Serpent's Tooth

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2011 by Michael R. Collings

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Judi,

  with gratitude for her initial request

  so many years ago

  that I write a mystery,

  and

  For Robert Reginald,

  with thanks for words of advice

  whispered into my artificial ears.

  OPENING QUOTATION

  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

  to have a thankless child!”

  —William Shakespeare,

  King Lear, Act I, Scene IV

  PROLOGUE

  The late afternoon sun blazed down on the narrow rutted road that ran behind the field, baking the already red-tinted earth to the consistency of brick.

  For many smaller creatures, the direct sun was the mortal enemy. It was too hot. It was too sharp. It was too bright. It robbed them of the comforting brindled patterns of light and shadow that so often offered them protection. For some, it marked the time when predators might lurk in damp grasses, on warm rocks, in the cloudless skies, circling and watching and waiting for a single, fatal momentary lapse...for the chance to kill.

  For the serpent, however, the warmth felt...well, it felt right. Life-giving. Bracing. It lay stretched across the two-lane track, completely motionless. It looked more like a thick, gnarled stick—perhaps three feet long—tossed negligently to one side by an unwary passerby than like the venom-filled stalker that it was.

  It had not moved for long minutes now.

  It might almost have been dead, except for the occasional flicker of a black, forked tongue as it tasted the still, pungent air.

  At this time of the year, with the first harvest just underway, no one used the back road very much. Oh, one of the local farmers might trundle along in a tractor now and again, preferring to take the shorter but rougher route rather than the smoothly surfaced county highway on the far side of the field.

  Or a couple of boys on furlough from the tedium of daily chores might tramp that way on their trek to the not-too-distant river and a favorite swimming hole, where they could enjoy some innocent horseplay far from parents’ prying eyes.

  But on the whole, like today, the road belonged to the snake. The only other signs of life were situated clear across the field, where a small crew was combining thigh-high wheat in long, straight rows. Another group would follow with the baler, scooping up the discarded straw and binding it in smallish rectangular bales. A third group would finish the job, hoisting the bales manually onto a noisome flat-bed truck, where the last two or three hands would stack them for transport back to the farm.

  There were more modern machines that could do all of these disparate tasks without relying on human muscle-power, of course, but this was a small field, one of only four belonging to an independent farmer, and money was tight. It was cheaper to hire the local boys to manhandle the bales.

  All of that made little difference to the serpent.

  It lay unmoving, except for that tiny, almost unnoticeable flick-flick-flick of its tongue, tasting, smelling, tasting....

  The dry cloud of pulverized straw that billowed behind the combine as its blades thrust clack-clack-clack through the field.

  The hot oil spilling in greasy black droplets from the ancient baler’s nearly worn-out engine.

  The thick, black exhaust that stuttered from the flatbed’s tailpipe whenever the driver hit the gas pedal.

  The sweat of the men as they boosted bales on their knees high enough for the others in the flatbed to grab them and swing them onto the stacks.

  The sweetish aroma of the wheat itself, bleeding from severed stalks, spilling its life-fluid onto the hot, thirsty ground.

  The faint hint of moisture from the distant river.

  The....

  The black tongue flickered, paused, flickered again.

  Ahhh. There it was....

  The scent-taste-sound of something small scurrying this way, threading its way through the jungle of stalks and stems in a blind panic, racing through the stand of as-yet uncut grain, terrified beyond terror by the sounds and smells of the monster behind it that sliced and tore and shredded, that ruptured burrows with its massive tires and sent tiny communities of nervous rodents scampering for the safety of the untouched portions of the field.

  A field mouse.

  And it was close. Deliciously close.

  The snake moved.

  When it left the heat of the roadway, slid easily beneath the ramshackle barbed-wire fence that marked the boundary of the farmer’s acreage, and entered the field, not a single stalk quivered to mark the hunter’s passage from the bright sunlight into the shadows.

  It made no noise as it insinuated its way toward the terrified mouse still running heedlessly away from the noise and confusion of the machines. Nothing would have noted its passing, brown on brown maneuvering through clots and small stones and broken, desiccated stalks.

  The mouse careened forward. The machines’ stench overcame its normally keen sense of smell; their noise drowned out any hint of warning from its almost preternaturally sharp hearing.

  It jumped onto a small stone, paused for a fraction of a moment vainly sniffing the air, sniffing the air, then leaped....

  Directly in front of the snake.

  Suddenly only inches apart, both hunter and hunted froze.

  Time seemed to have stopped.

  Then, at the same instant, two things happened.

  The tiny brown mouse leaped, straight upward at first, and then making as if to twist its body backward in a frantic attempt to escape, its long tail whipping sideways....

  Just as the snake lunged, its blunt triangular head almost parallel to the ground, thrusting out from its coiled body almost too fast to follow with the naked eye. Jaws open and fangs extended, it struck the mouse just behind the neck, engulfing the mouse’s entire head. The momentum carried the mouse onto its back, where it gave a single spasmodic shiver, went rigid with shock, and—almost miraculously, it seemed—flipped upward feet-first from the snake’s abruptly open mouth. It contorted itself once in the air before landing on all four paws...again, directly in front of the snake, facing it.

