by Kelly Lane
She giggled again, shaking the fat around her belly.
“I see,” I said, looking quickly away.
No wonder Claudia insisted they leave!
“Silly us.” Precious raised her arms and laughed, feigning some sort of relief.
“I’m sorry if you were caught off guard. I assumed y’all knew about us bein’ nudists and y’all were here about renting a room or two. And if y’all are, and even if y’all aren’t into nakedness, you’re in great luck. I just happened to have some rooms free up after some tourists ducked out on us unexpectedly. I guess it’s for the best. This one woman was positively screeching at me the entire time she was here . . . about everything. I couldn’t do enough to please her. Then when she left, I had to personally pack all her stuff and deliver it to her at another place outside town. How tacky is that? I even had to come back to fetch her forgotten shopping bag full of silly touristy junk—tee shirt, sunscreen, maps, postcards, pens, some local oil and honey, and even one of those tacky peanut-shaped brass paperweights.” Pottie Moss waved her arms dramatically and her face and neck blushed as she spoke. “I mean, you can go out and buy most of that crap in any ol’ grocery store. And who the heck wants a stupid peanut paperweight anyway? Really, except for the crazy-ass peanut—which nobody should want—it’s not like the junk wasn’t easily replaceable! But nooooo, she had to have it all, and right away.”
Precious and I nodded, sympathetically.
“Still, I hated to see the group go. We need the income, you see. Times have been tough. And my brother, Skeets, he can’t do much since he’s got the sugar real bad . . . you know, diabetes. It’s so bad, he’s insulin dependent. And he’s afraid of needles, so I’m always givin’ him his shots. Dealin’ with Skeets and his diabetes, it’s hard for me to get away from this place anymore. Actually, I’m thinking now that it was truly a blessing not havin’ to be at that Yankee woman’s beck and call. She nearly ran me ragged. Nothing was right. And I don’t understand that, you see, because I pride myself on treating our guests right . . . That’s why I was excited to see y’all here today, not that I’m not excited to see y’all, mind you . . .”
I was distracted from Pottie Moss’s ramble when I spied a middle-aged man and woman walking hand in hand outside near the backyard fountain. Like Pottie Moss, they were completely naked. Of course, completely oblivious to the fact that I wasn’t listening to her, Pottie Moss chattered on. By the time I turned back to listen, I’d missed a whole chunk of what she’d said.
“. . . That’s why if y’all are here for a room, I can offer you a tremendous savings today! I have two singles, nice and bright. Or, if you prefer, I’ve got a very private suite with a king-sized bed . . .”
“Um, actually, Pottie Moss, that’s why we’re here today. About your vacant rooms,” I said, looking her straight in the eye.
“Wonderful!” She clasped her hands together in delight. “Let’s get you registered. I just need a credit card . . .”
“No. I’m sorry. You don’t understand.”
That’s when I introduced myself and apologized for Daphne, about taking in the Bostoners.
“Oh . . . Oh. I see. Yes. I should’ve recognized y’all.” She frowned for a moment, as if she was trying to get it all straight. Then she smiled. “Eva! That’s it. You’re Robert Knox’s youngest girl. The one who keeps running away and finding dead people, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, well! Do come in and sit down! Please!” She turned toward one of the sitting rooms. “You, too, miss,” she said to Precious. Like everyone else that day, it seemed that once she realized who I was, she couldn’t wait to hear the gossip about the dead man.
“Soooo, I heard y’all found another dead person at your place! What happened? Does the sheriff know anything yet? Was it another murder? Do tell me all about it!”
I handed Pottie Moss the basket filled with olive oil from Daphne.
“I’m afraid we don’t know anything yet. Just that a man appears to have drowned in the pond last night.”
“A man, you say? It was a man who died? Another man? And you found him? Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Well ain’t that the butt end of a dirty hog. Another dead person. A man. Why, I bet your guests are fit to be tied!”
“Actually, they’re taking it all in stride.”
