Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 08 (12 page)

"Thank gawd I found you!" she said, her hand clutching her bosom. Her dress was torn and splattered with mud, and her hair looked as if she'd come too close to a ceiling fan. I could see her teeth chattering and almost hear her knees knocking. "This is an emergency! Come on!"

"What's wrong?"

"There's no time to explain. Cynthia Dodder's in my car unconscious, blue, barely breathing. I'm afraid she's had a heart attack or a stroke. In any case, we got to get her to the hospital, and it's too risky to move her to your car!"

I grabbed my car keys and followed Ruby Bee out the door. "Keep up with me," I said. Praying that my siren and cop lights were working, I got in my car, hit the switches, and turned onto the highway. I would have alerted the dispatcher, but the radio had succumbed to a staticky death months earlier. Two out of three is respectable.

We averaged sixty miles an hour and a thrill a minute, but Ruby Bee stayed on my bumper all the way to the emergency entrance of the Farberville hospital, where medical personnel briskly took charge. Once Cynthia had been whisked away on a gurney, I sank down on a bench, crossed my arms, and took a look at Ruby Bee and Estelle. Neither's pallor was significantly better than the patient's. Their arms and legs were covered with oozing scratches, and mud from their shoes had sullied the antiseptic floor of the waiting room. As noted previously, Ruby Bee's hair was in a bad way, but Estelle's beehive was at a precarious pitch and only a bobby pin away from catastrophe. No respectable cat would have bothered to drag them in.

"Would you care to explain?" I asked.

Ruby Bee opened her purse and pulled out her wallet. "I need a can of soda pop before I can begin to try to tell you what happened. What about you, Estelle? I got plenty of quarters."

A solemn young nurse came into the waiting room, faltered as she saw my badge, then resumed her proficient demeanor. "Is one of you a relative?" We shook our heads. "Do you have information about Ms. Dodder's health insurance? I need to start the paperwork immediately so that she can be admitted to the intensive care unit."

"How is she?" asked Ruby Bee.

The nurse's smile was encouraging, if also synthetic. "The doctors are with her now. We'll monitor her very carefully until we can transfer her upstairs, but I really need personal and insurance information. Perhaps she has various cards in her purse?"

"There wasn't any time to grab her purse," Estelle said, then inexplicably began to snivel. The only other time I'd ever seen her do so was on a night when sherry had loosened her tongue and she'd hinted darkly about a forbidden relationship in the past. "We dragged her all the way back to the car and raced to Maggody, terrified she was gonna die before we made it. The last thing we were worrying about was her purse!" She collapsed against Ruby Bee's shoulder and began to sob.

"I must start the paperwork," the nurse murmured unhappily. "Hospital regulations."

"Let me talk to them for a minute," I said. When she fled toward her office, I said, "You dragged her all the way back to the car? Just where were you-all?"

Ruby Bee peered around Estelle's hair. "By Boone Creek, downstream from the low-water bridge. Maybe a hundred yards as the crappie swims." She began to thump Estelle on the back. "Gracious, the way you're carrying on! Why don't you go to the ladies' room and splash some cold water on your face?"

I held up my hand. "Wait a minute. What were the three of you doing by the creek? Wasn't it a little dark for a picnic?"

"It might have been."

"Don't start this! Cynthia Dodder is in critical condition, and the last thing I need is for you to turn evasive on me. This is not the worst place for me to choke out some answers. After I get finished, they can wheel you upstairs and feed you intravenously until you recover."

Estelle released her stranglehold on Ruby Bee and sprawled into a molded plastic chair. "We saw an alien, if you must know, Miss Hulk Hogan. A big silver one that shimmered in the dark. It was the scariest thing I've ever seen, as sure as I live and breathe. I liked to have a heart attack myself when it came walking across the creek, its arms stretched out like it was aiming to grab us."

"On top of the water," said Ruby Bee.

I did some sprawling of my own as I tried to make sense of their story. I would have had more luck putting together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. "Okay, let's go back to the beginning. Why were you there?"

