Trace Their Shadows Page 8

  An officer at a counter looked up from a computer monitor, startled. In a glass screen she saw her reflection—hair blown into peaks, shirt tail hanging, eyes wide and panicky. He had a kind young face and he rose, came around the counter toward her, and politely asked her to sit in a chair by his desk. Soon she was pouring out her story——the skeleton, John waiting at the abandoned boat house, the race with another boat across the lake. The officer held up his hand.

  “Whoa,” he said. “Let me call the Sheriff’s Office. This is county business. I’ll get someone to take you over there.” He peered at her anxiously. “You’re sure you’re all right now, M’am?” She nodded and looked at her watch while he dialed. Time was passing too quickly.

  In a few minutes she was sitting in the white concrete Sheriff’s Office across from the courthouse, and re–telling her story to a thin, dark–complexioned sergeant with sharp eyes and a crisp green uniform. He turned a pencil reflectively in his fingers, then opened a narrow spiral notebook. “You’re sure this is a human skeleton?”

  “We’re sure of it. Of course, we can’t tell about its age. We haven’t touched anything.”

  He rubbed his chin. “Doesn’t sound recent. If the boat house hasn’t been used in years, it’s hard to see how it got buried under the floor. Floor hadn’t been disturbed?”

  “Only by termites, officer.” She looked again at her watch——ten thirty. “Look, it’s urgent. The boat house is going to be torn down tomorrow. The whole site will be destroyed. That’s why the owner’s grand nephew stayed behind——John Able. He’s there now. We want the site secured.”

  The bright eyes were grave. “And what were the two of you doing there at night yourselves?”

  Brandy squirmed. “I’m writing an article about the house for the Beacon. We were looking around before it’s all gone. You can check us out with Deputy Steve Able. He’s John Able’s brother.”

  The sergeant nodded when she mentioned Steve and she felt relieved. “And the owner wasn’t there? Had she given permission?”

  Again Brandy shifted in her chair. “This morning she told us she’d be away. She knows about the newspaper story. We didn’t think she’d mind. A spur of the moment impulse. We were out on the lake in John’s boat.” She smiled weakly. “The important thing is the skeleton.”

  The sergeant scratched a few notes on the pad. “There’s a patrol car not too far from that area now,” he said. “I’ll call the officer. It shouldn’t be long before he finishes his assignment. He can get over there.”

  She rose. “Mr. Able’s pontoon boat is tied up at the public pier. I’ve got to go back there for him, and I can’t leave the boat at the park overnight.” She twisted the strap on her canvas bag. “Only I’m a little nervous about the lake. I told you, I’m sure I was chased coming over here.”

  “Probably kids out on the lake for a lark. Thought they’d give you a scare. Kids around here will do that.” The sergeant reached into his desk and pulled out a flashlight. “Still, if someone did try to keep you from reporting this, they’ll know it’s too late now. But I’ll ask someone to watch. You signal with this if you have any trouble. We can get a patrol boat there pretty fast.” He turned and called to a corporal who was walking in through a rear door. “Give this lady a ride down to Wooten Park and see that she gets off in her boat all right. Get on the horn like a shot if anyone gives her a problem——and check her gas tanks first.”

  He picked up the phone and she heard him ask for the patrol car. Taking the heavy flashlight, she followed the other deputy outside. When they pulled up in the parking lot in front of the pier, she was relieved to see John’s boat still rocking, undisturbed, in the boat slip.

  The deputy leaned over the stern and inspected the tanks. “Looks okay for a round trip, m’am.” He lifted the lines off capstan and cleat. “I’m to wait here until you signal you’re safe on the other side. Just give one long wave with the flashlight.”

  The water had quieted, the moon sunk low in the west. Brandy peered again at her watch——eleven. John would be restless. The deputy scanned the lake with a pair of binoculars. Nothing stirred. Even the night fishermen had vanished. Brandy switched on the engine and the lights, eased out of the slip, and pointed her prow to the southeast. Navigating for the dark shore would be tricky, but she was beginning to think she could find her way blindfolded.

