Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures Box Set

by Margaret Lashley

  “Okay.” He looked down at my boots. “So what’s with the clodhoppers, Red?”

  “Don’t call me Red. They’re my father’s work boots.”

  “He doesn’t need them?”

  “Not where he is at the moment.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You tell me, Mr. Philosopher. He’s dead.”

  Grayson nodded. “Oh. The old Heaven-or-Hell paradox. If you’re into that sort of thing.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. But I’m quite certain there’s an intelligence at work behind all that exists. Does that work for you?”

  I shot him some side-eye. “Not really.”

  Grayson glanced to his right for a moment, as if he were consulting someone sitting beside him. He turned to face me again. “That’s okay. The universal intelligence says you don’t actually work for it, either.”

  Red flags began to wave like a NASCAR pileup. So I did what I usually did when that happened with a guy.

  I ignored them.

  I shifted into first and headed out of the parking lot.

  “Tell me something,” I said as we buzzed down Obsidian Road. “What’s with the fedora?”

  Grayson touched the vintage hat on his head. “This old thing? Keeps my head warm.”

  “It’s a Dobb’s Fifth Avenue from the 1950s.”

  Grayson shot me an appreciative smile. “That it is. Impressive.”

  “I worked in antiques after college.”

  “Smart move. I worked in entomology.”

  My foot nearly slipped off the accelerator. “Really? Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can earwigs really drive a person crazy?”

  Grayson laughed. “I have to hand it to you. You do pose some interesting topics of conversation.”

  I winced. “Sorry. I’ve never been much for small talk.”

  “Me neither. To answer your question, I suppose anything could drive a person crazy if they gave it enough power.”

  I groaned. “Not philosophy again. Come on. I’m talking about real life. Like ... what if an earwig crawled inside somebody’s ear?”

  “Ah. Anisolabis maritima. The poor, maligned little earwig. That’s an urban myth. Sure, once in a while one finds its way into someone’s ear. But it’s just looking for a dark, moist place to hide out. There’s never been a case of one damaging anyone’s brain or driving them crazy. In fact, they’re one of the few insects that display maternal instincts. But then again, they also eat guano. Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “No particular reason. We’re here.”

  I pulled the Mustang off the road where Grayson’s RV had come to a standstill two nights ago. It wasn’t hard to find. A few straggling scavengers still circled in the sky above, marking the spot like Mother Nature’s own GPS death drones.

  “Ugh. Buzzards,” I said, looking up as I climbed out of the car.

  “Vultures,” Grayson corrected.

  “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” I said. “Follow me.”

  Grayson kept close, just a step or two behind me as I searched for the trail I’d trampled into the sawgrass yesterday. The overnight rains had plumped the grass and washed the sand, making the trail barely discernable.

  “Only Americans call members of the genus Cathartes buzzards,” Grayson said behind me as I fumbled my way through the thigh-high grass. “To everyone else on the planet, a buzzard is a hawk, a bird of prey.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked, slightly annoyed.

  “In detective work, getting the details correct is critical. Buzzards are actually turkey vultures.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “They’re vultures. But that over there is a dead dog.”

  I pointed to the carcass lying about fifteen feet ahead in a clearing just beyond a stand of pines. The animal appeared to have lost its bloat and collapsed inward. It looked like a moth-eaten fur coat.

  Grayson walked up to the carcass. He squatted down close enough to disturb a swarm of flies. “It’s a dog, all right. Gave somebody hell, too. The fur around its jaws is black with encrusted blood.”

  “What do you mean somebody? Couldn’t another animal have attacked it?”

  “Sure. As long as the other animal knew how to wield a knife. See those straight, inch-long wounds in its side?”

  I stepped closer and tried not to breathe. Grayson took a stick and poked at a few holes, making my stomach twist. “Knife punctures,” he said, as matter-of-factly as if he were giving someone his lunch order.

  I’ll have a homicidal stab wound and a side of fries.

