Bone Valley (23 page)

A cricket landed
on my face and chirped. As I woke up and swatted at it, I heard Rasputin issue a shrill morning whistle.

I rolled out of bed, looked out my window, and saw it was still raining a torrential tropical-storm gusher.

Great, a flood and a plague of locusts. Idly, I hoped no other biblical curses were in the offing, then stumbled to the kitchen and made my coffee. After feeding Rasputin his morning Save the Forest trail mix bar, I watched him jumping around on the porch after the many crickets. Though Rasputin seemed to be getting the basic idea, for the moment the crickets still had the upper hand. Well, let hopping birds hop, I thought, and ambled back to my coffee and my kitchen table.

I missed Philip. I missed Bearess my dog. I missed my grandmother. I was getting so mopey I wondered if I had a hormonal imbalance, and then I figured it was just the rain.

Remembering that I’d read caffeine is an antidepressant, I refilled my coffee mug, and looked out the kitchen window at the continuing storm. I hadn’t missed a hurricane warning, had I? And weren’t we months past the hurricane season, anyway? But as hurricane rules no longer seemed to apply, this because of global warming, according to Olivia, I coasted to the den and turned on the television to check the weather.

Blah, blah, blah. Rain. Thunder. Cold front hits warm Gulf something, something. More rain on the way, the Weather Channel reported, with worsening thunderstorms on the horizon. The explanation of the storm didn’t interest me, but the predictions were beginning to catch my eye. Rapidly rising river levels in Sarasota and Manatee Counties, potential flooding.

Potential, my ass, had anybody seen Shade Avenue last night?

Then the TV offered me a big scene of a cute woman in a rain slicker standing in front of a big dam, talking into a microphone in one hand, clutching her hat to her head with the other hand, and smiling like Miss Bermuda Triangle in the semifinals. “Though the Manatee River is already nearing flood levels, officials explain that the dam on the river has a lock designed to open and divert the water when it hits flood stage, so east Manatee County is safe,” she said. The camera crew cut away to a scene of hunched-over men in slickers frantically trying to turn a big wheel-like thing while truly huge amounts of water swirled around them and a series of concrete structures got pelted by more rain.

Okay, I had to say Miss Bermuda Triangle was more reassuring than the men, who seemed not to be succeeding in their attempts to turn the big wheel thing.

Then, shattering her previous reassurances, Bermuda T-girl returned to the TV screen and said, “However, the Myakka and the Peace Rivers in Sarasota County are nearing flood levels, and people living in the flood zones of those rivers are advised to stay tuned to their televisions and radios in case evacuation is ordered.”

Well, that definitely ruled out driving to the office for another day of churning my in-coming mail and my deposition collection. I turned off the television, and started back to the kitchen, thinking maybe I’d make spice cookies for breakfast. I have a killer recipe for whole wheat spice cookies that uses canola oil instead of butter. But while I was pulling out my flour, something Sherilyn had said about Rayford, a bodyguard with nothing but “a dollar inside his shoe,” slapped me in the face. So how did a cowboy with presumably zippo knowledge about growing oranges—I mean, okay, how many orange groves are there in Montana?—get that grove in the first place? Yeah, that was weird. Definitely weird.

My visions of spice cookies dancing in my head butted against the puzzle of a poor bodyguard who now owned a Florida millionaire-developer’s dream of forty acres and a mule, or, that is, owned it until the sales contract was finalized. Then he owned 48 percent of a huge check. The
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
had run a story a couple months back on how farmland in the east part of the County was selling for up to $35,000 an acre, and the surveyor had told me there were a hundred acres in that grove. I had to get out a pencil to do the math, but I calculated Rayford’s 48 percent as around $1,680,000. Okay, spare change to M. David, but megabucks for the rest of us.

That certainly invited further query.

Naturally I couldn’t resist calling Rayford. Wondering if the rain would keep Rayford from the office, I looked in both the Sarasota and Manatee phone books for a private listing. Finding none for a Rayford Clothier, I dialed the number for Delilah Groves. Rayford answered on the fifth ring.

