Rock-a-Bye Bones (20 page)

It was a quandary. Cece was likely at Playin' the Bones with her man, Jaytee. And that's where Scott needed to be also. “Harold would be great, if he isn't busy. He can bring Roscoe for a play date with Sweetie Pie.”

It was pointless for me to attempt to escape adult supervision. I would only make life hard for DeWayne if I protested or delayed.

“I'll give him a call. I'm sorry, Sarah Booth.”

“Duty calls, and I'm fine. Sweetie Pie is right here with me. And Pluto, the cat with the killer claws. We're fine. I'll enjoy a visit with Harold. Have you heard anything more about Gertrude?”

DeWayne cleared his throat. “No other sightings. Sarah Booth, she's hiding somewhere close. She comes out to get the rumors started and then runs back in her hidey-hole. She's cunning, and she's planning something, and whatever it is, you aren't going to like it.”

My gut clenched in a way that told me DeWayne's predictions were probably true. “I'm on alert.” I slid the kitchen door latch as I talked. With Coleman in the house, I hadn't felt the chill of apprehension. Now, though, I was on edge.

“Harold should be there shortly. If there's a problem, I'll come pick you up and take you to Fitler with me.”

“Okay.” I'd made it to the front door and snapped on the porch lights. The day had slipped into darkness so complete the lights illuminated the porch and nothing else. I bolted the door until Harold arrived. As much as I hated to involve my friends in what could be a dangerous scenario, I didn't want to be alone.

Gertrude was crazy. And she hated me.

My hand was still on the door lock when Sweetie Pie materialized at my side. She growled and inserted herself between the door and me. When I looked down, Pluto was there, too, back arched.

Someone, or something, was outside my home.

 

16

I eased to the sidelight on the right of the heavy oak door and peered out. I'd never seen such a black night. Despite the inky darkness that seemed to drink all light, everything was normal. My car was parked at the front steps. The wind blew a few dead leaves across the gray boards of the porch. Typical November night. Everything was fine. My imagination had gotten the best of me.

I petted Sweetie and rumpled her ears. “Take it easy, girl. We're both on edge.” Pluto was not a cat to be cozied out of his wariness. When I reached to stroke his sleek black fur, he growled low and deep.

“It's okay,” I told him, pulling back the sheer curtain at the sidelight so he could see out unobstructed. “No one is there.”

A long shadow stretched across the porch where none had been before. It moved toward the door. It had a head, torso, arms, and legs. The animals were correct—someone was on the porch.

I pressed my back against the door, my thoughts like rodents trapped in a cage, running madly. I'd foolishly left my gun in the trunk of the car. I was careless. I didn't bring it inside when I got home. I'd violated one of the first rules of those who kept a gun for protection: if it wasn't accessible, it was useless.

Footsteps scuffled at the door, and beside me, the brass knob turned to the right, then to the left. The door was locked and refused to open.

The knob rattled with such force I almost cried out. I jumped away from the door but knew better than to race up the stairs and trap myself on the upper floors. Instead, I rushed to the kitchen, Sweetie Pie and Pluto at my side.

The first thing I did was check the dead bolt and latch the doggie door so Sweetie and Pluto couldn't hurl themselves into the yard and possible danger. I found the biggest knife in the kitchen and gripped it tight. Close-contact defense wasn't what I considered a good idea. I far preferred the option of shooting the intruder at twenty paces. Without my pistol, that wasn't going to happen. The knife was the best weapon I had.

My cell phone was upstairs in my bedroom, and the only landline was in the detective agency office on the other side of the house. I wasn't trapped in the kitchen—I had options—but I wasn't in the best place, either.

Several of my coats hung in the mudroom, and I gathered my warmest clothes and changed into paddock boots. A flashlight was a necessity, and I slipped the brightest one into my jacket pocket. It was cold outside, and if I had to hide on the property, I wanted to be warm and able to see.

What I was doing my damnedest not to do was wonder who was outside my house. At the top of my dread list was Gertrude Strom. She was out to get me, and she had the courage of the insane. There was another possibility, though. What if it was someone involved with the baby? After all, the infant had been left at Dahlia House. Maybe whoever left her wanted Libby back? That thought was more frightening than facing Gertrude armed only with a knife.

