Those were fine qualities to have in a wife. When Mrs. Nail allowed herself a small moment of pride, she claimed those qualities for herself. Smart. Independent. Caring. Her husband had never complained about those parts of her. It made him crazy when she worried obsessively about their kids, or when she poked into their neighbors’ business, but he appreciated the fact that she did a good job of looking after all the details in their family life. She knew that she made him happy. He made her crazy with his nostalgia for the good old days, which weren’t all that good most of the time, but he was a steadfast and self-sacrificing husband and father. He made her happy.
He’d work out his differences with Oka Hofobi eventually, but she was impatient with his timetable. No one was immortal, particularly not men his age. It would be a great tragedy to die suddenly, unexpectedly, without making peace with a well-loved son. She prayed for that peace every night.
She had nearly given up on seeing Oka Hofobi find the happy family life she wanted for him. Interesting work was all well and good, but books and artifacts gave off no warmth at the end of the day. Maybe Faye would help him find that warmth.
Ross Donnelly returned the clunky hotel room phone to its cradle. Again. He’d poked Faye’s room number into it for the last time. The last time tonight, anyway.
He’d skipped the political fundraiser, after all, because Mr. Judd had looked so shrunken and frail in his hospital bed. No one with a heart could have left him there, not even with a sheriff to take care of him. He’d called Faye several times to let her know, hoping she’d stop by the hospital to check on their friend. If he were completely honest with himself, he’d have to admit that he was looking forward to an hour in the hospital cafeteria with Faye, drinking bad coffee and eating stale doughnuts. But she hadn’t come, and she hadn’t answered his calls.
Women usually made themselves available, just on the chance that Ross might call. They didn’t always sit by the phone, though some did, but they certainly didn’t turn off their cell phones. Usually, it was a moot point, anyway. Usually, they called him.
Why did he care? The Fair was over tomorrow, and he’d be driving back to Atlanta, where a lot of pretty women snatched up their cell phones when they saw his number on the screen. Were they prettier than Faye? Not really, though they certainly dressed better. Still, Faye’s work shirts and poplin pants and heavy boots couldn’t cover up a bone structure worthy of an Egyptian queen. Nor a mind that just might be sharper than his own.
Good Lord. Now he was waxing poetic over a woman who was usually wearing a stray spot of dirt somewhere on her shapely body.
Yes, he was going home to Atlanta tomorrow, but he’d already checked the mileage from his house to her improbable island mansion. It was three hundred miles from his doorstep to hers. Well, not her doorstep, actually. It was three hundred miles from his doorstep to a boat ramp where Faye could bring her boat to pick him up. It didn’t take long for a car like his to travel three hundred miles.
He picked up the phone again, though not to break his promise to himself. He didn’t dial Faye’s room number. He dialed the number for her friend, the enigmatic Joe Wolf Mantooth. Ross was pretty sure he would like Mr. Mantooth, despite his grizzly man exterior, if it hadn’t been for Faye. The woman claimed that Joe was just a friend, but Ross wasn’t sure he believed it.
He listened to Joe’s phone ring, wondering what he was listening for. Was he wondering if Faye would answer? Was he planning to listen for the sound of her breathing in the background when Joe picked up the phone and said, “Who do you think you are, calling at this time of night? Don’t you know it’s almost midnight?”
As it turned out, nobody answered the phone at all. Ross turned out his bedside light, but he didn’t sleep.
The Legend of the Snake
As told by Mrs. Frances Nail
We Choctaw set great store by Sinti Hollo, who is said to be an invisible horned serpent dwelling deep in a cave, underwater. Sinti Hollo can bring the heavy tropical rains that make these lands like a garden. His voice is like thunder, but it is not thunder.
It is said that Sinti Hollo revealed himself to Sequoyah, who first wrote down the Cherokee tongue in an alphabet of his own making. Many say that this must be true, for the serpent comes to young men who possess wisdom beyond their years. Only to those lucky few does he show himself, and only those few receive the gift of his ancient wisdom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Friday
Day 8 of the Neshoba County Fair
Faye couldn’t feel her lips. It was cold and she had been silent too long.
