Champagne for Buzzards (3 page)

I was on fire with indignation. Driving down Main Street, the big oops happened. How annoyed was Clay going to be with me for pissing off his decorator? And what about the seventy to eighty people coming for a party in one week's time? A party in an empty house, which once upon a time would have been my ideal, wasn't really the style I was going for. What was I going to do about a party in a house without furniture?

Laura Kemp had already had the inside of the house painted top to bottom in a soft cream and all the old cypress floors had been redone. I dialed Marley. She was with a patient and wouldn't take my call. Dental hygiene wasn't as important as my problem so I headed on over to the office.

Marley's my best friend, has been since grade school, and she follows every trend going in home decoration, knows everything about it and loves to shop. Except these days she was recovering from the end of her love affair with David, a man she thought she was going to marry. She'd fallen into a huge pit of despair from which we couldn't seem to drag her.

Marley looked up from the open mouth of her patient. Her red curls had turned into a shrub from which her pale freckled face peeked. Her glasses, still new and startling, were as round and full as headlights. She pulled down her mask and said, “Where'd you get the suit?”

“Same place you got the hair.” I turned and walked out of the room. She followed, closing the door behind her and snapping off latex gloves. “What's up?” she asked. I told her. Marley went into a fit of laughter. “Clay used to date that bitch,” I said.

“Was there anyone in the social register he didn't date?”

“I think he did it so none of them could tie him down.”

“Well, if that story makes you happy. My bet is he was just horny and rich and could get away with it.”

I slapped her on the arm but not hard enough that she was going to retaliate and lay me out in my new suit. “What am I going to do?”

“I suggest you rent or buy some furniture.”

“Will you help?”

“Hell, yeah. Spending someone else's money, how great is that? But where's the money coming from?”

“Good question. Buy now, pay later if it's my money. But Clay will cough up the dough. He just might not see the need to rush out and do it in a hurry. But here's what I figure. We can hire a bunch of chairs and tables with long tablecloths and pretend we left the house empty on purpose. We can set some up on the porches too. I already bought lots of Japanese lanterns and fairy lights to twinkle in the trees. We only need to buy geegaws for the bathrooms and a few little things, just enough to tart the place up a bit.”

Marley said, “Surprise parties never turn out well.”

“If it isn't a surprise there won't be a party. Clay doesn't like birthdays.”

“Then why bother?”

I thought about it for a second. “Truthfully, maybe being younger is the only thing I have on my side. I'm thirty-one and he's forty-five in ten days. He hates being fourteen years older, puts him at a disadvantage, but he has money, class and all the good things, so it doesn't hurt to remind him I have one thing he can't ever have again.”

“Wow,” she said, “you're a bigger bitch than even I knew and I always gave you lots of credit for that.”

“Thank you, it's lovely to impress someone. Will you come out this weekend and help me decide what to do?”

“Sure.” But Marley wasn't looking at me as she said it. She was looking out the window. I followed her gaze. A turkey vulture sat on the roof of Big Red. Now, a turkey vulture isn't something you see every day in downtown Jacaranda.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” Marley said.

“Something about Big Red, there were buzzards sitting on it this morning.”

“Probably the suit, you look like you died and someone forgot to close the lid.”

“Go back to torturing the guy in your chair.”

“Oh, forgot all about him. I finish early today. I'll pack a few things and come right out.”

The turkey vulture had hopped down from the roof and was in the bed of the truck by the time I arrived. He was pulling at something, holding it down with his feet and grasping it in his beak and pulling hard. I waved my tasteful black clutch purse at him. He squawked in annoyance but took off, not far, just to the middle or the street, waiting to see if I abandoned whatever he had fallen in love with in the back of my truck. I looked to see what it was. It was a hand.

I screamed and jumped away as if the vile claw might reach for me. I looked around to see if my scream had brought anyone. I was alone. Just me and the thing.

Had I really seen what I thought I saw? I leaned forward, stretching out my neck to see the gruesome details without moving any closer. Holy shit! It was still there. Really, it wasn't much of a hand. Just bones in the shape of a hand since much of the meat had been stripped away.

Crazy jumbled thoughts tumbled over each other in my brain. Who did the hand belong to? How did it get there? But the biggest question of all was what were you supposed to do when you find such a thing? Of all the dangers Ruth Ann had warned me about, nothing ever came close to this.

