Violet Eyes (13 page)

“Welcome to summer in the swamp,” he grumbled, and slapped something on his left biceps. He was getting eaten alive out here.

“Damned bugs,” he complained, and stood up from his small vegetable garden with a groan. He looked at the holes in the broad hairy leaves of his tomato plants and frowned. He’d been worried about leaf rot this year—it had been so wet. But instead, it looked like he was feeding a healthy crop of tomato hornworms. He bent over and lifted the branch with the chewed leaves, looking for the offender. They blended in well with the plant, but Aidan found it quickly, clinging to the underside of the third leaf on the branch. He reached down and plucked it off before it could do any more damage. The thing was fat and green, and had already probably eaten twice its weight today. Hornworms were nature’s “stripping machines”. They’d crawl up a stem, start chewing, and just
keep
chewing, hunger or not, hell or high water, spurting out voluminous bug poop as they ravaged their way along the leaves. They ate until they were so fat they couldn’t hold on to the plant anymore, and then they’d roll off, fall to the ground and turn to a pupa that eventually would hatch into a moth.

“Well, ain’t that the devil,” Aidan complained. He’d never had a hornworm invade his garden since he moved to Florida, though he’d had them up north. Best thing he could do would be to mix up some soapy water and spray down the plants with it. The worms hated the soap and started squirming around—which would help him locate…and dispose of them.

Aidan walked across the backyard to the house. Emily was out for the afternoon, so he didn’t bother to take his shoes off when he walked across the carpet to the kitchen. If she’d been home, she would have shrieked at him like an angry tea kettle. Aidan poured some dish soap into a spray bottle, filled it with water and shook it. Then he trudged back to their small garden. It wasn’t a big yard, but he loved to eat tomatoes and peppers that he’d grown himself, even if his yield was small.

He knelt and squirted the soapy water at his eight tomato plants until the leaves were quickly covered in suds, then he watched to see if anything came squirming out from under the leaves, irritated and angry. As he looked, he slapped at the back of his neck. Another bite. He could already feel the ones on his leg swelling.

There!

He reached down and retrieved a squirming hornworm as it revealed itself, accordion-ing around a tomato plant’s stem as it tried to escape the soap. It was a big one, electric green and plump as fruit, with a long curved horn at one end.

Aidan snorted. “Let’s see how your horn handles a shoe,” he smirked. He dropped it to the grass and stepped on it.

Something bit him on the arm, and he looked down at his forearm.

A fly. A damned fly. Weird-looking little bugger too—this fly was jet black, with a little slash of purple on its back. Must have come in from the Everglades or something. This was like, the
Revenge of the Bugs
day. He dropped the spray bottle and slowly lifted his other hand above the arm. When he brought it down, he felt the thing smash beneath his palm. That made him smile.
Weird
fly was now
dead
fly.

Revenge of the Bugs
day was turning into
Revenge of the Gardener
day. He picked up the spray bottle and headed back to the house. But he swatted his legs twice as he walked.

Damned things were persistent.

Chapter Twenty

Sunday, May 12. 8:10 a.m.

Rachel was walking Feral again. And walking was a more apt description than it had been a couple days ago. Eric should be taking the dog out, but she didn’t complain too much, because she had been hoping to run into Billy outside again. She needed to see if he’d mind keeping an eye on Eric again tomorrow night. Terry had asked her out again.

And she really wanted to go. This time, without a makeshift cane!

But as she walked Feral up and down the block, and the dog proceeded to sniff at every single tree and bush root, nothing moved around Billy’s house. She was going to have to go over there later, at a decent hour and knock. She wished she’d gotten his phone number or email address the other night. It was stupid, but she’d rather email someone than walk across the street and knock on their door. It was just…more unobtrusive. She could ask on her own time, and he could answer on his… One thing Rachel definitely embraced was the e-mail age.

Of course, Anders—naturally—felt otherwise. He preferred to be right there, in your face, every time he had something to say. She shook away the thoughts of him, and led the dog back home. Thoughts of Anders, Terry, Billy had to take a backseat. She had to run errands and clean the house and do all the other things a single mom had to manage—cramming a week of “home” work into the weekend.