  On the return trip the wind was at her back and had lessened. The boat purred solidly along under a waning moon. No one else was on the lake. Brandy began to relax. Surely the nightmare had ended. As she closed on the opposite bank, she turned further east, and cruised along near the trees, searching in the dim light for the Able mansion. No motorboat, she noticed, was moored at Blackthorne’s dock. When she spotted the bulk of the boat house, she raised her flashlight in a high arc, amazed that in Tavares, almost three miles away, the signal would be visible as a tiny light.

  She did not see John’s own flashlight beam, but she realized he might be saving his batteries. She did not like to call out. She was not sure who might lurk on the other side of the fence. Cutting her speed almost to idle, she turned off the running lights, and nudged her way carefully into the slip, surprised that John had not come forward to help her. She could now see him, standing back near the doorway, silent. He’s angry, she thought. I’ve been gone too long. Switching off the engine, she picked up the flashlight again and reached overhead with the other hand, prepared to steady herself by holding to the cross beam.

  “Don’t,” John said, his voice low and strained. “Don’t move. Don’t touch anything.”

  Above her she heard a sickening, slithering sound.

  She froze, then shone the flashlight upward. Glistening in the shaft of light, she saw the long, fat body, the upraised head, and the gaping white jaws of a cottonmouth moccasin.

  TEN

  Facing her, the snake’s head swayed slightly, its eyes like steel drills. Brandy stifled a cry. John’s flashlight flicked on and froze on the heavy coils and the lifted, triangular head. The mouth yawned a fleshy white. “The warning posture,” he whispered. “Don’t make a sudden move. Going to try to knock it into the water.”

  She put one foot behind her and stepped slowly backward, grasping for the console, while John advanced, crouching, in one hand a long, narrow board. The black snake head turned. When he had almost reached the boat, he slammed the board up and sideways. But the cottonmouth was quicker. Like a bullet, its body uncoiled and shot forward. Brandy’s eyes widened. She screamed, “No!”

  At the same instant, the moccasin’s fangs sank into John’s hand. She gave a sob, sprang out of the boat, and rushed toward John as the moccasin drew back and slid over the edge of the pier into the water. John had dropped to his knees, supporting his wounded arm with the other hand.

  She tried to remember the snake bite first aid she once learned in a health class. “Lie down,” she said, “be absolutely still.” She turned back, lifted a boat cushion off the front seat, and kneeling beside him, helped him stretch out with his head raised on the cushion.

  “The kit,” he muttered. “Under the first seat.” In the dull light he was deathly pale. Perspiration beaded his face. “Hurts like hell.”

  She climbed back into the boat, pulled the first seat forward, and found a small plastic first aid kit. Kneeling once more beside him, she laid a hand on his clammy forehead. He squirmed. “Thirsty,” he said.

  Already the small round holes in the back of his hand were turning dusky. Brandy dampened a piece of gauze with disinfectant and gently wiped around the wound, then dried it as best she could with clean gauze. “A deputy should be here right away. He’ll call an emergency response team on his car radio. They’ll get you to a hospital in no time.”

  She felt the inside of his wrist and counted. His pulse rate was fast but weak. She had to protect him from shock. Standing up quickly, she pulled off her jacket and tucked it around him, then yanked up her shirt, stripped it off, and tore a wide strip o
ut of the back, willing herself to stay calm.

  “Got to make a tourniquet,” she said. “Tie it above the wound and below the pulse.” She twisted the cotton strip into a band and knotted it loosely between the darkening holes and his wrist. Please, God, she thought, send the deputy now.

  John turned his head from side to side, his chest heaving, his teeth clinched. “Going to be sick.”

  “You mustn’t go into shock.” She found a bottle of aspirin in the kit, scrambled back onto the boat, and opened the Styrofoam cooler behind the captain’s chair. In a few seconds she knelt again beside him, holding a can in one hand and a fistful of ice in the other. Lifting his head slightly, she managed to get two tablets down his throat. His voice was faint. “Pop tastes good,” he mumbled. “So thirsty.”

  Wrapping the ice in another strip of cloth from her tattered shirt, she passed it across his cheeks and forehead and held it there. He’s got to have anti–venom, she thought, and soon. He stared up at her, silent, the muscles in his face tense with pain.

