New Digs

Damn armadillos!

I couldn’t be mad. Not really. They say ignorance is bliss, but, unawares or not, I don’t want to sleep over a grave. Not on your life.

I could, however, have done without their timing.

It had been a long day under the searing sun. I’d hacked back the vines engulfing my new-to-me yard, a Sisyphean task. I was quite sure, the minute I turned my back, their ropy tentacles would again reach out from the depths of Jungle Jim’s tangle next door to pull my shrubs beneath their verdant waves. That was no reason to go down without a struggle.

By the hefty diameter of some specimens, thick as a baby’s arm, I surmised no one had fought the good fight in some time. That held true for everything to do with maintenance on my place. The cottage had been empty for years, the vacation home of a couple too elderly to use it and too frugal to hire a caretaker.

I wasn’t complaining. If the house hadn’t been a “project,” I couldn’t have afforded it.

I’d chased down my long day with a longer seaside evening, joining my neighbors from the tidy side, Claire and Teresa, for Coronaritas and watching, first the sunset, then Australian rugby at the Mucky Duck, an English-pubby affair of dark wood and Guinness-abelia.

I didn’t understand either rugby or the beach-front Duck’s incongruous decor, but Claire was into it. What the hey. I wasn’t about to turn down a quencher, or, as new kid on the block, a friendly invitation. And, I must confess, I rather enjoyed watching strapping lads pound up and down the field, even if I had no concept of the game.

It was not Teresa’s scene. Not the Mucky Duck. Not Coronaritas. Not rugby. Not burly, dirt-caked men.

She would have preferred an evening amid the Christmas lights at The Bubble Room, dissecting sunburned tourists’ wardrobes over Pink Mules. Her repeated nail-gazing and sporadic sighs made her position clear.

Ah, the things we do for love.

Dosed with sun and tequila, I was fried by the time Claire’s Jeep turned down our dead-end road. We said our good-nights. Claire and Teresa trundled off to their retro digs. I dragged my tired carcass up the splintery steps of my stilt house and flopped down on the chaise to sleep.

I’d taken to sleeping on the lanai. It wasn’t any cooler than the A/C-less interior, but it had air flow.

All things considered, it was a big upgrade from life aboard Squid, the 1939 power boat tied to my worm-eaten dock. So neglected I’d gotten her for free, I’d lived on her for years, saving up to buy a house of my own. I would never take hot, running water for granted again.

No-see-ums aside, it was magical sleeping in the treetops — the rustling foliage, the muffled crash of surf, the dawn birdsong — most of the time. Not so charming was the hair-trigger motion sensor of the carport lights below. Any wandering creature set it off, sending white hot blades of high-K halogen slicing up through the floorboards, fanning the ceiling like a disco. I would roll over, squeeze my eyes shut and wait out the timer, a feeble strategy to avoid the irreparable zapping of my circadian rhythm.

The lights snapped on at least once per night, so the sudden flare jolting me out of my too-brief slumber was no surprise. I pulled the sheet over my head and started the countdown to blessed blackness.

But it didn’t come.

What the heck?

I listened. I thought I could hear some kind of scratching in the sand below. I got off the chaise and pressed an eye to a crack between the boards.

It wasn’t much of a view. I could see movement. Something small. Maybe more than one.

Raccoons? Palm rats? Armadillos? Whatever they were, they needed to stop or I was going to be a sleepless wreck.

I shoved my feet into Tevas, grabbed a broom and headed down to scare off the intruders.

An old name for the armadillo is gravedigger, because — you guessed it— they dig up graves. They do this, not out of morbid curiosity or a taste for corpse flesh, but because fresh graves are easy digging and delicious insects are often found in association with the departed.

They also jump straight up, as high as four feet, when startled.

I was about to learn both facts simultaneously.

From the base of the stair, it was impossible to see what was going on amid the labyrinth of rusty bicycles, faded trash cans, jumbled beach chairs, crusty paint cans and disorganized lumber I’d inherited from the former owners. But I could hear scrabbling coming from somewhere behind a stack of once-turquoise decking.

Tetanus in mind, I picked my sandaled way carefully through the debris, perhaps too carefully. In hindsight, a little bumbling on my part would have saved us all a scare, or at least part of a scare. As it was, they never heard me coming.

Broom held high, I rounded the pile. The spring-loaded diners shot upward, scaring the bejesus out of me, and caromed into the night, crashing through the maze like crazed bocce balls. Their exit revealed, in the aftermath of their digging, a human hand.

I did what any sensible person would do. I dropped the broom, screamed, stumbled backward and fell over a bucket. I scrambled to my feet and fled to the relative safety of driveway.

