Death & the Redheaded Woman Read online

  Felix nodded, twitched his head to the side and led Death away from the crowd.

  He sighed deeply. “Wren was engaged,” he said. “Cameron Michaels. Writes for the paper.”

  “Guy was a jerk?”

  “No, he was a great guy. Treated her like a princess. Sweet, thoughtful, sensitive—”

  “Gay?”

  “Oh, yeah! He showed up at their wedding rehearsal in a dress. Wren thought at first it was a prank, but when she laughed at him, he burst into tears. The whole thing was just sad and strange and deeply embarrassing. And, of course, this is a small town. Something like that happens, everybody knows about it.”

  The two men simply stood side-by-side, shaking their heads ruefully for a few seconds.

  “So, you waiting to see Wren, then?” Felix asked.

  Death sighed. “No, unfortunately I’m here on business, not pleasure. I’m looking for a lady named Leona Keystone.”

  Following Felix’s vague directions, Death crossed to where a white tent sat in the corner of the yard, five or six people standing in a ragged line outside the open tent flaps. Inside, two older women sat at a folding table with a cash box and a file box between them and a large, leather-bound ledger lying to one side. Another woman leaned over the table from the front, looking at a collection of little squares of card stock.

  “I got a lamp, too. I don’t see that in there.”

  “Did you just buy it?”

  “Yeah, just before I came over here.”

  “Hold on a second.”

  A towheaded kid of about twelve hurried into the tent to drop off a couple sheets of perforated card stock.

  “Jody, do you see a lamp in there for number sixty-five?”

  The kid glanced over the sheets, then picked one up and started breaking it into smaller squares. “Here it is. ‘Big, ugly lamp, $12’.”

  “It’s not ugly!” Number 65 protested.

  The older of the women behind the desk took the card with a roll of her eyes. “Go tell your grandfather ‘no editorializing’.”

  The boy grinned, grabbed a can of soda out of an ice chest in the corner and slipped away.

  “That’ll be forty-six dollars,” the woman continued, then glanced up at Death as her customer was writing out a check. “You must be the enigmatic Mr. Bogart.”

  Death grinned. “I don’t know about enigmatic, and I never have been called ‘mister’, but I am Death Bogart. Are you Mrs. Keystone?”

  “We’re both Mrs. Keystone. I’m Leona and this is my sister-in-law Doris.”

  Doris smiled up at him briefly and turned her attention to the next person in line, a tall man offering her a square of white poster board with the number 37 written on it in black magic marker.

  “Millie Weeks told me to expect you,” Leona said. “She said something about you wanting to look for the jewels?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Um, you know about the jewels too?”

  “Of course. I expect everyone around here knows about them. I just can’t imagine how you hope to find them. And there’s really an insurance company still interested in them? After all this time?”

  Death shrugged. He’d gotten the same reaction from Millie Weeks at the Historical Society, and it puzzled him. Six years didn’t seem so very long. “I guess, when a company has to pay out in a situation like that, they don’t stop trying to recover their losses.”

  “No, I guess not. Well, Millie said the police chief put in a good word for you and the Historical Society doesn’t mind you looking through the house, as long as one of us is with you. Our girl, Wren, is appraising and cataloging that lot. Why don’t you get together with her? Then, when the police say it’s okay to go back in, the two of you can arrange a time to meet.”

  “Sounds good.” An excuse to spend time with a pretty lady always sounded good. “Do you know where she is?”

  The boy came back, then, with another handful of sales sheets.

  “Jody,” Leona said, “do you know where Wren’s gotten to?”

  “Grandpop sent her home. Said she looked beat.” He tipped his head up to look at Death. “She found a dead body this morning!”

  Death caught the note of excitement and an underlying thread of envy in the boy’s voice. He grinned and ruffled the kid’s hair. “Some people have all the luck!”

  “I know!”

  He turned back to Leona. “So, um, could you tell me where—?”

