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Fred and Tigger were both sound asleep in the back seat by the time we made it to I-49 on our way to the airport. The cat fought me when I first tried to put her in the Jeep but was now curled up next to Fred. I would have left her back at the farm after she scratched my arm, drawing blood, but Bonnie had asked me to bring her. I’d forgotten about the scratches by the time we’d driven past Clinton and off the winding Highway 7. My mind had been occupied with the murders and how Kelly was coping. I’d have to give her a call in the morning and see if she needed anything.
Bennett had almost accused her of killing her uncle’s girlfriend. More than likely, he’d sent her gun to the crime lab in Jefferson City soon after he’d taken it from her. I assumed the crazy neighbor’s death was murder, but now I wondered if it could have been suicide. If Grace was the slut Kelly said she was, it’s possible Al killed her, and then himself. But that didn’t make sense either. How could he stab himself in the heart and still have time to hide the knife?
Maybe Al caught the killer looking for something in the barn and was stabbed during a fight, but why would the murderer leave the knife at the scene? And if the knife did belong to Captain Scott, how had the killer come by it? Was the killer the grave robber? No, that didn’t make sense. I knew for a fact Fitzgerald was the grave robber, and he’s dead.
Maybe there would be prints on the knife. It was the least I could hope for. Bennett needed a suspect, and Kelly had to be his prime suspect. She was the only one with means, motive, and opportunity. If the killer was stupid enough to leave fingerprints, it would take the heat off her.
***
BONNIE CALLED ME BEFORE I reached the airport to let me know I was late, and I didn’t need to park in short-term parking. She instructed me to pick her up at the curb outside the arrivals entrance. I seriously thought about not stopping as I pulled up to where she was standing. I saw a middle-aged man standing next to her, wearing a crumpled sports jacket and a nearly unbuttoned dress shirt. I’d have known her nephew, Jonathan Scott, even without his signature gold necklace. About the only thing he was missing to make him look like the loser he was, was an unkempt, three-day beard. He spoke first when I got out of the Jeep to load her luggage.
“Glad you could finally make it, Jake. What happened? You get lost again?” Jon hadn’t lost his charm or the nasty smirk engraved on his face from years of bitterness.
I turned to Bonnie without bothering to answer Jon. “What’s he doing here?”
Bonnie shrugged, and let out a sigh. “It’s long story. I’ll explain later.”
“There’s no explaining to do. I’m here to finish the job you botched,” Jon said. He smiled wickedly and reached into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes, watching my reaction the way a cobra watches its charmer.
I ignored him as he lit up, and turned to Bonnie. “Margot’s firing me?”
“No, of course not, Jake. She just thought you needed a little help. Now, would you two get into the car and stop acting like a couple of schoolboys?”
In my younger days, I would have told Jon where his mother could stick her job and walked off. But one thing I have learned from the so-called school of hard knocks is sometimes it’s best to settle for crow or you’ll end up eating nothing at all. Not that it would hurt me to miss a couple meals, but Fred wouldn’t be happy about it. I grabbed Bonnie’s bags and put them in the back with Fred.
***
“SO, WHY DON’T YOU BRING me up to date, Jake? Do you have any idea who has my great grandfather’s sword?” Jon asked between puffs of his second cigarette. He was in the passenger seat next to me. Bonnie was dozing off in the back seat with her cat on her lap. Poor Fred was lying next to her all by himself with the saddest look on his face.
“You haven’t heard? We found that days ago. And now I know where his Bowie knife is, too.”
“Oh?”
Although I had to keep my eyes on the road now that we were merging onto the highway from the airport traffic circle, I managed to catch a glimpse of Jon’s expression. Most clowns would kill to be able to squish their eyebrows together the way he did. It also left the door open for me to get in a little dig.
“Yeah, but unfortunately, the sheriff has it. He’s keeping it as evidence in a murder investigation. Which reminds me. The sheriff would like to talk to you tomorrow.”
I didn’t think it possible for someone to frown so hard that their eyebrows could actually touch. “The sheriff? Why does he want to talk to me?”
“Beats me. Maybe you have some unpaid parking tickets, but more likely, he’ll want to search you for traces of marijuana, like he did me. He seems to think everyone from Colorado is a pothead.” It was all I could do to keep a straight face when I saw Bonnie awake in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were huge.
Jon flipped his cigarette out his open window. “Oh, my God! I just remembered I forgot to get my bags. I need you to take me back to the airport. Just drop me where you picked me up and I’ll get a shuttle to Truman.”
Bonnie’s eyes grew even larger, and her mouth fell open when I made an illegal u-turn, nearly T-boning a taxi. I didn’t bother to tell Jon there were no shuttles to Truman.
***
“YOU AMAZE ME, JAKE,” Bonnie said once we had dropped off her nephew and were back on the road. She was sitting up front with Tigger on her lap and Fred lying between us with his big head on my lap. His woeful eyes replaced by a huge smile while I rubbed his fur.
“Why’s that, Bon?”
“Telling poor Jon that Bennett was going to search him. Where did you come up with that?”
I suppressed a chuckle. “Beats me. I only wanted to ruffle his feathers. I didn’t think he’d take me seriously.”
“Well, I imagine he’s halfway to Denver by now. I’m going to have some explaining to do to Margot.”
“Tell her that her baby boy needed his diaper changed.”
“Jake! That’s not nice.” She crossed her arms and pretended to pout, but she couldn’t keep up the act for long, and soon a big smile crossed her face and she broke out laughing.
