Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112)

  Critical Praise for the mysteries of Sheila Simonson

  “Lively and appealing first mystery…a promising debut, deftly juggling a cozy modern suspense story with an up-to-date romance.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Larkspur

  “A second adventure for California bookdealer Lark Dodge… Always literate, intriguing… add a plus for readers planning a trip to London and environs.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Skylark

  “Sharp characterization—particularly of the marvelously wry Lark—and a mystery that is skillfully intertwined with Lark and Jay’s life as they try to start a family grip the reader’s interest up to a resolution that puts an intriguing twist on the standard sleuth-in-danger finale.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Mudlark

  “The delight of the Lark Dodge series is that you can read them as satires or as straightforward murder mysteries. But you should read them.”

  —The Oregonian on Meadowlark

  “A deceptively stately pace, accompanied by interesting subplots and vivid jaunts in the country.”

  —Library Journal on Malarkey

  Also by Sheila Simonson:

  THE LARK DODGE SERIES

  Larkspur

  Skylark

  Mudlark

  Meadowlark

  Malarkey

  Buffalo Bill’s

  Defunct

  A LATOUCHE COUNTY MYSTERY

  2008 / PERSEVERANCE PRESS / JOHN DANIEL & COMPANY

  PALO ALTO / MCKINLEYVILLE, CALIFORNIA

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Sheila Simonson

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  A Perseverance Press Book

  Published by John Daniel Company

  A division of Daniel Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

  Post Office Box 2790

  McKinleyville, California 95519

  www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

  Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

  Book design by Eric Larson, Studio E Books, Santa Barbara, www.studio-e-books.com

  Cover image: Monotype by Lillian Pitt, from the “Ancestors” series. Collaborative Master Printer: Frank Janzen, TMP. Printed at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Pendleton, Oregon. Photographed by Studio 421, Pendleton, Oregon.

  “Buffalo Bill’s”. Copyright 1923,1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage, from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904-1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Simonson, Sheila, (date)

  Buffalo Bill’s defunct : a Latouche County mystery / by Sheila Simonson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-880284-96-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10:1-880284-96-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Indians of North America—Fiction. 2. Sheriffs—Fiction. 3. Librarians—Fiction. 4. Petroglyphs—Fiction. 5. Columbia River Gorge (Or. and Wash.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.I48766B84 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  2008000709

  My thanks to Meredith Phillips,

  the kind of editor writers dream of.

  This book is for my sweet husband, Mickey,

  who is very very patient.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It would be foolish to insist that the Columbia River Gorge is fictional. It is spectacularly real, a National Scenic Area that adjoins two National Forests, with Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens on the north in Washington State, and Mount Hood on the south in Oregon. On the north side, it is sparsely populated.

  For the purposes of the story, I rearranged the scenery and political geography of the western end of the Gorge, subtracting Ska-mania and part of Klickitat counties from Washington and combining them into fictional Latouche County. Latouche County does not exist outside my imagination. There is no Tyee Lake. Klalo, the county seat, resembles at least four small towns in western Washington, but is its own imaginary place. I hope there are real toads in it.

  I changed the demography of the local tribes as well as the geography, though I tried to make the ethnic variation plausible. The Klalo tribe is Chinookian in language and in some of its customs, but it is as much a product of my imagination as Latouche County. Its principal chief, Madeline Thomas, doesn’t exist, but I wish she did.

  Buffalo Bill’s Defunct takes place in October 2004.

  Buffalo Bill’s

  defunct

  who used to

  ride a watersmooth-silver

  stallion

  and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

  Jesus

  he was a handsome man

  and what i want to know is

  how do you like your blueeyed boy

  Mister Death

  —e.e. cummings

  THE twenty-five-foot moving van shifted down. Meg McLean clenched her hands on its steering wheel. She kept her foot on the accelerator and her eyes on the double center line. No passing? No kidding.

  To her left, a parade of cars sped toward her in the oncoming lane of the narrow highway. To her right, past the graveled shoulder, the scenery dropped two hundred feet straight down to the Columbia River.

  Meg was driving Washington State Highway 14 east from Vancouver, the last stretch of a long haul from Southern California. Ahead of her, a logging truck laden with splintery cedars wound upward. Behind her, a bronze Lexus hung just far enough back to be visible in the van’s side-view mirrors. The Lexus had its lights on “bright.” The driver had been looking for a chance to pass for five miles.

  The van held all of Meg’s possessions, forty-two years’ worth, with her ‘97 Honda Accord clamped to the tow-bar. The truck’s maximum speed was an unwise sixty-five downhill. On long upward grades like this one, the speedometer hovered at thirty-five, dropped, then surged a bit as the truck shifted down again. The drivers behind her were entitled to impatience. She hoped one of them wouldn’t shoot her. She hoped her daughter wouldn’t phone. Lucy had called every day of the trip at precisely three o’clock. It was one minute to three.

  The truck’s CD player held only one disc at a time. It was recycling George Gershwin’s piano-roll pieces. Meg had listened to all of them twice but she didn’t dare take her right hand off the wheel long enough to change discs.

