On the Run (26 page)

My mind was on Mac and that hazy relationship, and it took me a moment to follow when she plunged into another subject entirely.

“Someone has been watching us. I found a place up at the end of the clearing where brush has been piled up so he’d be concealed but could see out.”

“You mean this is where the guy who was camped back there in the woods was spying on us?”

“Maybe. But someone has been there more recently than that.” She looked back over her shoulder toward the woods as if eyes might even now be probing us.

My instant suspicion, as usual, was spying Braxtons. Yet it seemed unlikely they’d have been watching all this time and not done anything yet. “How recent?” I asked.

“Probably today. I found a beer can. It was empty, but there were still a couple drops of liquid around the top. They’d have evaporated if the can had been there long.”

This was disturbing news, but I was also impressed. “That’s good detective work.”

“I read it in a mystery. Mysteries can be quite educational.” In an absentminded way she added, “I learned from one that a crocodile can’t stick out its tongue.”

Probably not a terribly useful bit of information, but if some scaly, big-toothed creature stuck its tongue out at me and claimed to be a crocodile, I’d now know it was an imposter.

We sipped our lemon sodas and contemplated crocodile tongues and the return of the camper/skulker.

“You think it’s the same person?”

“Same brand of beer. I think he may be camping in a different place now. Maybe he realized that other spot had been discovered and decided to move. I can probably find the new—”

“No,” I said hastily. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

“I don’t think we should just ignore him.”

“But what’s he
doing
here? What does he want?”

“I think he’s probably watching for a time when everyone is gone so he can do whatever it is he wants to do. Search for something, steal something, whatever.”

“You don’t think he’s a personal danger to us, then?”

“I think if he gets tired of waiting he’ll go ahead with whatever it is he wants to do, and if we get in his way . . .” She held a finger against her head and clicked an imaginary trigger.

Which gave me a really bad image of Jock and Jessie, dead on the sofa. If the guy had killed once, he probably wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

“Maybe we should contact Deputy Hamilton,” I said.

“Deputy Hamilton already thinks we’re strolling in the Twilight Zone.”

The kind of people who turn simple suicides into complicated murders. The kind of people who see bizarre connections between a bullet in an old deer head and bullets in dead bodies. Although Deputy Hamilton had seemed to have some doubts about the suicide scenario himself. But my bullet-in-deer-head call probably hadn’t raised our credibility level.

“I’m wondering . . .” Abilene gave me a sideways glance that suggested she suspected I might not like what she was about to say. “I’m wondering if we could capture him ourselves.”

“Capture him?”

She was right. I didn’t like it. This may be a spy/thief/ murderer, someone who could be equipped with anything from a machete to an Uzi. We were one LOL and one emu caretaker equipped with . . . what? One green emu egg and an oversupply of imagination.

One guess about who was most likely to capture whom.

I managed to keep from erupting like an egg in a microwave and say with relative calm, “How could we possibly capture him? We don’t have a gun, and even if we did—”

“There are other ways. Just come out and look at the place where he’s been hiding. Maybe we can think of something.”

I did not want to get involved in planning a capture, but curiosity about the place where he’d been spying on us got to me, of course. Abilene led the way through the weedy grass to the far end of the clearing. Koop came along, sidetracking now and then to do a capture of his own with a grasshopper. By the time we ducked into the woods I had enough seeds and stickers caught in my socks to sabotage the Garden of Eden.

I didn’t even see anything until Abilene said, “Here we are. This is it.”

Brush had been so carefully stacked in gaps between live bushes and trees that from the outside it looked like part of the natural landscape. The hiding place was like a small room, with the stacked brush on three and a half sides, the entrance on the side away from the clearing. Overhead, branches dipping from surrounding trees dappled the space with a green canopy of shade. The unknown occupant had spent enough time in the brush-enclosed room to trample the ground to bare earth. It appeared he was either a nervous pacer or he practiced flamenco dancing in his spare time. The beer can lay where Abilene had found and left it, half-hidden in the brush.

Koop sniffed out a few crisp yellow crumbs on the ground. Cheetos? The ants were industriously working on them, but they hadn’t made off with all of them yet—another clue that it hadn’t been long since the skulker had been here.

Peering through peepholes cut into the brush gave a clear view of house, yard, emus, and motor home. And us. The stars of this skulker’s private peep show. In spite of the heat I felt a spider-tap-dancing-up-the-spine chill as I realized how easily he could pick us off with a rifle from here.

A less crucial point was that I was glad we weren’t inclined toward such watchable activities as nude sunbathing.

“So, what do you think?” Abilene asked.

“What happens if we do figure a way to capture him? What then?”

I had various uneasy thoughts, central to which was the idea that this looked way too much like catching a tiger by the tail. We had no idea what kind of “tiger” we might catch, or how vicious or well-armed he might be.

“If we caught him, then we could call Deputy Hamilton,” Abilene said.

That sounded better, quite reasonable and sensible. “But what if Deputy Hamilton arrives, and our capturee turns out to be, say, some innocent bird or squirrel watcher?”

“Innocent bird and squirrel watchers,” Abilene declared, “do not build hiding places and then sneak around peering through peepholes, watching normal people do normal things.”

True.

“Do you think he comes at night?” I asked.

“It’s possible, if what he wants is to get in one of the sheds. But since he hasn’t already done that, I think he wants to get in the house, and he wants to do it when no one’s home. He wouldn’t figure we’d both be away at night, so he’s watching during the day for a time when we’re both gone.”

“We could just leave a note letting him know we’re on to the fact that he’s spying on us. Maybe that would scare him off.” I realized the hopeful foolishness of that even as I said it. We might as well leave a picture of a gun and a sign saying “Bang! You’re dead.”

