Key limes have long, lethal thorns, and this one had a wad of black human hair snarled on a thorny limb. The hair was long and curly, and it appeared to have been left there recently. I thought of Marilee’s shiny black hair caught in the brush of her hair dryer, and a cold snail trailed down my spine.
When Christy was barely walking, I went to pick her up at the day-care center one day and found another mother raising hell because her little girl had a bald spot on her head. The day-care women were red-faced and almost in tears. They said another toddler had just reached out and grabbed a handful of the child’s hair and yanked it right out. They said he had never done anything like that before and he had done it so quickly, they hadn’t been able to stop him. The mother threatened to sue, and she was weeping when she took her child home. I didn’t blame her. Who wants their baby yanked bald-headed, even if the yanker is just a baby, too?
I leaned my elbows on top of the gate and looked into the woods, where the tracks of the old road ran about fifteen feet before they disappeared into a tangled mass of live oaks, palms, hibiscus, lime trees, palmettos, ferns, and twisting potato vines. The foliage was so thick, I couldn’t see anything except green. Steam was beginning to rise from the damp ground, and the thick foliage absorbed it and breathed it out again.
I put a foot on one of the gate’s crossbars and boosted myself up. I told myself to mind my own business and let Guidry investigate. I answered myself back that I only wanted to have a look beyond where the road became obscured. I slung a leg over the gate and scaled it. My Keds made gritty sounds as I walked down the devastated road to the spot where it disappeared into the brush. With both arms stiff, I parted the foliage hanging in front of my face. The road was visible for another few feet and then disappeared again in leafy branches. I let the branches close behind me and walked to the next barrier.
It was like being in the Amazon. Thick branches joined overhead to make a canopy that blotted out the early-morning sky, and I could feel the surrounding foliage exhaling its hot breath. An odor of decay or of something dead rose from the steaming thicket. I’ve never been claustrophobic, but this was nuts. There was nothing to see here, no reason to be here. I had to get out of this place and go take care of my pets. But first I parted the next tangle of branches and got a stronger whiff of the odor—a sweet, heavy smell that reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what. I pushed a branch aside and looked ahead at the exposed road. More long black hair fanned out on the shadowed ground. For a second, that’s all my brain allowed my eyes to see. But you can only hide from the truth for an instant when it’s stretched out in front of you. Marilee lay across the road. She was face-up, with her arms slung out to the sides and her legs bent in an awkwardly lewd way. She wore a white skirt and a navy shirt tied at the waist. Animals had eaten away some of the flesh on her arms and legs and the entire lower part of her face. Her eyes stared upward in horror. I gagged and covered my mouth, then turned and ran, batting at the closed branches hanging over the road and making whimpering sounds deep in my throat.
I scrambled over the gate and ran to my bike. I made a diagonal cut across Midnight Pass and pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Breeze. Then I got my cell phone out of my hip pocket and dialed 911.
The operator who answered was cool. I gave her my name and location, and told her what I’d found. She kept her voice at a level monotone. “Please remain where you are,” she said. “Somebody will be there in just a few minutes. Can you describe yourself, please, so they’ll recognize you?”
That was smart. She was getting me to talk about how I looked, not how the corpse looked. She was also keeping me on the line while she sent somebody out, just in case I was a psycho who had dumped the corpse in the woods myself and was planning on pretending to be an innocent bystander when the deputies hauled it out.
“I’m on a bike,” I said. “It’s okay, I’m not leaving. I’m an ex-deputy.”
She and I both knew that could be a lie, too, but she stayed cool. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll tell them to look for a woman on a bike in the Sea Breeze parking lot.”
Just as she said it, a green-and-white patrol car pulled in. Deputy Jesse Morgan parked and got out of the car and walked to meet me.
“Miz Hemingway,” he said. Carefully, as if I were a bomb that might explode any minute. “You’ve found another dead body.”
Eighteen
Morgan tilted his head toward the Sea Breeze. “Is the body in there?”
I pointed across the street. “No, it’s in the woods behind that gate. It’s Marilee Doerring. That’s the woman whose house the other body was in. Animals have been at her, but I recognized her.”
I was trying to be as cool as he was, but my voice cracked a little bit when I said that.
Flat-voiced, he said, “What were you doing in the woods?”
I could feel my face getting hot. “After you left, I saw some hair hanging on a key lime branch. I went back there to check it out.”
“Uh-huh.” He gave me that slow, level look again. “Can you show me the body?”
“I can show you where to find it, but I’m not going back there again.”
He looked down at me with the same coolly appraising eyes and then nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We walked across the street and down the stretch of road to the gate. I pointed to the hair on the lime tree. “Somebody must have been carrying her body around the end of the gate and her hair got caught in the thorns.”
“Don’t touch it,” he said. “Did you touch it?”
“Of course I didn’t touch it!” That felt better. Anger always makes me feel stronger.
I said, “Just climb over the gate and walk straight back. I’ll wait for you, but I need to get to my animals, so don’t take too long.”
He gave me another level look and climbed over the gate. His legs under his dark green shorts were muscular and tan. He walked like a man who was at home in the woods, pushing through the branches without any tensing or awkwardness. He disappeared from view and I waited, imagining him pushing through the next branches and seeing Marilee the same way I’d seen her. When he stepped back through the branches, he was calling for a crime-scene unit. He rang off, put the phone back in its holder on his belt, and fixed me with a penetrating look.
“You’ll be available later?”
“Sure. I just have to see to my animals first, and then I’d like to go home and soak in Clorox for a while.”
He grinned. He had a nice grin, he should have done it more often. “Where will you be after you soak in Clorox?”
I sighed. “I’ll be wherever Lieutenant Guidry wants me to be.”
I gave him my cell phone number again so they could get in touch with me. When I left him, he was climbing over the gate again to guard the body until the CSU people arrived.
For the rest of the morning, images of Phillip’s beaten body and Marilee’s mutilated body sprawled on the musky ground alternated in my head. I kept remembering how Rufus had barked at the wooded area every time we went walking. I should have known he was trying to tell me something. Dogs can smell dead bodies from a distance, even bodies that have been buried in shallow graves. If I had investigated the first time he barked, if I had told Guidry about Rufus barking, if, if, if…
Death has a way of forcing us to look at the ultimate question that hovers just below our consciousness. That pitiful body in the woods was no longer Marilee’s home. It was just rapidly decaying flesh, no more human than a fish carcass rotting at the edge of the sea. So where was Marilee? Where was the mind that had informed her body when its heart beat?