The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  She dragged in a breath and I thought she’d never let it out.

  When she did, eyes closed, its weakness was louder than a shriek.

  Daniel said, “We have to move.”

  In spite of his parka and my crouching strategy, I was very cold, my bare feet almost numb as I crouched on the forest floor, my toes gripping the moist earth.

  I was aware that the ground was no longer sopping wet, it was simply wet, the vegetation still dripping. But the porous duff beneath the big trees was only damp. A little breeze had come up. I shivered, my neck rigid against the cold.

  Daniel shucked his fleece shirt and said, “Guys, socks off.”

  In unison, the three put butts to ground, stripped off their shoes and socks, their naked feet comically white there in the dimness of the foggy forest, then replaced their shoes.

  Yes, it was getting foggy—the breeze was pushing it in, just like I’d seen it come over the hills of Marin from the ocean—I could almost feel it on my face.

  I took Petey’s socks and forced my feet into them, shocked that they almost fit, albeit stretched to their limits.

  I then placed Daniel’s socks on Gina’s feet, while George worked his over her hands. “Fresh this morning, anyway,” he muttered cheerfully, and I saw that he had, as well, quickly stripped to his bare chest, handing Petey his jacket and two shirts. Petey turned to me with them.

  “Keep your T-shirt,” Daniel advised.

  “Won’t need it between here and camp, we’ll be sweating. Put them on, Rita.”

  “Take my secret-agent coat, too, Mom,” said Petey, anxiously stripping like the big boys.

  “No, stop.”

  George held Daniel’s parka open to shield me somewhat, and I peeled off my sopping sweater and donned his clothing, still warm from his body. His overshirt, of thick wool similar to Joey’s army coat, felt sublimely toasty.

  Keeping my wet jeans on, I stepped into the sleeves of Daniel’s fleece pullover and wrapped the shirt around my butt and waist.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, “thanks, guys,” knowing my job was to hunker here until they could come back for me with my spare clothing and, more important, footwear. “My river sandals are at the bottom of my bag,” I told Daniel.

  George then draped Daniel’s parka over Gina’s back and tucked her good arm into it. She came more alert.

  “Lance,” she muttered hopelessly. “Lance.”

  Daniel cleared his throat. “We don’t know for sure what happened to him. We found him in the river. There’s a man we rescued who said he was walking along, saw Lance in trouble, and tried to help him, but he couldn’t, and Lance fell into the gorge. That’s all we know.”

  Gina nodded faintly.

  “This guy’s name is Joey Preston. Did you meet up with him?”

  She gave him a confused look.

  “Petey,” said George, “your assignment is to take care of your mother while we get your aunt Gina to safety.”

  Petey looked up at him and nodded. He stared at George’s powerful torso. He had loved to wrestle with George, who’d gently shown him a technical move or two.

  George had shown me some moves as well. Not that kind, the self-defense kind. He’d been shocked one night when I’d related how a sketchy-looking guy had shoved me in the parking lot at the Ralph’s on Sunset and then tried to grab my purse.

  I’d shoved him back, and he was too drunk or too sick from needing a fix to hurt me enough to make me relinquish the purse.

  If you live in L.A. very long, you’ll be accosted for money so many times you get used to yelling, “Back off!” really loud to the ones who get too insistent. The unarmed ones, anyway.

  Your radar gets a workout, trying to sense which screwed-up, filthy bums are harmless and which one in a thousand will come after you, eyes furious and implacable.

  You’re never supposed to resist in the event of robbery, but I’m like fuck you. Especially if it’s a purse I really like.

  So George had made me practice the eye gouge, the nose push, the throat slam, the groin grab-and-twist (easy, girl), the backward head butt, and the knee blowout, over and over, until I felt pretty comfortable with them. And basically, he confirmed what my gut already knew about dealing with a determined attacker, be he robber or rapist: fight back every time; fight with everything you’ve got; fight like a rabid animal.

  I wished I’d known those moves when I was married. Isn’t that just an insane thing to think? But if you’ve tried making a life with an unpredictable alcoholic, you know exactly where I’m coming from.

