An Accidental Death

AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH

Also by Phyllis Smallman:

Sherri Travis Mystery Series

Margarita Nights

Sex In A Sidecar

A Brewski For The Old man

Champagne For Buzzards

Highball Exit

Sherri Travis Short Mystery Series

Bitty And The Naked Ladies

Jack Daniels And Tea

AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH

Winner of a 2012
Royal Palm Literary Award

short fiction

The Florida Writers Association

PHYLLIS
SMALLMAN

WWW.PHYLLISSMALLMAN.COM

Phyllis Smallman Publishing

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED IN CANADA IN 2013 BY
PHYLLIS SMALLMAN
www.phyllissmallman.com

Copyright © 2012 Phyllis Smallman

All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Smallman, Phyllis
An Accidental Death / Phyllis Smallman.
(A Sherri Travis Short Mystery)

ISBN 978-0-9878033-7-5 (electronic)

Title. II. Series: Smallman, Phyllis. Sherri Travis Short Mystery.

Cover and text design by Phyllis Smallman

Cover Art by Phyllis Smallman

First published by Spinetingler Magazine
www.spinetinglermag.com

eBook development:
WildElement.ca

An Accidental Death

Cash was missing. We knew who’d taken it. Once again, Aunt Kay and I went looking for my brother Scott. We found him in the backyard of my parents’ house. They were paying him to put down new patio stones around the pool while they were on vacation but Scott hadn’t made much progress. It was pretty much the same as it had been the week before.

Scott wasn’t alone.

“Figures.” My disgust was boundless but Aunt Kay’s reaction was rage.

She charged towards Ryan, swinging her bag at his head and screaming, “Stay away from him with your poison!”

Ryan raised his arm to defend himself. “Crazy old bitch.” He danced away from her, yelling, “Knock it off.”

But Aunt Kay didn’t stop, kept hitting him again and again with her purse.

I laughed. My kind, gentle aunt, an overweight pensioner, was going after a drug dealer with her purse and I laughed. I didn’t step in to stop her or even help her. I laughed.

Steel flashed.

“No,” Scott shouted and slipped between Ryan and Aunt Kay. We all froze in place, absorbing events that couldn’t be changed, while overhead a raven cried. Its shadow flew across the surface of the pool and then I heard Scott’s soft, “Oh.”

Aunt Kay caught Scott as he fell, wrapping her arms around his waist and trying to hold him up. Scott’s hand opened and a plastic baggie, with three pieces of crack cocaine that look like chunks of dirty plastic, fell to the stones.

Ryan shot towards me, headed for the street. I picked up a shovel and swung, without thinking. Ryan fell at my feet and I ran for the kitchen to dial 911.

When I came back, Ryan lay face down and spread-eagled in the pool. Aunt Kay’s right arm was in the water, almost up to her shoulder, her hand on Ryan’s back. She looked up at me with a blank stare.

“Let him go,” I said.

Frozen in place, still holding Ryan down, she didn’t respond.

I pulled her to her feet saying, “I’ll get him out.”

I rolled Ryan over the concrete surround of the pool and onto the gravel where he lay with vacant eyes staring up at the impossibly blue sky. I drew my sneaker carefully through the long lines his heels had made entering the pool, smoothing them over and hiding them. Then I hauled Ryan off of the concrete to lie on top of the marks my sneakers had concealed. Only then did I roll him onto his stomach, just as I’d been taught when I was a good girl guide.

A siren wailed in the distance.

Aunt Kay still cradled Scott in her arms, crooning to him softly. When I took Scott’s body from her she tried to clutch him back but I grabbed her upper arms and shook her gently, forcing her to focus on what I was saying.

“It was an accident, wasn’t it?”

I brushed her hair back from her forehead. “After I hit Ryan with the shovel, he tried to get up. He was disoriented and stumbled into the pool, didn’t he?”

She didn’t answer.

The sirens grew louder.

“It was an accident. You tried to get him out of the water but he was too heavy for you.”

Awareness came into her eyes and then came panic. She turned her head towards the wail of the sirens.

I cupped her chin in my hands, turning her face back to mine. I said, “It was an accidental death.”

She nodded.

CHAPTER 1

It was Sunday morning and I was out on the lanai of my borrowed beach house, sprawled in a canvas lawn chair, the Sunday
Herald
dis­carded at my feet. The bright Florida sun was giving me a headache. I couldn’t find the energy to go inside the air-conditioned house or even move into its shade. I’d surrendered to lethargy and given up on everything but breathing.

The September air was heavy with humidity. At ten o’clock in the morning, the temperature already hovered around ninety, with a forecast for worse to come. Overhead small white clouds, eager to be gone, rushed across the sky, leaving nothing behind but the drought that wouldn’t end.

Elvis flew in with wings extended, neck out and long legs dangling, and came to a running stop. He stepped delicately onto the listing concrete squares and stood there with his head twitching right, then left, and then back again.

“What, do you want . . . applause?”

He cranked his neck around and gave me the evil eye. “I’m no tourist. I knew you could do it.” Elvis tilted his head to the side.

“Go away you moocher. I’m the only one getting a handout today.”

He lifted a stick leg and paused before he set it gingerly down and inched closer.

“There isn’t a scrap in that fridge.”

He cocked his head, one yellow eye considering me as his fine white feathers quivered in the light breeze.

