Cast Iron Cover-Up (The Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries Book 3) Read online

“Henry told me everyone’s specialty. Among them, they have a historian, a cartographer, an archeologist, a mining engineer, and a pre-med student.”

  “They could still be looking for gold as a hobby,” I said.

  “I forgot to mention something. Henry implied that they were each chosen to use the skills they’d been learning in school. So tell me this. Why would they need a cartographer? Everyone knows exactly where our only gold strike was. Shoot, I even told them again myself. So why bring a historian, not to mention an archeologist? This is no simple hobby. Something’s going on, but I haven’t a clue what it might be about.”

  “I don’t either, but I’d love to find out,” I said.

  “How do you propose we do that?” Pat asked me.

  “Leave it to me, dear brother,” I said. “I have my methods.”

  “I just bet you do,” he said as he grabbed the last box. “Thanks for lending a hand.”

  “It might not have been the least I could do, but it was pretty darn close,” I said with a smile. “Do you have any plans after work?”

  “Like what, mowing the lawn?” he asked me.

  “You live upstairs. You don’t have a lawn,” I reminded him.

  “Then I probably won’t have to do that, will I?”

  “Are you seeing Jenna tonight?” Jenna Lance was the town vet and, as of just recently, my brother’s new girlfriend.

  “She’s out of town at a conference for the next four days,” Pat said. “How about you? Are you going out with Timothy?” I’d been dating the accountant and outdoorsman since the same time Pat had first gone out with Jenny, the timing purely a coincidence. Timothy had bought a large tract of land that abutted mine, so technically we were neighbors, though we were still separated by a great deal of dense woods. I had eighty-two acres myself, while he was the new and proud owner of fifty-seven.

  “He’s been taking a class in Franklin in timber-framing all week, but he’s coming home tomorrow,” I said. “He wants to use the joinery techniques in the cabin he’s going to build.”

  “That sounds like it could be really cool,” Pat said.

  “I know. So, we both go years without having significant others in our lives, and now that we do, they both bail on us. Is it us, do you think?”

  My brother grinned at me. “Well, not me, at any rate.”

  I threw an empty box at him, which he easily ducked. “You’re going to have to aim better than that,” Pat added.

  “Who said I was trying to hit you? That was just a warning shot.”

  He laughed. “Got it. Would you like to grab something to eat with me? I know we spend all day together, but we really don’t get much chance to talk, do we?”

  “If you’re not sick of my face by now, then I guess I could stand seeing yours a bit more, too,” I answered. It was the closest thing to a compliment he was going to get out of me, and he knew it.

  “Sounds like a plan. Where should we go?”

  I was about to answer when someone was suddenly banging on our front door. I’d seen Pat lock it earlier, so I knew that as far as he was concerned, we were closed for the day, barring some kind of major emergency.

  I was about to tell the young woman exactly that when I saw the blood on her hand that she’d been using a second before to beat on our front door.

  CHAPTER 4: PAT

  “Call Kathleen,” I told Annie as I raced to the door. Peggy, the archeologist from earlier, was standing outside, and she was a total mess. She’d clearly been sobbing, judging from the trails of tears still streaming down her face, and there were smudges of blood on her shirt and cheeks as well as her hands.

  “What is it?” I asked as I unlocked the door and opened it. “What happened?”

  “It’s Bones. I think he’s dead,” she said, sobbing again as she collapsed into my arms.

  “Calm down and tell us what happened,” I told her as Annie dialed our sister’s number. “Take a deep breath, Peggy. You can do it.”

  “Okay,” she said, doing her best to stifle her tears. “We were at the dig site, and I had to take my car and come into town for dinner supplies. It’s my turn to cook something on the camp stove tonight, and Bones was mad at me for forgetting to buy groceries when we were in earlier. Anyway, I wasn’t away for more than thirty minutes, but when I got back to the site, everyone was gone, even the tents and the van the others came in. At least that’s how it looked at first. Then I saw Bones, lying face down in the newest hole we’d been working on.”

  “Where exactly is this dig site?”

  Peggy frowned at my sister. “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?” Annie asked, clearly getting frustrated with the college student. “How are we supposed to help Bones if we don’t know where he is?”

  “We didn’t ask the owner permission to dig there,” Peggy said. “I told Bones we had to do it, but he wouldn’t let me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why are you apologizing to me?” Annie asked. And then, after barely a moment’s thought, she asked, “It’s on my land, isn’t it?”

  “Part of it might be,” Peggy acknowledged. “Most of the land we’re digging on belongs to some guy named Roberts, but you might own a little of it, too. There’s no building of any kind on his land, so we thought it would be okay.”

  “You thought wrong,” Annie said as she started for the front door.

  “Where are you going?” I asked her, as if I even needed to.

  “I’m going to see what’s going on. You can stay here if you’d like and wait for Kathleen, but I’m going to go find out what happened on my land.”

  “I want to go back with you, too,” Peggy said, pleading. “I shouldn’t have taken off like that. I panicked! But if we go back, if it’s not too late, I might be able to do something to help him.”

  “Call Kathleen and tell her where we’re headed,” Annie told me.

