by Anne McAneny
“Poor Mrs. Elbee,” he said.
I stared at him in surprise. How did Reclusive Yoga Guy from New Beulah know Old Lady Elbee from Back Beulah?
“Very disappointing,” he continued. “You called it in, too, I assume?”
“Yes, they should be here soon.”
“I guess her demons got the better of her. She and I met at the Farmer’s Market about a month ago, haggling over the same object.” He sat down, facing the same direction as me, with Mrs. Elbee’s body acting as a warped coffee table between us.
“You know, I don’t recall asking a crazy man to join me.”
“Crazy? How so?”
“Who enters the swamp barefoot? In yoga pants no less?”
He glanced at his pants as if seeing them for the first time, and then smiled at me, his dark eyes steady and entrancing. “Why do you call these yoga pants, particularly?”
I used a jumping fish as an excuse to turn my head and hide the blush of my cheeks. Had I just outed myself as a voyeur? I glanced back over, shrugged, and feigned confidence. “Anybody can see those are yoga pants. You’re not the only one who works out.”
He flicked a bug from his arm as his lips curled into a suspicious smile. “So you also know that I work out.”
Inside, I burned. Outside, I played it cool. “Our yards do face each other, you know.”
“Oh, yes. I know.” He filled the gap between the two short phrases with all sorts of innuendo. Then he glanced from his house to mine. “With half a mile of water between. You must have quite the eyesight.”
Time for either confession or diversion. I chose the usual. “So, what was this object you and Mrs. Elbee were haggling over? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“You’re a reporter. You’re obligated to ask.”
I pulled a curious pucker. “You seem to have the advantage over me, Mr. . . .?”
“No mister. Just Rafe. Rafe Borose, rhymes with morose.”
“Borose, okay. But Rafe? You don’t hear that one too often. R-A-F-E?”
He seemed amused that I’d spelled it aloud. “That would be correct.”
“An anagram of fear.”
“Aha.” He flicked the wild brows. “Not unexpected.”
“What’s not?”
“You process in words, letters, probably homophones and puns, too.”
I shrugged. “Spelling bee champ.” I raised three fingers. “Three years in a row.”
“Image guy myself. Colors, diagrams, lots of mental swirling.” He twirled a finger near his head. “Ideas form in three dimensions—not that they always make sense. Numbers float around like dots, and smells come to me in rainbow shades.”
I bit down on my lower lip, intrigued. “Does sound ever come to you as a scent?”
He closed his eyes and sniffed the air. “Your voice is strawberry rhubarb pie, with a squeeze of lemon.”
I smiled. As a fan of the sweet and tart confection, I found the comparison apt. “Very unexpected indeed,” I said.
“What is?”
“You’re a synesthete. I’ve never actually met one. Your senses are intermingled and cross-patched. Much more interesting than a girl who can memorize a dictionary.”
“You’re sitting in the middle of a swamp with a dead body for company. I’d call that interesting.”
“But back to my question. Were you and Mrs. Elbee haggling over the last eggplant available?”
“Actually, we both wanted an amulet acquired by a decidedly strange vendor.”
“Bruce?”
“I don’t know his name. He barely spoke. Wore a funky braid halfway down his back, a flowing robe, and communicated mostly with gestures and grunts.”
“That’s Bruce. Big traveler, not a big talker. So what was the amulet for? Good luck?”
“No, that would be a charm or a talisman, both of which attract good things to their wearers. But an amulet”—he cut a serious glare in my direction—“is more of a defensive piece.”
“Defensive? Who would Mrs. Elbee need defending from?”
He shrugged, and new muscles bulged before disappearing. “She mentioned that her husband died a few years ago. Maybe he was moving things around in the dead of night.”
I laughed. “George Elbee didn’t strike me as the haunting type. Unless he was haunting the fridge for a cold one.” Guilt tapped me on the shoulder—bad taste to be making fun of the dead widow’s husband right in front of her. Another round of my game lost.
“She told me she was worried about a restless spirit who was out to get her,” Rafe said. “Pissed off and petulant was how she described it.”
