Sorry, Mac. There isn’t going to be any mango left for you. But it’s for a good cause.
Swish, swash, smear. Hey, a little mango can go a long way!
The gun clattered to the ground as Sheila swiped at her mango-ed eyes. It skidded into the dense foliage off the trail. I heard a splash as it plunged into the creek somewhere down below. Sheila threw her head back and forth and flailed her arms at me. I dodged flying mango and flapping arms.
I wanted to run back down the trail, but Sheila stood between me and the gate. One eye was still closed with mango, but the other was open now, and, even one-eyed, an angry, shrieking Sheila was a formidable adversary. She advanced on me, bigger, stronger, and younger—
I took the only direction I could go. Uphill. Sheila thundered after me. This is the woman who sometimes bicycles or even jogs all the way over to Kate’s Kabins. I’m the LOL who enjoys a leisurely stroll with husband, dog, and cat. She’d catch up with me here in about two shakes of a ghost goat’s tail.
I had to get off the trail, get in the woods. Hide!
I wish I could say I took the picket fence in a flying, adrenalin-fueled leap. What I did was make a flying leap, get my sweatpants hung up on the sharp point of a picket, and hear a big r-r-i-p when I crashed to the ground. My head hit a dead log. A stick poked me in the ribs. My ankle smashed into a rock. I shook my head, trying to clear the haze. Behind me I heard Sheila clambering over the fence and saying words she hadn’t learned on her occasional forays into church.
The yard light didn’t reach here in the undergrowth, but scattered moonlight showed she was now on my side of the fence. What now, Lord? Get up and run? With my head feeling as if it had just collided with a tombstone? A foot caught in blackberry vines stopped any immediate notion of fleeing. Hide, Ivy, hide! I clutched the ground as if it were an old friend and scooched deeper into the brush. This was a good time for full-force invisibility.
I held my breath as Sheila crashed through the woods past me. Yes, invisible.
Cell phone! Now!
I frantically grabbed the phone out of my pocket and pushed the On button. Call Mac? 911? I didn’t get a chance to decide. In the dark shadows of a hillside woods, a turned-on cell phone screen gives off enough light to be seen from outer space.
Well, maybe that’s exaggerating, but it gave enough light for Sheila to look back and spot my hiding place. She floundered toward me. I tried to slither away. Except slithering doesn’t work when you’re tangled in blackberry vines and windstorm debris. My leg hung up on something, and Sheila slammed a broken branch down on me. She hit my most vital point—the cell phone. It tumbled out of my hand.
I reached for it, but she took another whack. And another. Then I realized she thought the lit-up phone was still in my hand, and I scooted the other direction, leaving her to attack the defenseless phone.
Better the phone than me.
I managed to get out of whacking distance, got to my knees, and stumbled at a crouch through the trees. I glanced back and saw that the cell phone light had gone out.
Okay, Lord, I’ve used up the mango chunks and the cell phone. What’s left?
I eased to an upright position and listened, trying to pinpoint Sheila’s whereabouts, but now all I heard was the silence of the night. No crashes, no curses, no ominous crunches of foot. Where was she? Uphill from me? Downhill? Ahead? Behind?
Okay, I knew what she was doing. She’d gone into statue mode. Silent, motionless as one of the dinosaurs, biding her time, waiting for me to make some giveaway move so she could pounce on me.
I could play that game too.
I froze, also motionless and silent, barely breathing. Except, you know what happens when you’re trying to remain motionless and silent. Your left leg itches. Your skin crawls with the need to scratch it. Your stick-poked ribs ache. You need to shift position to relieve the pain. Your chest feels ready to explode with the need. And then—what else could happen? Why, you sneeze, of course, from all that powdery stuff stirred up by your movements.
A sneeze strong enough to register on the Richter earthquake scale.
It seemed as if I could hear and feel the echoes of it all through the dinosaur park. But what I heard, of course, was Sheila on the move again. Coming a little more cautiously this time, but out of statue mode, advancing on me like some animated monster in leggings.
