Swamp Team 3

by Jana DeLeon

  “According to Floyd, he didn’t have to. He sent his pet bobcat out to defend his property line.”

  I frowned. A bobcat sounded much less intimidating than what had attacked my shirt. “Bobcat?” I said. “What’s a bobcat?”

  Gertie perked up. “It’s when a tiger and a house cat mate.”

  “Is that even possible?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Ida Belle said.

  “It is too,” Gertie argued. “A housecat couldn’t carry cubs that large, but as long as the mating is a female tiger and a male house cat, it would work.”

  “Doesn’t seem all that satisfying for the tigress,” Ida Belle said.

  “Enough!” Carter yelled. “Bobcats are their own wild species and not a result of some porno interspecies mating, especially not with domesticated animals.”

  “Is it even legal to own one?” I asked.

  “That’s not the point,” Carter said, his face starting to redden.

  “It might be,” I said. “You were ready to arrest me last night when you thought I’d thrown a house cat on you. Seems to me that siccing a wild animal on people ought to carry a stiffer penalty.”

  Gertie nodded. “If I’d been attacked by a vicious animal, I’d sue the owner.”

  “Me too,” I said, completely agreeing with the sentiment if not the actual process.

  Carter’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me? You’re standing there with your T-shirt in shreds and you want me to believe that some other group comprised of one young woman and two older ones just happened to be snooping around Ally’s house?”

  “For your information,” Ida Belle said, “I tore up Fortune’s T-shirt. We’re beading the bottom of it, see?” She pointed to the row of beads she’d attached to one of the strands. “I think it’s tacky as hell, but the kids seem to like the look. I think the choir should sell them at our next benefit, but I needed a sample.”

  “And Fortune has to wear the T-shirt while you work?”

  Gertie frowned. “I suppose it would be easier on Fortune to let her try it on afterward.”

  Ida Belle nodded. “We should have thought of that.”

  “Unbelievable.” Carter shook his head. “I’m going to say this one more time and that’s it—stay out of my investigation, or I swear, I will have every one of you sitting in my jail the rest of the summer.”

  Ida Belle rolled her eyes. “So dramatic. Can you just get on with your job and leave us alone to do ours?”

  Carter gave us one last disbelieving glare before whirling around and stalking out of my house. As soon as the door slammed shut behind him, I plopped down in a chair.

  “He didn’t buy that for a minute,” I said.

  “Of course he didn’t,” Ida Belle said, “but if Floyd wanted to press charges, he’d have to go down to the sheriff’s department and identify us, then fill out a bunch of paperwork, something Carter would have informed him of as soon as he complained.”

  Gertie nodded. “The sheriff’s department could be full of free beer and hookers, and Floyd still wouldn’t set foot in the place.”

  I held up my shirt. “He doesn’t exactly need the police when he’s got an attack cat. What the hell?”

  Ida Belle perked up. “Yes, that was most interesting.”

  “You think my almost being mauled by that wild animal is interesting?”

  Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “Don’t be dramatic. A bobcat can’t kill you. You would only have sustained some scratches. It’s interesting because I don’t know anyone who’s ever had a pet bobcat.”

  “I wonder if Ally knows about it.” Gertie said.

  “We’ll ask her about it when she gets here,” I said. “I want to know more about this Floyd. He sounds like just the sort of guy who’d have no qualms about setting fire to someone’s house.”

  “Without a doubt,” Ida Belle agreed. “But we need a motive.”

  “And opportunity,” I said. “Did either of you see him at Ally’s last night?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “That’s strange, right?” I said. “I mean, he lives right next door, but the neighbor across the street reported the fire. If he didn’t see it, you’d think he would have come outside when the fire department showed up.”

  Ida Belle nodded. “Even if only to make sure his own house wasn’t in danger.”

  “If there’s any chance Floyd could be our guy, we need to find out where he was last night. Surely someone in town knows.”

  Ida Belle and Gertie exchanged glances.

