"Don't send it away. Don't! Take it home. Get him out of the box!"
Nic stretched her eyes and wished she hadn't. The man's stare was dark, wild, and riveted to the box she carried. She clutched it tight and held her breath as they passed.
"Keep it! Keep it. He belongs here!"
He—the derelict had definitely muttered the word he.
She dared a backward glance: grass, sand, the usual roadside debris, and the Chevrolet dealership in the background, but no derelict, not even a shadow of one. No screeching brakes or battered bodies in the road, either, or footprints in the sand. The faded man had simply vanished.
Heaven knew the Florida sun got brutal enough to fry human brains, but not in the season the natives called winter, so Nic called the derelict a waking dream, a brain-cramp—the sort of mistake anyone could make and no reason not to finish her trek to the post office. But she returned to the trailer instead.
RJ Walker had removed his pickup; Nic could have driven her Honda. There was a squirrel sitting on the hood, twitching its tail, the way squirrels did.
Another squirrel perched above the trailer's door while a third raced along an overhead wire, headed for a transformer pole. Her heart skipped when the squirrel leaped safely for thicker wires where it paused, twitching and scolding.
Nic climbed the aluminum steps to her front door. The drive's manufacturer gave her a whole month to return the hard drive before it debited her hemorrhaging credit card. She poured cold coffee into a rinsed cup and sent an e-mail to a close, yet distant, friend who lived not far from her stored furniture—
Hi, Sara. Sorry I've been out of touch. This places gets weirder all the time.
Monday I lost a hard drive to suicidal squirrels— pallbearer squirrels, according to Sunshine Power, and they should know, I guess. Today I thought a saw a hobo's ghost out on the highway. I'm still sending out resumes by the score and hearing nothing back. Unless it's my folks, I'm lucky if I say two words to another human being in a day—I wound up complaining to Sunshine Power just to havesomeone to talk to. It's them or the squirrels. I keep telling myself this is only temporary, that I'll be out of here in a month, so there's no need to get my stuff out of storage up north—as if I could afford to bring it down here.
Miss you. Miss winter. Miss everything I ever complained about.
All for now ... Nic.
Nic was catching a nap in the bedroom between rounds of boredom and e-mailing resumes when someone banged loudly on the door. There was no good reason for anyone to come knocking on her door, but a bunch of bad ones. The first bad reason to form fully in Nic's imagination was her parents, who were in good health but retired now and getting old.
Never mind that bad news usually traveled by phone; once the idea had occurred to Nic, it filled her entire imagination. She had hospitals on the brain before opening the door.
Nic heard the twangy drawl of the natives: "Afternoon, ma'am. Bobby Walker, ma'am—"
He was too old to be a Bobby. No one over the age of eighteen should be a Bobby, unless he was a professional athlete and Bobby Walker, though not grossly out of shape, was long past eighteen. His face was more weathered than tan beneath unruly hair that had started to recede. He squinted as though he needed glasses—which might account for his parking habits.
But Bobby Walker—RJ Walker, in all probability—had all his teeth, at least all the ones that showed when he talked. Nic hadn't gotten used to seeing people her own age with missing teeth. Snaggle-tooth grins were a constant reminder of how fundamentally different life was in dead-center Florida.
Bobby Walker stuck out his hand. She clasped it barely long enough to say—
"Nicole Larsens."
"I don't mean to bother you, ma'am, but you've got to quit feeding the squirrels."
"I'm not feeding them," Nic replied, feeling very un-ma'am-like in her jeans and nap-wrinkled T-shirt.
"Maybe you don't think you're feeding them, ma'am, but they wouldn't be here like this, if they weren't finding food."
Nic blinked and realized that between Bobby and his red pickup, there'd been a squirrel explosion. The animals were agitated. She couldn't count more than a few without losing track. There were at least a dozen and more when she looked right or left.
"I'm not feeding them. I'm not doing anything to attract them."
"Well, ma'am, then maybe they've got a colony under your trailer. In winter they like to find someplace warm—"
A colony of squirrels under the sagging bedroom floor? The image conjured up countless bad movies, and Nic's thoughts must have shown on her face because Bobby Walker quickly said—
"I could check underneath, ma'am. Set a few traps—?"
Spring-loaded rings of rusty, serrated metal added themselves to Nic's imagination without improving her sense of security.
"Live traps, ma'am," Bobby Walker added, accurately guessing the reasonfor Nic's silence. "I'll empty 'em down the road. I'll look for holes, too. You don't want to go under there, ma'am."
Southern hospitality. Southern charm. And every bit as effective as Northern sarcasm. Whatever Nic saw when she looked at Bobby Walker, what he saw was another damn Yankee without the sense God gave ants. On the other hand, he was absolutely right: Nic didn't want to crawl around under the trailer. She could waste time begging the park owner or accept Bobby Walker's offer.
The choice was clear, but before Bobby Walker went off to get his traps, Nic asked, "Have you heard of pallbearer squirrels?"
He gave her a doubting glance. "No, ma'am, can't say that I have."
So she told him, in quick sentences, about the power problems, her call to the utility company, and the explanation she'd received.
"Huh," Bobby Walker concluded. "They do get into habits, but so do people.
Never heard anything about them following leaders—" He caught himself, changed his mind. "My momma used to say that when squirrels got crazy, it was because they were chasing brownies. My momma said things like that; she was Scottish."
Nic took note of the past tense and said nothing about Mrs. Walker's opinions of ancestry.
For the next hour, Mrs. Walker's son thumped and cursed beneath her rented trailer on his way to deciding that the crawlspace wasn't squirrel-infested.
"There's a hole or two they might fit through, but there's no scat, no nothing to say they've set up housekeeping. Looks like they've just got a fascination for your front door—"
They both took a moment to study the squirrels. Nic couldn't say that there were more now than when Bobby first knocked on her door, but certainly there were no less.
"If you're not feeding them, I can't imagine why they're doing that, but once a few of them get trapped, the rest will get the idea that there's nothing here for them." Bobby had set his traps beneath the steps and beneath a holly bush midway between the steps and Nic's car. "You might hear something as they're sprung," he warned Nic.
Nic forced a smile and thanked Bobby Walker for his help. He lingered at the foot of the aluminum stairs as if he expected an invitation. She gave him a question instead.
"What happens next, if the traps work?"
"Oh, they'll work, ma'am," Bobby Walker replied, lapsing into Southern formality. "I've got 'em baited with more peanuts and corn than any squirrel can resist. Might not trap them all, but there'll be a mess of squirrels in those traps when I check them tomorrow morning."