Ruby Bee's eyes were flickering, and I could tell she was debating how much of the truth I deserved to hear. It was a dilemma she'd faced in the past; I usually came out on the short end. "Around nine o'clock Cynthia was in the barroom having coffee -- and a piece of lemon icebox pie, I might add -- when a local boy brought a note for Dr. Sageman. She opened it in case she might need to interrupt him while he was in the middle of hypnotizing Dahlia. All of a sudden she dashed out the door and drove away. Being naturally concerned, Estelle and I went out to the parking lot, where we happened to see the note stuck partway under Dr. Sageman's door."

Estelle leaped into the narrative. "It said that some kind of shiny disk had crashed in the woods downstream from the bridge. There was even a map showing that weedy old road that goes there."

"We were worried about her safety," added Ruby Bee. "Otherwise, we wouldn't have so much peeked at the note. It was a good thing we did, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yes," I said without inflection. "So you decided to go there in case Cynthia needed your invaluable assistance. Then what happened?"

Ruby Bee opened her mouth, but Estelle once again cut her off. "Cynthia'd parked just past the bridge, so we left the car behind hers and walked to the creek. It was darker than the inside of a cow, because one of us has forgotten to replace the batteries in her flashlight since Hiram Buchanon's barn burned to the ground. We poddled along for a good five minutes, tripping over branches and fighting back brambles, and finally came to that grassy patch where teenagers have been known to sunbathe without a stitch on. You know the place I mean?"

"I know the place."

"I figured you would," Estelle said, wiggling her eyebrows at Ruby Bee. "Well, we stopped behind some bushes to see what was going on. Cynthia was looking down at something on the ground when there was a loud snap-crackle-pop across the creek." She paused for dramatic effect, noticed I was not appreciative, and continued. "Out of the woods came this big silvery creature, with arms and legs and regular stuff, but with a round head. Its eyes were shaped like almonds and pitch-black. There was no trace of a nose and nothing but a little hole where its mouth was supposed to be."

"And it was glowing like an old-fashioned lantern," Ruby Bee said, finally getting her turn. "It looked right at us, lifted its arms, and came lurching across the creek. There was enough moonlight to see real plainly that its feet were a good inch above the water. I can't begin to describe how petrified I was, especially when Cynthia screamed and fell down in a heap like a rag doll. My blood was roaring so loud I couldn't hear myself think!"

I was puzzled by their earnestness. They, along with Cynthia, had been frightened by something, although I wasn't buying a luminescent silver creature that walked on water. "Then what happened?" I asked cautiously.

Estelle pulled out a tissue and blew her nose. "The creature stopped right in the middle of the creek, like it was startled. Ruby Bee and I managed to get Cynthia's arms draped over our shoulders and carried her up the road as fast we could go, all the while looking back to make sure it wasn't coming after us and trying to keep our own selves from gettin' hysterical. It took forever and a day to get to the car, lemme tell you."

"And you drove to the PD," I said. I suppose I should have come up with a barrage of questions, but I was too perplexed to do anything more than stare at the dingy green wall and try to assimilate the scene they'd described. It played like a low-budget movie.

The nurse reappeared. "I have to get the information before we can move the patient upstairs. By law, we must provide emergency treatment, but that's all."

I stood up. "I'll drive back to Maggody and see if I can find her purse. Do you remember if Cynthia had it with her down by the creek?"

Ruby Bee and Estelle held a whispery conference, then agreed that she had. Maybe.

"Wait here," I said. "I should be back in an hour. One of you needs to call Dr. Sageman and the other woman from Little Rock to let them know about this."

Ruby Bee grabbed my hand. "I don't want you to go there by yourself. We didn't make up this crazy story, and we sure didn't share a jar of Raz's moonshine on the way to the bridge. I don't know how to explain it, but there was something menacing the way that creature came at us. It wasn't anything like that cute E.T. in the movie. Call over to the sheriff's department and get somebody to go with you, honey."

