Jacob's Ladder Read online

  She knelt again above the man and placed the sheet across his face, a gesture of respect, and noticed a broad band across his wrist, an area of skin that was not tan like the rest of his arm. It looked to Rose to be a spot that marked the bearings of a piece of jewelry, a watch maybe, that was now missing. Rose slid her fingers across the pale stretch of skin and then gently laid his arm to his side.

  She stood up and searched around the camper. The old man didn’t seem to have anything valuable with him. What she could make out of the personal belongings that had been ransacked, all appeared scanty, outdated, and inexpensive.

  The dog began to whine, and Rose turned to the black mutt. “I guess you know what happened,” she said. “But you aren’t likely to tell.” She reached down, petting his head.

  “So, we better go call the law.” She squatted down again, facing the dead man.

  “Looks like Mary was right,” she said to no one. “We got some trouble here.”

  She got up and walked over to the door, held it open while the dog limped out. She pulled the door shut and stood staring at the camper and the truck, the place of such tragedy.

  As she headed down the steps, moving in the direction of the golf cart, she noticed something in the grass about twenty feet from her mode of transportation. She hadn’t seen it when she pulled in. It was a small thing, but it shone in the sun, like a mirror or a piece of tin. She walked over to it, knelt down, and realized it was a bracelet. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.

  It was silver, a cuff style, a broad band with intricate designs engraved in it. There were small pieces of blue-green turquoise lining both the top and the bottom edges, one large stone pressed and set in the middle. It was not that old, Rose could tell, but it was very well made. It was thick and heavy, nothing like the thin, slick bracelets that she saw most people wearing.

  The designs were the same as the petroglyphs she had read about in an article about prehistoric times. They were designs that people found on stones and sides of mountains in the Southwest, symbols of animals and clans, maps and shields.

  She held the piece of jewelry in her hand, rotating it, studying it, and as she tried to understand the meanings of the engravings, she realized that the bracelet was the same size as the faded place on the dead man’s wrist.

  More than likely, Rose thought, the killer stole the bracelet and then dropped it when he got outside the camper. He was likely in a hurry or had his hands full of other things and it just fell into the grass. He probably doesn’t even know he lost it, she thought. And yet, she was almost sure that this was the only thing of value that the old man could have had.

  Could the thief be so careless? she wondered. And if he killed a man for this piece of jewelry and then lost it, might he return to Shady Grove and try to find it?

  The last question worried Rose. And quickly, as if she thought someone could be watching, she stuck the bracelet in the front pocket of her jacket, got into the cart, and hurried to the office.

  This time, the old dog did not follow behind. He stood at the trailer and watched the woman leave, then turned and lay down at the foot of the sliding steps.

  Rose drove quickly to the entrance of the campground and parked at the front steps of the office. She ran inside, where Mary had stood up from her desk and come around the counter after hearing Rose speeding up the drive.

  “Call the sheriff,” Rose said. Her tone was calm but imploring. “The one-dollar-bill customer was in the old tent section. One of the sites off the road, a back-in, one without any hookups. A truck and Coachmen from New Mexico.”

  She took a breath as Mary hurried around to her desk and picked up the phone to dial the number.

  “He was an old man. Indian. The dog came with him.” She felt flushed, even though she hadn’t run a step.

  She stopped as Mary asked for the sheriff; then the office manager slid the receiver away from her mouth and raised her shoulders at Rose as if raising a question. “What I say to Sheriff Montgomery?” she finally asked.

  “Tell him there’s been a murder,” she replied. “The man’s dead.”

  FOUR

  “Did you touch everything in the trailer?” Sheriff Montgomery asked as he stepped over pots and pans, following Rose as she walked in front of him over to the dead body.

  He sighed as he looked around. Murders always made him cranky and tired. It hadn’t been too terribly long since the Franklin murder, and he’d just started to feel relaxed, when now this, another unexplained death, occurred down by the Mississippi River.

  “No, I just pushed aside the table, pulled away that sheet, and tried to see if there was anything I could do,” she told him.

  She knew that the sheriff was still displeased with her from the first time they’d met. “I touched the sheet, of course,” she explained. “I thought maybe he wasn’t dead, that I could help.”

  When Rose first arrived at Shady Grove and heard about the death of Lawrence Franklin, a local funeral home owner, she became convinced that the sheriff was involved in foul play, that he was somehow partly to blame. She was wrong and had apologized, and they had seen each other lots of times in the past months, at town events, restaurants. They had been cordial to each other, but Rose thought the lawman still seemed to hold a grudge against her.

  She had mentioned it once to Thomas, told him that she thought Sheriff Montgomery didn’t like her. He told her the sheriff acted like that with everyone, that his hard edge was what helped him maintain his authority and that there was nothing unique in how he treated Rose. She had listened to what Thomas had said and tried to believe him, but she’d never fully accepted that Sheriff Montgomery didn’t have something against her.

  “Tell me again how it is that you found the dead guy.” He had made his way to the body and was kneeling beside the traveler. He studied the man’s face. There was nothing odd about his features.

  Rose was close behind him. “I was out trying to find the late-night arrival. Somebody had left the money and Mary couldn’t find where he was camped. I was out searching for him.”

