Skinny-dipping

by Claire Matturro

“A will?”

  “Yeah—it won’t take me long. Just a couple of minutes to write it. Please?”

  The inscrutable face on the evil Jennifer flustered me a bit.

  “I mean we ...are friends. Just this last request. Please?” Were friends, the past tense being more technically accurate, as it’s hard to feel warm, fuzzy feelings toward someone planning to force you over the side of a monstrously high bridge. But claiming to still be her friend might warm her hard heart more than the harsh-sounding past tense.

  “Don’t try anything,” she said.

  “Ah, yeah, like I’d shoot my felt-tip pen at you?”

  Mierda, I thought, easing over to the desk as a wary Jennifer and a tail-wagging Bearess followed. What I was talking about was a holographic will—a will in the dead person’s handwriting and signed but not witnessed. I had no idea if Georgia would probate a holographic will; Florida will not. I needed a witness—two, probably, but at least one.

  “Okay, don’t get antsy. I’m just getting out a note-pad and a felt-tip, all right?”

  Quicker than a high school typing exam, I wrote out: “I, Lillian Rose Cleary, being of sound body and mind, do hereby leave my 180 acres of apple orchard and woods in north Georgia, in the county of Habersham, to my beloved brother Delvon Williams Cleary. To my other beloved brother, Daniel Taylor Cleary, I leave my house in Sarasota, Florida. The remainder of my estate should be divided equally between Delvon and Daniel.”

  This probably wouldn’t win me an A in any estate-planning class, and I wasn’t even sure it would work in the probate courts of Georgia and Florida, but I had to try, as the thought of my mother evicting Farmer Dave and selling off my timber rankled me.

  Now the tricky part. “Ah, Jenn, I need a witness. Could you sign below my signature and date it?”

  “You got to be kidding.”

  “Uh, no. It doesn’t count without a witness.”

  Jennifer stood over my shoulder, glanced at what I had written, and said, snidely, I might add, “Why don’t I just sign a confession?”

  “No—oh, no, everybody knows we are friends. This will make it look like, you know, we are friends, not like you’re the one who, ah, killed me. I mean, really, who witnesses somebody’s will and then kills them?” I paused, stunned by the pictures my mind was throwing at me. “If you make me jump off the bridge, then this looks like a suicide note. Sort of.”

  Actually, I was pretty certain I needed two witnesses, now that I thought about it. As Jennifer hesitated, I pushed the needle.

  “Jenn, ah, maybe we could, ah, stop at a gas station on the way to the Sunshine Skyway or something and get two signatures from the clerks or something. I mean, if you aren’t cool with this.”

  “Hell, no. Are you totally nuts?”

  Probably. A little, anyway. Might be genetic. Delvon and my parents definitely were around the bend. But a full contemplation of the madness that might run in my gene pool was not something I had the luxury of pursuing at that precise moment in time. I needed to get a credible will signed.

  “All right, if you’d just sign it. Be my witness.”

  “Like I’m really Jennifer,” she said. But she reached over and signed and dated my hasty will.

  “You any good at forgery?”

  “Stop stalling,” she snapped.

  “Just one more signature. I don’t care, some woman’s name. Anybody’s.”

  Jennifer leaned over me again while I sniffed her perfume—White Shoulders, I thought—and again contemplated grabbing the gun from her. She scribbled some nearly undecipherable signature that maybe was Della Street. Wasn’t that Perry Mason’s secretary? Did Jennifer have a sense of humor, or had I just misread the forged signature? Did it matter in the overall scheme of things?

  “Great. Thank you.” As if we were in an office and this was a normal will.

  “Sure.” As if it were nothing. As if she weren’t planning to kill me.

  “One more thing... ah, two, actually.”

  Jennifer waved the gun at me and said, “No more stalling. Get up.”

  “The ferret. You know, Newly’s ferret, Johnny Winter. Let me put down some more food and water in his cage. I mean, no telling how long it will be before somebody thinks to look in the guest room and feed him.” Stall, stall, stall, my desperate brain commanded, and I obeyed. “You don’t want that poor animal to starve, do you?”

  Jennifer squinted her eyes, but she apparently had a soft spot for animals, as she finally nodded.

  “Bearess, stay,” she ordered, and the dog sat.