  In the instant it took for the mouse to orient itself, the snake’s head withdrew, as fluidly as quicksilver, into striking position.

  But it did not strike.

  Not immediately.

  It could hear-taste-smell the mouse’s terror, the frenzied, flurried beating of its tiny heart, the sound of its blood thrum-ing though its body, the scent of utter fear rising unbidden from its flesh.

  It caught the mouse’s wide-eyed gaze, caught it and held it, hypnotically.

  It swayed its triangular head slightly to one side.

  The mouse twitched just enough to follow the movement.

  The snake swayed back.

  The mouse’s small, bead-like eyes followed.

  The snake swayed sideways again.

  Again the mouse’s eyes followed.

  The snake began to sway back to its original position—the mouse intent on the serpent’s deep-set slitted eyes—when without a break in its rhythm, the snake surged forward, its head an impossible blur, jaws extended to their fullest revealing the satin-white lining of its mouth and its fangs protruding and deadly, this time pinioning the mouse, biting down hard, letting the venom drip into the mouse’s quivering flesh.

  And the battle—brief but epic—was over.

  But the process—the almost interminable process—of consuming the mouse was only beginning.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Hello?”

 
“Lynn, dear, it that you?”

  “Victoria?” I darted a quick glance at the old-fashioned Big-Ben wind-up alarm clock on the pine nightstand. Its rigid arms pointed to 7:15. Not that long past dawn.

  Even for what was essentially a farming community like Fox Creek, it was a bit early for a telephone call, especially a simple social call to exchange the latest recipes or gossip about the doings of wayward youngsters or brag about the splendid state of one’s gladiolas.

  “Victoria, are you all right?” My voice was harsher than usual, both because I had only been awake a few minutes and because of the sudden fear that made me sit bolt upright in bed.

  “I’m just fine, dear.”

  “Are you sure? It’s only....”

  “Yes, of course I’m sure. I just need to ask a favor. It’s about a friend of mine.”

  By this time, I was on my feet, cell phone in hand, and on my way to the closet, mentally choosing which clothes I could throw on if Victoria Sears needed me right away.

  “But you’re okay?” I repeated. Victoria was, after all, well into her seventies, coming up on her eighties with a speed that I wasn’t sure she herself sometimes recognized, and fiercely independent. Even knowing her for only a few weeks, I couldn’t imagine anything short of a life-threatening emergency that would make the woman call—and call for help—this early. Victoria was a stickler for the proper forms.

  Victoria laughed. It was a light, pleasant sound, like water running over stones in a creek bed in early spring. But we were already close enough friends for me to detect something more, a hint of darkness, beneath the sound. That small undercurrent frightened me.

  “I’m fine. Really. But I do need your help with...with something that might be rather urgent.”

  I had already pulled on a pair of jeans and was shifting the cell phone to my other hand so I could work my way into a blouse.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, a very dear friend of mine is...is in a bit of trouble, I think. I just got a call from Carver—the Ellises live next door to her—asking if I could get down there as soon as possible.”

  “Do you need me to drive you?” Victoria owned a sturdy vehicle and was more than capable of driving herself anywhere she wanted. Perhaps she was more shaken up than I had imagined over her friend’s difficulty—whatever it was—and didn’t trust herself on the road.

  “If you could I would greatly appreciate it. The Behemoth”—that was her pet name for her station wagon—“is laid up at the moment. She’s in the garage in town. If you could just pick me up and take me down-mountain and drop me off at the Ellises, I’d....”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “You don’t need to hurry too fast. I don’t think there is any real rush. Not any more. It’s...well, I’m not sure there’s really anything I can do, but I did tell Janet Ellis that I’d be there.”

  “I’m almost out the door, Victoria,” I said, buttoning the last button on my blouse.

  “Thank you, Lynn dear. I truly appreciate it.”

  She hung up.

  I rummaged around in my drawer for a thick pair of socks and dropped onto the rumpled bed to put them on. My high-topped hiking boots—a fashion statement I would never dreamed of wearing before I arrived in Fox Creek only a couple of months earlier—were lying by the side of the bed where I had left them the previous afternoon after a long, luxurious tramp into the low mountains behind my cabin. Toppled onto their sides, the boots looked comically like a couple of exhausted soldiers taking a welcome but unexpected breather.

  I didn’t know what Victoria might need me for, but I knew enough about the area to come prepared. The last time I had shared an emergency with Victoria, we had had to hike up and down the mountains abutting her home twice, making one of the trips by flashlight long after dark, and this time I was determined to be ready for anything.

  I grabbed a bagel from the refrigerator and gulped down a quick glass of icy milk. At the doorway, I nearly bolted through before I remembered to take my floppy straw hat down from the rack and jam it on my head. Estelle had instructed me to take a hat whenever I went anywhere, and her advice had proved useful several times now.

  Okay—bagel, milk, hat. Check. And I was on my way.