Picturing Lauren Bacall, I huskyed down my voice to low and sexy, and said, “Rayford, this is Lilly. Lilly Cleary. We met—”

“What do you want now?”

Okay, so we weren’t going to be best friends. I switched to business mode, and said, “I wanted to let you know I received the notice of dismissal of the lawsuits against my clients.”

“Goody. Thanks for letting me know. ’Bye now.”

“Wait, wait…I’m wondering if you could tell me about the arrangements you and M. David had with the groves.”

“You’re the big, smart lawyer, you figure it out,” Rayford said, and hung up.

When I called back, nobody answered. Doubly rebuffed made me more curious than ever.

If this were a trial, I’d collect every scrap of paper, evidence, information, and supposition, and analyze the dickens out of it. So that was what I was going to do on the multilayered riddles before me.

And the deed might be the place to start. So thinking, I booted up my computer. Within minutes, I was searching through the Sarasota County Property Appraisers Web site.

Oh, big, frigging surprise! I thought when, sure enough, I found that one of M. David’s corporations had owned 100 percent of the orange grove, but had sold a 48 percent interest to Rayford just a few months ago. The property office’s records listed the sale price as one dollar and “other considerations.”

Weird. Definitely. In fact, fishy weird, not just weird weird.

I left the computer running while I leaned back in my chair and contemplated what I knew in the big-picture sense, and what it might mean. Taking the easy stuff first, I concluded that the note on M. David’s body about making an appointment with me meant an appointment for Sherilyn. I made a mental note to try to exchange that information with Josey for something of value she might know.

Still cogitating, I wandered to the porch, where Rasputin hopped up on my arm and twittered up at me, beak parted, big bird eyes staring right into mine. I wondered if I could pet him, but then he hopped off and ran after a couple of chirping bugs.

After more fully taking in the disaster area that was formerly my porch, and having that sensation of my brain being squeezed to mush by collected debris throughout the house, I forgot baking cookies, gobbled a couple of trail mix bars, and fetched my buckets, mops, and herbal disinfecting all-natural spray cleaners, Borax, Clorox, and brushes. Jimmie saw me coming out of the laundry room armed with my cleaning tools, muttered a quick “Uh-oh,” and disappeared back into his room.

I set to scrubbing the entire house with the ferocity of Catwoman on too much caffeine. I raged at the cracks and crevices where typhoid and TB and E. coli and bird flu viruses like to live, and Philip called four times before the sun went down to make sure I was all right and offered to come over, and I said no, and kept cleaning until my Borax, Clorox, and orange spray were all gone. I felt a smidgen saner.

Jimmie, apparently sensing it was safe to come out of his room, stuck his head in the kitchen and asked, “What you fixing to fix for supper?”

“Stuffed green peppers,” I said. “I stuff the peppers with texturized vegetable protein, cheese, and a combo of onions and tomatoes, with sliced carrots on the side.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe I bests go see how Dolly’s doing in all this here mess.”

“I think Dolly knows how to come in out of the rain.”

“Yeah, and she also knows how to fry chicken,” Jimmie said, and took my London Fog out of the hall closet without asking and ducked outside.

Seeing as I’d spent the day chasing dust and germs, I needed a shower before cooking, so I checked all the doors and windows, found them locked, and showered until the hot water was gone. After that, confident I was home by myself for a Saturday night, I threw on a pair of tight jeans a good decade out of style and a loose camp shirt with baggy front pockets. Because my feet were cold against the marbled-concrete terrazzo of my floors, I slipped on a pair of Keds that had thousands of miles on their soles. Thus, dressed appropriately for moping around the house alone on a Saturday night, I went into my kitchen and started sautéing some onions as a first step in preparing the stuffed peppers. The battering of the rain was driving me crazy, so I tried to drown it out by turning on the radio to listen to WMNF, the cool, alt-radio station out of Tampa.

As I started scraping carrots, it never once occurred to me that Henry and I weren’t the only people in Sarasota who could open a locked door without a key or dynamite.

Someone threw a
quilt over my head.

