by Amy Vansant
“Look at these...” she said, squatting next to a small set of prints.
“Turbo?”
“No. They aren’t dog prints. The toes seem kind of long—maybe they’re smeared? Maybe cat prints?”
“What are you, Davey Crocket?”
She chuckled. “Remember? I went through a phase in grade school where I was fascinated with animal tracks.”
Declan nodded. “That seems totally normal.”
Tracing the tracks, she followed the cat prints to a corner behind the water heater.
“There’s a hole in the wall back here,” she said, trying to get a better view.
“So the local cats come in and out at will?”
“Looks like—”
Declan cut her short. “Charlotte—”
She pulled her head out from behind the water heater to find Declan pointing to a different corner of the room.
Following his gesture, she saw something on the ground where he pointed.
She moved to it.
“Is that...?”
Declan nodded. “I can’t imagine what else it could be.”
A shiver ran down Charlotte’s back. “That’s not from a turkey.”
She wasn’t looking at something that had come from any kind of bird.
She was looking at a half a human ear.
There was a loud boom! and the lights went out, plunging them into darkness.
Chapter Eleven
Charlotte and Declan both yelped and grabbed for each other.
“Are we in a dark room with a chewed ear?” whispered Charlotte.
She felt Declan’s grip on her arm tighten. “I’d say stranger things have happened, but I don’t think they have.”
The low rumble of a distant engine reached their ears.
“Generator?” asked Declan.
She nodded, though she knew he couldn’t see. “Clearly, not our generator.”
“Hello?” said a voice at the top of the stairs.
Charlotte turned her head toward the sound. “Mariska?”
“Did the lights go out down there?”
Charlotte and Declan shuffled toward the stairs, holding hands but each with the opposite hand stretched in front to keep from smacking into walls. Charlotte had never wished she wasn’t barefoot so much in her life.
“It’s black down here.” Charlotte shouted up the stairs, less to convey the obvious facts of their situation and more to confirm that someone within earshot could call for help when the ear-munching monster grabbed them.
“I was just starting the coffee and everything went dark. What are you doing down there?” asked Mariska as the couple felt their way up the stairs. Charlotte felt her blood pressure tick a point down upon hearing her voice.
“Bob left a paint tray down here. A cat got in the house and the dogs chased it through the paint.”
“Snitch,” said Bob’s voice somewhere behind Mariska.
“Did you say a cat?” asked Mariska.
They reached the top of the stairs. The storm clouds weren’t allowing much early morning sunlight to reach the windows, but at least they could see.
“There’s a hole in the wall down there, behind the water heater,” said Charlotte.
“Among other things,” muttered Declan. Charlotte shot him a look, hoping to convey that she wanted to keep the ear between them a little longer. He pressed his lips shut.
Charlotte continued rambling, hoping Mariska wouldn’t inquire what Declan meant. “That whole place down there is less of a room and more of an enclosure. The walls are flimsy. I think it’s supposed to be storm surge space, but they’ve turned it into utility space.”
“They have a generator next door,” said Bob, standing at the side window, peering at their neighbors.
Charlotte nodded. “We heard it kick on.”
Mariska returned to the kitchen. “I think I might have made a cup or two before we lost power.”
“It’s all yours,” said Charlotte. She’d seen Mariska without her morning coffee.
Charlotte pulled a chair from the kitchen table and sat. Elbows propped, she dropped her head in her hands. She felt exhausted, and now remembered waking on and off throughout the night as either Abby or Turbo stretched to make more room for themselves. For such a tiny dog, Turbo knew how to make his presence known. Darla’s snoring hadn’t helped, and Turbo had joined in, serving as a tiny echo of his mother’s mighty snorts.
Carolina thumped down the stairs in a plaid nightgown trimmed with white ruffles that covered more flesh than a Victorian mourning gown.
“What are you wearing? A lumberjack’s muumuu?” asked Charlotte.