I waited for her to regain her composure before changing the subject. “Actually, I lied a little. Bennett had no idea Jon would be on the plane, but he did want me to ask you if you have pictures of your grandfather’s Bowie knife.”
“Great, great-grandfather, Jake. How old do you think I am?”
“Twenty-three?”
“You need glasses.”
“Okay, great, great-grandfather. So, what do I tell Bennett?”
“Tell him I don’t have them. I could ask Jon, but I doubt if he’d be willing to help you recover the knife.” Her mood had changed faster than a signal light at a speed trap. I couldn’t read her face because she was staring out her window, but her voice said her mind was somewhere else.
We drove along in silence for several minutes. Fred and Tigger were both sound asleep, and I thought Bonnie was, too, until she spoke again. “This isn’t the way you went last time.”
“No, I don’t like to drive Highway 7 at night, so I thought we’d take 50 to Sedalia and then go south. It’s all four-lane highway that way.”
She turned toward me with worry in her eyes. “We do need to get the knife back pretty soon, or Margot’s going to send Jonathan back.”
“I have a feeling she’ll send him regardless, or are you forgetting all the repairs needed on the farm? The fact that I’m twice the carpenter he’ll ever be doesn’t matter when it comes to family.”
She turned back toward the window again. “No, I haven’t forgotten, and neither has Margot.”
***
I LET BONNIE SLEEP in the next morning while Fred and I walked around the farm. She had taken over Crammer’s old bedroom on the upper floor, and Fred and I had settled into the sunroom on the lower level. The old house had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, but only Crammer’s was livable because of the leaking roof. The sunroom, on the other hand, had been added on sometime in the last decade, so all I had to do to make it a temporary bedroom was tack some sheets onto the French doors leading to the living room, and move in a used bed I’d picked up at one of Truman’s many junk stores. There was also a bathroom—slash laundry room—I was able to use without waking Bonnie. The bathroom looked like it had been added on about the same time as the sunroom. How the original occupants managed to raise a dozen kids with only three bedrooms and a single upstairs bath I’d never know.
I also called Kelly twice and each time got her voice mail. Both times I left a message asking how she was doing and if she needed anything. I wanted to ask if she needed a hug but thought she might take it the wrong way. What she really needed was for someone to find out who killed her uncle and his girlfriend.
Some innate feeling told me all the murders were connected to Captain Scott’s weapons, so I had the brilliant idea to start at the beginning and revisit the cemetery. Fred must have had the same idea because he was a hundred yards ahead of me sniffing the hallowed ground. I’d expected him to head for Captain Scott’s grave, but he was hot on some critter’s trail and heading in the opposite direction.
“Whoa, Fred! Wait up,” I yelled, running to catch up with him. I might as well have been yelling at the trees. Fred ducked under the rickety fence surrounding the headstones and went straight toward the caretaker’s shed. I needed to pick up the pace before he disturbed a den of skunks or copperheads.
He was nowhere in sight by the time I got to the shed, so I cautiously pushed aside some of the vines that were growing everywhere, and stepped inside through a doorless entry. The shed had been constructed from fieldstone and would probably stand another 150 years, but the door and window frames had long ago rotted away. I was surprised to see the rest of the shack intact until I noticed it was protected from the weather by a newer metal roof. Along a windowless wall stood a homemade tool cabinet with open doors. The only tools in it were a pick and shovel with bright-yellow, fiberglass handles, which I knew without searching the Internet didn’t exist 150 years ago. Someone must have been here recently. I found Fred sniffing at the base of the cabinet.
“What’ve you got there, boy?” I asked after kneeling down to his level and saw that the cabinet had been hiding something more sinister. There were tracks in the dusty floor indicating the cabinet had been moved recently. I lied down to examine the bottom of the cabinet, and Fred started licking my face. He must have thought I wanted to play.
I quickly sat up to wipe off my face, and inadvertently pushed against the cabinet, causing it to move. It had been covering a hidden stairway.
Fred forgot about cleaning my face and raced down the stairs before I had a chance to stop him. “Get back here, Fred!” I yelled, too late. What little light that shone through an east-facing window gave no hint he was down there. I had no choice but to follow him.
The room below the caretaker’s shack had floor to ceiling shelves along each wall, stocked with old Mason jars. I couldn’t see what was in them in the dim light, but I realized it must have been a root cellar, built before modern refrigeration. It wasn’t until I fished out my smart phone and turned on its flashlight that I saw half the room was filled with freshly dug dirt from a tunnel. Fred had disappeared into the tunnel. It was too big to have been dug by a groundhog or whatever Fred had been chasing, and it didn’t take a Mensa candidate to put two and two together and come up with how Fitzgerald had robbed the graveyard without disturbing the surface. It also didn’t take much imagination to recognize it must have been a tunnel collapse that killed Fitzgerald, and if I didn’t get Fred out of there soon, it could happen to him.
“Fred, come here boy.” I didn’t want to yell for fear I might cause another collapse, so I said it softly. When he didn’t show, I decided to crawl into the hole a few feet and shine my light. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, and I was about to add one more to the list by going after him when I saw two reflective dots coming slowly toward me, and I silently said a little prayer that the ground didn’t cave in before he came to me.
“Good boy, Freddie. Keep coming. That’s a boy. I promise I’m not mad at you,” I said and backed out of the tunnel. When he got close enough, I grabbed his collar and dragged him the rest of the way out. Although I had lied about not being mad, I soon forgot and gave him a big bear hug. I was so relieved to have him back that I didn’t notice the piece of blanket he had in his mouth.