Needless to say, that got my attention and I started frantically flailing about, but the quilt thrower proved much stronger than me. Besides, dancing around blind inside a quilt didn’t lend itself to effective self-defensive kicking. As I couldn’t even raise my arms to punch, I tried the time-tested technique of screaming my brains out.

When my yelling didn’t bring forth help, I tried to conquer panic by concentrating on the details, that is, until I could figure out what to do.

What I could tell so far was that someone had entered my house and thrown my own quilt—in the moments before darkness enveloped me, I had recognized the quilt as one that lived on the back of the couch in the den and was made of a blend of delicate blue organic cotton and wool and I had paid a small fortune for it and I didn’t want it hurt, thank you—over my head. While I was assessing details, my assailant yanked tighter on what felt like a rope or a belt around my waist. Then he knocked me down and rolled me on the floor until I hit something, possibly the kitchen wall. In spite of it all, I was still clutching the carrot in one hand, and the small kitchen knife in the other.

Though the sound was muffled by the quilt over my ears, which was also doing a number on the breathable air quality in the immediate vicinity of my nose and mouth, I could hear my uninvited guest slamming drawers and other things around and figured Miguel had finally come after those fertilizer receipts. I profoundly wished that Bearess still lived with me, or that Jimmie would get his face out of Dolly’s fried chicken and see or hear something amiss and call 911. I also realized this would not have happened if I had listened to Philip about going to his house. But now was hardly the time to rethink my past decisions, and I pushed against the wall with my body, trying to right myself, though for what purpose, I wasn’t entirely sure.

After I gave up trying to stand, I rolled about on the floor trying to find the doorway on the off chance I could roll through it into a hiding place while Miguel looked for receipts.

But, proving my own adage that things can always go from bad to worse and one should never think otherwise, my assailant came stomping back into the kitchen and started banging on my head with his fist.

This didn’t seem like very Miguel behavior.

But then I remembered the splintered canoe paddle, whacked to kindling in one hit against the picnic table.

“Where’s the videotape?” a forced, whispery voice asked.

Muffled by the quilt, my fear, the rain, and the fakey stage whisper, I couldn’t tell if this was Miguel.

But Miguel wouldn’t want a videotape.

Miguel would want receipts.

Nope, I had an unknown assailant pummeling my head in my own house.

And, worse still, I could now smell the oil and the onions burning in my skillet. I tried to shout out to please turn the stove off before he burned down my house, but apparently people who break into your house, wrap you up in quilts, throw you on the floor, and then beat you about the head with their fists didn’t care about such niceties as whether they accidentally burned your house down too.

That is to say, the person continued to hit me over the head and then punched at my face. Mercifully the quilt muffled the punches. But the hot oil sizzled hotter.

“Where’s the damn tape, the videotape?” he repeated, as if somehow in my fear I had managed not to process the question the first time.

Not inclined at the moment to chat with this criminal about tapes, I tried to roll away from his fists. When he kicked me and ordered me to “stay put,” I decided to stay put. All I could think now was that Jason the baby lawyer, or the now-exposed fake-spinal-injury plaintiff, was trying to find and destroy the tape of the faker working in his own yard. But the smell of the burning oil on the stove refocused me from trying to place the voice.

“Please, turn off the stove,” I shouted through the quilt.

“Where’s the damn tape?” Punch, punch, punch.

Okay, if that was the game, I guess I’d have to play it. “At the office, the tape is at my office,” I cried out. “Right on top of my filing cabinet. Now turn off the stove.” If my house burned up, not only would I lose, like, you know, my house, but poor Rasputin, my pet jay, frolicking on the porch with the wild crickets, would burn up too.

But obviously my attacker didn’t care about adding arson or bird murder to his list of crimes, intent, apparently as he was, on kidnapping me. In other words, he was dragging me outside and I never heard the little popping sound the stove makes when turned off.

As he bounced me through my own house to the door, I was bound up so tight I couldn’t fight back. In a minute, we were outside, and my door slammed shut behind us. Though the blanket protected me from the rain as the madman dragged me outside to a vehicle, I could hear the sound of the storm around me. Attack-kidnapper man unceremoniously dumped me in the back of a van, or an SUV, started the engine, and drove off.

