St Kilda Consulting 04 - Blue Smoke and Murder

sold for back taxes. The lawyer had already filed for an exemption on further taxes due to the ranch house and barn burning down.
    Taxes. God .
    How much could an all-but-abandoned ranch be worth ?
    Jill parked in the overgrown yard, climbed out, and stretched before she went to wrestle with the old padlock that secured thefront door. Not that there was much to steal—worn cowhide chairs, an old plank kitchen table, and bunk beds whose “springs” consisted of rope strung between two-by-fours.
    Despite its rust-pitted appearance, the padlock opened easily to her key. Modesty must have oiled the lock recently. Or maybe she’d rented the cabin out to someone for a time. Cash was always welcome on a bare-bones Western ranch.
    Inside, the cabin was surprisingly clean. Jill wouldn’t have to camp out in the yard while she put the place in order. There was even a covered bucket of water near the ancient long-handled pump in the kitchen. She lifted the bucket to prime the pump, then stopped when she saw the neat rectangle of folded paper that had been tucked beneath.
    Her name was written across the paper in Modesty’s elegant, archaic handwriting.
    Jill set the bucket aside and unfolded the paper. An odd sensation prickled over her arms.
    She was reading a note from the dead.
     
    GO TO YOUR OLD HIDING PLACE.
    LIFE ISN’T AS SAFE AS IT SEEMS TO THE YOUNG.
     
    “Well, that’s weird,” she said. “Wonder if the old bat was senile? God knows her sister was no model of sanity.”
    But Grandmother Justine was a long-dead family legend, and Great-aunt Modesty had always had a death grip on reality.
    Jill tucked the paper into the hip pocket of her jeans, primed the pump, and smiled as clean water gushed into the old iron sink. With the supplies she had picked up in Page, she was set for several weeks. After that…well she’d worry about what came next when she knew how long she’d have to stay at the ranch. She didn’t have any idea of what went into settling someone’s estate.
    With a sigh, she opened the cranky shutters on the east side of the two-room cabin, letting in the late-afternoon air while she unloaded the Honda and made coffee on the camp stove she’d brought. She took a mug of coffee into the front yard to enjoy the sound of the wind moving through the huge old cottonwood. The tree was one of the things she had truly missed after leaving the Arizona Strip.
    The massive cottonwood had taken root near the spring long before any Brecks ever arrived in Arizona Territory. As a child, she had used the tree for a living ladder to climb partway up the cliff. The rest of the cliff she had climbed the hard way, when she was older.
    “I suppose you’ll die someday, too, old friend,” Jill said, tracing one of the deep ridges in the cottonwood’s bark with her fingertip. “I won’t be alive to see it. You’ve got a few hundred more years in you than I do.”
    Modesty’s note echoed back like a ghostly agreement.
    Life isn’t as safe as it seems to the young.
    “Oh, all right,” she said, annoyed by the cryptic message. “I’ll do it.”
    Irritating people was something Modesty had raised to an art. Jill should be too old to have her buttons pushed so easily.
    But she wasn’t.
    Muttering under her breath, she grabbed a flashlight from her backpack and looked around the cabin. There was an obvious root cellar outside. In the days before electricity came to the rural West, root cellars and springhouses had been as close to refrigeration as it got. Sometimes she had hidden in the root cellar.
    But her favorite hideaway was inside the cabin, at the back of the pantry, where a handmade cupboard pulled away to reveal a rough opening. Behind the cupboard was a six-foot-square room. The space had been hammered from the sandstone cliff that was the back wall of the cabin. In the days before banks and police, when Indians and outlaws roamed the land freely, the hidey-hole had keptsafe everything of value to the Brecks—including their own lives when raiders came.
    She ran her fingers behind the third shelf, slid aside a concealed wooden bolt, and tugged on the edge of the cupboard. The tin-backed cupboard creaked and protested when the concealed door swung open. As a girl, Jill had always felt a delicious shiver of secrecy when she crawled into the small space and hid among the burlap bags of rice and beans and sugar.
    She switched on the flashlight and looked inside. Instead of supplies, she found