I told Robert about my article. When he voiced no objection, I took a couple of quick pictures, thanked him for his cooperation, and went outside. Connie and Ray waited by the bike rack. It took them a moment to recognize me.
Ray made a frightened face and pretended to stagger away. “Hayley, you look horrifyingly, horrendously hideous,” he said.
“Thanks. I think,” I said, suddenly hoping that I wouldn’t run into Bransford today. We were not approaching the event from the same point of view. To me, it was mostly fun with a little bit of work thrown in; that is, taking photos and a few notes to help write my article about the parade. To him, it would be all business: the scary business of keeping ten thousand tipsy people in zany costumes safe. And besides, our relationship was still in the early enough stage when a girl wants to be seen only at her prettiest. My zombie paint job would not qualify for “pretty.”
Ray pulled out a small container of red paint from his backpack and added fake measles to my arms and legs. As he finished, a man dressed as a zombie prisoner wearing striped pajamas with dangling handcuffs and chains around his ankles called out through a megaphone.
“Zombies! Take your places. The unofficial parade is about to begin!”
The song “Monster Mash” began to pulse through the speakers. One of the four police cruisers idling by the curb flashed its blues and swung into the middle of the road to lead the procession. Danielle and the rest of the royal courtiers fell in behind the cops, a mob of unruly zombies crushing in after them.
After several minutes, a space opened up and we pushed our bikes into the queue. “How’s Mom doing with the baby?” I hollered.
“So well we may never get that girl back,” said Ray with a grin. “She looked awfully cute in her zombie onesie, but your mother was right—this is a lot of excitement for a baby.”
We got onto our bikes and began to pedal. The crowd pressed in on either side. I dodged a wobbly elder zombie on a three-wheel bike to my left and three tricycles loaded with the Andrews Sisters zombies on my right. A radio in one of their baskets played a tinny version of “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” I snapped photos to the left and the right. Two very drunk zombie girls in black dresses whose hems fluttered dangerously close to their bike spokes approached from either side of me ringing their warning bells.
“Zombie on the left!” cried one.
“Zombie on the right!” said the other.
“Zombie down!” came another call from behind.
“These people are having too much fun. They have to learn to pace themselves over the week,” I muttered to Connie. “I’m going on ahead, I think it’s safer to ride single file.” Not that I hadn’t done my share of partying back in the day, but I’d learned my lesson. There was a good reason that one of the liquor stores in town was called Lost Weekend.
I spurted ahead of the others, staying to the right of the pack, concentrating on not getting run into the curb. I held my phone up to take a short video of the crowd following behind me.
“Zombie down!” echoed a call through the crowd.
This time, the “zombie down” did not sound like crying wolf. I stopped riding and spun around to see what was wrong. A zombie was splayed out on the pavement. The two tipsy girls swerved past, barely missing the figure in the road.
“Zombie down!” The shouts grew louder and more shrill as the costumed revelers passed their call up the slow-moving bicycle cavalcade to the front of the parade, like a twisted version of telephone.
As none of the zombies around me were stopping to help, I got off my bike, tucked my phone away, and crouched beside the person on the ground. It was impossible to tell who she was or what her color was normally like. Her face was painted mostly white, with patches of black and red almost the opposite of my pattern. She was dressed in a flowing white gown that made the most of her buxom figure, streaked with the requisite bloodstains and red glitter. Her headdress, which looked like a Cinderella tiara, zombie-style, had been knocked off her head in the fall and landed a foot away. I snatched up the tiara so it wouldn’t get trampled and shouted over the noise around us.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
She babbled incoherently and clutched her stomach, writhing on the roadway.
“Who did you come with?”
More slurred babbling. I leaned in closer to her, trying to understand her words, and noticed a fruity odor on her breath. She’d probably had way too much of the grain alcohol fruit punch that I had fortunately passed up.
“Can you sit up, or should I call for help?”