“Even that impossible-to-please skinny gal? Why, I heard her screeching at one of her men friends from here to Sunday the other night.”
“Really?” I said. “Which man was that, do you know?”
“Afraid not. They was all together in one of the rooms, acting real secretive. I knocked once to offer them some tee shirts—they got I’D RATHER BE NEKKED printed on the front—and that bitty woman nearly tore my head off, sayin’ they didn’t want to be disturbed or nothing. She sounded real upset.”
“Excuse me, Miss Pottie Moss,” Precious said abruptly. “We’ve gotta be going now. I got somewhere to be by four thirty and we’re runnin’ late.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Thank you for reminding me, Precious. Pottie Moss, Miss Daphne packed all sorts of our olive oil goodies in the basket for you. There’s some soap, bath oil, and fresh olive oils—”
“Oh, great day! Thank you. I’m all out of olive oil. You know, like I said, my brother Skeets is diabetic, and since we’ve changed up his diet and he’s been usin’ lots of olive oil, he’s actually been able to reduce his insulin dependency by a whole lot. Since we’ve started on the olive oil diet, I probably give him half what he used to get. Oh, and I see y’all have brought me some olive tea as well! I just bought out the last box in town down at Joy Birdsong’s place. You ever been there? Birdsong Botanicals? Why, Miss Joy is a whiz when it comes to natural remedies. She’s taught us so much to help with Skeets’s diabetes. This olive oil is like liquid gold!”
“As a matter of fact, I just came from Joy’s place.”
“Aha!” Pottie Moss cried, pulling a bottle of olive oil from the basket. “Just like I said: liquid gold!” She read the label on the dark green bottle. “I see, we got some Knox Liquid Gold Extra Virgin Olive Oil. I’ll be sure to put it to good use, y’all hear! Thank you kindly.”
Just then, there was a huge crashing noise outside. We all ran to the front door to see that Skeets had pulled into a drive on the side of the property in his truck, towing the trailer with the big airboat. Only, he’d gotten the huge fan at the stern of the boat stuck on a low-hanging oak tree branch.
CHAPTER 14
After Precious dropped me off back home, I was eager to return to the village and deliver the corks to Merle Tritt at Abundance Hardware before he closed the shop at six. So, I hustled in our Kubota RTV—something akin to a souped-up, heavy-duty, all-terrain, oversize golf cart with mini dump bed behind the covered bench seat—to Daddy’s warehouse, where I abandoned the Kubota. I tossed two crates of used bottle corks into the bed of Daddy’s old Ford F-250 pickup, and I hopped up into the cab.
That’s when our farm manager, Burl Lee—a brawny fellow with muscled arms the size of telephone poles, an easygoing style, and a smile to match—ambled over from the big John Deere 4850 tractor he was repairing to warn me about taking the dilapidated F-250 onto the road.
“This ol’ biddy never leaves the farm,” he said, shaking his head. He slapped a bear-sized hand on the once-red, now-faded orange truck hood. “Tires are bad. Plus there’s something hinky about the transmission. You’ll never get her out of second gear.”
“That’s okay . . .”
“It ain’t okay if you want to go much over twenty or twenty-five miles per hour, all the way to town.”
He had a point. Going to the village normally took fifteen to twenty minutes or more, and that was going fifty.
“I don’t care,” I said. “I need to get to the hardware store before six. I’ll barely make it as it is.
Are the keys inside?”
“Sure are,” Burl said, shaking his head with a shrug.
He patted me on the shoulder as he instructed me to be sure to carry my cell phone. Then, he added that he’d try to send someone to pick me up after they were done with work at six or six thirty, when I’d be sure to call him saying that I’d had enough, or wrecked the truck, whichever came first.
He got a big laugh out of that.
Of course, I figured he was kidding. And anyway, that never would’ve happened, because when I pulled out of the farm drive and onto the main road, I realized that I didn’t have my phone with me. No matter. I grabbed the black plastic knob on the truck’s manual gearshift and stepped onto the squishy accelerator pedal. The old truck lurched forward with a big jolt.
