by Carolyn Hart
Annie lunged to her feet. Okay, okay. Laurel and Miss Dora could clever themselves right into the Broward’s Rock jail. Fine. Be her guest.
“The festival—Laurel, I’ve got to run.” But at the door she looked back. Laurel regarded her warily. “Laurel, don’t break into anything. The general is not a nice man.”
Laurel observed her with interest, her dark blue eyes thoughtful. Then she grinned, that insouciant smile that dared the world. “ ‘I bear a charmed life.’ ”
Annie felt a prickle down her back. “Oh, God, Laurel, not Macbeth!”
Annie’s back ached. She sneezed. Used books were always dusty. She tried Max’s cell number one more time. No answer. Of course she’d left a message at his office. Didn’t he pick up his messages? Not, a little voice whispered, when he was on the golf course.
She wasn’t resentful. Of course not. She wanted Max to enjoy life. She slammed the last box of books onto the tarp at the back of the booth. Okay. Tomorrow Max could help her arrange the books. She shoved a box with her foot and the lid flipped open. The immediate pleasure wasn’t as intense as chocolate, but spotting Dorothy Cannell’s Down the Garden Path ran a close second. And tomorrow would be buckets of fun. Mystery lovers would descend, more eager for a book to complete a collection than Pam and Jerry North for a martini. Annie’s merchant instinct quivered. The mystery lovers would be great, but even greater would be the curious, attracted by the name—Death on Demand. Some of them wouldn’t have read a mystery since The Footprints under the Window or The Secret of the Old Clock. Did Annie have a message for them! The world was now in the very throes of the Second Golden Age of the Mystery and Annie was just the bookseller to acquaint these novice readers with their exciting future—new books and old by present-day masters of mystery Nancy Pickard, Gar Anthony Haywood, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Bill Crider, Gillian Roberts, Jeffery Deaver, Pat Benhke, William Bernhardt, Barbara D’Amato, Tony Hillerman, Earlene Fowler, and so many others. Once hooked, as most would be, they would come time and again—she looked around for notepaper, instead scrawled “Reorder Finney” on her palm—to plumb the incredible variety of mysteries available at Death on Demand. Annie gave a sigh of sheer happiness.
Piccolos sounded discordantly. Angry voices rumbled like distant thunder. Annie poked her head out of her booth, shaded her eyes against the blazing sun. Suddenly, harsh as a wounded bird, a piccolo squalled—long, flat, shrill. A group of people was bunched near the area that had been marked off as a small parade ground. At the edge, bystanders began to move, stepping back, turning away. Bud Hatch walked briskly out of the center of the clump. Even at the distance of a football field, Annie saw his swagger. Good old Bud, sharing his charm and good humor, no doubt. Well, this audience of one wasn’t interested. She closed the last box, then checked to be sure the tarp was securely in place, just in case an ever-possible thunderstorm ushered in the Fourth. She nodded, satisfied that everything was ready for tomorrow. She stepped out of the booth into a scene that would appear frenzied and chaotic to an observer unfamiliar with the final hours before the opening of an outdoor festival.
Dust rose in clouds as volunteers dragged wooden tables over humpy ground. Hammers resounded as the last few booths were assembled. Henny Brawley stalked toward the forest preserve, moving faster than a Virgil Tibbs’s karate chop. Henny’s eyes glittered, and her mouth was a thin straight line.
Annie waved hello, but Henny didn’t even see her. Henny dodged around the mobile food vans—hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, tacos, gyros and wraps as well as cotton candy, saltwater taffy and funnel cakes—and plunged into the forest preserve.
Annie was hot and tired and ready to go home and plunge into the swimming pool, after, of course, greeting exuberant Dorothy L. and assuring her she was the most beautiful cat in the world with her arctic-white fur and gentian-blue eyes. Annie could do this because Agatha, who was resident queen of the bookstore, wouldn’t hear a word of it. Each cat was the center of her own universe, imperious Agatha at the store, genial Dorothy L. at home, and please God the two would never meet again. When she and Max went on vacation, cat sitters came to the store and the house.