Still terrified the thing might reach out and grab me, I edged forward to see what was attached to the hand and saw a leather watchband encircling the wrist bones. Above the watchband a scrap of red plaid stuck out from under the tarp. It wasn't just a stray hand. The lumpiness of the covering told me the owner of the hand was probably under the tarp.

“Holy crap.” I started to crumble to the ground in shock but remembered the cost of the suit and leaned against the car behind me instead. I disabused myself of any faint hope that the person was sleeping and it wasn't a dead body in the bed of the truck. If he wasn't dead it sure must hurt like hell when the vultures went to work on him. I stifled my hysterics with the back of my hand and dug in my bag for my cell phone. I definitely needed help here. I punched in a nine and a one but just before I added the last digit the practical part of my brain took over. This wasn't an emergency. The man was already dead. Should I take him to the hospital or to a doctor? Well that was pretty much ditto for the emergency number, not a lot they could do now. What in hell was I supposed to do with a dead body? Drive it to the morgue? And where would that be? What I needed was the police.

Detective Styles, with the Jacaranda police force, was the cop in charge of the investigation when my husband Jimmy was murdered. Tough but honest, I knew I could rely on him. I pushed Styles' number only to be told by his electronic voice that he was away for a week and giving me an alternative number to call if the problem couldn't wait for his return. I didn't make another call.

My brain, over its initial shock, was working again. This body had nothing to do with Jacaranda. The buzzards sitting on the truck before I ever left Riverwood said it was already there when I slid behind the wheel that morning. The Sunset Bar and Grill was slowly getting on its feet and didn't need any bad publicity about people dying of unnatural causes around Sherri Travis. I was already part of too many colorful stories in Jacaranda. I liked the idea of taking my troubles to new territory. Besides, maybe the guy in my truck hadn't died a violent death. Perhaps he had been feeling sick and climbed in there to rest but instead he'd died, died of natural causes. It could happen.

I wasn't buying any part of the story I was telling myself. Only one thing was clear. The guy was quite dead so it didn't matter to him where his death was reported and waiting wasn't a problem; nothing was going to hurt him anymore. I scrambled into the driver's seat and hit the lock button, keeping myself safe from the thing in back.

Freaking out and seriously melting down, I tore out of the parking lot, while saying, “Take it easy, take it easy.” The last thing I needed was to be stopped by a cop, with a dead body on board.

And within blocks I realized I'd made another serious mistake. I shouldn't have driven back along Main Street with its stop and go traffic and the sidewalks crowded with people who wove in and out of stalled traffic. At every crosswalk I waited for someone to look into the bed of the truck and start shrieking. If that happened I'd play dumb, my best act.

I should have at least made sure the hand was covered. Yeah right, as though that was going to happen. No way was I getting close to those bones.

I crept through town waiting to be caught, expecting the waking nightmare to get worse.

Once I crossed over the causeway to the mainland my panic subsided and my heartbeat eased its mad tattoo. It was even better when I merged onto the freeway. I thought my troubles were over. Not even close.

That's when the wind caught the tarp, sending a blue corner snapping back and forth outside the back window, the grommet striking the window like a bony knuckle rapping to demand entrance. Why the hell hadn't I tied the tarp down? But then I would have had to get close to the monstrous thing, would have had to reach into the truck bed and pick up the tarp, pull it tight over the body and see the hand again, touch what it had touched. No, no, no…not going there. Let it flap.

Too many Stephen King books gave me a vivid picture of what driving around with a dead body on board meant. At any moment that hand would slither into the cab and grab me, bony fingers wrapping around my neck and choking off my breath with a maniacal chortle. My head sank down closer and closer to my collarbone, going into protection mode, to make death by skeleton as difficult as possible.

Independence was now full of shoppers — pulling out of the hardware store parking lot in front of me, stopping to talk to neighbors or just jaywalking. I drove through town at a snail's pace and watched the sky for the return of the buzzards.

When I turned off the road and onto the long twisting lane to the ranch house, my heart was going triple time. “Thank God,” I breathed. My relief was boundless.

Tully was out in front of the house on a riding lawn mower, going around and around in circles, a cloud of dust following him as he cut what was supposed to be lawn but was mostly weeds and bare patches.

