Authors: Maggie Toussaint
Something rock-like.
In coastal Georgia, we had few rocks. Granted, an early settler might have placed a rock here, but what were the odds of me digging it up? No rocks had been unearthed near the big house, and they’d pushed mounds of dirt around, evening up the land, filling a natural swale where Carolina wanted the house sited.
I could pry the rock out of there. But there was something about the distinctive gray color that riveted me. Something barely detectable on a sensory level. Unease rolled through my gut, weighing me down, making it hard to breathe.
Should I touch the object?
Whatever it was, the energy coming from it was minimal. Was it plant matter from the roots I’d exhumed? Possibly. But I doubted that explanation.
More likely, it was a gray rock I’d found. Rocks had found their way to the Georgia coast as ship ballast during Colonial times. This could be a ballast rock.
Despite my logic, my unease mounted. After learning the hard way to trust my instincts, I respected them. Something about this hidden object tripped all my senses.
I could call someone. But who? And what would I say? I dug up a rock and it might be important? Who would believe that I was scared to touch a rock?
Get a grip, Baxley. It’s probably just a rock.
I fetched my new trowel and knelt beside the hole. I held my gloved hands about a foot over the object and concentrated, hoping that the closer proximity would give a stronger signal.
No change.
Only a faint wisp of energy.
Self-preservation wouldn’t let me dig unshielded. I fortified my senses with sturdy imagery and moved sandy soil away from the object, bit by bit. With each pass of the trowel, my nerves pinged.
The exposed shape was rounded like a summer melon. It didn’t resemble a polished rock. The smooth texture seemed bony.
I shivered. Was this the remains of something or someone? A lump formed in my throat.
Let it be an animal,
I wished silently. Let it be something other than human remains.
I lowered down on my belly and brushed away the remaining dirt with my gloved fingers. Stroke by stroke until the empty orbs of twin eye sockets stared back up at me.
There was no mistaking the species.
I’d found a human skull.
Senses reeling, I staggered away from the sandy hole toward the safety of my truck. I’d dug up a person. A dark shadow passed through me, icing my blood, disorienting me. The whine of insects had me cringing; the strength of the sunshine had me squinting.
I bolstered my mental barriers, dampening my extra senses, bringing my reaction to the skull back down to normal, if there was such a thing. Icy lightning coursed through my veins, and I panted like a pup.
Stop that. You’ll get light-headed and pass out, and there’s nobody for miles and miles.
I glanced at the tangled woods swathed in unrelenting shadows. What secrets did they hold?
My sweaty clothes blanketed the chill in my bones. I couldn’t fall apart now. I had to be strong. Help. I needed to summon help.
With trembling hands, I peeled off my leather gloves and fumbled for my cell. I went the wrong way on the alphabet until I found the sheriff’s contact information. I mashed the Send button so hard it was a wonder it sprang back out again.
Birds chirped.
The sun shone.
And those sightless eyes swam in my head.
When the sheriff growled his name into the phone, I nearly swooned with relief. “Wayne? I need you.”
“Babe, those words are music to my ears,” Sheriff Wayne Thompson’s voice roughened with delight. “Your place?”
My stomach clenched with disgust. Why was he trying to make this into something it wasn’t? I stroked the green pendant at my neck and felt better. “Get your head straight. I’m out on Misery Road. Out at that new place Carolina Byrd built.”
“Oh, yeah. What’s it called, Meadows or something? Wait. That’s not it. The Marshmallow place.”
“Mallow. She named it Mallow. I’m doing her landscaping, and I dug something up.” The penetrating image of the sightless eyes flashed into my head, triggering another glacial blast down my spine. I shivered. “Correction. I dug someone up.”
I listened to the thick silence with growing trepidation. My grip tightened on the phone. “Wayne? You there?”
“Dang, Baxley, my boy’s got a big basketball game tonight. Why do you keep making work for me? Can’t you cover it back up, and we’ll look at it tomorrow?”
His callous remark burned all the way down my throat. Tears blurred my vision. “Get real.”
He sighed. “I hate real. Real cuts into my hunting and fishing.”
My gaze stopped on the weeping cherry tree. I’d hoped to be finished with this job today. Carolina had made it crystal clear I wouldn’t get paid until the job was done. I needed this money. “Do your job, Sheriff. Or would you rather I call in the state boys? I’m sure they’d be happy to come take a look at my dead person.”
