“You’re a wimp,” she said.
“Yes, I am. Now stop and let me rest before I shoot you.”
“You’re too tired to pull the trigger.”
“Probably. But I could scare you.”
“We’ll take two minutes. Breathe a little. Drink some water. And here, eat this energy bar.”
“I don’t need energy. I need a new body.”
“Well, you’re not going to find one up here. So, eat this,” she said and threw the bar at me.
I caught it, rested a few seconds, unwrapped it, and then decided my mouth was too tired to chew. If only this mountain had some level places in it. The dogs were lying down and panting hard. I knew how they felt. Starnes was even making sounds of labored breathing.
“See, you’ve exhausted two strong canines,” I said to her.
“They’re wimps, too.”
“There is no mercy in you whatsoever.”
“We gotta find that girl. I can live with some pain. I can’t live with finding her body. I want her alive and well.”
“I do too, but there’s only so much that I can take of this.”
“Okay, we’ll rest a little here, but we can’t take too long.”
“Don’t those two guys have to stop and rest?”
“Money is motivating their stamina,” she said. “You and I are motivated by altruism.”
“And here I thought I was a detective to earn a living.”
“When’s the last time you were paid for doing detective work?”
I had to think, and my mind was too tired to do that. I had to force myself to chew the energy bar. The water tasted good, but the best thing was that I was sitting and not moving my legs. They seemed to appreciate the inactivity of the moment.
After a few minutes, Starnes stood up and motioned for me. She didn’t say a word. She simply moved on up the mountain, and I reluctantly pulled myself to a standing position and followed her. She was now about forty yards ahead of me. The dogs were maintaining their close proximity to her position and her hiking speed. I was the tail of the donkey.
Chapter 13
“I grow some things, Laurel Shelton, but mostly I hunt and fish. A strange old woman taught me how to cook.”
“Who taught you how to hunt?”
“I don’t remember. I reckon I jest learned it ‘natural. Some things jest come to ya. Does that happen to you?” Homer said.
“Sometimes, Mr. Gosnell. Sometimes.”
“Please call me Homer.”
“Is that a family name?”
“Whattaya mean?”
“Is there someone in your family’s history named Homer?”
“Not that I hear’d of. I wuz told long ago by someone that my mama liked to read someone named Homer whilst she wuz in school.”
“That’s a good reason to name one’s child Homer, I suppose,” Laurel said. “And you’re the only one in the family with that name.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I ever knew anyone named Homer. The old woman told me that I was named after a very smart Greek poet.”
“I have read some of his poetry,” Laurel said.
“Can you ‘cite any of it?”
“No, but I can tell you the story he wrote about in his poetry, at least I can tell you some of the story.”
“That would be good. Been a long while since a body told me a story.”
“Who is the old woman you refer to?”
“She comes and goes. Most of the time she shows up here at night. I don’t know how she gets here, but she comes, walks right in and sits down over there,” he pointed to a small chair by the window closest to the front door.
“That does seem odd,” she said. “I thought I was your first visitor.”
“I don’t count her as visitor. She’s more like a ghost-thing, you know, she comes and goes as she pleases. Not a’ tall like a regular person, you know. Jest keeps me from bein’ so lonely, I reckon.”
“What do you hunt, Homer?”
“Whatever I get hungry for. Ya like your squirrel and dumplings?”
“Not my favorite, but I’m hungry enough to eat a bear if I had to.”
Homer smiled. “Bear meat can be tough to chew if’en you don’t cook it proper. I’m still learnin’ ‘bout how best to fix it. But I do have some leftover squirrel and dumplings.”
“That’d be good,” Laurel said.
Homer moved quickly to retrieve a pot from the refrigerator and put it on the small stove he had.
“Good to know ya eat natural stuff. I will find a rabbit tomorrow and make you a stew.”
Laurel watched Homer set the table and then dish out a large helping of the squirrel dumplings he had heated for her. He poured her a glass of water and set it next to the plate. She took a small, cautious bite of the squirrel. It was good.
Homer watched Laurel as she finished the large helping in short order.
“Did the old woman teach you about making stew?” Laurel asked.
“She did, as a fact. She’s taught me jest about ever’thing I know ‘bout cookin’. Still learnin’ some stuff, but I do alright.”
“And you never asked her name?”
“Oh, yes. I asked her name,” he said as he took her empty plate to his sink.
“And what did she say her name was?”
“She said jest call her Aunt Jo. But that don’t seem to be right by me since I don’t know her to be kin to me. So, I call her Miss Jo, jest to be polite. She’s an old woman for sure.”
Homer picked up a bucket and headed towards his back door.
“I’ll be right back. I need to get some water from the spring out here so I can clean the dishes. I like things to be clean and neat.”
He left and Laurel had a moment alone to look around his small but well-kept cabin. Questions remained for her as she took in her new setting – a sparsely furnished dwelling in this isolated region of the county. He had managed to live alone and become quite self-sufficient, at least that’s what she thought. An old woman named Jo who visited him by night taught him to cook. Laurel thought that to be an oddity of sorts. Teaching himself to hunt and fish seemed a bit more natural to her. She had heard some stories about an old woman named Aunt Jo who had the sight, but she figured folks were just making up stuff to entertain themselves.