  She murmured, “Just look what I’ve done to you.”

  “Wasn’t you. Moccasins are night hunters. Shouldn’t have come without a gun.” His own eyes glazed. She could barely hear his voice. “Sylvania warned us.”

  Brandy remembered. Sylvania had said water moccasins were the biggest danger in the lake. Because of them, she didn’t go to the boat house.

  Brandy turned off the flashlight. The moon had gone behind clouds building in the west. She sat in darkness. A bullfrog——or maybe a ‘gator——bellowed. Around them crickets and night insects whirred and trilled.

  Supporting John’s head against her lap, her gaze strayed to the fourth floor dormer windows. She had glimpsed a shape there when she pulled away from the boat house. Now it was too dark to see. Behind her under the floor in the dark and the dampness the skull lay waiting. Was there a connection, a danger?

  Finally in the distance she heard the brief squeal of a siren and a few seconds later, the crunch of tires in the parking lot. Next door the Dobermans set up a storm of barking. She could hear them now, rushing along the fence. She eased John’s head back onto the cushion, and seizing the flashlight, signaled wildly. At that moment a figure emerged around the left wing of the house.

  “Over here!” she called. “We need help!”

  But before she could swing the beam to the left, she heard a voice from the opposite direction. “Sheriff’s Office,” it said. “Deputy Martin. What’s up?”

  Confused, she focused the light to the right and picked up a uniformed deputy striding toward the boat house, ignoring the dogs that lunged along beside the barrier of chain link, and following the beam of his own flashlight.

  “Cottonmouth bite!” Brandy shouted. “Emergency!”

  The deputy half–slid down the slippery bank, grasped a pier railing, and stepped onto the platform. Squatting on his heels beside John, he tilted back his hat and shone his light on John’s hand. The wounds were now puffy and almost black.

  He gave a low whistle. “Son–of–a–gun. Got you bad. Looks like you took good care of him, little lady.” He stood up, a tall well–made man of perhaps thirty with the sunburned complexion blond people often have in Florida. To Brandy he looked like a saint.

  “I’ll get on the horn pronto,” the deputy said. “EMS will carry him to Leesburg Regional.” He jumped down into the weeds along the shore. “I’ll be sure they bring anti–venom.”

  As he started toward his car, Brandy called after him, “Isn’t there another deputy with you?” The figure she had seen on the lawn to the left had not arrived.

  He looked back over his shoulder. “No partner tonight,” he said. “Just me, Miss.”

  Brandy swung her light across the lawn under the dormer windows, highlighting the pale, straight trunks of the cypress, the stretch of ragged grass, the boarded up alcoves of the first floor. In the warm night she shivered. Nothing else was there. Perhaps the first figure had been her imagination.

  When the flashlight beam began to fade, she switched it off and knelt beside John. “Hang in there,” she whispered. “The troops are on the way.”

  In silence they waited until the matter–of–fact form of Deputy Martin re–emerged along the right fence. He swung back up on the pier. “I’ll need to see about that skeleton the sergeant reported.”

  Brandy nodded toward the open boat house door behind them. “In there, deputy,” she said. “I think the moccasin went into the lake, but be careful where you walk. In places the floor’s almost gone.” A few minutes later she heard the creaking of boards as he moved around, then his low whistle. He must have seen it.

  He eased his way back outside. “I’ll secure the place as soon as the response team gets here,” he said. “Odd place for a burial, all right.” He tugged a small spiral note pad and pencil out of his pocket. “We got a little time. I guess I ought to get your statement, Miss.”

  With the tail of her shirt Brandy wiped John’s forehead again. Professional of the deputy to pretend he didn’t notice the whole back of her shirt was missing. “I’m with the Tavares Beacon,” she began and described as completely as she could how they had found the bones. “The Sheriff will probably want to know if anyone’s missing around here,” she added. “The answer is, yes.” She glanced up toward the dormer windows. “A girl——her name was Eva Stone——vanished here in 1945.”

