Sour Grapes (A Savannah Reid Mystery #6) (20 page)

"Oh, yeah, you know all about it."

"Unfortunately, I do. I've sat on all-night stakeouts with you. I know you far too well."

"And familiarity has bred contempt?"

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She grinned at him. "Naw, not contempt. . . maybe momentary disgust, but--"

"What have you got for me? Have you been layin' around in bed, eatin' bonbons, or have you been workin'?"

"Bonbons, I wish. You'll want to check out Barbie's shampoo, the bottle there in her room. Word has it, it's spiked with drain cleaner. The bottle probably has prints on it that belong to a sweet little darlin' named

Desiree Porter. And she may have slashed Barbie's evening gown, too."

"Mmm . . . do you suppose she did more than that?" "It's a possibility. But then, at this point, there are so many possibilities."

"How's that precious sister of yours this morning?" "The one I'd like to hog-tie and send back to

Georgia in a burlap bag?"

"That's the one."

"She's getting her picture taken with the rest of the

girls. They are getting ready for the interview judging this afternoon, and then the talent show and the awards tonight.?

"So you figure they'll be heading out of here tomorrow

morning?"

'There's some sort of goodbye breakfast, and they're supposed to be gone by noon."

Savannah felt the cell phone in her purse buzz. She took it out, looked at the caller ID, but didn't recognize the number.

"Hello. Yes, this is Savannah."

She glanced over at Dirk, who was all ears.

"Yes, Frande, I'm glad you called. How can I help you?" She nodded. "Of course. I'd be glad to. I'll be right there."

Dirk tried to lean closer and listen, but Savannah nudged him away.

"All right. I understand. I'll wait until after eleven. Yes, I'll see you then, and thank you for calling."

"Well? What did she want?" Dirk was practically dancing. "Did she say anything about her brother? Did she say he was there at the house?"

"No, she didn't mention Trent, but she did say that she's decided to talk to me, to tell me what was going on just before Barbie disappeared."

"Hey, that's great! But she doesn't want you to show up until after eleven, huh?"

'That's right. Her mom will be going to work then, and she said she wants to talk to me alone."

Dirk's face fell. "I guess that answers my next question."

"That's right, big boy. You don't get to go this time. It's a girl thing."

"After hanging around here, I'm gonna have to watch football games, chew tobacco, and belch for a week to get all this estrogen out of my system."

Savannah patted him. . hard . . . on the chest, right about where she figured one of his stashed muffins was. She felt it mash very nicely.

"I'm going to go tell Atlanta that I'm leaving the winery

for a while. I'll have Ryan keep an eye on her for me while I'm gone."

"Yeah, and I will, too. Let me know right away if the Gorton gal tells you anything good."

"I will, sugar I surely will."

As Savannah turned to leave, she thought she saw a movement among some oleander bushes only a few feet

away. But the brush was extremely thick, and she couldn't see if it was a person or maybe a bird or

No, she knew it wasn't a bird, or a gopher, or a stiff breeze; that was wishful thinking. It had been a person. Someone had been standing there. The question was: How much had they heard?

And the other question that nagged at Savannah

long after she had left the pool area was: If they heard everything--would it matter?

She had an uneasy, almost sick feeling, deep in her guts that it would. She just wasn't sure how.

Savannah didn't need to see the graffiti on the walls

of almost every building on Via Norte to know that she

was in the bad end of town. The bars on every window and door were proof enough.

Having served her time on a beat in that neighborhood as an SCPD officer, she had memories. . . most of them unpleasant. . . of events that had gone down on nearly every street corner and in almost every alley. And the occupants of many of the houses were known to her, as she had seen some of them at the worst moments of

their lives. She and Dirk had sometimes been the reason those were bad moments, as they had arrested them for everything from domestic abuse to public intoxication

and sometimes much worse.

But she could also recall the good times, when she had returned a runaway five-year-old and his dog to his

frantic mother, when she had arrived just in time to deliver a premature baby and managed to coax breath into

the infant's tiny lungs, when she had talked a young woman into leaving her violent boyfriend and starting a

new life for herself and her children in a safe house.

She had made a difference on these streets and inside

these houses that were miniature fortresses, although

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that might not be obvious, looking at the neighborhood now.

Turning the Mustang down the road where the

Gorton family lived, she noticed that this street was better than some. The yards were small but well-kept, with the patches of grass watered and mowed, flower beds blooming with geraniums, nasturtiums, and marigolds.

Savannah parked in front of 337, noting that there were no cars sitting in the narrow, gravel driveway. Francie's mother would have left by now, and although Savannah preferred to interview a minor with a parent's

permission, the girl had been adamant about waiting until they could be alone.

Savannah also kept her eyes open for any sign of

Trent. The boy stood a good chance of becoming their number one suspect, and the sooner they located him and started keeping tabs on him, the better.

Dirk had told her that he drove an old, restored Dodge Charger, but there was no sign of either the boy or his car.

As Savannah walked up the sidewalk to the front

door, she heard a whining, coming from the other side of the fence that bordered their property. It sounded like a dog in some sort of minor distress. She made a mental note to check on it later.

No one came to the door when she knocked the first

time, or the second, third, or fourth.

That's what I was afraid of, she thought. The kid got scared and decided not to talk after all.

She walked around the side of the house to the backyard

and could hear the dog next door whimpering as he followed along the opposite side of the high, wooden fence. -

To enter the rear of the property, she had to pass

SOUR GRAPES ZVI

through a gate. The backyard had been enclosed with a hurricane fence, and she saw a small henhouse at the rear of the property. A dozen or so chickens pecked at some grain that had been strewn on the ground, and an enormous red rooster sat atop a fence post, proudly surveying his domain.