“If there was a hotdog in there I’d eat it myself.” Elvis was the only egret in all Florida who preferred hotdogs to fish. He couldn’t abide those disgusting things no matter how hungry he was.

“Get lost, freak.”

Elvis decided I was suffering from a serious lack of charity and lifted off with a squawk of protest to fly north across the sand dunes, back towards Jacaranda, looking for someone more generous than me.

This tiny aqua bungalow, on the beach in Jacaranda, was built closer to the edge of the Gulf of Mexico than the new laws allowed. Sand dunes and beach grasses were the only things I could see from the patio. It didn’t matter, all the other beach houses were empty until the season started. I was alone in paradise, solitary and miserable.

Even the chartreuse gecko darting in and out of the clay pots full of dead flowers couldn’t lift my mood. My business . . . no, my life, the Sunset Bar and Grill, was running on borrowed money and the fumes of my dying dreams.

I kept telling myself that everything would go back to normal when the long line of cars with out of state license plates started arriv­ing. The winter before, the tourist trade had been down, leaving me pirouetting on the edge of bankruptcy, and now I’d reached a crisis point. The Sunset needed an infusion of cash or it wouldn’t survive.

If I could just last until after Thanksgiving, two more months, I stood a chance of keeping the bank from stepping in. But this nasty, nasty little voice in my head kept saying, “And what if the tourists don’t come? What if this is the new normal . . . the new state of things?” God, I hate that little voice. It keeps insisting on pointing out truths I’m quite capable of avoiding.

I tried to think of someone to tap for money, considered all my options, and discovered there weren’t any. When you grow up in a trailer park on the edge of a swamp, you just don’t make the right social connections to stave off insolvency.

It was time to make a new plan and decide what I was going to do when it all went down the tubes. I’d read every line in the Help Wanted section of the
Herald
, but nobody wanted bartenders, my only marketable skill.

So there I sat identifying the expendable—which server I’d let go and what supplier I could string out a little longer—when I heard a car pull in on the crushed-shell driveway. Glad to be distracted from my wretchedness, I went inside to see who my visitor was.

A police car was parked outside the kitchen window.

CHAPTER 2

The back door of the cruiser opened. A swollen ankle in a white sneaker appeared below the door. A few seconds later the second foot followed. It took a little more time for the stout figure to pull herself to her feet.

I gripped the edge of the sink and stared at her as my world went tilt. Everything outside looked so bright and ordinary, but I knew the truth. Elderly ladies don’t come visiting in police cars.

Aunt Kay was overweight, maybe even obese. Two black raisin eyes peered out of her rice pudding face while her salt and pepper hair sprang up from her head in an uncontrolled tangle of steel wool. Holding onto the top of the door with both hands, she stepped around it, slamming it behind her without ever taking her eyes off the kitchen window.

She was dressed in cropped beige pants and a square-cut orange flowered blouse, an outfit that did nothing to enhance her appearance. But looks had never been the important thing about Aunt Kay. She had something far rarer than beauty; she was easy to love.

Frozen in front of the window, I watched her uneven gait as she made her way to the house. My brain was doing a quick survey of potential disasters and came up with too many possibilities to make speculation worthwhile.

When she reached the carport and disappeared from my sight, I rushed to the kitchen door. I stepped out onto the small stoop, holding the screen door open with my butt, and waited as she pulled herself up the rickety wooden steps on knees that no longer bent.

Aunt Kay stopped at the top, gave me a weak smile, and turned to wave at the police car. The cop saluted and reversed out onto Beach Road.

“What are you doing here?” I reached out and kissed her smooth cheek and hugged her, smelling the familiar odor of rose-scented talc. The fragrance brought back feelings of comfort and safety. Aunt Kay had been my afterschool caregiver through most of grade school, and my weekend minder while my mother worked and Tully Jenkins, my mostly absent father, was either in disgrace or hauling oranges north.

I liked going to Aunt Kay’s house. It was close to my best friend Marley Hemming’s house and there was always a jumble of kids to play with. Later, when I was too old to need watching and an abusive man moved in with my mother, Aunt Kay’s was my safe place to hide from his hands. She never turned me away or pushed me to tell her what was bothering me. She just accepted that I needed to be there.

“What’s happened?” I was desperate to hear the worst now, needed to know the full extent of the nameless horror about to crash into me. “Why is a cop delivering you to my door? Why are you here?”

I tried to hug her again but Aunt Kay shook me off. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Sherri, give me a minute.”

I held the door while she went inside, dropped her bag on the table, took a deep breath, and then let the air out all in a rush. “I wanted to tell you before you heard it from someone else.”

I waited, my mind chasing shadows. Someone had to be dead. My first thought was Clay. But he was up north at Cedar Key and Aunt Kay barely knew him.

It couldn’t be Marley. She was out at the ranch with Tully and if either of them were dead the other would have called. But what if they were both dead?

I reached out to touch Aunt Kay’s arm. It felt chilled and damp, like her blood had gone cold. “Just tell me.”

“It’s Holly.”

“Holly Mitchell?” I said the name just to be sure I had the right person . . . that I’d heard correctly.

Aunt Kay nodded. “She’s dead.”

“She can’t be! Holly’s too young.” Silly thing to say—being twenty-one is no protection from death. “Was it an accident?”

Aunt Kay looked away and her lip quivered.