The Widow's Revenge (7 page)

She recalled that her grandmother had warded off the devil’s disciples by hanging a string of garlic cloves over every possible entrance to her home, including the fireplace. (Witches are notorious for slipping down chimneys.) Loyola searched her dusty pantry, but found only two cloves hanging from a rusty nail—not enough to prevent a witch from coming through even one door or window. But there was a more efficient way to use the stink:
And it ought to keep those murderous rascals away from me.

Did she string the pair of pungent roots around her thin neck?

Certainly not.

Loyola Montoya ate both garlic cloves
right on the spot.

Tough old lady.

AFTER A BRIEF BUT DEEP AND RESTFUL SLEEP, CHARLIE MOON ENJOYED
a mug of honeyed coffee on the headquarters porch. The rancher was serenaded by the song of an uproariously happy river splashing its way over a glistening cobblestoned highway to the faraway western sea. Yonder on a rocky ridge, a wily old canine raised her nose to commune with an unseen waning moon and managed a passable imitation of cowboy singer Don Edwards mimicking a yip-yipping coyote—and thus was the circle of mutual admiration closed. Pretty good stuff, and you’d think a man would be satisfied, but this was not enough for Mr. Moon. Never one to deny himself a lawful pleasure, he topped off the treat by filling his eyes with the eastern sky, which was aglow over the Buckhorns with a silvery-white phosphorescence. Exclusively for his benefit, the silver radiance melted into liquid gold, followed this with shimmering streaks of pink, then swirls of deep purple. Good things have a way of passing away too quickly, and this sterling performance was completed within a dozen heartbeats.

The tribal investigator drained his mug, went inside and strode across the parlor and into the hallway, where he stopped in front of a mirror mounted on a closet door. Knowing that Loyola would expect him to look his very best, Moon had dressed in his gray Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, matching gray bull-hide cowboy boots, and a dove-gray John B. Stetson. The tall man straightened his black string tie and checked the sharp-as-an-ax creases in his custom-made slacks. As a final touch, he pinned the gold Southern Ute tribal investigator shield onto the left pocket of his white shirt.

He evaluated the resultant image with a critic’s flinty gaze. Pronounced it
not bad.

In a final adjustment to the
strictly business
portion of his outfit, Moon checked the .357 Magnum six-inch-barrel pistol holstered on his hip. No problem there. Loaded for bear. On a social call such as this, the sidearm was merely ornamental, but appearance was (by Moon’s careful reckoning) about 92 percent of getting a lawman’s job done, and Loyola expected a visiting cop to be suitably armed.

What a fine morning this was.

What an extraordinary day it would be.

LOYOLA’S TEN ACRES

The sun was hanging nine diameters high in a pale blue sky when Charlie Moon turned off the paved road and onto the rutted dirt lane that wound its serpentine way through a quarter mile of sage, piñon, and juniper before finally terminating at the farmhouse that Loyola Montoya had called home since the deepest, darkest years of the Great Depression.

Moon parked the Columbine Expedition in the scant shade of a sickly elm. A pair of inquisitive yellow jackets landed on the windshield and peered at the new arrival. Ignoring the winged, stinging insects, the tall, thin, gray-clad man got out of his automobile. He strode across the weed-choked yard toward the slightly awry front porch of a weather-beaten frame house, which had not felt the touch of a paintbrush since Loyola’s husband had died almost thirty years ago. Hopeful cottonwoods had sprouted here and there. Also sage and prickly pear. The invited visitor stepped onto the porch, hoped his bull-hide boots wouldn’t break through one of the rotted pine boards. He tapped on the front door, which opened under the pressure of his knuckle to exhale a musky scent of staleness. Moon took hold of the door, tapped harder.

Nothing.

“Hello inside—anybody home?”

He could hear the tinny tick-ticking of a small wind-up clock.

This did not feel
right.

The lawman called out louder, “Mrs. Montoya—it’s Charlie Moon.”

A warm breeze rattled dry cottonwood leaves.

The lawman stepped inside. He stood in the gloomy parlor, waiting for his pupils to dilate. Little by little, the familiar interior of the widow’s home
materialized. The small brick fireplace that featured a fancy wrought-iron grate. A sagging old sofa that reminded him of a swayback mule his grandfather had ridden to Ignacio every Saturday morning. A recliner flanked by a Walmart lamp with a plastic shade and a handmade maple magazine rack. Though sensing that the effort would prove futile, Moon called again for the lady of the house. He was rewarded with the expected nonresponse.

Over the stale scents that inhabit any old, lived-in house, the Ute’s nostrils picked up something that commanded his attention. Or was it two somethings? No, three. He raised his nose, sniffed in a larger sample. The strongest of the scents was both familiar and oddly sweet. Roasted meat?

Yes. Pork, he guessed.

I bet she’s cooked up a big breakfast for me, then wandered off somewhere.
Moon recalled that there was a root cellar under the kitchen.
She’s probably gone down there to get a jar of preserves.
The second, more stringent aroma, was kerosene. No surprise. Loyola cooked her meals on an eighty-year-old kerosene stove.

But what was that underlying, peculiar odor? He took another sniff.
That smells a lot like . . . burned hair.

The lawman drew his sidearm and took five long strides across the living room, a shorter one into the kitchen’s twilight. The firearm hung heavy in his hand.

What he found there shall not be described in any detail.

Suffice it to say that the aged woman, whose body was on the floor, had expired in a localized fire. That the blaze had apparently started when a kerosene lamp had been knocked off the kitchen table. That Loyola’s gray hair was mostly burned off.

That her roasted flesh smelled
sweet.

Feeling himself about to retch, Charlie Moon sprinted out the back door, off the porch, and into the edge of the apple orchard. He tried vainly to fight off an attack of dry heaves, and the nightmarish image and scent.

