The Darcy & Flora Boxed Set

by Blanche Day Manos

  Chapter 14

  “Darcy, this is all so unbelievable.” Coffee sloshed from her cup as my mother raised it to her lips.

  I nodded. “Yes. First the earthquake, then the mountain lion. I can tell you that my heart was in my mouth when that thing turned and looked at me. And that scream! It made my blood run cold.”

  My mother shook her head. “You know, Darcy, we are not to believe in superstitions. That would be wrong. God is much greater than all the evil in this world.”

  She traced a small crack in the top of her antique dining table. I knew that thoughtful look. “But? Out with it. What superstition are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you know all the silly things about breaking a mirror or a black cat walking across in front of you,” she answered.

  “And about owls being harbingers of good or bad luck. Yes, I remember. But that isn’t what you’re talking about, is it?”

  Without looking up from that mesmerizing crack, she said, “I was just remembering what my mother, your Granny Grace, said about the scream of a mountain lion.”

  “Granny Grace was a Christian, Mom. Surely she didn’t put any stock in old wives’ tales.”

  “No, she didn’t. But she said there was a saying among some people that the cry of a panther meant death.”

  A finger of fear traced itself down my backbone. That was understandable. Never in all my life had I heard anything so otherworldly. Taking a sip of coffee, I considered. “Well, I believe we can disprove that one. Although it scared me, that wild cat didn’t threaten me at all. He just hid in the bushes.”

  Mom nodded. “Yes, that’s what he did. I imagine the earthquake had upset him and maybe put him on the prowl. You know, animals can sense an earthquake or a storm coming before it actually happens. Maybe that panther was out at Spirit Leap last night. Maybe that was what you heard in the woods.”

  A panther? Well, why not? If it, with its finely tuned wild senses, knew that the earth was about to shake, it could have been nervous and moving around. But the footfall I heard didn’t sound like the quiet padding of a cat. It was too loud for that.

  “Have you heard any local news tonight about the earthquake?” I asked, going to the television set.

  “Actually, I haven’t thought of that! I guess the quake rattled my nerves and then I was worried about you.”

  “It looks as if it’s big news,” I said, as a picture flashed onto the screen.

  The TV anchorman stood by a large map of the United States. He was introducing a prominent seismologist.

  “Quakes that can be felt in Oklahoma are relatively rare,” the earthquake expert said, “but they certainly happen, ten times more frequently than usual since 2009.”

  “So does Oklahoma sit atop a major fault?” Drew Adamson, the anchorman, asked.

  “Pressure can build along fault lines,” seismologist Charlie Thomas answered. “The Wizetta Fault, or the Seminole Uplift as it is called, is a very deep fault east of Oklahoma City.”

  “The quake was felt over much of the central and northeast parts of Oklahoma,” Adamson said, indicating bright little dots along the state map. “Reports are coming in from Oklahoma City all the way down to Tulsa, Tahlequah, and Levi.”

  “We will hope this is not a “forequake,” Thomas said. “That is a sort of pre-earthquake that comes before a much bigger one.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” Mom said. “Turn it off, Darcy. We certainly don’t want an earthquake bigger than this one.”

  I obliged and poured another cup of coffee.

  “You know, Mom,” I said, “that mountain lion didn’t seem threatening, but he might have a taste for domesticated meat if he could find it. I think you or I had better tell our neighbors about my encounter with it. Their horses and mules might be in danger, although I guess the panther would have to be awfully hungry to jump on something as big as a horse.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Oh, I almost forgot. Grant phoned. He asked that you call him at the office when you got back. He wants to know that you are safe, I’m sure. And he asked if the quake had damaged anything. I told him the only damage was to my nerves.”

  I fidgeted. Should I return Grant’s call? I didn’t want to encourage him, but I wanted him to keep the lines of communication open in case he found anything else about Andrea Worth, or if he and Jim discovered some sort of proof at Spirit Leap that would make my story about a noise sound more like truth and less like hysteria.