  Then with her as a shadow I moved into the second bedroom, where I checked on Johnny’s still full water tube. I poured the whole box of food in there with him. Johnny Winter blinked his little pink weasel eyes at me and chittered, almost friendly-sounding. I briefly wondered if Angela would accept Johnny Winter lovingly into her and Newly’s apartment now that Crosby, peacefully doped on doggy Valium and in the loving arms of his mistress, was on his last road trip to his final resting spot under the pecan trees.

  I left the door unlatched on Johnny Winter’s cage and left the guest room door open. What possible difference could it make now if he had a misadventure on the furniture?

  That done, there was only the very last thing: Pray.

  “Do you mind if I take a moment to kneel and pray?”

  “Make it quick.”

  Jennifer was being entirely too indulgent. Apparently, killing someone with whom she had shared Stairmaster tips and drunk spiked coffee was harder than poisoning doctors she blamed for the death of her husband.

  I had hope yet. Sam would be driving into the driveway at any moment. In the meantime, I planned to kneel and pray—really pray—and then if Sam had not jumped in to rescue me by then, I would leap up headfirst into Jennifer’s torso and butt the gun out of her hand.

  First, I knelt and prayed. “Dear God, please get me out of this mess. I promise to try to be a good person if you save me.”

  So spank me—in my near-death moment of religious fervor, I wasn’t original.

  Chapter 32

  Delvon later explained to me that it was the unseen but no less divine hand of the Great Savior that led him to knock on my door and enter with a key I had long forgotten he had at the precise hour that Jennifer the Stairmaster wizard came to shove me into kingdom come.

  That God would send the Georgia Bureau of Investigation into Delvon’s tiny corner of bug-infested backwater Georgia with a search warrant and a herd of trained pot dogs, sending him on the lam straight toward me, might, I thought, technically be a bit outside the established dogma of most churches, but then Delvon wasn’t a member of most churches. He was a deacon at the First Pentecostal Church of the Holy Ghost and the Savior Who Will Return. At any rate, I was glad for the help, and I have thanked God.

  Though, technically Delvon’s claim to have been led by God to save my ass would have made better propaganda if Delvon had in fact actually saved my ass.

  Instead, all irony aside, it was Johnny Winter, the wiz-spraying ferret, that saved me. What happened was this:

  As I knelt, praying, the doorbell rang, and I thought it was Sam, said my “thank you” to God, and hopped up to answer the door. Of course, Jennifer knocked me down with a pretty strong backhand for a skinny girl, though the gun gave her some added weight.

  I landed on the terrazzo floor with a painful thunk, and Bearess came over and licked my face.

  “Don’t even think about screaming,” Jennifer said, “or I’ll shoot you.”

  Well, I was going to be dead either way, so I was thinking I’d roll into Bearess and scream on the theory that Jennifer, being a bad shot, wouldn’t shoot at me if I were near her dog.

  But before I had a chance to try that, the lock on the front door made that little clicking noise and the door opened, and there stood Delvon, looking every bit the mad-hatter dope grower on the run. Apparently these last years John the Baptist had been his fashion guru, as my brother actually had stic
ks and weeds stuck in his long tangled hair.

  “Praise the Lord, thank you, Jesus,” he said, and raised his hands in thanksgiving.

  I stood up. “Jennifer,” I said, my best manners forward, “this is Delvon, my brother. Delvon, this is my friend Jennifer.”

  Delvon stepped forward and offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

  “And this is her dog, Bearess,” I added.

  Jennifer didn’t accept his offered hand, but Bear-ess accepted the head pat.

  “Jennifer is planning on killing me by making me jump off the Skyway Bridge,” I added conversationally. “What brings you to visit?”

  “Got GBI and narcs over my place like roaches on the leftovers,” he said, and I watched his eyes flit to the gun, the dog, Jennifer’s face, and back to the gun. Taking it all in. Delvon is cool that way—he studies up on things.

  “Delvon grows marijuana and poppies for a living,” I added, smiling at Jennifer.

  “We had a bit of a tussle before I got away,” he said. “Hitchhiked to here down the interstate. Rough ride.”

  Well, no duh. Who would pick up a wild man with sticks in his hair and torn clothing?

