Ten Little Bloodhounds (15 page)

“I really think we should work together on this. I know all ten suspects. I have knowledge that would be valuable for you to know.”

“Sorry.”

“Will you please tell me why?” His voice was petulant and annoyed. He wasn’t taking me cutting him out of the loop with good grace.

“Certainly. I’m going to invade these people’s past and present life like it’s never been done before. If they think that Alyce spied on them, they’ll decide she was a kind ol’ aunt before I’m done. I can’t do the legwork personally, so operatives will and report to me. I don’t think a second party, you, and possibly a third, your secretary, should also know their secrets. You’ve admitted you have personal knowledge of most of them already.

“The important fact to remember is that
nine
of these people are innocent, and we assume one is guilty. They are all strangers to me and if they are innocent, I don’t want their personal lives aired to anyone, including you, if it is unnecessary. Do you get my drift?”

He did, but he sure didn’t like it. I could see him reluctantly swallow his objections. In his lawyering mode, he was probably already marshaling his thoughts for a future confrontation in which he could change my mind.

I thought I knew why he wanted to know every scrap of information I obtained. He knew that whoever ended up inheriting the fortune, the other nine would surely
contest the will. Knowledge is power. I personally didn’t give a fig which one inherited. I just didn’t want to give him information that could affect the outcome of a protracted court battle. Fair’s fair. As a stranger their secrets were safe with me if they weren’t the one who eliminated Miz C.

“I was going to say, keep me posted, but I understand that is not going to happen. So I’ll say, we’ll be talking in the future.” He gave me a frosty smile.

“You can count on it.”

I watched him walk across the tarmac toward the helicopter that was partially blocked from view by the corner of the grooming room.

Now I would get the answer to a pressing question: Will Rand still attempt to speak to me? My pride had dictated that I would rebuff his first attempt, but I was rooting for him to try again. I stood a long thirty seconds before I ducked back inside my office. I didn’t want to be caught waiting for him on the porch.

“Damn!” I had no sooner sat down at my desk when I heard the whine of the helicopter’s rotor increasing, ’til it was shattering the peace and quiet over my head. He was leaving, the schmuck! I gnashed my teeth in anger and disappointment. His ego was obviously in direct proportion with mine, big. Very big, maybe even bigger. At this rate, I’d never get to see that quaint little restaurant and the St. John’s River in the moonlight. A person could starve to death waiting for another invitation. I could dry up and blow away while we played silly games.

“What did he say?” Jasmine was breathing hard. She must have trotted across from the grooming room. She eyed me expectantly as she advanced into the room.

“Not a dang syllable!” I muttered. “He leaned against the grooming room and waved at me while I hid behind the curtain. I had Donnie Ray stop him from entering before Jackson. Afterward, I expected him to try again, but he flew away obviously sulking.”

“That sure reminds me of someone. Who could that be?”

Her head was cocked to the side and her eyes were sparkling with good humor.

“Don’t nag me, I feel rotten.”

“I’ll change the subject. I retrieved the info from the master spy. It’s in the car. Donnie Ray wants to name the last female puppy Caboose. You said this was going to be Judy’s last litter.”

“Over my dead body. We can’t call her the runt, either, she weighs the most.”

“Let’s discuss naming her over lunch. Hungry?”

“Getting thwarted always makes me hungry,” I declared.

Just after three, the detective agency based in Washington, D.C., called. The male caller identified himself when he was assured he was talking to me.

“Ms. Sidden, I’m Chester Adams. I’ll be your personal representative here at the agency. I will be handling your inquiries and instructing the operatives who will be securing the answers to your questions. If you’ll tell me the names of the people you would like to have a dossier on, I’ll get started.”

“Certainly,” I replied. He held while I found my list. I read the names of Miz Cancannon’s five nieces, their four husbands, and Rand.

“I want this as detailed as possible, by next Friday
morning. Call first and speak to me, then you can fax what you have on them. Never fax any information without checking first, so I will be the one receiving the information. Do not give out any information to anyone who calls for it if it isn’t me. The lawyer who is paying the freight is not privileged to receive any duplicates. Is this understood?”