  “Oh no. I am not giving out a young woman’s address or phone number to a strange man, and I don’t care if the police chief does like you.”

  “But—”

  “And you can turn on those pretty green eyes all you want. It won’t change my mind.” Taking a blank scrap of poster board, she wrote out an address and handed it to him. “This is where we’re having a sale tomorrow. Wren will be there. You can talk to her then.”

  three

  Keystone and Sons had two auctions on Sunday, the first starting at 8 AM and the second at 1 PM, so dawn found Wren in the front yard of yet another house, unpacking cardboard boxes of assorted glassware onto a long, tarp-covered trestle table. One of the grandsons plopped a box down hard, making it clink and rattle, and Wren shot him a sharp look.

  “Be careful with that!” she scolded.

  “Aw, it isn’t anything but a bunch of crappy dishes.” He took one out and held it up. “Look, the picture on it’s not even clear.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s very expensive crappy dishes. That’s Blue Willow Ware from Occupied Japan, and it’s worth good money.”

  He sighed. “Whatever.”

  A shadow fell across Wren’s left arm. She caught a whiff of leather, a hint of aftershave, and all of a sudden Death was right there. He loomed over her, almost touching her, braced his lovely butt against the trestle table, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back to grin down at her.

  “You so should have known!”

  “Known what?”

  “About your boyfriend. That he was gay. Couldn’t you tell by the way he kissed you? Or even when you were making love?”

  She should have kicked him in the shin and told him to get lost, but instead she found herself blushing furiously, turning away and mumbling something defensive.

  “What was that?”

  “He said he wanted to save himself for our wedding night.”

  Death hooted. “Seriously?”

  “Like Superman did in Lois and Clark.”

  He sighed, still laughing, and shook his head. “Sweetheart, there is something you have just got to understand. Any man who’s not trying to get a pretty girl like you into bed has definitely got issues!”

  Wren considered that for a minute, then slanted a look up at him, sly, not raising her head. “And do you have issues?”

  He laughed again at that, surprised but rueful. “Well, not that kind of issues, but …” He ran one hand down his face, then straightened and scrubbed his palms against his jeans. “We’ve never been properly introduced. My name is Death Bogart and I’m a private investigator.”

  Wren took his hand. His grip was firm but not overpowering. He knew his own strength and knew how to control it. “I thought you were a surety recovery agent?”

  “I have multiple personality disorder.”

  “I see. So what can I do for the two of you?”

  He grinned again, teeth white against tanned skin. “Mrs. Keystone—Leona Keystone—said I should talk to you about searching the old Campbell place. The Historical Society has given the okay and the cops are planning to release it in the morning.”

  “Searching it?” She frowned. “Searching for what?”

  Death shrugged. “Possibly a cache of stolen jewels.”

  “You mean hidden jewels.”

  “Well, yeah, I’d assume they were hidden.”

  “Yes, but you said ‘stolen jewels’. They wouldn’t have been stolen. I mean, of course, they might have been. But they were hidden so that they wouldn’t get stolen and if they did get stolen,
which, personally, I think is a very good possibility, then they wouldn’t be hidden any more so there wouldn’t be any point to looking for them. Because they’d be gone.”

  “What?” She’d spoken very fast and he shot a bewildered look at the grandson, who was still unpacking boxes on the other side of the table. The kid just shrugged.

  “She’s an auctioneer. What do you expect?”

  “Right.” Death looked down at Wren. “Could you walk that past me again?”

  Wren sighed and spoke like she was addressing a small child. “You want to look for a cache of hidden jewels.”

  “… okay.”

  “What makes you think you can find them now? No one else has ever been able to.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a long shot, but it’s worth a shot. See, the insurance company that paid off the claim would really like to recover its losses.”

  Now it was Wren’s turn to stare. “An insurance company? Seriously? After all this time?”

  “It’s not really been that long.”

  “Over a hundred and fifty years?”

  “Yeah. No! Wait. What?”

  “What?”