I stood in the tropical night vibrating with adrenaline.

Did I really just see that? Was it some aberrational image concocted by my tequila-addled brain?

Lights flicked on in a few houses. Folks were probably wondering if some midnight stroller had just been eaten by an alligator.

I crept back to the carport and peered over the pile. Still there. Jesus!

I dashed up the stairs, grabbed my cell and dialed 911.

Shit! No bars.

I ran back down and out to the road, a receptional ley line of our end of the island. Yes! I called dispatch.

“Can you wait for us outside?” asked the eerily calm woman on the other end of the line. Hands in carports were not an emergency in her world.

“Sure … I guess. How long will it take you guys to get here?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

“Okay.”

I wanted police. I wanted them now. But what was I to do? Stand in the road and slap mosquitoes it seemed.

The carport lights went off, plunging me into darkness. The palms became ragged silhouettes against the starry Gulf sky. The white shell road gleamed bluely. Pairs of impish eyes, the twin spots of fire beetles, glowed from the inky foliage pressing its margins. I heard a sturdy crunch and saw the arc of a swinging flashlight.

“Hello?” I offered up to the beam.

“Is that you, Kingfisher?”

It was Claire. She had taken to calling me that, and I liked it. Claire had a nickname for everyone she liked — everyone but Teresa — and some she didn’t. I suspected my new moniker had more to do with my spiky, blue punk cut and than it did my angling prowess.

“Yes.”

“What are you doing in the dark? Who screamed?”

“That was me.” I explained the situation.

“Holy fuck! Is it attached?”

“I assume so. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.”

“Can I look?”

“Jesus, Claire.”

“I just want to know if it’s attached.”

“I think we’re going to find out soon enough. Also, it’s probably not a good idea to add your footprints.”

“Right.”

“Could you tell if it’s a man’s or woman’s?”

“I didn’t look all that hard, but I’d guess male.”

“Hmmmm. How dead did it look?”

“What do you mean, ‘How dead?’” It was Jungle Jim, who had crept up on us in bare feet and a kimono, his hair in a scraggly ponytail.

My heart almost stopped, but Claire didn’t miss a beat. “I mean, is it fresh or all Ma Bates mummified?”

“On that scale, I’d go with fresh,” I mused.

“Black or white?”

“Definitely not black, but it was pretty sandy. I couldn’t say white for sure.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Jim. It was a fair question. I explained it all again.

“This will be bad for property values,” was the compassionate response from the world’s most laissez-faire gardener. He was right.

“Did it have a ring? A tattoo?” Claire didn’t care about property values. She’d inherited her atomic-age home from her grandfather.

“Can you please stop with the twenty questions. I told you, I was too freaked out to study it.”

“You’re sure you don’t want me to take a look?”

“No! I mean, yes. I’m sure. Let’s just wait for the police.”

From my lips to Gods ears. Down the lane came not one but three cruisers — the entire force for all I knew — and an ambulance, lights ablaze. Blasé dispatcher be damned, this was clearly the most exciting thing to happen on the island since the tandem-bike-related domestic brawl a few months back.

They angled to a stop, illuminating the scene with headlights. A broad fellow with a shaved dome and air of authority strode over to our little knot.

“Hi, Clair. Hello, James.”

Everyone knows Claire. Her family was on the island before there was a bridge, before the two hurricanes salted the soil and made agriculture impossible. They’d made a killing selling bad farmland to developers. The Samsons were old Sanibel.

James Swan, that was Jungle Jim’s real name. Word had it he used to find more than fish offshore in the ‘80s. I was unsurprised he was known to the law.

“Who are you?” the policeman demanded, giving me the squinty eye. Maybe it was my hair.

“I’m the one that called this in. The homeowner,” I snapped. It had been a trying night. And, just maybe, I’m a little testy around respect issues.

“Riley, I’d like you to meet my new neighbor, Kristen Fourier. Kristen, this is Detective Riley Strauss.” Claire had manners.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” I responded, extending my hand in lieu of an olive branch. Detective Strauss gave it a shake, taking me in. I saw his eyes widen.

“What happened to your leg?”

I looked down. “Holy crap!” Blood soaked the pink, cotton flowers covering my left thigh, oozing through a rent in the fabric. “I must have caught a nail when I fell.”

“You need that looked at,” was his professional assessment. He took me to the ambulance. I was glad to give the EMTs a reason for getting out of bed. I was fairly certain they weren’t going to be able to help the hand.

Sitting on the tailgate, wincing as my wound was cleansed, I repeated my tale of discovery to Detective Strauss. There wasn’t much of a backstory. I’d moved in just a week before and had been avoiding the chaos in the carport. I’d had bigger fish to fry, the mess inside the house and the yard.