  Victoria’s home—she called it a cabin but it was really much more than that—was only a mile and a quarter from the place I was renting from my mother’s friends, Estelle and Edgar Van Etten. The first time I met Victoria, on that memorable day when Alix Macrorie’s body had been discovered at the foot of Porcupine Falls, I had walked the distance. Physically it had taken me the better part of half an hour but internally, the trek had seemed infinitely longer.

  It had been the first anniversary of Terry and Shawn’s deaths, and the last thing I had wanted was to let anyone else intrude on my private sorrows. But I had promised Estelle, and I had made the trip.

  And in many ways, that short walk had saved my life.

  Now I had a chance to repay Victoria in some small measure for what she had done for me that day.

  It took a little more than five minutes of bouncing along the rutted road to get to Victoria’s, but not much more. She was waiting for me at the gate that led from a low picket fence through a garden of carefully cultivated wild flowers to the front door of her house.

  She was dressed in what I recognized as her get-out-and-get-to-work garb: loose jeans that would have looked absolutely ridiculous on any other woman her age but that seemed perfect for her; a riotously flowered blouse that must certainly have been hand-sewn but would have passed muster in any made-to-order store; sturdy boots of the same brand as my own (not a surprise, since she had taken me shopping shortly after the furor over Alix’s death had subsided and instructed me in the relative merits of half a dozen possibilities); and her own wide-brimmed floppy hat. Her over-sized handbag hung loosely from its shoulder strap.

  She waved a cheery greeting as I pulled up at the fence, but I thought I saw a certain grimness beneath her welcoming smile.

  I had barely pulled to a stop before she was at the car door, had opened it, and was settling herself in the passenger seat, cinching her seat belt with a dexterity that would have put a woman thirty years her junior to shame.

  With one hand she gestured—rather imperiously, perhaps, but I was used to her mannerisms—back down the road.

  “Head on into town. The Ellises live just on the other side.”

  Since the road dead-ended at Victoria’s fence, it took me a couple of minutes to maneuver the car around, but finally we were aimed in the right direction. I hit the gas and we took off down the road.

  Victoria didn’t say much. At first she sat ramrod stiff, clutching the top of her handbag, which told me that she was far more concerned about whatever we were about to confront than she was willing to admit.

  Something was wrong, seriously wrong.

  I knew her well enough to understand that when it was time, she would tell me everything I needed to know. She was normally a fountain of information, at times downright chatty, but today she seemed more taciturn than I had ever seen her.

  We continued toward Fox Creek—“down-mountain” as the natives would have said—until we passed Estelle and Edgar’s place. Not too far beyond that point, the landscape altered noticeably. The pines and firs we had been threading through thinned out at the same time that the vista ahead broadened and flattened to reveal a long, fairly narrow valley between two stretches of mountains. It was perhaps ten miles across before the further range began again, first with a few small foothills—brown and sere in the late summer heat—then more abruptly with granite walls approaching the vertical and stands of evergreens clutching for life in the thin, scattered patches of soil.

  In between lay acres of fertile farm land, sectioned here and there by graveled roads that gave access to a few distant homesteads, usually a house, a barn, and a few scattered outbuildings.

  We passed one or two such places and, since the road was becomi
ng both more level and more easily passable, I had begun to speed up a bit—nothing hair-raising, mind you, but substantially more than, say, what one would expect of a Sunday afternoon sightseeing jaunt.

  Moving for nearly the first time since she sat down in the car, Victoria suddenly rested one hand on my arm and said, “I think you’d better slow down, Lynn dear.”

  “I’m not really speeding...,” I started to say but she tightened her grip on my arm with one hand and pointed toward the road ahead with the other.

  “I really think you should slow down. You wouldn’t want to hit that.”

  I stared ahead. And saw nothing, except a long, thin twig straddling the middle of the road.

  A four-foot-long twig...that abruptly moved.

  I must have nearly screamed—a combination of taut nerves because of the as-yet unnamed emergency that was so serious that Victoria didn’t even want to speak about it, and the sudden movement ahead as the twig raised its narrow, glistening head toward us and began to coil the rest of its long, lithe body.

  “It’s nothing to worry about, dear. Just slow down and give it a chance to save face and get away. Remember, it’s more frightened of us than we are of it.”

  Yeah, right.

  I slowed.

  Almost as soon as the car began to lose forward momentum, the twig—that is, the snake uncoiled and, moving in sinuous curves that held a curiously off-putting beauty and grace, slipped over the rough ruts and disappeared into a thick bank of white-flowered vegetation in the borrow-pit.

  I knew those plants.

  Queen Anne’s Lace.

  After Victoria’s and my earlier experiences, I recognized the good Queen, and I tendered Her Majesty a good deal more respect and attention because of that. She and her dastardly cousin, Devil’s Plague—more familiarly known in the Fox Creek area as Western Water Hemlock, a fatally poisonous plant.

  But that, as they always say in the books, is another story.1

  Without realizing it, I had been holding my breath the whole time, until the smooth tip of the snake’s tail finally disappeared into the shadows. I let out the pent-up air with a distinct whoosh and turned to face Victoria.