On the Run (15 page)

Over the tuna sandwiches, I reported the conversation to Abilene. “Of course, I may have spoken too soon. Perhaps you aren’t even interested in staying here for a while . . . ?”

“I’m interested.” She smiled. “It’s not as if the president of General Motors is breathlessly waiting for me to show up in a power suit and claim some high-powered executive position.”

“IBM is ignoring me too.”

“Okay, then, if Frank wants us to caretake here, we’ll do it?” She sounded genuinely eager, and I was pleased that she also seemed to accept the idea of herself and me as an “us.”

“You don’t mind sleeping all cramped up there on the sofa?”

“I don’t mind. Though maybe, until the weather turns bad, I’ll fix a place outside to sleep.”

Outside? I thought about the close-by woods, the unidentified footprint, and the unknown reasons Jock and Jessie were interested in a guard dog. Although, after talking to Frank, I decided the guard dog may have been about protecting the emus from someone letting them out again, not a personal danger. “You wouldn’t feel unsafe outside?”

“I feel a whole lot safer here, inside or out, than I ever felt with Boone,” Abilene declared with a depth of feeling that told me again of the physical and emotional pain she’d been through. “And I like looking up at the stars at night. Sometimes . . . I think about God then.”

She gave me a sideways glance, as if self-conscious about the admission, but I nodded my approval. “It’s hard to look at all those stars and not think about God,” I agreed. And I just might sleep outside myself, I decided. I liked looking up at the Lord’s handiwork too, which unexpectedly now reminded me of Mac MacPherson and some stargazing we’d done together.

Abilene and I smiled at each other, pact made. Which was when I reluctantly realized I owed Abilene certain information before she committed herself to this. With insurance money providing Boone with a new Porsche, she was probably safe from him now. But she wasn’t necessarily
safe
. Not when she was with me.

It took quite a while to tell her all about how I’d helped send one of the Braxtons to prison for murder and how the brother had vowed vengeance. How the Braxton clan had already twice tried to carry out that vengeance, once with an arson attempt on my house back in Missouri, once with a car bomb planted in the old Thunderbird I’d traded for the motor home. How the Braxtons had more recently picked up my trail and chased me into Oklahoma.

“I think I ditched them before I headed down this way to Dulcy, but I can’t be sure. It’s possible they’ll show up right here. And I doubt they’d be concerned if someone else got caught in the crossfire of a scheme to do me in.”

Abilene had stopped eating mid-story and was staring at me in astonishment.

“So it could be just as bad, or worse, than if Boone was after you. I won’t be hurt or angry if you’d rather not stay in the danger zone around me,” I added when she seemed speechless.

Finally she said, “You don’t
look
like . . . uh . . .”

“A target for thugs? A magnet for murderers?”

“You look like someone’s granny who sits in a rocking chair and knits scarves and booties.”

I winked at her. “That’s my disguise. Down underneath I’m really Ivy the Invisible Investigator, upholder of law and order, bane of crooks everywhere. Although, in a pinch, I can knit too.”

She eyed me doubtfully. “You’re sure about these people? There really is this mini-Mafia out to get you?”

A mini-Mafia. Oh yeah.

“I’m sure. I could drive you into Dulcy or Horton or wherever the bus stops, and help you get a ticket to . . . somewhere.” No response to that, and it occurred to me her thoughts were perhaps running in the opposite direction. “Or maybe you’d rather
I
disappeared into the sunset, and you could stay on here to caretake alone?”

“What do
you
want?”

“I don’t want to put you in danger.”

“I’ve been in danger for the past six years.” She rubbed the ridge above her wrist, an absentminded gesture but a powerful reminder of that danger. “I survived Boone all those years without you. You’ve survived the Braxtons without me. It looks to me as if together we could take on all of them, or anything else that comes along.”

I beamed at her. “I think so too,” I said.

High-fives may be old-fashioned these days, but that’s what we gave each other anyway.

16

Frank came over a couple hours later. The temperature was close to ninety. Abilene was repairing a weak place in the emus’ fence, but I was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of the motor home, painting my toenails. I was embarrassed at being caught at something so personal and hastily stuck the cap back on the polish. Too late. Frank was already staring at my left foot.

