by Jessa Archer
The music and prayer reached a fever pitch, and Elijah stepped forward, holding one of the snakes out to his father, who raised it high over his head as he continued the swaying dance. Mindy watched, mesmerized. Then Eli held the second snake out toward her.
As she reached for it, the side door swung open. Billy Thorpe stepped inside, yelling “Police! Put the snakes away!”
I was pretty sure that was the first time Billy or anyone else with the Woodward County Sheriff’s Department had ever yelled those words when making an arrest. Whatever he was planning to say next, however, was drowned out by a piercing scream from Mindy Tucker as the snake Eli was holding sank its fangs into her arm.
✰ Chapter Eighteen ✰
Everyone froze.
Everyone except Abel, that is. The good Reverend Davenport lifted the snake he was holding above his head and hurled it into the aisle. Before the snake even landed, Abel grabbed the edge of the table and tipped it over. The Bible, the silver pitcher, and the reptile box all crashed to the floor.
The water—and whatever else was dissolved into it—splashed onto the wooden stage. Some of it was soaked up by Davenport’s Bible, which had landed face down. The handle of the box snapped off as the lid popped open and four snakes slithered out.
So, apparently, did Abel Davenport. While all eyes were on the box of snakes as it tumbled to the stage and then onto the steps and into the screaming congregation, the reverend vanished.
Two of the snakes retreated to the back of the stage, but three others, including the one that Davenport had flung through the air, were now loose in the main auditorium. And I doubted that any of the creatures were in a pleasant mood.
Mass panic spread through the barn as everyone shoved toward the nearest exit. There were only a few kids in the place, but since they were mostly the children of members, they were seated near the front and therefore near the snakes. Billy hesitated briefly just inside the door, clearly trying to figure out where Abel had gone. Then he did exactly what I knew he would. He grabbed the two kids closest to him and got them out of the building.
Wren’s military medic training kicked in. Despite her fear, she took off down the side aisle toward the stage, where Mindy Tucker was cowering behind the overturned table, clutching her arm. “Make sure Patsy’s mom gets out,” Wren yelled. “And any kids you see.”
Teresa Grimes was in her eighties and barely five feet tall, so Wren definitely had a point. It would be all too easy for her to get trampled if she somehow got separated from Jesse and Patsy. I began pushing my way through the people in the center aisle to see if she was okay, but we needn’t have worried. Jesse may be a horrible gossip and all-round pain in the butt when he’s at the diner, but he’d turned out to be very level-headed in a crisis. He’d scooped Teresa up and was halfway to the exit, with Patsy close behind.
Someone else had apparently stayed cool in the midst of the panic, because they’d thought to yank out the long plank of wood barricading the wide barn doors. Once they were open, the mass of people shifted in that direction, knocking over wooden chairs in their wake. Almost everyone made it outside in a matter of seconds.
The part of my brain that instinctively screams run when it sees a snake was strongly urging me to follow their lead. Instead, I glanced around to see if I could spot the escaped reptiles and, hopefully, figure out where Abel Davenport had gone. One of the snakes was under a chair toward the middle of the barn, curled into a tight little spiral of death. I gave it a wide berth. Abel hadn’t been anywhere near the three doors. It was entirely possible that there was another exit back behind the stage, but he hadn’t been headed in that direction, either. After he flung the snake into the aisle and tipped over the table, he went to his right. By the time I looked back, he had been gone.
Eli, however, hadn’t followed his father. He was still on the stage, pushing one of the snakes back into the box with a long metal rod that had a squeeze handle at one end and what looked like tongs at the other.
“There’s another snake hiding under a chair,” I told him. “Right side, near the middle.”
Eli nodded but didn’t say anything. The snake was now firmly inside the tongs. All of his attention was on getting it back into the box, which was luckily still intact, aside from the broken handle.
Wren crouched down next to Mindy and Meredith. The snake’s fangs had carved two deep, narrow parallel trenches into the girl’s arm.
“You need to stay calm,” she told Mindy, and then looked up at me. “Do you know if anyone called 911?”
