Dying for a Dude (Laurel McKay Mysteries Book 4) (2 page)

I shaded my eyes from the afternoon rays and eventually spotted some figures clad in navy-blue uniforms standing near the back property line, at least two hundred yards away. I darted through the star thistle and headed in their direction.

Ouch. The destructive yellow weeds ripped through my fragile stockings, leaving untidy black strings hanging down my calves, but my concern for my mother’s well-being took precedence over any damage to my costume.

Breathing heavily from my trek, I finally reached the group of people standing in a semi-circle around a large hole partially covered with worn wooden planks. I exhaled a sigh of relief when I spied my petite grandmother alongside the men. Gran and I used to be the same height and weight, but lately she seemed to be shrinking and now stood a few inches shorter than my five foot four and a quarter. Gran’s natural hair color remains a mystery, even to me, since the woman is addicted to wearing wigs in every color and style. She could be Cher, Dolly Parton or Lauren Bacall on any given day of the week.

Today her carrot-colored curls resembled a cross between Lucille Ball and Bozo the Clown. I tapped her on her shoulder. Gran jumped and whirled around. Her faded blue eyes, under orange-penciled brows, widened when she recognized me.

“Gran,” I said, “what happened?”

“Laurel, thank goodness you’re here.” She introduced me to the men who shifted their gaze from the gaping hole in the ground to me. Their four pairs of eyes zeroed in on my loosened bustier, which now exposed letters A through C of my double D’s.

I hitched up the garment and scowled at the men. My grandmother stared at me.

“What on earth are you wearing? You look like a hussy.” She cocked her head. “Or a Kardashian.”

“It’s a costume. I’ll explain later. Where is Mother, and why is the fire department here?”

“Is that you, Laurel?” A disembodied voice drifted out of nowhere.

I swiveled my head to the left then to the right. I looked up toward the cloudless blue sky. Nothing. Only one direction remained. I inched closer to the opening in the ground and peered down. Way down into coal-black darkness where a pair of eyes gazed back at me. Did a wild creature fall into the hole?

My breath caught as my brain finally caught on.

I leaned forward and cried out, “Mom?”

“Are you okay?” I hollered.

“I twisted my knee,” Mother yelled in return. “How soon can they get me out of here?”

The four men shook their heads rendering a negative answer to her question.

“Hang in there,” I shouted back at her. “They’re working on it.”

“So what is this hole thingy?” I asked the stocky, balding firefighter next to me. “And how are you planning on bringing her up?”

“We think it’s a shaft from one of the abandoned gold mines,” he said. “It looks like someone boarded it up a long time ago. The planks warped over the years, and your mother fell right through. There’s over a hundred gold mines located around Placerville, so it’s not the first time something like this has happened. Especially this close to the Gold Bug Mine. A few years ago, a tractor just dropped through the earth and landed in an old shaft.”

My mouth opened almost as wide as the hole we viewed. “Gran, were you aware of this particular mineshaft?” I asked.

She shook her curly orange head. “I didn’t suspect there were any shafts not properly closed off.”

“Why was Mother walking so far from the house?”

Gran rubbed the toe of one ratty gray slipper in the dirt. She looked as guilty as a kid caught sneaking a piece of pie. My stomach gurgled at the thought of the peach pie waiting back at the house. Maybe if I waved it under the men’s noses, it would incent them to come up with a solution.

“You know your mother. She’s such a know-it-all.” The tiny spider veins around my grandmother’s nose darkened as she scowled. “I warned her not to traipse around up here, but she insisted on walking the property line, searching for some darn easement.”

Gran crossed her arms over her thin rose-pink cardigan. “It’s not my idea to sell this property.”

“You’re too old to live alone,” echoed my mother’s voice from the cavern below.

“And you’re too annoying to––” Gran stepped forward, but I stopped her before she tumbled down to join Mother in the mineshaft.

One of the men finished a conversation on his cell. “We’re getting someone specially trained for this type of extraction,” he said.

I sent Gran back to the house and asked her to brew fresh coffee for the men. And to call my stepfather. It would be easier to bolster my mother’s spirits if she and her own mother weren’t butting heads. I tried to keep Mother occupied while they collected the necessary equipment and people.

