Micanopy in Shadow (19 page)

“Better give me a description of your wife.”

“Medium height, reddish hair, thirty years old.” He swallowed. “Nice figure.” He pushed himself up again and stepped to the desk. “I’ll be at the park as soon as I can get someone to watch the baby.”

“Gotcha. I’ll call the Park Manager now, give him the description.”

When John reached Hope, her reaction was frantic. “Oh, God!” Tears trembled in her voice. “What have I got Brandy into?”

John answered simply, “You want to help, come sit with Brad. I’ve got to get out there.”

* * *

A white splinter of moonlight shone through the wax myrtle, and a chill breeze stirred the leaves. All else lay in blackness. Lines from MacBeth came to Brandy, as they often did: “
Good things of day began to droop and drowse; whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse
…” It was those black agents that worried her. Where were the black, shining eyes?

From the marsh beyond came the whirrings and chirpings of crickets and frogs. Brandy could squint with only one eye. Her head throbbed, her legs and feet felt numb, her skull ached, but her vision seemed clearer. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder when she moved. She managed to roll out of the ditch but could not pull herself up. She breathed weakly. A sticky fluid oozed down her neck from the back of her head. If she moved, she would injure herself more. Wait for rescue.

Her mind spun with disjointed memories—a sudden blow, limbs and twigs scratching by as she fell, a choking band around her neck, rough hands grasping her, torture in her upper arms and shoulder, bristling stubble and stones, coarse weeds prickling her skin, and at the last, the stifling rush of brown, musty water; when the heavy pressure against her head and back finally stopped, she’d opened her eyes and gasped for breath, pain racking her throat; she shuddered; her final memory—the huge, hairy head with eyes like glittering slits.

She heard no footsteps, no voices. The bulky shapes had disappeared. She was alone—unless … From the tower she’d spotted a long, scaly hump in the shallow prairie lake. An alligator, of course. They slept in the sun by day, hunted by night. How far was she from that lake? What else lived in fetid water and emerged to hunt?

She must act to save herself. Was she still in the same place where she was when attacked? She sniffed and smelled the faint odor of asphalt and perhaps dried fennel. She should be near the same trail. A few feeble attempts to push her body up failed. Her aching arms would not respond and her left shoulder burned. She knew she could never crawl away, and her eyes filled. Her head was injured and had bled. With sore fingers, she burrowed through the sticks and high grass on the slight rise beside her, searching for her canvas bag with her cell. It was gone.

Of course. Steadly would take the phone, the original letter, and the note he left with the ranger. Her fingers scrabbled over her jeans, dug into empty pockets, explored her torn shirt. Finally they touched her lightweight jacket, flung down beside her. She could drag it across her against the oncoming cold, but in her mind flickered a better idea. The jacket was cream-colored, almost white. She must lift her right arm and hold it. She managed to grasp the zipper edge—her arm felt like wet spaghetti—summoned all her waning strength and hurled it as high as she could at the wax myrtle. It thudded midway up the small tree, slid down the branches about a foot, snagged on a brittle twig, and hung there. The effort exhausted her.

She tried to calm herself by thinking of John and Brad. The thought made her more anxious. There had been the medium’s final warning: “
Be very careful … you have put yourself in danger
.” She hadn’t listened. Not really. A gray fog settled behind her eyes. She might still die. She closed the lids and began to lose all sense of time and place.

And then Brandy felt something slither across her shins. The final segment of a long, narrow weight pressed down while a sliver of moonlight fell on the marsh grass. A fat, brown-black snake was sliding slowly over the stubble. Its triangular head twisted left and right, hunting—a cottonmouth, so close Brandy could see the black stripe along its head. Its elliptical eyes gleamed like points of ebony. Brandy’s heartbeat seemed to stop. Paralyzed, she drew in her breath and held it. All pit vipers could detect the warm blood of a mammal. If she tried to squirm away, the snake would surely strike. If it did, how long before help found her? The last of the snake’s stubby tail glided over her lower legs, coiled its thick body, lifted and swiveled its flat head toward her. Its wide, cottony mouth gaped open.

