Water Witch (2 page)

About a month later, while getting ready for
bed, Fritter showed up at my door again, pawing as if he meant to
rip through wood and screen. It was late, and I was already grumpy
from a looming deadline and an article that refused to gel, so I
just grabbed the first thing I happened upon in the fridge and
threw it out to shut him up. It was sliced deli turkey, which
evidently didn’t require sniffing because he simply swallowed the
meat whole. I didn’t even have time to close the kitchen door
before he was at it again, scratching, pawing, whining for all he
was worth. Twenty minutes later an F2 tornado plowed through Cyler,
missing my house and the twenty-acre spread that surrounded it by
mere feet.

The final incident that forced me to put two
and two together about the dog came a couple of weeks later. I’d
just climbed into my truck to head for the grocery store when the
mutt came tearing around the corner of the house and threw himself
at the driver’s door. I hollered at him to beat it, but he only
hurled himself at the door again. I honked the horn, and he ran off
a few feet, then came to a stop and gave me a look that seemed to
say,
Listen to me—see me—don’t go!
That look was so
human-like, so
readable,
I almost got out of the truck.
Instead, I gave myself a reprimanding tsk and sped off. Fritter
chased the truck down the long gravel drive, and it was about a
mile down Highway 142 before I finally lost him.

On my return trip from the store, bench seat
loaded down with eggs, milk, bread, more sliced turkey, cans of
beef stew, and orange juice, I was t-boned by a teenager speeding
across an intersection in his father’s red Camaro. Luckily there’d
been no serious injuries. I managed to walk away with only a bump
on the head, a scratch on my right knee, and the inside of the
truck covered in egg slime. When I got home, Fritter had been
waiting. He yapped and raced about my feet, evidently glad to see
me, then trotted off with his tail and head held high. There’d been
no mistaking the haughty attitude . . .
“See what you get for
not listening to me, Ms. Thing?
” Ever since then, the dog and I
had a clear understanding. He scratched, I paid attention.

With my stomach twisting up in knots, I
pushed away from the table and went over to the door to see what
Fritter wanted. As soon as I turned on the back porch light, I
spotted him running in circles, chasing his tail as if something
had latched onto it and refused to let go. I pushed open the screen
door and quickly scanned the sky. There was no whistle in the wind,
no reddish glow. It looked like any other small town, Texas night
in April. Cool, dark, and filled with more stars than was possible
to count.

I turned to the dog. “What now?”

As soon as Fritter heard my voice, his
frantic circling ceased. He looked up at me, and the intensity of
his stare sent my heart hammering against my chest.

“What?” I asked again, frustrated he didn’t
speak English and I couldn’t speak dog. All I had to go on were
those
looks
he gave me. “Well?”

In response, Fritter suddenly bolted,
squeezed himself between the open door and me, and ran into the
house.

“Hey!”

The mutt ignored me, toenails ticking,
scritching on the kitchen linoleum as he ran across the room. I
watched dumbfounded as he finally slid to a stop, right beneath the
old telephone mounted on the far back wall. There he sat and
chuffed, looking up at the phone, then over at me, then up at the
phone again.

I stood in the doorway, unsure of what to
make of the situation. Fritter had never come into the house
before. In fact, he’d never stayed in the yard longer than a day at
a time. When he wasn’t warning me of something, he came and went as
he pleased; usually taking advantage of the bowl of water and
occasional leftovers I placed near the tool shed out back. Although
he didn’t belong to me, I’d named him. I had to call him something
other than Dog, and Fritter just seemed appropriate. A sort of
commemoration of the first time we met.

I closed the door and walked over to him,
settling my right hand on my hip. Fritter chuffed again, swiped his
tongue over his snout, then flopped onto his belly. He glanced up
at the phone, then over to me, and the inside of my chest suddenly
felt weighted with a thousand fluttering bats. Was he trying to
warn me that something was going to happen in this house? Or that
bad news was coming by way of the phone? My stomach churned again,
and I tried convincing myself, despite the other warnings, that I
was being paranoid. That Fritter was nothing but an old dog that
happened to be around in the wrong place at the right time. Nothing
but coincidence. But I couldn’t let it go.