Meanwhile, the other officers were busy securing the scene from the growing crowd of full-timers, drawn like so many moths to the strobing lights. But it was a thin crowd. We were into May. The season was over. The summer heat was dialing up. Most of the houses stood vacant.

Late to the scene was Teresa, who swept up to the ambulance looking as put together as ever. Perhaps that explained her late arrival.

If Claire was old Sanibel, Teresa was new Captiva. The daughter of an investment banker with her very own Harvard Law degree, she was slumming it hanging with us. I couldn’t imagine what her father thought of her living with Claire or her work for Lee County Legal Aid.

“Oh, Kristen! What happened? Were you attacked?” she asked.

“No, no. I cut myself.”

“But the police?”

“I think I found a body.”

Her mahogany skin turned walnut. I thought she was going to pass out. The EMTs saw it, too. One grabbed her elbow and sat her down beside me. Claire excused herself from the crowd, where she’d been presiding like a tour guide, and joined us.

The adrenaline was wearing off, my leg was starting to throb, and I was feeling a bit woozy myself. I wasn’t up to telling my story one more time. Claire was only too happy to paint Teresa a picture, filling in fuzzy details with her vivid imagination.

A formation of spoonbills passed overhead, pink against the pink dawn, as the body bag was carried out and loaded into the ambulance. The doors shut and they were off to the morgue. Nothing more to see here.

The weary gawkers shuffled off to their coffee and grapefruit. I was transferred to the back of a cruiser for transportation to the clinic, stitches and a tetanus booster in my future. No way, with that gash, was I was driving my old, manual 4x4.

As we were about to depart, Strauss put his hand on the roof and dropped a downer through the open window, “You can’t return home till we clear the scene.”

Thanks so much. Just in my house and already out on my ear. And the police wonder why people don’t report crimes. “Can I live on my boat at the dock?” I bargained.

Claire elbowed Strauss aside. “You’re not climbing in and out of that washtub with that wound. This is the tropics, kiddo. That puppy needs to be kept clean and dry. You’re going to stay with us.”

“And we’re going to get you back in your house pronto. Don’t you worry,” piped Teresa from behind.

By afternoon, we were back at Claire and Teresa’s, sitting beside the pool with mojitos. We’d dragged the TV out to the Florida Room so we wouldn’t miss WINK News’ evening broadcast. Always on the prowl for fresh blood, it didn’t disappoint. The BREAKING NEWS headliner flashed behind the toothy anchor and we leaned in.

The body of a man discovered under a home on Sanibel had been identified as Thomas Kendall. A wallet and air ticket found on the body had facilitated the investigation.

Teresa was about to say something, but Claire shushed her.

Struggling to suppress his glee over the tabloid scoop plopped in his lap, the anchor pressed on with the knowns of the deceased.

Kendall was an anthropology professor at the University of Florida who had been fired for crossing academic Rubicons. Claiming to be in communication with the spirit of a Calusa shaman who had anointed him his spiritual heir, Kendall began initiating impressionable undergrads in his cult-like ceremonies. One of them squealed.

Was he for real, delusional or a charlatan? The University didn’t care. Between his abuse of the student-teacher relationship, cultural appropriation and failing to maintain academic distance from his subject, it showed him the door. He was lucky someone’s parents didn’t sue his ass. It had been all over the news at the time.

Some men are embarrassed by adverse publicity. Not Kendall. He reveled in it and doubled down.

He wrote a book, Way of the Calusa. Riding on the wave of free press, negative or not, it became a bestseller in New Age circles. He developed a following on his Fierce People blog.

It was genius really. Long ago dead from European disease and wars with enemy tribes, there were no Calusa left to call bullshit.

Database in hand and book proceeds in the bank, he ratcheted his business plan up another notch, opening a retreat, Casa Calusa, in a sprawling 1920s house built atop a shell mound at the end of Pelican Lane.

“He was a neighbor?” I sputtered through my rum.

“The house is haunted,” Claire replied, not answering my question. “That’s why we sold it.”

“Wait! What?”

“That was Claire’s family home,” Teresa explained. “Her grandfather sold it and the surrounding land back in the 60s and built this place.”

“So the dead guy was running a shaman school in YOUR family home at the end of OUR street?”

“Yep,” said Claire, turning off the TV. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.”

This story is part of the Murder Room project on Chalkboard.

Ignoring the rules of the Murder Room, my characters have taken control of the keyboard and stretched this tale out beyond the short story format. The question is, dear readers, shall I indulge them?

Image: Cropped antique post card of a shell mound at St. Petersburg, FL; published by G.W. Morris; Portland, ME [19 — ?]