“Sounds like she needed that amulet more than you.”
He rotated his head slowly in my direction. “You don’t think I’m hauntable?”
“Are you?”
He thought about it. “I’d rather be the haunter than the hauntee. But I only collect the pieces for their beauty and history, so I bowed out of the bidding and let her buy it.” He glanced at Mrs. Elbee’s neckline. “I think she’s wearing it.”
I looked down to see a thin, silver chain around Mrs. Elbee’s neck. Carefully, I lifted one flap of her blouse and saw the head and horns of a ram with two cobras curling up from its forehead. “Is that it?”
Rafe leaned over and took a respectful peek. “Sure is. Made of ivory. It’s a symbol of the Egyptian deity, Amun. Usually, you see the ram’s head with one cobra, but the gods merited two. And Amun, he was king of the gods, according to some stories.”
“I remember something about him from school. Wasn’t he invisible?”
“Until you called him by his fuller name, Amun-Re. Then he’d appear. There’s also a belief that he could regenerate himself by becoming a snake and shedding his skin.”
“If only it were that easy.”
Rafe gazed at me, but I gave him only profile.
“No idea who’s handling Mrs. Elbee’s arrangements,” he said, “but I bet she wanted to be buried with that amulet. In Egypt, the dead were often entombed with them to ward off evil spirits in the afterlife.”
I shivered as a breeze kicked up. “Poor Mrs. Elbee. Now she’ll be in the same realm as that pissed-off spirit.”
“She must have been carrying quite a burden.” A quiet moment passed, and then he spoke again. “We must have spotted her around the same time. I had just gone back inside and was watching my favorite heron—pure spastic elegance when he swallows a fish—and I knocked my telescope with my elbow. The lens landed right on the body, and then you came into view.”
I got a paranoid twitch in my gut. “You . . . have a telescope?”
Rafe pointed to his glass-encased residence. “Several. The most powerful is on the third floor, behind that dark window with the green shutters. Modern-day crow’s nest, if you will.” He fixed me with a penetrating but charmed gaze. “That’s how I know that you seek me out with your Porro-prism binoculars, if I’m not mistaken.”
“I’m afraid you are mistaken.”
“Really? I can usually tell from their shape. The Porro-prism binocs contain multiple reflective surfaces that determine the light’s path, which is curved.” He used his hands to illustrate. “The curved route forces the barrels of the binoculars to be wider. Makes them bulkier than roof-prism models that split the image but allow some light to escape.”
I took a breath and huffed. “I didn’t mean you were mistaken about the model of binoculars.”
His tight smirk made him downright adorable. “I know.”
“What makes you such an expert on the travels of light, anyway? Are you a scientist?”
“No, just a guy who’s fascinated by splitting and interfering with light. It makes the real unreal and gives us a glimpse of other dimensions.” He flicked a bug from his arm. “I’m hard-pressed to think of anything more intriguing. But back to you spying on me.”
I considered diving headfirst into the swamp, to let the sun’s rays on the water split my image a thousandfold, perhaps dis
solving my embarrassment. But rather than death by a thousand refractions, I was saved by the arrival of Chad’s Blazer on my driveway. The green, all-terrain vehicle moseyed to the water’s edge at the same slow pace its driver usually walked.
“The law has arrived,” Rafe said, rising and stepping back into the water like it was a second skin. “And you seem to have everything under control here.”
“Yes, but,” I said, inexplicably desperate for him to stay, “shouldn’t you give a statement? They’ll want to know what you saw.”
Rafe smiled in a jaded fashion. “I find quite the opposite. They usually want you to verify what they already think.” He slipped fully into the water. “But in this case, Chloe, tell them I saw the same as you.”
His use of my name sent a shiver through my midsection. “Which was?”
“Mrs. Elbee’s body racked with . . . something. But of course, I saw it in symphonic tones while picking up the scent of those garishly bright fingernails.”
Part of me wanted to reach out and draw him back. “What did they smell like?”
“Oranges, of course,” he said, flicking the brows as he skimmed away on the water’s surface.