  There was no need to, though.

  Our big sister, who also happened to be the sheriff, was driving up as we all walked out onto the Iron’s front porch.

  “Is that blood?” Kathleen asked the moment she spotted Peggy. “It’s not yours, is it?”

  “It belongs to my friend, Bones,” she said. “Please. You’ve got to help him.”

  “Where is he, in your car?” Kathleen asked as she started toward the vehicle in question.

  “No, he’s either on my land or Timothy’s,” Annie said. She’d made it a point of pride paying the two of us for our share of the land, even if it had put her in a financial bind to do it. Kathleen and I had wanted to gift the property to her outright, but Annie wouldn’t hear of it, so we’d set up a payment plan, and every month, part of my twin sister’s share of the business went to Kathleen and me. I hadn’t spent a dime of the money she’d been paying me, but I couldn’t speak for Kathleen.

  “What are you talking about? What exactly is going on here?”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” I said. “Peggy, I know you’re in town digging around looking for something. If it’s not gold or emeralds, then what is it?”

  “Can we talk as we drive? Please?” she begged me.

  I looked at Kathleen, who nodded. “We’ll all go in my squad car. Annie, you can sit up front with me. Pat, why don’t you ride in back with her?”

  I agreed.

  Once we were on our way, Kathleen asked, “Now tell me the truth. What exactly are you looking for?”

  “Buried treasure,” Peggy said.

  “Maybe you’d better go back and start from the beginning,” I suggested.

  “Three months ago, Henry found some documents buried in a stack of old papers in an unrelated archive, and there was a map there, as well. It was written in some kind of code, but we believe there’s a great deal of money buried around here that nobody knows about.” Peggy interrupted herself by saying, “Hey, you missed the turn.”

  “She’s going in the right direction. My place is up ahead,” Annie said.

  “May
be so, but we’ve been coming in and out on that road.” When Kathleen turned around and backtracked a thousand feet, I saw fresh ruts in the service road that accessed Timothy’s land.

  “Those tracks look new,” I said to Annie. “Did you notice them before?”

  “I just assumed Timothy made them,” she said. “I can’t believe five people were digging on our land and I missed it.”

  “Eighty-two acres is a lot of ground to cover, especially when you spend so much time at the Iron,” I said.

  “I didn’t even smell a campfire,” Annie protested.

  “That’s because we never had an open fire since we got here. We’ve been cooking on one of those little propane stoves from the start,” Peggy said. “We were all so happy to get decent food at your place this afternoon, I felt really bad about not telling you what we were doing.”

  “If that’s supposed to make me feel better, you’re going to need to try a little harder than that,” Annie said.

  Kathleen raised an eyebrow toward our sister as we jounced along the bouncy path. It certainly couldn’t be called a road. Compared to this, Annie’s driveway was an interstate. We came to a bit of a clearing, and Annie said from the back, “This is where the old Blankenship homestead used to be.”

  “It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Peggy said. “I haven’t been able to afford to go on any digs of my own yet, but what we’ve found here so far is really cool.”

  “Why don’t we save the dig report until after we see to your friend?” Kathleen had called the ambulance driver and told her where we were headed, and I could hear the siren behind us in the distance. As we got out, my older sister asked, “Now where exactly is this body?”

  Peggy led us to an area where the old homestead had once stood. I’d seen it six months before on a hike with Annie, but now it looked as though an oversized gopher had moved in, with holes randomly dug all over the place. I glanced at the hand-laid stone foundation, which was now all that was left of what once must have been a pretty nice home, according to local folklore. Jasper Blankenship had been a wealthy man, or so everyone had assumed until he’d died and left his widow nearly penniless. She’d been forced to sell off most of the land her husband had acquired, and my family had bought a nice-sized chunk of it, where my sister was now living. As I looked around, I saw an old well and what had to be a family cemetery nearby, too.

  Peggy walked over to a freshly dug hole, and I noticed that they’d cut the barbed wire that separated Timothy’s land from Annie’s. This excavation seemed to straddle the property line, and as we all leaned forward, I took a deep breath before I looked at the body.

  There was just one problem, though.

  Bones was gone.

  CHAPTER 5: ANNIE

  “I don’t understand,” Peggy said as she stared down into the shallow hole, and I saw Pat touch her shoulder gently to comfort her. My twin brother had a way of soothing people that I couldn’t master, no matter how hard I’d tried in the past. Okay, if I was being honest with myself, I never really tried all that hard in the first place. Why should we both have to be so compassionate? One of us had to be a cold-hearted pragmatist, so why not me?

  “Are you sure he was in this hole?” I asked her. “Maybe it was somewhere else.”

  “I’m telling you, he was right there,” Peggy said, her voice edging into hysteria.

  Kathleen stepped down into the shallow hole, which was no more than two feet deep. It was six feet by six feet wide, and there was no way that a body could be hiding anywhere in it.

  “This has been freshly dug,” our older sister said as she got close to the dirt, pinched some between her finger and thumb, and then rubbed it away.

  “Of course it was,” Peggy replied. “We just finished it this afternoon.”