  “Come on, both of you,” Jennifer said, pointing the gun. “Now you’re both going to have to jump off the bridge.”

  I waited for Delvon to do something. Apparently Delvon was waiting for the Second Coming or a rapture. We all kind of stood around doing nothing.

  “I mean it,” Jennifer said, sounding testy. “You don’t march out to my car right now, I’ll shoot you both in the stomach and leave you here. Know what that feels like?”

  No, I didn’t, but I could imagine. Still I stood, stuck to my spot on the floor as if I were suddenly a well-rooted oak tree.

  Then there was this little scamper noise and a little chitter, chitter, chitter, and in wandered Johnny Winter, the inquisitive ferret.

  Nature took its course in rapid succession. Bear-ess saw what to her dog brain must have looked like a rat, or something she was supposed to kill, and she pounced at the ferret, which jumped away, chittering up the side of the new secondhand chair until it had a vantage point on the dog, and it squealed its banshee squeal. Bearess lunged into the chair, closing the vantage point. But Johnny wasn’t down and out yet, not by a long shot. He turned his back, raised his tail, and sprayed.

  None of us, especially Bearess, had any notion at all that a ferret has the same built-in defense as your basic, garden-variety skunk. Well, technically, not nearly as strong as a skunk’s, but definitely pungent. Pungent enough that Bearess howled and spun back against Jennifer, knocking her off balance. As Jennifer struggled to stand, Johnny aimed at her, lifted his tail, and repeated the performance. So much for her White Shoulders.

  We were all gagging and gulping and backing up, and Bearess, in a hysterical dog pounce, vaulted at Jennifer, as if hoping Jennifer would scoop her up in her arms and make that terrible, terrible smell go away. Instead, Jennifer fell down under the panicked dog’s full-body hurl and dropped the gun.

  Delvon, living deep in the woods and more tolerant of wild smells, recovered quickly from the next-best-thing-to-a-skunk drenching. He snatched the gun up before Jennifer could grab it. I was mostly trying not to throw up.

  And, yeah, it did cross my mind that this was the second set of furniture that Johnny had killed off in my house, but in light of the overall circumstances I overlooked this.

  Jennifer and Bearess sprang to their nimble feet and ran like greyhounds for the door. Delvon and I ran outside, not so much to follow but to breathe fresh air.

  Jennifer and Bearess jumped into her car, and she drove away.

  After gulping air, Delvon, still holding the gun, said, “Whoa. Praise Jesus, what was that all about?”

  “Dev, I’ve got to call the police.”

  “No, Lilly Belle—I’m in enough trouble.”

  Delvon is the only one allowed to call me Lilly Belle without getting knocked upside the head for it. And he had a point about the police coming anywhere near him. So I said, “Let’s follow her.” Since this was from the same brain that had blithely opened the door to a killer, I wondered a bit about all those youthful indiscretions in the world of mind-altering substances. Maybe there was a tad bit of brain damage there.

  But, lacking sense or not, chase her we did. Jennifer had a commanding head start, but my ancient little Honda rallied to the challenge, and, besides, I was pretty certain I knew where Jennifer was going. I remembered her hysterical “I can’t go to jail,” and I wondered if she’d already been there or whether her two stays in mental institutions were close enough to jail to persuade her to seek other alternatives, no matter how rash.

  Given the late hour, traffic was light, and we dodged a few cars and stayed steady on the tail of the car we thought was Jennifer’s, racing toward the Sunshine Skyway in the night.

  We reached the top span of the bridge in less than half an hour, but Jennifer had enough of a lead on us that she was already out of her car and had climbed over the railing. She had taken off her jeans and stood there, perched on the edge of eternity, in a blouse and a pair of midnight blue bikini panties.

  “Jennifer, don’t,” I cried out. I meant it. “I’ll help you. We’ll all help you. We’re a whole law firm of lawyers. We can get you off. They killed your husband. A jury will understand.” Not likely, of course, but a modest lie at such a junction seemed forgivable.

  “Jesus will help you if you open your heart,” Delvon tossed in there.

  Bearess stood beside Jennifer and whimpered so loudly I could hear her, even at the distance I stood from Jennifer.

  “They’ll think I’m crazy. I can’t go back,” Jennifer said.

