting her husband, Orville, in investigations had sharpened her intuition when it came to crime, and there was definitely a crime here, of that Ruby was certain.

She just didn’t know what the nature of the crime was, and despite the fact that it was Hazel Potts who lay prostrate in bed, insensible to anything going on around her, Ruby was far from convinced that Hazel was the only victim in this would-be crime.

The other victims just might not know it yet.

End of Sample

Buy Ebook EditionBuy Paperback (Short Story Collection)

Rebel without a Claus, the 2nd title in The Little Tombstone Cozy Mysteries, is a Christmas-themed novelette (about 61 pages). It is available in ebook form at all major ebook retailers or in paperback form as part of the short-story omnibus edition of Little Tombstone short stories.

Blurb
It’s Christmas time at Little Tombstone, a rundown roadside tourist attraction in the tiny town of Amatista, New Mexico, and the annual visit from Santa Claus to the children of the village doesn’t quite go as planned.

Edgar Martinez, who’s played Santa every Christmas for the past twenty years, fails to make an appearance. He doesn’t even call.

The show must go on, so a substitute Santa takes Edgar’s place. But when Emma decides to investigate why Edgar, who is normally a rock of reliability, didn’t show up for the twenty-first year running to put on his size XXXL crimson crushed velvet Santa suit, she discovers that Edgar seems to have disappeared altogether.

Read a Sample Chapter

Five days before Christmas, I was in the dining room of the Bird Cage Café helping my second cousin, Georgia, set up the oversized, throne-like homemade plywood armchair which would soon contain the considerable bulk of Edgar Martinez, otherwise known as Santa Claus or alternately, Santo Clós, to the children of the village of Amatista and the surrounding countryside.

Mr. Martinez had been playing Santa in the dining room of the Bird Cage Café for the past twenty years, back when both he and Juanita, the proprietress of the Bird Cage, were considerably younger and Edgar had been at least a hundred pounds lighter.

That was according to Juanita.

“I don’t see how Edgar can go on like this,” said Juanita, surveying the modifications that Oliver, our handyman, had made to the massive painted plywood chair. “If that boy gets any bigger, he won’t be able to leave his house.”

“That boy” was pushing sixty, but since Juanita was nearly on the wrong side of seventy, I supposed that to her, Edgar probably did seem youthful.

I had my own memories of Mr. Martinez playing Santa Claus. By the time the tradition had become established, I’d been a gangly teenager and far too dignified to think of sitting on Santa’s knee and revealing my Christmas wishes, but I did have memories of the dining room of the Bird Cage being filled with squealing tots and their parents.

I was pretty sure there was a picture of me and Georgia somewhere, standing stiffly on either side of Santa in front of the backdrop of the garish pink and green aluminum Christmas tree my Uncle Ricky had acquired back in the sixties.

The antique tree had been quietly retired not long after that picture of Georgia and me had been taken, but this year, while cleaning out one of the guest cottages behind the Bird Cage in hopes that it could be turned into a habitable abode for Georgia and her son Maxwell, we’d come across that prickly aluminum tree, and Maxwell had become enamored with the thing.

This would be my first Christmas back at Little Tombstone, my extended family’s rundown roadside tourist attraction, since my grandmother had passed away.

It was strange for it to be just Georgia and me. We were all that was left of the family unless you counted Georgia’s mother, Abigail, who wouldn’t set foot on the place.

It was going to fall to Georgia’s precocious six-year-old son, Maxwell, to carry on the family line.

It was just as I was trying to imagine Maxwell as a grown man with children of his own and failing entirely, that the boy of the hour appeared with Earp, my late Aunt Geraldine’s ancient and irritable pug, in tow.

My great Aunt Geraldine, Georgia’s grandmother, had never allowed Earp to go around in the nude, and she would have heartily approved of Maxwell’s enthusiasm for dressing the poor pug up each morning before breakfast in one of the many little doggie outfits she’d bequeathed to me along with the animal.

This morning, Earp was costumed as a tiny elf, complete with hat, jacket, and little felt elf booties that made him pause and flick his back feet—first the right, then the left—every third step as he plodded across the worn floorboards of the dining room.

Maxwell was dressed to match.

“Where did you find that elf costume, Maxwell?” I asked.

“I found it in a box. We’re going to be Santa’s helpers.”

Maxwell was always finding things in boxes. In a place like Little Tombstone, with its rambling buildings complete with basements and attics, there was a lot of scope for indulging one’s desire to collect things: which appeared to have been a major pastime of every inhabitant of Little Tombstone for the preceding sixty years.

Who knew what we might find before we got the place set to rights, assuming that ever happened.

“Does Santa need helpers?” I asked Maxwell.

