Authors: Kathryn Meyer Griffith
The whispering continued and became louder. It was coming closer. She could make out it was a male and a female by their voices. She recognized the woman’s annoying voice. It was the same woman who’d tried to pressure her into selling her trailer before the fire, and most likely the same man with the sour look on his face, with her. The two suits. What the hell were they doing out here this time of night? Up to no good, she thought. She concentrated and listened to what they were saying.
“You sure this is going to work?”
The woman’s voice.
“You torching her trailer didn’t.”
“I was playing it too safe. I didn’t really want to outright kill the old crone, but now I don’t care. It’s like the others. We’ll lose that humongous bonus if she doesn’t sell…and now that we know she won’t cooperate and we have a final deadline, she has to go.”
“You’re so cold-hearted, Leonard.”
“No, it’s just business. They’re only old people anyway. No big loss. They’d be dying soon enough. We’re just helping them along a little sooner, Shelia.”
A chilling laugh.
“The money’s worth it. I’d knock off a hundred old farts for what we’re being paid.”
She thought Frank had told her their names were–she fought to recall and finally the names came to her–Scott and Maria? That wasn’t their real names then. And they had been the ones who’d burned her home to ashes. The bastards! Now they wanted her dead, too. Wait until she told Frank. He’d make them pay for what they’d done. And Tina? Had they been responsible for her death, as well? She had the feeling they had and listening to them conspire to do away with her now gave her the shivers. It was a shame the big stick she used for defense had burned up in her trailer or she would have jumped out of that tent then and there and smashed them over their stupid heads with it. They more than deserved it.
“And how was I to know the stubborn old witch would rebuild? But I guarantee this will work. She’ll probably have them put the new trailer right where the other one used to be. She’ll spend the night in the trailer even with no furniture. Old people are so predictable. All I have to do is place the bomb in the ground strategically below the area where the gas lines will be so it’ll explode the structure. I’ll time it for the middle of tomorrow night. I’ll plant the bomb just deep enough so the blast will look like a gas line accident. The earth’s all torn up and fresh anyway. No one will notice we put something in it. It happens all the time. A new house and a bad connection and BOOM! And the sheriff is stupid enough to fall for it. Another accident, pure and simple. He won’t be the wiser. It’ll be the last straw.”
“And if the old witch doesn’t actually die in the explosion? She escapes again?”
the woman questioned.
“Still a win-win. She’ll finally sell us her land. I guarantee it. If she doesn’t, I’ll grab her and take her for a ride she’ll never come back from.”
“It better work or I’m not going to be happy. We only need three more lousy parcels of land here to meet our quota. I want to get out of this podunk town and back to the city. This place with all its weird people, mists and woods gives me the creeps.”
“It will work. Then we’ll visit Tina Thompson’s nephew again and get some sort of commitment on paper so when the house is his he’ll sell it to us. If it’s a signed legal document, the corporation will accept it, since they don’t plan on beginning construction for some time.”
“Sounds good to me. Let’s do this and get the hell out of here. I want to get back to the hotel and order a big fat steak from room service and snuggle up in that soft bed for the rest of the night.”
“You going to order me a steak, too? Let me spend the night in that soft bed with you?”
“If do this right and you’re lucky, it’s a possibility.”
The two were moving away from her and Myrtle couldn’t catch much more of what they were saying. Something about the third and last property they had to get.
So they were going to snuff her no matter what? So they had another victim in mind? My, my, my.
Then came the sound of a shovel digging into the ground, more whispers and heavy breathing. Myrtle kept real still, listening; her eyelids drooping. She must have fallen asleep or something because suddenly the sun was rising in its full glory and when she looked out of her hiding place the two schemers were gone. She was alone again.
Had it all been a dream? Not likely, she thought. She knew what she’d heard was real.
Scooting out of the tent she searched for where they’d left the bomb and found it only because she knew what she was looking for. She was bending over the freshly disturbed patch of dirt, a little darker than the rest with moisture, when Frank drove up in his truck.