Carolina scowled and playfully shook a small balled fist at her. “Is the electricity out?”
“It is,” said Mariska.
Carolina raised her hands. “The meat. No one open the fridge. Don’t let out the cold.”
Charlotte looked over at Mariska, who had frozen in place, creamer in hand, refrigerator cracked open. She eased the door shut.
“They have a generator next door. Maybe we can ask to store some of the meat over there,” said Charlotte, drawing away Carolina’s attention while Mariska sneaked the cream back into the fridge.
Declan sat beside her and whispered a single word. “Ear?”
She bit her lip and shook her head. “Let’s wait.”
She stared out the window at the storm. The gray weather was getting her down. It rained nearly every day in Florida, but it was also sunny nearly every day. And back in Florida, she didn’t have a human ear downstairs waiting for her to collect.
While the others gathered in the kitchen to toast bread and cook eggs on the gas stove, Charlotte grabbed a plastic zip-seal bag and sneaked upstairs. She grabbed her phone to use as a flashlight and was about to leave the room when she spotted Darla’s tweezers sitting beside a makeup bag. She snatched them and slipped back downstairs to the utility room. Using the tweezers, she grabbed the ear, studied it beneath the phone’s flashlight for as long as she could without gagging, and then dropped it into the bag.
“So this is where it started.”
Charlotte jumped at the sound of the voice and fumbled the tweezers. They dropped to the ground with a tinny clatter.
Darla stood at the bottom of the stairs with a ball of clothing in her arms. Her gaze dropped to the tweezers on the ground. “Are those my tweezers?”
“Hm?” Charlotte stared at her phone, where it sat propped on the washer. She’d set up the flashlight to illuminate the room. Without it, Darla wouldn’t be able to see a thing.
Would it be suspicious if I reached out and slapped my phone to the ground?
“What were you doing with my tweezers? What’s behind your back?” asked Darla.
Charlotte kept the ear behind her back and pointed to the spilled paint with the other.
“I’m cleaning.”
“In the dark?”
“I didn’t want it to dry.”
Darla sat the clothes on top of the washer and stooped to retrieve the tweezers.
“You haven’t been scraping paint with my tweezers, have you? You’ll ruin them.”
“No. I wouldn’t do that.”
Darla put her hands on her hips and arched an eyebrow. “Charlotte, you know I know when you’re up to something. What do you have behind your back?”
Charlotte crumpled the bag until she felt the ear inside of it. Her fingers recoiled from the squishy object, but not before her expression had registered her disgust.
Darla’s scowl deepened.
“Fine.” Charlotte revealed the bag, holding it aloft for Darla to inspect it.
Darla moved to keep from blocking the flashlight and peered at the bag. After a moment, her eyes popped wide. “Is that an ear?” she screeched.
Charlotte nodded.
“Turkeys don’t have ears.”
“Not last I checked.”
“You found that here?” Darla shimmied back, scanning the floor as if she
’d just realized she stood on hot coals.
“Right where you’re standing.”
Darla mounted the lowest step, clinging to the banister railing with her fingers curled like eagle’s talons.
“Where’s the rest of him?” she asked.
“Not here. Though I suppose his finger is upstairs,” said Charlotte.
“We were down here before. How did we miss an ear laying on the floor?”
“See these tracks? They’re not the dogs’. I think a cat sneaked in and brought us a trophy.”
“Where would a cat get an ear?”
“That is the question, isn’t it? Maybe it was in the trash with the finger originally. Not that that explains much.”
Darla looked up the stairs. “Do the others know?”
“No. The electricity went out two seconds after Declan and I spotted it. I thought it would be creepy to tell everyone about it in the dark.”
Darla pursed her lips and sighed through her nose. “I’m starting to question if that other chunk you found in our room is from the turkey.”
“You and me both.”
Darla climbed a few steps and then stopped. “Now can we take these bits of John Doe to the police?”
“No. The beach is swamped even at low tide. We’re stuck.”
