“We need to find out more about the Ciancios, Mace.” She raised serious eyes to mine. “Tony might be dangerous in a way that I hadn’t considered.”
Before Mama or Marty had the chance to process what Maddie might mean by that, I said, “Sal doesn’t seem to like him much, but he won’t say why. I’m going to add that to a list of questions I have for C’ndee.”
Marty said, “But nobody’s seen her, right?”
Mama nodded.
“Maybe we should ask Sal where she went,” Maddie said.
“I don’t know, girls,” Mama said. “They’re family. They’re thicker than ticks on a fat dog.”
“Meaning Sal might not want to tell us what he knows about her,” Maddie said.
I thought about our first acquaintance with Mama’s fiancé. “Remember how secretive Sal was, and how we were convinced he was Tony Soprano?” I said, as my sisters laughed.
“Who?” asked Fran, who was in her seventies and probably thought HBO was a kind of body odor.
“Like Don Corleone from the Godfather movies,” Maddie interpreted.
“Not the Mafia again, Maddie.” Mama sighed. “Just remember: you girls found out Sal’s one of the good guys, despite appearances. Maybe it’ll be the same for Tony. Not every man of mystery has a notorious past.”
Marty patted Mama’s arm in agreement. “When we met Sal, he just wanted to keep his business private. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Humph,” Maddie said.
“Yeah, Sal’s a private guy, all right.” I shot Mama a look. “Now just imagine the poor man marrying the Mouth of the South.”
That started a round of bickering about which of us was the biggest gossip.
“Well, maybe I am interested in people, girls,” Mama concluded. “But I’m never mean, like some I could mention.” She glared at Maddie, who acted like she didn’t notice.
“I was always taught, and I tried to teach you girls, that if you can’t say something nice you shouldn’t say anything at all.”
“Now, Rosalee, where’s the fun in that?” Fran’s smile was devilish, even bisected by several straight pins. “And what did y’all mean before about the Mafia?”
Marty whispered, “The day Ronnie Hodges was killed, somebody chopped off the head of a wild pig and left it on Alice’s front porch.”
Fran gasped.
“I said then that it looked like the kind of calling card the Mafia would leave,” Maddie said.
“Which Maddie knows because she watches the movies.”
We ignored Mama’s smart-aleck tone. “It was like a warning,” I told Fran.
Lowering herself onto a stool next to the rose-colored platform, she spit the straight pins into her palm. “That’s just awful.”
“Ronnie’s company was called Pig-Out BBQ and Catering, ” I explained. “Maybe somebody doesn’t want Alice to continue the business.”
Mama said, “Alice doesn’t even want to continue it. She told us it was bleeding money.”
Marty winced at the word choice. “Maybe somebody was trying to send a message to other restaurant owners to get out of the business or what happened to Ronnie …”
“… and that poor hog,” Fran interrupted.
“… will happen to them,” Maddie finished Marty’s thought.
“Maybe we should warn the Pork Pit and the Georgia Pig,” I said.
“Don’t forget that guy along State Road 70 with the trash can smoker who calls himself Pig Pickin’s,” Mama said. “He could be a target too, if somebody has a thing against barbecue.”
We all thought about that for a moment. Finally, Maddie shook her head firmly.
“Impossible,” said my sister, who never met a pulled pork platter she didn’t love. “It has to be about something else.”
I gazed into the woods of Himmarshee Park, all cool and green. The late-afternoon sun slanted through the branches of a cypress tree, washing me in slivers of golden light. This wooden park bench beat any pew beneath stained glass in a grand cathedral. In a way, the park was my cathedral.
“All set, Mace?”
Rhonda’s voice startled me out of my meditation on the glories of the outdoors.
“You bet, Boss. Heading home?”
She lifted an arm to show me her purse. Her car keys were in her hand. “You should have a dozen or so people show up for your nature walk. Some of the old folks from Leisure Lake trailer park are coming over in a van.”
“Sounds good.”
I actually preferred the senior citizens to students from Maddie’s middle school. Kids that age are tough to impress. The boys always try to act tough, and the girls squeal like idiots if they so much as see a spider.
“By the way, Mace …”
I cocked my head at her.
“Please show some patience if people ask stupid questions. Not everyone knows as much about the outdoors as you do.”
“I’ll be an ambassador of good will, Rhonda.”
She looked skeptical. But she waved anyway, gliding across the wooden deck outside our office. Her keys jingled like a soundtrack at a high-fashion runway show.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost six, which meant Rhonda was well past her quitting hour. I felt grateful, and not for the first time, that no one had ever seen fit to make me a manager.
The sunset walkers would arrive within forty minutes or so. And that would give me just enough time to feed the handful of injured or unwanted critters currently living in the park’s makeshift zoo. I hurried to the animal enclosure, where I was welcomed as usual by the white-striped presence of Pepe No Pew.
The de-scented skunk had been a pet, until his owner cruelly released him into the wild. As I pulled dinner together, he padded to the front of his pen. On the menu for Pepe: A chicken neck, a selection of chopped fruit and vegetables, and a couple of crickets and worms tossed into his pen so he could find them later.
Our residents generally included a few of the “nuisance” animals I trapped in my part-time job. The park had a wildlife license as part of our educational mission. I tried to expose visitors to some Florida critters; tried to convince them co-existence was possible. If only people could see how beautiful the corn snake was, for example, and how it wouldn’t hurt them if left alone, they’d be less likely to want it dead.
Or, that was my hope anyway.
“Hey, buddy. You get your mouse tomorrow,” I called out to the snake.
The creature lay coiled in the corner next to an elevated den I’d made of rocks, straw, and branches. A screen over the top of the pen kept him from slithering out.
“Not a bad crib, huh? You’ll be going back to the woods soon. Just think of this as an all-expenses-paid snake-cation.”
Carrying a large tray with the animals’ food, I made my way around the enclosure: The possum got a little moistened cat chow, bite-size chopped fruit, a raw egg, a splash of yogurt and, for the fish course, a couple of thawed silversides.
The raccoon got wet dog food, supplemented with a bit of fruit, fish, an egg, and a thawed baby chick.
My last stop was Pepe’s pad. Without his scent, the skunk was defenseless in the wild. So, he was stuck with us for life. Dropping food into his shallow bowl, I leaned in for a chat.
“You’re getting as fat as a fixed dog, you know that, Monsieur? Maybe we need to get you a little skunk-sized treadmill. Would you like that?”