Tressed to Kill (18 page)

“Thanks,” I told Kayla again.
“Happy to help,” she said as I stepped through the door.

Chapter Eighteen

THE DAY WAS DIVING TOWARD EVENING AS I RETURNED to my car. It was hard to believe I’d been laid off that morning, thanks to the DuBois women and Barbara Mayhew. What with the tension of talking to Philip DuBois, the paddle boating, and running all over St. Elizabeth investigating a twenty-six-year-old mystery, not working was exhausting. I returned to my apartment, called Addie to tell her I’d hit a dead end, and decided another shower was in order. I let cool water spray over me for an unconscionably long time and emerged feeling refreshed. A spritz of cucumber-melon body splash and I felt like a new woman. Maybe Vonda would want to make good on the wine rain check. I called her up, and she offered to meet me at The Pirate.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “This reunion family are a bunch of polka fanatics, complete with their own instruments, and if I hear one more accordion solo I’m going to shoot someone. Ricky can man the fort tonight.”
We arrived at the bar simultaneously. “Let’s get our wine to go and walk on the beach,” I suggested. Despite the day’s activities, I felt antsy and didn’t want to be cooped up in the bar.
“Sure,” Vonda agreed. “I don’t think I could stand to watch that, anyway.” She nodded discreetly toward a couple kissing at a corner table. When they broke apart, I recognized Simone DuBois and her fiancé. A bottle of champagne nestled in a bucket on a stand beside the table.
The bartender handed Vonda and me plastic cups of wine, and we passed the cuddling couple on our way out. Simone glanced up, and a dazzling smile broke over her face. “Grace, Vonda!” she exclaimed, as if we were best friends and she hadn’t just shut down my mom’s business. “You can be the first to hear our big news. Greg and I got married today!” She waggled her ring finger to display the diamond-encircled wedding band that had joined the engagement ring.
“I’m a lucky man,” Greg announced, snagging the hand and kissing it. Simone giggled, more than a little tipsy.
We stared at them in astonishment. Vonda was the first to recover. “Well, congratulations,” she said. She raised her wine cup. “A toast to the bride and groom: may you have many years of happiness together.” We all raised our glasses and drank.
“We eloped,” Simone explained unnecessarily. “We’ll have a huge reception later this summer.”
“But I couldn’t wait any longer to call her my own,” Greg added, a goofy grin spreading across his face.
“The whole white wedding celebration thing didn’t feel right without my mom,” Simone said, a hint of sadness intruding on her face.
“Of course not,” I said gently. “You did the right thing.”
“I certainly did,” she said, shedding the sadness as she leaned over and kissed her new husband. When the kiss showed no signs of ending, Vonda and I crept away.
NINETY MINUTES LATER, WHEN VONDA RELUCTANTLY said she had to get back to the B&B, I called my mom. She said she was fine alone for the night, so I drove back to my apartment, ready for some time on my own. Closing the bedroom window, I turned the air-conditioning back on to cool things off. I couldn’t sleep if I was too warm. Fixing some mint tea, I slipped on my UGA tee shirt and curled up in the recliner to read Georgette Heyer’s
False Colours
. The lighthearted story was one of my faves and I could probably quote parts of it from memory; still, it never failed to comfort me or lighten my mood. When I got to the part where Kit agrees to impersonate his twin brother, I yawned and headed to my room. It might be only nine o’clock, but I was exhausted. And I’d be up late the next night at the Rothmere ball. I wondered suddenly if Special Agent Dillon would be there. Feeling a little tingle of anticipation, I brushed my teeth and climbed into bed, pulling up the crazy quilt my Nana Terhune made me.
I was just dropping off to sleep when a whisper of sound jolted my eyes open. I lay as still as a rabbit in a hawk’s shadow, straining to hear. I breathed in and out through my mouth, trying to slow my breaths, afraid I wouldn’t hear whatever it was over the thrum of blood pounding in my ears. It came again, a raspy shush. Maybe the forsythia bush scraping against the side of the apartment? No, it was closer than that. In the room. I couldn’t lie here like a sitting duck, waiting for whoever it was to make their move.
“Stop right there or I’ll shoot,” I said. My voice trembled. I leaned to my right to turn on the bedside lamp, wishing I really had a gun in the drawer.
The soft white of sixty watts illuminated the room. My eyes darted to the doorway. No one blocked the opening. I scanned the room. The bathroom door was wide open and no one crouched in the shower stall behind its glass door. The closet door was still closed. I hadn’t heard its distinctive squeak, so no one had jumped in there. An unsettling thought popped into my head. Maybe someone had hidden there earlier and was waiting for me to fall asleep before attacking. The sound I heard could’ve been the intruder brushing against some clothes. I felt light-headed.