“Are y’all awake?”
“I was dreaming of summertime,” said Oka Hofobi. “Thanks for waking me up.”
“It is summertime. Just not here in this cave. Listen, we can’t just sit here and get hypothermia. Move your legs around, and listen. I’ve been thinking.”
“Great,” Joe said. “Wasn’t it you that threw me in the creek? Maybe you shouldn’t think.”
“I’ve been figuring out how Neely pulled it off.”
“What? Killing Calhoun? Or poisoning Mr. Judd?”
“All of it. The part about killing Calhoun is pretty straightforward. She probably used a stone knife from her father’s collection. Joe said the killer was shorter than Calhoun. Neely’s small, and a sheriff would certainly have training in hand-to-hand combat. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to break Calhoun’s arm and slit his throat. And we know Calhoun knew her and trusted her. You saw how she talked him out of the tractor. She could have just walked up, said hello, fussed at him about growing marijuana, then sliced his throat.”
“Do you think it was her driving the tractor chasing us that night? Or Calhoun?”
Faye had never even asked herself that question. “If it was Calhoun, then he must have high-tailed it into the woods just in time to get himself killed. More likely, he was already dead, and it was Neely in the tractor, trying to scare us away from the murder site. I bet she didn’t want the body found until the next day. She would have wanted her trail to get cold. Besides, daylight would have given her a chance to make absolutely sure that she didn’t leave any evidence behind.”
“You and Joe ruined that devious plan. Good going.”
Faye didn’t hear Oka Hofobi. Her brain was already chewing on another problem. “Dr. Mailer said Chuck was all upset about a tool that was missing from his collection. But I don’t think Neely had access to that collection—at least, not before the killing. If anybody had broken into the trailer, I think we’d have heard. Think about it. Chuck would’ve noticed if anything had been disturbed. He would have had a spasm.”
“Why do you say she didn’t have access to the collection before the killing?” Oka Hofobi asked. “Could she have gotten her hands on it afterward?”
“Don’t you remember? She came to the work site and asked me to show her some examples of tools with sickle sheen. I guess she could have palmed one while I was showing them to her. I think I even left her alone with them. Why wouldn’t I?”
“We’re wasting our breath.” Oka Hofobi’s voice sounded tired. “Why would she steal one of Chuck’s tools when the deed was already done?”
“Maybe she wanted to swap it with the real murder weapon.” Joe’s voice sounded strong in the blackness that hid his face. “If she killed Calhoun with something out of her father’s collection, she’d always have to worry about someone recognizing it.”
Of course. Stone weapons might not have serial numbers like guns, but they were no less unique. If Neely’s dad had been showing off his arrowhead collection for decades, there was a very real risk to using one of those pieces to do murder. Neely had stolen one of Chuck’s blades so that she could swap it with the one retained for evidence—which a sheriff was easily able to do.
“Nice detective work, Joe. If we ever get out of here, you can bet that Chuck will be able to identify the one being held as evidence as one of his. And you can bet that he’ll have it well-docu
mented in his notes.”
Random sentences from textbooks and professional journals flitted around Faye’s mind, distracting her from her physical misery. She was certain that the cave where she sat was inextricably linked to the mound that loomed over it.
Monumental architecture in the Americas had been shown, time and again, to be linked to geological formations. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan in Mexico was built atop a cave. Part of the largest mound at Poverty Point extended over a natural pit that had been twelve feet deep. Siting the mound there must have been a meaningful decision, since it meant that the community would be hauling many tons of dirt just to fill that pit before they could even begin raising the seventy-foot-tall mound.
If the mound’s site had been chosen by priests to link it to a cave that, perhaps, had religious significance, Faye found herself wanting to applaud the pragmatic engineers who she believed had found a way to make it useful. Unless she missed her guess, they had enlarged and extended an existing cave to divert surface water and springwater that could, over time, have eroded away the mound they’d worked so hard to build.