Sweetie paced in the kitchen, going from the back door to the dining room door, which I had also bolted. It was a swinging door, and sometime in the past, when my father was a child and careened through the house, his mother had put a thumb bolt to stop the kids from knocking each other out with the door. Now it served the purpose of keeping anyone who'd gotten inside the house out of the kitchen. Of course it was only a wooden door. It wouldn't keep bullets out.

My watch showed only five minutes since DeWayne had called. My concern was that Harold would drive right into a trap. If this was Gertrude, she would shoot my friends, knowing that was as good as hurting me.

The shrill cry of one of my horses came from the field behind the house.

I ran to the window of the mudroom and searched the blackness outside the barn. The horses were not confined; they were free in the pastures. It would be hard for a stranger to catch them, but they were vulnerable if a madwoman meant to harm them.

Clutching the knife and with no further thought, I stampeded out the back door and toward the sound. Horse hooves pounded into the dirt, and in the near blackness I could make out my three horses bucking and kicking. At what I had no idea. If Gertrude had done something to my horses, I would kill her. She would suffer death, even if it took me the rest of my life.

This was probably what she hoped to achieve—to force me out of the house where I was protected and into the open where I was a target. I didn't waste time figuring out her plan.

Reveler was near the fence, and he reared and pawed the air. I froze. If he came down on the wooden fence with his forelegs, he could be crippled for life. What in the hell was making the horses react so? I couldn't see anything in the pasture with them.

Sweetie had remained by my side, but she caught scent of something on the wind. Her hackles rose and a deep, fierce growl erupted from her throat. Then she was gone. She streaked across the open yard and jumped through the fence. In a moment I heard her hunting bay echoing from the empty cotton fields. She was in hot pursuit of something.

Pluto took a position at my right side. His arched back told me he, too, sensed danger. He turned slowly in all directions.

When we both turned back to the house, I saw her. Gertrude Strom stood on the back steps at the kitchen door. Her wiry red hair caught the yellow glow of the porch light. She wore a big coat and sensible shoes, and she had a gun in her hand pointed at me.

“Run!” I yellowed to Pluto. I darted right, away from the horses, as the first shot rang out in the night. I heard the bullet smack into a fence post and I rolled like I'd seen on some crazy cop video. It had looked silly at the time, but now I realized, as a target, that it behooved me to duck, spin, tumble, and scramble.

“Gertrude!” I yelled as I ducked behind the barn. “I'm going to kill you.”

“You can try.”

If I'd doubted it was her, I recognized her voice. “You're insane.”

“Isn't that your worst nightmare, Sarah Booth? I
am
crazy enough to do anything. Just like this—showing up at your house when you're unprotected. How about I kill you in your own yard?”

Talking to her only allowed her to draw a bead on my location. I eased into the interior of the barn. Pluto was a shadow as he raced ahead of me and jumped on the ladder up to the hayloft. I'd seen too many horror movies where the bad guy shot holes into the floor of the hayloft to want to follow the cat. There wasn't really another choice. If I stayed below, without a gun to shoot back, I was an easy target. Maybe there was something in the hayloft, like a pitchfork, that I could hurl at Gertrude.

“I wouldn't be counting on any of your friends coming to the rescue, Sarah Booth. This is between you and me.”

She was a middle-aged woman with flabby arms, a bad dye job, and wire-rimmed glasses. How she had become the Leonarda Cianciulli of Sunflower County, I had no idea. All I knew was that if I wasn't very careful and extremely lucky, I would end up in Gertrude's bar soap and teacakes. Leonarda had devised truly clever ways of disposing of the bodies of her victims. Gertrude was just as diabolical and twice as nuts. And I was the prime target for her ire.

“Come out, Sarah Booth. Come out and take your medicine. I would hate to hurt one of those beautiful horses just to get your attention.”

She was evil. And she was taunting me. I kept quiet. If she didn't know where I was, she might focus on finding me instead of trying to hurt my pets. Speaking of, Pluto nestled against me in the hay. He was not hiding—he was waiting for his chance. Pluto plotted his attacks. I could only hope Sweetie Pie stayed away. She'd sailed across the pasture chasing whatever had been frightening the horses.