  “What?” I asked.

  “His usual hangout is the Swamp Bar,” Gertie said.

  I groaned. The Swamp Bar was second only to Number Two Island on the list of places that I had no desire to ever visit again. My first trip hadn’t been overly pleasant, and the resulting law enforcement detainment when we were fleeing the scene was one of the most humiliating moments of my life.

  And since I’d arrived in Sinful, that was saying a lot.

  “I think there’s an even bigger issue at work here,” Gertie said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You and Carter. I’m afraid that if you don’t move toward a romantic entanglement soon, the opportunity might pass, especially given your choice of ignoring his requests to sit still like a lady.”

  My mind flashed back to how uncomfortable I was searching for a topic of conversation the night before in Carter’s truck. “That’s probably for the best. The closer he is to me, the more opportunity he has to discover the truth. Last night was a bad idea from the get-go. We all knew it.”

  Ida Belle and Gertie exchanged glances, then changed the conversation to the best way to get information out of the crew at the Swamp Bar. I was only partially listening.

  Everything I’d said about Carter and me was true. Forming a relationship, especially the romantic kind, with the local law enforcement was the worst idea I’d had since arriving in Sinful. And that was a tall heap to top.

  What surprised me was the disappointment I felt at acknowledging this.

  I forced my mind away from thoughts of lost potential with Carter and tried to focus on the matter at hand. When Ally was safe again, I’d have all the time in the world to dwell on my failings as a normal woman.

  I had a feeling it would be a very long dwelling.

  ###

  Ally returned from her candle-lighting prayer vigil about an hour after Carter’s visit. We were in the kitchen having roast beef sandwiches and what was left of the blueberry muffins from that morning. Ally went straight to the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, and flopped into the remaining kitchen chair.

  “That good, huh?” I asked.

  She took a breath and huffed and I readied myself. I’d seen her do that once before after a visit with Celia and shortly after the huff, a good five minutes of complaining had poured out. Not that I blamed her. Ten minutes praying with her Aunt Celia would have me bitching for the next thirty years. Spending an entire afternoon with her would require a solid year of international broadcasting.

  “I cannot believe that woman,” Ally began. “I know she’s my family and she just lost her daughter and had nasty business all around, but Jesus H. Christ, does she have to be such a smug bitch?”

  Ida Belle, Gertie, and I glanced at one another and all wisely remained quiet. The answer, after all, was implied.

  “She actually said that all of this was my dad’s fault for not building the house correctly in the first place.” She threw her hands in the air. “Like my dead father popped out of the ground, threw gasoline on my house, and threw a match at it. I tried to tell her that Carter said it was arson, and you know what she told me—she said that was ridiculous because no one in Sinful would burn down another person’s house. We’ve had a rash of murders lately, but arson is apparently a worse sin to Aunt Celia.”

  Ally chugged back a good quarter of the beer and slammed it down on the table. “Then she shifted gears and started
blaming me. If I’d stop having ‘ideas’ about being a career woman and settle down with a good man, he would have kept the house in better repair and this wouldn’t have happened. When I suggested that there wasn’t a man in this town worth marrying, she told me that Carter would have been if I’d bothered to make my move before he locked his sights on ‘that visiting Yankee.’”

  “And just when I thought we were becoming friends,” I mumbled. My short history with Celia had been full of ups and downs. Apparently, we were on a down trend.

  “Oh, coming from Aunt Celia, that was complimentary, trust me.”

  Gertie cleared her throat. “Was there any actual, uh…praying at this prayer vigil?”

  Ally nodded. “Celia finally had to come up for air, and one of her friends with a piece of backbone left suggested we move to the prayer part of the gathering. That was pleasant, I suppose, but given my short sleeping stint last night, I almost nodded off. The final chorus of ‘amens’ startled me back into consciousness.”

  Ida Belle shook her head. “At that point, you’d have had to use jumper cables on me.”

