Jessie Delacroix and the Sanctum of Shadows (Whispering Pines Mystery Series Book 2)

by Constance Barker

  The salty old pirate was giggling like a schoolgirl and having the time of his life. As she lathered him up, Arthur took his clothes…“Leave the shirt,” I said. “We’re going to need it.”…and dashed far into the shadows to hide them, and I tossed his boots as far as I could.

  “My turn,” Cammy said reluctantly as she pulled off her slacks and folded them neatly. “Don’t let my boots out of your sight.”

  I nodded. I knew the pistol she had in her right boot might be our ticket out of here if our plan didn’t work.

  She had on a pair of capri-length designer yoga pants and peeled off her tight T-shirt to reveal a blaze orange neoprene sports bra with a zipper front that went down to her midriff. She almost looked like one of those heavy-metal warrior princesses from a video game as she smiled proudly. “Badass, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah!”

  Cammy grabbed the belt-scarf, which was about a square yard of material, and went out to join Ginny and Olivant.

  “It’s cold!” Cammy nearly jumped out of her skin. “Why didn’t you tell me, Ginny?”

  “What’s to tell? It’s a river in the middle of November, and it’s fed by a tributary that starts from a cold-water spring in the mountains way up North in the Chattahoochee National Forest. So of course it’s colder than a witch’s tin cup.”

  That’s not the way I learned the expression, but I liked it better.

  Cammy understood the severity of the situation and settled down. “Let’s clean up your body now,” she said sweetly, putting some shampoo on the wet scarf and scrubbing him while Ginny dunked his head to rinse out his hair.

  As I crammed their boots and clothing into my shoulder bag I heard men talking and laughing in the woods, quite a distance away. Crap. We can’t go through the woods…they might catch us. So I packed up my shirt and jeans too. I had on my short yoga pants and black sports bra I used for jogging with Arthur. Then I waved to the other girls that I was ready.

  “Okay, Captain,” Cammy said sweetly, “close your eyes…we’ve got a nice surprise for you!”

  He gladly obeyed. “I can hardly wait!”

  Cammy ripped the scarf into two pieces and tied one half around his head like a blindfold. She laid the other half over her shoulder.

  Ginny took his hand and guided him towards the shore. “Step carefully, Captain. Might be sharp stones.”

  He stood, dripping wet, on the grassy shore of the Elvira with the reflection of the hazy sky on the water behind him. He was skinny, boney, bruised, and scarred – and, it appeared, quite excited to be with us.

  “You’re going to like this game,” Cammy said to him, nuzzling her bosom against his arm. She took the other half of the scarf from her shoulder and wrapped it around one of his wrists.

  “Where’s me Flame?”

  “I’m here, Captain…dear.” Ginny put her hand on his chest, which seemed to calm him, but she was spellbound by his protruding manhood, to which she gave wide berth.

  Cammy wrapped the scarf around his other wrist now too, pulled both wrists tightly together behind his back, and knotted the fabric several times. I thought the jig would be up by now, but Olivant still seemed to be going along with the program, so we all kept up our giggly girl act.

  We still had to gag him and bind his feet. I spotted one of his filthy socks still on the ground and picked it up with the nails of my forefinger and thumb.

  “Keep your eyes closed, Captain,” Cammy said with her lush lips pressed to his ear. She rubbed Ginny’s hand on his chest until she got the idea to keep doing it herself. “I’m going to take your blindfold off, but don’t open your eyes until I tell you, or you’ll spoil the surprise.”

  I whispered instructions to Ginny as Cammy carefully untied the blindfold and held it in front of his face. Ginny put her lips to Olivant’s other ear and whispered the words I had told her.

  “Okay now, me handsome prince, open your mouth…”

  Olivant complied, and I shoved the sock in. Cammy lowered the blindfold a few inches and pulled it over his mouth, tying it very tightly behind his head.

  He was squealing and squirming like a stuck pig now, no longer our compliant dupe. Cammy grabbed his bound hands and raised them as high as his shoulders behind him to the threshold of pain. “Shut up,” she ordered. I was very happy to have her around. She could really command any situation.

