Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20)

by Jenna Bennett

No argument here. “I’ll see you at home,” I said, and hung up. “Guess we’ll make our way back.”

  Grimaldi nodded. It was totally without enthusiasm. Yung, meanwhile, seemed delighted. “About time,” she said.

  “Tell you what,” I told her. “We’re not that far from the road. Like Grimaldi said, we’re walking parallel to it. Since you’re not enjoying this, and you’re not really dressed for it, why don’t you strike out that way—” I pointed, “on your own, and you should get to the road in a few minutes. Then you can walk back to the car from there. It’s the same distance we’ve already covered, but at least you won’t have to deal with the rough terrain.”

  And we wouldn’t have to deal with those frequent little sighs and muttered curses.

  Not that I blamed her. For being a federal agent in a designer wool suit and high heels, she’d held up remarkably well. Much better than I would have under the circumstances. But if all we were doing were going back, there was no need to put her through it. And this way, Grimaldi and I could have a private conversation, too.

  Not that I had anything I wanted to say that Yung couldn’t hear. But the group dynamic was different with an FBI agent in our midst.

  Yung looked at once elated and suspicious. “Are you sure that’s the right direction?”

  “Pretty sure. Grimaldi?”

  She nodded. “We went due west from the car, and then south. The sun’s up there.” She pointed it out, as if it hadn’t been slanting fingers of light through the leaf canopy for the past hour. “If you keep it at roughly the same angle, you should be able to go straight that way and hit the road in ten or fifteen minutes. Then you can follow it back to the car.”

  Yung nodded. “I’ll see you there. You have my number if you find anything?”

  Grimaldi assured her she did, and then we watched Yung navigate away from us through the trees, until her black-clad figure was gone from sight. Grimaldi turned to me. “You OK moving ten or fifteen feet in one direction, and I’ll go ten or fifteen in the other, and we’ll walk a parallel track back the way we came?”

  “Sure.” Twenty or thirty feet wasn’t enough that we’d lose each other, but we could cover more ground that way.

  So Grimaldi paced off to the west, and I paced off to the right, in the direction Leslie Yung had disappeared, and we headed back toward the car at a more than polite distance. The sounds of Yung’s passage—the swishing of leaves, and the occasional cracking of a dry branch or muttered curse—had faded now, so she must be making good time toward the road.

  Grimaldi and I shuffled northward. Carrie stayed asleep, and I kept one arm up over her small body to keep her from any accidental harm. I used the other to push aside branches and vines that got in my way.

  “Are there rattlesnakes around here?” I called out to Grimaldi.

  She gave me a look, potent even across the twenty-five feet that separated us. “You’re the local. Shouldn’t you know?”

  “I never spent much time in the woods,” I said. “You’re more of the outdoorsy type. Besides, this was your idea.”

  She sighed. “Yes, there are rattlesnakes here. Timber rattlesnake and pygmy rattlesnake. Also cottonmouths and copperheads. They all bite.”

  “Lovely.” I started to look around even more carefully, and lifting my feet higher. I probably looked like a majorette—minus the twiddlestick. “Is it the right time of year for venomous snakes?”

  “They hibernate when it’s cold,” Grimaldi said, scanning left to right as she shuffled, “but it’s warm enough by now that I figure they’ve come out. So the answer’s probably yes.”

  “Lovely.”

  I found myself looking more for snakes than for bones, and told myself to stop. There’s being cautious, and then there’s being afraid enough to forget what your job is.

  I widened my area of inspection, though, so I’d see any snakes coming, and it was because I did that I saw it. “Hey!”

  “What?” Grimaldi’s voice said.

  “Come here. I think I may have something.”

  She changed direction and came toward me.

  “Look out for snakes,” I added, as she crashed through the underbrush.

  She gave me a look, but didn’t comment. Just stopped beside me. “What?”

  “That.” I pointed. “Over there, past that log. Is that a rock? It looks very smooth and regular to be one.”