  George told Petey, “Make sure your mom rests and stays warm, OK? Don’t let her run around.”

  With a pointed glance upstream toward the log bridge and the dark woods beyond, he added, “It looks a little warmer over here, deeper in the shelter of the trees.”

  “OK!” said Petey, escorting me in my awkward getup to a grove of young firs.

  The men set off, George taking the first turn carrying Gina, piggyback. She was able to hold on to his neck with her good arm. Daniel spotted her from behind lest she fall backward. As they began to move, she moaned.

  Hearing her, seeing her distress, and realizing what she was going to have to go through to get to camp, Petey turned gray.

  “Mom, oh, gosh, Mom.”

  I hugged him, and instead of pulling away as he’d been occasionally doing—growing into such a big guy and all—he buried his head into my side. I told him, “Honey, she’s going to be OK. When somebody gets hurt, it always looks bad at first, doesn’t it? Remember when you cut your arm on that broken glass door?”

  “Yeah!” He looked up. “There was blood all over the place!”

  “You bet there was.”

  “I thought I was gonna die!”

  “You bet you did.”

  “But I made it!”

  “That’s right, and so will Aunt Gina. We just have to stay in our strong place.”

  “Our strong place.” He understood.

  Chapter 22 – Gina, Buddha, George, Whiskey

  Badger Cabin was rapidly becoming Bandage Cabin, given that now Gina was ensconced there opposite Joey Preston.

  Using a length of rope and some of the tent canvas from the storeroom, George rigged up a privacy curtain across the cabin.

  I helped Daniel remove the rest of her shreds of clothing and figure out how to keep her warm. She was only semi with it.

  “Uh-oh,” said Daniel, “she’s bleeding from the pelvis.”

  “Oh, my God, let me see.”

  He looked at me desperately.

  “Oh,” I said, once I’d gotten a better look at Gina’s naked lower body, “it would seem she’s gotten her period.”

  His “oh” reflected a world of mixed feelings about women and their bodies. Well, you can’t expect guys to deal easily with this kind of thing.

  I touched her cheek to try to get her attention. “Gina, are you expecting a visit from Aunt Flo?”

  “Huh?” inquired Daniel.

  “Girl code.”

  “Oh.”

  “Um, yeah.” Gina was able to help me. She squirmed a little and realized. “Sorry.”

  “Hey, no problem.”

  I’d brought a small stash of tampons, but I thought inserting anything would be a bad idea.

  “Is your pelvis hurting?” Daniel said. I so admired his poise in dealing with this issue.

  “Ev’thing fuckin’ hurts.”

  I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was to hear her talk like that. However, I had seen her alarmingly bruised and swollen side, so I was taking nothing for granted. I went to the storeroom and grabbed another of the seemingly endless stacks of T-shirts. I folded one into a nice comfy pad for Gina.

  “Ahhh,” she sighed.

  “Softer than Kotex,” I remarked.

  “Hurts to breathe,” she said, after her sigh.

  This frightened me but Daniel said, “She might have a cracked rib, but it can’t be too bad or she wouldn’t wa
nt to breathe that deeply. Her lungs seem OK. And she doesn’t have a fever...yet. I’m worried about a spleen or kidney injury. She’s holding steady, though, good pulse, so I guess I shouldn’t borrow too much trouble. I’d expect you to have a cracked rib or two yourself.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not, really.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She had not forgotten about Lance. I expected her to weep, but all she did was murmur his name once or twice. Then she fell silent, and her eyes went far away. I believe she needed all her resources just to survive. I’d piled my sleeping bag and other warm things on her.

  By now it was late afternoon—what a long day this Saturday had been! I rifled the storeroom back of the commandant’s office hunting for clothing, more first-aid supplies, anything we could use.

  Daniel hadn’t thought to ask George to bring more stove fuel, and his bottles were running low.

