Granger's Threat. Teresa Pijoan

      Granger’s

      Threat

      A Murder Mystery Laced with a Web of Lies and Familial Contempt

      Teresa Pijoan

       This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

      and incidents either are the product of this author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

      and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events,

      or locals is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and

      does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

      © 2014 by Teresa Pijoan

      All Rights Reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

      mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems

      without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer

      who may quote brief passages in a review.

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      P.O. Box 2321, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504-2321.

      Book and Cover design › Vicki Ahl

      Body typeface › Granjon LT Std

      eBook 978-1-61139-253-1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Pijoan, Teresa, 1951-

      Granger’s Threat : a murder mystery laced with a web of lies and familial contempt / by Teresa Pijoan.

      pages cm

      ISBN 978-0-86534-983-4 (softcover : alk. paper)

      1. Murder--Investigation--New Mexico--Fiction. 2. Family secrets--Fiction.

      3. Mystery fiction. I. Title.

      PS3572.A4365G73 2014

      813’.54--dc23

      2014003979

      www.sunstonepress.com

      SUNSTONE PRESS / Post Office Box 2321 / Santa Fe, NM 87504-2321 /USA

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      Dedicated

      to

      Sue Vliet

      and

      Carol C. Pijoan

       “Oh what a tangled web we weave,

      When first we practice to deceive!”

      —Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17

      1

      Calavera, New Mexico

      Early morning, Thursday, January, 1988

      Margaret sat in the wooden Captain’s chair beside the rented hospital bed, causing Margaret’s bed to be pushed into the corner of the large bedroom. The one lamp on the bedside table gave an ominous glow to the white walls. She stared at her eighty year old husband.

      He was a slip of his former self. His body was now a frail, weak skeleton covered in skin, opaque skin. The odor emanating from his body was wretched as was the way of the dead or dying. The man was curled in a fetal position. His claw like hands were wrapped one around the other. His feet were pointed downward as his knees were bent almost up to his hairless chest. The toenails were thick, dark orange, and cracked. Margaret pulled the white cotton sheet over his feet. She didn’t want to look at them anymore.

      Her son’s deep voice permeated the silence. “You know this wouldn’t have been so difficult if you would have just let him die from pneumonia last month?”

      The sixty year old Margaret began rocking back and forth with her arms wrapped around her waist. She tugged at the sweater of lavender blue that hugged her thin frame. “Granger, I couldn’t do it then. I just couldn’t. The doctor had the visiting nurse come in and she was the one who called the ambulance. What was I to do?” She glared at her son through her long eyelashes, “There was no choice. What was I to do?”

      Granger grimaced. This was her way to blame others for her own lack of action. She had always been this way. He sat back on the rolling medical stool on the opposite side of the hospital bed from his mother. He lifted his head to study the large painting on the wall over her bed. The dancing ballerinas were always dancing east, they never sat down and they never had a break. Granger sighed. He never got a break from her either.

      When he was small boy, being raised on an isolated farm way out on the flat lands, his mother would wait up for her husband, his father, to come home from the hospital only to hand him a list of all the troubles their children had caused during the day. She made sure that the children were punished for their ‘sins.’

      If her husband did not beat the children to a pulp, then he was not allowed to get into her bed. He was hardly home as it was, right? He was always at the hospital. He was one of four doctors for about five hundred miles of flat dry farmland. He rarely came home. If he did come home, well, he needed to prove that he was worthy of being a father and do his fatherly duty of punishing the children. He was to keep them in line!

      Granger remembered those nights when his mother leaned against the door frame of the bedroom to watch her husband as he would grab the kids who were sound asleep. Both Sophia and Granger were blissfully unaware of the hell that was soon descending upon their weak and fragile bodies. Granger’s father was six-two and weighed around two hundred and forty pounds. He was strong and powerful in spirit with his striking Mediterranean good looks. Father would throw them, one by one onto the floor, kick them only to pick them up and pitch them back onto the bed with a loud remark to their mother, “There, are you happy now?” Then his father would hurry out the door, down the hall to fall into bed for desperate sleep.

      Now his father was struggling to stay alive and Granger was the one with the power. His mother jerked when father started to wheeze and then cough. The phlegm in his father’s throat had settled. Father would aspirate if he wasn’t lifted to a sitting position. Usually either the visiting nurse or Granger’s sister Sophia, would be here to lift father, but tonight they had sent his sister home to her husband and kids. Tonight was the night to do the deed.

      The wind continued to howl in the cold January night. The dog and the cats had been locked out of the bedroom by his mother. She was terrified of witnesses yet she would not, could not ever do any deed by herself. Granger sucked in air. His father’s face was contorting. His father had not been able to speak for almost two years and in the last three months only a grunt was given when the catheter had been put in or when his head was lifted for eye drops. The cough was becoming more labored, more difficult. Dark brown eyes shot open struggling to see anyone who would or could help him.

      Granger’s mother covered her mouth as tears fell from her round blue eyes. The tree branches outside rubbed against the side of the roof