I moved too, retreating. Except now there was a downed tree behind me, and I edged up the hill to get around it. I floundered a step, paused to listen, extracted my leg from a thorny blackberry vine—ouch!—managed a few more steps. Okay, yes, I was getting away from her! All I had to do was stay hidden and silent, work my way downhill and out the gate.
Something touched my back. I turned—
Shining eyes! Teeth!
Something jumped and crashed through the brush. Big as a marauding tank! Noisy as an attacking army!
I screamed and plunged headlong into a tangle of brush and vines and branches. Which is not the way to make a silent escape. The tangle caught me like a bug in a spiderweb. Now my position must be as obvious to Sheila as a bonging buoy on a stormy sea.
In a shift of clouds and moonlight, I suddenly saw what I’d backed into. Sammy the Saber-Toothed Tiger. I tried to breathe easier. His teeth and eyes might look lethal, but he was actually no more dangerous than a stuffed tiger in a toy store.
Something, the something that had apparently been bedded down for the night beside Sammy until I rudely interrupted, was still crashing through the brush, but it was, blessedly, headed away from me. Hopefully, it, whatever it was, was as scared of me as I was of it. I hadn’t time to worry about categorizing its identity now. I had bigger, closer worries. Sheila definitely wasn’t bothering with stealth now. Sheila was all crashing speed, a destructive tornado bearing down on me. I caught a flash in the moonlight. Her silver concha belt. A killer with pizzazz. Only a few feet away.
No way could I outrun or outmaneuver her on this jungled hillside. My turn to go into statue mode. I scrunched my back against a tree, slid noiselessly to the ground, and tucked myself into a ball. A shifting shaft of moonlight lit the ground a couple feet away, but the light only darkened the shadows at the base of my tree. I hoped.
I pulled my jacket up over my head to keep any gray hair from showing in the dark. I willed my muscles to relax. A turtle probably relaxes within the safety of its shell, doesn’t it? Shrink, Ivy. Shrink and relax. I reminded myself of how often I’d felt invisible in a crowd. An invisible LOL. I pulled that cloak of invisibility around me now. Sheila couldn’t wander around in the dark forever. She’d have to give up and leave. I’d wait her out, sneak back to the gate, and escape.
Hey, Ivy, you know any other good bedtime stories?
Because two eternities later—though I suppose in real time it wasn’t more than a minute or two—I peeked out from under my jacket and there she was. My eyes were on the level of her knees. A rip in her leggings exposed a knee bone. It shone like a lethal weapon in that shaft of moonlight. The scarf was gone. So was the turquoise clip in her hair. No pizzazz now.
Maybe she hadn’t seen me—
Then I saw my foot sticking out from under the shroud I’d tried to make of my jacket. I groaned. White socks. Could I have chosen anything more visible? Not unless I’d painted a neon target on my chest.
She kicked me in the leg. “Get up, Ivy.”
I couldn’t think of any advantages to getting up, so I didn’t.
I tensed, waiting for another bigger and better kick, but she vaulted to a different plan. She reached down and grabbed me, oof-ing a bit, but there I was, slung over her shoulder like a sack of onions. I remembered something I’d thought the first time I met her, that she was strong enough to drag Duke to the church or the altar or anywhere else if she took a mind to. What she obviously had a mind now was to carry me somewhere.
I doubted it was a rescue carry.
MAC
I look
ed at my watch the moment I woke on the recliner. How long had I been asleep? Shouldn’t Ivy be home by now? I hesitated only a minute before tapping the numbers into my cell phone to call Duke.
The phone on his end was ringing, ringing, ringing. But no answer. What did that mean? I remember he’d complained that the phone didn’t ring louder than a mouse’s squeak. Maybe they were having fun with a noisy game of cards or Monopoly or something.
I put the dinner Ivy had left for me in the microwave to heat. I ate it. I fed BoBandy and Koop. I listened to Miranda Lambert on the radio sing about her little red wagon.