Darla huffed and continued up the stairs. Two steps later she stopped again.
“You used my tweezers to pick up that ear, didn’t you?”
Charlotte squinted her eyes. “No?”
Darla shuddered. “This is starting to feel a little like a dang horror movie.”
Charlotte nodded and followed. “Little bit.”
Chapter Twelve
Charlotte caught up to Darla and asked her to keep news of the ear to herself a little while longer.
“I’d like to have some idea what’s going on before we scare everyone,” she explained.
Darla grimaced. “I’ll do my best, darlin’, but something like we found an ear is likely to fly out of my mouth at some point.”
“Understood.”
Charlotte hid the ear in her room and sat on the bed, contemplating her next move. Someone had to have seen something. Surely someone couldn’t arrive with a person, kill them, chop them into bits, throw them in the bin and then leave without anyone noticing?
Unfortunately, they hadn’t yet identified the last people to stay in the house and most of the houses nearby were rental units—
She straightened.
The nursing home wasn’t.
She needed to talk to the people of the Elder Care-o-lina.
Invigorated by her new mission, Charlotte trotted back downstairs, slid into shoes and donned the jacket they’d inherited with the house before slipping out the door.
Bounding down the porch stairs, she hit the bottom landing and stopped. The back yard had turned into a mud pit. Swirling eddies of brown water danced where once there had been land.
She stepped into the mire and slowed her pace in order to keep her footing and not sacrifice a boot to the sucking slop. Creeping past the neighbor’s roaring generator, she braced herself against the driving rain as she rounded the corner of the Elder Care-o-lina. She clomped up the nursing home’s front stairs, basking in the light streaming through the glass panels on either side of their front door.
Electric lights. Ah, I remember those.
As the wind bit through her jacket she realized it would soon grow cold in their electricity-free house. Cold for any average person—freezing for a mob of Floridians.
She realized that in addition to probing for information about fingers and ears, she needed to find a home for the seventeen dismembered cows huddled in their melting freezer.
Even if the neighbors were murderers, they might have freezer space. No point in alienating them too quickly in case the group needed a warm place to hole-up and wait out the storm. If polled, she guessed sixty percent of Floridians would prefer living with killers over temperatures below forty.
Charlotte knocked and a man she guessed to be in his early sixties answered. He was tall and pudgy, with a balding pate and shy manner.
“Hello, last thing I expected was a knock on the door. You poor thing. Come in,” he said, ushering her inside.
She entered and held out a hand, water puddling at her feet. “Thank you, I’m Charlotte, we’re staying next door.”
“Nice to meet you, Charlotte. I’m Emmitt. I saw you drive in.”
Charlotte laughed. “I imagine you couldn’t miss us.”
They shook hands and Charlotte winced as the motion rattled more water to the floor. “I’m making a mess of your foyer.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. Take off your coat and I’ll hang it here.”
She did and he secured it to a peg on the wall.
Charlotte looked around the large open living area. It mirrored their own vacation house, except that the walls were painted an aggressive shade of orange. She heard a clatter and a door in the foyer that she’d assumed to be a closest opened. A middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform walked out, pushing a man in a wheelchair.
She tilted to get a better view and confirmed that the “closet” was, in fact, an elevator.
The nurse’s face betrayed her surprise at finding a guest in the foyer.
“You’re the ones with the crazy snake bus,” she said.
Charlotte nodded. “Guilty as charged.”
“Julie, this is Charlotte. Julie is our full-time registered nurse,” said Emmitt.
Charlotte stepped out of her boots and moved forward to shake Julie’s hand. She’d planned to continue her greeting to the frail man in the wheelchair, but he remained unmoving, seemingly unaware of her presence.
“That’s Mr. Remy,” added Emmitt.
“He’s not really with us anymore,” whispered the nurse.
Charlotte nodded and counted the old man’s fingers and ears as nonchalantly as she could.
He possessed the usual number.