“Absolutely. The best method is to use a code word, one of your choice, and it’s to be mentioned in your first sentence to me, or the call will be terminated.”

“Bobby Lee.”

“Very well. I would like to mention that six days is not enough time to completely cover every facet of their lives. An in-depth study will take longer.”

“How much longer?” I asked.

“It will depend on whether there are blanks in their histories, and if they lived or worked in Europe or Asia.”

“Fine. I’ll expect your call next Friday before ten
A.M.
If you don’t mind my asking, I seem to hear a Southern accent in your speech.”

“You do,” he answered. “I thought it had disappeared, but hearing your voice must have made me revert back to it. I spent half of my life right outside Atlanta, in a small town named Tucker. When I graduated from high school, I moved to D.C.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” I replied.

“Oh yes, I go back to visit several times a year, Mom, and old high school buddies.”

“No old sweethearts?”

“They have all vanished by either moving away or into marriage and motherhood.”

“Time marches on,” I commented. “You’ll get back to me next Friday?”

“I’ll call you by ten. Nice doing business with you, Ms. Sidden.”

“Jo Beth.”

“My name is Chester, but everyone calls me Chet.”

“Good-bye, Chet.”

I looked at the clock. I had been up since midnight but wasn’t sleepy. If I took a nap, it would mess up a good night’s sleep later on. I decided to go help Jasmine and Donnie Ray prepare the feed for the evening kennel rounds.

Windell was working, but he would leave at five. My masterpiece litter was throwing all our schedules out the window, but they were worth their weight in gold. I giggled aloud. Maybe the day they were born, but not now. Puppies doubled their weight in the first week. These sweethearts were filling out very nicely.

The phone rang as I was crossing the back porch. I hurried back.

“Hello.”

“May I speak to Ms. Jo Beth Sidden?”

“I’m Jo Beth Sidden.”

“We met briefly Thursday mid-morning, Ms. Sidden. My name is Captain Evan Danglish, USAF. Please don’t hang up until I tell you, I’m the good guy. I was with Colonel Rupert Hayes, USAF. He was the bad guy.”

“I’m still listening, Captain. How’s the colonel doing?”

“He’s muttering and scowling, as usual. I wanted to apologize for his behavior. Almost all Air Force personnel here at Moody are professionals, but we have a couple of rotten apples in our barrel. The colonel is one of them.”

“I accept your apology on behalf of the Air Force, Captain. This call wasn’t necessary, but I appreciate the effort. I bump into species like the colonel on a weekly basis. All is forgiven.”

“Thanks for understanding. I know you’re very busy, but I wondered if you could spare me a few minutes. I was the pilot of the missing plane. If it’s not found, I figured out that it will take me around two hundred and thirty-two years to pay for it out of my salary.”

I laughed. “Surely you jest?”

“Yes, ma’am, but until that plane is found and they determine the reason for the crash, my future as a pilot in the Air Force is on hold.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Captain, but there is nothing I can do to help you. Without a pinpoint location within a few hundred yards’ diameter, my bloodhounds couldn’t find it. With you seeing the plane going straight in, it could be buried completely, maybe as much as twenty-five feet deep. That’s just an estimate, however. I don’t know how to figure the speed and the terrain it encountered.

“It could be underwater, or entangled with huge cypress trees several hundred years old,
and
below ground several feet. For every yard the search area is widened in a circle, you could begin to multiply the hours of search needed by one thousand.”

“I was about three hundred feet up and looking right at her when she went in. You could call it a bird’s-eye view. Maybe I could describe the area? It’s crystal clear in my head and printed indelibly in my mind.”

I sighed. People can’t grasp the enormity of the swamp. I’d humor him a little longer. His career was in jeopardy, and he was hurting.

“Let’s say you can describe it. I can too, and I didn’t see the plane go in. It had lots of tall cypress, some water in small sloughs, a stagnant skim on a fairly large pond, acres and acres of planted slash pine, and lots of vines concentrated here and there almost covered in yellow leaves. From the air, it seemed the patches of vines were large areas of bright yellow flowers. The cypress and old growth trees had long strands of Spanish moss, all hanging from the south side, and the same amount drooping from the old growth section of long-leaf yellow pine. Sound familiar?”

