Casket Case (31 page)

He grinned and said, “Okay. I’m glad to know you really liked ’em. I’d been thinking you weren’t impressed with my work.”

“Oh, Dennis,” I said as I picked the dead animals up from the dining table. “This is a work of art. How could anyone not be impressed?” I wanted to grab the gun, but I was afraid that if I looked at it, Dennis would remember it. I had no doubt that if we went after it at the same time, he’d reach it before I did. If so, I might wind up being shot. I also didn’t want him looking at the floor and remembering his knife.

No matter how impressed with the squirrels I may have tried to appear, Dennis pulled a piece of rope from another pocket and tied my wrists together in front of me. He put the squirrels into my hands and pinned my arms against my body. He lifted me from the floor and, half-carrying, half-dragging me, forced me to his van.

I’d
never even wondered where Dennis Sharpe lived. He drove up Highway 21, cut off into a deeply wooded area, and made a few more turns before he stopped in front of a cabin with a couple of rickety-looking wooden tables in the front yard.

“Come on.” He pulled me across the seat and out his side of the van. Not wanting to offend him, I brought the squirrels with me, clutched against my chest with my bound hands.

Inside, the cabin was filled with dead animals, preserved and mounted on wood and stone. A couch was covered with more examples of his taxidermy. He shoved the birds, cats, dogs, raccoons, possums, and squirrels over, pushed me down, and sat beside me. The small round table near his kitchen area was covered with small tools and animal skins.

“It’s a good thing I’ve been following you,” he said. “Carter would have spoiled you for me if he’d killed you. I don’t want a mark on you.” He smiled. “I’m gonna tell you a secret. Sometimes when people want a mounted dog, some special breed, I steal one and then euthanize it so I can preserve it.”

The man’s expression was so proud. Like I’d be impressed. “I do it just like they execute people. I looked it up and ordered the same drugs off the Internet. It’s painless. The animal just goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up, and it doesn’t mar the body at all. That’s what I’m going to do for you. It will be painless.”

Buh-leeve me, I’d rather die painlessly than in agony, but given my druthers, I’d prefer to stay alive.
Think, Callie,
I said to myself,
there has to be something you can do, some way out of this.

“Then I’m going to preserve you forever and set you right here on the couch. I can watch you, and I won’t be out driving around looking for you, peeking through your windows, or following you when I should be working to make my business successful like it used to be.” He reached behind the couch and picked up a bag, which he handed to me. “Here, open this.”

I shook the bag and out fell a wig. A cheap platinum blonde wig. “Put it on,” Dennis said. “You’ll look like you did the day I met you.”

Obediently, I pulled the wig over my head and tried to stuff my own brown hair up under the blonde. “Don’t worry about that,” Dennis said, “I’m going to shave your head.”

Don’t ask me why, but the thought of his shaving my head was as terrifying as the realization that he planned to “euthanize” me.

“Dennis,” I said, “you don’t have to shave my head. I can color my hair back to blonde. Let’s go to the beauty supply store or the pharmacy. I’ll buy the color and put it back the way you like it.”
I need to get him to take me to where other people are. Let me see someone to signal that I need help.

As though reading my mind, Dennis said, “No, you’re never going to leave my cabin. I’ll put you to sleep and preserve you. Like that Eva Perón. Twenty years from now, you’ll still be sitting here with me every day, and I can talk to you while I work.” He sighed. “It gets lonely here.”

He was thinking Eva Perón. I was thinking Norman Bates. I also wondered how painless his euthanasia would be.
Think,
I told myself,
what have I read? Is it better to fight or try to convince an assailant to stop by talking to him, making him relate to his victim as a person?

If Dennis Sharpe was lonely and needed someone to talk to, I’d try to accommodate him. Surely I could speak better alive than dead. Of all things, I thought about one of my daddy’s chauvinistic jokes.

“Why can’t women ever speak their minds?” Daddy would ask. “Because it leaves them speechless,” he’d answer himself, then laugh like he was the greatest comedian in the world.

Tears burned my eyes. Daddy had just opened up and really shown emotion toward me on my birthday. My disappearance would devastate him. And The Boys. And Jane. And the Middletons. And Rizzie. And maybe Levi Pinckney. And what would happen to Big Boy if I died?

Dennis pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tenderly wiped away my tears. Cautiously, trying not to hurt my battered face. “Nothing to be scared of, Callie. And just think, your face will remain unlined and unwrinkled. I can use some makeup to cover what happened to you on the highway. I didn’t even think it might disfigure you. I was so mad that I just wanted to scare you.”

“And your body,” Dennis said with eyes filled with awe. “Your body will stay just as youthful and firm as it is today—twenty, thirty, even forty years from now.”

“My body? If you’re searching for the perfect body, you’ve made a mistake!” I squeaked.

“What do you mean?”

“My body isn’t me.”

“Well, I know that. Your body is only part of you. There’s your personality and your sense of humor, and your intelligence. I can’t preserve those for you, but they’ll always exist in my mind while I have the physical you here with me always.”

“Will I have to wear this black dress?” I asked, hoping I could convince him to take me shopping.

“No, I bought you a white dress. It’s not like the one Marilyn Monroe wore in that famous photo, but I know from her picture that you’ll look great with the blonde hair and white dress.”

“Will you show it to me?”