  I laid his shirt on his feet with the arms out wide. Ginny wrapped one arm of the shirt around one ankle, and I did the other. We wrapped the arms again and tied them tightly behind him. Then we tied the cuffs of the shirt arms together, leaving a loop in the middle.

  “Right here,” I said, pointing to a stub of a four-inch thick branch jutting upward from the tree next to us, about six feet off the ground. The three of us had no problem lifting the skinny pirate upside down to the branch. Ginny used her long arms to hook the tied shirtsleeves around the branch stub, and we left him hanging feet-first.

  “Bye, baby!” Cammy Jo winked at Olivant and blew him a kiss. He dangled there with a stunned look on his face, but I knew he would wiggle out of his situation before long, or his men would come looking for him.

  “Maybe we should wash his clothes before we go,” Ginny suggested.

  I grabbed her by the arm and put my finger to my lips. “Shhh! Listen!” I whispered.

  The voices of the men in the forest were getting louder and closer. They must be the ones Morgan had told to be back by sunset. I pointed to the river, and we waded in up to our waists. I wasn’t prepared for the numbing coldness, but I saw my shadow floating on the shimmering surface of the water and remembered that the real me was not beneath the water at all.

  My shoulder bag had a plastic liner and a zipper, so I closed it up and put my head through the straps. Then I swung the bag around to my back, and we all and started swimming quietly back toward the jail cell of Phineas Bandersnatch and the red-haired man.

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  Chapter Eleven

  The water was icy cold, but at least we were swimming with the current of the Elvira River. Arthur and Granny were taking a land route back to the prison bluff, as they could hide in the shadows very easily.

  “Stay close to the edge,” I whispered loudly. “You don’t want to get caught in the current.”

  Ginny was walking through the water, but Cammy and I preferred to avoid the mucky river bottom and swim most of the time. We could still hear the voices of men in the woods, but it seemed like we were getting past their position now.

  “Psst!” Ginny waved to get our attention and pointed to the middle of the river.

  Cammy and I stopped and stood up to take a look.

  “What?” Cammy asked. “It’s just a log floating by.”

  I knew that kind of “log.” It had eyes on the front end.

  “Gator,” Ginny said.

  Cammy turned her head quickly back toward the creature and let out a high-pitched shriek. I quickly put my hand over her mouth.

  “Shhhhhhh!” I put my face right up to hers and shook my head. We couldn’t afford to get caught. Not now.

  The alligator paid no attention, but the voices of the men stopped suddenly. I thought my heart was going to beat right out of my chest.

  “Over this way,” I heard one of them say.

  Oh no…they’re coming for us.

  A moment later Ginny rattled off a few perfect birdcalls. I recognized the sound of the barred owl, familiar around the swamp, but she threw in several more birds, incorporating sounds that were a lot like Cammy’s shriek. She created a perfectly orchestrated bird fight right before our ears, and a lot of the real birds started flying away. I heard one of the men laugh.

  “Ha! It sounds like the old night owl is chasing down its dinner and has a little birdie screamin’ fer its life.”

  They started walking away again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. My friends are awesome. I really chose the right people to come here with me.<
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  Pretty soon we could see the shoreline rising where the bluff with the prison cell must be, and we stopped and listened. The voices of the men were gone now. I could still see the ship a thousand feet or more feet behind us.

  “Seems like some commotion back there,” I said.

  Cammy looked. “They must have found the Captain.”

  “Yep…we better hurry,” Ginny advised. “We got pretty near a hundred feet of swamp to get through.”

  Ginny led the way. We sank up to our knees into the mud with reeds and cattails getting invasively intimate with our scantily clad bodies, which were way too tender for this harsh environment.

  “If we ever get home, I’m going to get into a nice warm bubble bath and stay there for a day.”

  My body was nearly numb from the cold water…and the muck, weeds, and swamp bugs just added insult to injury.

  “I’ll be right there with you, Jess,” Cammy said.

  “Me too.” Even Ginny had had enough of this swamp. “I never had a bubble bath, but it must be a lot better than cold muddy water.”