He nodded his head so vigorously that his elf hat tilted to one side.

“Mr. Martinez is a very experienced Santa,” Georgia pointed out. “I think he’ll be fine on his own.”

Georgia was not the sort of mother who’d ever encouraged Maxwell to believe in the mythological, and, admittedly, Santa Claus was about as mythological as one could get. Even if Georgia had been the type to try and get her offspring to believe in the magic of Santa, it might not have worked.

Maxwell’s idea of light reading was The Scientific American, and his favorite party trick was reciting the periodic table of elements backwards.

“I think you’d better ask Mr. Martinez first before assuming,” Georgia told Maxwell.

“I’m not sure about involving Earp,” I said.

Poor Earp had flopped down underneath the aluminum tree and was trying to chew off one of his front booties, which was so securely velcroed around his ankle that all he’d succeeded in doing was getting a mouthful of slobbery felt fuzz.

“Emma! Earp wants to do it!” Maxwell insisted.

“What if he bites someone?”

“Earp doesn’t bite!”

Earp didn’t usually bite. He’d never bitten Maxwell, and he’d never bitten me. He had nipped Georgia, but that was only after she’d trod on him in the dark, so I considered that to be an understandable indiscretion due to extenuating circumstances.

It was unlikely Earp would bite any of the kids who came to sit on Santa’s knee, but it wouldn’t at all surprise me if his discontented grumbling might not scare a few of them.

Plus, there was the question of hygiene.

“Technically speaking,” I said. “Earp’s not even supposed to be in here.”

“Why not?” Maxwell asked.

“I’m pretty sure that there are rules against having dogs inside restaurants.”

I was pretty sure there were rules against smoking cigars, too, but over at a table in the corner, Hank Edwards, curator of Little Tombstone’s Museum of the Unexplained, was doing just that.

As was his habit, Hank had turned over one of the little plastic NO SMOKING signs that Juanita put out in vain to remind her customers—Hank in particular—that smoking was not allowed.

I expected that as soon as Santa arrived and the kiddies were unleashed in the dining room, Hank would make a hasty exit.

Hank is not pro-kid, although you wouldn’t know it by the way Maxwell peppered him with questions every time he saw him.

Hank is also very much not pro Christmas. In fact, at the curio shop next door, which is supposed to be a place Hank derives his livelihood from selling cheap faux-southwestern tchotchkes to tourists, he’d made his feelings on Christmas quite clear.

The dusty front windows of the shop were obscured with placards announcing that there were “No Christmas Items of any Kind for Sale” and “Keep Christmas out of Amatista.”

I don’t know what had led Hank to believe that anyone in the village or passing by would think the Curio Shop would be the prime location for doing any last-minute Christmas shopping, but Hank was obviously keen to keep the festively minded at arms’ length.

I don’t know where Hank acquired his animosity toward Christmas in particular, but then there were any number of things Hank regarded with deep suspicion: the medical-industrial complex, the truth about the death of JFK, and the insistence of the scientific community that aliens did not regularly visit our planet.

“Why is there a rule against dogs in restaurants?” Maxwell asked me, and I was forced to suspend my observation of Hank just as he lit up his second cigar.

“Dogs aren’t very clean creatures,” I said.

“Earp is very clean,” said Maxwell. “He just had a bath last night.”

Earp had just had a bath. Somehow, Georgia and I had managed to suds up the pug and rinse him off in the apartment’s only tiny bathroom.

Earp was undoubtedly cleaner, but the bathroom wouldn’t recover for a while.

I gave up on the question of banning Earp from the premises. Instead, I went over to one of the front windows and cracked it open to let out the cigar smoke. Hopefully, Hank would finish his platter of bacon and eggs and his second cigar and leave before any asthmatic youngsters arrived to see Santa.

“Shouldn’t Mr. Martinez be here by now?” Georgia asked Juanita when she passed through the room to refill Hank’s coffee and inform him that she’d added his breakfast to his running tab. I decided that Chamomile, the waitress, must be on her morning break.

“Yes, he should be here already,“ Juanita replied. “Edgar is very reliable. It isn’t like him at all to be late.”

Outside on the boardwalk, I could see that a few families were already lining up, according to instructions, to await their turn to come into the dining room to see Santa Claus.

Hank might not be capable of obeying posted signage, but apparently, the younger set, eager to remain on Santa’s “nice” list, wasn’t having any trouble complying with protocol.

“I hope Edgar gets here soon,” Juanita continued. “It’ll take him ten minutes just to get into his suit.”

She pointed at the size XXXL crimson crushed velour suit hanging over the back of a nearby chair. It was a good thing that Edgar always agreed to serve as Santa because there wasn’t anybody else in the village who wouldn’t look absolutely ridiculous in that suit. There weren’t enough pillows to be had around Little Tombstone to make that suit fit an average man.

