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

  “Are you saying that you don’t believe her?” I asked our older sister.

  “Think about it. All we have is this girl’s word that something happened out here today. She needs to get a thorough examination before I take her back to my office.”

  “Do you think she’s hurt?” I asked, thinking about the blood we’d found on her.

  “Honestly, I think there’s a chance that she’s high,” Kathleen admitted. “I’ve seen it before. If she’s on drugs, they may be doing something to her mind.”

  “I don’t know. She seemed awfully lucid to me,” Pat said.

  “Plus, if it’s all in her mind, where did the blood come from?” I asked.

  “That’s a very good question,” Kathleen replied. “If you find anything, particularly a blood trail, call me. Do you understand?”

  “We do,” Pat and I answered in unison.

  “I just wish I could believe either one of you,” Kathleen said as she shook her head slightly.

  After Kathleen and the ambulance were gone, Pat and I started our search.

  We had to be quick, since Kathleen’s people were probably on their way, so every second had to count.

  A part of me dreaded the idea of stumbling across a body, but it was something that we had to do on the slight chance that Bones was out there alone and in need of some immediate medical attention.

  CHAPTER 6: PAT

  “Why exactly were they digging all of these random holes?” Annie asked me as she peered down into yet another shallow depression.

  “Peggy already told us that. They were looking for buried treasure,” I reminded her.

  “I know that, but what specifically?”

  “Beats me,” I asked as I looked around the open area of what had once been the main house’s front yard. Annie and I had already scanned the surrounding woods, and neither one of us had found a single thread of evidence that Bones had ever been farther than the clearing we were now standing in. There were no holes in this particular part of the clearing, but I could see where the weeds and grass had been matted down in three large rectangles. “At least she wasn’t lying about the tents,” I said, spotting a few places where pegs had been driven into the earth and hastily pulled out. “The question is why did they take off so suddenly?”

  “Having a dead body to deal with might be a pretty good reason,” Annie said.

  “Sure, but why take it with them?”

  “Pat, they might not have realized that Peggy came back to the site. If they left Bones’s body to do something else, she could have showed up when they were gone.”

  “What do you think could possibly be more pressing business than dealing with a dead body?” I asked her.

  “Finding a place to hide it,” Annie answered grimly.

  “We don’t even know if Bones is really dead or not,” I reminded her.

  “Maybe not, but it doesn’t do us any good assuming that he’s in the hospital, does it? The only way we’re going to be productive here is to work off the premise that someone killed him.”

  “Okay. Let’s say for a moment that’s true. It sounds as though it was clearly a homicide, and I doubt they all did it together. So why did the others leave?”

  “Maybe they don’t know who the real killer is themselves,” Annie suggested.

  “I would think that would be even more reason to call the police instead of packing everything up and getting out of here. If we hadn’t seen evidence to the contrary ourselves, and if the group hadn’t been at the Iron earlier today, there’s a good chance that no one would believe Peggy now. We met the others, at least some of them, so we know that she wasn’t alone, but if Peggy hadn’t shown up and led us here, would we have had any reason to believe that what we’re seeing is anything but what it looks like?”

  “What exactly does it look like?” my twin sister asked me.

  “Like someone went a little crazy with a shovel. There are what, seven holes dug around the perimeter here? I thought they had some kind of map. Do these holes look a little too random to you, too?”

  “Maybe the directions weren’t as clear as Peggy made them sound. If there was room for interpretation, it could easily lead to something like this.”

  “I don’t know. It looks like a lot of trouble to me,” I said.

  “Pat, if Blankenship buried his money somewhere on the property and they managed to unearth it, it could be worth a fortune. I can’t imagine how much his gold and silver would be worth on today’s market.”

  “Then again, it could all just be one big lie,” I told her. “Let’s assume that it’s true, though. There’s no reason to believe that it hasn’t already been found, even if it was ever buried somewhere around here in the first place.”

  “I’m guessing they at least found something,” Annie said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If Bones is indeed dead, then someone must have killed him for a reason,” she answered.

  “That’s a good point. Okay, let’s assume that everything Peggy told us was the unvarnished truth. I know Kathleen thinks the girl is high on something, but she didn’t seem that way to me. What did you think?”

  “That she’d seen something traumatic,” Annie said. “Was she under the influence of anything but shock? I don’t think so.”

  “So, we’re agreed on that much, at least. Let’s play out the scenario the way she’s presented it. Peggy leaves to get food, and someone, unknown to the others or not, kills Bones for whatever reason. Maybe he found something of value, or perhaps he pushed one of the other kids a little too far. Either way, he’s in the excavation, either dying or already dead. It’s not unreasonable to believe that no one saw the murder take place. One swing of a pickaxe or a shovel, and Bones falls down into the hole. While it’s not deep enough to bury him, his body could still be obscured from everyone else’s line of sight if they weren’t nearby when it happened.”

  “Then how did the killer get the others to abandon the site?” Annie asked me.

