Drawn Into Darkness(36)

Huh. The new woman who lived in the pink house hadn’t picked up her mail either Monday or yesterday, which was Tuesday. No big deal, just credit card applications. Casey Fay started to shove today’s mail in on top—

Oops. Liana Clymer—or Leppo; judging by her mail, she seemed to go by both names—anyway, Liana had a big package that would not fit into the mailbox, something from Kookrite Kitchenware.

Retrieving the accumulated mail along with today’s, Casey Fay steered onto the yard in front of the pink house—hardly anybody had “lawns” down here, let alone paved driveways; the whole world was for driving on. Well, except for pure swamp, but people didn’t live there. Casey Fay stopped between two mimosa trees in front of the place where Liana Clymer lived, and beeped her horn.

She waited a minute, because rather than just dropping the mail at the door, she really wanted to have a look at the new woman who was renting the house where Old Lady Ingle had lived so many years before going into the nursing home. Like everybody else around here, Casey Fay kept track of, well, everybody. But if Liana Clymer/Leppo was a Yankee, maybe she thought honking your horn was rude and she wouldn’t come to the door. The reason a little beep-beep was not rude was because it gave the person inside the house a chance to get some clothes on before somebody knocked on their door. Some people spent the summer days sitting butt naked in front of a fan, especially if they only had window air conditioners, when even central air couldn’t keep up with the heat.

But the house door didn’t open, so Casey Fay sighed, gathered all the mail plus the parcel, got out of her aging Chevy Cavalier, and walked up three wooden steps and across a small porch to the door.

Even before she knocked, she knew something was wrong. That strong odor, unmistakable. Something had died.

Why would anybody let something dead lie and stink in their house? Unless it was—the person herself?

Nose wrinkling, Casey Fay put the envelopes and the parcel into a transparent plastic bag she pulled from her pocket, knotted it to protect the contents against rain, then left the entire package on the porch by the door, as was policy when something wouldn’t fit in the mailbox. Yet, after slowly retreating down the steps, she didn’t leave. Not sure what she was looking for, she walked to the side windows and peeked in, seeing nothing except a shadowy bedroom. Still uneasy, she ventured around back—

Now, why in hell would anybody leave her car, in this case a metallic blue Toyota Matrix, parked in the backyard under the clothesline?

And if the car was here, why didn’t the Clymer woman seem to be home? Unless she was lying dead inside the house . . .

Casey Fay knocked at the back door anyway, but when nobody opened it, she found she’d already made up her mind. She sure didn’t like that smell coming from behind the front door. As she walked back to her old Chevy, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911.





ELEVEN





“Hey! Justin, damn it . . .” Given no choice—or it felt like no choice, as if Justin were a three-year-old chasing a rattlesnake and I were his mom—I ran after him.

I might never have caught up with him if it hadn’t been for sandspurs. Those small weeds didn’t look like much, but just as their name implied, they grew thick in sandy ground and had seeds that were—prickly was not the word. These things were vicious, like Mexican cowboy rowels.

“Ow!” Justin yelped, trying to run through them barefoot. Cursing fluently enough to show that he was indeed no longer the sweet little boy his parents remembered, he limped to a halt before he could reach the dirt road. He raised one foot to pull sandspurs out of it. Catching up with him, I glimpsed red; the little green devils had stuck him deep enough to draw blood. And he couldn’t bear putting his weight on either foot for long. Swearing, he hopped from one to the other as if he were standing on hot coals.

“Sit down,” I told him, trying to get hold of him somehow to help him ease the weight off his feet, but like a drowning person he grabbed me instead and nearly pulled me down with him. Yet his butt had barely touched the ground before he started protesting, “What if Stoat comes?”

It was a horribly real possibility with no solution. Sitting on the ground, I lifted one of Justin’s feet into my lap and started pulling the sandspurs out of it with my fingernails as quickly as I could.

“What if he drove down here right now, what are we going to do?” Justin insisted.

“What if we’re little pink seashells on a vast ocean beach and someone steps on us?” I grumbled, waxing existentialist at him. “What if the world is a flake of dandruff on a Titan’s head, and he gets itchy?” I finished with one of his feet and grabbed the other. “Hold still!” I complained as he winced—whether from physical pain or from mental anguish, it was hard to tell. “What if Stoat the Goat doesn’t drive down here right now?”