  I grimaced. “You sure you didn’t hit it with your RV?”

  “Yes. I don’t see any crushing injuries. No broken bones.”

  “Could the dog be the source of the red eyes you saw the other night?”

  “Well, I think we can rule that out, too.”

  “How?”

  Grayson lifted the dog’s head up with a stick. The eye socket on the other side of its head had been sewn shut.

  “That would be hard to pull off with only one eye,” Grayson said almost merrily. “Yes. Those are knife punctures, all right. This dog put up one hell of a fight. I’m surprised the guy who tangled with it made it out of here alive.”

  “Uh ... maybe he didn’t.”

  Grayson looked up at me. “Why do you say that?” He rose to his feet like a shot, then glanced all around him. “Do you see a body?”

  “No. But yesterday, I thought I did. I must’ve imagined it, because when I came back an hour later with Paulson, it wasn’t here.”

  Grayson studied me. “Are you in the habit of seeing imaginary dead bodies?”

  When I didn’t dignify his question with an answer, Grayson’s face softened. “Look. It may be important. What did this body you thought you saw look like? Was it male? Female?”

  “I don’t know. The face was ... gone. Ripped off or something. Its head was a bloody pulp.”

  Grayson nodded. I studied him for signs of skepticism, but couldn’t detect anything but earnest interest.

  “What else can you tell me about it?” he asked.

  “It was wearing an orange jumpsuit.”

  “Hmmm. Must have been an escaped convict.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ever since I was a kid playing in the woods, I always worried I’d come across an escapee from Starke Prison. Maybe I really did just imagine it.”

  “But you’re not a kid anymore,” Grayson said.

  I looked away and studied the ground at his feet.

  “Something tells me there’s more to this, Drex. Something you’re not telling me.”

  Ahh crap. What the hell.

  “This isn’t the first dead guy I’ve seen lately who turned out to be a mirage.”

  Grayson took a step toward me. “What do you mean?”

  I sighed. I was in this deep. Might as well go all the way.

  “The guy who shot me on Thursday? I saw him in the hospital as I was leaving. I’d swear it was him. But then Earl told me it couldn’t have been, because he was dead. Hit by a bus.”

  Grayson nodded. “Time to cue the Twilight Zone music, huh?”

  Dammit. I shouldn’t have told him.

  “So where was this guy you saw yesterday?” Grayson asked.

  I pointed to a stand of trees. “Up against that pine over there.”

  I followed Grayson over to the tree. He examined the bed of rust-colored pine needles surrounding the trunk, then used a stick to clear a spot in the sand below. The normally light-gray sand was tinged pinkish-red.

  “Could be your guy was no ghost.”

  I peered at the pink sand. “Is that blood?”

  “Possibly. Hard to be sure after all the rain last night.”

  I glanced around the woods, suddenly horrified. “So what happened to the body? He was dead, I’m sure of it. He couldn’t have gotten up or crawled
away.”

  I wanted to ask Grayson if he believed in zombies, but then again, I didn’t want to know the answer.

  “See these marks and scuffs in the sand?” Grayson pointed to a set of half washed away canine-looking tracks and slash lines in the sand. “He could’ve been dragged off by predators. Or eaten down to nothing by your friendly neighborhood vultures.”

  I shook my head. “Not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “After I saw the body ... or mirage, or whatever the hell it was, I ran back to my car and called Paulson. It took him about an hour to arrive. When we came back here, the dog was still over there, but the body was gone. I had to have imagined it. Vultures couldn’t have eaten it in an hour.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Grayson countered. “A few years ago, a woman fell to her death hiking in the French Pyrenees. Before the rescue helicopter could get there, she’d been totally devoured by vultures in under forty-five minutes.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Nothing left but shoes and clothes and a few bones.”

  “Gross! How do you know that?”

  “A good private investigator keeps up with those kinds of things. That, and I happen to have a subscription to the Huffington Post.”