“Did you find any gold down there?” I asked her.

Mother hesitated a few seconds before responding. “I landed on something hard. Maybe I will find a nugget or two.” Her voice brightened with the thought that her tumble could result in a financial windfall. Given the current price of gold, even a pebble-sized nugget would be worth a designer purse or two.

Fifteen minutes later, two new members of the fire department joined our group. One of them was almost my height but half my girth and possibly half my age. She introduced herself as Tina and quickly donned some equipment, including a long emergency safety line, which the men tied around one of the massive cedar pines. Then she carefully rappelled her way down the shaft. I held my breath, worried that Tina might knock some rocks loose creating an even more hazardous situation for my mother.

The murmur of voices soon echoed up to us. I hoped my mother’s injury was not severe. Her career as a real estate broker keeps her busy especially during the summer months. Mother would not be happy if this accident affected her mobility.

Suddenly a bright light flashed from the bottom of the mineshaft followed by a high-pitched scream. Then a second scream. I dropped to the ground, crawled to the edge of the hole and peered down.

“Are you okay?” I called out.

Mother and the rescue worker huddled together. The firefighter’s Maglite pointed in the direction of a pile of narrow white sticks.

Whoa! The sticks were attached to a pelvis. And above the pelvis, a bone-white skull glowered at us through empty eye sockets as if we were personally responsible for disturbing its slumber.

Less than thirty minutes after the discovery of “Mr. Bones,” the rescue team successfully hoisted Mother up the shaft using a harness and some sort of pulley system they referred to as a ladder gin. Mother probably would have preferred a gin martini.

Earlier, one of the men had snatched a couple of chairs from Gran’s patio. Mother dropped into the cushioned chair with relief. They urged her to let them take her to the hospital to get checked out and have her knee examined. She refused, insisting it wasn’t anything serious. She finally acquiesced to letting one of the men wrap her knee for support.

Mother assigned me the job of picking dirt and other icky stuff from her formerly perfect coiffure and from the back of her ivory linen blazer. Her black pants could probably be dry-cleaned, but her jacket was torn in several places and beyond repair.

I plucked a tiny white object from the fine blond strands of her short hair.

“Oh, ick.” I dropped the item faster than a hot coal.

My mother flinched. “What was that?”

“Oh, nothing. Only a piece of…” my voice trailed off. No need to mention she’d sported a chip off the old skeleton.

I decided to switch Mother’s focus to something more cheerful––her new husband. “Bradford should be here soon,” I said. His arrival was certain to cheer her up. It had only been a few months since my mother, Barbara Bingham, a widow for thirty years, had married retired detective Robert Bradford. They initially met when Bradford and his then partner, my new honey, Detective Tom Hunter, were investigating a primary murder suspect––me!

At first, I doubted Bradford’s intentions, positive that the tall bald detective was wooing Mother solely with the purpose of finding enough evidence to place me behind bars. Several months later when I became embroiled in another deadly affair, Bradford rescued me from a frigid death in the depths of Lake Tahoe. I immediately became one of his biggest fans.

Mother had flourished as well as mellowed since she met the detective. I love my mother, but she is a perfectionist who expects perfection from everyone else. As far as I was concerned, anyone who could loosen up my uptight mother was okay in my book.

Speaking of uptight, I desperately needed to change my clothes into something far less revealing. Gran had tightened the strings of the corset for me. According to her, I still looked like a hussy, but at least I was keeping my goods to myself and away from the gaze of the over-appreciative firemen.

Before they took off, the firefighters stretched yellow and black “caution” tape around the hole. Due to Gran’s property being outside the Placerville city limits, the crew contacted the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office about the discovery. Tina and her partner said they would remain until the police arrived.

I whispered to my mother. “Do we have any missing relatives that you know of?”

She recoiled at my suggestion. “Don’t be silly. Whoever that is has most likely been lying there for decades, maybe a century or more.”