“You want to see it?” His tone changed again. Now he sounded like a little boy, eager to show off.

“Of course. I want to see all my presents from you so I can thank you for them.” I looked at the squirrels beside me with all the other animals that had been shoved over on the sofa. “Like my squirrels,” I said and turned so I could pick them up with my bound hands. I actually petted the back of that rat-thing.

“You never thanked me for the flowers. Not for the vase or the wreath.”

I was glad I’d never thanked Levi for the bouquet. I’d thought it was from him, but I hadn’t been sure enough. I almost told Dennis, “I didn’t know they were from you,” but that might set him off. Instead, I mumbled, “I’m a little shy sometimes. I didn’t know exactly how to tell you how much I loved them.” I almost fluttered my eyelashes at him.

“I guess you knew I was mad at you when I took the wreath to your house. I’m a man and sometimes men get mad at women. My father used to scream at my mother. ‘Sit down and shut up!’ he’d yell at her. You won’t have to worry about that because you’ll always be sitting quietly watching me do my work. Men like that, you know. A woman should watch her man work and admire what he does.”

“I could do that.” My voice had taken on a pleading tone that was strange to me. “I could watch you work. I could admire you. I could even cook your meals and clean the house for you,” I said, but I thought,
until I could get away or slam one of these rocks against your head.

“You don’t understand, Callie. I want you with me forever, but I don’t trust you.”

“You can believe me. I promise.” I didn’t even bother to cross my fingers. My words weren’t a fib; they were an outright lie.

“I’ve been looking all my life for the perfect woman. Every time I find one it turns out that she isn’t right or she leaves me. I’ve found you. I wish I could freeze-dry you. I can’t afford the equipment, but I’ll preserve you even better than if you was freeze-dried. It’s going to be perfect. Wait right here.”

He stood, then shook his head. “No, you’d better come with me. I can’t trust you not to run out the door.” He snatched me up by my arm, pulling me so hard that both hands flew up. He dragged me into a bedroom, small and crowded with even more dead animals, many of them reptiles. Snakes, lizards, and turtles of all sizes filled one side of the room. Foxes and wolves on the other side were poised for attack, mouths open with bared teeth. Suspended from the ceiling with wings spread, seagulls seemed caught in flight.

Dennis zeroed in on my staring at the seagulls. “You should have seen yourself that day when I was hunting seagulls,” he said. “I don’t usually kill them. I just try to break a wing so they fall and I won’t have so much work to do to cover the shot. I was just playing with you when I shot the watermelon.” He laughed.

He opened the door to a wardrobe and pulled out a white dress on a hanger. On the shelf at the top, I saw a jumble of brightly colored satin and laces. Jane’s thongs. The thief who stole them from the back of the Mustang hadn’t been a squirrel or raccoon. It had been a rat. A rat named Dennis Sharpe. He saw me looking and slammed the wardrobe closed. Then he picked up a shoebox from the floor and pushed me out into the main room again. “I need to get you still and quiet because I’m not really good with inserting the IV needle. I’ve got exactly the drugs used for executions, so it will be peaceful and painless, but I need you to be still, so I’ve got some animal tranquilizer.”

He lifted a dart gun from the box. “I don’t think this hurts much either. You need to lie down on the couch.” He began shoving the mounted animals onto the floor. I strained against his arm, trying to pull away, with no success.

“See, Callie, you’re fighting me all the way.”

He pointed the dart gun straight at me.

He paused for barely a moment, but his grip on me loosened.

Only a second or so, but it was long enough for me to jerk away from him and run as hard and fast as I could out the front door. I crashed straight into my daddy. Sheriff Harmon ran beside him with his gun drawn. Dennis Sharpe came charging through the door still aiming the tranq at me. Again, the sound of gunfire. Not a tranquilizer dart. A forty millimeter. The sheriff bent over Dennis Sharpe’s prostrate form and said, “I hit him, and he’s out, but it wasn’t a chest shot. How about you, Callie?”

My answer was silent, but dramatic.

I threw up again.

Jane
and I lay on the sand at Hunting Island Beach, trying to get some tan in the late afternoon sun. With her naturally light skin, Jane avoids the beach in the middle of the day, and I had worked until midafternoon anyway.

I’d picked her up at her new apartment, which for the time being was
our
new apartment. Both of us were living in Jane’s side of the duplex while our landlady had my living room painted and the carpet replaced. She’d even let me select what I wanted. I’d chosen a tan berber.

Jane suggested we come to the beach because she didn’t like hanging around the apartments until the remodeling was completed. She had this weird idea that George Carter’s ghost might be in my side of the duplex because he’d shed so much blood there.

I’d bought a bagged supper for us on the way home from work that afternoon, but we hadn’t opened it yet.

Jane wore her skimpiest purple string bikini while I had on a modest black one-piece suit, yet I felt more naked than she looked.

I’d bought the bathing suit before my birthday because it would conceal underwear if I wore an inflated bra and my booty-boosting panties beneath it, but I wasn’t wearing any underwear. All I had on was the maillot, which made me feel bare.

“You seem moody,” Jane said as she sat up and handed me the tanning lotion. I poured some of the solution into my palm and began rubbing it on her back. “I’d think you’d be happy that your friend Mrs. Counts won the Southern Belle Baking Contest and will be expanding her business.”