“I couldn’t have described it better. It’s exactly what I saw. How did you know?”

“Because there are five hundred and fifty thousand
square acres
of the Okefenokee that look almost identical to the uninitiated and ones who are not flora experts. Does this put the impossible task more in perspective?”

“But … there was a tree I remember. I kept my eyes on it all the way down. I thought it could be used as a marker to find the spot. The plane crashed about thirty yards to the right of it.”

His voice quivered with desperation. He was now grasping at straws.

“And what was so special about this tree? Is it extra-tall? Full of limbs? It didn’t have any moss? Come on, Captain, you haven’t been listening.”

“I focused my eyes on it when I was following the plane’s straight-in approach. It … it was dead. Bone white, all the bark had fallen off. Tall, maybe forty feet.”

I blinked. There were hundreds of dead bone-white
trees still standing as if they were sentinels, guarding flora and fauna from encroaching chemical plants and careless hunters who built fires on dead grass in small clearings. I knew of one special one that had helped me once.

It was a fanciful thought, but I had felt safer sitting as close to it as I could—leaning against its dead trunk last October—when I was mantrailing Silvers, who had flipped out, shooting his mother and his first cousin and seriously wounding one of Hank’s deputies—but it couldn’t be
my
tree.

My tree had listed about five degrees, like it could give up the ghost any second and come slowly downward. A fallen guardian, the sound muffled by thick trees and a foot of humus. It had protected me from prowling scavengers, and at early dawn, the eager bow-hunters who crept in and sat in a tree stand and fired at any movement.

In the early predawn, I had patted its massive trunk and found Silvers less than two hours later sound asleep. It was an uneventful capture. My tree had a V in the top that looked like a two-pointed crown for the dead giant. It was possible it was still standing. Some stayed upright against all laws of gravity for several years.

“Ms. Sidden?” The captain was wondering if we had been disconnected.

“Sorry,” I replied, “I was daydreaming. Did your large dead tree have anything more unusual, maybe a few small white limbs near the top?”

“Yeah. No dead limbs, but the top had broken off in a distinctive V pattern, just like someone had carved a
notch in it. I saw it from the east. Facing it, the whole tree leaned to the left a bit. Not much, but it was noticeable.”

“Are you Irish by any chance, Captain?”

“No ma’am. I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

“Well, you certainly have the luck of the Irish. I know exactly where the tree stands that you described. In fact, I spent a miserable wet night at its base one night almost exactly one year ago.”

“Does that mean you can find the plane?” His voice was hoarse with excitement. “You think we have a chance?”

“If your extraordinary luck holds, it’s almost a dead cert. What are you doing next Tuesday morning? Care to come with me? We’ll go find that Viper of yours.”

“What should I tell the colonel?”

“Not a whisper to the colonel! In case you were giddy and got your coordinates wrong and got turned around, or the distance is greater from the tree to the plane than you estimated, it could take us a month of searching. I don’t enjoy looking the fool. We’ll have the exact location and a trail blazed to the nearest road before we tell the colonel anything.”

I explained to him how to dress, and how to handle the scent article. I told him to arrive at dawn, and to come alone. He promised he’d be here if he had to be AWOL. I didn’t doubt him. In fact, I pitied anyone who tried to stop him.

I
had relieved Wayne at ten the previous night and he in turn woke up at five, and ran me out of the birthing room at six. I had a long soak in the tub and then cooked myself a huge breakfast of canned hot biscuits, scrambled eggs, and bacon. I was feeling almost human. I yawned and fought the urge to crawl into bed and take a short nap.

I settled in my desk chair and got comfortable. The coming conversation with Hank would take a while. It seemed lately that I had to constantly soothe Hank’s ruffled feathers. He took offense more easily and took longer to forgive me. Hank wanted a wife and a family, preferably two sons and a daughter, and I was the one he wanted to marry.