“Insurance money,” Grayson said. “Lester and Arlene didn’t have any kids. With Lester out of the way, Arlene would be the sole beneficiary of his policies.”
“But it couldn’t be Arlene,” I argued. “She has an—excuse the pun—airtight alibi. She was locked in that bunker when Lester was killed.”
“That’s not provable,” Grayson said, slapping on that know-it-all professor expression I was beginning to loathe. “If she was, who locked her in there?”
“Lester,” I said.
Grayson cocked an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
I frowned. “Who else could it be?”
“How about Hank Chambers?”
“What?” I nearly gasped. “You think Chambers locked Arlene in there?”
“Yes.”
“Why? As part of some evil plan to kill Lester and split the insurance payout?”
Grayson winked. “Bingo, cadet. She’s got the alibi. He’s got the girl.”
“Nah,” Earl said, shaking his head. “I don’t buy it. Hank wouldn’t do that to Lester. Them two brothers was tight. I seen pictures of ’em baggin’ game together from all over the county. They was good hunting buddies.”
Grayson snorted. “Two hombres alone in the woods together with dueling pistolas. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Listen,” Wells interrupted. “The whole insurance angle doesn’t hold water. I checked. The only life insurance on Lester was for five grand. Barely enough to bury him.”
Grayson’s lips twisted. “Well, if it wasn’t for money, then it had to be for love.”
“Hold up a minute,” Wells said. “You think Hank’s having an affair with Arlene?”
“I’d say it’s a distinct possibility,” Grayson said. “And it could’ve been going on for a long time. This scheme of theirs took a little planning.”
I grimaced. “But Chambers is married!”
Earl laughed. “Since when’s that stopped anyone from foolin’ around?”
“That’s also not accurate,” Wells said. “Chambers’ background check showed he’s divorced, as of last month. Not too amicable, I might add. His ex-wife threw him out of the house with nothing but a restraining order for company.”
Grayson glanced at his cellphone. “Speaking of Chambers, where is he? Shouldn’t he be back from Walmart by now?”
“You’re right,” Wells said.
Earl shrugged. “Well, it is the first of the month an’ all.”
Wells sighed. “I forgot about that.”
The police radio on Wells’ belt crackled. “Excuse me, I need to get this.” He turned and walked away.
I glanced over at Dr. Crum. He was staring at the pavement, chewing his lip.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Crum looked up, wide-eyed, as if I’d startled him. “Oh. Nothing. I just ... well, I’m kind of baffled by what’s happening. First with Lester, and now Arlene.”
“What do you mean, ‘first with Lester’?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to say anything because of patient confidentiality. But your question about poisoning got me to thinking. And, well, since he’s dead, I guess Lester won’t mind.”
Crum looked at me in a way that made me think he was seeking my approval to continue. I gave it to him with a quick nod. “Right. Lester won’t mind.”
Crum shifted onto his other pink sneaker. “Lester came to see me a few weeks ago. He was having hot flashes and tingling in his hands. We’d made a joke out of it—that he was suffering from menopause.”
He looked up at me. I gave him a weak smile.
“Anyway,” Crum continued, “I didn’t think that much of it until today. When I tried to touch Arlene. She told me to stop ‘prickling’ her.”
“She was mumbling crazy talk,” I said. “She could’ve been talking about the injections. Nobody likes needles.”
Crum pursed his lips. “That’s true. But she felt a bit warm to the touch, as if she had a slight fever.”
“So you think instead of poisoning, she and Lester might’ve both contracted some kind of illness?”
Crum sighed. “Either one is possible. The flu’s going around. And lots of things in the environment can cause adverse reactions. Food additives. Exposure to pesticides. Even the chemicals in cleaning products.”
“You got any theories on which it might be?” Grayson asked.
Crum shook his head. “No. But I’ll get on it as—”
“I’ll catch you all later,” Wells hollered, running by us and nearly bowling Crum over. “Got an emergency to get to,” he yelled as he raced toward his patrol car.
“What’s happening?” Grayson called after him.
