Jaime consulted his notes. “Mr. Pete Naujokas of Estes Park, Colorado,” he said. “And yes, as far as I know, he’s still up there. Third RV spot on the right inside the campground. But how can he possibly identify her?”
Frank held up a piece of paper. “The night clerk faxed me a copy of Sandra Ridder’s mug shot.”
Jaime laughed. “Frank Montoya’s trusty mobile office strikes again.”
Frank’s technological additions to his Crown Victoria had been the topic of much good-natured ribbing both inside and outside the department. But at times like these, it was easy for Frank to rib back.
“It’s only a little after nine,” Joanna told her officers. “Even the most dedicated RVer won’t have hit the sack this early. Frank and I will go show Pete Naujokas the picture and see what he says. That way we’ll know for sure whether or not Sandra Ridder is the woman who was digging in the rocks.”
Leaving Jaime Carbajal to continue his investigation of this new part of the crime scene, Joanna and Frank headed for the campground. The gravel road, little more than a trail in spots, was rough and winding enough to prove something of a challenge to Frank’s Civvie. Once they arrived at the campground and saw some of the big RV rigs parked there, Joanna wondered aloud how they had made it up the road.
Frank looked at her and grinned. “Most of the guys who drive these are retired,” he told her. “They don’t care how long it takes to get from one camping spot to another. They’re not on a set schedule.”
Outside the Naujokases’ RV, four people in folding camp chairs were seated around a blazing fire. “Mr. Naujokas?” Joanna asked, exhibiting her ID.
“That’s me.” A smiling, slightly built man stepped out of the firelight. “Most people call me Pete,” he said.
“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady, and this is Frank Montoya, my chief deputy. I was wondering if you’d mind taking a look at a picture we have here and telling us whether or not it’s the woman you saw down by the park entrance last night.”
Frank passed him the faxed mug shot, and Pete Naujokas walked it over to the fire in order to take a closer look. “That’s her,” he said, coming back to return the paper to Frank. “Who is she-or rather, who was she? Some kind of criminal?”
“Her name is Sandra Ridder. She went to prison for manslaughter eight years ago, after the shooting death of her husband. Her mother lives a few miles away from here off Middlemarch Road.”
“But what was she doing here?” Pete asked. “At the campground?”
“We think she came looking for something, maybe something that had been hidden for years.”
“Since before she went to prison?”
“That’s right,” Joanna told him. “We found an empty container, but there was no sign of what had been in it.”
Pete shook his head. “Most likely not a missing ring,” he said. “The whole thing gives me the willies.” He shivered. “I guess I’m lucky she didn’t accept my offer of help. No telling what might have happened then. When you hang around campgrounds like this, you meet up with a lot of really nice people. It lulls you into believing that everyone’s pretty much the same. Know what I mean?”
Joanna nodded.
“I guess I’ll be more careful after this,” he added with a rueful grin. “Being a good Samaritan is supposed to be a good thing. On the other hand, being a dead good Samaritan is downright stupid.”
“After you left the woman by the sign and came on up to the campground, did you hear anything?”
“You mean like a gunshot?” Pete Naujokas asked. “No, I didn’t. I’ve asked around. As far as I can tell, nobody else did, either.”
Frank and Joanna left a few minutes later. After a brief stop to check in with Jaime Carbajal, they continued back to Joanna’s Blazer.
“That is weird,” Frank mused along the way.
“What is?”
“If Sandra’s mother lived just a few miles away, why not hide whatever it was on her mother’s property instead of someplace as public as the entrance to a national monument?”
“Because she didn’t want whatever it was she was hiding to be connected to her mother or to her,” Joanna said. “A weapon, maybe. What about the gun that was used to kill Tom Ridder? Was that ever recovered?”
“I don’t know,” Frank replied. “I can probably find out tomorrow. It would have to be damned small to fit inside that bowl.”