She answered with a low groan. My gaze flicked over her body, her arms splayed out, her legs akimbo. So much fake blood had been painted on the costume that it was hard to tell if she was really in trouble. I took her hand, which was cool, bordering on icy. Her pulse was racing.
And then I noticed a froth of red in the corner of her mouth. Immediately woozy, I sat back on my haunches and tried to think. Whether or not this problem was alcohol-related, helping her was above my pay grade.
There was no point in calling out for assistance; no one would hear me over the din of the crowd and the pounding music. I sent a quick text message to both Lieutenant Torrence and Detective Bransford, hoping one of them could feel the vibration or hear the text, and was close enough to help. Then I waved down a few of the passing zombie riders.
“Please, can you ride over and grab some paramedics and the cops? This person appears to be in trouble and in need of medical attention.”
I turned back to the downed woman and took her hand again. I opened one of my packets of zombie bandages and dabbed at the blood around her lips and the sweat beading on her forehead. “What’s your name?”
Truly, it would have been hard to recognize my best friend in this costume. When she didn’t answer except for another groan, I chattered nonsensically about the costumes I saw in the passing crowd. More zombies stopped pedaling and began gathering around to rubberneck.
“Any real medical people here?” I begged. “Doctors? Nurses? Even a shrink?”
But no one stepped forward.
Finally, I heard the comforting whoop of sirens.
6
Most spices, along with coffee and chocolate, had some bitterness in their flavor profile. Even sugar, when it cooked too long, turned bitter. But to me, spice was for grief, because it lingered longest.
—Judith Fertig, The Cake Therapist
I did not so much see Detective Bransford as smell him: the scent of the lime shaving cream he used, and under that, the slightly musky deodorant that never quite masked the smell of man.
And then, of course, I heard him.
“Everyone move away,” he yelled, spreading his arms to clear out the gawking zombies. “Give this woman room to breathe.”
I stood up and took a step back, just as Bransford stepped closer.
“Did you see what happened here, miss?” he asked brusquely, looking straight at me. “Are you traveling with this person?”
“Nathan, it’s me. It’s Hayley,” I said.
“Good god,” he said, with a grimace that said a lot more—like What have you done to your face? Why are you here? And good god, woman, you in the middle of something again? Then he seemed to reset himself, from personal to professional. “Okay, Hayley, did you see what happened to her?”
I shook my head. “I was riding my bike and, suddenly, there she was, behind me on the ground. People have been shouting ‘Zombie down’ all afternoon, so at first I thought it was just more drunken silliness. Like maybe she was pretending to be dead.” My voice hitched. “There’s a lot of that around here and it’s still early in the week.”
“Did you see anyone run away before or after she fell?” he asked. “Anyone with a weapon?”
I threw my arms up in a gesture of helplessness. “There are weapons everywhere. Swords, knives, syringes … You name it. And everyone’s got blood dripping down their costumes, too. So I didn’t realize at first that she was r
eally hurt. My theory is she got drunk and bit her tongue when she fell.”
“Do you know who she is?”
I shook my head, then risked another glance at her painted white face. Did anything about her look familiar? Hard to say in that makeup.
“Did you hear an unusual noise? Like a gunshot?”
“No.” I shivered, thinking about the time last winter when I’d been shot. I hadn’t even realized that I’d been hit. It had taken the pain and the blood and the actual hole left by the bullet to make me understand. Had the same thing happened to the downed zombie woman?
When a uniformed cop arrived to secure the scene, the detective beckoned me over to the sidewalk, away from the worst of the craziness. By this time, Connie and Ray must have realized that I was missing and circled back to join me.
“What happened? Are you okay?” they chorused.
“I am, but she’s not.” I pointed to the woman on the ground. “You’ve met Connie and Ray,” I told Bransford. We four had had drinks once since he and I had gotten together, but as Connie’s pregnancy progressed and the baby was born, their socializing was much reduced. And besides, the chemistry between them and my detective friend hadn’t been instantly obvious. “We were riding together,” I added.