We waited another ten minutes while the line grew outside. Juanita went back to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on the lunch special. Chamomile, the waitress, came back from her break and started making her rounds, refilling napkin dispensers and setting out condiment bottles.

Hank finished his breakfast and left, leaving a lingering cloud of cigar smoke behind him.

Juanita came out from the kitchen and said she’d tried to reach Edgar, but the call had gone to voice mail.

“What are we going to do?” Georgia asked. “We can’t just send all those kids home.”

“I think we’re going to have to stall for time while we dig up a substitute Santa.”

“Stall for time? How?”

“Perhaps, this is Santa’s Elf helpers’ shining hour?” I suggested.

“Emma!” Georgia said.

His mother might not have been in favor of it, but Maxwell was on the job. Before Georgia could express additional misgivings or define any parameters of what consisted of appropriate means of stalling for time, Maxwell was halfway out the door.

Fortunately, he left Earp behind, and I took the opportunity to relieve the poor pug of his onerous felt booties.

After I’d concealed the booties underneath the sparkly skirt of the aluminum Christmas tree, I addressed the question of acquiring a substitute Santa on such short notice.

“I’m going to see if I can talk Ledbetter into playing Santa,” I told Georgia and bolted out the back door of the Bird Cage before she could weigh in on the idea.

Ledbetter, one of our three tenants in the trailer court behind the Bird Cage, was tall enough to fit Edgar’s costume, although, unlike Edgar, Ledbetter was a fitness buff and would require considerable padding to approximate anything approaching a traditional Saint Nicholas physique.

Marcus Ledbetter, who’s a combat vet and suffers from PTSD, doesn’t normally do crowds, but I was counting on the crowd being almost entirely juvenile, and him being sheltered behind a wooly white beard might be enough to make the experience tolerable for him.

Ledbetter is a man of few words, but that didn’t worry me. Santa doesn’t have to say much. He just has to listen.

I found Ledbetter out back, bundled up in a puffy parka and sitting with his eyes closed on a folding chair next to his trailer soaking up the midmorning sunshine like an old cat.

“That you, Emma?” he asked without opening his eyes.

The man has the hearing of a Vulcan. How he knew it was me, I have no idea.

“We have a problem,” I said.

“What’s that?” He opened his striking blue eyes and gave me an unblinking stare.

A lot of people find Ledbetter intimidating, but I’m not one of them. Ledbetter is a gentle giant who wouldn’t hurt a fly. In fact, he flat out refused to kill a bat once.

But just because Ledbetter wasn’t into killing wildlife didn’t mean he was going to be easy to talk into playing Saint Nicholas.

“Edgar Martinez hasn’t shown up to play Santa,” I said.

“Is that today?”

“Yes, and there’s a whole crowd of kids waiting outside of the Bird Cage to see Saint Nicholas, but all we’ve got is an empty suit.”

“I don’t think Edgar’s suit will be a very good fit,” said Ledbetter.

“I don’t think it will, either, but you’ll come closer to fitting it than anyone else.”

Surprisingly, it didn’t take much persuasion to get Ledbetter to agree to play Santa.

I ran back inside to collect Edgar’s Santa suit, the hat with the flowing snowy white hair attached, and the curly beard.

After collecting the costume, I went to the front door of the Bird Cage and peaked out through one of the cracked panes of glass in the front door to see how Maxwell was getting along with keeping the crowd entertained.

I don’t know what put the idea into Maxwell’s head—it was as good as any I’d have come up with on such short notice—but he’d decided that the ideal strategy for keeping the crowd happy was leading a sing-along of Christmas carols.

When I say, “Christmas carols,” I’m using the phrase very loosely. At the moment I peeked my head out to see what was going on, the line of waiting parents and children were engaged in a rousing rendition of Ninety-Nine Pugs and an Elf on a Shelf modeled on the timeless and tasteless classic Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

The waiting crowd was down to seventy-eight pugs—the real pug having nearly fallen asleep on Maxwell-the-Elf’s feet after his exhausting struggle to divest himself of his little felt booties.

I shouldn’t have worried about his biting anyone. If Earp could sleep through Maxwell belting out a rendition of what must be the most irritating song on earth, he must be even deafer than I’d thought.

“I see you let Earp out,” I said to Georgia as I passed back through the Bird Cage.

“Maxwell came back for him. Maxwell said Earp was an essential member of the cast.”

“I’d better get this costume out back to Ledbetter,” I said.

“He agreed?”

“He did.”

“I’m so relieved,” said Georgia. “Now, maybe things will go smoothly.”

Except they didn’t. Things didn’t go smoothly at all.

End of Sample Chapter

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