Wells yanked open the car door. “Not sure yet, but I think we might’ve found Rexel.”
“Where?” I yelled.
“Climbing the giant strawberry,” he hollered, and took off with the lights flashing.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“WHAT THE HECK?” I ASKED. “Giant strawberry? Did I hear that right?”
Crum nodded, his face drawn with concern. “Wells must mean the city water tower. It’s painted like a strawberry.”
“I got to see me that,” Earl said, and fired up Bessie’s massive diesel engine. “How do we get there, Doc?”
Crum sighed. “Take I-4 to Park Street. Head south. Can’t miss it. Believe me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You coming?”
Crum shook his head. “No. I’ve seen enough crazy for one day. And I need to get to the lab.”
“Let’s go,” Grayson said. “Keep us informed on what you find out, Dr. Crum.”
Crum nodded, but his eyes were studying some faraway corner of the sky. I figured he was either deep in thought or was trying to avoid seeing his own shirt.
Grayson strapped on his seatbelt and said, “Punch it, Earl.”
My cousin obliged. He mashed the pedal to the floor, and we took off like a tractor out of hell. I tumbled into the side of Grayson, causing him to grunt.
Earl laughed. “You two just can’t keep your hands off each other, can you?”
My ears burned. When I pushed myself off Grayson, I saw his cheeks were pink, too.
“THE FUN NEVER ENDS around here,” Grayson said as Earl took the corner of Wilder Road on two wheels. Straight ahead, the massive water tower loomed at us like the villain in a low-budget horror flick—Attack of the Man-Eating Fruit Mutant.
“Turn here, Earl,” I said. “Onto Cherry Street.”
Earl’s face twisted into a lopsided grin. “Really? You sure we ain’t looking for Strawberry Street?”
Grayson snorted and nodded toward the tower. “From the looks of it, we’re already on Sesame Street.”
Below the giant berry-shaped tower, a group of elementary-school-aged children were running wild, threading in and out of the growing throng of gawkers. Three patrol cars were already on the scene, their lights flashing. They looked like toys compared to the humongous strawberry.
“There!” Grayson said, pointing to an empty space on the side of the road.
Earl squeezed Bessie in between a faded blue church bus and an old ice cream truck. Grayson opened the door. The tune It’s a Small World filled our ears as it crackled from the ice cream truck’s audio system. The speakers sounded like they’d been shot since the early ‘70s.
“Somebody needs their xylophone tuned,” Grayson said as we piled out of the truck.
“Hey, he’s got creamsicles!” Earl hollered.
“No time.” Grayson nodded toward the tower. “Look.”
I stared up at the tower and blinked. I blinked again, thinking it might have been another twin-induced hallucination, but the view didn’t change.
About a hundred feet up the stem of the colossal strawberry, a naked old white man was hollering and shaking his fist at the crowd like an angry maggot. Blue and red lights flashed alternately in my eyes. It’s a Small World plinked at my ears like a toy piano hammered on by a chimpanzee.
> This must be what it’s like to have an acid flashback.
“You think that’s Rexel?” Grayson asked.
I cringed. “Yeah. I recognize the liver spots on that shiny bald head even without my cheater glasses.”
Earl elbowed me. “You sure that’s all you recognize?”
I punched Earl in the gut. After a round of retaliatory sparing, we settled down and joined Grayson. He was staring up at an enormous yellow crane. It lurched in fits and starts toward the monstrous strawberry like a ten-story-tall praying mantis.
Mantris vs Strawzilla. It’s got a nice ring to it.
Once the crane got within range, it extended a long, pendulous arm toward poor old Rexel, who was still flailing his fist like an angry, albino fruit-fly larva. Some guy dressed like a shortstop grabbed him by the torso, then yanked Rexel, kicking and screaming, into the basket of the cherry picker.
The crowd erupted into cheers, then half of them made a beeline for the ice cream truck.
“Well, I’ll be,” Earl said, succinctly summing up the event.
“Rexel was such a stickler for the rules,” Grayson said. “What the hell’s gotten into him?”