  So George, Petey, and Daniel went into the woods hunting dry firewood, which we could at least burn in the sheltered fire pit to heat our food and—God is good—water for coffee. George had brought a two-pound can of Maxwell House, which Daniel and I, hoity-toity L.A. people, would have turned up our noses at a couple of weeks ago but which we now consumed with the kind of gratitude you feel for a lung transplant. It tasted fantastic too.

  So yeah, mark it right next to Gramma Gladys’s saying about hunger being the best sauce: Desire is the great coffee leveler.

  The temperature dropped even lower—I guessed down near forty—but I was coping with it OK in my own long underwear, pants, and layered sweaters. A drizzle came and went. As kids do, Petey seemed immune to the cold, but I kept an eye on him.

  Remembering the blotter pad on the commandant’s desk, I thought the office could yield more dry paper for tinder.

  Methodically, I went through every drawer in the desk and file cabinet, uncovering a trove of rodent-gnawed paper, old field mouse nests, as well as a recently vacated one, judging by the scurrying sounds when I opened the drawer.

  ROSTERS, one drawer was marked.

  CAMPER FORMS, another one said, but it was empty.

  The rosters were so neatly organized it took me only a minute to look back through the years and find the Sauvenard name.

  Both boys were there.

  And there also, for one same summer, was the name Joseph Preston.

  A chill crept up the back of my neck.

  I knew he’d lied. The son of a bitch. He was the same Joey from the garage, my fan Lydia’s son or nephew, whatever. I left the rosters intact and stacked up the blotter pad with the bits of cardboard and the like I’d found.

  I realized if we needed to we could tear down bunks and the cabins themselves to burn for cooking heat.

  A pile of musty clothes had been left behind in a cabinet, perhaps by camp counselors, some Levi’s and flannel shirts. I could wash these in the lake, without soap, which we were conserving in case Daniel had to make a solution of it to flush wounds again should they become infected. Also some wool socks that I got excited about until they fell apart in my hands, victims of moths.

  And then I recoiled when something furry brushed my arm deep in the cabinet’s shadows. I took a breath, then cautiously proceeded to uncover a neat stack of three raccoon pelts, complete with tails and faces, the eyes empty holes in their black masks, the noses shriveled and hard. They’d been stored carefully, interleaved with brown butcher-type paper. I sank my hand into the irresistible fur, which was slightly prickly on the surface, buttery as thistledown beneath.

  Flipping one over, I could see two small holes in the pale-fawn skin where the bullets had gone in. Well, I guess the camp counselors had had to do something to pass the time. I found no basketry supplies, but I did discover an unstrung yellow fiberglass bow with a red grip, no arrows.

  The pelts had been beautifully tanned and preserved, and instead of the repulsively musky smell of practically everything else around here, I caught the aroma of the tanning liquids on the skins, somewhat like kerosene-soaked cork. Hard to describe the smell of those hides, except that they brought something back to me from childhood. The warmth of animals, the finality of death, the cycles of autumn hunting and harvest. However, the little blind faces creeped me out. I left them.

  Kenner, Gina had mumbled, was somewhere in these woods. If she had really seen him, we needed more clues where to look, and I sure as hell didn’t think we should spend a lot of time hunting for Kenner when we had two serious candidates for evacuation.

  I would really have expected Gina to be an emotional wreck after all this, but she seemed to surrender to the situation.

  Not give up—no, she’d clung to that rock as stubborn as a barnacle; I well knew that part of her—and she wasn’t about to give another inch to the forces of destruction and decay that seemed to want to claim all of us, as well as everything in this camp.

  But she wasn’t going to waste energy resisting what already was.

  That was it: to accept the situation you’re in and work from there. Not to struggle in the net.

  So Gina Farmer was a pain in the ass and the Buddha all together in one person.

  I wrung a fresh rag in cold water and went to her, George following. I doubled the cloth and laid it on her bruised cheek. Her cheek looked like a past-ripe mango.

  “Ohh,” she breathed with the small comfort. Then she looked up, the fingers of her left hand working. “My ring,” she whispered.