Annie looked toward the preserve. Another figure plunged out of sight on the forest path. So Jonathan Wentworth had seen Henny’s distress. Annie took a step or two toward the parking lot, feeling the familiar old Jell-O sensation as the moist air rolled over her. Their swimming pool had never seemed more appealing. But if she intended to support Henny on the library board, now was the time to stand up and be counted. Obviously, Bud was up to no good again. If she joined Henny and Jonathan, it wouldn’t be a quorum but they could make some plans. At the least, Henny could vent some steam. The high red flush of anger on her face wasn’t good for her.
Annie swung around, hurried past the food trailers to a weathered gray wood that proclaimed “Lucy Banister Kinkaid Forest Preserve.” Majestic loblolly pines swayed almost imperceptibly in the breeze. Annie ducked beneath a low branch of a magnolia, drew a deep breath of the sweet scent, and paused until her eyes adjusted to the soft gloom beneath the forest canopy of interlocking live oaks, magnolias, and slash pines. A rustle sounded to her right. The puffy white tail of a deer disappeared behind a curtain of royal ferns.
Annie was vaguely familiar with the terrain. Several paths, a couple of them boardwalks, led to a gazebo in the center of the preserve. Far ahead Annie heard a clatter on the boardwalk.
“Henny,” she called. “Jonathan?”
A mourning dove burst from a tree limb. The dove’s ooh-ooh-ooh combined with the frenzied attack of a pileated woodpecker on a nearby trunk to drown out her voice. No-see-ums swirled around her like the sports media spotting Martina Hingis. If it were anybody other than Henny, Annie thought grimly, as she ran lightly along the boardwalk, she would be out of here in a South Carolina second. She didn’t outdistance the gnats. In fact, they seemed to think it quite sporting of her and billowed alongside in a wavering cloud. Hitchcock was off base with birds as villains. He should have picked swarms of nasty, pervasive, blood-sucking, unshakable gnats.
Annie’s jog freeze-framed into statue stillness. She was about two feet from the snout of the biggest alligator she’d ever seen. Okay, maybe not the biggest, but God knew it was the closest. She came down softly on the balls of her feet. “Just passing through,” she observed chattily. The reptile’s unwavering gaze was more attention than Annie wanted. “Hope you are a papa, not a mama.” Mother alligators protect their young for eighteen months and alligators can outrun humans for fifty yards. A dentist would love them as patients, with a minimum of seventy cone-shaped teeth that rip their prey. Annie moved slowly, softly, quietly. She didn’t start breathing again until she was around the bend.
Yes, okay, she’d admit it, she was terrified of the black swamp kings. They were not sweet little animal friends. They were cold-blooded, huge, powerful beasts. She darted uneasy glances behind her, but the boardwalk remained empty. She continued to step lightly. Drooping palmetto palm fronds hung across the path. Yaupon holly and saw palmettos fought for space. Swaths of Spanish moss hung eerily still in the forest quiet. That faint breeze never reached the interior of the forest, though high above no doubt the crowns of the pines gently swayed. Annie felt as though she were hundreds of years from the present. Only the weathered wood walk beneath her feet testified to recent human presence. She felt an intruder in a world not meant for her. She peered forward. Something moved swiftly up the trunk of a huge live oak. Annie shivered as she recognized a red rat snake. She’d once attended a lecture where a naturalist referred to the red rat snake as handsome, proving that civilized people differ markedly in their enthusiasms.
Annie moved lightly on her feet and tried to avoid touching anything in her path. She tiptoed around a clump of saw palmetto as stealthily as Raffles slipping silently through the hallways of the rich, ready to crack yet another safe. Reaching out, she carefully pulled down the sharp, serrated frond of a saw palmetto and saw Henny i
n the preserves gazebo. She wasn’t alone.
The weathered wooden gazebo afforded a superb view of a serene lagoon rimmed by cattails. Henny stared out at the still green pond, her eyes steely, her mouth set in a hard line, her angular shoulders hunched. Jonathan Wentworth, his handsome face grave and somber, stood beside her.
“I’ve got to do something this time.” Henny’s hands balled into tight fists. “I can’t let Hatch get away with this. It was barbaric.”
“Let it go, Henny.” Jonathan’s deep voice was grim. And commanding. He looked every inch a military man, his lined face stern and determined, his posture upright.
