The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  “Yes,” said George slowly.

  Daniel seemed to catch a certain vibe and said, “Maybe that ought to wait. It’s almost five now. Want to eat in about an hour? We’ll talk it over after dinner.”

  “Great,” I said as he went to check on the invalids in Badger Cabin.

  Petey was, I saw, sketching the view from the rickety steps of the kitchen cabin, darting in occasionally to sneak M&M’S. George had brought a gigantic bag of peanut.

  George looked at me carefully. “You look like you could use a shot of whiskey. Would you like one?”

  I laughed. “Oh, yes, please, and how ’bout some smoked salmon to go with it?”

  He smiled with a secret, reached inside his coat, and pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Then he proved he was God by reaching for my hand and leading me to Kestrel Cabin, the one farthest removed from the others.

  He pulled open the door, smiling shyly, that tentative smile on his rugged face that never failed to melt my heart. At some point today—I guess while Daniel and I were tending to Gina—he’d swept the cabin clean and laid a carpet of Camp Saskee-wee-wit T-shirts (facedown) in the center of the floor, just big enough for two people to sit on.

  The stump of a candle burned on a bean can lid.

  He’d spread a clean red bandanna and covered it with small pieces of flatbread, each topped with a glistening chunk of smoked salmon. The oily, sweet smell made my mouth water so suddenly it ached.

  “A little something before dinner,” he explained, daring to watch my reaction.

  All I could do was shake my head. Then joy took over. Visceral happiness.

  In ordinary life this little picnic—a bottle with no glasses, food eaten off the floor with our hands, no bevnaps or ice, no jazz on the stereo—would seem as bravely pathetic as a roasted rat served forth in a concentration camp barracks.

  Suddenly I understood the romance of roasted rat.

  George had been careful not to create a sex nest—the T-shirts just kept our butts off the cold planks; he hadn’t brought in a sleeping bag or anything. This was simply a goddamn tribute of love.

  As if he needed to do anything more.

  We spent a magical hour in that cabin.

  Chapter 23 – Fear Like a Brick

  “It’ll be easy enough to get to the confluence of the Harkett and the Quilmash,” said Daniel, tracing a line on the map with his finger, “but I don’t see how we’re gonna find their camp—provided they’re still there—with any kind of stealth.”

  “Stealth’s not a problem,” said George. “Our problem is speed. We want to rescue Kenner, but—”

  “We don’t want to rescue Kenner,” I broke in, “we have to rescue Kenner!”

  The map, bathed in the cold glow from Daniel’s battery lantern, lay flat on the one un-rotted picnic table in the dining pavilion, which was, frankly, spooky at night. Damp darkness nibbled at the map’s edges, and I felt apprehensive. Sea monsters flopped in the lake with sudden splooshes that echoed off the hillsides. An owl hooted over and over, three hoots, then a pause, then three more identical, impersonal, insistent hoots. If that was a mating call and I were a girl owl, I would really not be interested. Show me some emotion.

  I guess it was about midnight. A bush rustled nearby and I reacted in spite of myself. George said, “Just a rodent, maybe a weasel.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The way it moves.”

  “I thought you were a city boy.”

  He laughed shortly. “I’ve done a little...time...in the woods too.”

  “Were you a scout?” asked Daniel.

  “No. Look, I think we need to challenge an assumption here. We’ve got two gravely injured people. If we get them to our cars, then down the mountain to the washout near town, I’m sure we can get help from there. Or if one of us hikes back to the gorge, even tonight, we might get a cell signal again, and maybe somebody can get a floatplane in here. How much time do we want to spend trying to get to Kenner, when we only have a vague idea of where he might be, and when every hour we delay getting Gina and Joey to a hospital may be crucial?”

  “George, we have to,” I said simply. “We’ve got to try. He comes out to these woods in the storm of the century; he risks his neck looking for his brother and my sister; then he runs into these creeps who’d just as soon kill him, which puts him categorically in more danger than either of them!” I nodded fiercely toward the dark shape of Badger Cabin. “Frankly!”

