Murder at the Powderhorn Ranch (6 page)

Why had he been out on the road at night? Trouble sleeping and took a walk? Always possible. A fight with his wife, causing him to storm out of the cabin? That was another possibility.

There was a sign on the front of the ranch’s honeymoon cabin, white lettering on dark brown wood:

THIS CABIN WAS THE FIRST LOVE NEST FOR OUR HAPPY HONEYMONERS. Below was a list of honeymoon couples, and the dates they’d stayed there to launch their married life. Had the reason for my visiting it not been so grim, I might have had a warmer reaction to the sentiment.

I stood at the door and poised to knock. After a deep breath, I did. Both the screen and inside doors were closed. I looked at the front window. The curtains were drawn. I knocked again. Still no response.

“Mrs. Molloy?” I called. I repeated it, louder this time, accompanied by more knocking. I cocked my head; someone was moving inside.

“Mrs. Molloy, it’s Jessica Fletcher.”

I looked at the interior doorknob as it started to turn, then stopped, as though whoever was turning it—Geraldine Molloy, I presumed—had second thoughts.

“Mrs. Molloy, it’s Jessica—”

The inside door opened, revealing Geraldine Molloy. She was in pajamas. Her reddish hair was disheveled, her eyes puffy with sleep.

“What do you want?” she asked in a thick voice.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Come back later. You woke me.”

“I’m sorry to have done that, but it’s important, Mrs. Molloy. There’s been an ... an accident. Your husband. He’s ... he’s dead.”

From what I could observe through the screen, her expression didn’t change.

“Did you hear me, Mrs. Molloy?”

Was she drugged? I wondered. Had she taken a potent sleeping pill that caused her to sleep so late and to be in a fog?

Then the news seemed to sink in. She uttered a small involuntary gasp and backed away from the door.

“Mrs. Molloy, I—”

She disappeared from my sight, and the sound of a door slamming reached me on the porch. I pulled on the screen door’s handle. It wasn’t latched. I opened it and stuck my head into the cabin. A closed door was to my right, obviously a bedroom into which she’d retreated. I took in the living room without stepping farther inside. It was in disarray. Clothing seemed to have been tossed about, draped over chair backs and on the floor. I crossed the threshold and silently closed the screen door behind me, then cocked my head to hear sounds from the bedroom. There were none. I crossed the living room to the area where the small refrigerator and coffeemaker were located. The coffeemaker was on, the carafe full. I touched the carafe; it was hot.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I knock on the bedroom door, call her name? Or would that have been an unwarranted intrusion into the shock and grief she must have been feeling at the moment? Maybe I shouldn’t have volunteered to be the one to break the news. Perhaps we should have waited for the sheriff’s deputy to arrive, someone more skilled at handling such delicate matters.

I decided to leave the cabin and sit on the porch for a few minutes to wait for her to pull herself together and emerge from her bedroom refuge. I was halfway across the living room when the sound of a door opening stopped me. I turned to face the bedroom. Geraldine Molloy stepped from it. She still wore pajamas, and her expression had not changed. What
was
different was that she held a lethal-looking handgun, and it was pointed at me.

I held out both hands as I said, “Mrs. Molloy, there’s no need for a gun. I’m not here to threaten you. I came to break bad news, and I wish I wasn’t the one to do it. Please, put the gun down.”

“Paul is dead?”

“Yes. An accident. Well, maybe—the sheriff is on his way now. Until he arrives, we must stay calm. Put the gun down, Mrs. Molloy. We can sit and talk until he’s here.”

Until that moment, she’d been rock steady, not even a minute tremor in her hand. But now she began to shake, the weapon whipping back and forth. I was afraid it would discharge accidentally. I moved to my right, came closer to her, placed my hand on the gun, and took it from her. My heart was pounding, and perspiration dripped from my forehead down my nose. I drew a deep sigh of relief, placed the gun on a table, and went to her, my arms wrapped around her, allowing her to cry it out, her thin body heaving against me.

As I held her, I heard footsteps on the porch. I turned to see Jim Cook and Seth Hazlitt at the door.

“Everything okay?” Seth asked.