  “I don’t see any blood anywhere,” Kathleen answered calmly as she studied the disturbed soil carefully.

  “Not to mention a body,” I added.

  That earned me a reproving look from both of my siblings, but Peggy didn’t even seem to realize that I’d said anything.

  “This just doesn’t make any sense,” Peggy said as she looked around. “Where is everybody?”

  “Are you sure they were here earlier?” Kathleen asked her, as though the college girl had completely lost her mind.

  “I can vouch for that part, at least. Five of them came into the grill for lunch this afternoon,” I said, “and Pat met them, too. They were real enough then.”

  “Tell me about your companions,” Kathleen said.

  The ambulance finally made it to us just as my sister spoke. “Hold that thought, and wait right here. All of you,” she added, looking at me and Pat in turn.

  “Where would we go?” I asked my brother after our older sister walked over to confer with the ambulance driver.

  “Oh, I don’t know, how about off looking for Bones’s body in the woods?”

  “I told you before, he was right here,” Peggy said, suddenly snapping back to us. “I don’t know what’s happening.” After pausing for a moment, she began yelling each of her friends’ names in turn. “Henry! Marty! Gretchen! Where are you?”

  “Why didn’t you call out for Bones?” I asked her softly.

  “You didn’t see him,” she said as she shuddered a little. “Even if he were still alive by some miracle, there’s no way he’d be in any shape to call out to me.”

  “Where were you all staying?” I asked as I looked around. “There aren’t any tents here, so I’m assuming that you had a place in town.”

  “No, Bones thought that might be too suspicious, so we all camped here. Some of us stayed in tents, but they’re gone now. We had the camper van, too,” she said. “It’s obviously not here, either. They must have all just packed up and left.”

  “Taking the body with them?” I asked her.

  “Maybe we should wait for Kathleen to come back before we question her any more,” Pat said to me.

  “I’m not sure we have that much time to waste,” I said, and then I turned back to Peggy. “Do you happen to know the plate number of the missing van?”

  “No, of course not. I drove my car down here with Henry, and the rest of them came with Bones. I don’t even know what state it’s registered in. There are cars from all over at school.”

  “At least we know who the van belongs to,” Pat said.

  “Sorry, but we don’t know that, either. Bones borrowed it from a friend at school,” Peggy said as she shook her head.

  “Is there any chance you know the student’s name he borrowed it from?” I asked her.

  “Sort of, but it’s not going to do you any good,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “We all call him Sniffles at school, because of his allergies,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever even heard his real name.”

  “What are you three talking about?” Kathleen asked us sharply as she returned.

  “The van some of them came in is gone, and so are their camping equipment and tools,” I said. “We can’t get a plate number, or even the owner’s name, for that matter. Maybe they took the body with them when they left.”

  “They wouldn’t do that!” Peggy protested.

  “Not even to rush him to the hospital?” Pat asked her gently.

  “Okay, maybe they’d do that,” she allowed. “But where were they when I found Bones before?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll ask them that when we find them,” Kathleen said before turning to the ambulance driver. “Sorry for the wild goose chase.”

  “No worries, Sheriff. We’re on the clock either way.”

  “Do me a favor and check with the hospital when you get there,” Kathleen requested.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” the attendant asked.

  “Could you describe him for us, please?” Kathleen asked Peggy.

  “He’s in his mid-twenties, he’s short, and he has dark hair,” she said.

  “And he answers to Bones, if he’s in any
shape to answer to anything,” I said.

  Pat gave me one of his critical looks, but I just shrugged. Was anything I’d just said a lie?

  “Peggy, do you happen to know his real name?” Kathleen asked her.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  “Wonderful. We have a missing student, four of them, actually, and one of them is injured, if not deceased. The problem? We don’t have anything to go on.”

  “Do you need us for anything else, Sheriff? If not, we’ll keep you in the loop if we hear anything,” the driver said.

  Kathleen looked at the young woman for a moment, and then she said, “Why don’t you take her with you, okay?”

  “What? Why? I’m not hurt,” Peggy protested.

  “We need to get you checked out and cleaned up,” Kathleen said reasonably. “You’re not going to be able to help Bones until we take care of you. Besides, I need to know more about these friends of yours.”

  “You could hardly call them friends. Henry’s the only one I even knew before this weekend,” she said.

  “Then we’ll start with him,” Kathleen said.

  “What about us?” I asked our older sister. “What would you like Pat and me to do in the meantime?”

  “You could always ride back to town with me,” Kathleen suggested.

  “Or we could look around a little since we’re here,” I said. “My place is just through those woods. We can head there when we’re through. It might be worth a shot if we hang around and looked for clues.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll have some of my people do that,” Kathleen said.

  “Sis,” I said in a soft voice, “if he’s out there somewhere, he could be in serious trouble. How about if we promise not to touch anything, and if we do find something of interest at all, including Bones, we’ll let you know ASAP?”

  “Pat, do you agree to that?” she asked our brother.

  “Of course. We won’t disturb the crime scene, if that’s your concern.”

  “If it even is one,” Kathleen said softly as the attendants gently led Peggy away to the ambulance.