Chapter 9
Chad’s perfect head of hair exited the Blazer first, followed by broad shoulders. The local barber had once described Chad’s stiff black locks as tunnel hair, ’cause it don’t matter if he’s in a wind tunnel or a cyclone—not one strand of that stuff is goin’ no place.
With the exception of the bulky shoulders, Chad sported a runner’s bod—narrow hips, sinewy legs, and minimal body fat. He’d drunkenly confided to me once that he viewed fat as a luxury of normal childhoods filled with cookie jars and birthday cakes. Denied the opportunity to indulge as a child, he felt a near-obsession to abscond as an adult.
He waved to me before turning to pull on his waders.
The Blazer’s passenger door then opened to reveal Sherilyn, already wearing her pink waders. A couple months back, she’d painted large yellow daisies on them—heck, my job needs a shot of joviality. But when she grabbed her crime scene kit and stepped out of the Blazer, she looked like the interior of a Volkswagen exiting the wrong vehicle.
She strode toward the water with the same exuberance she showed for everything, from a hand of poker to a hand in a box—something she’d found last year after a loan went wrong between two oystermen—and she entered Black Swamp like it was a puddle. “Be right there!” she shouted.
“Couldn’t you have floated Old Lady Elbee over here?” Chad yelled, approaching the water like it was acid. Most of his foster homes had been in cities; he much preferred the certainty of concrete over the swamp’s shifting bottom.
“Keeping the body disturbances to a minimum,” I yelled back, my voice finding no echo as Black Swamp sucked up everything in its path—except tourist dollars. Nearby Crater Marsh and Juniper Swamp had made a killing in recent years, offering air boat rides and bridge-walking tours during high-water season, but the residents of Back Beulah weren’t nearly as eager to share.
Sherilyn and Chad’s eventual arrival maxed out the population of my tiny island. “Who was that bushy-haired guy out here with you?” Chad said, sounding more like a jealous teen than a deputy with a dead body to manage.
I jerked a thumb toward Rafe’s house. “Lives in the glass house. Saw the body same as me.” I delivered my response like a sea-weary captain, trying to convey how much I couldn’t care less who Rafe was; it only served to emphasize the opposite.
Chad harrumphed. “Maybe he knew where to look. I’ll have to question him.”
I waved away Chad’s suspicions. “I think we all know this is most likely a suicide, Chad.”
“I’ve seen that guy around New Beulah,” Sherilyn said. “Yum-mee! Bit of a loner, though.”
Chad ignored Sherilyn and smirked in my direction. “Looked like you two were getting pretty chummy out here.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we were just about to get into some ménage-a-trois necrophilia when you guys showed up.”
“Eww,” Sherilyn said before grinning.
“What’s his name?” Chad asked.
“Rafe Borose. Rhymes with morose.”
Chad snorted. “What the hell kind of douchey, prep-school name is that?”
“I don’t know. Seemed to fit him, though.”
“So he is a douche, then?”
I almost smiled at Chad’s cute stripe of jealousy. He’d never gotten over our break-up even though he’d initiated it. Neither of us could put a finger on our underlying issues, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he was in love, and I only loved the sex. Poor Chad had no history of normal relationships on which to base the relative normalcy of ours, but he knew there should have been more to whatever we had. More depth, more honesty, more something, but with me, he was ramming his head against a wall and could barely make a crack. Warm and fuzzies weren’t my strength. One thing I knew for sure, though: he shouldn’t gauge normal by me. He deserved better than that.
I gestured to Mrs. Elbee who was starting to shrivel. “Shall we attend to the business at hand, Deputy?”
Chad forced his attention to the body. “So what happened to Mrs. Elbee? Her own bitterness come around and bite her in the ass?”
“Chad, please,” Sherilyn said. “Let’s show some respect.”
“Sorry, Sherilyn. Just that Grace Elbee made my outlook on life seem bright and sunny. What’ve we got?”