Okay, I’m not too proud to admit this. I was scared. I was petrified. I’d been kidnapped and my house and my pet bird left to destruction by a hot-oil fire. On top of that, I seemed to be suffocating. I kept trying to roll inside my prison quilt, as if somehow that would improve my situation, but all that effort did was make me breathe heavier and use up air faster than it could filter through the cotton stuffing in the quilt.

In this haze and my ire, I slowly became conscious of being rocked against something hard, and realized it was the vehicle’s door, and that we had slammed to a stop. Before I could get reoriented, I heard the man ask me what the combination to my law firm’s back-door lock was, and too frightened not to, I told him.

The vehicle’s door slammed, and then there was silence. I struggled to get a good breathful of air into my lungs before I passed out. Inhaling and exhaling, I forced myself into a deep, rhythmic pattern—air in, air out—until the panic passed. Oh, all right, I was still scared, but I made myself take stock. The knife. Yeah, the knife. It occurred to me that cutting my way out of the quilt and running into the night full tilt before my irate kidnapper came back might count as a good idea.

Struggling and groping, I discovered that the rope tied around my waist only trapped my arms above my elbows. Within the confines of my quilt prison, I could actually move my hands and lower my arms a little. Not, as an orthopedic surgeon would say, a full range of motion, but it was something. I still had the big carrot in one hand and the small kitchen knife in the other.

With some difficulty, I stuffed the carrot into the loose pocket of my camp shirt and started cutting my way out of the quilt with the knife. But then I heard the sound of a vehicle door opening.

“I got the tape,” Maniac Man said, snarling in his hostile stage whisper.

“Jason Quartermine, you son of a bitch, you let me out of here right now or so help me, I’ll see that The Florida Bar strips you of your license and the state attorney stomps you under the jail.”

Instead of an abject apology, I heard laughter, muffled again by the quilt, and then I heard the door slam and the vehicle start off. Once more I took stock. The only tape I knew about was the one Jimmie had made of Jason’s client clearly demonstrating to the world at large that he was not disabled, as he claimed in his lawsuit. Therefore, being a lawyer and an analytical sort, I had decided that Jason was trying to steal the tape so he could proceed with his stupid car-crash lawsuit. So it was all right that Jason—or the faker plaintiff if that’s who my kidnapper was—took the tape because I, Lilly, Queen of the Duplicate, had the original locked up in the firm’s safe upstairs, in addition to the copy my mad kidnapper must have readily found.

But obviously Jason, or the faker plaintiff, meant me harm or he’d have just rolled me out of the van and left me to either drown in the storm or be rescued. Of course, I realized, Jason had to shut me up now because I’d just told him I knew he was my assailant.

Chastising myself for doing a
really
stupid thing, I resolved earnestly not to do anything else stupid for the rest of my life, and to cut my way out of the quilt so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be measured in minutes. Working within the limited range of motion I had with my hands, I began to cut, not without some regret at ruining my expensive quilt.

Okay, so, cut maybe was an overstatement. Saw, poke, jab, curse, breathe.

Breathing being the hardest part.

As I sawed at the quilt, I slid, bumped, and skittered about in the vehicle. My mad chauffeur was obviously taking a long and winding road to our destination. With nothing to do but worry and work at the quilt with my small kitchen knife, I sawed a little hole in the quilt, near my hands. Not without some struggling, I squeezed the knife and enough of my fingers out of this hole to get at the rope that bound the quilt around my body. My new plan was simple: Saw through the rope and be prepared to spring like a wild animal the first time the van stopped and the door opened. But naturally the rope was tough as all get out, and my little kitchen knife seemed hardly up to the task, and it was slow going, but it wasn’t like I had anything else to do. My mind ping-ponged about in various degrees of fear and irritation, but I worked slowly, steadily, and kept sawing away at the rope. All of this was, I decided, a decent analogy to trial preparation—hard, dull work mixed with fear and loathing.

Still, it’s amazing what one can do when highly motivated, and I was pretty highly motivated. At last, the threads shredded and the rope was cut and I hunkered down in the back of the vehicle and waited for a chance at escape.

