Читать книгу Serpent's Tooth - Michael R. Collings - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

“Hello?”

“Lynn, dear, it that you?”

“Victoria?” I darted a quick glance at the old-fashioned Big-Ben wind-up alarm clock on the pine nightstand. Its rigid arms pointed to 7:15. Not that long past dawn.

Even for what was essentially a farming community like Fox Creek, it was a bit early for a telephone call, especially a simple social call to exchange the latest recipes or gossip about the doings of wayward youngsters or brag about the splendid state of one’s gladiolas.

“Victoria, are you all right?” My voice was harsher than usual, both because I had only been awake a few minutes and because of the sudden fear that made me sit bolt upright in bed.

“I’m just fine, dear.”

“Are you sure? It’s only....”

“Yes, of course I’m sure. I just need to ask a favor. It’s about a friend of mine.”

By this time, I was on my feet, cell phone in hand, and on my way to the closet, mentally choosing which clothes I could throw on if Victoria Sears needed me right away.

“But you’re okay?” I repeated. Victoria was, after all, well into her seventies, coming up on her eighties with a speed that I wasn’t sure she herself sometimes recognized, and fiercely independent. Even knowing her for only a few weeks, I couldn’t imagine anything short of a life-threatening emergency that would make the woman call—and call for help—this early. Victoria was a stickler for the proper forms.

Victoria laughed. It was a light, pleasant sound, like water running over stones in a creek bed in early spring. But we were already close enough friends for me to detect something more, a hint of darkness, beneath the sound. That small undercurrent frightened me.

“I’m fine. Really. But I do need your help with...with something that might be rather urgent.”

I had already pulled on a pair of jeans and was shifting the cell phone to my other hand so I could work my way into a blouse.

“What is it?”

“Well, a very dear friend of mine is...is in a bit of trouble, I think. I just got a call from Carver—the Ellises live next door to her—asking if I could get down there as soon as possible.”

“Do you need me to drive you?” Victoria owned a sturdy vehicle and was more than capable of driving herself anywhere she wanted. Perhaps she was more shaken up than I had imagined over her friend’s difficulty—whatever it was—and didn’t trust herself on the road.

“If you could I would greatly appreciate it. The Behemoth”—that was her pet name for her station wagon—“is laid up at the moment. She’s in the garage in town. If you could just pick me up and take me down-mountain and drop me off at the Ellises, I’d....”

“I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“You don’t need to hurry too fast. I don’t think there is any real rush. Not any more. It’s...well, I’m not sure there’s really anything I can do, but I did tell Janet Ellis that I’d be there.”

“I’m almost out the door, Victoria,” I said, buttoning the last button on my blouse.

“Thank you, Lynn dear. I truly appreciate it.”

She hung up.

I rummaged around in my drawer for a thick pair of socks and dropped onto the rumpled bed to put them on. My high-topped hiking boots—a fashion statement I would never dreamed of wearing before I arrived in Fox Creek only a couple of months earlier—were lying by the side of the bed where I had left them the previous afternoon after a long, luxurious tramp into the low mountains behind my cabin. Toppled onto their sides, the boots looked comically like a couple of exhausted soldiers taking a welcome but unexpected breather.

I didn’t know what Victoria might need me for, but I knew enough about the area to come prepared. The last time I had shared an emergency with Victoria, we had had to hike up and down the mountains abutting her home twice, making one of the trips by flashlight long after dark, and this time I was determined to be ready for anything.

I grabbed a bagel from the refrigerator and gulped down a quick glass of icy milk. At the doorway, I nearly bolted through before I remembered to take my floppy straw hat down from the rack and jam it on my head. Estelle had instructed me to take a hat whenever I went anywhere, and her advice had proved useful several times now.

Okay—bagel, milk, hat. Check. And I was on my way.