Gertrude's voice cut through the night. “Oh, that pretty gray. That's the one you rode over to my house with that bitch partner of yours. I wonder what he'd fetch at the meat buyer. At least thirty cents a pound? Where is Tinkie? She and Oscar took a private plane ride this afternoon.”

How the hell was Gertrude keeping tabs on us when she was a phantom? No one on the west side of the state seemed able to arrest her, yet she knew the most intimate details of our lives.

“Sarah Booth, I'm going to mess up your life. I came here in person to tell you. That movie star man threw you over after he realized I'd left him a cripple. I'm going to do the same to everyone who cares about you until you're all alone. Then I'm going to make you pay.”

For what? I'd never done anything to her. She had a stupid idea that my mother had betrayed a confidence—but that had never happened. Never. I'd tried to talk to Gertrude, but it was pointless. Her reality came strictly from her own twisted thought processes. She was a victim. She'd been wronged. No matter that it was all a fantasy. She still intended to make me and all my friends pay.

Car lights swung down the driveway and swept across the barn. The purring motor of Harold's sports car stopped after he'd parked behind my car. I could hear the radio playing a new Jason Isbell song. Harold had impeccable taste in music and really bad timing for his own safety.

“Oh, company is here, Sarah Booth. It's that handsome banker friend. How about I give him the surprise of his life?”

I couldn't hide like a desperate rat while Harold walked into Gertrude's snare. I ran around the stacks of square bales and hurried to the loft widow. I pushed it open. “Harold, watch out! Gertrude is here and she has a gun.”

Harold dropped behind his car, and a streak of frizz and gristle took off toward the barn. Roscoe was on the hunt. “Get Roscoe. Gertrude is insane!”

I ducked back in, expecting her to take aim and plug me. But there was nothing. Not a sound. Roscoe set up a bark, but he stopped at the barn. He stared into the night, jumping up and down with the ferocity of his barking. In a moment Sweetie Pie joined him, baying as if she were on the trail of a Baskerville.

Risking a hole in my head, I crept to the edge of the loft door and glanced down. Harold was behind his car. Sweetie Pie and Roscoe had stopped at the edge of the driveway and were looking toward the road. The chain of events was obvious. Gertrude had parked along the verge and walked across the front pasture to get to Dahlia House undetected. She'd left the same way. She'd come and gone with such ease.

In the back pasture, the horses had settled down. I don't know what Gertrude did to them, but once I was positive she wasn't playing possum and had truly vacated the premises, I'd check them over thoroughly.

“Sarah Booth,” Harold called. “Are you hurt?”

“No. And you?”

“Embarrassed. I should have had my shotgun. DeWayne said Gertrude was on the loose, but I never believed she'd show up here.”

“Did you see her?”

“No.” He slowly stood up behind the car. “I didn't see anyone. And I didn't see a vehicle. Are you sure it was Gertrude?”

“Without a doubt. I'll be right down.” I made my way back through the hay and down the ladder to the floor. Harold was waiting for me.

“Gertrude isn't a spring chicken.” Harold put an arm on my shoulder as he flipped on the barn lights and examined the interior of the barn. “How is she running all over the place and avoiding capture?”

“That's the sixty-four-million-dollar question, isn't it?” Aggravation burned like salt in a wound. “She could have killed me, but she didn't. She's playing a game and having a great time.”

I filled three buckets with grain and poured them into the horses' stalls. Reveler, Miss Scrapiron, and Lucifer came on the run. While they ate I examined every inch of them. The only thing I could find were a few scratches on Reveler's back legs. Tomorrow, when it was daylight, I would check the pasture for brambles.

Harold patiently watched as I finished my chores. When the buckets were back in place and the horses turned out, he put his arms around me. “Calm down. Everything is okay.”

I realized then how terrified I'd been—for him and my animals more than myself. Gertrude had damaged someone I loved. She'd changed his life irrevocably. Tears pushed against my eyelids, and I leaned against Harold and let him rub my back through my thick coat. “She is going to kill me if she can, and she's going to hurt every one of you. Somehow she knows what each of us is doing. She knew Tinkie and Oscar had flown somewhere.”