Almost Perfect (6 page)

He stopped at the house to sketch a hasty line drawing. He did everything on computer these days, but he
still had a quick hand with a pen. An original drawing spoke more eloquently than computer printouts.

He rolled up the sketch, tucking it into a cardboard tube for protection, and slipped on a shirt, before jogging up the sandy path toward his landlady's house. He'd been meaning to explore more of his surroundings anyway. Anything was better than staring blankly at a computer screen while listening to the roof being torn off above his head. His eccentric landlady qualified as far better than just “anything.”

A flash of red caught the corner of his eye, and Jared turned to investigate the thicket of scrub brush to his left. He didn't figure snakes came in red, but he was being extra cautious these days. He'd had the notion that Cleo Alyssum lived alone on this swampy end of the island, but if there were others about, he'd be interested in knowing it. He had a sneaking suspicion that snakes didn't fly any better than frozen turkeys, but he couldn't see any way to blame his landlady for them.

The bushes moved in a wave proceeding in the general direction of the pines farther inland. He wasn't much interested in exploring jungle, but he could skirt around the thicket and look for a higher, dryer path.

He hoped he wasn't tracking a wild animal. He didn't want to end up like his pal Freddy, dead of a heart attack at thirty-two. Of course, Freddy had been at his desk, not stalking panthers.

Every time he thought of Freddy, Jared's heart raced as if
he
were having an attack. They'd been buddies since the age of ten, freaks together, him and Freddy and Dirk, the Three Musketeers. Freddy had been the chubby boy everyone laughed at, but he had the drive and ambition Jared had never possessed. Freddy had sworn he'd be a millionaire by thirty, and he'd done it. He'd also sworn
he'd be married to a supermodel, but he'd died single and childless, and his wealth had gone to charity.

Maybe Freddy's death was the reason he couldn't concentrate these days, something about staring into the face of eternity caused one to reevaluate priorities.

He didn't want to reevaluate anything but his reason for signing that damned contract.

Call it denial, but to his way of thinking, living in the moment made more sense than regretting what was past or worrying over what lay ahead. If he had a heart attack chasing a wild animal in a red shirt, so be it. He spotted the flash of red again, darting between the pines.

Wild animals didn't wear red shirts. From the small bare footprints in the loose soil, he calculated it had to be a child.

He let the kid run ahead and feel safe. Did his landlady have children? She hadn't looked the motherly sort. He could imagine her as a sculptor wielding torch and metal, but not a mother.

Brushing past another of those damned prickly bushes, he stumbled on something in his path. Righting himself by grabbing a pine trunk, Jared jumped, startled, as a heavy rope fell in front of his face.

Before he could react, a net dropped from the tree and engulfed him in folds of rotting cords.

Well, hell, he might stick his head in the sand to avoid impending disaster, but he couldn't deny this predicament.

“I don't think you're supposed to say those words,” a girl's whispery voice commented thoughtfully from the depths of shrubbery.

Jared shut up and glanced around. He had a bad habit of not filling his pockets before leaving the house, so he didn't have his penknife on him. He could sever the rotten cords of the net with some effort, but he preferred using brain instead of brawn to untangle it. So far, he hadn't succeeded, and resentment simmered at being caught in such a foolish situation.

“Help me out of here, and I won't say them,” he promised in a voice gruffer than usual. He'd embarrassed himself plenty of times before, but not in recent memory. He preferred his suave, urbane image to that of class clown these days.

“Gene keeps hoping he'll catch a panther.” An awkwardly tall, skinny girl drifted through the shrubbery, eyeing the tangle of cords and ropes hanging from the tree limb. “I can't imagine what he'd do with one if he caught it.”

Jared would guess her to be about fourteen or fifteen, although garbed as she was in a loose dress several sizes too large, it was hard to tell. She looked at the tree and rope and anything but him. Her wiry brownish-blond curls fell in her face and stuck out all over her head
without any indication that brush or comb had ever touched them. Her dusky complexion and frail features possessed an ethereal quality that—had he been a fanciful man—would have given him pause to wonder if fairies inhabited the island.

He did happen to possess an unfortunate penchant for fantasy, but he preferred superheroes to fairies.

“If you'll just grab that rope over there, I think the whole thing will lift up.” Fairies and red-shirted wild animals and witches and skeletons—this island was turning into a real menagerie of cartoon characters. If he couldn't get something out of this, no one could.

She looked doubtfully at the heavy rope but gravitated toward it, giving it a slight pull that produced little effect.

“Tug harder,” he urged, searching around his feet for the opening. He saw movement with her next tug and pounced on it. Whoever had rigged this trap hadn't intended it for people, at least. “A little harder, and I think I've got it.”

The cords rippled, and he gathered as many as he could, locating the edge of the net and lifting until he had a space large enough to duck under. “Who is this Gene and where do I find him?” he called over his shoulder as he disentangled himself.

No reply.

Free at last, he let the net fall to the ground, and swung around to see what the girl was doing.

She was gone.

What in hell kind of rabbit hole had he fallen into, anyway?

Sweat pouring down his back, his cardboard tube battered and torn from swatting flies, mosquitoes, and hanging vines of indeterminate nature, Jared emerged
from the thicket path into a clearing littered with makeshift stick cages and wooden crates.

Well, at least he knew he and his landlady weren't entirely alone out here. The paths wandering through swamp and scrub brush couldn't have been made by wild horses or whatever creatures inhabited the place. He hadn't seen a sign of animal life since setting out, but he
had
seen the girl and a red shirt. He thought.

A baby bird cheeped from a cardboard box filled with grasses and matchbox feeders. An iguana lay sleepily in a cage beneath a spreading live oak. A variety of colorful lizards scattered into hiding beneath a loosely stacked pile of rocks. And a potbellied pig snorted through rubbish inside a wire fence. Quite an assortment. As a kid, he would have loved this.