  “Ugh! Even if you’re right, and I’m not saying you are, shouldn’t there be something left of the body? Or at least the orange jumpsuit? It should be easy to spot in the grass around here.”

  Grayson smiled like a proud professor. “Now you’re thinking like a private investigator.”

  “Save your praise. I’m not really a P.I. At least, not yet. I’ve only got my intern license.”

  Grayson smiled. “I know.”

  My eyebrows shot up in surprise. “How?”

  Grayson’s smirk evaporated. He cocked his head to one side. “I’m a private investigator. I thought I’d mentioned that.”

  “Argh! You’re exasperating!”

  “Okay, okay. Ever heard of a thing called Google?”

  “Of course.”

  “You should try it sometime.”

  “Ha ha. I would, but I don’t have internet at home at the moment.”

  “At home? Don’t you have a smartphone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drex, if you’re serious about becoming a P.I., I suggest you learn how to use your phone. Now, let’s do a little beating around the bush and see if we can find some trace of this orange jumpsuit person, shall we? He or she might turn out to be our red-eyed monster after all.”

  “Fine.”

  “And while we’re at it, tell me all about this getting shot business,” he said. “And the other dead guy you think you saw.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  DESPITE SEARCHING FOR nearly an hour, Grayson and I couldn’t find a trace of the dead person in the orange jumpsuit. Grayson thought the pinkish stain in the sand could’ve been blood or a layer of microbial fungus. He collected a sample for testing. If it was blood, it could’ve come from the dog. So the jury was still out on whether my concussion was causing hallucinations, or I’d simply lost my freaking mind.

  “Well, that was fun,” Grayson said as we climbed back into the Mustang. “I thought we were going to see a dead deer, but we ended up with a one-eyed dog who, tragically, found himself on the wrong end of Jack the Knife.”

  “I should call Officer Paulson,” I said, sticking the key into the ignition. “Let him know about the knife wounds and all.”

  Grayson buckled his seatbelt, wincing at the effort. “Who is he again?”

  “He’s the cop assigned to Point Paradise. We’re too small to have our own police department. So Paulson acts as kind of a liaison, covering our area from his office in Waldo.”

  “Well, you picked an interesting first case, I’ll give you that. Sure beats tracking down deadbeat dads and cheating spouses.”

  “This isn’t my case. I only told Paulson about it.”

  “Sure,” Grayson said. “That’s right. You can’t work cases by yourself with an intern license.”

  “Yeah, technically. But I already am working another case for Paulson, kind of.”

  Grayson shot me a devious grin. “Really?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just a stupid little thing. He didn’t want to be bothered with it.”

  Grayson wagged his eyebrows and spoke in faux Groucho Marx. “Tell me, Gracie. How stupid is it?”

  I laughed. “Our village kook keeps getting weird phone calls. Beeping. Robot voices. Stuff like that. It’s nothing, really. But I guess, like you said, you’ve gotta start somewhere.”

  “You’re kidding,” Grayson said.

  “I wish.”

  Grayson touched my arm. “No. I’m serious. You ever heard of a place called Point Pleasant, West Virginia?”

  “No.”

  “It was the site of some weird happenings back in the 1960s. People in that little town started getting weird phone calls.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah? Well, who doesn’t every now and again?”

  Grayson nodded. “Fair enough. But quite a few of them also reported being chased by a flying, red-eyed monster.”

  The hair on the back of my neck bristled. I turned the key in the ignition and shook my head. Could that really have been what I saw—what I tried to chase down—at the Stop & Shoppe?

  “They called him the Mothman,” Grayson said.

  I willed myself not to say a word about my encounter. I was already halfway to crazy. I didn’t need to give Grayson any more fuel to drive me the rest of the way to nutsville.

  “You and Earl are gonna love each other,” I said as sarcastically as I could muster. “He’s a freaking conspiracy theorist, too.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Nope,” I said, and mashed the accelerator. “Life itself is enough of a conspiracy for me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “WELL, THERE GOES MY getaway plan,” Grayson said as he surveyed the carnage inside the service bay of my dad’s garage. The engine to his RV had been thoroughly disassembled by Earl, who’d spread its innards all over the place like he was getting ready for a jumble sale.