“Yes. Everything’s fine. Why don’t we give Mrs. Molloy a few extra minutes alone. I’m sure she’d like to freshen up and get dressed before the sheriff’s people arrive.” I held her at arm’s length. “That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it, Mrs. Molloy?”

“Yes,” she managed in a tiny voice. “Yes, I’d like to do that.”

“I’ll wait out on the porch.”

Before joining Seth and Jim on the porch, I quietly picked up the gun from the table and carried it with me, closing both doors behind me.

“How’d she take it?” Seth asked.

“Badly.” I held up the revolver.

“Where did you get that?” Jim asked.

“From her.”

“She threaten you with it, Jessica?” Seth asked.

“No. I’m sure she didn’t mean to use it. It was nothing more than a reflex action born of fear and the devastating news I’d delivered.”

But I did silently admit to myself that her reaction was unusual, something I might follow up with her at a more opportune moment.

Jim used a handkerchief to place the weapon in his jacket pocket. “I’ll turn this over to the sheriff when he gets here. I’m sure he’ll want to have it checked for prints.”

“Any word from him?” I asked.

“His on-duty road officer called in from the car,” Jim said. “Talked to Bonnie. Should be here in ten, fifteen minutes. He’s got the county coroner with him, and a homicide investigator. They’ve dispatched an ambulance, too, to remove the body, I suppose. Not much more to be done for Mr. Molloy.”

“Poor woman,” I said, referring to Geraldine. “Have the Morrisons been told?”

“Yes,” Jim said. “Felt I had to before they heard a rumor and started sensing something was wrong. Thought it was better to hear it directly from me, but the cousin, Willy, had already told them.”

“What will this do to the week, Jim?” Seth asked.

“Bonnie and I had a brief talk about that,” Jim replied. “Of course, we don’t know what the sheriff will want from us and the guests, but if the investigation isn’t too intrusive, we’d like to go on with the week as normally as possible, if that is possible. Bonnie’s convinced that if it was murder, it had nothing to do with anybody here at the ranch. Some sickie passing through.”

“I hope that’s the case,” I said. “If it isn’t—”

“I’d rather not think about that,” Jim said.

The door opened, and Geraldine came onto the porch. She’d obviously taken a fast shower; her hair was still wet. She was dressed in a simple blue denim dress and white cardigan sweater.

“Sorry about the news, Mrs. Molloy,” Jim said.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Paul dead? It’s inconceivable. What happened? Did he fall off a horse? Was he kicked?”

“We don’t know yet, ma’am. The police are on the way. Coroner, too.”

The word
coroner
caused Geraldine to shudder and to grip the porch railing for support.

“Why don’t you sit down, Mrs. Molloy,” Seth suggested, pulling a chair closer to her. She sat, closed her eyes, and slowly shook her head.

“Would you like some water?” Seth asked. “Coffee? I’ll get some from the lodge.”

“No need for that,” I said. “There’s coffee brewing in the cabin.”

Geraldine opened her eyes. “There is?” she asked.

“Yes. Didn’t you put it up?”

“No, I—Paul must have before he left this morning.”

“You know for certain he left this
morning?”
I asked.

“No. I just assumed he did.”

I stopped myself from saying that judging from what I’d seen of the body, Paul Molloy had been killed last night. But that was pure speculation on my part.

We all turned in the direction of the house, where two vehicles kicked up dust as they turned in to the ranch, lights flashing. One was a marked Gunnison County sheriff’s car. The other was the ambulance. “We’d better get over there,” Jim said.

“You go ahead,” I suggested. “Seth and I will stay with Mrs. Molloy until she’s needed.”

Jim took purposeful strides to the house. From where we stood, we could see that the vehicles had carried a number of people; we counted three in police uniforms, and the ambulance discharged a man and a woman wearing white—emergency medical personnel was the assumption.

I fetched Geraldine Molloy coffee from inside. As I poured it into a cup—she took it plain black—I paused to ponder what she’d said. If she was to be believed, and I had no reason not to, her husband had put up the pot. But when? It was unlikely he would have done that if he’d left during the night. And if my preliminary analysis was correct, he hadn’t been there in the morning to do it.