“Hard to tell,” Sherilyn said. “We’ll give her a good once-over at the lab.” Sherilyn lifted Mrs. Elbee’s leg. “Ligature marks around her ankles but not very deep.” She indicated the back of the ankle. “And very little on the back side. Kind of odd.”
“You think she tried to drown herself by tying something to her ankles?” Chad asked.
“Maybe, but she did sort of a careless job,” Sherilyn said. “Awkward way to go.” She lowered Mrs. Elbee’s foot and looked up at Chad. “Might want to check the river current, figure out how she ended up here. And if she was trying to kill herself with just her ankles weighted, you’ll need to check water depths to see where she could drown with her body upright. If you can find her entry point into the water, it’ll be easier to find the thing she weighed herself down with. How long has she been missing?”
“Few days,” I said, ashamed for the entire town that it had taken so long for anyone to notice her absence. “I stopped by yesterday to check on her, but when I saw that her car was gone, I figured she’d left town without mentioning it.”
“The timing makes sense,” Sherilyn said. “Usually takes a couple days for the bloat-and-float. She’s lucky nothing took a bite out of her.” Sherilyn glanced up and down the length of the body. “That nail polish is kind of loud for Grace.”
I stared at the nails and reflected. “People don’t always think rationally when they’re out to kill themselves.” My voice faded off at the end of the sentence and I didn’t chance a look at either of them. One could never really be sure what stayed secret in Back Beulah.
“If Mrs. Elbee is here with us,” Chad said, “then who took her car?”
“She could have driven to a different spot on the river before jumping in,” Sherilyn said.
“But her house backs up to the river,” Chad said. “Best lot in town. And no one’s reported an abandoned car.”
“Better put an APB out on that car,” I said. “Just in case.”
“Wouldn’t hurt to seal off her yard, too,” Sherilyn suggested. “She’s got a lot of river frontage with heavy brush near the bank. If it was foul play, someone might’ve snagged a piece of clothing on a branch or left an imprint in the mud.”
“Will do,” Chad said. “Hey, Chloe, think I oughta tell my father to watch out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Seems like things aren’t working out so well for the lottery folks. First Boyd and now Grace.”
“Don’t spread that around,” I said. “I still have three intervi
ews to do for my article.”
Sherilyn clapped her gloved hands together. “Okay, let me get some pictures and we’ll get Mrs. Elbee out of here.”
Chad shook his head, disgusted. “Imagine swamp water being the last thing you taste in life.”
I swallowed away a rush of queasiness. I often wondered if swamp water was the last thing Hoop had tasted. Now, given what I’d seen in Boyd’s basement, I kind of hoped it was.
“I gotta ask,” I said. “Is Boyd Junior talking at all yet?”
“Not a word,” Chad said. “Lawyered up real fast. The guy can hardly add two and two, but when it comes to his constitutional rights, he turns into a regular legal scholar.”
I snorted my repugnance, the morning’s roller coaster of emotions threatening a loop-de-loop.
“Chloe,” Chad continued, “you want to come with me to Mrs. Elbee’s? You’ve been in her house more than the rest of us. Maybe you’ll notice if things are out of place.”
“Sure thing,” I said. I knew he was asking out of kindness, to offer me a diversion until some answers materialized about Boyd’s basement, but I’d helped out on cases before. While a reporter’s presence at two crime scenes in one day might not sit well with snooty townspeople, Beulah folks didn’t seem to mind. Sheriff Ryker had even floated the idea of deputizing me once. Of course, that was before I’d assaulted his car with my foot.
The ambulance arrived, and Mrs. Elbee exited Black Swamp the same way her husband had—wet and dead.
Back on land, I peeled off my waders, wondering if I was being observed while performing the world’s least sexy striptease. Was my image whole or split in a certain telescope across the way?
And then I wondered why the thought made me tingle.
Chapter 10
Chad and I found Mrs. Elbee’s front door unlocked, a common condition in Beulah where robberies mostly consisted of teenagers filching beer from garage fridges. Sometimes, the delinquents even left a few crumpled dollars in exchange. We donned gloves and booties before entering, though I suspected we wouldn’t find much more than a sad, strange note.