Greedy Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  “Ms. Delaney and I intend to answer that question immediately,” Peyton said. “We’re going out to the Carlisle place to take some samples and see what we can discover.”

  “I’m not certain that’s a good idea.” Doc squinted at me. “You look a bit peaked, Sarah Booth. I don’t think you need to expose yourself. A weakened immune system is an invitation to terrible complications.”

  I started to argue the hazmat suit, but Peyton signaled me to remain silent. He cleared his throat and drew Doc’s attention back to him. “I’ve given this some thought. Perhaps the whole plantation should be sprayed with chemicals strong enough to kill the weevils and the mold. The crop is lost, anyway. An aerial spraying would remove the threat of the weevils spreading.”

  Doc sighed. “I’m not the one to make that decision, Mr. Fidellas, but I’ll support you. As much as I hate the idea of spewing chemicals across a thousand acres, I think we have to stop this any way we can.”

  “I’ll speak to the sheriff,” Peyton said as he rose. “If I have any additional breakthroughs, I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fidellas. I’ll start the evaluation now for the best route to fight this. Because I’m out of other options with Oscar and Gordon, I’ll start treating them while I set up a CT and some cultures for mold. I’ll consult with authorities at the Mayo Clinic to develop a protocol.” He stood up slowly, obviously eager to be on his way and as obviously near exhausted collapse. “If you’ll excuse me, time is running out. I need to apply this information now.”

  “How are the patients?” I asked.

  Doc wouldn’t look at me. “As I said, Luann and Regina are improving.”

  “And Oscar and Gordon?” My voice cracked, because I knew by his phrasing that things weren’t good.

  “No improvement. In fact, we’ve found some bleeding in Oscar’s lungs.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why haven’t they improved? If the realtors are better, why not Oscar and Gordon?”

  “I have no idea, Sarah Booth. That’s the damnedest part of it. I have no idea.”

  Peyton put his hand on my back, a gesture of support. “This is a mutant strain, Sarah Booth,” he said. “What we’re dealing with here is a wild card.”

  As I stepped toward the door, the room spun. Doc said something and someone grabbed me as I toppled sideways. Whether I hit the floor or not, I couldn’t say. I telescoped swiftly into a black void.

  “Sarah Booth! Sarah Booth!” Doc called my name.

  The most noxious odor, sharp and caustic, made me start and struggle to sit up. Blindly I reached out and captured the hand with the bottle easing under my nose. “What ever the hell that is, get it away.”

  “Old-fashioned smelling salts,” Doc said. His face came into focus and I saw relief in his eyes. He wafted the bottle under my nose for good measure. “Ladies who wore tight corsets often carried a bottle in their reticules.”

  “I’m not wearing a corset,” I grumbled.

  “Then we’d better run some tests and find out why you swooned,” Doc said.

  “I agree.” Peyton hovered just behind Doc’s shoulder, his face a mask of concern.

  I’d forgotten where I was or that he was with me. Pushing myself up, I reconnoitered the room. Sure enough, it was Doc’s office. The coffeepot was a dead giveaway.

  “I didn’t swoon.” I was insulted by the term. “I just got a little dizzy.” I sat up the rest of the way. From this angle, Doc’s office was even more cluttered than I’d thought.

  “You’re going to have some tests done, Sarah Booth. I’m stepping in as surrogate parent.” Doc looked about as frazzled as I’d ever seen him. He was worried about me, and he already had a plateful of worry.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Tomorrow morning.”

  Doc considered. “You promise you’ll show up?”

  I studied the possible turns of phrase I might use. Lying to Doc wasn’t an option. “I promise.”

  “Be here at eight. We’ll get some labs, go from there. But before you leave, I’m checking your blood pressure and drawing some blood.”

  He disappeared into the hall and returned with a blood-pressure cuff, which he put around my arm. In a moment he removed the instrument. “A little low, but nothing to worry about.”

  “See, I’m fine. I haven’t slept much or eaten properly. That’s all it is. I’m not sick.”