With my eyes glued to the closet door, I ran through my options. One, open the door and confront whoever was hiding there. If I’d had a gun, that might have been doable; without one it was sheer stupidity. Two, quietly reach for the phone and call 911. But the intruder would hear the beeps as I dialed and might leap out of the closet. I could be raped or kidnapped or dead before the police arrived. Three, sneak out of the room and run like mad for the front door, then call 911 from Mrs. Jones’s house. I liked option three.
Still watching the closet—had I seen a shadow move across the half-inch space between the door and the floor?—I silently lifted the covers and slid my legs over the side of the bed closest to the door. I could do this. The skritching noise came again and I tore my gaze from the closet. He wasn’t in the closet—he was under the bed! Just as I was wondering if Mrs. Jones would hear me scream, my eyes caught a flicker of movement. Ye gods! A fat, evil-looking water moccasin was coiled on the floor not three feet from my bare foot. I froze.
Its heavy, triangle-shaped head tracked slightly back and forth, mouth open to show the white lining that gave it the name cottonmouth. The snake’s muddy gray body, thick as a man’s wrist, was coiled, ready to strike. I couldn’t reach the phone from where I sat, not without moving my foot. And I was afraid if I so much as twitched a toe, the snake would strike. I could clearly see its fangs and imagined them piercing my flesh, injecting toxin. After only five minutes of holding my position, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to win this reptilian game of freeze tag. The snake would outlast me. Already my tense muscles cried out for movement and I felt a cramp developing in my calf. I had to do something.
My eyes scanned the bed for anything within reaching distance. My pillow. Maybe I could drop my pillow on the snake and at least distract it long enough to get my foot back on the bed. It would still be between me and the door, but once I was out of striking range I could call for help. Moving slower than I ever had in my life, I inched my right arm behind my back to get a grip on my pillow. I tugged it a centimeter at a time until it was beside me and I could lift it onto my lap. I was sweating by the time I had it in both hands. Stuffed with goose down, the pillow made an unwieldy weapon. Yet, if I could drop it on the moccasin, its softness might smother the snake for a critical moment or two. With any luck, it would be a bit sluggish from staying immobile on the cool wood floor.
The snake had not relaxed its posture since I put my foot on the floor. My calf twitched as the cramp took hold and the snake tensed. It was now or never. Slowly easing the pillow to my left, I held it just off the edge of the bed. Should I heave it toward the snake or drop it between my foot and the snake? Thrusting the pillow toward the cottonmouth, I jerked my foot onto the bed and rolled to the middle as the snake struck. It banged against the box springs and I cried out involuntarily. I gave myself a couple of seconds to catch my breath, then scrambled to my feet in the middle of the bed and lunged toward the window. I wasn’t going to play hide and seek with a poisonous reptile all night. I knew moccasins could climb; I’d frequently seen them sunning on tree limbs stretched out over the Satilla River. I knew it was seeking warmth as the air-conditioning continued to do its job. And the warmest spot in the apartment was my bed.
I wasn’t up to seeing if I could out-race it to the door, and the bathroom wasn’t an option because the gap beneath the door and the floor was large enough for the snake to squeeze through. I climbed onto my bedside table, knocking a book and the lamp to the floor. With a crash of ceramic, the light went out. Damn! Not knowing where the snake was, I balanced precariously on the narrow table and jerked at the window sash. It flew open and I thrust a leg out, completely forgetting about the screen. It gave with a ripping sound and I swung my other leg onto the sill. Thanking the good Lord that I lived in a one-story apartment, I pushed off and crashed through an oleander bush on my way to the ground. I landed with a thud on my right side. The bitter scent of crushed oleander and the piney smell of the mulch engulfed me. Breathing heavily, I took stock of my situation. My flesh stung where the oleander’s branches had scraped it open, I felt bruised and I thought my ankle was twisted, but no bolts of pain shot through me so I figured I hadn’t broken anything. Gingerly pushing myself upward into a sitting position, I brushed mulch and dirt off my nightshirt and out of my hair.
Standing took a fair amount of effort, since I discovered I was trembling, my legs shaking so badly they hardly supported me. Forcing myself to move, I hobbled toward Mrs. Jones’s house and a telephone. No way was I reentering my apartment to make the call. As I rang the doorbell and waited for Mrs. Jones to answer, I wondered for the first time how the snake had gotten into my apartment. The answer that came to me made me shake so hard I was sitting cross-legged on the veranda when Mrs. Jones opened the door.