She wondered about Homer’s age. In fact, Laurel Shelton wondered about many things related to her new acquaintance, Homer Gosnell. She had questions about his family for sure.
After he returned and began washing the dishes from the meal he had prepared for her, she offered to dry the dishes and put them away. He had to show her where each dish was housed, but that was part of her scheme to see what Homer had by way of supplies.
When they finished washing and drying, she told him some of the tales she could recall about Odysseus, Homer the poet’s great hero in The Odyssey. Homer Gosnell was enraptured by the stories and the events as Laurel related them. He became like a child listening to the exploits of the great character from Homeric literature. Quite often Laurel provided her own spin to a specific incident although she seldom wavered from the fabled storyline. She sometimes spiced up an adventure, but never tried to deceive Homer Gosnell, her captivated audience, by changing the original plot.
Two hours flew by for the tale-spinner and the listener. For Homer, it was the best evening of his life in the last several years. For Laurel, it was a time to forget her anxiety, her fear, and the threats that were looming in being pursued for no discernible reason by some yet unknown men.
“You can sleep on the bed in that room,” Homer said. “It’s clean. I washed the sheets this morning. It smells really good.”
“But where will you sleep?” Laurel asked after having observed that there were only two rooms in that tiny house.
“By the door,” he said. “I have a blanket. It was given to me by Miss Jo. She said I would find it useful in the winter. It will be useful tonight. It’ll make the wooden floor a little softer.” He smiled at Laurel. It
was a pleasing smile, at least Laurel thought so.
“That’s really kind of you, Homer. I hate to take your bed.”
“You slept in the woods under some leaves. My bed is yours. I sleep by the door.”
Laurel told Homer she needed some privacy to go to sleep. Homer took an old sheet from his tiny supply closet and constructed a barrier between the rooms. There was no door between the two rooms. Laurel didn’t have bedclothes to change into. When she ran away, she knew that she would be sleeping outdoors most of the time. Still, she wanted to have some privacy.
He obliged without hesitation.
She had settled into his comfortable bed and had dozed off momentarily when a sound awakened her. The little cabin was dark. Homer had no electric lights and used only two oil lamps. They had both been extinguished by this time.
The sound from outside the cabin came again. Laurel got out of the bed and slowly moved in the direction of the sheet hanging between the rooms. She was practically blind. The blackness of the room was thick.
She arrived at the sheet and pulled one edge of it aside. More blackness in the outer room.
“Homer,” she said in a soft voice.
There was no answer.
“Homer, are you awake?” she said in the same voice.
Again, no answer. She decided not to venture into the outer room. She could easily recall the sparse layout, the position of the few pieces of furniture that Homer had, but she did not want to move about in the darkness. She moved to the wall on the right side of the sheet and slid down to the floor quietly. At some point, she remembered that she had removed her boots. She crawled back in the direction of the bed. Using her hands, she searched for the boots in the darkness. She found them after a few minutes of searching and leaned against the wall close to the bed to put them on.
She decided to stay where she was instead of crawling back to the sheet door.
Unknown to Laurel, Homer had heard the sound outside the cabin. Through his years of isolation, he had become a light sleeper. The smallest of sounds would easily awaken him. He had eased out of the cabin’s door with his weapon of choice. He was a hunter, after all. Quietly, he positioned himself in the natural light of the nighttime to see what it was that was approaching his home.
There was no moon to aid his vision on this night. Only a few stars were out, but they provided sufficient light for him to see two figures moving towards his place. Homer judged the distance from him to them. He aimed his bow at the figure in the lead and released the arrow as if he knew exactly what he was doing.
The first arrow hit Homer’s target in the upper torso. Homer could not tell exactly where his arrow had penetrated, but he knew he had hit his mark. The sound the arrow makes when penetrating flesh was familiar to Homer. Immediately there was a soft moan. Homer figured it was from the figure he had shot. The other figure turned and ran away, leaving his now dead companion. The second arrow from Homer’s bow narrowly missed the running figure. It was only by luck that the arrow had not struck the second figure. When the second figure realized that his companion had been shot, he turned and began running back into the woods as fast as he could. In the darkness, he could not see the large root extending from the maple, which caused him to trip at just the right moment. The arrow whizzed by allowing him to live another day.
Homer waited a long time to see if the other figure would return.
Inside the cabin, Laurel Shelton thought she had heard something that sounded like a groan. Prior to that sound, a rushing noise like an extremely fast bird had come whistling by and landed abruptly. She could not identify what bird might make such a noise. It was foreign to her.
She crawled back to the sheet door. Leaning against the right-side wall once more, she waited for some sound in the outer room. She was anxiously quiet.
Laurel heard a squeak.
“Homer,” she called, this time in a much louder voice.
“I’m here, Laurel Shelton,” he answered.
“I thought I heard a noise outside,” she said.