“Myrtle, you had us worried,” he said loudly as he strode up to her. “You weren’t at Tina’s place and after all that’s happened lately you know you should be careful.” In the new sunlight he was unshaven and looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed. But she probably looked even worse in her rumpled clothes and uncombed hair. So what. At her age she didn’t care what she looked like.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to upset you and Abigail. I just had to be home, that’s all, on my own land. But it’s a good thing I was here last night,” she pointed to the tent which could now be partially seen under the branches she’d piled on top of it, “because if I hadn’t been, by tomorrow night I would have been blown to smithereens.”
“What are you talking about?” Frank stopped feet away from her. She could see the relief on his face. Ah, it was so sweet that he cared about her.
Myrtle pointed her thumb at the soil by her feet. “Those two corporate suits that have been buying up all the land around here paid me a clandestine visit a little bit ago. They didn’t know I was camping out on my property. I was hid. But they buried a bomb right here.”
“A bomb? Why would they do that?” Frank was examining the ground in the area she’d indicated. His expression was priceless. Not many things unhinged the old cop, but she could see this did.
“So it’d blow my new modular home up tonight when I was sleeping in it.
KAPOOW!
Problem solved for them. And me? I’d be in a thousand bloody pieces and dead for sure. Then they could swoop in and steal my land. The S.O.Bs.”
Frank, clever as he was, would understand the implications. “It’d look like another convenient accident? A gas line explosion or something?”
“You got it.”
“Are you sure it was the same two people from the Lansing Corporation?”
“I couldn’t prove it. I didn’t actually see them, it was too dark. But I’m pretty sure it was them because I recognized their voices. It was that man and that woman. I’d bet a breakfast at McDonald’s on it.” She sent him a sly sideways glance above her grin. “I like the sausage biscuits, and I love their coffee, in case you ever want to know.”
Frank didn’t answer her but stepped away from the uneven dirt as if a nest of poisonous snakes had buried themselves there. “I’d better call the sheriff and tell him to bring out the bomb squad.”
“I don’t think our town has a bomb squad,” Myrtle retorted sarcastically.
“Then he’ll have to borrow another town’s bomb squad. Either way someone will have to come out here, dig up, and diffuse the thing.”
“Better make it quick, Frank,” Myrtle quipped, shielding her eyes with her hand, as she looked out at the road in front of them which faced her property. “It looks like my house is here.”
And she was right. Coming over the rise of the road about a half mile away was an eighteen wheeler pulling a section of house on a flatbed behind it and there was another truck behind the first one also pulling a flatbed.
“Hot dog!” Myrtle exclaimed and started trundling towards the road. Her arthritic legs were acting up again but that didn’t stop her. Pain was all in the mind anyways. She pushed through it as she always did. “It’s about time. I’ve been waiting for this.”
When she turned to look at Frank he was already on his cell phone blabbing everything to either the sheriff or one of his merry men. Soon they’d be swarming over the place asking their typical idiotic questions and looking as dumb as always. Mearl’s deputies were sure clueless, or, at least, most of them were. They ought to hire Frank. He was worth ten of them easy.
She didn’t care about any of that as long as they got rid of the bomb so the people from the modular homes could set up her new house. She couldn’t wait to get into it. She’d been too long without one. As much as she liked her rambling she also liked to have a place to lay her head at night away from prying eyes. Some place the ghosts couldn’t get to her.
The first truck, with a raucous squeal of airbrakes, came to a stop on the road and she went to meet the man who climbed out of it to explain they’d have to wait some–until the bomb was gone leastways. Once the cops got there and while they waited for them to dig it up she’d sweet-talk Frank into taking her to McDonald’s for breakfast. Yeah, that’s what she’d do.
Whoa, was she hungry. Thinking about one’s own demise could do that to a person.
Chapter 12
Frank
He couldn’t believe someone had planted a damn bomb on Myrtle’s land and it would have gone off beneath her new home the next night and killed her. He couldn’t fathom the gall, cold-bloodedness and greed of those miscreants who were passing themselves off as real human beings and the sadistic game they were playing or the company that would have hired them.