IT WAS MIDNIGHT BY THE TIME THE POLICE AWAKENED a snake wrangler—a man who made his living trapping nuisance gators and snakes that had taken up residence inside people’s homes, boathouses, or sheds—and he corralled the moccasin. By then, I was feeling calmer, partly because Mrs. Jones had put a slug of brandy in the cup of chamomile tea she brewed me and partly because Special Agent Dillon and a couple of patrol officers—not Hank, thank goodness—were inspecting the outside of the apartment with flashlights.
“He’s a feisty one,” the man said when he emerged from the apartment. Clad in thigh-high boots and gloves, he carried a heavy canvas bag that bucked and wiggled in an alarming way. Tucked under his other arm was a long metal tool.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked, hugging the rose-printed robe Mrs. Jones had loaned me tightly around my body.
“Turn ’im loose in the Okeefenokee where he won’t bother nobody,” he said. “Ain’t no point to killing him. You can’t blame him for doing what he did. He was just being a snake.”
That was all fine and dandy, but if he wanted to go on being a snake, he’d better stay out of people’s houses. “How did he get in, do you suppose?” I asked.
“Dunno.” The man shrugged. “Did you have the door open, or a window?”
“The window,” I admitted. “But it has a screen.”
“Maybe came up through a hole in the crawl space,” the man said, depositing the bag in a special container in the back of his truck. He clanked the snake-catching tool in beside it.
Dillon came around the side of the apartment as the man climbed into his truck. “Thanks, Tyrone,” he said, shaking the man’s hand. “I appreciate your coming out at this hour.”
“Anytime.” The man grinned and put his truck in gear.
“Hey, Special Agent,” one of the officers called from the side of the house. “Look at this.”
I trotted beside Dillon as he headed around the corner. The cop shone his flashlight at the window. “Here’s where your snake got in, miss.” Using the heavy end of the flashlight, he slipped it under a flap in the screen and lifted it. “Unless that moccasin was real handy with a Super Leatherman,” he said, “I’d say someone slit your screen and dumped it inside. You got any enemies?” He looked at me with concern and a hint of suspicion on his young face.
“No,” I said as Dillon replied, “Dozens. And making more every day.” His voice and expression were deadpan.
I glared at him as the patrol officer looked from me to Dillon and back, trying to decide if Dillon was kidding.
“It’s all right, Officer Hernandez. I’ll take it from here.”
Hernandez rounded up his partner, and the two of them returned to their patrol car.
“You know,” Dillon said, as the car bumped down the driveway, “I don’t think I’ve had a whole night’s sleep since I met you.”
The tag stuck up from his green shirt, and I reached out to tuck it in, snatching my hand back when I realized what I was doing. “That’s not my fault,” I said. I turned on my heel and headed barefoot back to Mrs. Jones’s veranda. She’d offered me a guest room for the night, and I’d accepted, knowing I wouldn’t get any sleep in the apartment and not wanting to alarm my mother by showing up on her doorstep at this hour.
Special Agent Dillon grabbed my arm to stop me. “This is getting serious, Grace. The attacks are escalating. That snake could have killed you, or at least put you in the hospital.”
“You think I don’t know that?” To my fury, tears leaked from my eyes.
“And whoever it is,” he went on inexorably, “has figured out where you live. The other incidents—the Molotov cocktail, the note, the intruder—all happened at your mother’s house. “Don’t the two of you have a relative you can visit some place like Oregon or Illinois until we close this case?”
“What if you never solve it?” I asked, scrubbing the tears away with the back of my hand. “Do we just start over again in Peoria? I don’t think so.”
“What happened today, Grace? Who did you talk to, what did you do to trigger this response?” His voice was grave.
I couldn’t read his face in the darkness. The light over Mrs. Jones’s door puddled on the veranda and didn’t seep beyond it into the darkness where we were still standing. Becoming aware that Dillon’s hand still held my arm, I shrugged it off. “Well, first thing this morning a lady from the State Board of Cosmetology closed down Mom’s shop—”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard that.”
“You must be the only one.”
He must have heard the tears in my voice because he said more gently, “Let’s sit.”
In silence, we walked to the veranda stairs and sat on the steps. I tucked my feet up under the hem of the robe. A cluster of moths beat frantically against the light over the front door. That’s how I feel, I told them silently. Like I’m beating my head against this case to no effect. The light’s yellow glow illuminated Dillon’s profile with its crooked nose and strong chin as I continued with the account of my day.