Seven hours came and went, but when Rachel finally realized she still needed to connect with Billy, she still saw no sign of life across the street. She walked across the street, conquering her distaste of begging people in person, but it didn’t matter. Billy didn’t answer her knock on the door.

Hmmm.

She had never asked what he did, but she thought he was still going to college. The whole news angle on the reports of his tragedy on the Key had revolved around mentions of coeds. Where the heck would a college kid be on a late Sunday afternoon?

Maybe he’d taken a boat back to the island of the flies, she thought. And stifled a laugh. That’d be a genius move.

She decided to talk to Susan at work in the morning and see if she could keep an eye on Eric for a couple hours. So much for relying on neighbors!

The “beach bunny” said yes. Rachel didn’t know where Susan found time to cultivate such a rich tan when she was stuck in a cube five days out of seven, but she couldn’t help but look at her and think of her as “the beach bunny”. And part of her saw the Playboy emblem when she thought “bunny”.

Rachel hated herself for being so critical of Susan, especially when the girl was nice enough to say, “Sure, I can watch Eric tonight, I love kids!” Which she did, first thing Monday morning. But there was just something about her constant positive energy (and probably a bit of jealousy about her perfect tan and shockingly blue eyes) that irritated her every time Susan spoke. How the girl could always be so enthusiastic about things, Rachel didn’t know. The jaded part of her wagged a finger and said, “She’ll learn.” But another part of her wanted to be Susan. And knew that whatever “Susan-ness” she’d had had been stomped and broken by Anders years ago.

As it happened, it was lucky that Rachel had thought to ask Susan if she’d watch Eric first thing in the morning, as they were both in the lunchroom getting coffee. Because the rest of the day was a train wreck—call after call, meeting after meeting. She never even stopped for lunch. And then it was 5 p.m., and Susan popped her blonde head over the top of the cubicle and said with a guileless smile, “See you in an hour?”

Rachel put aside any pettiness and genuinely grinned. “Yes! And thanks! I’ll buy you guys a pizza if you want?”

“Where do you want to eat?” Terry said an hour and a half later as he helped her up in to the cab of his truck.

“What are my choices?” she asked. Her stomach growled audibly in the cab, and Terry laughed.

“Sounds like it probably doesn’t much matter, but there’s tolerable, good, and better…it just depends on how far away from here you want to drive.”

She laughed. “We’d better aim between tolerable and good… Billy hasn’t been around, so I’ve got Susan from my work watching Eric. I don’t want to keep her too long.”

“Okay. Then I’m going to introduce you to… The Gator Shack. One mean lizard, one good cook.”

“Is that their slogan?”

“No, that’s just an honest description. There’s a pet gator in a fenced-in pond just behind the place. You can sit out back on the deck and watch them feed it, if you’re there at the right time.”

“Sounds charming. Do they serve burgers?”

“Sure. And a mean gator gumbo if you’re brave…and not afraid of offending the mascot!”

The place was hopping, with John Fogerty belting a bayou vibe over the whole shebang with “Change in the Weather” as they walked in and were escorted to a table that had some kind of tree moss hanging over it from the ceiling.

Rachel skipped the gumbo, but she did try some French-fried gator nuggets. “Let me guess,” Terry asked as she chewed the first one. “Tastes just like chicken?”

She laughed and nodded vigorously.

He grinned. “Everything does when it’s breaded and fried!”

She was still smiling when a woman with jet-black hair and a tan worthy of South Beach stopped at their table.

“Well, is that the infamous Terry Brackson sittin’ right thar at a table?” she said with a deep drawl. “I haven’t seen you in a python’s age. But I see you’ve found someone to keep you busy!”

Rachel felt her eyes go wide. She wasn’t sure what to think about that comment…was this a former girlfriend? A hopeful? Was she an obstacle here?

But Terry didn’t react to the comment at all. He just laughed easily and introduced Rachel.