Victoria’s home—she called it a cabin but it was really much more than that—was only a mile and a quarter from the place I was renting from my mother’s friends, Estelle and Edgar Van Etten. The first time I met Victoria, on that memorable day when Alix Macrorie’s body had been discovered at the foot of Porcupine Falls, I had walked the distance. Physically it had taken me the better part of half an hour but internally, the trek had seemed infinitely longer.

It had been the first anniversary of Terry and Shawn’s deaths, and the last thing I had wanted was to let anyone else intrude on my private sorrows. But I had promised Estelle, and I had made the trip.

And in many ways, that short walk had saved my life.

Now I had a chance to repay Victoria in some small measure for what she had done for me that day.

It took a little more than five minutes of bouncing along the rutted road to get to Victoria’s, but not much more. She was waiting for me at the gate that led from a low picket fence through a garden of carefully cultivated wild flowers to the front door of her house.

She was dressed in what I recognized as her get-out-and-get-to-work garb: loose jeans that would have looked absolutely ridiculous on any other woman her age but that seemed perfect for her; a riotously flowered blouse that must certainly have been hand-sewn but would have passed muster in any made-to-order store; sturdy boots of the same brand as my own (not a surprise, since she had taken me shopping shortly after the furor over Alix’s death had subsided and instructed me in the relative merits of half a dozen possibilities); and her own wide-brimmed floppy hat. Her over-sized handbag hung loosely from its shoulder strap.

She waved a cheery greeting as I pulled up at the fence, but I thought I saw a certain grimness beneath her welcoming smile.

I had barely pulled to a stop before she was at the car door, had opened it, and was settling herself in the passenger seat, cinching her seat belt with a dexterity that would have put a woman thirty years her junior to shame.

With one hand she gestured—rather imperiously, perhaps, but I was used to her mannerisms—back down the road.

“Head on into town. The Ellises live just on the other side.”

Since the road dead-ended at Victoria’s fence, it took me a couple of minutes to maneuver the car around, but finally we were aimed in the right direction. I hit the gas and we took off down the road.

Victoria didn’t say much. At first she sat ramrod stiff, clutching the top of her handbag, which told me that she was far more concerned about whatever we were about to confront than she was willing to admit.

Something was wrong, seriously wrong.

I knew her well enough to understand that when it was time, she would tell me everything I needed to know. She was normally a fountain of information, at times downright chatty, but today she seemed more taciturn than I had ever seen her.

We continued toward Fox Creek—“down-mountain” as the natives would have said—until we passed Estelle and Edgar’s place. Not too far beyond that point, the landscape altered noticeably. The pines and firs we had been threading through thinned out at the same time that the vista ahead broadened and flattened to reveal a long, fairly narrow valley between two stretches of mountains. It was perhaps ten miles across before the further range began again, first with a few small foothills—brown and sere in the late summer heat—then more abruptly with granite walls approaching the vertical and stands of evergreens clutching for life in the thin, scattered patches of soil.

In between lay acres of fertile farm land, sectioned here and there by graveled roads that gave access to a few distant homesteads, usually a house, a barn, and a few scattered outbuildings.

We passed one or two such places and, since the road was becoming both more level and more easily passable, I had begun to speed up a bit—nothing hair-raising, mind you, but substantially more than, say, what one would expect of a Sunday afternoon sightseeing jaunt.

Moving for nearly the first time since she sat down in the car, Victoria suddenly rested one hand on my arm and said, “I think you’d better slow down, Lynn dear.”

“I’m not really speeding...,” I started to say but she tightened her grip on my arm with one hand and pointed toward the road ahead with the other.

“I really think you should slow down. You wouldn’t want to hit that.”

I stared ahead. And saw nothing, except a long, thin twig straddling the middle of the road.

A four-foot-long twig...that abruptly moved.

I must have nearly screamed—a combination of taut nerves because of the as-yet unnamed emergency that was so serious that Victoria didn’t even want to speak about it, and the sudden movement ahead as the twig raised its narrow, glistening head toward us and began to coil the rest of its long, lithe body.