  The honky-tonk accompaniment made her feel like a character in a silent film who was being victimized by technology—Harold Lloyd on a girder. She glanced right and drew a shaky breath. The river glinted in the afternoon sun, now three hundred feet down.

  The highway twisted into a stretch of evergreen forest splotched with the intense yellow of maple leaves on the verge of falling. Falling down. Down.

  Her cell phone beeped. Meg touched the Talk button with a sweaty finger. “Can’t talk now, honey.”

  “Mom!”

  “I’ll call you back,” Meg shouted at the phone. Both fists gripped the wheel like death as the parade of vehicles emerged at the edge of another cliff.

  Her daughter’s grumbles cut off. The dial tone hummed beneath the tinkle of Gershwin’s manic piano.

  Half a jaw-clenching hour later, the landscape flattened. Signs of human habitation began to appear in the dense, rock-strewn forest—a shed here, a mobile home there, a dirt road trickling into the brush. The Lexus passed
and inserted itself between Meg’s van and the log truck.

  At the first turn-out, she pulled over onto loose gravel, shoved the gearshift into Park, and set the emergency brake. She popped the Eject button on the CD player and leaned back in the blessed silence, eyes closed.

  Cars flashed past. She heard them but she didn’t look at the drivers’ reproachful faces. Finally she hit the speed dial and connected with Lucy.

  “Are you still on the road?”

  “You got it, kid.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be in Klalo by now.”

  “I’m doing my best. Highway 14 is a goat track.”

  “You should have hired a professional mover. It couldn’t cost that much more.” Lucy was calling from Stanford University, one of the more expensive institutions of higher learning in the nation. She knew very well why her mother was economizing.

  I will not quarrel with my only child. Meg fumbled in her nylon CD holder for soothing sound. The discs adhered to their tight transparent slots. Beethoven? Too dramatic. Vivaldi? Too jumpy.

  “Mom, are you sure you’re making the right move?”

  “It’s a crap shoot.”

  “Mother? Are you all right?” Fear, confusion, honest concern. Lucy was a good daughter.

  Meg sighed. “I’m fine, Luce, just not used to this kind of road.” She glanced at her watch. Three-thirty. She was only two hours behind her AAA TripTik schedule. “So how was the test?” She closed her eyes again and drifted as Lucy swung into an account of her first math exam. Math was important. Lucy wanted to be a physicist.

  It was four-fifteen before Meg reached the city limits of Klalo, seat of Latouche County, and four-thirty before she pulled onto the driveway in front of her one-car garage. Driveway was a dignified term for two strips of grass-infested gravel. The garage, an afterthought of the 1920s, stood well back beside the two-story frame house she had bought in a burst of summer optimism. In the chilly light of mid-October, it didn’t look like home.

  Maybe that was too harsh. What it looked like was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, though it faced a quiet tree-lined street near the library she was going to run. Head Librarian, Latouche County Regional Library. Sounded good.

  The van fit neatly onto Meg’s period driveway, but the rear end of the Accord stuck out into the street.

  “The hell with it,” she muttered. She set the brake and killed the engine. Because she was a short woman, she had to rappel down the side of the truck and reach up to slam the door. She fumbled the house keys from her purse, opened the side door that led into the kitchen, and sprinted for the bathroom. Bladder.

  She washed her hands at the salmon pink retro basin and avoided looking in the mirror. There was no soap and no towel. She rubbed her hands dry on her jeans and picked up her purse from the cat-barf-patterned linoleum—original, the realtor had assured her with a straight face. When Lucy graduated from Stanford, Meg would replace the bathrooms, both of them. At least the one upstairs had a shower.

  She drifted back into the kitchen. It was empty of appliances except for a propane range and a water heater. There was no dishwasher. The whole house was empty, in fact. That was as it should be, but the blank volumes of space made her uneasy. When the ding-dong of the doorbell echoed on the chilly air, she shivered. She moved the thermostat up to seventy-five as she plodded down the hall to the front door. The propane furnace whooped on. She drew back the bolt and wrestled the door open. It took both hands.

  “Hi, I’m Darcy Wheeler. You must be Miz McLeen.” Darcy was plump, taller than Meg, and dressed in jeans. Her sweatshirt logo promoted Washington State University.

  “McLean, like Shirley MacLaine, different spelling.” Meg forced a smile. “Call me Meg. Come in. Are you a neighbor?”

  “Next door. The Craftsman with blue trim.” Darcy stepped over the threshold, two Styrofoam cups with plastic lids thrust before her. “I brought you a cup of coffee.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Meg was wired from the drive.

  “One’s decaf and one’s not,” Darcy said brightly. “Hey, no place to sit.”

  “It’s pretty bare. I’ll take the decaf, thanks.”

  Darcy, who looked fifteen but could be thirty, strode across the dusty oak floor of the living room and set her cup on the mantel. “Lots of room. Are you going to unload that humungous truck all by yourself?”

  Meg followed her. “I thought I’d call a temp agency.”

  “A what?”

  Panic grabbed. “Where do I hire casual labor?”