While waiting and worrying, my feet went to sleep, and hunger bore down on me, and I felt a desperate need to both pee and take a shower. Suddenly the vehicle slowed, banging me against what I figured was a seat. I could feel the vehicle making a sharp turn onto what quickly appeared to be a very rough road, if in fact it was a road at all. Bump thunk bump thunk bump. The vehicle stopped again. Gears ground and tires whirled and my maniac captor cursed. After more wheel spinning and grinding, the vehicle started forward again, but more slowly. Bump—thunk—bump—thunk. Then the vehicle stopped, a door slammed open, and I could hear rain and thunder and a man’s muffled cursing.

When the cursing faded, I surmised that this was my chance to break for new territory. After struggling out of the quilt, I found myself sitting inside an SUV. I slipped the knife into my jeans pocket, thinking I might need it again. Peering out the window, I saw nothing but dark and rain, but knew I was better off wet and lost than staying in the vehicle. I eased open the side door and climbed out.

The rain hit cold and hard against me, and I shivered, but kept moving as fast as one can move in tread-bare Keds in a slick, thick, mud bog. A bolt of lightning, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder, startled me so badly I accidentally made a little screeching noise. I ran blindly, maybe another fifty yards, before I flat-ass slid down, butt first, in the slippery muck. Okay, these shoes failed the runs-well-in-mud consumer test. After making a quick mental note to henceforth always wear mud-worthy hiking boots while cooking dinner, on the off chance I was kidnapped from my kitchen in a storm a second time, I got up and started moving, a little more cautiously this time. Another bolt of lightning and clap of thunder made me screech again. Okay, so spank me, but I didn’t have my usual self-control. Also, I didn’t have a clue as to where my kidnapper was, but when the next bolt of lightning hit with its brief flash of light, I saw where I was—at Lenora’s wildlife rescue.

Well, now what?

How would Jason know about this place?

So, hey, work it out later, I chided myself, and started running again in the general direction of where I thought the river was. In movies, those chased always flee to the river, and though no one with bloodhounds was on my tail, I figured it was as good a route as any. If I had a plan, I think it was to go to ground as soon as I was out of the compound.

But moments after my second bout of screeching, I was tackled by the madman and landed facedown in mud. I struggled, but was no match for the crazy man jumping on me and thrashing me about. As we wrestled, I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere except worse off. Pummeled as I was by nature and a Ted Bundy reincarnate, I concentrated on keeping my nose out of the mud so I could breathe as the man lifted my head and smashed it down repeatedly into the soft, squishy ground under it.

Apparently I ceased to struggle. I mean, I wasn’t totally paying attention to the details at this point, but I felt the man roll me over, slap me across my face, and begin to tie the rope around my waist, pulling my arms tight against my body. At least he didn’t re-enshroud me in the quilt, and, except for some mud in my nose, I could at least breathe.

Grateful for the air that I was sucking into my lungs through my mouth in huge gasps, I made myself open my eyes and was rewarded by getting my face slapped at the same time that rain battered my eyeballs. Given the shortcomings of my situation, in the dark I got only the briefest, distorted glimpse of the man, and, in my renewed panic, I couldn’t recognize him.

Maybe Jason. Maybe faker plaintiff. Maybe Jason had hired a tough guy to retrieve the videotape. By then I had forgotten to wonder who was mistreating me so, when the madman picked me up and carried me toward a shadowy building of some sort. One of Lenora’s shacky outbuildings. After he opened a door, Maniac Man unceremoniously dropped me, then I heard the sound of a door slamming and I was alone.

Alone was good.

Alone was not having someone smashing my face into mud.

Alone was the reprieve I needed to get the damn knife out of my damn tight jeans, which, let me tell you, were destined for the Goodwill bag after this, and I slung my head trying to get the mud out of my eyes, and then I opened them. In the dank shed, I rolled and struggled to get to my feet, but I was unable to get any sense of balance. And then, to my horror, I heard the man return, laughing a laugh that I recognized as Big Trouble.