  The note of relief in Grant’s voice was unmistakable. “I’m glad you’re all right, Darcy. Earthquakes are something we don’t know much about here in northeast Oklahoma,” he said. “We usually know when a tornado is headed our way but an earthquake . . . .”

  He was probably sitting at his desk shaking his head. “Do you remember that heavy old file cabinet in my office?”

  “Uh-huh,” I answered.

  “The quake scooted it away from the wall and left a crack in the ceiling. Anyway, Darcy, it’s great that you and Miss Flora are safe. I want you to stay that way. Which leads me to the next thing. Jim and I checked out the woods and pasture at Spirit Leap this morning before the quake and we didn’t find anything, but remember that Rusty Lang is on the loose again and I don’t think he has any particular love for you, Darcy.”

  So much for finding proof that Jim Clendon was wrong about my overwrought nerves!

  Grant paused. “Are you really sure that you heard something in the woods last night? Do you think it might have been just a deer?”

  The feeling of being watched was real. If Grant believed Jim rather than me, though, there wasn’t much I could do to change his mind. However, I wouldn’t give Grant the satisfaction of hearing my story about the mountain lion. Then he would be certain the wild animal was my noise in the darkness.

  “Oh, Grant, I don’t think so, but who knows? By the way, Rusty Lang shouldn’t be a problem. After all, I didn’t make him rob that drugstore. He simply paid for a wrong decision. Surely he doesn’t hate me.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Darcy,” Grant said. “Criminals have to blame somebody. Think about it. He is from the Dallas area, so what’s he doing in Levi, Oklahoma? I doubt that he came up here because of a fondness for his cousin. Just keep your eyes open and don’t go anywhere alone.”

  Grant might be the sheriff of Ventris County, but the last time I checked, he didn’t have the right to give orders to a law-abiding citizen. I bit my tongue. “Okay. I’ll be on the look-out,” I replied sweetly.

  I hung up and saw that Mom was gazing at me with an expression that could only be called “extreme motherly concern.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom; a person can’t go through life in a glow of love and friendship. Probably everyone gathers a few enemies along the way, but we don’t always know who they are. See how lucky I am to at least know about Rusty? I can be on guard now.”

  She just looked at me and shook her head.

  I walked over to the coffee pot. Good. There was enough for one more cup. “You know, Grant said that earthquake moved a file cabinet in his office. Could it have shaken up things at Spirit Leap? If we went back and looked, maybe we could find some kind of clue that Grant and Jim overlooked. I really believe someone was out there with me at Spirit Leap last night. I could sense it.”

  Mom frowned. “If you are thinking about going back to that dangerous place, I can tell you right now that I’m going, too. Not today though; it’s too wet and dreary. What do they call those earthquakes after an earthquake?”

  “Aftershocks.”

  “Yes. Well, who knows? We might have one of those aftershocks. You could meet anybody or anything out there. Until we know that you are no longer in harm’s way, wherever you go, I go.” She nodded her head.

  Sighing, I said, “And put you in danger too? I can’t see that’d help me.”

  My mother lifted her stubborn chin. “Wherever you go, I go. Period.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said meekly.

  Chapter 15
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br />   The sky shone a sunny blue and all I needed was a light sweater across my shoulders as my mother and I walked through her back pasture to Spirit Leap the next morning. Nature seemed to be apologizing for the earthquake and dismal rain of yesterday. I could almost believe, along with part of a poem by Robert Browning that “God’s in His Heaven; all’s right with the world.” But, sad to say, although He is, it isn’t.

  The boulder that had been my chair didn’t look right.

  “Look at that,” I said. I dropped down on my knees. “You can see where the rock used to sit; there’s mud beside it instead of grass. The earthquake must have moved it!”

  Between the grass at the bottom of the rock and the rock itself was a muddy strip of bare ground about two inches wide which ran the length of the boulder.

  My mother joined me on the grass. “You’re right. That’s a slide mark. I can’t believe it! This thing must weigh a ton.”