  “I’m not sure. He, or she for that matter, could have told them someone was onto what they were doing out here, so they had to scram, and fast.”

  “How would the killer explain Bones’s absence?”

  “Maybe they claimed he wandered off, and they’d come back for him later. The point is that they got the others to leave, and in a hurry. Once most of the signs of their presence were gone, the murderer must have worried about something he’d left behind that might incriminate him.”

  “Or her,” Annie reminded me.

  “I can’t keep saying ‘him or her,’ and ‘they’ sounds a little clunky. Let’s just agree to call the killer a generic ‘he’ and leave it at that, unless you prefer the female pronoun.”

  “No, ‘he’ is fine with me,” Annie said.

  “I’m glad we at least got that settled,” I answered. “So, the killer evacuates everyone else, but he leaves the body behind. Peggy shows up, finds Bones, and then understandably flees. As soon as she’s gone, the killer comes back and retrieves Bones’s body. It shouldn’t be too tough getting it in the back of a van. Only what does he do with it then? He can’t just chauffer it around town until he comes up with a convenient place to unload it.”

  “And the other three don’t even realize what has happened. Are they in danger as well?” Annie asked me.

  “Not if they don’t find the body before the killer gets rid of it. If they do, then they become liabilities, and there will be a higher body count than we’ve got now.”

  “This open space alone will take forever to search,” Annie said. “We can’t just comb through the grass and weeds on our hands and knees. What we could use is a metal detector.”

  “If we find these kids, I’ve got a hunch they already have one,” I said. “Why else would they dig in what looks to be a random pattern? The map must have brought them here, but I have a feeling that they weren’t able to solve the cryptography completely. They should have brought a math major with them if t
hey couldn’t find someone good with puzzles.”

  “Why do you think they used a detector, Pat?”

  “Look at the holes. They don’t follow any kind of search grid I’ve ever heard of. Other than picking a spot and hoping to get lucky, I have a hunch that they used the detector and tried to find the buried money that way.”

  “Why two feet deep, though?” she asked me.

  “Maybe that’s as far as the treasure was buried, according to the documents Henry found. Who knows? It could simply mean that’s as deep as their detector reads accurately. When we find them, we can always ask them, but in the meantime, we’ll have to guess.”

  Annie started walking back to the hole where Peggy had claimed to find the body. As she started to step down into it, I asked her, “What are you doing?”

  “If there was any evidence down here before, Kathleen would have already disturbed it. I want to see if there’s anything here that might provide a motive for murder.”

  I watched my twin sister for a second as she pawed through the dirt before I got down on my hands and knees and started feeling through the weeds around the excavation. Annie noticed what I was doing and asked me, “What are you looking for? There’s a pile of dirt right there they dug up. If there’s anything to find, don’t you think it would be somewhere in there?”

  I looked over at the red clay soil, mounded up like a tombstone at one end of the hole. “If there had been something there before, surely they would have found it.”

  “I still think we should check it out,” she said.

  “I can do that,” I said as I stood and moved over the dirt. Grabbing a heavy stick along the way, I used it to probe the soil they’d taken out of the hole, but I didn’t find anything. “No luck,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I can’t do much without a shovel,” she said. “The soil is pretty dense at this level.”

  “Then I guess it’s a wash,” I said as something caught my eye. A beam of light had illuminated something in the grass for just a second, and I bent down to see what it might be.

  I’d been hoping for a gold coin, so in that respect, I was disappointed, but what I did find was still interesting, nonetheless.

  CHAPTER 7: ANNIE

  “What did you find, Pat?”

  My brother held something up in the light, and I could see it was nothing more exciting than a small button from a jacket. “It’s got to be a clue, doesn’t it?” he asked me.

  “How can you be sure of that? It’s hard to know how long it’s been here.”

  “The thread is still attached, Annie,” he said as he held it up so I could get a closer look at it. “It hasn’t been here that long.”

  “It still might not mean anything,” I said, not wanting my brother to get his hopes up too high. “With all of this activity, it’s not hard to believe that someone lost it working.”

  “Maybe so,” Pat said, “but it could be significant.”

  “It might help if we knew whose jacket it matched,” I said.

  “That’s where our detective work comes in,” Pat said. “We find the person who lost this button, and then we ask them about what really happened to Bones.” He got out his handkerchief and wrapped the button in it, being careful to keep the thread attached.

  “Hang on a second,” I said as I took out my phone.

  “You’re not calling Kathleen now, are you?” I asked her. “It’s too soon to report this, if you ask me. There might be something else we’re missing.”

  “Take it easy. I’m not calling her. Let me see that button again.”

  He did as I asked, and once I had a good shot, I took a few photos of it with my phone, trying to get a good image of the thread as well. I wasn’t sure how good the color match would be, but at least we’d have some evidence of what we’d found for ourselves once we turned it over to Kathleen.

  “Smart thinking, Annie,” Pat said.