“Is something wrong?”

“No! No, of course not. I guess I’m just surprised to see the toe ring.”

Obvious were the unspoken words at the end of that sentence: on someone of your advanced years.

“My grandniece gave it to me. She’s always trying to drag me into the twenty-first century.”

“Oh. Well, it’s, uh, very attractive.”

“It took some getting used to,” I had to admit, “but now it’s quite comfortable.” I wiggled my toes and thought defiantly,
And even LOLs can wear toe rings if they want to. So there.

Frank plopped into the other chair, and I realized he looked frazzled.

“No luck finding anything?” I asked, glad to be away from the subject of toes and toe rings. I stuck my feet under the chair to let the polish dry.

“No safe deposit box key. No wills. No deed. I did run onto a box of cancelled checks covering the past couple of years, and maybe I’ll find something useful there. But I’m wondering now if they have a private safe hidden around here somewhere.”

“Wouldn’t they have told you if they did?”

“I don’t think Jock and Jessie were quite as paranoid about me as they were about everyone else, but they didn’t exactly take me into their confidence.”

“Have you decided yet how long you’ll be staying here?”

“I’ll probably leave tomorrow. Mikki called. She got home from the convention and says the kids are giving her a bad time so I’d better get home and referee until I take them back to their mother in Dallas.” He sounded harried, as if juggling kids, wife, and ex-wife was a nerve-wracking job. “So, I want to talk to you about your looking after the ranch for a while.”

“Both of us?”

“The lawyer says money can be released to pay the burial expenses and probably whatever is necessary for ‘preservation of assets.’ But I don’t yet have any idea what cash is available, so I can’t offer you much in the way of salary. The two of you could split it however you want.” He smiled wryly. “What I can offer is all the food you can eat, all the toilet tissue and paper towels you can use, plus enough shampoo, toothpaste, dental floss, and Band-Aids to last into the next ice age. Also, should the need arise, an impressive supply of snake-bite kits and Pepto-Bismol. You shouldn’t have to buy much while you’re here.”

“I have a long cord we can run from the motor home to the house for electricity, and hooking up the water hose is no problem. But we’d have to find some way to connect into the septic system.”

“Jock and Jessie lived in a travel trailer here while the house was being remodeled, so there must be a way. We’ll look for it.”

The cash he then got down to offering was indeed not much, but he said he’d also pay electric and phone bills and set up an account at the feed store for emu food. I called Abilene over for a brief conference, and we accepted the offer.

“Is there anything we can do to help out now?” I asked, as I had before.

He reached in a pocket and pulled out a key ring fastened to a square of leather with Jock’s name carved into it. “Right now I need a break. I thought I’d take a look at what’s in these outbuildings.”

He didn’t invite us, but neither did he say the exploration was private, so I put on my shoes and we tagged along.

“I’ve been wondering what’s in those big tanks,” I said as we followed him to the first shed.

“The one labeled G is gasoline. The D is diesel. You may as well use whatever gas you need for the motor home while you’re here. I think each tank holds a thousand gallons.”

The labeling was logical enough, although I wondered about the safety of keeping such huge amounts of inflammable liquid around.

“Jock and Jessie didn’t trust the Middle East oil supply in a crisis and figured on having a stockpile of their own. I’m not sure who they didn’t trust when they bought all that corned beef. And six boxes of foot fungus powder.” He stopped and glanced back at us. “I’m sorry. You must think I’m terribly disrespectful.”

“Frustrated, perhaps?” I suggested.

“Yeah, I guess that’s it. Frustrated. Jock and Jessie and I had a lot of differences. We weren’t really close, and sometimes I wanted to shake them for being so strange and stubborn. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love them.”

“Did your children know them?”

“We visited them out in California a couple times when Natalie and I were still married, and she brought the kids up here from Dallas to see them several times. Jock and Jessie weren’t really grandparent material, but they tried, and they always liked Natalie.” He frowned as if he found that baffling, and resented it as well.

“Did she share their . . . umm . . . survival interests, perhaps?”