  “You mean a defibrillator?” Gertie asked.

  “No, I meant jumper cables.”

  “But then things got hairy again,” Ally said. “Carter showed up at the church and had the nerve to question where I’d been the last two hours. An entire room of women told him I’d been right in front of them the entire time, except for the one potty break, but he still seemed suspicious. Mumbling about trespassing and bobcats and beaded shirts. I swear, he sounds like he’s losing it.”

  Gertie, Ida Belle, and I exchanged looks and Gertie started to laugh. Ida Belle held out for a bit then laughed as well.

  Ally sighed. “I should have known. What were you guys up to while I was gone?”

  I gave her a rundown of our activities. Her expression shifted from amused, to horrified, to disbelief, to laughing so hard she had to put down her beer.

  “I can’t believe you tried to pass the whole thing off as beading a shirt,” Ally said. “And are you sure it was a bobcat?”

  I stood up and showed her what was left of my tee. “Something far larger than Merlin did this, and it was definitely in the cat family.”

  “It was a bobcat,” Ida Belle said. “There’s plenty of them in the swamps, but this is the only one I know of living in the suburbs. You didn’t know Floyd had a bobcat?”

  Ally frowned. “I try to avoid anything and everything to do with Floyd.”

  “Has he given you trouble?” I asked.

  “Floyd is nothing but trouble.” She shook her head. “He and Mama had a running feud over property lines at the back. Floyd swears that the fence between our lots is thirty feet over into his property. They went to court about it a couple years before Mama got sick. He still contends that the courts only sided with Mama because he was a criminal.”

  “And did they?” I asked.

  “No. Anyone who’s seen the original surveys and plats can tell straight off that the fence is fine.”

  “Thirty feet is an awful lot to claim as a mistake,” I said.

  Ally nodded. “There was a method to his madness. Both properties are narrower up front but branch out as you move toward the rear.”

  “Like a trapezoid?” I asked.

  “Exactly. But Mama’s trapezoid runs right into an inlet of Sinful Bayou. Floyd wanted that inlet in his property line so he could build a boat shed and dock his boat there. To irk him even further, Mama put up a ten-foot board fence across the back of the property. It didn’t even have a gate on the back end.”

  “So as far as Floyd was concerned, she was wasting the space.”

  Ally nodded.

  “But there’s an iron fence there now.”

  “Yeah, the wooden one took a beating in Hurricane Katrina. Some of the men from church managed to keep it propped up while Mama was sick, but after she moved to the facility in New Orleans, I used some of the insurance money to replace it. The whole thing was one good gust of wind away from being in the bayou, and I would have been responsible for cleanup. I figured a fence with a view increased property value.”

  “Have you had any problems with Floyd?” I asked.

  Ally frowned. “He called the cops once when he thought I was playing my music too loud in the backyard. I was gardening. Carter told me to turn it down a bit, and I’ve worn earbuds ever since.”

  “So no score to settle?”

  Ally’s eyes widened. “By burning down my house? I can’t imagine—I mean, if he was still mad over the property line, wouldn’t he have done that before Mama left?”

  “It does seem a bit of a stretch,” Gertie said.

  “It may if he were a normal person,” I said, “but this is a guy who lives with an attack bobcat.” I’d known my share of psychos. Logical thinking didn’t enter into their decisions if they had an emotional investment in whatever act of terror they decided to engage in.

  “She’s got a point,” Ida Belle said. “Even though we can’t come up with a clear motive, we should still see if he had opportunity.” She looked at Ally. “I don’t suppose you know whether or not he was home when the fire started?”

  Ally shook her head. “The firemen said they knocked but he never answered. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t home, though. It would be just like him to be inside ignoring the entire scene.”

  “So we’re back to the Swamp Bar,” I said. “Oh, goody.”

  “What are you bitching about?” Gertie asked. “The last time I was there, I got shot at.”

  “You stole a boat,” I said. “The last time I was there, I almost drowned, and Carter caught me wearing a garbage bag and little else.”

