Greedy Bones (29 page)

I took her chin in my hand and pointed her at the window. "Do that thing with your lip. Let it pop out of your mouth."

She frowned as if I'd spoken Celtic.

"Don't play innocent with me. I'll bet Doc will move Oscar to a private room. He isn't contagious. He doesn't have to be isolated. When he moves, you get in there and do what ever you have to do to remind Oscar of the pleasures of the flesh. He's a man--wherever he is, he'll return for that."

"That's unethical, Sarah Booth. He's helpless."

"Ethics be damned. You tell Oscar from me that he can't leave until I figure this out."

Tinkie pressed her fingers into the glass. "He hears you. See, his hands are twitching."

She sounded less defeated, but I didn't have time to push her any harder. And I didn't want to. There is a limit to how much bossing a friendship can take. "Move him to a room and do your worst," I whispered.

I rushed down the hall before she could respond--either negatively or positively--to my unusual tactics.

The CDC office was locked up, but Peyton had left a note on the door for me.

"Exciting development in the mold. May be able to offer more help to Doc. Have gone to Jackson to a bigger lab. Bonnie Louise still unaccounted for. Will call. Peyton. P.S. The hazmat suit is in your car."

While everyone else thought I was nuts to go to the Carlisle place, Peyton had faith in me. The suit was in the passenger seat of the roadster. I climbed behind the wheel and pointed the car for the one place where evidence against the instigator of this plot might be found.

I parked at the front gate and donned the suit. From the road, nothing looked too bad, but once I made it past the house and into the fields, the devastation was like a biblical plague. The cotton, which I'd been told was two feet high and lush, was a scraggly vista of dead stems and curled, brown leaves. Weevils were everywhere. They crawled along the brown stalks. I'd never seen anything like it, but I could easily grasp the direness of the situation if this moved on to the next plantation. I didn't need Jitty at my side to tell me that this looked like a scene from the
War Between the States. Or a glimpse of the future on a globally warmed planet. This was devastation of a man-made order.

With the cumbersome suit impeding my movements and vision, I entered the field. Behind me, the gracious structure of the old plantation rose like a specter of the past, a lone sentinel of a way of life that no longer existed.

A curtain fluttered briefly in a window, and I was reminded of the ghost I'd encountered in Costa Rica. Spirits lingered in old houses, but it wasn't a supernatural presence that I sought now.

Working from what I knew of Oscar's and Gordon's actions, I began my careful examination at the edge of the fields nearest the house. Before I left the property, I intended to search the old plantation, but I had to find out if Oscar and Gordon had seen something in those fields that drew them both into danger.

Moving through the rows, I ignored the insects. With the leaves mostly gone from the cotton plants, the activity of the weevils was like a maddened army on the march for food. They moved relentlessly. When I peered closer, I realized that some of them were dead.

Others were dying.

I watched in fascination as fire ants pursued the weevils. Huge mounds of the poisonous ants had sprung up in the cotton rows. Stories of elderly people falling into ant beds were Southern lore. Injured and unable to get away, the infirm died from the venomous bites.

The ants were on the attack, pursuing the weevils. Right in front of my eyes, the balance of nature was reasserting itself.

The suit protected me from the ants, so I knelt down to study the action more closely. Some chemical or spore or pheromone or something in the weevils compelled the
fire ants to attack. Hordes of the burnished red insects raced in pursuit of the weevils.

The battle was fascinating, even for someone who didn't have a scientific bone in her body. Inching forward on my knees, I examined the dying weevils. The ants appeared to be stinging them to death--and then carrying them away. As I leaned over to watch a dozen yeomen ants hauling a weevil twenty times their size, I saw a key ring. Half-covered in dirt, it caught the glint of the sun. As I brushed the dirt away from it, I recognized the fake, pink diamonds that formed the initials BLM.

Bonnie Louise McRae.

A single key dangled from the chain.

Bonnie had been in the fields--it was part of her job. The key ring wasn't proof positive of any wrongdoing. Her job required her to examine the weevils. But what the key might open could be the coup de grace for the CDC scientist. If this linked her to the weevils in any criminal way, the proof of her complicity would be irrefutable.

The suit was hot and uncomfortable, and I started to rise. The house needed to be searched, just in case. While I certainly hadn't done a thorough job of the fields, it would take longer than a day to walk a thousand acres. I had to get the key back to town and into Coleman's hands.

As I lumbered toward the house, the first blow landed on my left side at my waist. It came out of nowhere and knocked me sideways. The next one caught me in the stomach, and I blindly grasped what felt like a baseball bat.

Through the tiny window of the suit, I couldn't see anything except dead plants and dirt.

My body doubled over, and though I hung on to the weapon, I couldn't retain my grip. The last thing I felt
was a whack to the head that sent pain sparkling behind my eyelids. Starbursts gave way to blackness.

"Don't move, Sarah Booth." Coleman's face peered down at me through the face mask of a hazmat suit. His voice sounded almost strangled.

When I tried to sit up, his hand pressed me back into the dirt. "Be still, you're bleeding."

I reached up to touch my face, but could feel no blood. "Where am I?"

"Be still, Sarah Booth. Please. The ambulance is coming." His hand on my chest held me motionless.

Sirens whined in the distance, and I squinted against the bright sun. I was outside. I turned my head and saw the dying cotton. Beside it was the helmet for a hazmat suit lying in the dirt.

My hands moved down my body and I felt the silken material, ripped in places, and realized where I was and what had happened just as a sharp pain tore through my abdomen.

"I've got to pick you up," Coleman said. His arms slid beneath me. "I have to get you out of here so the paramedics can work on you. I'm sorry." When he lifted me, the pain was unbearable and I couldn't stop the cry that escaped.