BANG!
The exhaust backfired as I pressed down on the rubbery clutch and shifted into second gear.
“Here we go!” I cried.
The hard plastic steering wheel burned my hands. The backs of my legs stuck to the piping-hot vinyl bench seat. The truck had been parked, unused, in the blazing sun outside the warehouse for weeks. As it lurched and bucked down the main road toward the village, I hand-cranked the window down. The hot breeze offered little relief to the sticky, stifling interior of the cab.
BANG!
I glanced in the rearview mirror to see a cloud of black smoke poofing up behind me. Bucking and farting down the twisty country road, Daddy’s decrepit pickup groaned as I pressed down on the rubbery clutch and tried to wrangle the stiff gearshift into third.
BANG!
After a half mile or so of gnashing and grinding, bucking and farting, still no luck. I was stuck in second. Just like Burl said I’d be. The motor whined as I kept my foot on the accelerator pedal, pushing second gear to the limit. The truck hobbled past an old farmhouse and an antique barn set amidst flat, sandy crop fields. Behind the farm was a stand of fast-growing loblolly pines. Out front near the drive, someone had posted an auction sign.
“Well, that’s new.”
I wondered what had happened. I remembered the place growing up. Early Daze Farm had been one of the busiest short-day onion producers around.
“Huh. Times sure are changing . . .”
Still squealing at the high end of second gear, Daddy’s rust bucket lurched under a shady tunnel of moss-covered oak trees. I kept my sneaker pressed on the accelerator pedal and slammed my other foot down on the squishy clutch pedal as I tried to shift into third gear. I wrangled with the gearshift a bit, and then I gave the accelerator as much gas as I dared . . .
The engine wailed, then with a giant jolt, the truck slammed forward as the transmission finally caught.
“Hooray for third!” I shook a fist in the air to celebrate my victory. “Wait till I tell Burl!”
Moving along at nearly forty-five miles per hour, my mind raced about Dex and the others. I still had no idea what to think. All I knew was that Dex and his Boston friends had shown up completely out of the blue, and then Dex had acted like his old jerky self and we’d argued in front of everyone, and then shortly thereafter Dex died. Really, I thought, trying to comfort myself, it was all no more than a strange coincidence.
But, what had happened to him?
I wondered. And what about the search warrant that Precious’s friend had mentioned? Was it possible that someone had actually murdered Dex? Or was it just another one of Detective Gibbit’s crazy fishing expeditions? Both Pottie Moss and I had witnessed Claudia’s over-the-top nervousness and wrath. What was that all about? And who had she been yelling at behind closed doors at Pottie Moss’s place?
At least I’d discovered why the group had abandoned the B&B. Naturists. I cringed, remembering Pottie Moss and her guests in their birthday suits. Knowing prudish Claudia, I was surprised she’d even lasted one night there. Although, Dex and the men had probably loved it. Daphne would get a chuckle when she learned about the nudists.
Or, maybe not.
The truck lurched forward unexpectedly and careened to one side. I gripped the faded steering wheel with both hands as I pressed down on the accelerator.
I’ll be damned if I’m going back into second gear . . .
Still, why was the group from Boston in Abundance in the first place? I knew darn well that Dex Codman remembered that Abundance was my hometown. Plus, he knew Knox Plantation was my home; he’d even proven it when he’d asked Daphne to sleep in my old bedroom.
Hope he liked the pink wallpaper.
Also, I knew that he and the others in the group—Claudia, Spencer, Wiggy, and Coop—were no bird-watchers.
So, what had they been up to?
Or more precisely, I thought, what are they up to?
Daphne’d reported she’d heard that because Dex had no family, and apparently, Coop was the executor of Dex’s estate; already they’d made plans to ship dead Dex back to Boston while they stayed on for another week.
Not only was that weird; it was cold.
Very cold.
Regardless, whatever it was that had first brought the group to Abundance was still keeping the group in Abundance.
All at once, I had a vision of Dex, floating in the pond. He was grinning and reaching out to me. I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to rid myself of the ghastly image. I couldn’t shake it . . .