  And just in case it wasn’t—just in case it was what I thought it was: the top of a skull—I wanted someone else to go over and touch it.

  Grimaldi looked at it. Her eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. “Stay here,” she told me.

  “No problem.” I had no need to go any closer. But I watched carefully as she made her way forward, observing the ground closely before she put her foot down. I didn’t think she was looking for snakes.

  She scrambled over the fallen log—it sported some moss and a colony of fungi on top—and bent over the… let’s be charitable and call it a rock.

  It wasn’t a rock, though. I’d known it as soon as I caught sight of it. And Grimaldi’s body language—the set of her shoulders, like she’d half expected and half dreaded it—was confirmation.

  But I asked anyway. “It’s him?”

  She glanced up at me. “It’s somebody. Definitely a skull, and I see some other bones, too.”

  “I’ll call Yung,” I said, lifting my phone.

  “You have the number?” Grimaldi kept poking at the ground with the toe of her boot.

  Of course I didn’t. “You call Yung. I’ll call Rafe. And tell him to tell the sheriff to add a search warrant for the property to the warrant for the RV.”

  Grimaldi nodded, fishing for her phone. “Either one of us is going to have to stay here with the remains, or we need some way of marking the spot.”

  I nodded, and then held up a finger as the phone was answered in my ear. “Darlin’.”

  “Rafe,” I said. “We found bones.”

  There was a beat. “In the woods?”

  “Of course in the woods. Where else would we be?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “And if you’re planning to ask me next whether I’m sure they’re human…”

  “I wasn’t.” I could hear the smirk in his voice. “I figure you can tell the difference between a human and a deer. Where are you?”

  “I told you. In the woods. We’re trying to come up with some way to mark the spot. If not, one of us will have to stay behind.”

  “I’ll let Bob know that we need the warrant to include the rest of the property. Hang tight.”

  He hung up before I could say anything else. I stuffed the phone into my back pocket and told Grimaldi, “They’re working on it. Why can’t we both stay?”

  “One of us has to go tell Yung,” Grimaldi said. “She’s not picking up. And it could take hours for them to persuade a judge to get the warrant and get the personnel and equipment together and back here. We can’t let her sit there by the car until they do. She doesn’t even have the key to open the door.”

  “Oops.” Guess we should have thought of that before we let her go off on her own.

  “Let’s just find some way of marking the spot,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have a helium balloon in your pocket?”

  “No,” Grimaldi said. “Do you?”

  She went on without waiting for my answer. “If you want to go back to the car, I don’t mind waiting here.”

  “I’d rather we went back together. You said it yourself. It could take them a while to get out here.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Grimaldi asked.

  “That we take this blanket—” It was Carrie’s and it was bright yellow, “and hang it from a handy tree branch. It’s big enough and bright enough that anyone who comes this way should be able to spot it. And then, if we go straight east from here, we may be able to mark the spot in the road where we come out, and maybe some of the path, too.”

  “Path?” Grimaldi said, eyeing it. I gave her a look, and she s
hook her head. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. Give me the blanket. I’ll climb this handy-dandy tree and hang the flag.”

  She suited action to words: hauled herself ten or fifteen feet up into the air and onto the branch of a scraggly pine tree.

  “Is that branch strong enough to hold you?” I wanted to know, watching it bow under her weight.

  “Are you calling me fat?” She was inching out, one careful step at a time.

  “Of course not.” Only someone severely nearsighted would. She was tall and lean and well-muscled. And probably weighed quite a few pounds less than I did. “I just don’t want you to fall.”

  “I’m not going to fall.” She draped the blanket carefully over the next branch up, and tugged it into place. “There. Hopefully that’ll stay there long enough to be a good signal.”

  It was eye-catching, anyway. Nice and bright against the dark green of the pines and the lighter green of the fresh spring leaves around us.