“Hell, no. Don’t do that. A man’s got a right to moan and groan a bit. I’ll do my job.” He swore again. “My wife’s gonna skin me alive. Hold on a minute while I have Tamika dispatch patrol units to your location.”
I sagged against the side of my truck, wishing Carolina Byrd had put her entryway in a different location. What were the odds that the one place she wanted her tree planted was right on top of a dead body? And the body had been down there a long time. Those stout roots overlaying the skull hadn’t sprung up overnight.
“Baxley? You there? Virg and Ronnie are on their way. They’re out by the four-way stop.”
Exhaling a shaky breath, I blinked the tears from my eyes. Ten minutes and help would arrive. Ten minutes and I wouldn’t be responsible for this dead person. I could hold on for ten minutes. “Okay.”
“What can you tell me? Can you identify the body?”
Shadows lengthened around me. A marsh hen cackled eerily. “There’s not much left. And I only exposed part of the skull. I don’t know what else is down there.”
“That means visual identification won’t work. We don’t have any local missing persons except for the Gilroy kid, and I doubt she’d be planted out there. It might be someone who was passing through. Say, do me a favor. Use your psychic mojo stuff and get me an ID.”
My knees trembled. “I don’t want anything to do with this. Plus, soon as I get involved, you’ll tell me I’m interfering with police business.”
“Go for it. I don’t see the harm here. If we’re down to bones, it’s more than likely a cold case. Probably not a homicide, or we’d have heard about it while we were growing up.”
I gripped the phone tighter, wishing it was as easy to control my knee-jerk reaction to the naïve sheriff. “This isn’t something I do on command. I’m not a parlor trick people trot out at their convenience.”
“Don’t get your panties in a knot. I just thought you could save us all some time and money.”
A few months back,Wayne had asked me to become a deputy. I’d refused the job because being surrounded by the negative energy of criminals wasn’t how I wanted to spend my workday. I much preferred the good vibes from plants and animals.
But that was before my well pump starting acting up, before I noticed that my daughter’s new-last-fall school pants were too short, before the dentist said Larissa needed braces. Any one of those expenses would break a single parent’s budget.
The idea of receiving a steady paycheck had been worming its way deeper in my thoughts. With my deceased husband’s Army benefits tied up in governmental red tape because there was no body, I had to be creative to pay the bills. December had been a good month, chock-full of pet-sitting jobs, but January, February, and March stretched out before me like winter doldrums.
I cleared my throat and jumped in head first. “Speaking of my special talent, I’ve been thinking. What are the chances of me hiring on as a consultant for the sheriff’s office?”
“We don’t employ any consultants.”
Despite his flat tone, I forged ahead with my idea. “This could benefit both of us. I need money; you need help solving cases. So? If I help you with cases, you’ll pay me?”
He hesitated for a moment. “I’ll think about that. You could run up a lot of hours, sitting on your tail, in the name of trying to solve a case. Even if I used discretionary funding, it would eat up money the department could spend on equipment or supplies. You’d have to close cases before I paid you, and we don’t have many murder cases.”
Way down Misery Road I saw flashing lights on two vehicles. Sirens blared. I huffed out my displeasure. “Dang. This doesn’t bode well for my checkbook balance. You can’t promise to pay me unless I close the case for you. I can’t promise that kind of result.”
He sighed heavily. “That Virg and Ronnie comin’?”
The warbling sirens were louder now. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
I took inventory. My heart rate was back to normal. My stomach wasn’t threatening to erupt. My hands weren’t dripping with sweat. “I’m good.” I meant it. “Look, why don’t we do a test run? If I contribute to solving this case, you’ll hire me as a consultant.”
“What benefits come with a test run?”
“You’ll get the benefit of a closed case.” My eyes narrowed as another implication hit home. “Get your mind out of the mud-hole. I’m not offering fringe benefits.”
He laughed, a low sensual caress in my ear. “That’s the Baxley I know. Do your woo-woo show for Virg and Ronnie. I won’t have to stay out there very long if you solve the case, babe.”
I had to be crazy to voluntarily spend more time around this oversexed man. “And another thing. Stop treating me like your next sexual conquest.”