I pointed a finger at him. “Look, if you’re
trying to tell me something, you’re going to have to do better than
that.”

Fritter glanced from me to the phone again,
yawned, then rested his muzzle between his front paws. His yawn
caused a few of the bats nesting in my chest to scatter. Maybe his
scratching wasn’t a warning this time. Maybe he just wanted a
warmer place to sleep tonight or a late snack. And even if he meant
to warn me about something, it couldn’t have been that urgent, he
looked too relaxed.

I blew out a loud breath and headed for the
pantry to get a can of beef stew. “You make me crazy, you know
that?” Fritter rolled his eyes in my direction, as if I were the
nuisance.

Shaking my head, I opened the pantry and
stepped inside. It was the size of a small, walk-in closet and
always smelled of fresh dug potatoes and onions, even though I
stored neither on its shelves. That scent had a way of bringing me
comfort, a sense of peace, home and family. I closed my eyes for a
moment and inhaled deeply, remembering. There was a lot to
remember.

My paternal grandmother had stored potatoes
and onions, which had been harvested from my grandfather’s garden,
in this pantry for as long as I could recall . . .which was quite a
number of years. I’d lived here since I was five, along with my
younger sister, Angelle, after our mother and father died in a car
accident in El Paso. Mom and Pop Pollock had taken us in
immediately after the accident, and for years, they made sure we
never wanted for the basics in life or questioned whether or not we
were loved. When it came to food and shelter, love and protection,
especially protection from outsiders who wanted to know more about
my secret, Mom and Pop Pollock had given all they had. And they
continued to give even after they died, which had been about two
years ago. Mom passed on after a heart attack on Valentine’s Day,
and Pop followed a month later from a massive stroke. Their will
had been short and simple; everything was to go to Angelle and me.
The house, the land, a 1987 Ford pickup with only forty-one
thousand miles on the odometer, and a surprising amount of money
they’d managed to squirrel away in money market certificates.

The money came from a pool of oil that had
been discovered on the south end of their property nearly sixteen
years ago. It had been large enough to plop them into the lap of
luxury for the rest of their lives. Instead, having always been
frugal, Mom and Pop had only bought necessities, preferring to save
a good portion of their new income for ‘a rainy day,’ which, of
course, never came.

With no mortgage on the house, and interest
checks coming in monthly, Angelle and I could have easily sat on
our butts and grown fat and bitchy over the last couple of years.
Fortunately, our grandparents had also left behind a work ethic
that kept that from happening. The money did, however, provide us
with the freedom to work at whatever we chose. For me, that meant
freelancing as a columnist for three large Texas newspapers, one as
far away as Dallas. The pay wasn’t all that great, but with money
not being an issue, I reveled in the opportunity to work
independently from home.For Angelle, it had meant earning a degree
in education. Now she worked as a second grade teacher in south
Louisiana, where she lived with her relatively new husband, Trevor.
Angelle loved working with kids as much as I loved working with
words.

Standing in the pantry, thinking about my
sister, sent a wave of loneliness crashing over me, and I quickly
grabbed a can of beef stew and got the hell out of there. There was
a significant difference between living alone and being lonely. I’d
always managed the former without a problem and fought my entire
life to ignore the latter.

To brush away the last of that forlorn web, I
shook the can of stew at Fritter. “You better damn sure appreciate
this. Ten o’clock at night, and I’m feeding a rag-tag dog.”

Fritter jumped up, and at first I thought he
was excited about the upcoming snack, but then he let out a sharp
bark and stared at the telephone, ears peaking. In that instant,
the phone rang.

I shot a look at the old beige box mounted on
the wall. It had no caller ID, no answering machine, and its ring
was shrill and always set my teeth on edge. Even worse, it summoned
all the bats back to roost in my chest. I set the can of stew on
the counter and took a step towards the phone, which sent the bats
colliding into each other. Fritter began to paw the linoleum and
howl, his snout raised to the ceiling. Between the scratching and
howling, jangling and fluttering, I felt a sudden urge to run out
of the house and never look back.