  “We’ll make that determination tomorrow.” He tied off my arm and inserted the needle, filling a vial. Once he was finished, I got on my feet before he could change his mind and slam me onto a stretcher.

  “Ms. Delaney,” Peyton said as he opened the door of Doc’s office, “let me assist you.” His hand under my elbow was firm.

  Great. The one image I didn’t want to project to the man who controlled the hazmat suits was weak and ineffectual. I moved briskly away from his hand. So as not to put the wrong spin on it, I said, “Thanks, Peyton. Doc wanted to pop me into a bed on the spot.”

  “It isn’t normal to faint, Sarah Booth. I’d hate to see you as collateral damage in this situation.” His hand lightly brushed my forehead, and I stepped away from his touch.

  “We’re on for the Carlisle place, right?” I forced a smile.

  “Are you certain? If you’re ill, the consequences could be terrible.”

  “I’m not ill.” Having to repeat myself made me grumpy.

  “Sarah Booth, if anything happened to you, I’d have to blame myself.”

  He was certainly intense. I looked down the hallway. “I’m fine, Peyton, but thank you. I want to get this resolved. Can I pick you and the suits up in about fifteen minutes? I need to speak with Tinkie first.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Taking a deep breath, I went to see my partner and best friend. I had good news for her. I could only hope it hadn’t come too late for the man she loved.

  24

  Tinkie stood, straight-backed and stoic, looking through the hospital window at Oscar. I told her about the mold, about the potential for treating it, and I promised I’d find the person responsible for bringing this plague to Sunflower County.

  She said nothing.

  “Tinkie, you can’t give up now. Doc can fix this. He will fix it.”

  Eyes riveted on her husband, she finally spoke. “Regina is drinking fluids on her own. Luann is sitting up and even talking on a cell phone. Their families are celebrating, and I’m happy for them. But look at Oscar and Gordon.”

  In contrast to the women, Oscar appeared worse. His pallor matched the sheets, except for the oozing pustules on his skin, which were red and angry. Beside him, Gordon seemed equally bad. How had this mold thing taken down two strong, healthy men yet passed over two women with lesser devastation?

  “I’m helping Peyton with something, but I’ll be back.” I resisted checking at my watch. “We’re going . . . to look for the source of these weevils.” Tinkie was so depressed, she didn’t bother to question where I was conducting this great research.

  “It’s too late.” She spoke so simply.

  While I wanted to argue with her, I couldn’t. If I had to guess a time schedule, I didn’t think Oscar would last through the night. “He’s fought hard,” I said.

  “He’s tired.”

  She was killing me. I could actually feel the tissue that held my heart in place begin to rip. When was it right to offer false hope and when to help a friend accept what appeared to be the inevitable? “Tinkie, what can I do?”

  “Will you help me with all the . . . necessary arrangements?”

  “We can talk about this later.”

  “I have to let him go, Sarah Booth. I’ve held him here, selfishly, because I can’t imagine my life without him. Now, though, I accept he has to leave me. He won’t be far.”

  Tinkie, unknowingly, had just stomped all over my own private wounds. Despite the fact that my parents had been dead for two decades, I hadn’t let them go. I couldn’t.

  “How do you know Oscar is ready to go?
” My voice quavered. There were times that Tinkie seemed to brush against another reality. She had a strong faith and a true belief that the veil between this world and the next was penetrable. When I was in Tinkie’s company, I could believe it, too.

  “I sense it,” she said. “He’s fought so hard. Trapped inside his body that’s shutting down around him, he still fought. I felt the struggle. Now, he’s still. It’s almost as if a part of him has already left.”

  Hell, why not scoop out my heart with a soup ladle? “He’s still because he’s tired. I’ll tell Doc to hit him with some speed. Now isn’t the time to throw in the towel. Let me have the rest of the day.”

  At last she looked at me. “I can’t ask him to suffer longer, Sarah Booth.”

  I would not have this. “You damn sure can. Think of the things he put you through. Think of the ba—” Oscar’s passion for a planned life had cost Tinkie greatly in the past.

  She put her hand over my lips. “You fight dirty.” She looked a little shell-shocked at my tactics.