  I winced. “Sorry. But I tried to warn you. The engine was shot, anyway. Earl’s a great mechanic. He’ll have it back together for you in a jiff. Three days, tops.”

  Grayson licked his busted lip as he digested the news. “Well, I guess I should make the best of it. Hold on a second.”

  He climbed inside the RV. A moment later, I heard bottles clinking around. I thought he was going to haul out a couple of beers, but he came back holding a Q-Tip. One end of it was fluorescent pink.

  “What do you think?” he asked, showing it to me.

  I eyed it dubiously. “Not my shade of lipstick. But I think it’d go great with your green eyes.”

  Grayson laughed. “I did a Kastle-Meyer on the soil sample.”

  “A castle what?”

  “Kastle-Meyer. A drop of phenolphthalein here, a drop of hydrogen peroxide there, and voilá. Pink means positive for blood.”

  I crinkled my nose at the swab. “Is it human?”

  “Indeterminate. I’d need to do a precipitin test to find out. And for that, I’d need more blood, a lab, and perhaps an unlucky rabbit.”

  “Oh.”

  Grayson tossed the swab into a trashcan. “Do you have lunch plans? My treat.”

  If I was hungry, I couldn’t tell. I was still too grossed out by the whole dead dog thing.

  “Tell you what,” I said, “given the state of our foreheads, I think we could both use a rest. I’ll make us some soup. We’ll get a nap, and then head out later to an early supper. I’m not that hungry right now. Besides, I need to call Paulson and catch him up on what we found.”

  Grayson nodded. “Actually, that sounds good. I could use a rest. What did you have in mind for dinner?”

  “There’s a little Mexican restaurant in Waldo. El Molino’s.”

  He waggled his eyebrows at me. “You had me at Mexican.”r />
  “Good. But, just so you know, I’m not interested.”

  “You’re not interested in eating?”

  I frowned. “No. I meant .... Look, you’re not trying to ask me out, are you? I hope there’s no ... you know ... ulterior motive.”

  Grayson shot me a look. “Oh. Well, make no mistake, Drex. There’s an ulterior motive, all right. I didn’t see a restaurant for twenty miles before my RV broke down. And I’ve heard the Uber service in this area sucks.”

  I smiled. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll bring you a bowl of chicken noodle.”

  “Could you do me a favor?” Grayson asked.

  “What?”

  “Would you change your shoes for dinner? Or if you don’t have any, go barefoot?”

  I crinkled my nose. “Why?”

  “Call me a softie, but I hate to see you dragging around in a dead man’s past.”

  My throat grew tight. I gave him the once-over. He gave me a friendly smile.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I STUDIED MY REFLECTION in the mirror and readjusted my wig. Then I fished my cellphone from the pocket of my coveralls and spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to add Paulson’s number to my list of phone contacts.

  Damned computers! Carl used to do all this crap for me. Why did I let myself get so dependent on him?

  I gave up and punched Paulson’s number into the phone. “Paulson? It’s me, Bobbie Drex.”

  “Hello, there. Anything new with Vanderhoff?”

  “No. But listen. I went back out to the site where we found the dog.”

  “You did? Why?”

  “I dunno. Curiosity? Anyway, I found something we missed yesterday. On the dog’s body. Its fur had puncture wounds all over it. Like it had been stabbed by someone.”

  “Stabbed? Huh. What did you do with the carcass?”

  “Nothing. It’s still there.”

  “This may be a case of animal cruelty.”

  “Or worse. Paulson, you know that body I thought I saw? It may have been real after all. I was thinking the dog could’ve been killed by an escaped con.”

  “Did you find the body?”

  “No. But the ground by the tree? You know, where I thought I saw it? The sand had a pinkish hue. It’s blood.”