“I saw a bunch of people on their phones. And I’m sure Billy—” I stopped. Where was Billy? He’d been helping kids get out, but I’d have thought he’d be back by now.
“You don’t need to call 911,” Elijah said. “She’ll be okay. We get bit all the time. The snakes are venomoids. Where did you say you saw the other one?”
Venomoid. My mind flashed back to the word scrawled on Tessa’s snake drawing.
“It’s over there,” I said, nodding toward the spot where I could still see the snake beneath the chair. “What’s…a venomoid?”
“It means they had an operation,” Meredith said. “Elijah’s dad had someone cut out their venom sacs. That way if you get bit, it’s not a big deal.”
“It’s a big deal for the snake,” Eli told her. “Two of them died during the operation.”
“Who cares about your stupid snakes?” Mindy said before shooting her mother an angry look. “And I’m sure you’d think it was a very big deal if you were the one who’d gotten bit. It still hurts, even if it’s not poisonous.”
“Venomous. Not poisonous,” Elijah corrected, and then nodded toward the pulpit. “And we have a first-aid kit inside there. Some ointment that will make it hurt less. Advil helps, too.”
I took two steps toward the pulpit and leaned down to look inside. Something rattled, and I scrambled back so quickly that I landed on my butt. “There’s also a freakin’ snake inside there!”
“Oh, good. You found her.” Eli smiled and trudged back up the steps.
From my vantage point on the ground, I had a good view of the loft and was surprised to see that the guy with the video camera was still filming. Which made sense, I guess. Video of the past few minutes would almost certainly go viral, which meant many thousands of people were probably going to get a good chuckle out of my reaction to the snake.
Eli hooked the handle of the first-aid kit with the metal rod. The snake hissed and reared its head as Eli extracted the kit and passed it to Wren. Then he deftly wrapped the tongs around the snake and carried it, wriggling frantically, over to the box. The top of the box was slit down the middle, with doors that opened under the snake’s weight. As soon as it dropped down into the box, the doors snapped shut behind it.
“This entire thing was a stupid idea,” Mindy said as Wren sprayed disinfectant on the wound.
“You’re the one who wanted to be on TV,” Meredith said.
“Not the only one,” Mindy shot back. “And I want to know about that man in the aisle. He’s my dad, isn’t he? Not the writer guy, but him.”
“Of course not,” Meredith said, getting to her feet. “I’ll be outside when you’re done here. This has been a total disaster.”
“Is that the last one?” I asked Eli. He was having a bit more trouble getting to the snake under the chair. It struck at the pole and then took off beneath the other chairs toward the wall.
“The last one in here, yeah. Josie escaped outside,” Eli said. “I hope she comes back. She’ll starve out there without her venom.”
Billy Thorpe came back into the barn a few seconds after Meredith left. The part-time deputy, Joe Mason, was right behind him. I could tell Billy was furious about something, and the twist of his mouth made me pretty sure that the something in question was connected to Blevins.
“I called for an ambulance,” he said to Mindy, “but they’re out on another call. We’re gonna get you down the mountain. The best thin
g you can do is keep calm, okay?”
“The snake that bit her was a venomoid,” Eli repeated as he hurried down the side aisle toward the snake. The tongs snagged the creature a little lower than they had with the others.
“What’s a—” Billy began.
“Venomoid,” I told him. “It’s not pois…I mean, not venomous anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Bart,” Eli cooed to the snake as he moved toward the stage. “That’s probably not comfortable, but you don’t want to get outside, buddy. You’d starve out there.”
Billy took several steps backward, and his gun was now pointed at Eli. “Put down the snake, Elijah.”
Eli looked at Billy’s gun, confused. “I don’t want you to shoot me, but if I put down the snake stick, Bart will get away. He can’t kill anyone, but like Mindy said a minute ago, it hurts if you get bit. I was gonna put him into the box with the others. Is that okay?”
“Eli captured the other snakes,” Wren said to Billy. “He seems to be trying to…help.”
