Every Body on Deck

by G. A. McKevett

  Savannah wanted to be a source of comfort and reassurance for the highly annoyed editor. But she was exhausted and had very little to offer.

  “I’m sorry, Patricia,” she told her. “I really am. If I had my way, we would all be sitting down to dinner right now in that big fancy dining room. But right now we have bigger fish to fry. Before sundown we have to find—”

  Dora interrupted her. “We may not have fish to fry, but if anybody gets hungry I do have some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my overnight bag.”

  Savannah stared at her mother-in-law for a long moment, then shook her head and continued. “As I was saying, we have to find overnight lodging for ten people in a town that I’m pretty sure doesn’t have a hotel.”

  Savannah marched over to Sergeant Bodin, who was assuring the weeping Tammy that she was not going to be arrested for purse snatching or any other felonious activities.

  “Please don’t cry, Miss Hart,” he was telling her. “I wouldn’t lock you up in a bank overnight with a suspected murderess. I promise you. Olive Kelly isn’t even in the bank right now. I let her go.”

  “You what?” Savannah demanded. “You turned her loose?”

  He nodded. “I did. I had nothing to hold her on. Last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal to carry a can of gas around the woods, as long as you don’t light it. We don’t have any solid proof that she did.”

  “Where is she?” Savannah wanted to know.

  “Probably the Honey Bear Motel. That’s where I told her to go when she asked me where she could spend the night.”

  A motel? A motel? Savannah thought. She felt like the sun had suddenly burst from behind the clouds and shone its warm, vitamin D–giving rays upon her face.

  John joined them just in time to hear the sergeant’s last remark. “A motel! Savannah, isn’t that a fine thing? It appears we’ll have lodging after all!” He turned to the trooper. “This Honey Bear establishment that you spoke of, you recommend it?”

  “With all my heart.”

  “It’s that good?” John asked.

  “It’s the only one in town. It beats sleeping out in the woods. At least the bear’s on a chain.”

  * * *

  “Good grief, there really is a bear.” Savannah couldn’t believe her eyes. A fully grown brown bear was chained to the porch of the motel, near the office door.

  Fortunately for those wishing to do business with the innkeeper, the chain was too short for the bear to reach them when they were entering and exiting the building.

  Unfortunately for the bear, he had very little freedom, and Savannah’s heart ached for him when they walked by and saw how limited his movements were.

  The animal had no bed, per se, only a pile of hay that had been tossed against the building. A large dog’s water dish was his only possession.

  An old-fashioned refrigerator with a soft drink logo on its door stood between the bear and the front door. A cardboard sign had been fastened to the refrigerator with a strip of duct tape. It read: FEED THE BEAR A SODA—$5.00.

  “I don’t know who owns this motel,” Savannah said. “But I hate them already.”

  Dirk pointed to the padlock that secured the chain around the animal’s neck. “If I had a key or a hacksaw, I’d set that guy free in a heartbeat. Let him run around the woods, the way a bear’s supposed to.”

  Savannah shook her head sadly. “He can’t be set free. Not anywhere near human beings anyway. They’ve ruined him by keeping him here and feeding him.”

  As they passed through the front door, Dirk said in a low voice, “You’d better keep your opinions to yourself for the time being, Van. Remember, we can’t all sleep in the Bronco.”

  If Savannah had hated the innkeeper before she laid eyes on him, she loathed him once she actually saw him.

  Hearing the bell above the door ring when they had entered, he had emerged from a room in the back and greeted them with a grunt.

  “No way!” she said to Dirk. “Kenny Bates has a brother.”

  She looked over the motel owner, mentally comparing him to her least favorite police officer in the world, Kenny Bates. Back in San Carmelita, Kenny made Savannah’s life miserable every time she had the unpleasant task of visiting the county morgue.

  Kenny was madly in lust with her. She wanted to stomp a mud hole in Kenny’s backside and toss him off the end of the town pier.