“Not this time, Jonathan.” She was breathing fast, her cheeks spotted with red. “I came out here to decide what to do. If I have to, I’ll cancel the pageant. Hatch is going to apologize—”
Annie lifted her foot. She looked down and saw a garter snake. She knew this was an environmentally helpful creature. But she couldn’t move.
“No. Henny, listen to me.” Jonathan reached out, gripped her shoulders. “It’s dangerous to cross him.”
“I don’t care. Sometimes you can’t look the other way. Sometimes you have to face down—” She broke off.
Wentworth’s face, always seamed and weathered, turned to a stony mask. His hands slipped from her shoulders, hung straight beside him.
The garter snake slithered away. Annie’s right foot came down. But she didn’t move. There was something going on here that she didn’t understand. But she knew pain when she saw it.
And so did Henny.
“Oh God, Jonathan, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Henny reached for his hands. Held them tight.
It was only an instant but it seemed an age, then Jonathan turned his hands to grip hers.
“Jonathan, please forgive me.” Tears brimmed in Henny’s eyes.
Annie took a step backward. This wasn’t the time for her to intervene. And before she said a word to Henny, she needed to know what Hatch had done.
“There’s nothing to forgive. But I want you to think about Hatch, about what he will do when he’s angry. Henny, I want you to be safe.” Jonathan’s seamed face softened. He managed a half-smile.
They looked squarely at each other.
Henny stepped back, freeing her hands. “Do you?” Her voice was sharp. “But you’re leaving me.” Then she shook her head impatiently. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I have no claim on you, Jonathan.”
Once again, his face was stern. “No claim? You know better than that. All you have is my heart.”
He held out his arms.
Henny looked at him with love and despair, then stepped into his tight embrace.
Gently, Annie let go of the saw palmetto frond. She moved quietly but quickly, especially once past the somnolent alligator.
It seemed ages since she’d set out to find Henny in the forest preserve, so it was disconcerting to regain the festival grounds and hear the high sweet tone of piccolos, the bang of hammers, occasional shouts, the clatter of metal chairs being stacked. Nothing looked different, but Annie felt very different indeed. She now possessed knowledge she didn’t want to have. But it was none of her business. She’d never have occasion to mention it to a soul.
She reached her car, slid behind the wheel, gasping for air in the 100-degree-plus interior. She turned on the motor and the air-conditioning. Sweat oozed down her face, her back, her legs. The swimming pool—to dive into the cool, serene water…Annie sighed, turned off the motor, got out, slammed the door.
Back on the festival field, she shaded her eyes in the late-afternoon sun. She saw several familiar faces: the director of the Red Cross, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the assistant manager of her favorite grocery store, an interior decorator, the president of the Arts Council, the oldest member of the bird-watching club. Annie knew them, but not well enough to march up and demand what the hell had Bud Hatch done now. Then she saw Edith Cummings slinking alongside the bandstand, clearly escaping.
Annie slogged through the moist air. She reached the side of the library. The dusty path ahead was empty. Where could Edith have gone? Not even Houdini could already be out of sight.
Annie sniffed, then turned and ducked beneath a bricked arch into the musty darkness of the original basement. “Edith, for God’s sake, snakes love dark places.”
“So do I,” came the acid response.
A heavy waft of smoke swept over Annie. She coughed.
“Nobody invited you,” Edith snapped.
Annie took a careful step sideways. Something soft and filmy brushed her face. She jerked away. “Oh God, if it’s a black widow—”
“Lady black widows have the right idea,” Edith said with definite satisfaction. “Eat the jerk and keep his sperm, produce babies whenever. Of course, you may have disturbed a brown recluse which—”
“Edith, dammit, stop. What happened with Hatch and that crowd by the parade ground?” Annie scarcely breathed. Her muscles ached from the rigidity of her posture. She didn’t want to disturb any creature that chose this musty dark region as its habitat.
“Oh, it was pure Hatch. I’d chose a black widow or a brown recluse over him any day.” Edith’s cigarette lighter flickered. Her deep-set eyes looked dark as caverns, her dark hair shimmered like a witch in firelight. “You know Toby.”