“Probably the same thing that got into Lester and Arlene,” I said.
Earl’s eyes grew wide. “You talkin’ demon possession?”
I shot my cousin some side-eye. “Absolutely. And on a Sunday, no less.”
Earl swallowed hard. “What do we do now?”
A man’s voice sounded behind us. “I’d say dinner and a movie, but how’re you ever gonna top that show?”
I turned to find Garth, the mullet-boy-wonder, grinning at us. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Same as you,” he said. “Gawking. I heard about it on my ham radio.” He laughed. “For us local operators, this is the event of the season. Maybe even the decade.”
I frowned. “Why do you say that?”
Garth grinned. “Old T-Rexel, of course. The guy’s always on our butts to follow protocol, then he gets naked and climbs the water tower like a geriatric King Kong. You can’t make that kind of crap up.”
“What you think got into the poor feller?” Earl asked.
Garth shrugged. “I dunno. But Rexel’s definitely off his regular feed. Nobody’s heard from him for days, and then last night he kerchunked my repeater.”
Earl grimaced. “Listen here, Garth. It’s better for ever’body if you keep your personal life to yourself.”
“Wha—?” Garth gave everyone a good look at his buck teeth, then cringed. “Oh! No, man. It’s not—ugh. Look, all I can say is, something’s totally up with that old dude.”
The flash of red and blue lights made us turn and stare. A police car drove slowly by. Rexel’s face and palms were plastered to the rear side-window like a kid forced to leave the carnival too soon.
“There he goes,” Earl said.
“Yep,” Garth nodded. “Looks like the show’s over. Where you guys crashing tonight?”
Grayson shrugged. “No particular plans.”
Garth shot me a grin. “Well, you’re welcome to camp at my place again. Pandora, your sombrero act last night put Rexel’s puny deal here to shame.”
I cringed inside. “Uh ... thanks, but—”
“We’d love to,” Grayson butted in. He turned to me and winked a green eye. “But not too heavy on the booze tonight, honey. We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
AGAINST ALL MY WILL and most of my better judgment, I’d ridden with Earl and Grayson back to Garth’s chain-linked junkyard of a compound.
Earl was excited about the idea of camping out again with the guys in his monster truck. I, on the other hand, was trying my best to convince Grayson not to spend another night there.
“Come on, Grayson,” I said as we climbed down out of Bessie. “We might as well head down the road and find a new case. There’s nothing out of the ordinary going on here.”
“You sure about that?” He studied me with those unreadable eyes of his. “It seems like only yesterday you were the one hell-bent on staying. Wait. It was yesterday.”
My face flushed pink. I attempted to cover it with a white lie. “I changed my mind. You were right. This is just an ordinary case of domestic homicide.”
Grayson’s eyebrow ticked up a good inch. “I’m right?” He grinned and shook his head. “Come on, Drex. What’s really going on here?”
Crap. It’s like the guy can see right through me.
The truth was, at the moment, I didn’t give a flip whether the folks around here were being driven wackadoodle by malaria-infested mosquitoes or sadistic, Southern-fried poltergeists.
I just wanted to get the hell out of Garth’s compound.
If we stayed, I’d be facing a humiliating ribbing from the guys about last night. I could’ve probably handled the jokes if I’d known what to expect—but the fact was, I couldn’t remember squat about what I’d done after that third shot of tequila.
I blew out an angry breath. “Nothing’s going on.”
It was a childish rebuttal, but the best I could come up with given the shaky state of my defense.
Grayson smirked. “So, what’s the harm in staying another night then?” He turned to my cousin. “You in, Earl?”
Earl grinned. “You bet.”
I scowled at my cousin. “What about the garage? Who’s going to run it?”
Earl hooked his thumbs in his armpits and rocked back on his heels. “Seeing as how you can’t fire me no more, I’m taking the liberty of a well-earned vacation day.”
Grayson’s lip curled up on one side. “Besides, we haven’t entirely ruled out Pan as the perpetrator.”
My molars clenched hard enough to crush rocks.
