“It’ll be okay.”
Winnie’s tone was soothing, but Jesse wasn’t buying it. “I don’t care who these guys are. I am not getting in that van.”
“I’ll finish checking down the levee,” Winnie said. “You call the sheriff. Maybe since there’re bullet holes in that boat, he’ll want to come check it out, and we can catch a ride with him.”
Jesse pressed her thumb and forefinger just over her brow and squeezed. “I think I feel a headache coming on.”
“Be brave, little scout. I’ll do this. You do that. And we’ll be out of here in a jiffy.” Suddenly almost perky, Winnie made shooing motions with her hands, then turned and started down the levee in the direction Jesse had just been.
“I really don’t see how this day could inspire optimism in anyone,” Jesse hissed after her friend before doing as she was told and beginning the short trek back toward the truck where the two strangers were now examining the devastation wrought by the debris prominently welded to its frame.
“Hi, there,” she called. Her thumb hovered near the phone where one, last tap would activate the number to summon Joe Tyler, which seemed like a much better idea at the moment than it usually did. “Looks like a mess, doesn’t it?” She did her best to sound more amused than worried, trapped or desperately tired.
“Sure does.” The tall, thin man who had been driving stepped forward. “Everybody here okay?”
He sounded friendly, concerned and sincere, which would be enough to make Jesse instantly suspicious if this weren’t Oklahoma, where everyone sounded friendly, concerned and sincere, and usually were.
“Oh, yeah, we’re fine. It passed overhead. We were just unlucky enough to pick up some debris, but we’ve got a tow truck on the way.”
“Ya’ll were lucky,” the other man said.
He was shorter, with a belly that looked like it had seen a beer or two, but again, that was not uncommon in an area where football, beer and pizza were as natural as beer, barbeque and fishing, or beer, fried chicken and anything you wanted to name.
“We’ve been tracking storm cells all over this area for a couple of hours now,” the first man added.
“Had two other tornadoes spotted north and west of here,” the second, stouter man continued. “One of ’em touched down, did some damage. Sounds like there could be more coming.” He paused in his recitation of doom to look around. Then he turned back to Jesse. “Ya’ll out here fishing?”
She smiled, refusing to show how creepy she found him. “Yep. We seem to have picked a bad day for it.”
“Well,” the younger, far more disarming one said, “we just wanted to make sure nobody was hurt over here. It looked like it was aloft when it passed over, but you never know.” He jerked his head toward the pickup. “You sure you don’t need any help?”
“No, we’re just fine,” Jesse assured him. She held her phone out. “Sheriff’s on his way.”
The younger one’s eyes went round with surprise. The other one took a step backward. Jesse now found them both equally creepy. The younger one’s round eyes narrowed and his attitude intensified.
“Why’d you call the sheriff if there’s no problem?”
Where the hell was Winnie, Jesse wondered as she flashed her best beauty-pageant smile. “He’s a personal friend of mine,” she said. Lips peeled, teeth bared, she tried not to slip over into the snarling-wolf smile that never won her any friends, but lying lips had a mind of their own. “He’s joining us here for a picnic lunch.”
Frowns creased their brows and both men eased back a step.
“Thank you for your kindness though,” Jesse added, hoping it sounded like the dismissal it was. “What news station did you say you were with?”
“We’re just volunteers,” beer belly said, now seeming more bumbling and less sinister. “We do it for fun.”
“What were your names again?” she asked.
“We’d better be going,” the younger man said, beginning to emerge as the leader of the two.
They turned and started back toward their van. Viewed at closer range the equipment on top looked more like something strapped to a luggage rack and less like anything to do with tracking weather. Jesse eased closer to Winnie’s pickup, feeling safer somehow once she was half hidden behind it. They had reached their vehicle, and she was almost ready to release the breath trapped in her chest when a scream of horror ripped through the silence.
Long, rending, terrifying, the screams repeated again and again with no discernible pause for breath in between. Jesse turned and started running toward the sound, noticing the men at the van did the same. Doubly frightened, she held out her phone and dialed as she ran.