  “You’re damn right. I’ll fight dirty and underhanded. Make him hang on. Just until midnight. Give me that, okay? Doc is going to start the antifungals now, even before the cultures and tests come back. And I’m going to find out who did this. Oscar would want to live to see justice, I can guarantee that. Sure he’s tired of suffering. He’s been through it. But he isn’t the kind of man who folds his tent and slips away into the night. And you’re not the kind of woman who would let him. Buck up and put the pressure on him to stay.”

  I took her chin in my hand and pointed her at the window. “Do that thing with your lip. Let it pop out of your mouth.”

  She frowned as if I’d spoken Celtic.

  “Don’t play innocent with me. I’ll bet Doc will move Oscar to a private room. He isn’t contagious. He doesn’t have to be isolated. When he moves, you get in there and do what ever you have to do to remind Oscar of the pleasures of the flesh. He’s a man—wherever he is, he’ll return for that.”

  “That’s unethical, Sarah Booth. He’s helpless.”

  “Ethics be damned. You tell Oscar from me that he can’t leave until I figure this out.”

  Tinkie pressed her fingers into the glass. “He hears you. See, his hands are twitching.”

  She sounded less defeated, but I didn’t have time to push her any harder. And I didn’t want to. There is a limit to how much bossing a friendship can take. “Move him to a room and do your worst,” I whispered.

  I rushed down the hall before she could respond—either negatively or positively—to my unusual tactics.

  The CDC office was locked up, but Peyton had left a note on the door for me.

  “Exciting development in the mold. May be able to offer more help to Doc. Have gone to Jackson to a bigger lab. Bonnie Louise still unaccounted for. Will call. Peyton. P.S. The hazmat suit is in your car.”

  While everyone else thought I was nuts to go to the Carlisle place, Peyton had faith in me. The suit was in the passenger seat of the roadster. I climbed behind the wheel and pointed the car for the one place where evidence against the instigator of this plot might be found.

  I parked at the front gate and donned the suit. From the road, nothing looked too bad, but once I made it past the house and into the fields, the devastation was like a biblical plague. The cotton, which I’d been told was two feet high and lush, was a scraggly vista of dead stems and curled, brown leaves. Weevils were everywhere. They crawled along the brown stalks. I’d never seen anything like it, but I could easily grasp the direness of the situation if this moved on to the next plantation. I didn’t need Jitty at my side to tell me that this looked like a scene from the War Between the States. Or a glimpse of the future on a globally warmed planet. This was devastation of a man-made order.

  With the cumbersome suit impeding my movements and vision, I entered the field. Behind me, the gracious structure of the old plantation rose like a specter of the past, a lone sentinel of a way of life that no longer existed.

  A curtain fluttered briefly in a window, and I was reminded of the ghost I’d encountered in Costa Rica. Spirits lingered in old houses, but it wasn’t a supernatural presence that I sought now.

  Working from what I knew of Oscar’s and Gordon’s actions, I began my careful examination at the edge of the fields nearest the house. Before I left the property, I intended to search the old plantation, but I had to find out if Oscar and Gordon had seen something in those fields that drew them both into danger.

  Moving through the rows, I ignored the insects. With the leaves mostly gone from the cotton plants, the activity of the weevils was like a maddened army on the march for food. They moved relentlessly. When I peered closer, I realized that some of them were dead.

  Others were dying.

  I watched in fascination as fire ants pursued the weevils. Huge mounds of the poisonous ants had sprung up in the cotton rows. Stories of elderly people falling into ant beds were Southern lore. Injured and unable to get away, the infirm died from the venomous bites.

  The ants were on the attack, pursuing the weevils. Right in front of my eyes, the balance of nature was reasserting itself.

  The suit protected me from the ants, so I knelt down to study the action more closely. Some chemical or spore or pheromone or something in the weevils compelled the fire ants to attack. Hordes of the burnished red insects raced in pursuit of the weevils.