  “I agree,” said Daniel. “I think it’s only right we give it a shot. Gina and Joey are both stable. Joey’s body is really trying to heal. Those long sleeps he takes during the day? Big part of the healing process. I say you and I try for Kenner at dawn, George. If we can’t get him by noon, we switch our priority to further evacuation efforts here.”

  “OK,” said George. “Rita, you good with that?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was the easy part.

  Hunched in the gloom near the embers of our cook fire, we proceeded to argue about what to do.

  “A simple plan’s the best,” I said helpfully.

  “Well, we can’t just blunder into the area and start shouting for Kenner,” said George.

  “You’ve gotta sneak up on them somehow,” I said, “scope them out and locate Kenner exactly, then—”

  “Then what? Stage a raid? They’ve got weapons.”

  Daniel said, “George, don’t you carry a gun?” Oddly, I noticed his voice shaking.

  George answered, “I do, sometimes.”

  “Well, what about now?”

  “Look, even if I did have one on me, a gun is not some kind of magical tool. A gun is not going to rescue Kenner. I’ll sacrifice Kenner’s life rather than risk a shoot-out with some backwoods clowns, where we all could go down.”

  He sighed, watching a squat brown bug crawl along the snap cuff of his jacket. “The ramifications of pulling a gun on somebody are huge. Let alone shooting them. People don’t understand that. They don’t understand what a liability a gun is, even way out here. I know this situation seems like Deliverance, people in the woods making up their own rules, but it’s not. The law is here, regardless, witnesses are here—even if the only witness is you.” He flicked away the bug and glanced at me and Daniel in turn, and I thought I detected the faintest contempt. “It’s only in the movies where good guys with guns solve everything.”

  Something was dawning on Daniel.

  And on me.

  Daniel was a true guy, a strong, smart guy, but he was still Daniel, whose motto back home in West Hollywood was, “Let an expert do it,” for everything from washing your car to filing your taxes. He was still the guy who liked to drink martinis while memorizing the dialogue in All About Eve. He obsessed about hair products. He would spend ten minutes explaining to you why you should prefer Rodgers & Hammerstein over Lerner & Loewe; he wore neon-orange Lycra T-shirts to the bars; he could not relate to power tools. He would drive across town for tiny cupcakes in designer flavors like prickly pear and curried maple to serve at a party, if he didn’t have the affair catered altogether. He spent more on clothes than George spent on rent. He knew the difference between piqué and percale. He was semi-famous for playing a minor yet recurring and endearing role in a popular police sitcom now in reruns. He was about to start shooting a new TV series where he played a professional exorcist’s husband who devised custom exorcism equipment in his home shop.

  He was, in short, still a gay Hollywood actor.

  I loved him so much.

  I saw him now confronting his limitations.

  He was confident in the woods. He could orienteer; he could climb and spelunk and haul half-dead guys with broken legs up from dangerous ledges unroped. He could reduce dislocations and set bones.

  He was tremendously brave.

  Yet I could see the fear in his hooded eyes, in the stiffness of his shoulders, as the reality of what he and George were abou
t to do hit him.

  This wilderness stuff is one thing. Confronting bonechopping kidnapping criminals who carry guns and axes was another.

  He was feeling it like a brick between the eyes. There in the lantern light George could see it too.

  I had gotten Daniel into this. I had asked him to accompany me to these woods and he had done so without a second’s hesitation.

  Earlier today, he had helped Joey to stand on one leg for a few minutes, leaning on him, to keep his circulation up. Joey didn’t like it—he moaned with the pain—but he did it.

  Daniel was a hero.

  He was my friend, and I realized that I could not expect him to go with George, who knew his way around violence.

  But he would. For us, he would put himself in a different kind of danger than he’d ever dealt with before. And I could also see, just below the surface, that he would do it to avoid the remotest possibility of George thinking him a wuss.

  As the guys discussed this incredibly delicate situation on their hands, I pictured them coming upon the loggers’ encampment and this bone-chopping leader simply executing Kenner with a bullet to the brain before they even had a chance to do anything.