Sheriff Mearl had called in the bomb squad from St. Louis, which was the closest big city, and they’d dug up and defused the bomb. It’d been a mean package all right–a large briefcase of C4 plastic explosives packed in tightly with a timer–and would have done the job ten times over. It would have blown the modular house to kingdom come with Myrtle in it.
The anger inside him, that had been brewing since the beginning of the troubles, and now also thinking of the missing and murdered people, threatened to explode inside him like that bomb would have done.
Frank was going to apprehend those two suits and bring them to justice as well as the unethical corporation behind them. After what Myrtle had overheard the night before, he was almost positive they were guilty of everything shady that had been taking place. Now he just had to find a way to trap them and prove it.
And he had an idea.
Parking in front of Abby’s house he turned off the truck and sat there a minute thinking. The sun was lowering into the horizon and the world was awash in a pinkish golden light. It’d been the warmest day, near eighty-six degrees and sunny, so far that year, and it had possessed the first taste of summer. It was a shame its beauty had been marred by bombs and wicked people.
Abby let him in when he knocked and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m so glad you’re here. I want to hear about everything that happened today. Every detail.”
“And you will.”
“Where’s Myrtle?” Abby asked, tossing a glance over her shoulder at him, as he trailed her into the kitchen.
“She’s settling into her new house and she’s as happy as a child with an expensive new toy.” Frank ambled over to the coffee machine, poured a cup and sat down at the table. It felt good to sit. It’d been a long day.
“You think that’s safe for her after what happened out there today?”
“She’s safe enough. The bomb squad got rid of the bomb and Sheriff Mearl, for once, did the responsible thing. He left a deputy to guard over her and her new domicile for the time being. The officer will be stationed indefinitely outside her house in a squad car.
“I also gave Myrtle an extra cellphone of mine I had reactivated today so she’d have a way to call me or the police if she needed help. Her home phone hasn’t been wired up yet.”
“That was thoughtful of you, Frank. That old lady has gone through enough. At least, she’ll have protection now. I guess she’ll be all right.”
“We can only hope. I wouldn’t put anything past those two yahoos from Lansing. They’re pure evil as far as I’m concerned, doing what they’ve been doing to the old people. It’s got to stop.”
“Of course it does. What happens now?”
“Like I said, I have a plan. I still have the telephone number from their card and my alias of Frank Stanus I can use–unless they’ve looked me up and discovered Tina’s nephew doesn’t really exist. In that case they won’t answer the phone or they will hang up on me. If they do answer I’ll attempt to lure them out to Tina’s house again, the police will be waiting, and they will be taken in for questioning. They won’t get away this time.”
“You believe that will work?”
“All I can do is try, Abby.”
“Good luck and be careful. They might not appreciate being tricked.”
“Most murderers don’t. But I’ll be cautious. My police backup will be hiding upstairs and I’ll be armed, as well.”
“When are you going to do this?”
“I’ll call them tomorrow. I already have it arranged with the sheriff. He’s sending out Deputy Stevens to assist me.” Frank got another cup of coffee and was eying the pie under the glass cake cover.
Without asking, Abby cut him a slice and placed it on the table before him, along with a fork. She laid a hand over his. “I don’t want anything happening to you.”
Frank pulled her face down to his and laid a soft kiss on her lips. “I know that, honey. I’ll be careful, promise.
“Have you all had supper yet? Where are the kids?”
“We had supper already. I’d just got done cleaning up the dishes before you got here. Nick is at his friend Freddy’s house studying for a history test–or so he says–though I think they’re calling this girl Nick likes and doing all the other nonsensical things teenagers do. And Laura is upstairs in her room doing who-knows-what. She got home from working at The Delicious Circle, ate quickly and disappeared into her room. If you listen you can hear the music coming through the door. She’ll end up going to bed early.” Abby smiled. “Her new job is whipping her butt.”
“Does she like working for Kate?”