“It’s nothing to worry about, dear. Just slow down and give it a chance to save face and get away. Remember, it’s more frightened of us than we are of it.”

Yeah, right.

I slowed.

Almost as soon as the car began to lose forward momentum, the twig—that is, the snake uncoiled and, moving in sinuous curves that held a curiously off-putting beauty and grace, slipped over the rough ruts and disappeared into a thick bank of white-flowered vegetation in the borrow-pit.

I knew those plants.

Queen Anne’s Lace.

After Victoria’s and my earlier experiences, I recognized the good Queen, and I tendered Her Majesty a good deal more respect and attention because of that. She and her dastardly cousin, Devil’s Plague—more familiarly known in the Fox Creek area as Western Water Hemlock, a fatally poisonous plant.

But that, as they always say in the books, is another story.1

Without realizing it, I had been holding my breath the whole time, until the smooth tip of the snake’s tail finally disappeared into the shadows. I let out the pent-up air with a distinct whoosh and turned to face Victoria.

“That wasn’t a rattlesnake, was it? I didn’t see any rattles or anything.”

She laughed again, the same water-over-stones light rippling laugh that still held a hint of something shadowy.

“That, my dear, was merely a kingsnake. Poor fellow was probably just resting after a long night hunting, and our noise startled it. By now it’s probably halfway home for a long day’s sleep, or maybe scouting out in the marshy areas for a final bit of a snack.”

“Poisonous?”

“Not at all. In fact, most of the boys around here, and probably more girls than would care to admit to it, have had a baby kingsnake as a pet at one time or another. For insects and worms and birds’ eggs—when they are lucky enough to find any—they are lethal. For us humongous humans, absolutely harmless.”

I couldn’t help it. In spite of the growing sense of something being wrong somewhere, I laughed this time.

Laughed and shook my head.

“I think, Victoria, that I’ve had just about enough of your royalty up here in the mountains.”

She looked momentarily puzzled.

“Kingsnakes scaring me half to death. And Queen-weeds trying to poison people.”

“Queen...? Oh, yes. Right.” She smiled to let me know she caught the joke. But it was a thin smile.

We were passing the final few patches of open field before entering Fox Creek proper. We clattered over an ancient iron bridge that spanned Fox Creek—unlike so many places back home, especially housing developments with pretentions to grandeur, up here, if something was called “Creek” you could pretty well bet that there would be a creek somewhere nearby.

The water was lower than it had been in early June but still higher than would be considered normal for this time of year, I was told by the folks who had spent their lives here. Summer heat coupled with the final spate of irrigation before harvests had siphoned off some of the earlier flow. Rocks showed in the middle of the channel, mossy and green a few weeks ago but now looking as if they had been thatched with ragged, clotted straw.

In a truly dry year, the locals assured me, Fox Creek could look like nothing more or less than a barely connected series of mudholes. When that happened, it was anything but a glamor spot.

When we hit the paved road on the other side of the bridge, we officially entered the town of Fox Creek.

It’s a small place, really, especially to anyone used to the ‘big city’ as I was, but I was surprised how long it took us to pass through four of its five intersections. Luckily, the lights were green. As far as I could see, there was no other traffic.

At the city limits, the state road turns into Main Street and continues under that name to the far side of the town, then it resumes its original moniker.

We didn’t get that far.

“Turn here,” Victoria instructed as we approached the fifth stop light. In “town talk,” that would be Avenue C, but again, once we passed the edge of town, it would continue as County Road 5A.

“Ellises live along here, about three miles farther on.”

We drove in silence. The county road was in better condition than the gravel track leading up to Victoria’s house, so there were fewer rattles and bumps. We didn’t see any more snakes, but I noticed a covey of redwing blackbirds perched on the cattails that grow in wild profusion between the roadbed and the nearest fields. The ground here would be swampy, damp even in August.