  Grimaldi skinned down the trunk and came toward me. “Got anything we can use to mark the way?”

  “If she were a little older, we could have used teething biscuits or Cheerios.” I patted my pockets. “I don’t think I do.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “Guess we’ll just do the best we can. I’ll film the walk.”

  “I’ll walk behind you,” I said, since I didn’t want my too-big derriere in the shot, and since I’d rather she get us through the woods than me.

  Nineteen

  Grimaldi must have had a better sense of direction than me, because after about five minutes, the trees started to thin out as we approached the edge of the woods. Grimaldi, who had been breaking twigs as we’d been walking along, in an effort to mark the path, stopped just shy of the road and began to undress.

  “What are you doing?” I inquired.

  She glanced at me over the top of her T-shirt before she continued to pull it over her head. “What does it look like?”

  The question was muffled inside the blue cotton.

  “It looks like you’re stripping.”

  “I want to leave this here to mark the spot.” She draped it over a branch before shrugging back into her overshirt and buttoning it up. That done, she proceeded to tie the navy T-shirt around the trunk of a sapling on the edge of the vegetation. “Come on.”

  She scrambled into the ditch and up the other side. I slid down, more carefully—the last thing I wanted was to fall and crush Carrie—and while I did, Grimaldi gathered a bunch of little stones and formed them into a small cairn on the gravel edge of the blacktop. “Just in case the T-shirt blows away.”

  There wasn’t much chance of that, from what I could see. The sun was high, the sky was cloudless, and the breeze was practically non-existent.

  On the other hand, Mullinax’s back forty consisted of a lot of trees, and if we lost our spot, it could take a lot of time and effort to find the bones again. It was mostly just luck that we’d found them the first time.

  “Let’s go,” Grimaldi said, hauling me up the last few feet to the road. “You all right?”

  “Just winded. The car’s this way, right?”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I can run ahead and come back for you, if you want.”

  She was obviously raring to go, and not discomfited at all by the hike through the wood.

  In my own defense, I’d like to say that I was still carrying a little baby weight, not to mention the weight of the baby herself, and that I’d never been in the kind of condition Grimaldi was. “Sure. If you want.”

  She was practically twitching with eagerness, so it didn’t surprise me when she took off like a rocket down the road. I bent my arms and picked up my speed, power-walking, while I watched her disappear into the distance, and then around the nearest bend in the road.

  It was a lot easier to walk along the road than through the trees, and took a lot less time, too. I’ll be honest, I figured I’d see Grimaldi’s SUV come toward me pretty quickly, because I had a feeling we hadn’t covered all that much distance back there in the woods.

  But that didn’t happen. Eventually, though, I got to the spot in the road—or on the side of the road—where I was pretty sure we’d parked. The car wasn’t there. Nor was Grimaldi.

  I looked around. It looked like the right spot, but one set of trees looks very much like another, so maybe I’d been mistaken. I kept walking.

  A few minutes passed, and then I heard the car engine. A few seconds later, the SUV rounded the curve in the road and pulled to a stop beside me. The passenger window rolled down. “Get in,” Grimaldi said.”

  I peered into the back seat. “Where’s Yung?”

  “Not here,” Grimaldi said.

  “Didn’t we park back there?” I gestured with my thumb over my shoulder.

  She nodded. “She wasn’t by the car when I got there, so I drove up the road looking for her.”

  “Maybe she got lost?” I opened the back door and prepared to transfer Carrie from the sling to her seat.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Grimaldi told me. “Just put the seatbelt around both of you. I want to get going.”

  Sure thing. I crawled into the front seat and buckled in. Carrie had slept through everything so far, and kept sleeping through this.

  Grimaldi had the car moving practically before I’d shut the door, and I turned to her. “You look worried.”

  “I don’t like it,” Grimaldi said. “It should have been an easy walk from where we were to the road. It didn’t take you and me long. A bit longer for her, maybe, since she wasn’t dressed for hiking. But even if she veered off course, she should have hit the road before we did. And she’s nowhere.”