“Answer,” she begged, the words shuddering with each pounding step, “please, please answer.”
Chapter Six
“This is Joe.”
The deep, gruff voice in Jesse’s ear left her literally weak kneed with relief and she almost stumbled for an instant before catching herself.
“Oh, my God, Joe! Sheriff. Joe,” she stuttered, still running toward the screams.
“Jesse?”
“Yes, thank God you’re there.” Alien emotions bombarded her—the urge to hug someone, the sting of unshed tears in the back of her throat, the embarrassing warble in her voice. They all told her was scared, very scared, and she wasn’t even sure why.
“I’m the sheriff, Jesse,” he said with more patience than usual. “I have to answer my phone. What’s that noise? I can’t hear you. Turn down the TV. And if you’re on a treadmill, stop. You’re damned hard to understand.”
“That’s Winnie screaming. And I can’t stop.”
Her words came between gasps for air and jerked with the pounding of her feet, but she couldn’t slow down. The first of the two men had just passed her and beer belly might not be far behind, if he wasn’t back there somewhere having a heart attack from the exertion.
“Who’s Winnie?” Joe Tyler demanded, sounding more like his normal self. “And why is she screaming?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say she just found a dead body. But that’s just a guess.”
“Stop!” he ordered. “Now! And talk to me. What the hell do you mean, a dead body?”
Jesse slowed down, still running but no longer sprinting to the finish line. “There are some men here.” She cupped her hand to the side of her mouth and lowered her voice. “I don’t like the looks of them at all.”
“I’m hearing a lot of screaming, a lot of panting, and a couple of words here and there. Stop running!”
His voice had taken on that about-to-tear-his-hair-out tone, but that didn’t worry Jesse this time. She had done nothing he could threaten to arrest her for. In fact, this time she was the one who needed help.
“Can you GPS my location from my phone?” she asked, still muffling her conversation with her hand. She had, however, stopped running. Their rescue took precedence over whatever had Winnie so freaked out.
“Yes, sort of. But it’s not as easy as they make it look on TV, and I don’t have a computer whiz standing by to do my every bidding. I’m a simple country sheriff, and I like it that way. That’s why I’m not a big city sheriff.”
Jesse realized she must have hit some nerve she hadn’t managed to hit before, because that was almost a conversation, and some of it was personal, but she didn’t have time for that now.
“So, can you GPS me or not?” she repeated.
“Why?” he asked, probably regretting his moment of personal disclosure.
“Because I don’t know where I am,” Jesse hissed into the phone in a muffled whisper. “And I need you to come here. There are a couple of guys who showed up right after the tornado went over. Winnie and I had just found the bullet holes in the bottom of the boat and were searching for the body to go with it, and they drove up and blocked us in, not that Winnie’s truck is going anywhere with all the shrapnel that twister dumped in the middle of the cab.”
“Tornado?” Joe repeated. Impatien
ce, irritation, and anything personal were gone from his voice. He sounded coolly professional. “Bullet holes? Do you need a tow truck?”
“Winnie’s called one, but they say it could be tomorrow before they get here. Apparently several tornadoes touched down in the area, and we’re on a waiting list.”
“What have you gotten yourself into this time?” he asked in wonder.
“I went fishing with a friend,” Jesse said.
But she understood what he meant. Her life did seem like a drama magnet at times. The most ordinary things could suddenly take on extraordinary proportions and instead of just walking away from the mess like a normal person would do, she somehow felt the need to hang around and make everything right again. It was this compulsion to fix broken things that seemed to get her into trouble.
“I didn’t do anything this time,” she protested. “Neither did Winnie. We were sitting on the banks of Ft. Gibson Lake, talking, when the tornado came over. Well, there was this bone she found in her yard. She needs to talk to you about that, but that was before the tornado.”