With interest, he peered into an elongated crate big enough to hold a refrigerator, and stepped back instantly. Snakes.
Black
ones.

He didn't get angry often. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been angry. But this was the outside of enough, and he'd been pushed as far as his temper would permit. It hadn't been his imagination that had ruined his antique Jag and nearly killed him. It had been a genuine live snake. Just like these.

An unearthly squawk nearly startled him out of his shoes, and Jared swung around in time to confront the beady eyes of a malicious-looking peacock. A snake, and a peacock, then. They'd been real enough. He definitely hadn't been hallucinating.

And they'd been put in or thrown at his car deliberately.

He still couldn't figure out how to blame his landlady for the trick, since she'd been in front of him the whole time his car had been parked and out of sight. So it had to be the fairy girl or the red shirt. A woman like Cleo
Alyssum might possess a couple of delinquent brats, although she didn't look old enough to have teenagers. Hell, what did he know about women and kids anyway? Although he liked sleeping with women, he couldn't claim to understand them, and his comic strip was more about himself than real kids.

Grabbing an abandoned box and snatching one of the smaller snakes from its wooden pit, Jared set off down still another path. He had a sneaking suspicion he knew the direction.

The guard peacock strutted after him, screeching its fool head off.

Watching warily for any more traps, Jared stalked through the underbrush until he heard the sounds of shouting. Well, she was definitely at home, then. It was time he had a little confrontation with one Cleo Alyssum.

“You can't keep skipping school, Eugene Watkins! You'll have the truant officer out here hunting you down. If I remember rightly, they lock kids up for not going to school around here.” Dressed for work, truck keys in hand, Cleo had spotted the splash of red behind the palmettos and tracked him down before leaving. She held him by the back of the shirt now and wished she could shake him until his teeth rattled.

“They ain't never gonna find me!” Gene shouted defiantly. “They don' care if I'm there or not. They can't teach me nothin' I don' know already.”

“I don't care if you never learn anything, but you have to have that piece of paper saying you're educated, or you'll not get anywhere in this world! Otherwise people will think you're a lazy bum and they'll never hire you.” Cleo supposed that wasn't the world's most effective argument, but she couldn't think of any other right offhand. She knew whereof she spoke, though. If only kids
could be inoculated with experience along with their vaccine shots.

“I don' need nobody—” Gene's eyes widened as he looked past her shoulder.

The back of her neck prickled. The screeching peacock should have warned her. Dropping Gene's collar, Cleo swung around, and her insides did a little kick dance she hadn't experienced in a long time.

Her nuisance of a tenant emerged from the wax myrtle bearing a cardboard box and a battered tube. Disregarding the cardboard, she gazed in wonder at the sweatdripping, scratched, and furious man smashing his way through the shrubs. Dirt, leaves, and perspiration coated his tanned face. If he'd ever buttoned his shirt, he'd lost the buttons, because it hung open now to reveal a vastly appealing bronzed and sculpted chest. If she didn't drag her gaze away, she'd be drooling any minute. Who'd have thought the comic hero would look like that?

“Is this the brat responsible for these?” He shoved the box in Cleo's direction.

She gazed dispassionately at one of Blackie's relatives and snatched Gene's collar again before he could flee. “I never tried to figure if snakes laid eggs or not,” she answered thoughtfully, “but I'm fairly certain kids don't lay snakes.”

Frozen in fear, Gene didn't laugh at her little joke, but she thought the comic hero quirked his lip upward for a fraction of a second. So, it wasn't a good joke. She hadn't much practice.

“Your snake?” he asked, shoving the box under Gene's nose.

“A man admits it when he's done wrong,” Cleo said quietly. “Only kids lie and pretend they can get away with it.”

Gene's shoulders sagged, and Cleo released his collar,
putting her arm around him instead. He'd angered his hero, and probably lost any chance at an autograph to impress the bullies at school. She understood. But she'd had to learn the hard way to accept responsibility for her actions. She'd teach Gene the right way.

“I'm sorry,” he muttered. “I didn't mean to hurt nothing.”

“I might have killed the snake,” Jared admonished. “And what happened to the damned peacock?”

“He got riled and lost some feathers, but he ain't hurt,” Gene said defensively. “He wasn't supposed to be roosting that time of day, no how.”

Jared quirked a questioning eyebrow at Cleo. “He yours?”

She should punch him for that, just for the age factor, but she supposed lots of people still had kids at sixteen or seventeen. She'd at least had the smarts to avoid that pitfall. She dug her fingers into Gene's knotty brown hair and tugged. Maybe she ought to claim him. It would save a lot of grief.

Gene settled the matter before she could. “Nah, she's a mean old witch who don't like strangers bothering her. I take care of her zoo.”

“Shouldn't he be in school?” Jared asked in suspicion.

Cleo caught Gene's hair tighter before he could make a break for it. “We were in the process of discussing that.” She didn't hold out a lot of hope that a snooty Yankee would help with a kid who'd ruined his car, but she wasn't shy about asking. “You want to explain to him the value of a good education?”

Jared narrowed his eyes as his gaze swept over the boy's dirty T-shirt, baggy pants, and ripped athletic shoes. “I don't remember talk being relevant at his age. Nikes mattered.” He scrutinized the boy a little closer.
“Beating up bullies mattered, so size was a factor. He could always go back to school after he grows into his shoulders.”

“Fat help you are.” She shoved Gene in the direction of her truck. “C'mon. I'll take you in.”

Gene's hangdog look tugged at her heart, but she didn't have experience in these things. She just knew the kid needed an education, and he couldn't get it playing truant.

“If they're a pair, there's another one floating around out there.” Jared nodded his head in the direction of the woods.