  The sheriff stood up and bumped into her. She quickly moved aside, trying to get out of his way.

  He yelled past Rose to the deputy standing outside the trailer. “Roy, get the coroner over here and make sure this area is secure. Close it off all the way to the driveway. And use the police-line tape this time, not the property markers.” The sheriff turned back to the body.

  “He was strangled,” Rose said after waiting for him to finish his instructions. “There are bruises all along his neck.” She paused. “It seems like a terrible way to be killed,” she added, mostly to herself.

  “All ways are terrible when it comes to being killed,” the sheriff replied, sounding particularly tired.

  “I thought Lucas didn’t have campers out here,” he added as he stepped around Rose.

  She leaned very far against the wall. “He doesn’t. I don’t know how the old man got over here.” She turned and looked again at the dead man’s face. “He’s Indian, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Indian, Mexican. Who knows, coming from over there?”

  Sheriff Montgomery had also taken note of the license plate. He knew the camper was registered in New Mexico.

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a notebook, and began writing some things down.

  “I think he’s definitely Indian,” Rose said softly, noticing the straight gray hair tied in a ponytail, the wide forehead, and the thin lips.

  He appeared different from the Native Americans she had met when she worked briefly in Lumberton, North Carolina, those from the Lumbee tribe. They were darker, with broader lips and noses. The dead man seemed to have more of an Asian influence, tight features and a lighter complexion.

  “How will you contact his family?” she asked.

  “From the plates. I’m having them run now,” he replied. “Tell me again what time you broke into the place,” he said gruffly, turning t
oward Rose.

  “I don’t know.” She held out her arm to look at her watch. “Not more than half an hour ago.” Then she remembered Ms. Lou Ellen’s appointment. It was after 9:00 A.M.

  “Oh my goodness. I’m supposed to take Ms. Lou Ellen to the doctor.” She faced the sheriff. “Can I run down to the office and make sure she gets a ride?”

  “Just go ahead and take her yourself. I’ll get your statement when you return.” He stuck the notebook in his pocket. “I got a lot of other things to do.” Then he glanced around the camper again.

  “You didn’t take anything from the trailer or find anything suspicious, did you?” He narrowed his eyes at the woman.

  Her hand was in her jacket pocket and she felt the bracelet. She knew she should tell the sheriff about having found it. She knew it was just the kind of thing he was asking her about, but something kept her from speaking of it. She shook her head, figuring she wasn’t lying, since the bracelet had not been inside the trailer. She bit her lip, knowing that she was stretching things in order to rationalize her behavior.

  She had no idea what she planned to do with the piece of jewelry; she wasn’t a thief by nature. It just seemed to her that it bore some secret regarding this man’s arrival and his murder, and she wanted to find out for herself.

  “Then just come by the office when you’re back.” He shook his head. “What is it with you and this place?” he asked, referring to the other murder in which she had become involved, when she first moved to Shady Grove, that of Lawrence Franklin.

  Rose shrugged her shoulders, trying to maintain her stance of innocence. “Must just be lucky,” she replied.

  “More like unlucky,” the sheriff responded.

  “I guess,” she said, but she was thinking it was more of a gift than a curse to be involved in these events.

  In spite of being put in danger and injured when she stumbled upon the killers of Mr. Franklin a few months earlier, she knew she would never have found her place in West Memphis, never have found her home, if it hadn’t been for the grave circumstances that occurred when she arrived.

  Her relationship with Mr. Franklin’s mother and the friendships she had made with Rhonda and Lucas, Mary, Ms. Lou Ellen, not to mention Thomas, had been worth every moment of fear and doubt she had suffered. And standing in the dead man’s trailer, near the body of a dead Indian from New Mexico, the premonitions she was experiencing were both oddly familiar and comforting.

  She knew she was about to encounter another exciting adventure. She pulled her hand out of her pocket and smiled at the sheriff.

  “Well, I hope you figure things out,” she said as she walked toward the door.

  Then she stopped and turned around. “Do you think he meant to come here, or was he just passing through?” she asked, referring to the dead man.

  “I suspect it was a little of both,” he replied.

  Rose thought the sheriff had something else to add. She waited as the lawman looked out the window. She followed his eyes to the banks of the Mississippi River, the water brown and choppy in the early-spring wind.

  “She pulls a lot of folks here,” he added, referring to the river. “Whether they mean to come and stay or whether they just want to see her, walk along the bank, float on top, she calls many a lost soul to her shores.”

  Rose smiled at that. She knew that she was one in the long line of those souls.

  “There’s a lot she tells to some folks,” he remarked, “and a whole lot she just keeps to herself well beneath those curved whitecaps.”

  Rose followed the sheriff’s eyes and watched the water dance in the breeze. She peered again at the lawman and nodded, remembering her own yielding to the Mississippi, the way she camped at the edge, the measure of comfort she found in her wide brown arms.

  “Yeah,” she responded. “I suspect one way or another, we’re all meant to be here.” She turned around and faced the dead man. “I guess he had his reasons, too.” Then she blew out a breath and walked a couple of steps toward the door.