“Bone? Never mind, don’t answer that. Look, I’m going to step away for a minute and get somebody started tracking your location. Don’t hang up. I’ll be right back.”
“That wouldn’t be a computer whiz, by any chance, would it?” Even with everything else going on, Jesse couldn’t resist taking a jab at the simple country sheriff who wasn’t nearly as unsophisticated as he wanted to appear.
“Be a good girl and don’t poke at the hornet’s nest,” was all he said before silence left Jesse feeling alone and vulnerable once more.
In the void of his absence she kept the phone handy and closed some of the distance to where Winnie stood almost shoulder to shoulder with the two strange men. All three of them stared up with varying degrees of horror and fascination at the giant thorn tree. Winnie whimpered brokenly while tears streamed down her red cheeks. She seemed devastated, and Jesse was suddenly reluctant to see what the others were looking at.
“Damn,” beer belly said, breaking his awestruck silence, “how you going to get him down from there?”
Tall, slim and disarming shrugged. “Cherry picker? Fire truck? Whoever gets to do it, I don’t envy ’em any.”
“Wow, you know that had to hurt.”
The younger man, who was definitely the leader, turned his gaze slowly from the tree to the shorter man next to him. “Well, yeah, Curtis, I guess it would have,” he said, his slow drawl etched with disgust, “if he had been alive at the time. But I don’t think he had that problem.”
In what seemed to be an overreaction to Jesse, the unfortunate beer belly finally looked away from the tree toward his buddy. His shoulders rounded in a defensive hunch, while his face twisted with a mixture of confusion, apology and what looked strangely like fear.
“Yeah, right. What the hell was I thinking?” he asked. “That tornado would have snapped him like a twig long before he got up there.”
“Shut up!” Winnie suddenly screamed. She looked around wildly, as if searching for something. “Have you no decency?!”
Both men took a step back, easing in the direction of their van as she advanced on a small tree limb that lay long dead and leafless only a few feet away. She scooped it up and broke off the tapered end before raising the now compact club overhead.
“Go on, get out of here! Nobody asked you here, and nobody wants you here!” Shouting as she lunged forward, Winnie swung the stick from above her head. “You’re nothing but a bunch of vultures!”
Jesse stood poised to intervene if the men did anything but turn and run. Luckily, she didn’t have to move.
Winnie took off after them, brandishing the stick like a knight riding into battle. Her stocky legs weren’t made for running, and even beer belly suddenly seemed like a gazelle in comparison.
“Try not to catch up to them, Winnie,” Jesse called before the other woman was out of earshot. “It probably wouldn’t be a good idea. But if you just happen to see their tag number, give it to me when you get back here.”
Then, while the Keystone Cops played out their scene, Jesse took a deep, steadying breath, walked the rest of the way over to where the others had stood, and took her turn. In no real hurry, she began where the trunk left the water and scanned upward on the tree. More than once she winced, looking away when her imagination thought it saw something, only to find when she peeked with one eye open that it was nothing more than a cluster of leaves, a broken limb, a squirrel.
Then, just when she had begun to relax, he was there, and her stomach heaved like an old, jerky roller coaster. Her eyes snapped shut and, waiting, she counted her breaths, concentrating on anything but what she had glimpsed, until the clenching in her stomach eased and her legs quit quivering.
Then, plunging straight into what she dreaded the most, she opened her eyes again and took a good, long look. A middle-aged man, he had a receding hairline and was wearing khakis, a plaid shirt and a pair of knee-high rubber boots. A simple fisherman who set out on a Sunday to spend a few hours of solitude, with no wife, no kids, no coworkers—just a man and his fishing rod, and timing that really, really sucked.
Halfway up the tree, he straddled a sizable branch, his back flush against the trunk, his head upright in a way that wasn’t natural in death. Where his neck curved into his shoulder, Jesse could see a lethal-looking cluster of thorns blossoming from the tree trunk, like a sunburst half-hidden behind a cloud. She was pretty certain the other half of the sunburst had the cloud pinned like a butterfly in a shadow box.