When I opened my eyes, I was passing another real estate sign on the side of the road. And I saw something metallic—was it blue?—flash from deep in the bushes. But I’d seen it too late to take it all in, and since I’d already passed by whatever it was, I couldn’t make it out. Quickly, I turned to look.
BANG!
I jumped in my seat. I tried to settle myself. But I kept seeing Dex’s ghastly image. I pressed down on the accelerator pedal and focused on the road ahead for a mile or more. I was approaching Benderman’s Curve.
I’m staying in third . . .
I barely pushed on the brake as I entered the near-hairpin turn. I should’ve downshifted—any normal person would’ve—except that I’d been so distracted I hadn’t thought it all through. Besides, I was worried about getting the dang transmission back into third gear again. So I held on tight to the steering wheel as I accelerated around the curve, without downshifting. The old truck tires screeched as they slid over the pavement . . .
WONK!
Three-quarters through the turn, the right rear tire blew out. The unweighted back end of the truck swerved right and left, out of control as shredded tire spewed about the pavement. Still negotiating the curve, I tried to correct, but the truck just kept skidding, making this terrible high-pitched screech of rubber on asphalt as I skidded wildly across the pavement.
Everything flashed by in slow motion, asphalt, trees, telephone poles . . .
Finally, the truck stopped with a thud. The back end had slid deep down into a roadside ditch.
CHAPTER 15
With no spare tire, no jack, and no help getting the back end of Daddy’s beater truck out of the ditch, it was pointless to even try to figure out how to fix it. Without a cell phone, there was only one thing to do.
Hoof it back home.
Burl Lee would never let me hear the end of this. I could expect a lifetime of “I told you so.”
Still, I hopped out of the cab and circled around the truck, just to properly inspect the situation. Deep in a ditch, the truck bed was several feet lower than the cab, which was still on the edge of the road. There were skid marks and little bits of tire scattered all across the pavement. And the air was filled with a pungent burnt-rubber smell. Of course, as I’d known right off, there was nothing I could do by myself. It’d take a tow truck or a tractor to pull the flat-tired rust bucket from the darned ditch.
I kicked a tire.
It didn’t make me feel any better.
So, I kicked it again.
Maybe s
omeone will drive by and give me a lift, I thought hopefully.
I reached up into the cab and turned on the hazard lights. Ten minutes later, as I stomped down the blistering pavement, not a single vehicle had gone by in either direction. And it was hotter than hell on that road. About a mile or so after that, I was decidedly hot and sweaty, and the bottoms of my feet hurt from pounding the pavement. Several minutes later, I spied a real estate sign stuck in the ground in front of some piney woods. It was part of the old Twiggs Creek Farm. I remembered seeing something flash by, not long before I’d hit Benderman’s Curve. Was this it? Hadn’t what I’d seen been something bigger? Regardless, I was sure the sign was new . . . Like the auction sign farther down the road, I’d not noticed a sign at Twiggs Farm before that moment.
When I got closer to the sign, I wrinkled my nose. It read, LAND FOR SALE. 2,250 ACRES. RIVER FRONTAGE. DICER REALTY. There was a phone number and a photo of brother-and-sister real estate team Dickey and Debi Dicer. Just seeing Debi’s smug, perfectly made-up face and her bleached blonde inverted bob hairstyle made me frown. I stood for a moment and studied Debi’s mug on the sign. Then I imagined her making babies with Buck.
Blech.
I kicked the sign.
“Ouch!”
I wondered just how the lovely Debi and her big brother, Dickey—who was equally smug and arrogant, and according to my sisters, slippery as a wet eel—garnered all the important real estate listings in town. Surely, there was at least one other real estate agent in the county?
The Dicers smirked at me from their metal sign.
I swiveled and took in the property behind the sign. Alongside the road it was scruffy—crappy pine trees, some shrubs, grasses, and tall weeds, mostly. Behind that, down a slope, was a flat, grassy field.