I wish I had.

CHAPTER TWO

Gritting my teeth, I marched over to the
phone. “Quit being ridiculous,” I muttered to myself, then yelled
at Fritter to shut up. He howled louder. I grabbed the receiver
from the cradle and yelled into it, “Hold on!” then dropped the
phone, scooped Fritter into my arms, and carried him outside. The
mutt barked and wiggled, squirmed and howled, as if I was leading
him to a torture chamber. By the time I got back to the phone, I
was out of breath.

“What the hell is all that noise?” My sister,
younger by two years and prettier by multiples of ten in my
opinion, never missed an opportunity to get right to the point. We
usually talked at least once a week, catching up on what was going
on in one another’s lives. But the last time we’d spoken had been a
couple of weeks ago, and even then the conversation had been short.
The school year was rolling to an end, which usually meant
Angelle's workload doubled, leaving her little time for leisurely
chats.

“Just Fritter losing his shit. I had to put
him outside.”

“Since when do you let him in the house?”

“I didn’t. He just kind of let himself
in.”

Fritter was still howling, and he began to
paddle the door with his paws. Right then, I had a sneaky suspicion
that whatever he’d been trying to warn me about involved this call.
The hair on my arms stood on end. If there was bad news coming,
there was no use dancing around it. Just as soon cut to the chase.
“What’s wrong?”

. “How . . . how did you know something was
wrong?”

Since I’d never told my sister about the
special connection between Fritter and me, I figured it best to
tell a little white lie. Better that than have her think I had a
few brain bulbs burning out. “I could just tell from your voice.”
She let out a little sob, and my knees weakened. Jesus, something
was
wrong. I leaned against the wall. “Talk to me.”

Angelle sniffled and let out a shaky breath
that I could hear even over Fritter’s howling. “I don’t even know
where to start.”

“Try the beginning.”

“That would take too long.” Another sniffle.
“Dun, I need . . . I need your help. I need you to come out to
Bayou Crow.”

My palms grew slick with sweat. “What’s the
matter? Are you sick? Hurt?”

“No, not that. I really don’t want to get
into everything over the phone. It would take too long and sound
too . . .too weird. I’ll tell you all about it when you get here .
. . if you’ll come.”

“Wait, I don’t understand. You need my help
but can’t tell me why?”

“No . . .well, yeah, I can tell you the most
important part—a couple of kids from my class are missing. An
eight-year-old boy named Nicky Trahan, and a seven-year-old girl,
Sarah Woodard. They’ve been gone for over twenty-four hours now,
and people here are starting to think they’ve either drowned or got
lost in the swamps.”

I frowned.“I can understand drowning with all
the water out there and everything, but how does a seven and
eight-year-old get lost in a swamp? It’s not like wondering off in
the woods. You can’t just walk through a swamp, right?”

“Not really. But there is a good bit of land
out there, though.”

“Okay, but don’t you have to get to that land
by boat?”

“Yeah.”

“Did either of those kids know how to drive
one?”

“I don’t think so. I mean they’re only seven
and eight.”

“That’s my point, how would they have gotten
out there?”

“Someone could’ve easily taken them.”

What came immediately to mind was,
Why?
But I didn’t ask. The question was stupid. There were
no real answers when it came to child abduction. Just sick assholes
with personal agendas. “Gelle, I don’t—”

“B-15!”a woman shouted in the background from
Angelle’s end of the line.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Poochie, Trevor’s grandma. She does that
every once in a while, call Bingo numbers I mean. Not sure why.”
Angelle lowered her voice. “She’s a sweetheart, but has always been
a little off. Started getting worse over the last two, three weeks.
You know, forgetting things, like taking her meds, leaving the
stove on, stuff like that. Trevor thought it best to move her out
here for a while.”

“You mean she’s living with you?”

“Yeah. She lived all the way out in St.
Martinville, over an hour and a half away. It was hard keeping tabs
on her from that distance. She doesn’t have any other immediate
family but us, and Trevor isn’t ready to put her in a nursing home
yet.”