“I checked. Just some night critters scurrying about. No worry. They will not bother you.”
Her apprehension was too high for her to move back to the bed. She leaned against the wall and after nearly two hours of trying to control her fears, exhaustion finally allowed some sleep.
Chapter 14
It was twilight when our little crew reached a point in the dense forest which permitted us to see a clearing ahead. We found a thicket of holly bushes to hide behind. I suspected that our two men had either stopped, as we did, to check out the clearing or had decided to camp for the night near the edge where the clearing and the forest intersected.
“You stay here with the dogs, and I’ll go check out that opening ahead of us,” Starnes said.
The muscles in my legs refused to allow me to disagree. Besides, she was more of a Daniel Boone type. Perhaps Danielle Boone would fit better. The dogs lay down and achieved that ridiculously easy sleep that most canines can do without so much as a pause between consciousness and deep sleep. I envied them.
I watched Starnes move cautiously through the thick foliage without making much noise. She was quite good at this woodsy stuff. The city lifestyle of my last twenty-some years adversely affected my rural side. My legs were thanking me for the rest.
I felt some hunger pains, but I was still too tired to chew. Besides that, we had only energy bars with us. They were not necessarily what I craved now. Food was not something we had planned on needing.
Starnes returned.
“Spotted them. They’re bedded down on the backside of a small cabin in that clearing.”
“They must think that Laurel is in that cabin,” I said.
“Be my guess, as well. Either they saw her go in or maybe saw her through a window. Who knows? At least they are there for a bit.”
“Waiting on the night?”
“Again, that’d be my strategy. They’ll likely make a move sometime after dark. We just need to keep an eye on them.”
“Can you see them from here?”
“No. We need to shift to a spot closer. Some mountain laurel are fairly thick about two hundred yards ahead on the left. If we move one at a time, each taking our dog with us, I think we can manage to get there undetected.”
Sounded like a plan. She led the way with Dog. I kept my eyes on her as she moved along crouching low to the ground. It appeared to me that she was also whispering to Dog as they inched along the rugged terrain. It was the first time I had noticed that she talked to the animal except for calling her to come. Maybe they were developing a relationship. Go figure.
She waved to me with our predetermined all-clear signal. Sam and I moved out. I gave him instructions on staying quiet and close to me. He obliged as if English were his first language. Sam and I had been conversing for several years now. It was not any dog whisperer kind of thing that existed between us. I spoke normally in plain English to him, and he seemed to understand from the first day we had met. Unusual dog.
When I was within fifty yards of her position, Starnes moved out again to the final destination. I followed suit, pausing only to make sure that the way was still clear. Starnes signaled to us. I followed and arrived safely and quietly. The four of us settled in for the next few hours. We were now waiting on our subjects to make the next move. They were squatting close to the cabin a hundred yards away in our clear sights.
Darkness descended. The coolness of the evening gave me a chill. The sweat I had created by pushing my body up the steep mountain was now causing me to cool down faster than I wanted.
“Pass me the blanket,” I said.
“Endure,” she said. “Use the dog.”
I was already using the dog. Sam and I were cuddling close as if we had a thing for each other. Despite his noticeable warmth, I was still cold. I wanted to wrap him around me, but I couldn’t figure out just how to do that.
“Can you see anything?” I said to the lookout.
&nb
sp; “They’re lying on the ground and watching the cabin.”
I decided to move and join Starnes. I was hoping that the minor exercise would create some semblance of warmth for my shivering body. I could see the two figures in what I figured to be starlight. It was a moonless night.
“You hungry?” I whispered.
“Trying not to think about it.”
“You should’ve been born in the 18th century,” I said.
“Then I’d be too old to be much good to you now,” she said.
Starnes’ humor.
I looked at my phone for the time. It was after ten. How time flies. I had expected it to be much earlier in the evening. The light in the cabin was still on. Being an alert detective, I noticed that the cabin light was flickering. I mentioned that to Starnes.
“Oil lamp,” she said.
“I figured as much despite my ignorance of mountain ways.”
Time passed. The light in the cabin went out. A few more minutes passed. The two figures stood up and began moving slowly towards the cabin. Whoever was inside was probably bedding down for the evening. Apparently, it was time for the two men to attack.
What struck me as odd was that I could easily hear the two men walking as they moved toward the cabin.
“Not very stealthy,” I said and pointed in the direction of our subjects.
“Not very smart either,” Starnes replied. “They could get themselves shot.”
“I doubt if Laurel is packing a weapon.”
“Only a knife. But there could be someone else inside that cabin besides Laurel,” she said.
“Hence their need for stealth, I suppose?”
“We need to move,” Starnes said. “Tell Sam to stay here for the moment.
I obliged, and we headed towards the two men who were presently moving towards the cabin in the clearing. The two figures ahead of us were close to the cabin but still in the open field. Suddenly, one of our two subjects fell to ground. I thought I heard a grunt, but I couldn’t be for sure.
“Did you hear anything?” I said to Starnes.
“No. Just saw one fall.”
The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon Page 8
