read them in a blink as the snake’s body thrust forward: ‘Angel Bay Child Remains Missing.’
With both hands, Josie slammed the wooden door. Glass shattered on the floor, and milk splashed up her legs.
The force of the snake’s strike thudded against the screen, his fangs breaking through it, catching on it, scraping the inside door. Trapped high off the ground in the mesh of the screen, his heavy body thrashed against screen and wooden door.
Covering her mouth with a shaking hand, Josie stretched out a leg and dragged a chair to her, bracing it under the doorknob. Shuddering, she snapped the lock and retreated to her kitchen, gagging as the rattlesnake battered at her door, its thrashing smacks shaking the doorframe.
She sank into an aluminum-and-plastic chair at the table. The door shuddered with the heaviness of the snake’s body smashing into it. She couldn’t think what to do.
A plan. She needed a plan. She couldn’t deal with that reptilian body only a cheap wooden door away. She couldn’t cope with it. Not now. Not with her dream waking her with its sense of evil pervading her world, not with Ryder Hayes’s phone call.
No, she couldn’t face that enormous creature thumping with intent against her house.
On the other side of her front door, the snake’s body made a hissing sound as screen and wood slid against one another with the heavy flailing.
Pulling her feet up beneath her, Josie locked her arms around her knees. “Enough, oh, please, enough,” she moaned, rocking back and forth, the clunking sound of aluminum against her floor riding under the agitated whacks of the snake’s body. “I can’t do this. I can’t.” She gagged, dry mouthed, nausea growing with each bump and whack against the door.
But of course she could, and so she stayed curled into herself for long moments, gathering her strength, preparing one more time to do what she had to do. Reaching deep into herself she disciplined herself to ignore the nausea and weakness dissolving her bones.
Finally, unlocking her arms, she stood up and went to get her knee-high boots, thick leather gloves and hoe.
If she’d had a gun, she would have used it.
But she didn’t. She had the sharpened hoe, and, tears streaming down her face, she used it finally, after long minutes of walking from side to side, nerving herself to approach the thrashing snake, not recognizing herself in the woman who, screaming and cursing, slashed and sliced at the reptile until the huge body lay in pieces, separated from the head hooked into the screen.
Tasting bile, Josie got a bucket and scooped up the remains of the snake. She had to use the hoe to knock the head off, ripping the mesh as she gouged at it. Gagging again, she looped the hoe edge under the curved fangs and lifted the head into the bucket. Sliding the metal end of the hoe under the metal handle of the bucket, she carried it to the steel garbage can at the back of her lot. Metal hoe clicked against bucket handle, clicked with each shaking step she took.
She left the bucket beside the garbage can. She’d done as much as she was able to for the moment. She slipped the hoe free, and the bucket tilted, wobbled. Nausea rolled up as she saw the bloodied heap mixed with chunks of newsprint.
She ran. Dropping the hoe, she ran for her garden, but she didn’t make it. Three feet away, she doubled over, retching, the harsh sounds tearing through her until she was spent and empty.
But she stayed upright.
Later she would remember that she wasn’t driven to her knees.
She coped.
Reminding herself of that truth over and over, she summoned the strength to retrieve her abandoned hoe, to hook up the hose to the outside spigot and waste precious water flooding down the concrete stoop and screen door until no trace of the snake’s presence remained except the gaping mesh flaps hanging like pennants from the edge of the screen door.
She felt as if the snake had exuded evil, its poisonous molecules oozing from it to her, lodging in her clothes, her hair. If she could have, she would have stripped naked and bathed outside.
Instead, methodically, systematically, squandering water with a vengeance, she sprayed herself with the hose first and then went inside, cleaned up and changed into a cotton dress. Keeping out the clip that had been Mellie’s present, she first washed it and then threw her shorts and shirt into a garbage bag.
Her hands never stopped shaking.
Bart would have been surprised.
Shuddering, she knotted the bag with one vicious twist and dropped it into the trash. She wasn’t overreacting one little bit, she told herself firmly and marched out her front door.
A tiny clink as the toe of her shoe nudged a small cylinder wedged into the crack between two of the walkway bricks.
The red-pepper capsule.
Stooping, she picked it up. Drops of water glistened against its shiny surface. The force of the water from the hose had forced it into the space where two bricks hadn’t quite met.
It must have been on her stoop. Under her newspaper. With the rattlesnake on top? She recalled distinctly the clattering sound the cylinder had made as it rolled off the edge of Hayes’s porch.
Driving into Angel Bay over the bridge that crossed Angel River, she could see the roof of Ryder Hayes’s house to the north.
At the Hayes property, the river swung in before taking a wide curve out toward the gulf and the bridge from the mainland to the offshore islands.
Devil’s Island was visible from the Hayes property, then Santa Ana and finally Madre Mia, which, over the years, had become Madder Me for Angel Bay natives.
He had come to her house this morning, and she hadn’t heard him.
She’d heard the newspaper delivery boy.
But not Ryder Hayes.
Every self-serve newspaper stand she passed on the way to the police station had black headlines that leapt out at her, and she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. Just before she walked up the steps into the station, she felt a tickle of awareness at the back of her neck, and, frowning she stopped and turned to look behind her.
A shadow vanished behind the corner of the dry cleaners.
An effect of the hazy heat?
Or someone hiding from her? Ryder Hayes?
The deep tolling of the bell from the Baptist church down near the river rang out, the sound long and sonorous, throbbing in the air around her.
She squinted toward the corner and saw nothing except the blaze of sun and the haze of heat rising from the sidewalk.
The door to the police station opened and Jeb Stoner poked his head out.
“Hey, Miz Conrad, come on in out of the heat. I’ve been watching for you.”
“Thanks.” Josie cast one quick look at the empty street behind her and followed the sandy-haired detective inside. She wanted to ask him why he’d been waiting for her, but thinking about that uneasy awareness she’d had, she allowed the moment to pass. Maybe she’d ask him later.
Inside he motioned her to his desk, letting her precede him. Like a rag doll, he flopped into a cracked vinyl swivel chair behind his desk. The chair creaked and groaned under his slight weight. “Can I get you some station-house gunk?”
“No. Thank you.” She folded her hand over the clasp of her purse hanging from its shoulder strap.
He always offered her coffee, and she never accepted. He never suggested a Coke or a glass of water. Josie wasn’t sure whether he didn’t remember or whether it was his way of making an awkward joke. Either way, she had grown tired some months ago of the pro forma offer.
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“Yeah, right.” Everything he said to her came out sounding as if he didn’t believe