  “You mean guys to help you move the furniture? Gosh, we just get our friends to do that… Oh.”

  “Oh,” Meg echoed. “Wow.” A little problem she hadn’t anticipated. The thought of heaving her refrigerator off the van all by herself made her want to hop on the first plane to LA—were it not that she’d have to drive the van to Portland Airport on Highway 14.

  “Let me think.” Darcy sipped coffee and brooded.

  Meg sipped, too. Not Starbuck’s but okay, a latte from the espresso stand on the corner, probably.

  “I could go see if Rob’s home. His truck’s there.”

  “Rob?”

  “Your neighbor on the other side. He’ll think of something.”

  The other side. Meg had coveted the Victorian gingerbread, though the house was too big for a single woman and not for sale.

  “Yeah,” Darcy said. “I’ll talk to Rob.” She abandoned her coffee and disappeared out the side door. She knew her way around. Meg followed on leaden feet.

  ROB Neill was painting the interior of the house after two years of procrastination. In the week of comp time he had taken, because otherwise he’d lose it, he had painted his daughter’s bedroom and the kitchen, and torn off a lot of wallpaper elsewhere. He had just reached the annoying alcove between the kitchen and the formal dining room. Like much of the house, the alcove had been done up in beige with cream trim. Rob’s grandmother had been an admirable woman, but he suspected her of color-blindness.

  He had scrubbed the space with TSP, covered the oak floor with a tarp, and slathered everything with sealant. Now, at last, the moment of truth. Was the Mediterranean Blue his daughter selected in August going to be too dark? He squished the roller in its pan until the fleece cover dripped paint, rolled off the excess, and laid down a long, perfect stroke. Aha.

  He set the roller on the pan and backed off a step, squinting. He could never remember whether latex dried lighter or darker. If darker, he was in trouble. The woodwork would be Circassian White, or whatever the paint company called it, and the old lace curtains had washed up well enough to lighten the gloom. Dark or not, the blue would do.

  Grunting with satisfaction, he filled the roller again and set to work. As he lost himself in the rolling rhythm, his mind drifted. He was going to have to defend his budget. Again. He should be up at the computer crunching numbers. The sheriff liked numbers. How To Lie with Statistics. It was an election year. Mack always got nervous in election years, though he had been kept in office four times by the voters of Latouche County and had no serious rivals.

  Rob laid down the last stroke on the north wall and set the roller back in the pan. Three-dimensional pie charts could be diddled. He soaked the edger in blue paint. Maybe a PowerPoint presentation with pie charts. Mack was susceptible to the Wonders of Computers, but Rob didn’t like PowerPoint graphics. I could just wing it, he mused, though he knew he wouldn’t.

  The trouble with public service was that the public wanted it, even demanded it, and didn’t want to pay for it. A lot of new housing, all of it taxable, had gone in since the last budget battle. As far as Rob could tell, these new voters would spend half a million dollars on a house without blinking twice but a half-mil levy to support the library or the fire districts would go down in flames. “Ever git my hands on a dollar agin,” he sang in his unmelodious baritone, “I’m gonna squeeze it till the eagle grin.” The blue paint on the alcove wall looked pretty damned good.

  He had fin
ished with the edger and picked up the roller again when the doorbell rang.

  MEG was standing behind the van, staring blankly and trying to remember how to unhook the Accord, when Darcy materialized on the far side of the car with the neighbor. She performed introductions and pronounced Meg’s surname correctly.

  The man’s name was Rob Neill—a spondee, boom-boom. Robert, Meg supposed, or Robin Hood, or Robinson Crusoe. He was fortyish, thin, medium tall, with straight sandy hair turning gray, and he looked at her from unsmiling gray eyes.

  “Hi. I’d shake hands but…” He held out a palm splotched with blue paint for her inspection. His clothes—jeans and a sweatshirt that told her Guinness was good for her—were pied with paint: blue, white, and lemon yellow.

  “Sorry to interrupt you. Do you know how to unhook these things?” Meg gestured to the Accord on its little metal ramp.

  He scowled. “Didn’t they give you instructions when you hired the truck?”

  “They did, but my brain died about ten miles back.”

  His mouth twitched. “Highway 14’s a slow drive. At least it wasn’t raining.”

  The horror of driving that road in wet weather struck Meg dumb. She stared at him. It could have been worse.

  He bent to look at the chain mechanism. “Hmm, yeah. Front-wheel drive car… Combination?”

  There was a padlock. After a blank moment she came up with the code.

  He removed the lock and fiddled with the hitch and the cables. “Okay.”

  “That’s it?” Relieved, Meg fished in her purse for the car keys. She had three sets of keys so it took awhile. Docking her car neatly in front of the house, Meg returned to find Neill removing the towing contraption from the back of the truck.

  He grunted and gave a heave. The mini-trailer dropped onto the gravel in a little puff of dust. He pulled it onto her patchy unmowed lawn, clear of the van. “I hear you need help unloading.”

  Meg took a long breath. “I do. Two people, preferably. I budgeted two hundred dollars.”