“No, but she’s always been big on fitness. Yoga and karate and weight lifting, even running marathons. Jessie admired that. It didn’t make for a real cozy situation the time Mikki and I came up and Jessie kept raving about what fantastic shape Natalie was in and how she’d run all the way up to the lake and back when she was here. Sorry,” he added apologetically. “I’m sure that’s more than you ever wanted to know about my marital complications.”

Not necessarily. Gossip isn’t usually one of my shortcomings, but curiosity is.

He unlocked the padlock on the first shed, swung the door open, and switched on the overhead light. I instantly felt rather overwhelmed by all the
stuff
. I could identify a couple of big items on the concrete floor as generators because they bore a similarity to the generator in the motor home. With these, using the gasoline or diesel in the big tanks, the Northcutts were well prepared to take care of their own electrical needs in case of disaster.

Frank confirmed this, adding, “They intended to convert to solar power eventually, so they’d be completely independent, but they hadn’t gotten started on installing solar panels yet.”

Gardening tools lined one wall, apparently also for a future project, because I hadn’t yet noted any actual gardening activity.

There were animal traps, a box of compasses and flashlights, five-gallon jugs of water, a Coleman camp stove and several lanterns, something I thought might be a solar cooker, and various other items I couldn’t even identify. An electric meat saw looked big and powerful enough to cut up any creature currently roaming North America. Everything, it appeared, for the well-stocked do-it-yourself survivalist.

Including, I noted, a pair of snowshoes hanging on the wall. I’m fairly certain snowshoes are about as useful in southeastern Oklahoma as shark repellent, but the Northcutts obviously intended to be prepared for any contingency, up to and including a coming ice age. A tangle of webbed material in camouflage colors draped the wall beside the snowshoes. The emu-catching net, perhaps?

“Looks like all they were lacking is a rocket launcher and a nuclear submarine,” Frank muttered.

I wasn’t certain we might not yet discover those items. On to the next shed.

Here were several big boxes of an odd type of gun, not like those in the cabinet in the house. I could tell they weren’t handguns, but neither were they rifles or shotguns. So what were they? I cautiously picked one up. It appeared to be constructed of sturdy plastic, with a canister attached on the bottom and a container, rather like a covered funnel, on top.

“Are they toys?” I asked, puzzled.

Frank bent over one of the boxes. “No, I don’t think so.”

More boxes held plastic bags of small, brightly colored round objects, somewhat like gumballs. Several jumpsuits in camouflage colors hung on the wall. Another box held a jumble of goggles and face masks. I jumped when I looked farther back in the shed and saw a bear.

No, not a real bear. The wooden, life-sized silhouette of one. Along with other silhouettes of deer, a mountain lion, and people in various kinds of uniforms. Holes pockmarked the silhouettes. After a moment I realized what they were. Bullet holes.

The whole setup jittered my nerves. What did we have here? Some terrorist cell accumulating a stockpile of strange, futuristic guns?

“Hey, I know what these are!” Frank held up one of the guns, unexpectedly smiling when he peered into the container on top. “They’re paintball guns. I took Jeff and a couple of his buddies to a place outside Dallas where they rent them. They had a big field where you could go out and play games and shoot.”

“At each other?” I asked, mildly appalled.

“Sure. They usually set up teams, with maybe a goal of capturing the other team’s flag. You hide behind wooden or vinyl barriers, but sometimes you’re out in the open running between them, and as soon as you’re hit with a paintball, you’re out. But it’s not just for kids. Lots of adults get into it too. I did,” Frank admitted. “It was fun.”

He stepped to the door with one of the guns in hand, pointed it in the direction of a nearby tree, and pulled the trigger. A drippy red blob immediately blossomed on the bark. He grinned, obviously pleased with himself.

“Hey,” Abilene said, “that’s like all those blobs we saw out in the woods!”

I also realized now that what had looked like broken eggshells out in the woods were actually the remains of the outer coverings of the used paintballs.

“I remember Jessie saying something about some group that came here to practice war games out in the woods once in a while. I don’t know exactly how many acres are here, but several hundred anyway. Plenty for a full-scale war. I was afraid that they might be shooting real bullets, but they must have been using paintballs.”