  As Delvon and I shouted for her not to jump, Jennifer peeled off her blouse and arched her back, pointed her toes, and sprang up and out, off the bridge, 192 feet into the dark, hard waters below. Whether she pulled off her clothes because of the indelible smell of Johnny the skunklike ferret or in some final show of glory or rebellion, we’d never know.

  But one thing I did know. Jennifer didn’t just jump. She executed what looked to me to be a perfect dive. In the lights off the Skyway, I saw her hands come together, her feet push off, and her thin little body pull itself into the traditional jackknife position for a high dive, before she dropped below the line of lights and my vision into the night below us.

  “I’ve got to call nine-one-one,” I said, holding back a sob as Bearess howled into the void.

  “Oh, man. Listen, I’m gonna, you know, drift down to the other side and pray for that girl’s soul. You want to look for me, pick me up later?”

  “Hang on,” I said, digging in my purse for my cell phone. “I’ll call, then give you a ride to the bottom, and we’ll make plans to get you out of here, safe. Get you some money, good clothes. You can hang at the apple orchard with Farmer Dave. ’Sides, it’ll take ’em a few minutes to get here anyway.”

  “We’d better get that dog,” Delvon said, as Bear-ess howled in utter desolation and moved toward the railing.

  I saw what was about to happen and dropped the cell phone and threw myself at Bearess, grabbing her tail as she jumped up over the railing. Delvon, right at my back the whole time, grabbed me and held on, even as the raw muscular strength of a full-grown Rottweiler in grief nearly pulled me over the railing with her.

  The dog’s howling continued for a long, eerie moment, then ended.

  So it was, some twenty-odd years after the first time he’d grabbed me on the remaining span of the original Skyway, that Delvon reached out and saved me in the nick of time, just before I careened off the Skyway in a thwarted attempt to save Bearess, the loyal Rottweiler, as she leaped off the high girders of the great bridge into the waters below after her beloved mistress, Jennifer the mystery woman.

  When we were standing straight up again, Delvon took my hand and I cried, hard, heaving sobs. Delvon, my best ever friend, pulled me into his arms and said, “Oh, Lilly Belle
. We’d better pray, then you call the cops.”

  Epilogue

  I have a nearly endless capacity for driving those around me crazy.

  That’s why Ashton and Angela were both sitting at the counsel’s table, twirling their respective poufs of hair and chewing their lips and telling me how to pick a jury. Only the oddly pleasant Dr. Randolph, acting as if his unintentional Jimsonweed hallucinogenic trip to the ER had been a lobotomy of sorts, sat sedately while I let Stephen LaBlanc alienate the jury pool with his kind of Miami big-shot penetrating and insulting questions. Of the thirty people now sitting in front of Stephen as he talked down, through his nose, to them, prying into their personal beliefs about just about everything but oral sex, some six of them would eventually become the jury in Goodacre versus Randolph.

  Me, I was cool. So cool that Angela had been poking at me with her finger and whispering in my ear, and jotting me little notes about things I should ask the prospective jury members. So cool that Ashton was Mr. Antsy-Pants and kept leaning over Angela to hiss little suggestions at me.

  Me, I was so cool that even the migraine crashing against my skull didn’t rattle me. I just pulled out my bottle of Dr. Trusdale’s last prescription for Percocet and took one.

  Angela sucked in her breath. A bit self-righteous, if you ask me, for somebody living in sin with a man still technically married, and somebody who had induced her brother to commit a computer crime and steal valuable secrets from his own employer.

  “For heaven’s sake, Angela,” I said, ever the Zen master of mentors, “it’s just voir dire.”

  Angela tsked-tsked another minute. But Ashton stuck out his hand. “Got one for me?”

  I popped out a pill for him.

  Then Dr. Randolph eyed me suggestively.

  “You want one too?” What I started to say was “Write your own prescription,” but, then, sharing is the minimum standard for civilized behavior, so I rolled out a pill for the now transformed and weirdly affable doctor.

  Angela tsked again.

  Me, I was totally cool with voir dire, which is a fancy lawyer phrase for a session to ask the pool of perspective jurors (known in fancy lawyer talk as voirdiremen) questions designed to help a lawyer see into their souls and pick the ones who would naturally resolve any conflicts in that attorney’s favor.