Brandy prayed the posture was defensive. She was conscious of the chorus of crickets and frogs rising from the lake, but of no comforting voices or car engines. The black head swayed. In her terror she cut her glance toward the grass beside her. Among the roots of the wax myrtle, she glimpsed a slight movement.

* * *

By the time John drove into the park entrance, the night had grown even darker. He could scarcely make out the outlines of the tollbooth cottage, but a slim figure brandishing a beam of light stood beside a vehicle nearby. A wiry ranger of about fifty with a grayish beard and scant hair was waiting with a strong flashlight.

“I’m Tony,” he said after John cut off his engine and headlights and stepped out of his van. “You better ride with me, Mr. Able. It’s pretty damn dark out there. I’ve got a park vehicle, and I know the trails.” John locked his van and climbed into a pickup beside the ranger. “Sorry about your wife,” Tony added. “We already got three rangers out scouting the trails. It’s hard on a night this black.”

The ranger popped a stick of gum into his mouth before released the parking brake. “Gave up smoking two years ago. Still fighting the battle.” John noted a wad of gum wrappers in the ashtray. The ranger handed him two maps of the Preserve’s trails and shifted into drive. “We found your wife’s car in the visitor parking lot. We already called the volunteer working the Visitor’s Center this afternoon. She thinks she remembers seeing your wife look at the displays and climb up the tower to view the Prairie. She seemed fine then, but she was alone.”

John beat his hand on his knee. “I’ve got no idea where she was supposed to meet this guy. Have you talked to whoever took entrance fees this afternoon?”

“She wasn’t the regular volunteer, just a ranger covering for a few minutes. We’re trying to reach her now.”

John was surprised when Tony began wheeling the truck around to head back out the entrance. He flicked on the high beam and set off north on Route 441.

“We got 21,000 acres here,” he said, “and thousands of sinkholes. There are eight trails, some miles long and some short. I’ve marked the ones being searched now—Wahoota near the center and Lake Trail around Lake Wauberg.” He glanced over at John. “One of the rangers says he’s a friend of your wife’s, a guy named Grant Wilson. He says he’s helping her look into some family matter. She’s a newspaper woman?”

John nodded. “That’s right,” he said, but he had no intention of explaining Brandy’s record of dangerous investigations.

Years earlier when John first knew her, she had piloted his pontoon boat across a lake for help and was almost rammed—deliberately—by a powerboat. She could have drowned. Several days later she had been targeted and attacked with a tire iron.

Another year she took a small boat out onto the Suwannee River during a storm and found herself imprisoned on a houseboat. She escaped only to later suffer a deadly blow from a fire extinguisher.

In Homosassa she ventured alone—twice—into isolated woods. The first time she was almost shot, and the second time abandoned for dead in a forgotten cistern. John massaged his forehead, as if trying to erase those memories. Who knew what would happen in Micanopy? He didn’t choose to think about it.

Tony returned to business. “You and I will head for the north rim. We’ll search the Hawthorne Trail and the first part of the La Chua Trail. On foot she wouldn’t be able to get too far. We’ll access the Hawthorne Trail from 15
th
Street in Gainesville.” With one hand on the wheel, Tony pulled his cell phone from a clip and with the other punched a number, listened for a few seconds, then reported to John, “Nothing yet.”

At an interpretive building near 15
th
Street, now closed tight, the park manager had arranged for a switch to an all-terrain vehicle. John settled himself behind the ranger’s back on the seat pad, glad they were both lean men. They took off to intersect the Hawthorne Trail. The paved trail ran in a straight line through the darkness ahead, like a path vanishing into eternity. Both water oaks and turkey oaks rose up on either side. The ATV bounced along for almost a mile. John could see nothing beyond the line of trees. At a fork in the path, Tony curved right and roared up to a fenced overlook. A covered bench sat among low shrubs. The ranger ground to a halt beside it.

“People often stop here to rest,” he said. “On foot she couldn’t get much farther without a pause.” He hung binoculars around his neck, swung off the seat, and walked to an overlook, John beside him. The ranger shone his bright beam across the wooden fence and scanned the marsh beyond the dense shrubbery. A menacing black band of standing water stretched before them. As the light probed the grassy waste to the east, a deer bounded up and dashed out of sight. Something large splashed into the water—an alligator sliding into the sinkhole. John shuddered. Brandy was out there somewhere, helpless. All now lay still.