"Chickens. . . Hm-m-m," Savannah said to herself. "Not a good sign for Master Trent."

No one came to the back door either when she

knocked. Double damn, she thought.

"Francie," she called out. Francie, it's Savannah Reid. Are you inside, honey? If you are, open up."

After another pounding on the door, and rapping on a couple of windows produced no response, Savannah had to admit she was licked. Either the girl had left the house, or she was inside and had no intention of showing her face.

The trip was a write-off.

The whining next door got even louder, and when Savannah turned around to look, she saw the source . . . and why he was upset.

A gorgeous animal stood on the other side of what

was a wire fence farther back on the property, beyond the wooden planking. At first, she thought he was a purebred wolf, by his long, lean legs, big feet and lush fur. But as she walked closer to him, she saw that he had pale blue eyes and the markings of a husky.

"Well, hello, you handsome fella," Savannah told

him as she stepped up to the fence. "Aren't you a beauty!"

The dog whimpered and shook his head, as though

beckoning her to come over to his side of the fence.

"Yes, I would love to take you home with me," she

said, "but I'm pretty sure you would have Cleopatra and

Diamante for lunch. Or, at least you'd try, and you'd

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wind up with scratches all over that pretty long muzzle

of yours."

She grimaced, looking at the mangled, half-chewed poultry carcass that someone had tied with pieces of

rough twine around his neck. A sprinkling of white feathers littered the dog's yard. "Looks like you're already in trouble for trying to make lunch out of the

neighbor's chicken."

Having been raised in the rural South, Savannah had heard of the practice of tying a dead bird around a

clog's neck and allowing it to stay on him until it literally

rotted off. A disgusting method, but supposedly an effective one for putting the animal off the idea of chickens.

And certainly, this fellow looked as though he hated his situation.

"Maybe you should just stick with phoning the Colonel

the next time you get a hankerin' for a drumstick, darin'," she told him.

He mumbled something in wolf-dog that sounded

Like a pathetic denial.

"What's that?" she said, sticking her finger through he fence and stroking his moist black nose. "You say ,Tou didn't do it? You were framed? That's what all the )ad guys say. Why should I believe you?"

The big eyes rolled, and he shook his head, fluffing mit the magnificent ruff of fur around his neck where

us gruesome burden was tied.

"Well, that's true. You've never lied to me before,

Savannah stood there, thinking, wondering, evaluatng her options. "Hang in there, handsome," she said. I'll be right back."

And she was, a couple of minutes later with her Swiss krmy knife in hand. "I'll tell you what," she said. "If you

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come back here to the gate. . . that's it. . . right back here, where I can reach you."

She leaned over the locked gate that connected the

two yards. "Now don't bite me, okay?" Stretching as far as she could, she could almost reach the animal, but not quite.

"If you want me to help you, you'll have to stick those big dodhoppers of yours up here on the fence. That's a good boy. . . wolf . . . dog. . . or whatever you are."

He reared up and lifted his huge front feet onto the

gate. She was shocked to see that he was nearly as tall as she was. Images from Jack London's stories and the Grimm brothers' fairy tales flashed through her mind.

"'Hm-m-m . . what big teeth you have, my dear," she told him. "Ah, but you're just a big baby, aren't you?"

Again, more eye rolling and whining.

"Okay, okay. Hold still." Reaching across the gate, she slid her knife blade beneath the twine and quickly

sliced through it. She grabbed the end of the cut string and hauled the carcass over the gate to her side of the

fence.

"But you can't tell anyone that I cut this off," she told him. "It'll just be our little secret. And if anybody asks, it fell off of you and right here into this yard, which, by the way,! was invited to come into by one of the house's occupants. Got that? I just found this foul fowl lyin' back here on this side of the gate."

Relieved of his albatross, the ancient mariner began to prance about, shaking himself, and grinning a big, toothy, wolfy grin.

"Feel better now?" she asked, as she leaned over and coaxed him back onto the gate so that she could pet

him. Looking at the brass tag that dangled from his heavy leather collar, she said, "Nanook. That's your

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name, huh? Well, I've done you a favor, which means ,rou owe me. If I ever find myself plagued by a kid in a red cloak or a trio of bothersome pigs, I'm gonna call Ml you, okay?"

The blue eyes looked into hers with a depth of inteligence

and understanding that took her aback, and the luiet dignity of the creature touched her heart.

"You're welcome," she said softly. "It was my plea-awe."

Moments later, as she was placing the dead chicken nto a plastic bag she had dug out of her trunk, she neard Nanook pacing on the other side of the fence. At east he wasn't whining anymore.

But as she drove away, an ambulance siren sounded a ew blocks away, and she laughed to hear her new riend answer with a comical parody of the siren's howl.

Now she had another memory for this neighbornood

. the profound experience of looking into a

volt's eyes and, for a moment, touching a far more ioble soul than her own.

ike many California coast towns, San Carmelita had 1,...2begun its life as a mission, established by Franciscan fathers who had traveled from San Diego to the San

Francisco Bay Area, building churches and converting the Native Americans along the way . . . whether they

wanted to be or not.

And the San Carmelita Mission stood--as it had since it was built by those new, reluctant converts in the late 1700s--on a hilltop, overlooking the town and beyond it, the ocean. The panoramic view became more magnificent with every hairpin turn of the road that

zigzagged up the steep hill, giving a traveler the lighthearted feeling of truly being "above it all."

But Francie Gorton had no appreciation for the

sweeping vista as she guided her brother's Charger up

the hill toward the old mission. She was wondering why

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A. McKevett

Savannah Reid had changed their plans and asked

someone to phone and switch the location.

"Behind the mission just after eleven," the caller had said. "And she won't have much time, so don't be late."