  Oh, it is…it is…

  “Help! I’m stuck!” Cammy hollered softly.

  The mud was deeper now, and the watery muck on top was almost to my waist. “We’re coming.”

  Ginny and I each pulled on one of Cammy’s arms, but we couldn’t get her unstuck.

  Cammy was facing the shore, still quite a few yards away, and Ginny and I were facing towards her.

  “One more time…on three.” I took her arm tightly in my hands and tried to get a foothold on a rock I could feel beneath me. Ginny nodded that she was ready. “One…two…three!”

  We pulled as hard as we could, and Cammy Jo came loose more easily than we had thought. Ginny and I fell backwards into the swampy muck, and Cammy Jo went in face-first, right after us. All of us were completely submerged in the most horrible slimy muck imaginable. Ginny got up first and pulled Cammy and me to our feet. We looked at each other with our mud-drenched hair, filthy clothes and faces.

  “Next time you invite me on a little outing,” Cammy said, “remind me that I’ve got something better to do.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” I said. “This is what I look like every morning.”

  The mud got shallower, but we had to crawl on our hands and knees to distribute our weight to keep from sinking into the mud again. We got to the sandy shore, just 20 feet from the prison bars in the bluff holding Dr. Bandersnatch and the other man. We rose up slowly – hunched over, laboriously clomping one foot down in front of the other, and holding our wet arms limply away from our bodies.

  “It’s sea monsters from the deep!” the red-haired man bellowed, cowering at the back of the cave.

  “Nope,” Ginny said.

  “Just us wenches,” Cammy Jo added in her typical style.

  Arthur came walking out slowly from his hiding place on top of the bluff and joined us in front of the cell. It looked like he had a lot cleaner and easier trip.

  Bandersnatch had a look of relief and hope on his face. “You made it back! I didn’t think you ladies would have a chance against those barbarians.”

  “Sometimes finesse works better than muscle, Doctor.” I walked up to the bars, and the other girls fell in line beside me. I stood with my fists on my hips, and our three shadows were all pointing back toward the pirate ship – our next destination.

  “My God,” Bandersnatch said with wonderment and a bit of fear in his eyes. “You ladies look like you’ve been dragged through a freshly manured farm field and then back through the very depths of hell!”

  “Oh, stop, you flatterer!” Cammy said with a Valley Girl giggle and wave of her hand. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

  The very proper Bandersnatch was taken a bit off guard, but there was no time for socializing. Torches were lighting up back by the ship, and a band of scoundrels was preparing to come looking for us. I could hear Captain Olivant’s voice irately barking orders, but I couldn’t quite make out his words. I knew that they were only five minutes away if they walked at a deliberate speed, but it would probably take less time, since anger would quicken his pace. Fortunately, it seemed as though they were still making preparations for their departure.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” I said. “Soon they will be leaving to come after us…”

  “And to feed us to the alligators,” the red-haired man said with fear in his voice. “It’s their sport. They already done it to the man here before us. We could hear them out there on a raft, laughin’ as they dragged him through the water on the end of a rope, teasin’ the gators, and him screamin’ while they ate his feet and legs and arms. It was…”

  “…horrifying.” Bandersnatch finished the thought for his cellmate.

  “Granny…I mean, Arthur…” Nobody seemed to think anything of my mistake. “…did you find keys in the Captain’s pants?”

  He shook his head.

  I sighed. “And we can’t shoot it open; the pirates will hear us.”

  “A .38 doesn’t make much noise, Jess. And they’re pretty far away.”

  “And if it doesn’t work, Cammy, these guys are gator bait. We all might be.”

  “Well, there are five of us,” she said. “If I had some tools I could probably pick it, but maybe we have enough muscle to make this happen.”

  Phineas and I grabbed the bars on one side of the lock, and the others took hold of the other side. We yanked on the bars and rattled them as hard as we could, but the lock was solid and stubborn. We could hear the mob let out a roar as they left the ship and headed out into the woods with torches flickering around them.

