Dust danced in the streaming light coming from a single window. There was a cot next to one wall. A multicolored Seminole blanket folded neatly at the head of the cot. On the blanket was an eagle feather. I knelt down and looked carefully at the feather. I spotted a long gray hair on the blanket.
The room grew darker as storm clouds blocked the sun. There was a clap of thunder and rain began to beat the aluminum trailer like a thousand drumsticks. I sat on the cot, laid my gun down, and picked up the eagle feather. Holding it, my hand trembled. I could see dried blood at the base of the quill.
Later that night the rain tapered to a gentle drizzle. After I fed Max, I poured two ounces of Irish whiskey and took down a photograph of my wife Sherri from the old river rock mantle. I walked to the porch and sat. A whippoorwill sounded across the river. A sonata of frogs filled the rainy night air. Under a cone of light spilling from the kitchen onto the porch, I looked at Sherri’s face. I touched the image, my fingers moving across cold glass. I longed for her warmth, her smile, her laugh. God, how I missed her.
We were on a much-delayed vacation. Sailing from Miami to Key Largo. It was later in the afternoon and the sky was splashed in purples and gold. The sails stretched in a southeast wind. Eternity made a whoosh…whoosh…whoosh sound cutting through water, the setting sun reflecting the blush of a twilight sky. Sherri held the ropes near the bowsprit, her hair dancing in the wind. Suddenly, on both sides of the boat, two porpoises began leaping out of the water in unison.
Sherri laughed. “Look, Sean! Not only do they have a smile on their faces, it’s in their eyes. What a fabulous way they see the world around them.”
Six months later, she was in a hospital bed. Through her fight with ovarian cancer, the chemo treatments, an arsenal of pills, the constant blood work, her eyes never lost their light. The last week before Sherri’s death, she asked me to take her home. She wanted to be in our bedroom, surrounded by her books, little Max curled up next to her.
The night Sherri died I held her hand and wiped the perspiration from her face. She said, “Remember the dolphins, Sean?”
“I remember,” I said, trying to be strong when my insides were tearing apart.
“Remember their smiles…let it remind you how to smile. Somewhere…you’ve lost that…I miss it in you…promise me two things, Sean. Promise me you’ll move away from the dark side — the side you enter to try and make a difference. You need to reclaim yourself. And that’s where you will make the difference in the lives of others. And promise me you’ll watch over Max. She loves you almost as much as I do.” Her hand trembled as she stroked Max, who had snuggled next to her.
I leaned over and softly kissed Sherri’s lips. They were cool. She smiled one last time as I looked into her eyes and saw the light fade.
I placed her picture on the porch table, sipped the whiskey and felt it burn in my empty stomach. I called Max over to my chair and lifted her up. She licked my chin and lay down in my lap. I scratched her behind the ears and stared into my dead wife’s face.
I finished the drink and realized the rain had stopped. A slice of moon perched far beyond the live oaks. I sat there in the dark until after midnight watching fireflies play hide-and-seek along the banks of the river, their tiny lights reflecting in the dark current like meteor showers in the night sky.
THIRTEEN
The next morning I drove with Max to near the spot I had parked when I found the girl. Was her name Angela like Reverend. Jane said? She was now a body under a sheet in the coroner’s cold storage filing cabinet tucked away like another crime statistic.
Max followed me to the spot where I’d found her. I knelt down and began to search the area. Max sniffed blades of grass. She seemed to sense that something was wrong here. Deer tracks, wide and deep. The deer had been running. Had the deer been frightened by the person who had killed the girl?
“Let’s see where these came from, Max.” She ran ahead, barking and wagging her tail. Max and I were now backtracking, following a trail in reverse hoping it might lead to the start of how the girl got to the river.
We were within seventy-five feet of the road when Max stopped. This time the fur rose along her spine, a whine coming from her throat. She found a single shoe, a woman’s shoe. It had a high heel and a closed toe. I took a pen from my shirt pocket and lifted the shoe from the ground. It was the shade of cherries. No brand name.
I held the shoe with a handkerchief and carefully poured some of the contents from the toe area into one of the Ziploc bags I’d brought. The soil trickled out of the shoe like coal dust. Holding it to my nose, I could detect the faint odor of phosphates, possibly manmade fertilizers.
I lowered the shoe back where Max had found it and looked around for a second shoe before calling Detective Slater on my cell. “I found what I think may have been one of the victim’s shoes.”
“Where? Under your car seat?” Slater asked.
“It’s where you should have found it if you’d searched the crime scene the right way.” I fired back, regretting my comment the instant I said it. “Look, Detective Slater, she wasn’t wearing shoes when I found her. This shoe is another two hundred yards north of the river, near Highway 44. Maybe she lost it running from the perp. Maybe she’d been in his car. Or she could have been some poor kid in the wrong place at the wrong time hitching a ride. The shoe’s here. I’m leaving it and any other evidence right where I found it. Come get it.”
I could almost hear his mind crunching through the phone. “I’ll be there in an hour. Don’t touch anything. And don’t leave.”
“I wouldn’t think of it, Detective. Did you get an ID on the girl?”
“No, but we have the autopsy report.”
“You took a DNA sample from me. I know there was no match. But I don’t know exact cause of death or who she was. I was hoping you could tell me that.”
“Stay put until I get there.”
“I’ll make this easy. I’ll tie a white handkerchief on a tree limb next to Highway 44. You pull off the road and walk about seventy-five feet straight north from the tree and you’ll find the shoe. But you won’t find me. Do your own police work, Detective.”
I hung up. Max had vanished. “Max!”
Silence.
There was the noise of something moving in the brush. “Max, where are you?” Nothing. Then there was a sound you never forget — the sound of a rattlesnake.
“Max!”
I stepped around a large pine tree and stopped. The snake was as thick as my arm. Body coiled, ready to strike. The eyes trained on Max like heat-seeking weapons. They were dark, polished stones. The snake’s tongue tested the air in flickers of black.
“Max! Stop!” I blurted. She paid no attention to my command. Here was an animal she’d never seen, and it was shaking a new toy. Playtime with death.
The next few seconds switched to a film gate of macabre slow motion. Max’s nostrils quivered. She froze, mesmerized by the unblinking dark pearls. The snake coiled tighter. Head poised to strike.
“Max move!” My scream sounded distant. The strike was a blur.
The snake was dying before it could bury its fangs into Max’s face. An arrow had gone right through the rattlesnake’s head, impaling it in the ground. Its body wrapped around the shaft in a death grip, the rattle growing quiet, softly caressing the yellow quill feathers as constricting muscles and nerves died. The black pearls seemed to stare somewhere beyond Max.