Sufficient for the day was this horror. Sufficient for a lifetime.

His lungs needed a breath of fresh air—his face, beams of heavenly sunshine.

Which blessings were promptly granted.

WITHIN THIRTY
minutes of the tribal investigator’s terse cell-phone call, three Ignacio PD units and a La Plata County sheriff’s pickup had arrived. The four official motor vehicles delivered a total of seven uniformed cops.

While Moon was telling the town cops and the sheriff about the grisly scene in the old woman’s kitchen, they were joined by SUPD Officer Danny Bignight, who had gotten the word, as the Utes say—from the
talking drums
. Barely a minute later, a state policeman pulled up, with La Plata County ME Wilson Schmidt’s gray van trailing so closely behind that it might have been towed by the trooper’s low-slung Chevrolet sedan.

After a preliminary examination of the corpse and its immediate surroundings, the medical examiner’s tentative finding was that Mrs. Loyola Montoya had probably suffered a stroke or heart failure and collapsed. In the process of falling, the elderly woman had knocked a lighted kerosene lamp off her kitchen table, which had started the blaze. An autopsy would be performed on the blackened body and a detailed, official investigation made into the cause of the fire, but it was unlikely that these routine procedures would shed any new light on the widow’s final misfortune.

The tribal investigator reported Loyola’s complaint about “witches” and what he had discovered upon arriving at her home. While waiting for those with jurisdiction to show up, Moon had waded the creek and found evidence of a recently abandoned encampment. Judging from a quick examination of tire tracks and footprints, he estimated that four vehicles and at least ten persons had been camping on land owned by the Blue Diamond Natural Gas Company. An effort would be made to track down those trespassers who had hounded the unfortunate woman, but most of the lawmen were in agreement with the ME’s preliminary opinion—that Mrs. Montoya had died of natural causes.

The two Indians saw the matter from somewhat different perspectives.

SUPD Officer Danny Bignight had considerable respect for modern forensic science and didn’t doubt for a moment that the Apache elder had died more or less as the medical examiner theorized. The Taos Pueblo Indian didn’t know how they’d done it, but he figured that one way or
another, the band of
brujos
Loyola had complained to Moon about were responsible for her death.

Charlie Moon also accepted the ME’s tentative finding of accidental death, but, like his friend Danny Bignight, the tribal investigator suspected that there was more to the fatality than met the medical examiner’s eye—contributing factors. Some bad guys had trespassed on Blue Diamond land and gotten crosswise of Loyola. One insult and threat had led to another until . . .
Just for meanness, they killed Loyola’s goat and strung it up on her back porch.
The stress of the angry encounter had probably led to Loyola’s stroke or heart attack.
If that’s really how she died.
He flexed long, lean fingers that could straighten an iron horseshoe, then fold it back into a U.
I’d like to get my hands on whoever it was.
Such a gratifying opportunity seemed highly unlikely—the thuggish half-wits would be far away by now, probably in another state. It bothered Moon that they would probably never pay for what they had done.
Not in this world.
What troubled him even more was an overdose of regret that was settling sourly into his gut.
If I’d driven down here yesterday, right after I hung up the phone from talking to Loyola, she’d probably still be alive.
And not only that . . .
There’s a good chance I could have dealt with those so-called witches.
He raised a sorrowful gaze to the pale blue sky.
But I put off the trip.
Why?
Because I’m just a part-time lawman. And not a very good one at that.

The time had come for some serious soul-searching.

AFTER HE FINISHED HIS LUNCH, FOREMAN PETE BUSHMAN BIT OFF A BIG
chaw of Red Man Tobacco and went to sit on his front porch and chew. While awaiting the boss’s return, he entertained himself by spitting at blackflies. By and by, he heard the Ute’s automobile. He got up from his straight-back chair and ambled slowly across the yard to flag Charlie Moon down as the rancher slowed for a clattering crossing of Too Late Creek bridge. The scruffy-bearded stockman had not heard about Loyola Montoya’s grisly death down in La Plata County, much less the discovery of the charred corpse. As the tribal investigator lowered the passenger-side window, Bushman leaned on the door and grinned at the owner of the outfit. “Glad to see you, Charlie. There’s some things I need to talk to you about, mainly—”

“Not now, Pete.” Moon turned away from the foreman’s intense, beady-eyed gaze. “Whatever it is can wait till later.”

“No it can’t.” Bushman jerked his chin to indicate his residence. “Dolly’s down in her back again and—”

“I’m sorry, Pete.” Moon steeled himself for a conversation he preferred to avoid. “Does she feel well enough to go into Granite Creek and see a doctor?”

“Oh, sure. Fact is, we just got back from town. Doc Martin prescribed some little red pills, said Dolly should take it easy for a week or two. Maybe a month.”

“I hope that’ll do the trick. Make sure your wife gets all the rest she needs.”

“Oh, I’ll do that all right.” Bushman turned his head and spat at a fuzzy brown caterpillar. “But I’ve got an awful lot to do, so I’d like to hire
somebody to help look after my ol’ lady till she’s feeling some better. Kind of like a lady’s companion.”

Moon nodded. “See to it, then.”

Pleased by this easy victory, the foreman figured this was an opportune time to press a related issue. “And then there’s the new horse barn that needs to be roofed before winter sets in, and you know how that can happen here in September. But we’re shorthanded, Charlie, and—”

“Hire whoever you need, Pete.”

This was too easy. The cranky foreman glared at the boss. “Well I generally do, but only after you give me your okay.”

“Consider it given.” Moon nodded curtly, drove away.

Pete Bushman watched him go.
Well don’t that beat all.
He took off his tattered straw hat and scratched at his perpetually itchy scalp. Of all the people he knew, Charlie Moon was the most amiable.
I wonder what’s gnawing on his leg.