  They stared at each other, both bewildered.

  “Just what jewels are you talking about?”

  “What jewels are you talking about?”

  “I asked first,” Death said.

  “That’s childish.”

  “It’s true.”

  Wren sighed. “Fine. I’m talking about the Campbell family jewels.”

  Death raised one eyebrow and a corner of his mouth tipped up. Wren scowled and slapped the back of her hand lightly against his hard bicep. “Not that kind of family jewels!”

  “What can I say, sweetheart? That’s the only kind of jewels my family ever had.”

  Wren scowled at him.

  “Okay, okay! All jokes aside, really, what are you talking about? ’Cause I’m thinking, if there’s more than one set of missing jewels, it just might explain some of the strange looks I’ve been getting.”

  She turned back to setting out dishes, both because it needed to be done and because she knew she’d never be able to concentrate on her story if she was looking at Death. “The Campbell family goes way back. They came here in the 1830s, when European settlers first began to move into western Missouri. Ezra Campbell and his wife Lydia were married in Virginia, where his family had a big plantation and a lot of slaves. Lydia was the daughter of Obadiah Healey, the artist? He did portraits and landscapes and political cartoons?” She glanced up at Death and, seeing no recognition, shrugged and continued. “They migrated here right about the time Missouri became a state, looking for cheap farmland. Their son, Andrew, married Carolina Pettigrew, the daughter of a very wealthy family from Natchez, Mississippi, and by the late 1850s they were living in the house here.”

  “You sure do know a lot about them.”

  “I do volunteer work for the Historical Society sometimes. I helped with the research on the house after Mrs. Fairchild left it to them.” She carefully arranged a set of plates. “Anyway, the Civil War was harsh on the Missouri/Kansas border. Most of the towns in the area had some sort of citizens’ militia and there were larger organizations, Quantrill’s Raiders, for example, and the Kansas Jayhawks and the Missouri Redlegs and scores of others. Most of them claimed allegiance with one side or the other, but a lot of them were really just roving gangs, looking for any excuse to sack and loot a place. East Bledsoe Ferry wasn’t a town back then, just a ferry crossing with a mill and a general store, and the Campbell estate was isolated and ripe for the picking. Andrew had gone south to fight for the Confederacy, leaving a very pregnant Carolina behind with about a dozen slaves to look after the property.

  “One night they got word that a party of northern sympathizers was on the way out to free the slaves. She had them hide in the root cellar and said she’d tell the raiding party that they’d already run away.”

  “They did that?” Death interrupted, disbelieving. “They hid from the people who were there to help them?”

  Wren shrugged. “It was a dangerous time. The armed men who claim to be there to free you might really be there to ‘test your loyalty to your masters’ and then punish or kill you for being willing to run away. Or they might be there to kidnap you and re-sell you somewhere else.”

  “Ah, I see. That sucks.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, it didn’t work. The raiders found the slaves and took them over to Kansas, where they dumped them off in the middle of a street—this was in the winter of 1863—and basically said, ‘you’re emancipated. You’re welcome. Now go be emancipated somewhere else.’ A couple of them headed off for parts unknown, but most of them made their way back to where they started.” She caught Death’s look. “I guess any home’s better than no home at all.”

  “I guess,” he said, and there was an odd bleakness in his voice. “So what happened next?” he prompted.

  “It took them days to get back. When they arrived, the house was dark and cold. There was ice on the inside of the parlor window. Carolina was in her bed, in hard labor, delirious with fever and bleeding heavily. One of the men went for a doctor, while the women helped her as best they could. The baby—it was a boy—survived, but Carolina died about a week later.”

  “And this is where the jewels come in?”

  “The Campbells were wealthy. And Carolina’s own family were wealthy. And, in those days, wealth meant lavish clothing and expensive jewelry. As the story goes, they had a fortune in heirloom jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings and tiaras and brooches and cuff links and tie tacks. Anything you could imagine, in precious metals and rare gemstones. Well, sometime between when she sent the slaves to the cellar and when they returned, it all disappeared.”