“A tiger shark can’t shed its stripes.” He hesitated. “At least with me you know what you’ve got.”
The line prickled with silence. The hair on the back of my neck stirred. “What does that mean?”
“It means what it means.”
I could do without Wayne’s sexual innuendos. I could do without his condescension about my extrasensory abilities. But I couldn’t walk away from this potential income stream. Once this landscaping job here at Mallow wrapped up, I would be hurting.
I’d handled Wayne fine in high school. I could handle the man he’d grown into as well. I wouldn’t cave because this was difficult. I’d show them all. Life may have socked me in the teeth, but I was coming up swinging.
The sirens stopped. Car doors opened. Boots clomped on pavement. The presence of two deputies should have filled me with relief, but my insides knotted at the coming ordeal.
Virg Burkhead was thinner than Ronnie Oliver, but both of them hadn’t missed a meal in years. Virg was a few inches taller than me, about six feet in all, while Ronnie Oliver’s brown eyes were level with mine. Both deputies wore khaki-colored uniforms with dark brown trim and snazzy gold accoutrements. And guns, of course.
Couldn’t miss the firepower strapped to their generous waists.
“Hey, Baxley.” Virg hitched up his sagging pants as he approached. “Heard you dug up a body. Didn’t your mama ever tell you not to do that?”
I’d had an atypical childhood, growing up in an aging hippie and free-love household. The rules were few: be kind to your karma, love everyone, live each day like it was your last. Even so, I played along with Virg. “Don’t get me started on my mama. And I don’t know as I found a whole body, just a skull.” I motioned toward the hole in the ground.
Ronnie leaned over the hole, spat tobacco out the side of his mouth. “Wouldja take a look at that? Holy Mother of God, we’ve got a dead person on our hands. Why is this happening? I didn’t sign on to work around dead people. The cap’n assured me we didn’t get any dead people.”
“Wayne don’t know everything.” Virg pushed his way in front of Ronnie and peered in the hole. “Lookee there. You’re right. It’s a deadie. I wanted to go to the game tonight, too. My wife will be pissed.”
“Your wife is going to kill you, and that’s a fact,” Ronnie said. “We need to cordon off the area. If this is a crime scene, we need to know who had access.”
“Everyone had access, knucklehead. We’re right beside the main road.” Virg chucked Ronnie in the head and scowled at me. “What is it with your family and dead people? You some kind of a witch of somethin’?”
If I had superhuman powers, I would have tossed him across the road for insulting me. I hated labels of any kind. But I knew things I couldn’t explain. Like I knew Virg was scared of me. His fear leaked through my shields. An acrid stench wafted from his armpits to my nose.
I doubled my protective barriers and moved toward him. “You’ve known me your whole life. I went to school with your sister and tutored your brother. I’m no more a witch than you are. I’m unlucky enough to have been told to dig this hole in front of that wall. I didn’t set out to find any dead body. It found me.”
My outburst seemed to surprise him. He rubbed his chin. “Well, dang. The sheriff is right. You are one feisty woman.”
I jabbed a finger in his chest. “What is it with you men? Am I a threat to you? All I’m doing is trying to earn a living. I don’t understand why men see that as aggression. Should I sit home and wait for the welfare fairy to find me? Should I hope a big strong man sweeps in to take care of me?”
“Sorry, ma’am.” Virg backpedaled toward his cruiser. Ronnie, too.
It was my turn to curse. “Ya can’t leave.”
Virg and Ronnie crabbed away from me. “No, ma’am. We’re going to update dispatch and summon the investigator and the coroner. Then we’ll secure the scene.”
God help us. If this was the state of our crime-solving force, Sinclair County was in big trouble. Two grown men running from one puny woman. They each had me by a hundred pounds, maybe more. Plus they were both armed with guns and pepper spray, and if I wasn’t mistaken, Virg had a Taser on his belt, too.
The deputies holed up in Virg’s cruiser. Anger and disgust rolled through me in waves. I kicked the ground with my boots, sending a spray of loose sand toward the skull. The men were acting like idiots, but fear made people stupid.
So did anger.
Anger made me react first and think later. Not a good plan for someone with something to hide. Only who was I hiding from? The world? Or myself?