“Fine,” I hissed. “We’ll stay.”
WITH MY ESCAPE PLAN foiled, I sat by the campfire and awaited my fate, armed with a marshmallow stabbed onto the end of a stick. I figured if anybody got me too riled, I could jab them in the eye with it.
I poked my jousting weapon into the flames and watched the marshmallow on the end swell, then begin to turn golden-brown on the edges.
“Nothing like cooking over an open fire,” Earl said. He sat beside me and stuck a skewered hotdog over the flame.
Garth nodded. “It’s probably the thing I look forward to the most when the apocalypse hits.”
The most?
“I don’t get it, Garth,” I said. “Why are you a member of that Dreadmore camp when you’ve already got this place?”
Garth smiled, making me wonder how long it had been since I’d seen a dentist.
“Backup,” he said. “Every smart prepper has a secondary bugout location. You know, in case the first one gets raided or blown off the map. Only a fool like Jenkins thinks they can survive alone in some old World War II bunker.”
“He had the cabin as a secondary,” I said.
Garth snorted derisively. “That rundown cabin wouldn’t save him from a mosquito invasion.”
“I heard that,” Earl said, and swatted his forearm.
Garth shook his head. “The dude thought he could go it alone with his wife. But what if one of them gets sick or dies? No way, man. A real prepper knows there’s safety in numbers. You need reinforcements in case you lose a crucial member. You know, like—”
“Rexel?” Earl asked.
Garth shrugged. “I was gonna say Tooth, but yeah, Rexel, too.”
I cringed. “That lunatic’s still missing?”
“Yeah.”
Earl cocked his head. “But I thought they found him climbing that monstrositous strawberry.”
I sighed. “I meant Tooth.”
“Oh.” Earl shifted his gaze across the small campfire toward Garth’s brother, Jimmy. Dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, the young cop could’ve been mistaken for a teenager at a Southern Baptist boot camp. Earl yelled to him across the blaze. “What’s gonna happen to him, Officer Wells?”
Red flames reflected in
Wells’ eyes as he glanced up from his hotdog on a stick. “Tooth or Rexel?”
“Rexel!” I rolled my eyes in exasperation, and caught sight of my marshmallow. It had burst into flames and was dripping molten goo onto the red-hot coals. “Dang it!” I jerked my stick out of the fire, but it was too late. My marshmallow was nothing but charred remains.
“You never could cook worth a darn,” Earl quipped.
“Shut it or this thing’s going in your mouth.” I looked over at Wells. “So, what about Rexel?”
Wells shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s at the hospital under twenty-four-hour observation. We’re waiting on the psych evaluation to see if we can release him on his own recognizance.”
“T-Rex’s always been wound up pretty tight,” Garth said. “It was just a matter of time before a spring broke.”
I flicked the crispy black remains of my burnt marshmallow into the fire like I was casting a fishing rod. I stuck another one on the stick. “Any idea yet if what’s going on with Rexel is related to the Jenkins’ case?”
“If you ask me, I think their brains are being alterated by alien implants,” Earl said, then shoved half a hotdog in his mouth.
I jabbed him with the marshmallow on the end of my stick. “I wasn’t asking you. And would you can it already with the alien implants?”
Earl’s back stiffened. He mumbled at me with a mouthful of wiener. “Geez, Bobbie. Open that mind a yours to the possibilities. You didn’t believe in Mothman, neither. And look where that got you.”
I shot my cousin a dirty look. “What are you implying?”
Earl smirked, then glanced up and nearly choked on his hotdog. I followed his line of sight across the fire pit. Crum was standing there wearing his donut shirt, pizza pants, and the kind of facial expression I’d only seen on soap opera doctors—usually after unsuccessful brain transplants.
Earl rose to his feet. “What’s up, Doc?”
Grayson, who’d been working away feverishly on his laptop, glanced up and said, “Whatever it is, it doesn’t look good.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Moth Busters, Dr. Prepper, Oral Robbers: Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures 1, 2 & 3 Page 38