“Did you see this woman fall?” he asked them, without acknowledging that they had a personal connection. Me. Once they shook their heads, he started back to the spot where the woman had fallen.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he called over his shoulder. “We’ll certainly have more questions.”
“What in the world is going on? Is she drunk?” Ray asked. “Why can’t you leave?”
“She had blood coming out of her mouth,” I said. “And her skin felt ice-cold. I have no idea. Maybe she was shot or stabbed or something and he thinks I might’ve seen something.”
“Did you?” Ray asked.
“Oh my god, not that I know.”
Ray rolled our bikes away and locked them up in a nearby rack under a palm tree while Connie and I squatted on the curb to wait for Bransford to return. Two burly firefighter/paramedics rushed over and knelt alongside the downed woman. Last year, the fire department was awarded the ambulance contract in town, which some residents objected to as another example of the good old boys’ “Bubba” network. To me, it made sense to have local guys in the vans, guys trained in emergencies who know the people and the craziness of the place. I tried to judge from their actions how seriously she was hurt.
“Can you hear me, miss?” one asked. “Do you have any chest pain?”
“Are you experiencing any headache?” asked the other. “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”
As far as I could tell, she wasn’t responding. The first paramedic took out a small flashlight and shone it in her eyes. “Can you follow this, miss?”
No answers. They slipped an oxygen mask over her face, which magnified the zombie makeup. “We’re going to take you to the hospital, get you some good help,” the man said. I appreciated his reassuring voice. If she could hear him, I suspected she did too.
Another EMT truck rolled up on the far side of the street. Two more firefighter/paramedics climbed out and raced over with a rolling stretcher. The four men loaded her onto the stretcher, strapped her down, and wheeled her away to the waiting vehicle.
Meanwhile Bransford and the other police officers had begun to shuffle the people nearest the downed woman off the road. Possible witnesses were herded off to a picnic table in the shade. The remainder of the zombie parade lurched forward; most of the participants seeming to have no awareness that one of the costumed zombies was seriously down.
“This is not turning out to be much of a fun outing for you,” I said to Connie. “At least you’re not paying top dollar for a babysitter.”
“Not much fun for you either,” she said, putting a friendly hand on my knee. “Do you remember seeing that woman earlier this afternoon?”
I tried to review the forty-five minutes when I had wandered through the gathering crowd, waiting for my two friends to appear and the parade to get started. “It’s all a blur,” I said with a deep sigh.
But then I remembered that I had taken a lot of photographs. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and began to scroll through the images. I’d caught zombies drinking, zombies posing, zombies playacting in the roles dictated by their costumes. When we got to my photos of Robert the doll, Connie refused to look.
“I asked his permission,” I said.
“Even so,” she said, waving a hand and smiling. “I don’t dare risk any bad juju with Clare and all.”
I nodded and continued to sort through the photos until I came to the frames of the Fantasy Fest royalty. “Doesn’t Danielle look cute?” I asked, showing one photo to Connie. “Even with her face painted white and wearing rags, she looks adorable.”
“None the worse for wear, considering what happened last night with the tussle on Duval Street,” Connie said.
I enlarged one photo that I had taken of Danielle with her king and the other three Fantasy Fest candidates. “Oh my gosh,” I said, my heart sinking like a sponge cake in a cool oven. “I think the injured woman was the one that she was fighting with yesterday. We are headed for trouble.”
Several minutes later, the EMT van pulled away with its lights flashing and a short blast of siren. Bransford made his way back through the crowd to where we were sitting.
“How is she?” I asked.
“I’m not the doctor,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
Which I interpreted to mean she was in terrible shape if not already dead. I turned my gaze to follow the truck’s slow exit with lights flashing but no siren on now. No real urgency there. Or was I over-interpreting?
“I can see what you’re thinking,” Connie said. “Let’s be optimistic until they give us the facts.”
