by Sean Black
“They’re taking her somewhere she won’t be found.”
“And you know where that is?”
RJ dug into his breast pocket for some chewing tobacco. He offered some to Ty, who waved it off. “I have an idea, yes.”
“So where are they taking her?”
“Devil’s Pond,” said RJ. “It’s way out here about fifteen miles or so. It’s an old sinkhole pond. Lots of ’gators too. That’s if you don’t drown first.”
“And how does Mimsy know about this place? Doesn’t sound like much of a tourist attraction.”
“Oh, it’s not, believe me.”
“So how does she know that’s where to take someone?”
“I told her about it, a long time ago.”
“And how did you know?”
RJ plugged a wad of tobacco into the corner of his cheek. He didn’t answer. He just stared out over the vast expanse of sawgrass that sprouted from the water, a floating green carpet of nothingness.
“How did you know?” Ty shouted.
“I know because it’s where I took Carole Chabon’s body after they lynched her.”
59
“Over here. Carnes, over here.”
Deputy McGraw scrambled frantically back up toward the road, almost tripping over a cypress branch in his haste. He waved his hands, beckoning to Carnes.
“I found it,” he shouted to his partner.
They had been driving down that stretch of road on their way to old man Shaw’s to see if the big black guy, Johnson, was there. And to warn old Adelson Shaw to keep his doors locked and call if he saw him.
They had no idea what had got the man so heated as to take a shot at Miss Parsons, but it was looking like they had their answer to what might have happened to Cressida King. Who knew what a man who’d take a shot at a little old librarian was capable of?
That was the theory they were working on now, anyway. Who the heck knew what had been going on between those two, the reporter and her so-called bodyguard, before or since they’d arrived in town?
Not only had the big guy been arrested for DUI, there had been a pretty bad incident in California. Firearms had been involved, but some fancy legal work seemed to have gotten him off the hook. Well, their boss had told the deputies when they’d assembled for a quick briefing, that kind of thing might fly in Long Beach, California, but it sure wasn’t the way things worked in little ole Darling, Florida, or anywhere in Florida for that matter.
“Blue lives matter,” the sheriff had told them. “That means if you see him with a gun, don’t hesitate to do what you have to do.”
So they had been a few miles short of Adelson Shaw’s when McGraw had noticed branches that had been torn down from a couple of cypress and pop ash trees, and scattered at the top of the bank. ’Gators didn’t do that kind of thing. Nor did any other animal around here, apart from humans. It was way too green to burn, didn’t make for good kindling. It just didn’t make any sense.
Carnes had eye-rolled the younger deputy but indulged him. They were in no particular rush. Let someone else find an armed Marine who’d gone crazy was what Carnes figured. He was ten years off his pension and not looking to be a hero. There was a reason he’d taken the job down here, and that was because it was quiet, and you were likely to make it long enough to collect that pension and go fishing every day.
Carnes waddled over to McGraw, a little on edge, ready to draw his weapon, hoping he still remembered how to shoot the damn thing properly and wishing he’d spent more time at the gun range, like the other cops.
“What is it?”
“The car. I found it.”
Gingerly, Carnes picked his way over the branches. He stood on the bank and looked to where McGraw was pointing. Yup, that was it. The rental car they’d been driving around town.
“You think they’re still in there?” he asked McGraw.
The car was lying on its side, half sunk into the muddy water. McGraw scooted down the bank, trying to get a better angle to look into the cabin.
He looked back up at Carnes. “I don’t know. I can’t see anyone.”
“Okay. Well, let’s call it in,” Carnes told him.
“Wait!” McGraw shouted suddenly, scrambling further along the bank. “What the hell’s this?”
His hand rested on the blade of an ax that had been stuck, stake-like, into the ground. For a second Carnes had visions of that big Marine charging around the swamp with an ax. Or killing the reporter with it before driving the car into the swamp.
He pulled himself back to reality. A missing person, and his imagination had taken over. He needed to get a grip on himself.
McGraw was still looking around for clues, stomping all over an accident scene, maybe a murder scene, with his big old boots.
“Come on,” said Carnes, getting exasperated. “We ain’t investigators. This right here is way above my pay grade. We need to call it in.”
McGraw wasn’t for moving. He was like a bloodhound who’d just caught a scent and wasn’t for coming back, no matter how hard you whistled. He reached down, rolled up his pants legs, and started for the edge of the water.
“McGraw! What the hell are you doing?”
“What do you think?” said McGraw, grimacing as he waded into the slimy green water. “There could be someone in there.” He bobbed his head toward the car.
“Hey!” said Carnes.
McGraw stopped.
Carnes pointed at a clump of cypress where a ’gator was sunning itself, taking in the show. McGraw stood there for a moment, obviously torn between his heroics and his fear of what might happen if the ’gator made a move.
“Don’t be a damn fool,” Carnes chided.
McGraw finally took the hint. He waded the few steps back to the bank, climbed back onto the grass, and shook the water off his boots as best he could.
He squelched back to Carnes, stopped again, and hunkered down, trying to find an angle where he could see into the cabin. “Looks empty,” he said.