If she ever got out of this trap, she would crawl on her hands and knees and beg Mrs. Calhoun for permission to investigate this remnant of a remarkable culture.
A tiny plop sounded somewhere to Faye’s left, reminding her that, though the prehistoric engineers’ work had survived an astonishingly long time, the ceiling above her was frail. If one more rock fell out of that ceiling and dropped noisily into the water, she planned to scream. Except Faye found screaming unsatisfying when none of the sound reflected off the earthen walls of her prison.
On the plus side, she’d found that the deadened silence focused her mind. She’d figured out how Neely managed to tamper with Mr. Judd’s pills, even though she wasn’t in possession of a pharmacist’s license.
It all fit together so nicely now. She could see the sheriff’s hands competently sorting the pills. Nobody could have known the medications of an aging man better than Neely. At a guess, Faye would say that Mr. Rutland weighed twice as much as the congressman, and he was a lot sicker. She was no doctor, but surely the dosage of his blood pressure medicine would have to be at least twice as high as Mr. Judd’s, maybe a lot more.
By filling her father’s prescription and giving it to Judd, Neely nearly committed the world’s easiest, most bloodless murder. Of course, Mr. Judd had suffered a catastrophic drop in blood pressure. He was given a significant overdose of a drug designed to lower blood pressure. If he’d died of the overdose, as Neely had planned, his body would have gone undiscovered till morning. He survived because Faye was knocking on his door at the very moment he collapsed. Five minutes later, he’d have been unconscious and unable to answer her.
She’d rushed him to the hospital, where they’d overlooked the discrepancy in the dosage and sent him home…so he could take the same overdose again. And five more overstrong doses waited in his pill case. If Sallie Judd and his doctors couldn’t figure out what had happened—and why would his doctors suspect such a thing?—he would take an overdose again as soon as he was released from the hospital. And he’d do it every day, until those high-dosage pills were gone, or until he died. If Faye and Joe and Oka Hofobi died, there would be no one to warn him.
Faye found that the silence wasn’t just conducive to thought. It was conducive to prayer. She spent quite a bit of time praying that Sallie Judd had been able to communicate her concerns to her husband’s doctors without relying on the sheriff as an intermediary. Otherwise, Neely would be able to keep trying to kill him until she succeeded. It didn’t seem so selfish to pray for her own rescue, not when her death might condemn Lawrence Judd, too.
She wondered if Oka Hofobi prayed. She knew Joe did…although, as she thought of it, she realized that the sight of Joe in prayer was little different from the sight of him going about his everyday business.
“What time is it, Joe?” she asked, though time could hardly be less relevant in a world that light couldn’t penetrate.
“About midnight.”
Midnight. No wonder she felt herself sinking into a dark night of the soul. In the early hours of the night, she’d clung to her confidence that there was an exit to this trap. Now, when the sun was on the other side of the world, as far away from her as it was going to get tonight, she felt the questions creep in. If there had ever been an exit to this culvert where they were trapped, was it still there? She let herself remember the sliding sand noises that had punctuated the night. Was that sand slowly obliterating their escape route?
And what if they found an opening to sunlight and fresh air, but it was too small? What if the opening wasn’t a hole, but a simple drain, ringed with rocks to keep it stabilized? What if they couldn’t dig themselves out?
Faye had been keeping hypothermia at bay by sheer force of will. Though she was sitting, she was in constant motion, arms swinging, feet tapping, hips squirming. If morning found the three of them standing helpless in front of a tiny hole, one that let in light but not heat, she planned to throw herself into the water and wait for shock to set in. Better that, than waiting to starve.
She kicked Oka Hofobi. “You’re not moving enough to keep yourself warm. I’m not about to tell your mother you didn’t make it because you gave up.”
Oka Hofobi twitched and said something unintelligible, but he did move. Then he laughed.