  Theirs was a relationship made in hell, and here, two thousand miles away, was a guy who was the spitting image of him.

  He wore an old, dingy undershirt with holes in it that revealed far more of his belly than she would ever want to see. His baggy khakis were unzipped. He shuffled across the floor in house slippers that were bound together with swaths of duct tape.

  Savannah tried not to be overly judgmental of her fellow man. So she decided she didn’t mind the smell of tuna fish from the sandwich that he was eating. With his mouth wide open.

  She did mind the overpowering stench of body odor though. She minded it a lot.

  She was glad that Granny had stayed with the others outside and waited for her and Dirk to conduct the group’s business. Granny didn’t abide what she called “rank filthiness.”

  Many times Savannah had heard her say, “Even the poorest among us can afford the price of one bar of soap. There’s no excuse for being dirty. None a’tall.”

  “What can I do ya for?” the guy asked Savannah, giving her a long, lecherous look up and down her figure.

  “You can put your eyeballs back in your head,” Dirk said, “’cause that’s my wife you’re talking to and gawking at.”

  Savannah stifled a snicker. So much for watching one’s mouth and not saying anything offensive that might jeopardize their prospects of having a roof over their heads for the night.

  But the innkeeper didn’t appear to take offense. Something told Savannah that people spoke offensive things to him frequently. Probably on an hourly basis.

  “We need some rooms for the night,” Dirk told him.

  “Rooms?” He gave them a smarmy little grin. “I figured you two would be sharing one.”

  “We will,” Dirk snapped. “Like I said, she’s my wife. But we’ve got a bunch of friends and relatives waiting outside. We’re gonna need five rooms, at least. Six if you’ve got ’em.”

  “I got four.”

  Savannah’s mind raced through the possible combinations of people inhabiting the same bedroom.

  “No-o-o!”

  She hadn’t meant to scream the word, but she was sure she could hear it echo around the office walls for a full minute afterward.

  She drew a deep breath and regrouped. “What I mean is, we have a party of ten adults, and we really, really do need a minimum of five rooms. If there’s any way you can accommodate us, we’d be most obliged.”

  Kenny’s twin brother wasn’t moved. He dug at some tuna stuck between his teeth with a long, dirty pinky nail.

  “Four. Take ’em or leave ’em.”

  One quick, sideways look at her husband told Savannah that he was about to snap.

  “Do you have extra roll-away beds?” she asked.

  “Yep. One.”

  Savannah turned to Dirk. “Your folks are sleeping with us, and we get the roll-away.”

  He gave her a look of horror that gradually faded into numbed resignation. “Whatever. Let’s just do it.” He turned to Kenny B. of the North. “How much will that be?”

  The innkeeper named a sum that was so exorbitant that Savannah and Dirk thought he was joking. But after several moments of stony silence, they realized he was serious.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Dirk shouted. “Hell’s bells! We could stay at the Ritz for that!”

  He shrugged. “Then go stay at the Ritz.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, when Savannah and Dirk walked out of the office, keys in hand and hardly any money at all in Dirk’s pockets or Savannah’s purse, they had to pass by the bear.

  “Tell ya what, fella,�
�� Dirk told the poor creature. “If I can swing it, I’ll find a way to feed you a really big dinner before I leave. It’ll stink like sweat and taste a little like tuna, but something tells me you won’t mind.”

  Chapter 23

  Dora Jones talked in her sleep, too.

  Savannah could hardly believe it. But no sooner had her mother-in-law dozed off than she began chattering away. Unfortunately, the topics of the woman’s nocturnal mutterings were no more interesting than her daytime subjects.

  Dirk rolled toward Savannah, and the simple movement produced a cacophony of creaks and moans from the flimsy roll-away bed.

  “This wasn’t the worst day of my life,” he said, “but I think it’s in the top ten.”

  “I hear ya.”

  “Close the door, Richard,” Dora said from the other side of the dark room. “You left that screen door open again. I can hear it squeaking. I asked you to oil the hinges. Remember? Yes. Last week. Might have been last month when I asked you to clean the air conditioner.”