Near the house the driveway divided, one fork going left to the barn and the working part of the farm and the other arm going around to the front of the house. I went right and pulled up in front of the house. I slammed into Park and jumped out of the truck while it was still rocking. “Dad,” I screamed, running like no lady should or could.

Maybe it was that one word or maybe it was the way I tore into the yard, but he'd already shut off the tractor and was running across the lawn towards me.

He swept me up into his arms without asking anything, just holding on tight to stop my trembling. “It's okay, it's okay,” he said over and over, although he obviously didn't know how untrue that was.

Uncle Ziggy came down off the porch in his awkward limping jog. “What's wrong, what is it?” His hands gripped my shoulders while Tully made meaningless soothing sounds as old as time.

I freed an arm and pointed to the truck. “There, there,” I said. They both looked to the truck and Tully asked, “What, honey, what is it?”

“An arm, a man I think, there.”

They started towards the truck, holding me between them. “We have to go to the other side,” I told them at the tailgate. “It's sticking out over there.” I stared at the blue covering, waiting for it to move. We shuffled together around the truck with the two of them still holding onto me. I balked when we got closer to the thing. “I can't,” I said.

Tully left me with Uncle Ziggy and went and lifted the covering.

Tully jumped back. “Jesus Christ.”

So that answered my question. The hand was still there. I'd been praying it would disappear on the drive out from Jacaranda.

Ziggy pulled me away and shoved my head into his neck so I couldn't look at the thing in the back of the truck. “Who is it, Tully?” Ziggy said.

It took some time for Tully to answer. “Head's pretty battered but it looks like Lucan Percell to me.”

“Oh no,” I whimpered. Lucan Percell was the man Clay had driven off his land for poaching the turtles along Saddle Creek. Lucan Percell had bagged about sixty soft-shell turtles when Clay caught him. When Clay called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission he was told that the mass hunting of soft-shell turtles was legal; only the gopher tortoise was protected. A long and heated war had begun between Clay and Lucan. Only Clay's threat to have Lucan Percell arrested for trespassing could keep him off Saddle Creek and keep the turtles safe.

It couldn't be a coincidence that Lucan Percell's body was found on Clay's Riverwood Ranch. “Oh no,” I said again. Trouble had surely come to visit.

Uncle Ziggy led me away, up onto the porch, shoving me down into one of the wicker chairs. He left without saying anything while I leaned forward, putting my head between my knees and took deep breaths.

“Drink this,” Uncle Ziggy ordered, holding out a glass of amber liquid. The whiskey burned all the way down. I handed it back to him and croaked, “More.”

“Nope, you got to stay sober.” Tully climbed the steps to the veranda.

“Great! Of all the times for you to turn into a tea-totaller on me. Just when I need a friend the most.”

“We have to decide what we're going to do.”

“I already know what I'm going to do. I'm going to call the sheriff.”

“Nope,” Tully disagreed. “I'm going to. I'm going to put the truck under the drive shed where it was and call the sheriff. Tell him I just found it there.”

I shook my head in denial. “It's my truck and I've been driving around Jacaranda all morning. People saw me. One thing I learned from Styles, no matter what you tell the police, or any other authorities, you're stuck with it. Any inconsistencies will come back to bite you.”

“You sure you don't want your dad and I to just take him out and bury him somewhere?” Uncle Ziggy asked. “Clay's got hundreds of acres of wilderness out there with more than one gator hole to drop him into. Even if the gators leave anything of him behind, cops will think he just had an accident. Everyone knows he poaches all 'round here.”

“Zig's got a point there.”

“Everyone knows he and Clay don't get on. You aren't listening; I'm going to tell them I found his body. Clay will be well out of it. No matter what happens, no one can think I killed him.”

“All right, don't get excited, we'll do whatever you want,” Tully said, patting my shoulder.

“Sure we will, sweetie,” Uncle Zig agreed, but he didn't sound like he thought it was a real good idea, more like he just wanted to keep me from totally losing it.

“Can I have another drink now?”

“Nope,” Tully said.

“Well, this is a hell of a time to go AA on me.”

“You need to stay clear-headed,” Tully said and went to look up the sheriff's number.