Surely Ivy should be home by now. I called Duke’s number again. Still no answer. Okay, enough. I slipped on a jacket and went down to the pickup. BoBandy came along.
When I reached the trailer, Duke opened the door before I even got to the walkway ramp. He immediately saw I was alone. “I heard the pickup. Where’s Ivy? And Sheila?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I came over to find out.”
“Ivy said she was going to walk home—”
“Walk!”
“And then Sheila heard something and got worried. She grabbed my gun and went out to make sure Ivy was okay.”
Duke came outside and stood at the top of the ramp. We both faced outward.
No Ivy. No Sheila.
“Can your dog find her?”
I went to the pickup and let BoBandy out. He sniffed ground and trees, tail wagging.
“Find Ivy!” I said.
If this were a TV show, the dog would immediately race off and track her down. Lassie to the rescue! But that didn’t happen here. BoBandy is a great dog. Good natured and friendly and affectionate. He listens. Often he seems to know what we’re saying.
But right now he had no more clue what Find Ivy meant than if I’d asked him to find the square root of 127.
Then Duke said, “Do you hear someone screaming?”
IVY
I’m not particularly heavy, even if I have put on a few pounds since the wedding, and Sheila is definitely in good shape from jogging and bicycling, but hauling me uphill through brush and branches was enough to make her puff. She finally had to set me down—dump me down was more like it—and rest for a moment. A time to escape? Not with her big foot planted in the middle of my back.
I managed to turn my face out of the dead leaves and pine needles covering the ground. “Where are you taking me?”
“Since you eliminated the gun, I had to come up with another solution.” She sounded aggrieved that I’d unfairly sabotaged her plans, but she had a solution. “This will work better anyway.”
What kind of solution was up here?
The cliff.
The cliff. It wasn’t a hundred-foot drop. More like fifteen or twenty, maybe. But, with jagged rocks at the bottom, more than enough to mangle LOL bones. I gulped.
“In this moonlight, no one will believe I just fell off the cliff. And you’ll never going to convince anyone that I took a moonlight stroll up here and purposely dove off the cliff. ”
She considered that and rewrote her earlier scenario. “You acted really strange down there outside Duke’s trailer. Like you were all disoriented. Mentally confused. You started mumbling something about finding Mac and ran off into the park.”
“The park gate is always locked.”
A bothersome extra problem, but she was up to the challenge of solving it. “It was standing open. I’d been inside earlier because I was wondering if Brian had ever done anything to clean up the debris from the storm. I forgot to lock it when I came out. You could see that the gate was open and headed straight toward it.”
“But why would I—” I clamped my teeth. Shut up, Ivy, I chided myself. All I was doing was helping her get her story straight so it would sound convincing when my body was found down there on the rocks below the cliff. I switched tactics.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Kill Renée, of course.”
“What difference does it make now?”
“What difference will it make if you tell me?” I countered.
“You’re a nosy, interfering little old lady, aren’t you? Okay, why not? Renée knew what I was doing, and I knew she’d turn me in sooner or later.”
“You killed her just because she was going to get your garage sale business in trouble for not having the right permits?” I asked indignantly. “Why didn’t you just, oh, slash her tires or something?”
“You think I should have slashed her tires?” She actually chuckled. “Ivy, I’m surprised at you. Shocked, even. I’d never have guessed you were a slashing-tires kind of woman.”
“It would have been better than killing her.”
“Of course I wouldn’t kill her for her threat to turn my garage sale in for lack of permits.”
So Sheila had done—or was still doing—something bigger and more illegal than running a not-legally-authorized secondhand store. What? Did Renée know Sheila had bought and perhaps sold a few guns? Selling a gun to a friend wasn’t illegal but dealing in gun sales was no doubt a different situation. Then I remembered Sheila’s unfinished remark when I’d semi-identified Ric Echol outside her garage. So that’s how— How what? How Renée had found out something incriminating about Sheila. She’d heard it through ex-husband Ric.
I took a wild and totally uneducated guess. “She knew about your sales of Golden Temple?”
