Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“I always used to joke that I’d end up in a trailer outside Gallup, New Mexico,” she said, dropping across from me on an ancient stuffed sofa. “Hell, I couldn’t even get that far away from Phoenix. But, as Lorie probably told you, I was the librarian at The Republic for forty-seven years. I’m damned proud of that. I retired in 1985. Well, they retired me. Now I don’t even read newspapers anymore. I don’t want to know how awful t

he world is. Never watched television. I’m tempted to tear out the phone.”

I asked about Hayden Yarnell and the history of the kidnapping, but she leaned back, rearranged her long, dry hair like a shawl over her shoulders and smiled like a young girl. “Lorie tells me you’re a history professor and a deputy sheriff.”

“That’s true.”

“That’s like being a gas company and an Internet company all in one,” she laughed. “I own stock in one like that. Bastards. Never gets above nineteen dollars a share.”

“Kind of like me, I guess.”

She crushed out the cigarette and lit another. “Young people aren’t taught history any more,” she said. “They haven’t been for thirty years or more. It’s one reason the world’s so insane.” She waved the cigarette around like a smoky wand. “My uncle fought in the Spanish-American War,” she went on. “And he lived to see Americans walk on the moon. We don’t have that sense of connection to our past now. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. What did Faulkner say? ‘The past isn’t even past.’ We just have to rediscover every truth the hard way. Such arrogance.”

She stopped and looked at me. “Ah, Mapstone, you are in the clutches of an old lady with too many crotchets and grudges against the world. What did you specialize in, in graduate school?”

I hadn’t been asked that question in a while. “America in the Progressive era and the Depression.”

“To each his own,” she said. “Pardon my sexist language. I specialized in eighteenth-century England.” The merry eyes reasserted themselves. “But my dad also made me learn to type. So you’re lucky you have a skill to fall back on.”

She waddled over to a bookshelf filled with file boxes labeled in old-lady-scrawl. “Can you believe the newspaper wanted to throw all this out?

“So,” she said, “which one of you wants to know about Hayden Yarnell? The history teacher, or the lawman?”

She pulled out a large file box, blew the dust off and set it on a Formica table. “The year was 1941. Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened yet. Phoenix was still a small farming town, with some dude ranches and tuberculosis sanitariums—they called the patients ‘lungers’ then. Hayden Yarnell was the richest man in the state. He had a big house on South Mountain. It burned in 1942, not long after the kidnapping. He died soon after that. Talk about a string of bad luck. The ruins of the foundation are probably still out there. He also kept an apartment at the Hotel Westward Ho, like the rest of the Phoenix elite. Rumor had it he kept a mistress there, too. Back then, they called the big men in town the ‘summer bachelors.’ When it turned hot, they’d ship their wives off to someplace cool, and their summer girls would show up.”

All this was before she even looked into the files.

“What if I told you we found the skeletons of two children, entombed in a basement wall in a downtown warehouse owned by the Yarnell family? And somebody is now killing off the remaining Yarnell brothers.”

She exhaled from somewhere in her ankles. “I’d say I need a drink.” She took my mason jar and banged into the small kitchen. “You need one, too. Bourbon is the house specialty.”

“Easy on the dose for me.”

She returned and leaned on the table, watching me intently. “You found the Yarnell twins? Holy crap. Maybe I’ll have to subscribe to the newspaper again.”

“What do you remember about the time of the kidnapping?”

“Well,” she eased herself into a chair, “everything. It was Thanksgiving, an unusually cold autumn. Do you know we used to get hard frosts in Phoenix before they paved everything over? Anyway, I’d been at the paper for about three years. We all had our eyes on the war in Europe, and we knew it was just a matter of time before Japan jumped on us. But Phoenix was so isolated then, and things were very quiet.”

“Morgan Yarnell waited a week before reporting the kidnapping to the police.”

She nodded. “Strange, huh? He was the father of the twins. But the fact that they waited to call the cops was never very widely reported. The family had pull with the newspaper publishers, so no surprise there. I assume they figured they could handle it themselves, and any publicity might make the kidnapper kill the twins. Remember, the Lindbergh kidnapping was still very fresh in everyone’s minds. Talk about a media circus. The Yarnells were very well known, much more so than today.”

“But did Morgan get a ransom note, or what? It’s not clear from the record.”

She opened the file box and leafed through some yellowed papers. She produced some reading glasses from her pocket and angled them on her nose. “He told the police that the twins were taken from their rooms at the Yarnell mansion on South Mountain on the night of November 27, and their nanny discovered them missing the next day. He received a telephone call that day demanding a hundred thousand dollars be put in a locker at Union Station. He complied, but after a week the boys still weren’t returned, so he went to the police. No mention of a note or any communication beyond the call.”

“Did they have direct dial in town then? Maybe an operator helped the kidnapper place the call. I wish somebody had tried to find where that call came from.”

“Honey, I wish I was twenty years old with a cheerleader’s body, still with my IQ, of course. Nobody was asking these questions. When Jack Talbott was caught, everyone was convinced justice was done. Wait.” She leafed through a file of yellowed newspaper clippings and paper. “Maybe not everyone. Here, look at this.”

It was newspaper copy paper, flimsy and brittle with age. It was datelined Florence, Arizona, July 20, 1942. I read the lead aloud:

“‘Convicted kidnapper John Henry “Jack” Talbott was executed in Arizona’s gas chamber early this morning, but not before his last words accused Hayden “Win” Yarnell Jr. of masterminding the kidnapping of his four-year-old nephews.’”

I sat up straight. “I never saw this story.”

“That’s because it didn’t run in the newspaper. The publisher himself spiked it. The publisher was a good friend of the Yarnells, remember, and this Talbott character was hardly the most reliable witness. So the account of his last words never ran.”