  Ally’s eyes widened. “Holy crap, you never told me that. Why have you been holding out on the good stuff?”

  “Because vast humiliation is not something I relish sharing.”

  “You should if it’s funny,” Ally said. “If we can’t laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at?”

  I stared at her. “Other people?”

  “Got that right,” Ida Belle said.

  “Absolutely,” Gertie agreed.

  Ally laughed. “Tonight, we are going to open up a bottle of wine, and you’re going to share the trash bag story with me.”

  “What do I get out of the deal?”

  “Chocolate cake?”

  I felt myself weakening. “Maybe.”

  “And I might tell you about the time I went skinny-dipping with Bobby Hanson and his little brother stole our clothes.”

  I waved a hand in dismissal. “I bet everyone around here has one of those stories from their childhood.”

  “It happened last year.”

  I smiled. “Chocolate cake and ultimate humiliation it is.”

  Chapter Seven

  I managed to convince Gertie and Ida Belle that we should delay our Swamp Bar trip until the next day, and they headed out to return Maisey’s car. Ally decided that hours of prayer and insults from Celia rated a long, hot shower, and hurried upstairs to indulge. I took advantage of being alone to make a trip to the General Store to talk to Walter, the owner.

  The reason I’d given Ida Belle and Gertie for wanting to delay the Swamp Bar trip was because I wanted to keep a close eye on Ally since we’d had a creeper the night before. And that wasn’t completely a lie. Except for the part where I wanted to keep a close eye on Ally. What I really wanted to do was set my sights on the creeper. And assuming he was stupid enough to return, I wanted a way to make him pay without involving myself in a law enforcement incident. But I wanted to keep my plan on the down low.

  It was much easier to cover your tracks if no one else was stepping in them with you.

  Walter, unlike Ida Belle and Gertie, was happy to give advice without wanting to have any part in the actual activity, especially if the activity bordered on the illegal kind. The really cool thing about Walter was that despite being Carter’s uncle, he didn’t seem to have any desire to inform his nephew of other
people’s business. Basically, conversations with Walter were in a locked vault, which probably made him the most valuable person in Sinful.

  Despite my new goal to exercise more, I drove my Jeep to the store. If things went the way I expected, I would be returning with goods—the kind of goods I didn’t want people to see me walking down the sidewalk with.

  The store was empty when I walked in. Walter looked up from his newspaper and gave me a smile and a wave. “About time someone came in here and took me away from boredom,” he said.

  I slid onto a stool across the checkout counter from him. “I thought you were reading the newspaper.”

  He folded the paper closed and tossed it on the counter behind him. “It’s all political nonsense and sports statistics. No one has anything interesting to say anymore. How are things going with the cat?”

  “Considering I can’t keep cactus alive, I guess it’s going well.”

  “Tomcats have survival skills that match the best of military special forces. He’ll be fine.”

  “He’s definitely interesting. I’ve never been around cats before and the things he does are fascinating. The other day I was cleaning one of Marge’s guns and activated the laser sight. He bolted off the couch and chased that pointer until he was too tired to move. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life.”

  “Hunting instinct. It’s still strong with him because he was fending for himself for so long. And most cats can’t ignore a moving light.”

  “Hunting instinct…that makes sense.”

  He nodded and his expression shifted from cheery to serious. “I hear Ally’s staying at your house. Why don’t you bring me up to speed?”

  “When Carter suspected the fire was deliberate, he asked me to keep an eye on her, so as far as I’m concerned, she can have the guest room until Carter is certain it’s safe for her to go back home.”

  Walter shook his head. “I can’t imagine any reason that someone would want to hurt Ally. That girl has got to be the nicest person in this town.”

  “That might be reason enough.”

  “Ha. You got a point there. But still, I can’t think of anything to be gained. I don’t know her mother’s financial situation but I don’t think she has much to speak of besides that house.”