  I pictured them creeping along and suddenly being picked off by some three-toothed wilderness sniper.

  I considered urging George to go alone. But Daniel wouldn’t allow it, and although George would do it, and even might insist on that plan himself, a solo guy in the woods approaching a stranger’s camp is like a guy hitchhiking alone: a warning sign, not what you want.

  Excusing myself, I walked silently to Badger Cabin.

  Joey’s and Petey’s snoring rocked the rafters.

  “Yes, I’m awake,” Gina muttered in answer to my soft question. “Who could sleep in here?”

  I knelt to her, and we had a brief, whispered conversation.

  _____

  In the dawn’s grayness, I turned over in my creaking bunk (Petey having graduated to his own) and felt ready for coffee. Gina moaned alarmingly. “Ohhh.”

  Daniel and I sprang to her side. My sore muscles screamed. She gripped her head with her good hand. “It hurts so bad, oh God.”

  “Where?” questioned Daniel. “The side of your head?”

  “Ohhh,” groaned Gina, “I feel like I’m gonna vom.”

  I grabbed a bucket and held it to her.

  She retched weakly, but nothing came up.

  Daniel, pale, muttered to me aside, “The headache and the nausea together all of a sudden—she could have a slow-bleeding contusion. A brain bruise.”

  “That’s really serious, right?” I asked anxiously.

  “Yeah. Yeah.” He checked her eye tracking. She did not follow his finger well at all, but “her pupils are equal; that’s puzzling if she’s got cerebral bleeding. Gosh, I don’t know.”

  Gina retched again, then sank back.

  Daniel looked at me like, Now what?

  Oh, fuck waves were coming off him all over the place.

  I said, “Here’s what we do. You and George go for Kenner this morning. But hurry.” My voice faltering, I added, “I’ll be able to look after my sister. Right, Gina?”

  She reached out, but not to me; she gripped Daniel’s arm. “Don’t leave me. For the love of God don’t leave me.” She drew him close and rasped, “Rita doesn’t know what she’s doing. You’re the only one with real medical skills, in case something...happens.” She whimpered, “I’m scared, please don’t leave me, Daniel.”

  Reading his face, I knew he was picturing Gina dying on our hands. Then he was picturing Kenner getting chopped to smithereens.

  Calmly, I said, “I have an idea.”

  I sure as hell better have an idea; I laid awake half the night figuring out the details.

  Chapter 24 – Rita in Disguise

  “Ready?” George asked cheerfully.

  “Almost.” Today was not going to be a picnic, though he and I were pretending otherwise.

  I wanted to spend a few minutes communing with my boy. It was eight-thirty in the morning—Sunday morning, it occurred to me, the idea of days of the week even having names anymore striking me as absurd. I had just completed a very busy hour scurrying around the camp, preparing. The sun, behind uncertain clouds, had turned the sky white and the lake silver, and you could just barely see shadows. Isn’t that amazing, I thought—to realize you haven’t seen a shadow in days and days. The landscape looked different, more 3-D. Petey had been aware of that, being such a keen observer.

  I plunked down next to him as he sat cross-legged on top of the picnic table, curious about his drawings. He’d been “taking bearings” with his telescope, drawing, climbing, exploring, living the kind of existence that anybody—boy, girl, tadpole—would envy. My heart, for all its trouble lately, had a happy, glowing place in it for Petey.

  I was proud of him; he’d been a terrific team player. He’d learned how to stay calm, and he was getting fairly wise about the dangers of this world. Too young?

  There had been no way to prevent him from seeing Joey’s and Gina’s injuries and their suffering, but hey, that’s life too. Moreover, both of them were being quite stoic, and Joey was really coming along. The gashes on his head and thigh were starting to heal, and Daniel said that the fractured lower leg bones seemed stable for now.

  It was all right. At age six, before we’d even gotten here, Petey was already quite experienced when it came to unusual events.

  He was in the middle of drawing a new picture when he heard me approach. He flipped his sketchbook closed.