Carnes tapped his partner’s elbow and indicated they should get back onto the road. “Come on. Looks like we might have a real manhunt on our hands,” he said, with a final glance back toward the ax.
“You think?” McGraw said, his excitement spilling over into a broad grin.
60
Mimsy had taken Lyle’s place in the pilot’s seat. She sat atop the airboat, stick in hand, looking, to Cressida, like some mad English queen of old, ready to order her enemy’s execution with the drop of her handkerchief.
Lyle was sitting on the row of seats below Mimsy, a shotgun tucked between his thighs, which strained the seams of his denim jeans. Cressida was next to him, an empty seat between them. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. She knew how he felt.
She had already sipped her way through one bottle of water. She held it up and shook it. “Do you have any more?” she asked.
Lyle began to reach for a cooler that was tucked in under one of the seats. “Here, I got you.”
“No, Lyle,” Mimsy said. “No more water until later.”
Cressida was still thirsty. It wasn’t that trade-your-life-for-a-sip kind of thirsty but she still wanted more.
She decided not to argue. There was no point. And she wanted to see if she could work on Lyle somehow. Gain his sympathy. Perhaps make him change his mind.
As soon as they had set a course further into the Everglades, Cressida had realized what was up. They weren’t saving her. They’d have taken her back to Darling if they had been. By now she would have been living the fevered fantasy she’d had less than an hour ago. Or the first part of it, anyway.
Lyle reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds. Cressida eyed them. She hadn’t smoked in a long time. Now she could use one.
He tapped two out and offered one to her, palming it over so that Mimsy wouldn’t see. It was an offer that had the ring of the condemned woman. He fished out a cheap plastic lighter.
Mim
sy’s hand reached down and slapped the lighter from his hand. It fell onto the shallow deck of the boat and skittled under the seat. “You can have one on the way back. Not before,” she chided him.
He shrank down into the seat again. Cressida had an urge to reach down, grab the lighter, light up and blow smoke rings in Mimsy’s face. If Mimsy was going to be the road-trip mom from hell, Cressida could play the rebellious teenager.
Repressing the urge – what would it get her other than maybe tied up? – she shot a sympathetic smile in Lyle’s direction. She needed to get him on her side. Maybe not even that much. Just to a point where he wouldn’t be willing to go along with whatever Mimsy had planned.
The way back. Cressida had a feeling that she wasn’t part of the plan for the return leg. Not that anything had been said. But it didn’t take a genius to work out that this wasn’t a nature trip. They planned on killing her and leaving her out here.
Just like they had with Carole. Just like, no doubt, they had with Timothy French.
Rehydrating had given her back some of her faculties. Her leg still screamed with pain at every twist and turn the boat took but her mind was functioning.
Think, Cress, think. How are you going to make this work?
The shotgun was the obvious move. But Lyle was big, not in great shape like Ty, but size counted in a fight. Even more if she had to attempt to wrestle the long gun from him.
She closed her eyes for a second, trying to visualize how she could make this work.
She would have to either kill or get one of them off the boat. She’d need the other to get her back to land. If they both went out of the boat, or she shot them, she’d be almost back to square one again. Maybe worse. On top of the car she’d been in sight of land and a road.
Out here no one would find her. Likely not in time anyway.
The landscape had changed in the past minute. From the open plains of water-rooted sawgrass, the vegetation had become thicker. Every few yards it seemed there was a fresh stand of cypress or pop ash trees, branches bowed to the water. Cressida imagined it would make spotting the tiny boat from the air close to impossible. All it would take would be for them to squeeze through a stand of cypress on either side and a spotter would miss them entirely.
Yes, she would need one of them to get her back. Assuming they both knew the route they were taking, and also assuming she had a choice, it was a no-brainer. Queen Mimsy back there could meet her maker out here.
There was a poetic justice to it. The thought made Cressida smile.
Okay, she told herself, so kill one, and keep the gun on the other.
But how?
She would have one shot. She knew that.
She had to wait for the right moment. A second of distraction, a window of time where she could go for the gun, or maybe even tip one of them into the water.
And if that moment never arrived? Then she would have to engineer it. Create some kind of distraction.
She opened her eyes again. Lyle wasn’t sitting in the seat. He had moved. Now he was standing at the big scooped prow of the boat. He had the shotgun trained on her chest.
A hand tapped her shoulder from above.
“Not long now,” said Mimsy.
Cressida twisted around so she could see her. “Where are we going?” she asked Mimsy, doing her best to sound casual, like this was a little pleasure ride.
“Oh,” said Mimsy. “I think you’ll find it fascinating.” She let out a little laugh, as if she was amused by her punchline before she had even delivered it. “Let’s just say it’s a site of great historical interest.”
Cressida knew what she was talking about. It had to be the place they’d dumped her great-aunt after they’d lynched her. It was likely where Timothy French had ended up too. “I think you might be surprised by how interested people are in murder,” she shot back.
Mimsy grinned. She obviously got a kick out of the jousting—when she had the whip hand, of course. Take away Lyle’s shotgun, and Cressida doubted she’d be having as good a time right now.
“Murder involves killing another human being,” said Mimsy. “I’m not sure your kind qualifies.”