Long fangs and a voice like thunder.
Oka Hofobi hadn’t known until this very moment that he didn’t believe in Sinti Hollo. He had been interested in the old stories in an anthropological way, but he’d never considered the physical reality of a snake god. Not until now.
There wasn’t room in this little chamber for the snake’s muscular coils. How odd that he was aware of the room’s extent, when he hadn’t been able to see since Sheriff Rutland sealed its mouth. Did Sinti Hollo bring his own light with him? Or did he bring the ability to see in the dark?
Oka Hofobi opened his mouth. Maybe he could see with his tongue, like a snake. The idea made him laugh. Then he froze, because he had the feeling that one didn’t laugh in the presence of Sinti Hollo.
He’d always been told that the snake came to young men with wisdom beyond their years. Then why did he feel that all reason had left him?
The light was going, and the snake was going with it. Without speaking, Sinti Hollo had let him know that he had an important task ahead of him. Oka Hofobi didn’t know what it was, but his vision of the snake had given him the confidence that, when the time came, he would be able to face the task and do it well.
He felt a moment of giddiness when he realized that he would survive this cold wet tomb. Otherwise, how could he expect to accomplish Sinti Hollo’s task?
The giddiness passed when he realized that his task might be short and simple: to die well.
Oka Hofobi exhaled with a loud hiss. Then he flinched so hard that Joe could feel it from where he sat, on the other side of Faye. Joe reached out a hand and grasped his friend’s upper arm, partially to keep him from falling into the water, but also to calm him. It seemed that Oka Hofobi had never seen Sinti Hollo before.
“Did you see the snake?” he asked, then he laughed as he felt Faye jerk her arms tighter around her legs. “Not that kind of snake, Faye.”
“I’ve heard of Sinti Hollo all my life…” Oka Hofobi’s arm was still trembling so hard that Joe didn’t feel safe letting it go. “He was here.”
“He’s still here,” Joe said, slowly letting loose of his friend’s arm.
“You can see him?”
“Sometimes. But he’s here all the time. He’s very big tonight.”
Faye wasn’t in the mood to listen to people talking over her head, and she wasn’t in the mood to be nice about it, so she barked, “Who on earth are you two talking about?”
“Sinti Hollo. He’s an invisible horned serpent who lives in a cave, underwater,” Oka Hofobi began, in his best “I’ve-got-a-Ph.D.” voice.
“Well, I can see why he’d be down here in this wet cave,” Faye said in a decidedly unimpressed tone of voice, “but I don’t understand why you two are talking about seeing some invisible snake. Invisible. That means you can’t see it.”
“The people who can see him are exceptionally wise…” began Oka Hofobi-the-doctor again.
“Wise? And that counts me out, but includes you two?”
“If you’ll let me finish. Sinti Hollo appears to exceptionally wise young men.”
“Oh. Well, if he tells one of you men something important, be sure and let this little woman know. Okay?”
“Sure thing, Faye,” said Joe, who wouldn’t know sarcasm if it smacked him in the face.
“Joe?” Oka Hofobi asked. “When you said that Sinti Hollo was big tonight, did you mean that you’d seen him before?”
“Lots of times. You see plenty of things when you slow down and just look at the world. The snake don’t say much, but he makes himself understood all the same.”
Faye was mortally tired of fidgeting around, just to stay alive. She’d never really figured on spending the night between two attractive men but, if she had, this wouldn’t have been the way she pictured the experience.
Something was happening to the light. Well, there wasn’t actually any light. Something was happening to the darkness. It was pulling back into her peripheral vision. In the direct center of her field of view was…something that couldn’t possibly be there.
She couldn’t possibly see without light. Physics told her that. But she saw.
She was hallucinating. Rationality told her that. But every atom in her body told her that what she saw was real.
The snake was truly there. It was solid. It made its presence known without light as she knew it, and it spoke without sound as she understood it. Faye’s analytical mind surrendered, and she believed.
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