  “What are you drawing, honey? Let me see.”

  “No.”

  His flatness shocked me. The other day he’d asked for more “regular black pencils,” which happened to be unobtainable in the wilderness, though Daniel was able to give him the stub of a Ticonderoga #1 he’d found in his kit somewhere.

  Petey had enthusiastically shown off his pictures to me before, realistic drawings of ravens, a dead frog, the vista across the lake—I loved his free outline of the mountain ridges beyond—all the nature pictures interspersed with ones of muscly guys lifting big rigs over their heads, the figures crude but a hell of a lot better than the stick people most little kids draw.

  Having had my gag reflex pressed to the max by L.A. parents boasting of their children’s extraordinary gifts, I’d resolved when Petey was still in swaddling clothes to keep his talents in perspective.

  That said, I realized that my boy did seem to have a flair for drawing. To my cautious gladness, he hadn’t been whining at all for his (damn) ScoreLad, which I’d made sure had stayed home. Could he possibly be...outgrowing it? O happy day.

  But now he was refusing to show me a picture.

  “How come, honey?”

  “I’m not showing this to anybody till it’s good and ready.”

  “Yeah? OK. How come?”

  “Because it isn’t finished.” He seemed grim, and I realized he’d been quiet since last evening.

  “Is anything wrong, honey?”

  He shrugged. “You look weird.”

  “I do, don’t I? It’s just for fun.”

  He gave me a fishy look. Kids always sense more than they can understand. In fact, I was staking everything today on the alterations I’d made in my appearance. But I couldn’t get into that with him.

  I asked, “May we borrow your telescope today? It’ll help us on our mission.”

  “OK.” He handed it over.

  “Thanks, honey. See you later. Gimme a kiss?”

  “No.” He turned his back.

  Oh God, he’s freaked out. He knows.

  Well, if we don’t come back, Daniel will make sure he’s taken care of. Good education, good start in life. Petey would grow up to be discerning in underwear brands and musicals.

  What the hell kind of thoughts were those?

  What kind of mother would leave her beautiful child and walk off into a dangerous situation armed with nothing more than a costume, a rusty hatchet, and
her wits?

  This kind of mother.

  Me.

  Look at yourself, Rita.

  Yeah? So what?

  Life, I realized with a sort of slamming sound inside my head, amounts to more than playing it safe for the sake of the kids.

  I loved what George and I were about to do. I was confident. I didn’t want to die today, and I felt we had a more-than-even chance. But we had to have guts, and we had to be ready to improvise.

  As he and I set off hiking along the brink of the Harkett River north toward where the Quilmash came in, I was silently grateful that neither of us had yet said something idiotic like, I sure hope this works.

  Because it had to work.

  Angry-Zeus clouds roiled among the towering peaks, threatening to overcome the scrim of high white sky. I hated to even think it, but it felt like snow was coming. I watched the drizzle anxiously, looking and feeling for the sharper, heavier wetness that signified sleet.

  What George and I were doing was exactly like the astronauts boarding the first moon rocket, or Jonas Salk injecting himself with the polio virus: if it worked, we’d be heroes; if it didn’t, we’d be dead.

  Well, Kenner had walked into these treacherous woods in appalling conditions trying to find his brother and my sister, not worrying about his own safety.

  I’d simply misjudged him: he’d seemed so casual as to the whereabouts of Gina and Lance back in my apartment in West Hollywood, I thought then that he didn’t care. Well, we’d both been stunned by his mother’s revelation of Lance and Gina’s engagement.

  I tripped on a stick and in catching myself felt the deep soreness in my body from yesterday’s pounding in the river. The zingyness of my excitement compensated for my lack of sleep.

  We paused at a deadfall zone, a swath of trees blown over by some insane wind, now a hazardous melee of trunks and tops and snags perhaps a quarter mile long.

  “Quicker to go around it,” George said, and I agreed.

  We took no care as to the noises we made when approaching the place where the Harkett River met the Quilmash. The land began to slope downward.