“You’re against trying to capture him, then?” Abilene sounded disappointed.

“Well, no, not necessarily. I just think there are a lot of unknowns involved, and we’d better give it more thought. If we lie in wait for him out here, we may find ourselves captured by our skulker, rather than the other way around.”

“We could, you know, dig a pit and cover it with branches and leaves so he’d fall in. There are shovels and other tools in the shed.”

I jabbed at the ground with the toe of my shoe and made no more dent in the hard, summer-dry earth than I would poking a toothpick at a concrete sidewalk. Even with Abilene’s youthful strength and determination, I doubted we could dig a hole deep enough to capture any skulker more than two feet tall.

“I guess that would take too long.” Abilene sighed. “Maybe I’d better go read a few more mysteries for ideas.”

“I think we should forget any capture-the-crook scheme. If we’re always around, maybe he’ll eventually give up and go away.”

“Unless he decides to get
us
out of the way.”

Yes, there was always that.

I couldn’t sleep. Abilene’s theory that our skulker probably wanted to sneak into the house when we were gone during daylight hours was comforting. My hope that he’d give up and go away could also be right. But I kept hearing noises that suggested he might boldly try a different stratagem. Thumps. (Burglar crawling through a window?) Creaks. (Murderer coming up the stairs?) Crackle/crinkle. (That one baffled even my fertile imagination until I decided it could be a burglar/murderer crinkling the paper wrapping on a Snickers candy bar.)

Several times I got up and prowled the hallway, stopping at Abilene’s open doorway to listen for any outside sounds coming through her open window. All I heard was the ticktocking clock in the emu-egg nest. I hoped the sound was more comforting to the egg-enclosed emu than it was to me. To me it had an ominous ticking-down-to-doomsday, time-is-running-out sound.

By morning doomsday had not arrived. A radiant sun bloomed in a clear blue sky, and after breakfast Abilene said she had work to do outside.

“You’re not going to try to find where that guy is camped now, are you?” I asked, both suspicious and alarmed.

“Oh no,” she assured me. “I wasn’t thinking of that at all.”

Which should have given me a clue that she was thinking of something else I’d find equally worrisome, but a few minutes later I was excited about a find of my own. It was a manila folder labeled, with unambiguous clarity, Important Numbers. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a short series of numbers separated by dashes.

I could think of only one series of numbers that might warrant an Important Numbers file. The combination to the lock on a safe!

Abilene came in for lunch. She had scratches on her arms, bits of leaves and twigs in her hair, and sweat soaked through the back of her shirt, but, again, I was too excited about my find to think about these peculiarities. I showed her the numbers, and we spent more time looking for a safe built into wall or floor somewhere. Mikki had said she’d looked behind pictures, but we looked again, behind pictures, under furniture, and on the back walls of cabinets. We even found a way into a cramped attic over the bedrooms, and Abilene boosted me up so I could look around. I met enough spiders to get a good start on arachnophobia, but I didn’t find any safe.

By evening I was too tired to worry about safes or prowling burglar/murderers or even creepy-crawly things. I fell asleep the minute I hit the bed and stayed asleep.

Until at daybreak I found myself upright beside the bed, body rigid as an icicle, heart jackhammering.

27

I knew something had wakened me, but what? Explosion? Gunshot? Emu egg hatching?

More noises now. Coming from outside.

Crashing, breaking, whomping noises, all punctuated by a series of blood-chilling screeches. Koop jumped to his feet, back arched and hair standing up along his spine.

Pink-pearl dawn showed at the window, its serenity at odds with the clamor. I dashed into the hallway in my nightgown and met Abilene throwing on jeans and sweatshirt over her pajamas as she hopped and stumbled and ran down the hall.

“Hey, wait, where’re you going? What’re you doing?” I yelled after her.

“To see what we caught!”

“What do you mean,
caught
?” And what do you mean,
we
?

“I set a trap!”

“Come back! We said we’d call Deputy Hamilton if—”

“He might get away before Hamilton could get here.”

Abilene was already disappearing down the stairs. I debated a moment about calling Deputy Hamilton, but I was suddenly edgy about the legalities involved here. From what I’ve read, authorities tend to take a dim view of citizens acting on their own in matters such as this. And, from those weird sounds, I wasn’t even certain what Abilene had in her trap.

I ran back to my bedroom, scrambled into clothes, and tore after Abilene. Koop wanted to come along, but I shut the door to keep him inside. I caught up with Abilene near one of the sheds as she came out carrying a baseball bat. Noises were still exploding from the brush enclosure. Thrashing, scuffling, and, as we got closer, panting sounds. And definitely human, unless one of the local four-legged fauna had somehow acquired a fertile vocabulary of ear-burning epithets.

Abilene slowed as we approached the brush-enclosed space. Dust billowed above it. She put a finger to her lips, and we quietly circled to the entrance on the back side. She held the baseball bat aloft, at attack readiness as we crept ahead. Then we both stopped and stared in astonishment.

The green canopy of branches that had been hanging overhead had crashed to the ground and now tangled around a struggling figure. The scrabbling feet churned up the earth as they circled the head in some strange, stuck-in-place race. Shifting branches revealed a body encased in a net like an oversized grasshopper caught in a spider’s web. A rope flailed the bare dirt around the man, each twist of his body flinging it like some deranged lasso. Dust swirled around everything, including us, as if trying to escalate into a tornado.

Abilene lowered the bat. “Hey, it worked!” She sounded both astonished and pleased.

At the sound of our voices, movement within the net ceased. The body went rigid, but I suspected I was more scared of whoever was within the net than he was of us.