  I put my hands against the side of the rock and shoved. It didn’t budge. “I can’t even begin to imagine the force that could scoot a monster like this,” I said.

  Sunlight glinted upon a metal object at the base of the rock. I picked it up. A black and silver pocketknife lay in my hand.

  “Well, well. What have we here?” I held my open palm out to Mom. She touched it with one finger.

  “A knife! Was it under the rock?”

  “No. It was in the grass on the edge of this bare strip that the quake uncovered.”

  “Why didn’t Grant or Jim find it? It’s pretty big. I don’t see how they could have missed it.”

  “Somebody could have been out here after Grant and Jim left.” I shuddered. Why would anybody trespassing on my mother’s land come to this particular spot?

  “Maybe Grant came back later and looked again to see if he could find any sign of an intruder. Grant himself could have dropped the knife,” Mom nodded. “Yes, I’ll bet that’s what he did.”

  I turned the knife over. On its side were a few letters. “I’d say this thing has seen some heavy use. Looks like there used to be a name here but it has been rubbed off.” Four dim letters: C, H, m, s were in faded silver against the black knife.

  “It looks like something that may have been used as a promotion; a sales gimmick. Or maybe a door prize from a store that was having a sale. Those items always had the name of the store that was promoting it imprinted on the side. I remember your dad carried one for many years from Sutter’s Hardware. Joe Sutter gave them to his customers after he remodeled and had a grand opening. It had Sutter’s Hardware on the side.”

  “But who dropped it? Was it Grant or Jim? It could have been a hunter who dropped it a long time ago. This is deer season; maybe someone stopped here at the rock to wait for a deer to come out of the woods.”

  Mom nodded. “I’d hate to think anyone would go hunting here without asking my permission but that’s a possibility, too.”

  She got to her feet. “Well, hand it over to Grant. Let him try to figure this out. I hope there’s nothing sinister about its being here. It could have been here for years, hidden in a crevice of the rock. It just took a good hard shake to jar it loose.”

  If it comforted my mother to think that, so be it. I closed my hand around the knife. “If I take it to Grant, you can bet that he’s not going to be happy when I tell him we were back at Spirit Leap. He doesn’t want me to try to play detective.”

  “If you are thinking about keeping this a secret, forget it. If there really was someone out here last night, maybe he dropped the knife. Maybe it’s got fingerprints on it or something. You shouldn’t keep it, Darcy.”

  My mother was right, but I dreaded taking the knife to the Ventris County sheriff. If I asked around town, at Sutter’s or one of the other stores, would I get any information? It seemed unlikely that asking questions about where the knife might have come from would shed any light on whoever was here last night. I was convinced somebody had been watching me. But who? And why? Was Grant right about my not getting involved in Andrea Worth’s disappearance? Seemed to me I was pretty much in the middle of things already.

  As we walked back to the house, my mother echoed my thoughts. “Darcy, I’ve been thinking. Just suppose there really was someone here last night; was his purpose only to scare you?”

  “If that’s what he meant to do, Mom, he certainly succeeded.”

  “Or did he mean to do more than scare you but you outran him?”

  I pulled my sweater tighter around my shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “No, of course you don’t. But think, Darcy, why would anyone want to do either; why would he want to scare you or do you harm?”

  “I guess there’re only two possibilities: Rusty Lang who is out for revenge or somebody who doesn’t want me to meddle in the disappearance of Andrea Worth.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Mom said, as we went through the backyard gate. “What if Andrea is alive somewhere and for whatever reason, she wants to scare you off because she just doesn’t want to be found.”

  “What if . . . . ” Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Why would she do that?”

  “Only one reason I can think of . . . she’s happier away from Levi and has no wish to come back home or she’s afraid to come back.”

  “But wouldn’t she at least have told her mother that she’s alive?”

  Mom rubbed her forehead and gazed off into the distance. “Not if she feared for Sophie’s safety, too.”