Despite the May temperature being in the mid-seventies today, a chill enveloped me from my feathered head to my polished red toes. Approaching voices distracted me from my somber thoughts. Gran hopped through the weeds, trying to keep up with the long strides of the tall man next to her. His tousled chestnut head bent low as he listened to her chatter.

My heart ricocheted from one end of my bustier to the other as I greeted the newcomer.

“Hi, Tom.” I smiled at the detective. “Guess you heard what Mother stumbled across.”

“Not exactly how I imagined we’d be spending the evening together, Laurel.” Tom moved closer and lowered his voice. “Although that outfit is definitely an incentive to get my job done faster.”

Gran must have set the volume on her hearing aid to high. “Keep your eyes topside, sonny,” she chastised him. “You’ve got work to do.”

Mother morphed into broker mode. “Those remains need to be removed at once. The listing for this property went live on the MLS today, and I’m supposed to hold an open house here tomorrow afternoon.”

“Barbara, let’s make sure this is nothing out of the ordinary,” Tom said in his soothing baritone. “It’s likely someone who fell down the shaft a long time ago. Even if there’s evidence of foul play and it’s under our jurisdiction, it would be considered a cold case. Obviously, timing is no longer critical.”

Gran scowled at him. “Don’t you need to do some detectin’ before we open my property to the populace? Once people hear what’s been discovered, those crime-scene looky-loos are gonna be all over this place. I don’t need a bunch of nosy folks tromping all over my clean floors, rummaging through my closets and such. I got enough skeletons to worry about.”

Mother lifted her perfectly plucked eyebrows at me, and I raised my need-to-be-tweezed brows back. What was Gran muttering about skeletons?

A large burly man loped through the backyard, crushing the weeds attempting to impede his progress. He reached my mother’s chair and crouched down next to her.

“Barbara, are you okay?” asked Robert Bradford, her concerned husband. “Your mother called and told me you fell down a mineshaft. You could have been killed.”

She patted his bear paw-sized hand. “I’m fine, dear.”

His expression brightened and the relief on his craggy face was evident as he stood. “You were very lucky.”

“That’s what the fire crew said, but I just twisted my knee a little.” Mother rose from her chair. “See, I can walk by my …” She took two steps, winced then fell back into the chair. “Well, I’m sure I’ll be fine by tomorrow. I don’t have a choice. There are signs to put up, cookies to bake, flyers to send out, and…”

“Laurel and I can help with that,” he replied. The stern look my stepfather directed at me indicated my assistance was not an option.

Tom and I sighed in unison. Our plans for a long-awaited night alone were quickly going down the drain, or, in our case, down the mineshaft.

Tom and Bradford went to chat with the two firefighters who’d stayed behind. Even though Bradford had retired from the force almost six months earlier, the two men had forged a strong partnership and friendship. Tom frequently sought advice from the older man.

Tina, the firefighter who assisted in Mother’s rescue, gestured in a frenzied manner. Tom fiddled with his right ear lobe as he listened to her. That was one of his tells, indicating something about the conversation bothered him.

Tom walked over to me. He removed his keys, wallet and cell phone from his pockets and plopped them into my hands.

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

“I want to check the remains myself. Make sure nothing critical is missed. I’d hate to haul the crime scene guys all the way out here tonight if it’s not imperative.”

Tom borrowed a hard hat and secured the harness. Then the firefighters slowly lowered him into the gaping hole. I joined the others who watched his descent. Bradford and Tina both held huge flashlights aimed to light the way for him. My tall broad-shouldered boyfriend jostled against the rock walls, encountering a tougher time squeezing down the narrow shaft than my slender mother and the petite firefighter had.

The shaft, which appeared twenty-five feet deep, widened near the bottom providing Tom room to maneuver. He squatted and examined Mr. Bones’ remains. For several minutes, the only sounds we heard were a few muttered expletives reverberating up the shaft. As the sun’s rays plummeted behind Gran’s house, Tom requested they bring him back up.

It took a few minutes to haul him to the top. Once he unhooked the safety equipment, Tom brushed dirt off the front of his jeans. I lent a hand and wiped some smudges from his posterior. From the dark look on his face, my swipes were as close to a caress as either of us would receive tonight.