I looked back up at Bransford, dashed a tear from my eyelash. “I think I know who she is.” I pulled out my phone and showed him the photo of Danielle with the royal court. “She and Danielle were in that altercation yesterday. But Danielle didn’t have anything to do with this, I am sure of that,” I insisted. “She was way ahead in the parade—way up at the beginning, right after the cops.”
“We don’t know what happened yet,” he said, a grim look on his face. “It might be a heart attack or something similar, not a crime. Maybe she was only intoxicated. But if it wasn’t …” His voice softened a little and he patted my back. “You girls should probably go on home. I’ll talk to you later.” And then he walked away, shouting “Watch where you’re going!” at a couple of stray zombies who wandered in front of him, nearly cutting him off.
“I’d better text Danielle,” I said. “Somebody needs to be on her side.”
“I hope she doesn’t have a side,” Connie said.
7
But would this cake transmit the message that I cared a lot, but without any pressure, and that it was for Valentine’s Day, but no declaration intended, nor anything expected in return? Would it send the message of love and care, without appearing needy, too sweet, or clichéd?
This, I realized, was a lot to ask of any cake.
—Lucy Burdette, Fatal Reservations
We waited another fifteen minutes as the end of the parade trickled by, hoping for good news. Bransford separated from the cluster of cops by the far cruiser and came back over. “You all can go,” he said, ducking his chin at me. “I’ll call you later with an update.” He waved and wheeled away to his SUV.
Ray looked at me, his eyes full of sympathy. “I know this has been a shock,” he said, folding me into a hug, “but there’s nothing we can do for that woman, right? And maybe we can catch up with Danielle and make sure she’s okay. I’d love to buzz through town and see the rest of the scene on Duval Street. I don’t think Connie and I will be getting out much the rest of the week.”
So we fell in with the last of the stragglers and began peddling along the Atlantic. I tried to keep my mind focused on th
e light that glimmered on the ocean, rather than catastrophizing about the injured woman. Surely Bransford would fill me in with the facts of what happened, once he knew them. Since our relationship has evolved over the past few months, he’s been less prickly about police business. Though he still worries about my tendency to get involved in dangerous situations. And this episode wouldn’t help my reputation, even though the zombie woman’s fall had nothing to do with me. I stopped to help only because, well, because any reasonable person would have.
As we rolled along the water, getting closer to the downtown’s main drag, we began to see people in lawn chairs along the parade route. Some of them wore their own scary painted faces or other Halloween costumes. Some had brought children dressed in tutus, some wore tutus themselves, and many were busy enjoying coolers of beer and other beverages.
The zombies staggered past Smathers Beach, circled the upscale Casa Marina resort, and brushed by the official parade-watching station at Salute! On The Beach, the restaurant where Connie and Ray had had their rehearsal dinner last year. Then we turned inland on Reynolds, and down on South to Duval. By now, the sidewalks were thronged with viewers, which pushed the bikes together closer in the center of the street. A sense of claustrophobia crept over me. I wanted to bolt, but the only photos I had taken for Key Zest were the ones I’d snapped at the fort and a few during the parade before the woman went down. Then I saw the drag queens posing outside the Aqua bar, dressed in their own drag version of zombie attire.
“I’m going to pull over and catch my breath,” I hollered to Connie and Ray. “Take a few extra photos for the magazine.”
“We’re going to head back to the marina and pick up the baby,” Ray said.
“See if Mom and Sam and Miss Gloria want to order some takeout?” I asked. “Tell them I’ll be along in an hour or so?”
My friend Victoria, one of the performers at the Aqua, gave me a huge hug. “You look positively ghoulish girlfriend,” she said.
Tonight she had her face painted pure white, like a geisha, and her hair was dyed red and gelled into peaks that shot away from her head like a fright wig. She wore a short white dress with plenty of cleavage, tall black heels, and black lipstick.
Killer Takeout Page 4