I left before she could elicit a promise from me. I didn't know who was working the second shift at the sheriff's department, but my ears began to tingle as I envisioned the hilarity my request for backup would bring, especially when I got to the part about the luminescent alien with a bad attitude and a light step.

By the time I reached the turnoff to County 102, I'd come up with the most obvious explanation: The three women were the unintentional victims of a hoax perpetrated by the high school kids. Estelle had said that a local boy delivered the envelope addressed to Sageman. I made a mental note to get his name when I returned to the emergency room. Rousing him from bed and demanding the names of the conspirators would provide some measure of vindication for the uproar.

A white subcompact was parked beyond the bridge. I grabbed my flashlight (I myself replace batteries weekly out of sheer boredom) and took a quick look. The keys were in the ignition, but Cynthia's purse was not in sight. I reached through the open window and grabbed the car keys, then walked down the overgrown road. There were signs of Ruby Bee's and Estelle's hasty retreat: scuff marks and footprints in the mud, broken weeds, trampled branches, even a scrap of material from Ruby Bee's dress dangling on a thorny bush.

I came to the clearing and stopped. The moonlight glittered on Boone Creek. Nocturnal birds were making their usual racket, accompanied by tree frogs and cicadas. Some unseen animal rustled in the leaves. A car rumbled down the road, splashed across the bridge, and continued on its way toward Hasty. A bullfrog harrumphed plaintively.

This was not the spookiest milieu I'd ever been in, but it made the list. I swept the light along the far side of the creek, saw nothing, and continued into the clearing. Only then did I see the body.

Biting my lip and trying to keep the flashlight from sliding out of my sweaty hand, I edged forward. Brian Quint lay on his back, his arms and legs extended as if he were preparing to make an angel in the snow. His face was no longer pale; it was as red as a cherry. I dropped to my knees and futilely tried to find a pulse in his neck. His chest was still, his skin cool to the touch, his muscles flaccid. I pulled back an eyelid and shone the light. There was no response.

I rose and flashed the beam on the surrounding grass.

At what appeared to be precise intervals were short burn marks. I confirmed that they encircled us, and Brian lay in the middle. Cynthia's purse was nowhere to be seen.

It was time for some backup, and I didn't give a rat's ass if my call entertained the whole damn county.

I drove back to the PD and called the sheriff's department. The dispatcher was as skeptical as I'd anticipated but finally agreed to call the sheriff at home and send a couple of deputies to the bridge to protect the scene until everybody descended. I found the telephone number of the hospital and, after wandering through a labyrinth of extensions, managed to get through to Ruby Bee.

"They say she had a heart attack but is stable for the time being," she said in response to my question. "I tried to get hold of Rosemary and Dr. Sageman, but nobody's answering in either motel room. I can't think where they'd be." She covered the receiver and had a short conversation, then said, "Estelle says they might have gone over to Raz's. That alien we saw tonight was most likely the same one everybody saw two nights ago beyond those circles in his cornfield."

"Perhaps." I hung up and went back to my car. In my absence some considerate soul had rolled up the sidewalks and turned off the lights at the pool hall and the SuperSaver. There were a couple of people inside the Suds of Fun, woodenly watching their laundry churn as if Jay Leno were in there, too. There were no cars parked on the road in front of Raz's shack. A light was on inside it, but I doubted he was having a nightcap with Dr. Sageman and Rosemary Tant.

For some reason, Dahlia's house was lit up like a convenience store in a high-crime neighborhood. I pulled into the driveway, took a deep breath, and then went to the front door and knocked. When there was no response, I knocked more firmly and called, "Dahlia, it's Arly. I need to talk to you."

The door inched open, and one eye regarded me. "What do ya want?"

"Can I come in?"

She opened the door and stepped back. "I reckon so, but I don't see what business it is of yours. You can't arrest 'em after all."

I perched on the arm of the sofa and waited until she'd slammed the door and locked it. "Arrest who?"

"Those little gray men, that's who. You can't even arrest somebody in the next town. Why do you go and think you can arrest somebody that lives so far away you'd die of old age before you ever got there?"