Sheila looked as if she might kick me again, but I took another wild guess. “Because Golden Temple isn’t really incense, is it? That’s just kind of a code name. Something a customer can ask for instead of saying ‘I wanna buy some cocaine or meth’ or something. Is that what you’re giving Duke too? Drugs?”
“I’d never give Duke cocaine or meth.” Now she sounded indignant. “But he needs the pain pills. His knees really hurt him.”
“Opioids? OxyContin? Hydrocodone? Fentanyl?”
She didn’t specify the exact identity of Golden Temple. “I took them myself when I hurt my back a couple years ago. I had some left over, so I sold them. When I realized how much they were worth on the market, I found a foreign source for them.”
“People overdose on opioids! Haven’t you heard all the uproar about the danger of using them? People die from them! They’re a national problem.”
“I only sell to a few people, a very few people, and they’re people who need them for pain but have doctors who don’t care.” Now she was righteous. The dealer in deadly drugs doing humanity a good deed.
“But you know how illegal that is, or you wouldn’t have a code name for them.”
No wonder she’d been nervous when she suspected the biker I thought was Ric had inquired about Golden Temple for his buddy. Getting caught selling illegal opioids meant big-time consequences. Big enough that Sheila was willing to murder to escape them.
“It doesn’t look as if I can get any more of them anyway. I’ll save what I have for Duke. So shut up, Ivy. Just shut up. We’re wasting time.” She leaned down and did the ol’ onion-sack-over-her-shoulder thing again.
I knew a lot more now than I did before. I knew Sheila had killed Renée and why. I knew she had a lucrative business selling opioids to a few select customers.
How much good was all that knowledge going to do me or anyone else? About as much as Koop knowing the secrets of quantum theory and worm holes.
When we first arrived at the dinosaur park, I remember thinking it would be a great place to hide a dead body.
Unfortunately, it appeared that dead body was going to be mine.
Chapter 22
IVY
My arms dangled down Sheila’s back. My face flopped against her black sweater. It was rougher than it looked. I might even be getting a rash.
Like that was going to matter.
Branches brushed against my back and shoulders. One from a dead tree caught on my jacket and broke off. I grabbed it before it fell. A c
ouple feet long, a few dead leaves on the end. A weapon? Yeah, right. Maybe I could give her a rash with those dead leaves.
We flopped along. I had time, if not exactly a comfortable setting, to think. I decided I might as well try to add another bit of knowledge to my useless supply. A mutant curiosity gene apparently keeps on going no matter what dire straits you’re in.
“How’d you get Renée out to the Kabins so you could kill her?”
She stopped for a moment’s rest. I really must be putting on weight. “Let it go, Ivy. Is this how you want to spend your final minutes, fussing about Renée? Think about Mac. Or eternity. Whatever.”
Yeah, eternity. Would I be meeting the Lord soon? I look forward to that, eventually. But maybe a different time and place, Lord? I know Mac will be in that eternity sometime too, but I’d really like to have a few more years here on earth with him.
“Humor me.” I swiped a bit of sweater fuzz out of my mouth. We came out of the trees onto bare ground as we neared the cliff. The moonlight seemed almost unnaturally brilliant, though all I could actually see was the ground below my dangling head. “I just can’t figure how you got her to meet you there. You must have been very clever.”
It isn’t easy carrying on a conversation when you’re dangling over a shoulder. I had to lift my head or I’d just be mumbling into her sweater. Flattery is even harder in a situation where you’re feeling as hostile as I was. But Sheila fell for the flattery and couldn’t resist telling me how cleverly she’d manipulated Renée. She’d never been able to tell anyone before, of course. She even paused in her hill climb to jump right into it.
“I called Renée and told her my husband and I were retired and just passing through the area, and we’d just found this wonderful piece of property with some burned-out old cabins. That a friend in Crescent City had told us she was the very best real estate agent in the area, and we wondered if she could find out if this place was for sale. We just loved it, I told her, and price was no obstacle.”
Detour Page 25