  The EMS van’s siren keened in the distance. By the time they could hear it bucketing down the lane and see the reflection of its blue light against the metal fence, John’s chest was heaving again. Deputy Martin leaped once more to the grassy slope and strode toward the parking lot.

  To Brandy the medical team’s efficiency seemed awesome. Attendants in white uniforms swarmed up onto the platform. As John was eased onto a stretcher at last, her eyes again filled with tears. Sick and weak, she leaned for support against the boat house wall.

  “This your boyfriend?” a technician asked.

  “Not exactly.” Her voice came in a whisper. “A good friend.”

  He stooped to pick up one end of the litter. “Now don’t worry. He’ll get treatment on the way to the hospital.” In seconds they were bearing John back across the lawn.

  She trailed behind to watch the van door slide shut and the white emergency vehicle spurt back down the lane out of sight, siren wailing. Brandy suddenly remembered the girl on John’s dresser. She ought to be told, as well as his brother and his parents. On the way back to the pier she realized she was bone weary, but her task was far from over. The deputy had taken a roll of yellow and black tape from his car and was carefully stringing it around the boat house.

  “Marking off this whole area,” he explained. “The medical examiner will be here in the morning. He’ll tell us the sex and age of the skeleton.” He drove a stake into the soft ground and attached the last section of tape. “Detectives will want to inspect everything. They’ll need to reach the home owner, if they haven’t found her already.”

  Brandy ducked under the tape and started for the boat slip. “Mrs. Langdon’s husband is at the Comfort Inn,” she said. “They’re separated, but he may know where she stays in town.” She dragged herself through the boat’s aluminum gate. “I’ve got to take this boat back to a trailer park on the Dora Canal. Then I’ll be going on to the hospital to see how Mr. Able’s doing.”

  Deputy Martin grinned. “I think you’ll be safe on the way back. The sergeant says you were followed when you came across the lake to report the bones. If anyone was trying to scare you off, they’ll know it’s too late. By now everyone in the area’s been waked up. A motorcycle race couldn’t make more noise than the dogs and EMS. Signal if you have any more trouble. I’ll alert the sergeant to have someone watch for you.”

  After Brandy had lifted the lines from the posts, she edged the boat out of the slip without looking back. She no longer trusted her senses. The moon is down, she thought. Time for night’s black agents. After half a century, was someone
still trying to hide a bloody secret?

  Yet the danger to John, not a ghost or a murderer, drove her across the black waters. As the boat plunged on toward the dim shoreline, she gripped the wheel and focused on steering toward the tall, lighted cylinder of the old Tavares courthouse.

  In twenty minutes she had signaled to a deputy on shore and received an answering wave of his beam. Cruising on for a quarter of a mile, she nosed into John’s boat slip, tied up, and clambered onto the pier. Before his trailer steps she paused. In the loose dirt around them were a man’s footprints. A fine detective I’d make, she said to herself. I can’t even tell if they’re John’s or someone else’s.

  With the last of the three keys on John’s ring, she unlocked the door and was swept by last night’s emotion, by the feel of being whirled in his arms down the hall. Again she saw the high plane of his cheek, the warmth of his glance——but this would not do. She tried to think instead of Mack, but she knew what Mack would say about tonight. On the lake at night with another guy? Breaking into a boat house? A cottonmouth? He’d warned her.

  For a few minutes Brandy slumped on the couch, bone tired. Then bracing herself, she picked up John’s kitchen phone and called home. Before her mother could unleash her full outrage at the hour, she explained that John was in the hospital and that she planned to stop there before she came home. Next came the Sheriff’s Office, where she asked a deputy to be sure John’s brother Steve knew about the injury and alerted their parents.

  In the bedroom Brandy studied the photograph. In one corner “Love, Sharon,” was inscribed in tiny, precise letters. No flare for imaginative language, she thought, but she felt a thickness in her chest. Last night’s indignation had melted with her first look at John’s wound. In the living room she noticed the yearbook and annual she had thrust under the coffee table the night before. Surely John wouldn’t care if she took a look at them now. He had said to take them. They might reveal insights into the people she had to interview. But tonight, she had to know he would be all right.