I suppose that would have been too easy.
An orange tabby cat strolled through the room, never offering Charlotte a moment’s consideration.
“You have a cat,” she said.
“Three actually. That’s Sherbet, and his buddies, the twins, are somewhere around here.”
“The twins are black?” asked Charlotte.
Emmitt’s brows knit. “Yes. How did you know?”
“We saw them outside.”
He shook his head. “No. They’re indoor cats.”
Charlotte opened her mouth to disagree and then stopped. Apparently, cats did a lot of things people didn’t know about.
She considered asking Emmitt if she could check all the cats’ paws for paint, but decided against it. Odds were strong that at least one of the cats was their mystery guest and insisting she prove it would make it seem as if she’d only come to complain about the cat’s visit.
If somehow they were involved, she didn’t want to warn them about finding the ear and give them the opportunity to move a body. It could be that the body was nearby and the cats were using it as a twenty-four hour buffet.
She also had to stay true to her prime directive: Don’t alienate the people with a generator.
She turned her attention back to Emmitt. “It’s nice you have a generator. But I guess you have to have a generator with patients here.”
“Residents, not patients,” said a shrill voice. A red-headed woman wearing a turquoise track suit swept into the room. Julie had resumed her stroll with Mr. Remy and found herself blocking the approaching woman as the red-head whipped around the corner and attempted to make her grand entrance. The woman scowled at the nurse, shifting to continue her path toward Charlotte. Her frown once again morphed to a beaming smile, her arms outstretched in greeting.
“I’m Dinah. And you are?” She placed a hand on each of Charlotte’s shoulders.
“Charlotte. I’m with the group next door.”
The woman’s hands slid down Charlotte’s arms a
nd she enveloped the right hand with both her own. Charlotte guessed Dinah to be in her late sixties or early seventies. Her ruby hair sat piled high on her head, wavy tendrils spilling left and right from the haystack.
“I’m one of the residents,” said Dinah, though she didn’t seem to need any sort of assistance.
“She’s more of a mascot,” said Emmitt with a little smile.
Dinah slapped his arm, playfully. “Oh that makes me sound like some sort of pet. Stop that.” She turned to Charlotte. “I enrolled my mother here and I loved it so much I moved in a little early. It’s like living in a five star, beachside hotel. Why wouldn’t I move in?”
“And she’s a great help with the other residents,” added Emmitt.
“That’s wonderful, that you can stay so close to your mother,” said Charlotte.
Dinah shook her head. “Oh no, Momma’s dead, dear. A year ago.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No way for you to know. Don’t worry yourself.”
“So, Charlotte, how can we help you?” asked Emmitt.
Charlotte looked at him as she silently ran through the various reasons she’d come, searching for the most innocuous one to share. “Sorry. I almost forgot why I came. It’s your generator.”
“Is it too noisy?”
“Oh no, nothing like that. It’s just I don’t know how long the electricity will be out and we’ve got a lot of meat, er, food in the freezer. I thought I’d swing by, say hi, see how you’re all getting along in the storm and ask if you had some space in your fridge, should push come to shove.”
“Sure. We have a box freezer downstairs and we can always make room for a couple pounds of hamburger,” said Emmitt.
Couple of pounds. Riiight...
“Oh, no, that freezer is on the fritz, remember?” said Dinah, touching Emmitt’s arm.
Emmitt scowled for a moment before his expression released. “Oh, you’re right. Thank you for reminding me. Well, we can always fit food in the kitchen freezer. How much could it be?”
Charlotte smiled. You have no idea.
“Would you like the tour?” asked Dinah. She seemed annoyed that the conversation had wandered to such mundane topics as meat temperatures.
“Sure, that would be great.”
“What else is there to do on a day like today?” Dinah grinned and slapped Charlotte’s shoulder before raising her own arms to the sky. “This is the foyer,” she said, pronouncing it foy-aye, before twirling toward the kitchen.