  There was no time for hatching plots or building fancy levers, so we kept shaking the bars, hoping for a miracle.

  “It’s not working,” Cammy said.

  “You girls need to save yourselves. Go now,” Phineas said with a defeated sigh.

  “No! It has to work! We’re taking you home!”

  I grabbed the bars on both sides of the iron lock mechanism and started shaking them myself. “Come on, you stupid lock!”

  The voices were louder now, and I could hear Olivant. “We’ll burn those wenches alive, and feed the men to the swamp gators. I want no one left alive!”

  “Go, girls…now.” Bandersnatch said.

  “And thanks so much for tryin’. Those few moments of hope meant the world to us,” the other man added.

  Close to tears now, I shook the bars one more time. “Come on lock…come on! Open up!”

  I heard the mechanism turn inside the big lock, and the doors slowly swung open toward me. We were all stunned and couldn’t move for a moment.

  “Huh,” Ginny said, “I guess you just have to ask real firm like. That’s just how the Wenches of the Swamp did it in my grandpappy’s story. Let’s get outa here!”

  We circled around over the top of the bluff and headed back towards the ship to find the portal that would take us back home.

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  Chapter Twelve

  “Spread out!” I heard the Captain order. The pirates were already more than halfway to the empty cell in the bluff, and we were hiding in the shadows not far above it trying to work our way back to the ship. We could hear the power of their swift footsteps and the jangle of chains and saber blades as they got nearer and nearer.

  We were huddled behind a mound next to tall pine tree, afraid to take another step as adversarial voices and footsteps drew very near. We were all crouched on our knees with our hands on the ground in front f us. Arthur looked at me with his dark eyes, and Granny sent me a message with her mind.

  “Find a way, Jessie. You can do it. You have the power of the stars.”

  I didn’t understand. How could I find a way? And with what power? What stars? Suddenly my shoulder bag seemed to dematerialize and disappear from my shoulder.

  “What in the…”

  “I sent it back to the ship,” Gr
anny told me.

  “So…why don’t you just send us back to the ship too?” It seemed like an obvious solution.

  “Well, my record with living creatures isn’t too good. I tried it with a frog once, but when it got to the destination, its head was attached to the wrong end. But I can try it if you’d like, Jessica. Maybe I’ll get lucky this time.”

  Thanks, but no thanks…

  I heard a small creature running down the tree trunk next to us and looked to see a squirrel staring me in the eyes. She made some chattering squirrel sounds…which I seemed to understand.

  “I am Lia. Follow me before it’s too late, Jessie Delacroix. Use your power to become like me.” She leapt to the top of the mound and chattered something to the entire group, then she dashed off into the woods.

  “Let’s go!” Granny said with great urgency.

  I pointed at Arthur. “Go.”

  He dashed off, and with his first step transformed into a squirrel.

  “Do me,” Ginny said.

  I pointed at her. “Go.” As soon as she began to move, she was scampering quickly behind the others with her bushy tail waving behind her.

  “You have to keep moving quickly…” I could hear Lia’s message as she ran toward the ship. “…or you’ll change back and they will see you.”

  The others understood what they had to do, though they were fearful. I nodded at the red-haired man first… “Go.” …then to Bandersnatch… “Go.” They each outstretched their hands, which turned to tiny paws as they pulled themselves ahead, their legs funneling into furry little haunches as they pushed off to follow the others.

  “Keep moving!” I whispered to the others, hoping they would hear. Cammy Jo was trembling, and I took her hand. “Let’s go.”

  The menacing voices were practically in front of us now, mere yards away on the sandy shore below. I could hear the embittered Captain urging his henchmen onward now. “Bring me those bloody wenches! They can’t be far. I’ll rip their heads from their bodies with me bare hands!”

  Our hearts were racing, and she nodded at me. We dashed off together, small and furry now, following the scent of the others. It was exhilarating to be able to run so swiftly with such ease. If we were people the size of squirrels it would have taken hours if not days to traverse the quarter-mile back to the ship. Instead it seemed as though we ran with the speed of Africa’s fastest cats, as our powerful haunches propelled us silently forward.