Tony shook his head. “Well, if she was here, there’s no sign of her now. Stay here.” He pulled another stick of gum from a package in his pocket, crammed it into his mouth, and climbed over the wooden fence to slog through the wet grasses. In a few minutes he shook his head again. “Nothing.”

John thoughts raced. Was the ranger looking for a body? Surely Brandy would call for help if she were hurt. An ominous fact remained. She had not.

* * *

Beside Brandy, a little alligator, about six inches long, had blundered into the shrubbery. It spread it front legs, raised its narrow head, and poured forth a stream of shrill distress calls. She almost forgot the cottonmouth. If Mama heard her stripling, she would come and carry it to the water. Brandy would be an obstacle. But the cottonmouth had no such qualms. Its swaying ceased. In a lightning flash the black head shot forward and the gator’s tiny tail vanished down the white gullet. As the cottonmouth crawled on past the wax myrtle, Brandy heaved an enormous sigh.

Cold wind whistled over her body, and moisture seeped into her jeans, her shirt, her hair. She raised her head a fraction. In the dim starlight, a rabbit streaked from a clump of red bay bushes and bounded off toward the basin. Pain forced her to ease her head back down, but not before leaves in the thicket quivered. For a moment yellowish eyes stared at her, startled by her motionless form. Then a black spotted bobcat sprang after the rabbit, its long legs and short tail close enough for her to smell damp fur.

Brandy’s jacket trembled, but it still clung to the twig. She had closed her eyes when she heard sharp high barks coming from many tiny throats. The slight rise in the ground beside her, the twigs and sticks—of course. Why hadn’t she realized! A mother alligator’s nest. Hatchings were emerging. Early October was late for hatchlings, but possible, given the warm wet September. Somewhere in their mother’s cold reptilian heart beat the maternal instinct. She would come lumbering up from the lake to uncover the nest and shepherd her brood to the water.

Shivering with cold and terror, Brandy craned her neck up and stared toward the lake. A cloud drifted across the quarter moon, hiding what dim light remained. She strained to listen for a slithering sound, heavier than the cottonmouth’s, or for the gator’s short, strong legs thrashing through the marsh grass. The mother would attack whatever seemed to threaten her hatchlings. Brandy twisted onto her stomach, shoulder in agony. If she had broken a bone, she must be careful. She wiggled a pitiful few feet from the mound. High, persistent little cries filled the night air.

As the ragged cloud slid past, a band of faded moonlight fell over the shrubs, water, and grasses. The fronds of a scrub palmetto quivered, the leathery leaves of scrub sedge bent low, a cluster of runner oak shook, then flattened. The gator’s thudding advance was slow and deliberate and inevitable. Brandy squinted toward the sound. A dark green snout parted the leaves of a scrub oak, prodded ahead. Heavy legs steadily thrust the body forward. A few feet from Brandy, a seven-inch hatching poked its tiny head up and repeated its anxious call.

When a blinding swath of light cut across the ditch and speared the white jacket, Brandy choked back a scream and closed her eyes against the glare. Distant footsteps could mean her attacker’s return.

She waited—not only for the alligator’s thick snout.

* * *

John and Tony hiked two-thirds of the nearly three-mile round trip of Bolen Bluff Trail in the center of the prairie. They descended a slope onto one of the old camp dikes and walked out into the basin itself. At its end they peered over the ten-foot observation deck. Both thought this a likely location for a fall. Brandy might have concluded her interview and explored some areas alone. Still no sign of her. While they hesitated on the deck, dispirited and breathing hard, the ranger’s cell phone pealed. Tony put it to his ear as John gripped the railing, willing himself to stay calm.

After a moment, Tony asked, “You found something?” John’s heart lurched. “You know it belonged to the missing woman?” John’s nails bit into his palms. “I see.” Tony nodded at John. “I’ll bring him over to check it out.” He replaced the cell in the clip on his belt. “They found a canvas bag tossed over a fence on the Chacala Trail south of here. The cell phone company says the phone in it belongs to your wife. There’s also a notepad, but it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”