“Here you are,” I said, handing the steaming cup to Mrs. Molloy.

She seemed to have relaxed and gave me a smile. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.” She was certainly not the gun-wielding woman I’d first encountered when coming to the cabin to break the news of her husband’s death. I preferred this version.

We watched Jim lead the entourage from the house to where the body was being guarded by the two wranglers.

“I think I’ll join them,” I said. “Mind staying with Mrs. Molloy, Seth?”

“No need for anyone to stay with me,” she said, standing. “I’ll be fine. I’d like to be there, too.”

“I don’t think that’s wise,” Seth said. “Maybe we can stay in the house with Bonnie.”

“Good idea,” I said.

I walked with them to where Bonnie stood outside the office, her face set in anguish. “Mrs. Molloy and Seth will stay here with you, Bonnie,” I said.

I went to where the others now surrounded the body. A uniformed officer stopped me.

“It’s okay,” Jim Cook said. “This is Jessica Fletcher, the famous mystery writer. She’s a guest at the ranch this week. She was one of the people who found him.”

They’d cleared away the brush, leaving Paul Molloy’s body exposed. The coroner was on his knees examining it, fingers gently probing certain areas. Molloy’s eyes were open. Years of research into homicide investigations for my crime novels had taught me plenty, including that upon death the muscles controlling the pupils relax, causing them to lose the symmetrical appearance characteristic of being alive. His eyelids had become flabby, another sure sign of death.

The coroner, a large, beefy man wearing slacks, a yellow V-neck sweater over a white shirt, and elaborately tooled cowboy boots, continued his physical examination of the corpse. I knew what he was attempting to determine: the approximate time of death. He took Molloy’s chin and carefully moved it from side to side, checking the level of rigor mortis that had set in. It starts simultaneously throughout the body, but progresses fastest in the jaws and neck. Generally, it begins three to four hours after death, progresses from the head down to the feet, and reaches its full effect between eight and twelve hours following death. I couldn’t tell from where I stood what point of rigor had developed, but I had the sense it was pretty far along. If this coroner followed standard procedure, Molloy’s temperature would be taken once he’d been delivered to the county morgue to further help establish time of death, an inexact measurement because of all the variables—size and weight of the deceased, environmental factors at the time of death, clothing, and myriad other factors to be taken into account.

One of the officers took multiple photographs of the body and the surroundings in which it had been found, while the other two searched the ground for clues that might have been left by an assailant.

“Can we move him?” the coroner asked the plain-clothes homicide investigator, who’d been making notes.

“Yeah. We’ve got it all, I think.” He turned to Jim Cook. “You say his name is Paul Molloy?” during dinner. They were a last-minute reservation. We had an empty cabin—the honeymoon cabin—and invited them to come. This is a week we generally reserve only for one family. They hold their family reunion here every year. But we also invited Mrs. Fletcher and another old friend from Maine, Dr. Seth Hazlitt, for the week. Turns out we might have picked a bad one for them to come.”

“You can’t always control things like this,” the investigator said. “You can’t always plan for murder.”

“You’re convinced it was murder?” I asked.

“Looks that way to me, Mrs. Fletcher. By the way, I’m homicide investigator Pitura, Robert Pitura.” I took his extended hand. He was even bigger than the coroner, perhaps six feet, six inches tall, with a full head of hair that came down low on his forehead, and a genuine smile.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “Was it the wound to the chest that killed him?”

“Appears that way, although the doc will be the one to nail that down. You discovered the body?”

I explained the circumstances that had led Crystal to finding the body of Paul Molloy.

“See anything unusual this morning or last night, Mrs. Fletcher?”

“No. Did you get a sense of time of death?”

“The doc will determine that. The blood was crusted, though. Happened quite a while before you found him.”

“I thought the same thing.”

Pitura smiled. “I imagine you’ve done some studying of murder for your books.”

“Yes, I have, a necessity for a crime novelist. I was with the deceased’s wife this morning. She’s at the house with Mrs. Cook.”

“She say anything interesting?”

“Interesting?”

“About her husband, where he was, why he was out here?”