It wasn’t a question. “Sure.” Broward’s Rock was a small town. Anyone who knew Ned Fisher knew Toby Maguire.
“I will have to say the old bastard’s got guts.” But Edith’s voice quivered with disgust. “Toby’s a hell of a big guy.”
Indeed Toby was. Probably six-four, maybe two hundred and thirty pounds, mostly muscle.
“Anyway,” Edith sighed, “Toby plays the piccolo. And he and some kids from the band and a lady from the music club dressed up in uniforms, different kinds, a Revolutionary War uniform and the War of 1812 and a cavalry officer. They were playing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy,’ practicing an intro for the band concert.”
A thick wave of smoke rolled over Annie. She still didn’t move. She would rather asphyxiate than encroach on a web. “Hatch doesn’t like piccolos?”
“Hatch doesn’t like gays.” Edith’s voice was flat.
“Oh.” Annie had an idea what was coming, but that didn’t make it any more palatable.
“Macho man marched up to the flutists, barked out, ‘Heroes have worn those uniforms. Don’t let me see any of you dressed like that tomorrow.’ It went from bad to worse. Toby told him to get lost and wanted to know who the hell Hatch thought he was. Hatch came back that he, by God, was a patriot and a man—unlike Toby.” The lighter flickered again. Edith’s face puckered in weariness and distaste.
“What did Toby say?” Annie asked reluctantly.
Edith was slow in answering. She spoke jerkily. “They shouted at each other. Hatch made some crack about maybe Toby wouldn’t have been such a pansy if he’d ever worn a uniform like a man.”
“Oh, Edith.” Annie couldn’t see the librarian, but she didn’t have to. She heard the sadness and the pain in her voice.
“Yeah. But that’s not the worst. The worst—” Edith broke off.
Annie waited.
Edith breathed deeply. “Toby stood there and all of a sudden I know he didn’t see Hatch, he didn’t see any of us. His face caved in. Have you ever seen a derelict building blown up? They fix the dynamite so the bricks all fall inward.” Smoke spewed. “Shit.” She drew another ragged breath. “I’m going home. They can take the frigging festival and—”
Feet scuffed.
Annie plunged after Edith. Out of the basement gloom, she blinked against the glare, then followed the librarian up the dusty path toward the parking lot.
“What happened then, Edith? What did Toby do? Was Henny there?” But Annie knew the answer to her last question.
Edith stopped beside a VW with a faded orange paint job spotted with darker orange rust, a crumpled left fender, and a tilted bumper.
Annie looked at it in
awe. Restored, it belonged in a museum.
The VW windows were rolled down. Edith opened the squeaky door, flung herself behind the wheel.
Annie clapped her hands on the door. “Ouch.” She yanked her hands free, bent down to yell. “What happened then?”
The motor whirred. Edith’s dark eyes glittered with irritation. “Leave it alone, Annie. Go watch one of those TV let-your-guts-hang-out shows. Or get a life.”
“No. I have to know.” She talked fast. “Edith, somebody has to do something about Hatch.”
Dark eyes blinked. “Sweetheart, you’re a nice girl. But you’re out of your league.” A tiny smile tugged at Edith’s downturned mouth. “But, hey, why not? What can Hatch do to you? And maybe you’ll annoy the hell out of him.” She paused, shook free another cigarette. “My mouth feels like toasted shoe leather.” But she lit the cigarette and sucked hard.
Annie kept quiet.
“All of sudden, like I said, Toby’s face went slack. He got this glazed look. Like a bull that’s been pricked and poked and he’s bloody and hurt and doesn’t know where to go or what to do and the goddamn pricks keep on coming. He shook his head and said real low and harsh, ‘Mike was sitting right next to me. He grinned and told me someday he’d take me to the best barbecue in Memphis, in an alley across the street from the Peabody Hotel. It was the last thing he was ever going to say. The last. They blew his head off. He was still sitting there but he didn’t have a head and blood was everywhere. Blood on my fatigues. Mike’s blood.’ Toby took his piccolo and held it up and blew and blew and blew and then he blundered away.”
Annie had heard that high, shrill scream of a piccolo. She shivered despite the heat. The VW jolted forward and she stood in the dust, staring after it.