“So we’re looking for something that’s small and valuable,” Joanna added. “What about you, Frank? Supposing your house was on fire or about to be washed away in a flood, and all you could rescue was whatever would fit in a bowl that size. Given that set of circumstances, what would you have put in there?”
“My grandfather’s Purple Heart,” Frank replied with hardly a moment’s hesitation. “My birth certificate, a couple of photos, and my wallet. That way I’d have some ID and my credit cards when it came time to start over. What about you?”
Joanna nodded. “I’d probably do pretty much the same thing, only instead of a Purple Heart, I’d save my father’s sheriff’s badge.” As a teenager, Joanna had been given D. H. Lathrop’s sheriff’s badge after her father’s funeral. It had been one of her most treasured mementos before she was elected sheriff. Now it was even more so.
By then Frank had stopped the Crown Victoria next to Joanna’s Blazer. “See you Monday,” he said as Joanna climbed out of the Civvie. “If not sooner.”
“Let’s hope not sooner,” she returned. “I’d like to have one whole day to myself this weekend.”
Driving back across the Sulphur Springs Valley toward home, Joanna kept mulling the same question. What would have been in a bowl that small? And why Tupperware? The one thing Joanna remembered from her abortive and relatively unhappy career as a Tupperware representative was that those sturdy plastic containers-especially the round ones-were supposed to be both air- and watertight. Driving through the night, Joanna smiled at a recollection of Andy teasing her back then, telling her that if nuclear warfare ever broke out, that, after hundreds of years, the only artifacts left to testify to human existence in the late twentieth century would be warehouses chock-full of still usable Tupperware and still edible Twinkies.
Part of what had made selling Tupperware difficult for Joanna had to do with the fact that many people in town were broke. Once the mines closed, most of Bisbee’s economic base disappeared. For a long time the expected boom in out-of-state visitors had simply bypassed the little town. In those cash-strapped days, Tupperware had been hard to come by. You had to be invited to a party, go and play dumb games, and then fork over hard-earned cash in order to cart home a set of four of those stupid bowls. And, for Joanna, that had been the real difficulty in selling the stuff-she didn’t actually believe in it. Her mother did. Eleanor claimed to adore the stuff. Joanna remained firmly in the camp of margarine containers.
Joanna couldn’t remember her mother ever storing a dishful of leftovers without first using the distinctive little tab to raise the lid and let out excess air. And in Eleanor’s fastidiously run household, no Tupperware-stored leftovers were ever allowed to spoil or go to waste.
The same thing couldn’t be said of Joanna Brady’s more casually managed existence. Containers of food were sometimes inadvertently shoved to the back of a lower shelf in her refrigerator where the contents might well mutate into a new life form before finally being rediscovered. With margarine tubs or cottage-cheese or sour-cream containers, there was never any question of what to do then-throw them out, leftovers and all. But Tupperware was different and came with an entirely different set of rules. No matter how disgusting what had been left to molder inside, those had to be cleaned out and rehabilitated with bleach, detergent, and elbow grease. To do anything less seemed un-American somehow.
Taking Joanna’s own deep-seated prejudices and experience into account, that meant Sandra Ridder hadn’t intended to lose her Tupperware bowl-ever. Not the first time when she hid it, and not the second time when she had gone back to retrieve it. And whatever she had stowed in the bowl all those years earlier, she had meant it to be protected from the elements.
By the time Joanna neared High Lonesome Ranch, she had left off worrying about Sandra Ridder’s Tupperware and was dealing with concerns much closer to home. She wondered what had happened that evening in her absence. It was one thing to be a hands-on sheriff, but how about being a hands-on mother? What had her presence contributed to the investigation into Sandra Ridder’s death, and how much had she missed by being away from the High Lonesome and Jenny and Butch? The fact that she wasn’t alone-the fact that Joanna Brady was dealing with the daily ball-juggling contest of every other working mother in America-didn’t make her feel any better about it.