  Richard replied with a roof-rattling snore.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” Dirk said, pulling her close.

  “You always say you’re sorry,” Dora replied. “But that doesn’t get the hinges oiled, now does it?”

  Suddenly, Savannah started to laugh.

  Yes, it was a laugh that bordered on hysteria. But it was either that or cry, and crying would just give her a headache, which she didn’t need on top of everything else.

  Dirk nudged her. “You’re laughing, right?”

  “Yes. Might as well,” she said. “On this bed, with your parents five feet away, we certainly can’t fool around.”

  He chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “After the day you’ve had, I’m touched that you even considered it.”

  She moved her palm over his bare chest, delighting in the smoothness of his skin and the bristly roughness of his chest hair.

  “I almost always think about it,” she told him, her voice deep and throaty. “But sometimes it’s a case of ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’”

  “I hear ya. Right now I don’t think I could even—”

  “Eeeeeeeeee! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Eeeeeeeeeeee!”

  Savannah shot straight up and out of bed like a circus performer being fired from a giant cannon.

  In the middle of the floor, she gyrated violently, performing a strange, highly vigorous, nonrhythmic dance.

  Dirk leaped out of bed, too, and tried to grab her, but she was flailing her arms in the air so wildly that she caught him in the eye with a vicious right cross.

  Holding his eye, he began to dance up and down and yell, too.

  “What the hell’s going on?” shouted Richard as he flipped on the table light. He jumped out of bed and hurried to his son and daughter-in-law. “What’s the matter with you two? What happened? Are you hurt?”

  “Hell yes, I’m hurt!” Dirk said, his hand over his eye. “My wife just slugged me, and for no damned good reason!”

  Dora slept on, but commented on the event. “Richard, those cats are making a racket in the back alley again. Could you do something about that?”

  Richard grabbed Savannah by her shoulders and shook her. “Savannah! Honey, what’s wrong with you? Why did you hit Dirk?”

  She could hardly breathe, let alone speak, her teeth were chattering so hard.

  But finally, she eked out one word. “Sp-sp-spi . . . der.”

  “Spiders are good for us,” Dora muttered, rolling onto her stomach. “They catch and kill harmful bugs.”

  Savannah froze, then whirled toward the bed.

  Suddenly, her mind cleared, her thoughts began to actually form sentences again. “There are no bugs that are more harmful than spiders,” she told her sleeping mother-in-law through gritted teeth. “They are little monsters. That’s all they are. Hideous beasts! The only thing they’re good for is squashing. Squashing them until they are nothing but a tiny, wet spot on the floor or sidewalk or pavement. Squash, squash, squash!”

  Someone knocked on the door, and they heard Ryan ask, “Is everybody okay in there?”

  Richard walked over to the door and opened it a crack. “No,” he said. “My son and his wife are having a domestic dispute.”

  “Oh?”

  Savannah could hear a world of disbelief and amazement in Ryan’s one syllable.

  “Has . . . has anyone been harmed?” John asked.

  “Yes. Dirk has a black eye.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  She could tell that John was equally amazed by this strange turn of events.

  “Can we offer any sort of first aid?” John wanted to know.

  Richard turned and looked back at his son, whose eye was growing blacker by the moment. “If you can lay your hands on some ice, that’d probably be a good idea.”

  “Straightaway.”

  Savannah walked back to the roll-away bed and with thumb and forefinger, delicately lifted the pillow by its corner. She peered beneath it.

  Nothing.

  Peeling one blanket and sheet back at a time, she gradually stripped the bed. But she found not one hairy leg of the offender who had dropped down from the ceiling and landed on her bare arm.

  She went into the bathroom, took off her nightgown, and shook it vigorously.

  Still nothing.

  She slipped the gown back on and returned to the bedroom. She was just in time to see John’s arm, handing an ice bucket through the partially open door.