It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either, to be honest. If I’d had to guess which Davenport would toss a snake into the congregation and head for the hills when the police busted down the door, I’d have gone for the one who was currently out on bail for drug charges. The one I was pretty sure was responsible for giving Tessa the drugs that killed her. Eli probably didn’t know that her body had been found, but still.
Billy nodded and waited for Elijah to drop the snake into the box. It took a bit longer this time, because the snake was partially wrapped around the metal rod. As much as the creature gave me the creeps, I kind of sympathized. I’d be holding on for dear life too if someone was about to force me inside a box of angry snakes. But Eli squeezed gently on the handle a few times, and the snake dropped into the container with the others.
“Move away from the box,” Billy said, motioning with the gun. Eli did, raising his hands without being told.
“Elijah Davenport,” he said, “you are under arrest for the murder of Tessa Martin. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will—”
“I didn’t kill Tessa,” Eli said. “I buried her, and I can tell you where, but I didn’t kill her.”
Billy nodded toward Deputy Mason, who cuffed Eli as Billy continued with the Miranda warning.
Eli didn’t heed the warning, however. “I swear, I didn’t kill her. I’ll go with you, and I won’t fight, but…she was my friend.”
“Friends don’t sell friends tainted drugs, Eli,” Billy said.
“You’re right. I never sold Tessa anything! And nothing I sold was ever tainted. It’s just the psychedelic stuff we use in our ceremonies, okay? To get the people in the mood. I’m…I’m not the one who makes it. I sold a little pot, too, from time to time, but you already know about that. And I ain’t sold nothin’ to nobody since I got out on bail. I wouldn’t have hurt Tessa. She was just as sad as I was about the operations. And now Josie is out there, and she’ll die without her venom. How’s she supposed to catch stuff to eat?”
“What on earth is he talking about?” Billy mused, shaking his head as Mason led Eli outside. Then he turned to me and Wren. “Do either of you have any idea where the preacher went?”
“No. He just vanished after he dumped out the snakes,” I said. “I thought maybe you were following him when you didn’t come back.”
“Never saw him. I was dealing with bureaucratic…stuff. The source of which should be here any minute.”
“What are you charging Abel with?”
“Public endangerment, for starters,” he said, then added in a lower voice, “although he’s not the only one I’d be charging with that in a perfect world.”
“How’s she doing?” Billy asked Wren, who was putting a tube of ointment back into the first-aid kit. Mindy’s arm was now wrapped in gauze and immobilized in a makeshift sling.
“I’ve treated it as a bite from a nonvenomous snake,” Wren replied. “I cleaned the wound, used antibiotic ointment, wrapped it, and immobilized the limb. It’s not much more than a graze, so even if the snake was venomous, she might be okay.”
A deep bass voice said, “I’ve got him in the back of your car, Billy.”
I glanced at Joe Mason in surprise, realizing that I’d never heard him speak before. He was whip thin and slightly shorter than average, not really the kind of guy you’d expect to have pipes like James Earl Jones.
Billy nodded and said, “Thanks, Mace. I’ll have backup any minute. The old guy probably isn’t dangerous, anyway. Tell anyone still standing around to wait in their cars until we release them, and then go on and drive the girl here and her mom to the ER in Maryville. No need taking chances.”
“We don’t have insurance,” Meredith said. She was leaning against the frame of the open barn doors. “So we need to skip the ER bit. Mindy’s tough, like her mama. She’ll be okay.”
Jesse Yarnell was standing just behind Meredith with his hands in his pockets. Beyond him, Patsy and her mom were watching. I had a feeling they’d all just had a very interesting conversation.
“Take her to the ER,” Jesse told Mason. “I’ll follow you down and cover the cost for the doctors to check her out. Like Billy said, no need takin’ chances.”
Sirens sounded outside as Meredith whirled around to face Jesse. “I don’t need your help, Jesse Yarnell.”
“Wasn’t plannin’ to help you one bit, Meredith. This is about Mindy.”
And with that, Jesse turned and headed back toward Patsy and Teresa.
“Take the snakes with you,” Billy told Mason. “Even if they’re not poisonous, they may want to see what bit her. And keep the two of them at the ER until you hear from me or Blevins. I don’t know yet, but there may be charges.”