  The battle was fascinating, even for someone who didn’t have a scientific bone in her body. Inching forward on my knees, I examined the dying weevils. The ants appeared to be stinging them to death—and then carrying them away. As I leaned over to watch a dozen yeomen ants hauling a weevil twenty times their size, I saw a key ring. Half-covered in dirt, it caught the glint of the sun. As I brushed the dirt away from it, I recognized the fake, pink diamonds that formed the initials BLM.

  Bonnie Louise McRae.

  A single key dangled from the chain.

  Bonnie had been in the fields—it was part of her job. The key ring wasn’t proof positive of any wrongdoing. Her job required her to examine the weevils. But what the key might open could be the coup de grâce for the CDC scientist. If this linked her to the weevils in any criminal way, the proof of her complicity would be irrefutable.

  The suit was hot and uncomfortable, and I started to rise. The house needed to be searched, just in case. While I certainly hadn’t done a thorough job of the fields, it would take longer than a day to walk a thousand acres. I had to get the key back to town and into Coleman’s hands.

  As I lumbered toward the house, the first blow landed on my left side at my waist. It came out of nowhere and knocked me sideways. The next one caught me in the stomach, and I blindly grasped what felt like a baseball bat.

  Through the tiny window of the suit, I couldn’t see anything except dead plants and dirt.

  My body doubled over, and though I hung on to the weapon, I couldn’t retain my grip. The last thing I felt was a whack to the head that sent pain sparkling behind my eyelids. Starbursts gave way to blackness.

  “Don’t move, Sarah Booth.” Coleman’s face peered down at me through the face mask of a hazmat suit. His voice sounded almost strangled.

  When I tried to sit up, his hand pressed me back into the dirt. “Be still, you’re bleeding.”

  I reached up to touch my face, but could feel no blood. “Where am I?”

  “Be still, Sarah Booth. Please. The ambulance is coming.” His hand on my chest held me motionless.

  Sirens whined in the distance, and I squinted against the bright sun. I was outside. I turned my head and saw the dying cotton. Beside it was the helmet for a hazmat suit lying in the dirt.

  My hands moved down my body and I felt the silken material, ripped in places, and realized where I was and what had happened just as a sharp pain tore through my abdomen.

  “I’ve got to pick you up,” Coleman said. His arms slid beneath me. “I have to get you out of here so the paramedics can work on you. I�
��m sorry.” When he lifted me, the pain was unbearable and I couldn’t stop the cry that escaped.

  When I glanced down, I saw the blood. Dark and red it saturated the ground. A pool of it. My blood.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I gasped the words as he carried me away from the fields toward the house, toward the approach of the sirens.

  “Someone hit you and left you to die in the fields.”

  “They took my helmet off.”

  I felt the muscles in his chest contract. “I know.”

  We both knew the implications of that.

  “Doc will take care of you, Sarah Booth. You’ll be okay. And when I find the person who did this . . .”

  The fingers of my right hand clutched some object. I tried to lift my hand, to show him, but neither my hand nor arm responded. No amount of concentration could force my fist to rise to my chest.

  “I’m paralyzed,” I told him. Additional observations and complaints were cut short by the kind of pain that felt as if my torso were being squeezed by a giant. I had no doubt my pelvic bones would snap in two. “What’s wrong with me?” I demanded.

  “Save your strength.” He kept walking, his steps steady, determined. “Don’t worry about a thing, Sarah Booth. I’ve got you. Just don’t worry.”

  He spoke to me as if I were a small child and he soothed my fears. When he’d carried me all the way to the main gate, he stopped but continued to hold me in his arms. “Just hang on a few more minutes. Help is on the way.”

  The ambulance drew close, and when it stopped, he gently deposited me on the stretcher. The eyes of the EMTs, visible through the helmets they wore, were grave as they set up a drip. So Coleman had gotten suits for emergency personnel as well as the sheriff’s office. That was smart.

  “She’s bleeding out,” one of them said.

  “Stop it.” Coleman’s voice wasn’t raised, but it was clearly a command. “What ever you have to do, stop the bleeding.”

  “We’ve got to get her to the hospital,” one of the paramedics said.