  “Hope all is well,” she heard him say. “Let us know if you need us to help . . . to intervene . . . or whatever.”

  Richard just nodded, then closed the door and handed the bucket to Dirk.

  It was when Dirk lowered his hand from his eye to accept the ice, that Savannah realized the extent of the damage she had done to her beloved.

  His eye was not only black, but nearly swollen closed.

  “Oh, sugar!” she said. “I really got you a good one there! I’m so, so sorry.”

  Distraught and guilt-ridden, she ducked back into the bathroom and hurried out with a hand towel. She wrapped some of the ice in the towel and started to move toward Dirk with it.

  “No!” he said. “Stay away from me. You and your damned spiders. Sheez, woman. I never saw anybody go as nuts as you do over a helpless, little bug. You need some of that aversion therapy that Dr. Phil talks about. God knows you need help!”

  “I do not! A lot of people are afraid of spiders. They aren’t helpless at all. They bite, you know. Some of them are venomous.”

  “Very few. For the most part, they’re a lot more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  “That isn’t possible. I nearly had a heart attack.”

  “You have a stupid, unnatural fear of them.”

  “Do not.”

  Dirk grumbled under his breath as he applied the ice pack to his ever-increasing bruise.

  She ventured back to the bed and began her search again. She knew she wasn’t going to find the cursed thing. Once the cursed creatures landed on you, they always just evaporated.

  Until, of course, you turned the lights back off, and then they would rematerialize and bite you with their murderous venom and kill you in the most painful, horrible way possible.

  She picked up her pillow from the bed, inspected every inch of it, and then beat the daylights out of it. Tucking it under her arm, she walked over to her wounded husband and placed a loving kiss on his cheek.

  “I apologize for injuring you, darlin’. I hope you feel better soon. I forgive you for suggesting that I have a psychiatric disorder and need professional help.”

  Her indignant little speech delivered, she marched to the door.

  When she opened it, Dirk said, “Savannah, it’s dark out there. Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To sleep in the Bronco, of course. Heaven knows I can never sleep in that bed again.” She headed out the door. “Irrational fear, my butt.”

  * * *

  Eve
ntually, Savannah figured out how to lower the seats in the Bronco to provide a hard but flat sleeping surface. The space was far from roomy. She managed to find a halfway comfortable position, lying on her side. She couldn’t even think about stretching out, but as long as she was in a tight, fetal position, it worked.

  As tired as she was, she figured that as long as she was horizontal she’d be able to sleep.

  But it was cold, and she could practically feel the temperature dropping by the minute. She wished she’d brought a blanket, but of course that would have defeated the whole purpose, since the spider would have been lurking in its folds.

  Waiting. Fangs bared.

  In spite of the cold, she was so tired that she was about to drop off, when she heard it.

  A unique, spine-tingling, bloodcurdling, ancient sound. A sound that had struck fear in the hearts of mankind since the dawn of time.

  A wolf’s howl.

  It was soon followed by another and another, until the dark woods behind the motel rang with it.

  Savannah shivered as the sound went through her, colder and more chilling than the cold of the Alaskan night.

  That was when Dirk knocked on the Bronco’s window and scared her half to death.

  In a heartbeat, she flung the door open, welcoming him inside.

  As he crawled in next to her and wrapped his warm arms around her, he said, “Wow, it’s sure snug in here.”

  “Especially for full-sized folks like you and me.”

  “It’s cold, too. Babe, is there any way I can talk you into coming back inside?”

  “No,” she said, her voice quivering.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Before she knew what he was doing, he had enfolded her in a blanket, wrapping her tightly.

  “No!” she objected. “That’s not one off our bed, is it? That spider could still be—”

  “Sh-h-h,” he said. “It’s from my parents’ bed.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t lie to me about something like that, would you?”

  He laughed. “I might. But I’m not. Dad offered. Said we’d freeze out here without a blanket, and you’d never stand for using one of yours.”

  She snuggled into the blanket and against him. “I love your dad.”