Once a quail darted into the middle of the road, hesitated for an instant when it realized we were there, then, instead of dashing ahead and getting across in plenty of time for us to miss it, it suddenly decided to go back the way it had come. It spun around so fast—its low-slung, plump body on those ridiculously frail-looking stick legs—that it nearly toppled over.

My front tires missed it by no more than a yard.

Foolish bird.

Victoria seemed not to have noticed the moment of comic by-play. Her hand was gripping the flap on her handbag again, and she was staring out the passenger window as if there were something of life-or-death seriousness happening in the passing fields.

“It’s not much further,” Victoria said a few moments later. She pointed with one hand, finally releasing her grasp on her handbag. “Turn in at the first place. Down there.”

Up ahead I could see two houses—traditional clapboard farmhouses, two stories high, with deeply set wrap-around porches, huge maples shading the front yards and gravel driveways leading to side doors. The two houses were perhaps two hundred yards apart. They might belong to different families—and from what little I could glean from Victoria’s few remarks, they did—but they were alike as twins.

Form follows function, probably. Both were at least half a century old, perhaps older.

We turned in at the first drive.

Someone was waiting for us at the end.

I must admit that my heart thumped a bit faster for an instant when I recognized Carver Ellis.

Not that there is anything between us...romantically, I mean. Even if I were in the market for a boyfriend—much less a “significant other” (how I hate that phrase)—there would be nothing between us. Chronologically, he’s still pretty much just a kid, nearly a decade younger than my own twenty-nine years, but at times he seems even younger than that. I think there may be something developmentally not-quite-right. He’s not slow mentally, nothing like that, but occasionally there is the sense about him that he’s not as mature, not as adaptable to change or challenges, not as..., well, not as adult as his years would suggest.

He’s often more child-like than I expect, frequently surprising me.

Not childish. Just child-like. Innocent.

Well, I suppose that innocent is not exactly the right word. But perhaps you know what I mean.

Still, my heart flipped over one or two beats when I saw him standing there, waiting for us.

Because Carver Ellis is beautiful.

I know I shouldn’t use that word for a young man, but it is the only one that truly fits. Muscular in the all the right ways, the ways that suggest hard work, and lots of it, rather than narcissistic afternoon visits to a gym. Add to that a perfectly chiseled face. Startlingly blue eyes. Blond hair bleached almost white by daily exposure to the sun. Deep, even tan—I knew what his torso looked like because I had seen him once or twice shirtless as he worked around Victoria’s place, but I strongly suspected that not too far south of his waistline the tan would suddenly vanish.

Not that I ever expected, or in fact wanted, to actually verify that by personal observation, but I knew that he supported his widowed mother and that there were more than enough calls for his skill as a handyman to keep him too busy to lounge around in the sun working on a tan.

Yes, the boy was beautiful, but as I drove closer I noted something else.

This morning, underneath his tan, his skin was almost deathly pallid. His face seemed drawn and his hair was disheveled, as if he had jumped out of bed and finger-combed it on his way out rather than spending any time in front of a mirror.

And, closer yet, I could see that his hands were trembling.

“Victoria,” I said, keeping my eyes on Carver’s distraught face, “what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know for sure. Carver can be...well, scattered when he’s worried. And right now, I think he’s plenty worried.”

She was out of the car before I turned the engine off, standing next to Carver with her hand on his shoulder...a bit of a reach, actually, since he was a good head taller than she was.

I didn’t hear what she asked him, but by the time he answered I was almost even with Victoria and I heard him.

I heard him just fine.

“It’s Rick Johansson. From next door.

“He’s dead.”

1. Devil’s Plague: A Mystery Novel, by Michael R. Collings / Driving Hell’s Highway: A Crime Novel, by Gary Lovisi (Borgo Press, 2011); Devil’s Plague: A Mystery Novel (Borgo Press, 2011, ebook).