61
Up ahead, the blaze of sawgrass that seemed to Ty to have extended all the way to the end of the earth gave way to a dense jungle of trees and vines. It looked more Louisiana bayou than Florida Everglades. As they closed in on it, he was glad of RJ’s expertise.
Not all the trees still stood. Some had fallen into the water, blocking the path of even a craft like this. The airboat was making sense to him now. With no parts below the waterline and a shallow flat bottom it couldn’t run aground. A regular craft, anything apart from a rowboat, would have been in trouble within seconds in terrain like this.
RJ eased his foot off the pedal. The boat slowed, the propeller noise fading to something closer to a whisper. Their own momentum kept it moving forward as RJ scanned the water ahead, deftly moving the stick back and forth to adjust the vertical rudders and shift direction.
“How far have we got to go?” said Ty.
RJ took off his John Deere cap and swiped the sweat from his brow, then tucked it back on his head. “Couldn’t say exactly. Been a while since I’ve been out this way.”
Ty didn’t say anything to that.
“Can’t say I’ve missed it either,” RJ added.
“Listen, whatever you tell me out here, it can stay between us,” said Ty, unsure if he’d be as good as his word on this particular promise.
“Like Vegas?” smiled RJ.
“Something like that. What happened back then? I mean, what really happened? I know Carole Chabon was lynched and you dumped her out here. I also know that Mimsy was up to her neck in it, and Cress suspected something went down between Carole and Adelson that might have triggered it.”
“Long time ago now,” said RJ.
“Not that long. If it was, none of this would be happening now. We wouldn’t be out here.”
RJ seemed to chew that over. Ty studied his face. People might have assumed from looking at him that he was some kind of dumb redneck. They’d be wrong, thought Ty. The lines on his face, and the way he’d spoken, told of a man who was struggling with past events, unable to reconcile who he’d been with who he wanted to be.
From experience Ty knew that was a battle all of its own. Your moral compass might be pointed due north, but the tide could take you a few degrees off course. Over time the end result was that you ended up miles from where you thought you’d been headed.
The good news, thought Ty, was that there was always an opportunity to get back. He guessed that this was what RJ was doing now. Trying to get back on course. Before he checked out and it was too late.
RJ pulled the handle back a little from ninety degrees. The boat shifted left and edged its way between two clusters of cypress. “That was the story,” he said. “Mimsy finds that horny old goat in bed with Carole Chabon. Course he was a horny young goat back then. What they called a tough dog to keep on the porch, if you know what I mean.”
Ty had an idea. “So Mimsy killed Carole instead of him?”
“Let’s put it this way. It wasn’t the first time that Mimsy had caught him having a nooner with another woman. But this was a little different.”
“Because Carole was African American,” said Ty.
“Precisely. You see, to Mimsy it would have been like her finding Adelson having sex with . . . I don’t know . . . an animal or something. No offense.”
“None taken,” said Ty. He realized RJ was explaining Mimsy’s mentality rather than his own.
“Boy, she flew into some kind of a hot rage,” he went on. “Had everyone in town the same. That poor girl didn’t stand a chance.”
Both men lapsed into silence. The boat glided on, the canopy thickening, the bright sun fading a little.
“Want to know the real kicker in all of this?” RJ asked.
“Go on.” Ty was solemn.
RJ swallowed hard. When h
e spoke next his voice cracked a little. “She didn’t sleep with Adelson Shaw. He forced himself on her.”
Ty stared at RJ. “What? How could you know that?”
“Because that’s what she was screaming when they put that rope around her neck,” said RJ, tears starting to brim in his eyes. “‘He raped me.’ She kept saying it over and over. Except the more she said it, the more it made Mimsy angry. And Miss Parsons.”
“The librarian?”
“Oh, yeah. Bet she told you that she was in college when it happened.”
“Not me but, yes, that’s what she said to Cress.”
“She and Mimsy were right in the middle of it.”
Despite himself, Ty felt a lump in his throat. He flashed on old pictures he’d seen of lynchings. The angry white faces of men, women and even children, all gathered around to witness an execution with no trial. Not monsters, but regular people.
“Worst part of it?”
Ty wasn’t sure how much worse it could get than what he’d just been told.
“Sue Ann, my wife. She was there too,” said RJ. “She helped yank on that rope along with the rest of them.”
And you married her? Ty wanted to ask, but didn’t. He needed this man to take him to Cressida.
“She regrets it. I know she does. She has the same nightmares as me.”
Fresh silence that lasted as they wove through another deep thicket of vines and pop ash trees. Ty wasn’t outraged so much as sick to his stomach, and more than a little sad for how people could be. “You can’t change what happened,” he said. “But you can put it right.”
RJ stared at him. “And how do you do that?”
“You do what you’re doing now, and when we get back you tell the truth.”
“I’m not going to lie. I can’t make any promises. I’ve made enough to myself over the years . . . and broken them.”
Ty appreciated the man’s honesty. He respected it too. The world was full of people who would tell you what they were going to do. It made a change to find someone who knew themselves well enough not to do that. “So how long do we have to go?” Ty asked.