  “I’m sorry if I compromised your crime scene,” she said to the sheriff. She thought he appeared weary, that maybe the job was getting to him, that in some way he was too sensitive for such work.

  “It’s not a problem, Rose,” he said, sounding almost fatherly. “Go take Lou Ellen to the doctor and meet me at the station.” He hesitated. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Rose studied the older man. His words of pardon were enough to ease her guilt. She opened the door to the camper and found the dog standing at her feet. She bent down and scratched under his chin. “I guess you’ll be staying with us after all.”

  He wagged his tail and followed behind the woman as she made her way to the office.

  FIVE

  “Did you show Sheriff Montgomery?” Ms. Lou Ellen was examining the bracelet that Rose had taken from the area outside the camper.

  Rose drove ahead through the stoplight once it changed from red to green. She turned to see her friend holding the piece of jewelry that she had taken out of her pocket to give her. She shook her head.

  Ms. Lou Ellen raised her eyebrows. She seemed surprised.

  “I know,” Rose said before the older woman could comment. “It was wrong of me. I’m going to hand it over to Sheriff Montgomery when I go to the station.” She faced the road. “There was just something about it that made me want to keep it for a little while.”

  Ms. Lou Ellen hummed a reply as she flipped the bracelet over and traced the engraved symbols with her fingertip. “Maybe it’s this luscious piece of turquoise.” She held it close to her eyes to analyze it. “It is difficult to find gems this unspoiled anymore.”

  The older woman was right. It was a beautiful stone. The color of it was a rich watery shade of blue, unlike any piece of turquoise that Rose had ever seen. Thick and smooth from hours of polishing, it fit perfectly in the center of the bracelet and reminded the woman of a small reflection of the desert sky held in the pool of deep canyon water.

  “And the engravings are simply divine.” She traced the symbols. “I expect this is Hopi or Zuni, not Navajo. They tend to do more of a stamp than inlay.”

  She faced Rose, who seemed a bit puzzled. “I worked in a jewelry store before I married for money,” she added as an explanation. “We had a very good selection of Native American jewelry.” She held out the bracelet to Rose, who had stopped at another intersection.

  “What do you think the symbols mean?” Rose asked as she pulled ahead cautiously. She did not take back the piece of jewelry.

  “These are sequenced in such a way, they look like they tell a story.” The older woman kept it in her hands. She noticed again the different symbols. “Some of these are very old,” she said, remembering some of the more common symbols she’d seen on jewelry. She recalled bears and bear claws, classic signs of strength, corn and squash, the crops they grew, signs of clans and gods. But none of these was found on the dead man’s bracelet. She held it up to her eyes once again.

  “This, I believe, is an old sign of the sun,” she said, pointing to two symbols placed on both sides of the turquoise. Rose peered down to see what she was describing.

  “Usually, the sun is designed as a circle with a face placed in the lower quadrant just underneath a horizontal line stretching from side to side.”

  This carving, Rose saw, was a small circle within a larger circle.

  “I’ve only seen it in books, never on a piece of jewelry,” Ms. Lou Ellen remarked.

  “Now the spiral shown here”—she pointed to a carving on the bracelet—“is the common sign for migration.”

  The younger woman looked again to see what her friend was explaining.

  “And these”—she pointed to thick, crooked lines running parallel—“I would say these are map signs, trails or something like that.”

  She shook her head. “There were so many things to recognize. Most of the tourists just wanted a memorable story about the four-dollar earrings they were buyi
ng for somebody back home. Half the time, I just made things up.” She laughed. “I can be very creative when I’m trying to sell something.

  “Anyway, I don’t recognize a lot of these. Like this one?” She held up the bracelet, pointing to two rows of dots, small lines connecting them in three places. “I would guess that this is rain, but usually the symbol includes two columns of three small parallel and horizontal lines. I don’t know what the small marks in the middle would be. And this one…” She turned the bracelet over.

  There was a box, completely dark and carved out. “And this circle with half of it darkened and the other half bearing small dots … And these two with the box and the dot and these unidentifiable figures.…” She shook her head and put the bracelet in the console between them.

  “You’ll need to find somebody who specializes in old petroglyphs to understand some of this.” She sighed. “I mean, if that’s why you kept it?” She flipped down the visor and began to check her lipstick in the mirror.

  Her comment sounded to Rose like a question and she suddenly felt defensive in needing to provide an answer.

  “Well, I didn’t keep it because I plan to sell it or wear it or anything like that.”

  Rose felt the need to justify her actions even though she knew Ms. Lou Ellen was not judging her. Ms. Lou Ellen was just not that kind of a woman.

  “Of course you didn’t, dear,” she said sincerely. “You are just drawn to the great mysteries of life.”

  Rose remembered how she had taken the gold coin from Thomas’s trailer, the way she was pulled into the other unexplained death at Shady Grove. She knew her friend was referring to her participation in that event.

  “It can’t be helped.” The older woman studied herself in the mirror. She reached down and retrieved the lipstick from her pocketbook. “I was married to a man like that,” she added.

  “The dog?” Rose asked, glad for a chance to lighten up the conversation. She made the turn into town.