  “It didn’t get lost.” I extracted the dazzling jewel from my pants’ zip pocket. “Here, I’ll put it on your right hand so it doesn’t get stuck.”

  “Beautiful,” she breathed with utter sadness.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “You have it to remember him by.” Then I said, “Gina, you mentioned Kenner.”

  “Kenner,” she repeated. “He came for us. God bless Kenner.”

  “He came to the woods? You met him in the woods?” Mumbling, stumbling over words but keeping track of her account, she was able to tell us about getting lost, she and Lance. “Don’t know how. Instead of going back, we just got loster and loster.”

  “Yeah?” I encouraged.

  “Then we got saved by renegade loggers.”

  Renegade loggers? George and I exchanged glances at this.

  “How many loggers?” George asked.

  “Mmm, three. Like the Burris brothers, only meaner. The one.” She described a rescue that morphed into captivity. George and I listened.

  “So now they’ve got Kenner.” She spoke with much effort. “The one good one has the ponytail. I love Alger, he helped me get away. He must be dead...he went in the river. I love Kenner. He came looking for us.”

  George said, “Get away from where, exactly? Can you tell us?”

  “Corner of two rivers.”

  “The Harkett and the—?”

  She thought. “Quinine,” she said at last.

  “The Quilmash?”

  “Yeh.”

  “How did they hurt Kenner?”

  A sound of surprise came from the other side of the canvas partition.

  I had forgotten Joey Preston over there.

  George hadn’t.

  “Broke his arm.” She glanced at her own messed-up shoulder. “Beat him up. Gonna cut bits off him next.”

  “They want money from his mother,” George told her. Gina snorted faintly against the absurdity of that thought, and came a bit more alive. “They don’t know Bertrice. She’ll be here any minute with a boxa hand grenades.”

  George laughed out loud.

  “Joey,” he suddenly called, “who are the loggers? Tell us about the loggers.”

  A cough, then silence.

  Outside, I told George, “He knows Lance. They went to this same camp together, I saw the rosters. He lied about not being the same Joey the woman at the store told me about.”

  “Yeah,” said George. “Plus he seemed to do a double take when we brought Gina in.” We walked down the muddy path t
oward the lake. Or limped, in my case. Man, I was sore.

  I asked, “So what’s the deal?”

  “I asked him if he’d seen her before, and he said no.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “No, but maybe I’m getting paranoid. I expect everybody to know everything in these woods.”

  In cities, the features that draw humans together are coffee shops, bars, and churches.

  In the wilderness, I now realized, it’s views and cool rocks. Rivers usually offer both. Plus, you need water, you need to get from one place to another, you go to a river. Bridges are an especially acute focal point, even that dangerously half-assed log bridge lying across the Harkett. Especially that one.

  I turned to George. Fragments of the forest were sticking to his hair, his clothes. He’d washed up and bandaged his fingertip, but you can’t keep the woods off you for long.

  His sloping shoulders made him look somehow more muscular than other men. If a guy has squared-off shoulders, sometimes his shirts hang straight down and he looks like a tree. But the way George’s shoulders were, you could see how strong his neck was, plus you could see his back muscles through his shirt, which is nice. He once told me he was “built funny” but said it was a useful body type for a wrestler.

  I said, “Thank you for what you did.”

  He smiled into me, into my soul. “She’s your blood. I was in an impossible situation, really. If I’d saved you and let her die—and she would have, without a doubt—you’d never have forgiven me.”

  “That’s not so.”

  “You’d say everything was all right, but deep down you’d feel guilty. To be the one who survived, due to me. And you’d hate me for it. I couldn’t live with you hating me, even for an instant.

  “And I figured you could save yourself, if you had a good enough reason to—and wanting to kill me was a good enough reason. Like Petey once said, ‘When Mom gets mad, she can do anything!’”

  I coursed with shame that while floundering in that river I had not thought of living for my son. It was my selfish self I’d wanted to live for: My life, my vengeances, my unfulfilled desires. My fury.

  Well, I didn’t have to confess that to anybody.

  Daniel caught up with us. “We need to discuss going after Kenner.”