When Mason left, I pointed up to the loft and told Billy, “That’s who you need to talk to. He’s been filming the whole time. And if he didn’t catch which exit Abel Davenport used, I’m pretty sure one of the other cameras did. Davenport said they were doing some sort of documentary, or a pilot for a TV show. That’s why the crowd was so big tonight.”
“Well, imagine that,” Blevins said from behind me. “How would we ever have guessed what was going on without the shrewd and savvy Ruth Townsend here to connect the dots?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time she’s had to do it for you,” Wren said. “Although there are cameras around this time, so vanity might have drawn you here all on its own.”
I gave Wren a little smile of thanks but kind of wished she hadn’t chimed in. Steve Blevins ignored her comment entirely. In fact, he didn’t even deign to look at her, and under normal circumstances, he might have let her snarky words slide. But his face was currently at maximum sneer as he walked over to talk with Billy. He was furious about something, so I suspected he’d hold a grudge this time. That likely meant there would be a speeding ticket or some other sort of traffic infraction in Wren’s near future.
Blevins turned back to us and said, “You two get back to your car. We’ll let you know when you can leave. Billy, search this place top to bottom.” Then he yelled, “Hey, Lionel! Come on down. The old guy is probably over at his cabin or in the chapel. We can get some more footage there.”
“Sure thing,” the man yelled back. “Let me get my shoulder mount on.”
“I’m going to ride down to the ER with Mindy,” Wren told me. “My training is rusty, but at least there will be someone in the car who knows what signs to watch for. That way, Deputy Mason can just focus on driving without having to keep an eye on her. I’m going to take a wild guess that Meredith’s first-aid skills don’t extend beyond applying a Band-Aid. I’ll get a ride back with Patsy.”
“Are you sure? I can drive you down. Or come pick you up.”
“No,” she said. “Stay and keep Blevins straight. Something about this stinks. I think Eli’s telling the truth about Tessa.”
“So do I.” It was more of a gut feeling than anything else, but I’ve learned to trust those. �
��Funny how Blevins is on a first-name basis with Davenport’s camera crew.”
Wren gave me a hug and whispered a quick shhh into my ear. Then I felt something drop into my purse.
I glanced down. Nestled between my wallet and my reading glasses was the little three-eyed alien.
✰ Chapter Nineteen ✰
I followed the first part of the sheriff’s orders and returned to my Jeep. One car, a burgundy Dodge Charger, was noticeably absent from the lot, but most of the others seemed to be waiting for permission to depart.
I’d barely closed the door of the Jeep when I saw Blevins and Pointy Beard, whose name was apparently Lionel, walking toward the chapel. Blevins was talking and the cameraman was filming as they walked. As soon as they passed, I got back out and sneaked around the rear of the barn, keeping a careful eye out for Eli’s slithery friend Josie.
For the first time in weeks, I was glad that it was a wicked hot night. If Blevins had been the one to put Eli Davenport in the back of Billy’s car, he might have left the windows up despite the heat. To be fair, it probably wasn’t much hotter in the car than it was in the barn with all of the doors closed. But Mason was apparently closer to Billy Thorpe in terms of basic humanity. Both windows were rolled down a few inches to let what little breeze there was drift through.
I crouched down behind Billy’s car. Eli was leaning back against the seat. His cheeks were damp, but given the heat, I couldn’t be sure if it was from tears or sweat.
“Eli,” I said softly. He startled, and I realized he probably couldn’t see me. But I couldn’t risk going around to the other side because Blevins might spot me. So I tapped on the side of the car door.
“Over here,” I said. “It’s Ruth Townsend. From the yard sale? I own the Thistlewood Star. You said you didn’t kill Tessa. So tell me who did.”
He was quiet for a moment, so I said, “We don’t have long, Eli. You said Tessa was your friend. She deserves better than the guy who killed her going free, even if he’s your dad. If he did it, you shouldn’t take the fall for him. I need you to tell me what you know before Blevins comes out and runs me off.”