“Jesse.”
Startled, she looked around and saw Winnie hurrying back down the levee toward her. “Jesse.” She squinted, but Winnie’s lips weren’t moving, and she wasn’t even looking at her now. “Jesse.”
Finally, Jesse realized the voice was coming from her hand and lifted the phone to her ear. “Sorry, I got distracted.”
“You’re in a damned odd place. How big is that spit of land you’re on?”
Jesse looked around and noticed again how narrow the thumb of ground was that she stood on. “Oh, not very big. Pretty steep incline, too. Wouldn’t want to get drunk up here and roll down the hill.” She took a minute to steel herself, then said, “Joe, there’s a guy down here.”
“The ones you said gave you a bad feeling?”
“No. They’re gone. Winnie chased them off with a stick. By the way, she was going to try to get their tag number, and if she did, I’m going to give it to you. There was something definitely not right about those two.”
“You think they might have been planning to rob you?”
“I don’t know what they wanted, but anyone stranded out here after a storm would be pretty easy pickings.”
“Okay, you give me what you’ve got on them, and I’ll find out what I can.”
“One of them was named Curtis.”
“First three letters on the tag were EZS,” Winnie called, arriving home safely from the wars. “There was a bunch of mud covering the numbers on the end. It was a Dodge Econoline. Late ’90s.”
Jesse repeated the information to Joe before easing away toward the end of the levee. She didn’t want to set Winnie off on another round of tears, since she was apparently a more sensitive woman than Jesse had remembered.
“Joe,” she said, just above a whisper. “There’s a man out here. Stuck in a tree.”
“He can’t get down?”
“No. He’s actually stuck, and I’m pretty sure he’s dead.” Her voice came out harsh and low, strung out by tension and sadness.
“You can’t tell?”
“He’s halfway up a really big tree. The tree is standing in water and covered with thorns, and somebody needs to get him down.” Without warning her words became broken and mingled with tears.
“Are you all right?” There was real concern in Joe Tyler’s voice, and it only weakened Jesse’s crumbling armor.
“I don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t even know the man.” She dre
w in a long, hiccupping breath. “But a ladder isn’t going to do it.” The threat of outright sobbing eased, and Jesse’s voice strengthened to an occasional thready hoarseness. “The leader of the two scuzbags who were hanging around here said you would need a cherry picker or a fire truck. I think he means the one with the fancy ladder that’s got a bucket on the end.”
“Gotcha. Now, tell me more about this body. If you can do it without crying again.”
“Well, at least I wasn’t screaming,” she said, embarrassed by her breakdown. “And the body is sitting in the tree, one leg on either side of a branch, halfway up.”
“Does it look like he could fall when we start to move him? Do we need to get a boat in the water?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Jesse looked around for Winnie and found her sitting on a flat rock just a few inches off the ground, staring up at the man in the tree. Jesse turned her back and spoke low and distinctly. “I think he’s, um, geez, how do I say this?”
“Just spit it out,” Joe suggested. “Dancing around an issue is not exactly your forte.”
“Okay, then.” More irritated than insulted, she said, “Stuck, impaled. On a cluster of thorns. And he doesn’t look like he’s going to fall anytime soon.”
“Wait. Did you say thorns?”
“Yes,” she snapped, still smarting from his implication that she was no good at subtlety.
“You mean he’s in a locust tree?”
“I don’t know. Is that the same as a thorn tree?”
“Yeah. Are there thorns around where he’s sitting?”
She threw her arms in the air, exasperated with him in general. Then Jesse remembered that it was she who had called him, and that she needed him, and that he was helping her.
She returned the phone to her ear and said sweetly, “Yes, there are thorns exactly where he’s sitting, straight as a stick, head up, staring off into space. In a tree, straddling a limb.” She paused to stare up, just to double check. “Arms hanging at his sides.”
Murder Most Thorny (Myrtle Grove Garden Club Mystery Book 2) Page 4