  “So, don’t you think the marauders took it?”

  “Maybe. That’s certainly what everybody thought at first.”

  “But?”

  “But, there was a female slave named Jenny who always told an interesting story. She said she was sitting with Carolina, trying to comfort her as she lay dying. She was holding her hand, rubbing her thumb over Carolina’s fingers, and she noticed that even her wedding and engagement rings were missing. She said, ‘oh, you poor thing! Those bad men took away all your pretty jewelry!’ Jenny said that Carolina seemed to wake up then. She looked right at her, lucid as could be, and said, ‘they didn’t get it. I hid it good!’ Jenny asked her where she put it, but Carolina faded back out again and didn’t answer. That was the last time she seemed to know what she was talking about. She raved a lot, kept talking about ‘stars in the water’ and ‘the seventh stone’ and ‘all the pretty colors’, but there’s no telling if any of that meant anything. And then she died. And now, a hundred and fifty years have gone by and still no one’s found the missing jewelry.”

  Death thought about it. “She was upper crust, so probably not used to physical labor at the best of times. Plus, it was the dead of winter and she was heavily pregnant. So she wouldn’t have buried it. Was there a well? Or a cistern?”

  “A well and a cistern and a rain barrel. I hope you don’t think that, in 150 years, you’re the first to think of that!”

  He grinned down at her and damn but he had a nice grin! “Hey, I only just heard the story and I haven’t even seen the place yet. You’ve got to let me start somewhere!”

  “Well, if you can find them, more power to you! But I thought you were looking for a different set of jewels?’

  “Remember, I have multiple personalities.”

  Wren finished with the box she was working on and Death snagged the empty carton. “What do you do with these?”

  “Put them back under the table. People will use them to carry off what they buy.”

  He tossed it under the table as directed, then playfully shouldered her out of the way when she reached for the next box, picked it up for her and set it down on the table with exaggerated care.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’r
e welcome.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to get you out of telling me your story.”

  “Just trying to be helpful.” Death turned again to lean against the table. “My story’s a lot more recent,” he said. “Just as bloody and not nearly as romantic. Six years ago a masked assailant knifed a jewel courier to death in an elevator at the Royal Regency hotel in Kansas City. The courier had a briefcase chained to his wrist containing several billion dollars in both raw gemstones and finished jewelry he was delivering for a trade show in the penthouse. The killer cut off the courier’s hand to get the case, stalled the elevator between floors and disappeared, apparently climbing out the emergency escape hatch on the roof and rappelling down to the basement, where he forced the doors open to get out.”

  “Gosh! That’s horrible!”

  “Yeah. They think the courier was still alive when his hand was severed.”

  “Oh, the poor man! And his killer got away?”

  “Ah … sort of.”

  “Sort of ?”

  “Oh, the police know who did it. Only, they’re just on the cusp of being able to prove it. All their evidence is circumstantial and it might be enough to get a conviction, but then again it might not. The DA doesn’t want to risk the bastard—pardon my French—getting off, so he’s not going to prosecute for now. What they really need, the one thing that would be proof positive, is the stolen jewels.”

  “So that’s why you’re looking for the jewels? So a murderer won’t go unpunished?”

  Death cupped her chin in his hand and turned her face up to meet his. His smile was rueful, his voice sad.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m a better person than I am, Wren. The insurance company that paid off after the theft has put up a $100,000 reward for the jewels. I’ve had a run of hard luck lately and I’m pretty much starting over from scratch. That reward would really help me out. Plus, solving this couldn’t hurt my professional reputation. I’d like to be able to be a paladin for some noble cause, and I’d love to have you see me that way. But that’s not how it is and you’ve got to know, I’m in it for the cash.”

  Wren thought it over for a few seconds. “So, you can be a capitalist paladin. This is America, remember? You can be a capitalist anything.”