  I wished at that moment that Cliff Anderson had not placed Sophie’s letter in Mom’s mailbox. If only he had misplaced it or lost it along his route. But he hadn’t. Cliff was a very conscientious mail carrier. But if he had lost that letter, I could be reasonably sure that Rusty Lang was my only enemy.

  Chapter 16

  A slightly past-forty face with high cheekbones, longish hair, and dark eyes gazed at me from the mirror. And between those eyes were two frown lines. I could lay these most recent lines squarely at the door of our local sheriff who politely blew his stack when I took the pocketknife to him.

  “I thought the knife might belong to you,” I said demurely.

  “No, it doesn’t belong to me and Jim Clendon doesn’t carry one.”

  Amazingly, he did not seem at all pleased with my thoughtfulness although he did say the knife looked somewhat familiar.

  “Weren’t you listening to me, Darcy? Haven’t you learned from experience that there are people in this world who wouldn’t mind diminishing Levi’s population by one nosy reporter who can’t seem to understand that pure evil exists in this crazy world?”

  He had slammed the knife into his desk drawer, muttering something about the probability of smeared fingerprints, and the wisdom of staying away from Spirit Leap. I fled Grant’s office like a scolded child. Where was my backbone?

  Enough of that! It was a good thing that I had made a picture of the knife with my digital camera. The picture showed all the details, including the letters and the spaces where the letters had been rubbed off. I didn’t tell Grant but it seemed to me that the quicker the mystery of Andrea Worth was solved, the faster I would be safe. I had already put out feelers about her disappearance and I didn’t know how to back out at this late date. As for pure evil—yes, I was quite sure it existed. It seemed that much of it had settled in Levi, for some strange reason. I also believed that “greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.” I would just trust Jesus for my safety and do my best to find out if Andrea Worth was dead or alive. Whichever it was, I needed to know. And the only way I knew to ferret out her whereabouts was to ask questions. First stop would be the hardware store to see if Mr. Sutter could identify the knife. But that was for another day. This day had been stressful enough and I was ready for the rest that my neatly turned-down quilt and sheets promised me.

  “Scoot over, Jethro,” I told the sleeping cat. I bent down to scoop him off my bed and deposit him on the floor. Suddenly he sprang up on stiff legs, his back arching and the fur along h
is backbone standing straight up.

  I jerked my hands away and stared at him. Never, in the two months since he had adopted my mother and me, had he behaved this way. My throat felt tight. “What’s wrong, old fellow?”

  The cat didn’t appear to be looking at me. Instead, he gazed at the opaque night outside my bedroom window. His wide, unblinking yellow eyes brought back the memory of my encounter with his wild cousin. My legs suddenly felt like rubber.

  Tiptoeing to the light switch, I flicked it off. Moonlight filtering through the large window silvered my room. When I glanced again toward my bed, Jethro was nowhere in sight. I moved quietly, hardly daring to breathe. Something had caught the cat’s attention; something that I had neither seen nor heard. I brushed the curtain aside and peered out. Below me, the peony bushes in the front yard bowed their stalks to a brisk breeze. The limbs of the oak swayed above the gate. I strained my ears and heard nothing but the rattle of dry leaves. Then I heard something else—a muffled thud that was different than the usual night sounds.

  My mouth felt dry. Was that a footstep on the front porch? Should I wake Mom? Should I phone Grant? I pulled the curtain across my window. Had someone been down in the yard watching to see when I turned out my light and went to bed?

  Jim Clendon’s words came back to me about women and overwrought nerves. I would not call Grant again unless I had proof that my nerves were not the culprit.

  I crept into the hall. Gentle snores came from Mom’s room. Inching down the stairs, I prayed that the third step from the top would not creak as it usually did. The wind moaning around the corner of the house was the only thing I heard on the first floor.

  I thought of Dad’s old pistol in the bookcase drawer and willed my bare feet to cross the hall floor into the living room. Sliding open the drawer, I pulled out the gun. It felt cold and heavy but reassuring.