  “Thanks. Now what do we do?”

  Pat got down on his hands and knees and looked again at the grass near where he’d discovered the button.

  “What’s so interesting?” I asked him.

  “Come over and look at this for a second, would you?”

  Had he found something else? I joined my brother and tried to see what he was pointing to, but I couldn’t see a thing out of the ordinary. “What is it? What am I missing?”

  “Look at the way the weeds and grass are lying through here,” he said.

  It took me a second, but then I saw what he was talking about. “Something was dragged through the grass, and fairly recently, too.”

  “That’s what I think,” Pat said. “Like a body, perhaps?”

  “Bones wasn’t that big. How hard would it have been for the killer to throw him over his shoulder and carry him to the van?”

  “I’m not so sure it was the weight so much as having a dead body slung over your back. He might not have been dragged because of his weight, but more due to the fact that he was dead. If that was the case, it wouldn’t matter if the killer was a man or a woman.”

  I nodded and tried to get a picture of the disturbed ground as well, but my camera wasn’t nearly sophisticated enough to pick up what our naked eyes saw. “It’s no good,” I said, putting my phone away. “I can’t get anything usable.”

  “But we know that it’s here,” Pat said.

  “Sure, but what can we do with the information?”

  “What we always do,” I reminded him. “We file it all away in our minds, and when we have enough of the puzzle, we figure out who killed Bones.”

  “I have a feeling that we’re going to need a lot more information than we have right now,” he said.

  “True, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying,” I replied. I gestured toward the shallow hole where Bones had been found and the parts of the land that had been excavated, both on my land and on Timothy’s acreage. “Killing that young man here is a desecration, as far as I’m concerned, so while I might not know anything about him, and nothing I’ve heard about him makes me like him even a little bit, I’m still going to find out who killed him. Are you willing to help me do that?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” I asked her.

  “Thanks, Pat. I knew I could count on you.”

  “You shouldn’t even have to ask.” He cocked an ear and said, “Someone’s coming.”

  “It looks like Kathleen’s deputies are finally showing up.”

  I was wrong, though.

  It was someone else entirely who drove down the narrow lane toward us, someone I hadn’t been expecting at all.

  “Timothy, what are you doing here? I didn’t think you were coming home until tomorrow,” I said as I greeted him.

  “What can I say, I got homesick,” he answered after he got out of his gray pickup truck and slammed the door. There was a new bumper sticker he’d added to the others already there: Lumberjacks Do It in the Woods. Timothy was a tall, handsome man, and I felt a little flutter every time I saw him. We’d been friends forever, but when he’d asked me out on a date, it had still surprised me. Boy, was I ever glad that I’d said yes. I had been a big fan of the man before as a pal, but his stock had instantly rocketed skyward as a boyfriend. “I wanted to check this spot out for my cabin after learning everything I did in class. What are you guys doing out here?” he asked as he glanced at the holes in his land. “Were you looking for something in particular out here?”

  “Timothy, we didn’t do any of this,” I stammered.

  He offered me a gentle smile before he spoke. “I’m willing to take your word for it, but if you two didn’t, then who did, and more importantly, why?” Timothy kicked at a clod of dirt near the spot where Peggy had claimed that she’d found Bones’s body and sent it into the hole.

  “Sorry, but you can’t do that,” Pat said.

  “Why on earth not? It’s my land, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but this area just might be an active crime scene,” I replied.

  “What! A cri
me scene? What happened?”

  “We think someone was murdered here earlier today,” Pat explained.

  “You think? Don’t you know for sure one way or the other?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve got time. Let’s hear it.”

  Pat and I barely got through our explanation before Kathleen’s deputies finally showed up. One of them asked us to leave, and I nodded to Pat. “We’ll see you later, Timothy,” I told him as my brother and I headed off into the woods to my place.

  “You obviously don’t have a car with you. Would you both like a ride somewhere?”

  “Why not?” I asked. I’d intended on going back home and waiting for Kathleen to chauffer us back to my car, but this was even better. “We’ll take a ride, right, Pat?”

  “I’m good with not trudging through the woods,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We were nearly to Timothy’s truck when I asked Pat softly, “What about the button? Are you going to show it to one of the deputies?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll wait and give it directly to Kathleen,” he said.

  “What button?” Timothy wanted to know.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I replied. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Fine, but I want it duly noted how gracious I’m being about all of this.”

  I kissed his cheek. “It is noted.”

  “That’s all I’m asking,” he said with a grin. “Now let’s get out of here, shall we?”

  “Okay, but I need to mention something first,” I said as I walked over to one of the deputies. “Hank, you might want to get a little video over here.”

  “What did you spot, Annie?”

  “See how the grass is lying down along here?” I pointed out.

  “No, I don’t see…wait a second. There it is. Good spot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is there anything else I might be missing?” he asked me.

  I wanted to tell him right then and there, but I still thought it was a better idea to tell Kathleen directly. “We’re good.”