“Leave it to you to bring up snakes!” he laughed. “This is Monique,” he explained to Rachel. “She was a park ranger for a while, but while she loved the reptiles, she missed the sun, so she went back to lifeguarding. As you can see, it suits her well, but I always told her that she’ll get cancer faster that way. I warned her!” Then he looked back to Monique. “It’s just our second date,” he said, “so Rachel hasn’t ‘kept me that busy’ yet…but I’m hoping she will!”

Rachel laughed, and inside, she felt a warm spot blossom. So. He was hoping that she’d keep him busy, huh? Nice! But Terry was still talking. Saying something about a guy named Keith, and a beer run gone wrong.

“I told him, if you’re going to take beer into the swamp, you better run a string behind you to find your way out.”

“Keith couldn’t find his way out with a string.” Monique laughed.

“Probably true,” Terry agreed. “So it’s a good thing he had his cell phone to call me with so that I could wade in and find him and the rest of the idiots.”

Monique smiled, but then turned to look at the bar, as if she was trying to see if people she was meeting had arrived. In doing so, she gave them a view of her mostly bare shoulders and back.

“What the hell,” Terry exclaimed when she turned. “Did you work on your tan while lying on a bed of fire ants or something?”

The skin around her shoulder blades was covered with angry red bite bumps.

She turned back around and grimaced. “Lovely, ain’t it? I don’t know what they hell they were, but they bit the hell out of me. I was just jogging the other day—and when I stopped at this intersection, it was like a cloud of these nasty little flies were all there waiting for me. I was slapping at them like crazy, but the only way to stop them from biting was to just get back to running! I don’t think I stopped for half a mile after that!”

“Looks nasty,” Terry said.

“It feels worse!” she answered. “But I have to admit, they drove me to a good workout!”

The conversation devolved to updates on people that both of them knew, but Rachel had no clue. She zoned out, until the career lifeguard decided to take her offensively bronzed body elsewhere. But as she smiled and waved and turned away, Rachel couldn’t help but focus on the red dots that spotted the woman’s shoulder blades like the worst mosquito bites ever.

She couldn’t help but think of Billy, and the flies that had attacked him and his friends on Sheila Key.

Chapter Twenty-One

Tuesday, May 14. 7:17 a.m.

The
Passanattee Times
didn’t normally have a lot of local news to trumpet on its front page. Usually it was a political intrigue surrounding the zoning of a parking lot or fast food restaurant. But this morning, when Rachel pulled its thin weight from the orange plastic bag it came delivered in, the first thing that she saw was the word
Bite
.

Beware the Bite
the headline said.

Beneath that was a second headline, and a story that gave Rachel’s stomach a chill.

Passanattee Battles Scourge of Biting Flies

Residents of Southern Florida are no stranger to bugs, but recently, there’s been a particularly intrusive insect that has gotten under the skin of residents and kept the phones ringing “off the hook” according to workers at Ants to Zygaena Exterminators. The perpetrator is a species of small black fly that has been announcing its presence with a great deal of fervor—and leaving behind hundreds of red bumps in its wake.

“We first started getting calls three or four days ago,” said Arthur Helden, an exterminator for Ants to Zygaena. There were a handful of calls in the west end, but today, we actually heard from people in almost every part of town.”

Helden says the perpetrator is a type of swamp fly that has a purple streak down its back. It’s strongly aggressive and tends to fly in swarms like bees, rather than solo, which is unusual for flies, and contributes to their perceived level of “peskiness”. Several people have reported being attacked by the flies while walking down the street—one moment, they’re walking along the sidewalk and the next, a cloud of hungry flies is all around them.

“And their bites are nasty!” Helden noted. “We’ve sprayed at a few people’s houses where the customers looked like human pincushions—their faces and arms and legs were just covered in red bumps.”

Nicole Verdeyson, an entomologist at the Soriento Science Center, which maintains an exhibit on indigenous South Florida bugs, notes that the violet-marked fly appears to exhibit some of the same characteristics as the tsetse fly. While smaller than the tsetse, the flies invading Passanattee exhibit a long proboscis, and seem to have a need to feed on the blood of vertebrate animals. That said, she acknowledged that the species does not appear to be represented in the Soriento’s regular exhibits.