When I glanced down, I saw the blood. Dark and red it saturated the ground. A pool of it. My blood.

"What's wrong with me?" I gasped the words as he carried me away from the fields toward the house, toward the approach of the sirens.

"Someone hit you and left you to die in the fields."

"They took my helmet off."

I felt the muscles in his chest contract. "I know."

We both knew the implications of that.

"Doc will take care of you, Sarah Booth. You'll be okay. And when I find the person who did this . . ."

The fingers of my right hand clutched some object. I tried to lift my hand, to show him, but neither my hand nor arm responded. No amount of concentration could force my fist to rise to my chest.

"I'm paralyzed," I told him. Additional observations and complaints were cut short by the kind of pain that felt as if my torso were being squeezed by a giant. I had no doubt my pelvic bones would snap in two. "What's wrong with me?" I demanded.

"Save your strength." He kept walking, his steps steady, determined. "Don't worry about a thing, Sarah Booth. I've got you. Just don't worry."

He spoke to me as if I were a small child and he soothed my fears. When he'd carried me all the way to the main gate, he stopped but continued to hold me in his arms. "Just hang on a few more minutes. Help is on the way."

The ambulance drew close, and when it stopped, he gently deposited me on the stretcher. The eyes of the EMTs, visible through the helmets they wore, were grave as they set up a drip. So Coleman had gotten suits for emergency personnel as well as the sheriff's office. That was smart.

"She's bleeding out," one of them said.

"Stop it." Coleman's voice wasn't raised, but it was clearly a command. "What ever you have to do, stop the bleeding."

"We've got to get her to the hospital," one of the paramedics said.

"I'll ride with her." Coleman wasn't asking, he was telling.

There was no argument. Coleman climbed into the ambulance beside me, his strong hand gripping mine.

The ambulance took off, and though I tried hard to stay awake, I couldn't. I heard voices, soft and glowing with warmth, calling me into the safety of sleep. The pain was unbearable, and I yielded to the peace offered by unconsciousness.

When I came back to myself, I was some place quiet and cool. There was a tiny beeping noise, the shush of some pneumatic machine. In the distance I could hear people talking. Tinkie--I recognized her voice. And Cece. She was there, too. A masculine voice. Doc.

"Don't tell her until she's stronger," Tinkie said.

"Sarah Booth is tough," Doc said. "She'll handle this." There was a pause. "She was due to come in for tests tomorrow morning. I never suspected."

"I called Graf," Cece said. "He's in the desert without phone reception. They promised to get word to him and get him on a flight."

"Did you tell him she lost the baby?" Doc asked.

"I did. I wanted him to know, but it won't matter," Cece said. "His concern will be Sarah Booth. She was out in that field, with all that stuff. Someone hit her, took off her protective gear, and left her out there to inhale that mold and die."

Tinkie lowered her voice. "I wouldn't want to be the person responsible for this when Coleman catches him."

The conversation made no sense to me. I felt like I was disembodied, floating around a room where people spoke of me as if I were dead. But it couldn't be me they were
talking about. Someone had lost a baby, and I'd never been pregnant.

"Wait, she's moaning," Tinkie said.

Her cool hand, so small, stroked my forehead. "Sarah Booth," she whispered, "you're going to be okay."

"Tinkie . . ." That one word cost me a lot. I tried to open my eyes, but they wouldn't cooperate. "Paralyzed?" I had the sense that no part of my body would respond to any command.

"No, darling, you're not paralyzed." She kissed my forehead. "You're hurt, but you'll heal just fine."

"Happened?" If I could formulate a sentence it would be nice. I sounded like a poorly trained parrot spitting out one nonsensical word after another.

"You were attacked in the Carlisle cotton fields. Luckily Dewayne knew where you were. Coleman found you and got an ambulance. Someone hit you very hard with something. You're mighty bunged up, but you're too tough to kill."

She sounded so spritely and upbeat that I knew I was badly injured. I felt another pair of hands lift my wrist, and Doc leaned down.

"Gave us a scare there, Sarah Booth. You lost a lot of blood, but you're going to be fine."

There were more questions to ask, but I couldn't hold on to one long enough to speak it. "Graf?" I asked.

Cece fielded that question. "He's on his way."

Doc fiddled with the drip hanging by my bed. "I'm going to give you something more for pain. Just sleep, Sarah Booth. That's the best thing you can do for your body right now."

There was no time to sleep. My mother was calling me. I was suddenly among the oak trees at Dahlia House, a place behind the family cemetery. When I was a child,
I'd gone there to play with the fairies while my mother read books or entertained me with games only the two of us knew. It was our special place.

"Sarah Booth!" She sounded worried.

"I'm here." I walked among the trees, uninjured, whole and complete. At last I saw her, sitting on her favorite limb, one that swooped to the ground and formed a perfect seat. "I can't believe you're here."

And she was. As beautiful as I remembered. The sunlight caught in her dark brown hair, and her eyes danced with laughter. "You've grown into a fine woman," she said. "But I never had a doubt you'd be a looker. You stole your daddy's heart when you were born."

"You came back to me." I hardly dared to breathe for fear she'd evaporate. For twenty years I'd hoped for this moment, this time to be with her.

"Only for a short while," she said. "Jitty surely has told you there are rules here. I had to break a few even for this brief time."

"You know about Jitty?"

She laughed. "I know a lot of things." Her hand linked with mine and we walked among the shadows cast by the beautiful trees and the dapples of sunshine. "I know the woman you've become, and I want to tell you I'm proud of you."

"Why can't you come home if Jitty can?"

She squeezed my hand. "Sometimes love calls for sacrifice. I never want to encourage you to linger here, waiting and hoping for me. You have to live, Sarah Booth. Waiting for the dead isn't living."

"Tell me what to do."