  The car was picking up speed as she was talking. I scanned the trees along the side of the road for any sign of Yung, or sign that she’d been there, and didn’t see any. The small cairn of stones and Grimaldi’s blue T-shirt flashed into view and then out again as we zoomed past.

  “How far did we walk after Yung left us?” I wanted to know. “Five minutes? Ten? A football field or two?”

  “No more. It was heavy going through the woods.” She kept her eyes on the road as we traveled back toward town. “She ought to have hit the road right around the time we stopped to look at the bones. God, what was I thinking to send her off on her own in that suit and those stupid heels?”

  “That she’s a federal agent who’s used to taking care of herself?” I suggested. “Besides, you were trying to do her a favor, so she wouldn’t have to walk back through the woods in those heels.”

  Grimaldi nodded, but she still looked grim. After another minute she glanced over at me, with reluctant amusement curving her lips. “When I got there this morning, your brother was looking at her like he liked what she looked like. Guess I thought it wouldn’t hurt to make her look a little less pretty.”

  And a little more sweaty and disheveled. I nodded. I got it. “What’s going on with you and Dix?”

  Normally, when I ask that question, Grimaldi tells me it’s none of my business. This time, maybe because it took her mind off Yung, lost in the woods, she sighed. “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

  She glanced at me. “It means I’m not sure.”

  Obviously. “Can you be, maybe, just a little more specific?”

  “When your sister-in-law first died,” Grimaldi said, driving the car down the road toward town, “your brother was mourning. Then he had to learn how to be a single parent to two girls who were going to grow up without their mother.”

  I nodded.

  “I lost my mother young. Not as young as Abigail and Hannah, but young enough that I felt the loss.”

  I nodded.

  “We talked a lot during the first six months or so after Sheila died. And it felt like—I don’t know—like things were moving forward. But very slowly, because Dix was in mourning for his wife and not ready for another relationship, and then there were the girls, and what kind of stepmother would I be to two little sou
thern girls, anyway?”

  “A fine one,” I said firmly. “You gave them Police Barbies for Christmas that first year.” And it had freaked my mother out, which had been lovely to behold. Almost as lovely as her reaction to Rafe, when I informed her he’d be spending the night in my room. “You’d open up possibilities that I certainly didn’t get to see when I was their age. You’d be good for them.”

  She shrugged, as houses started to crowd in around the car as we got closer to town. I kept watch, but there was no sign of Agent Yung.

  “I don’t think he’s ready for another relationship,” Grimaldi said eventually. “It hasn’t been that long since your sister-in-law died.”

  “A year and a half.”

  “Less than the shrinks usually say it’ll take.” She scanned the road and changed the subject. “No sign of her. God, I hope she’s not back there with a broken leg.”

  “Maybe we should have stopped and called out,” I said. “We could go back and try to find her.”

  She shook her head. “We were close enough that we would have heard her if she’d yelled. And she had her phone. And my number. She could have called.”

  “Maybe she got lost,” I suggested. “Not in the woods, but when she got out. Maybe she got turned around and started walking the wrong way.”

  “If she had, we’d have found her by now. Unless someone picked her up.”

  “And gave her a ride?” Someone might have. This is the south. People are friendly here, and a young, pretty woman in a fancy suit and high heels walking down the road away from a stopped car would rouse the protective instincts in everybody. “She might be back at the police station with her feet up, sipping a Coke.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Grimaldi said, and put her foot on the brake to slow down as we hit the first stop light in Columbia proper.

  She wasn’t, though. Yung. Sitting in the lobby at the police station with her feet elevated and a cold drink. And no one had seen her, either.

  Grimaldi, looking quite grim now, dialed Bob. “Have you heard from Agent Yung?”

  “Not since she left with you this morning,” the sheriff’s voice came back over the speaker. “Something wrong?”