2
GWEN
The man arrives first about ten minutes later. He’s a rough specimen who looks like he’s just spent weeks out in the woods, and I don’t like it. Or him. Or any of this. He says, “Hey. I’m here for that snake.”
“ID,” I say. He blinks.
“What?”
“Show me some ID. I don’t know you, and I’m armed.” I’ve set my feet in a solid fighting stance, centered my weight, and loosened my knees. I don’t know if he recognizes that, but he eyes me warily. I wonder if he’s thinking I’m paranoid.
Well, he’d be right.
“Okay.” He holds up both hands. “Sure. Reaching for ID, okay?”
“Slowly.”
He does, never taking his eyes off me. He reaches back behind him, and I’m bluffing about the gun because I’ve left it in the goddamn truck’s locked glove compartment, and right now I’m kicking myself for that, but when his hand reappears—slowly—it’s holding a wallet. He opens it and pulls out a thick white business card.
“On the ground,” I tell him. He crouches and puts it down halfway between us, as far as he can reach.
I step over and pick it up in one quick, fluid dip, then raise it so I can read it while still watching him.
It’s a nice one, pure white with official black lettering and raised ink. Professor Greg Maynard. He works for the University of Tennessee. Goes to show, you can’t judge a woodsy hermit by his looks. He’s a full tenured professor of biology. How odd.
“Snake?” he asks again.
I point to the mailbox. “Sorry about that,” I tell him. “I just—I don’t know who did this. You understand?”
“Maybe it was just meant as a joke?”
“Open it.”
He gets a cotton sack and a stick with a hook on the end and flips the box open. The snake strikes. The professor doesn’t even flinch, but then, he’s standing at the exact safe distance. “Timber rattler,” he says. “Wow. Cool. You were lucky, that is definitely not a joke. Not a good one, anyway.” I watch, fascinated, as he coaxes the snake out of the mailbox, and it winds down the metal pole of the box to the dirt. From there, he efficiently pins the snake down just behind the head, and picks it up barehanded with an amount of calm I find amazing. The snake rattles and thrashes a bit, but it goes into the bag, and he cinches it shut and ties it securely.
I almost let my guard down until it runs through my mind that it would take someone with these exact skills to put a timber rattler in the mailbox.
“Are those local around here?” I ask him.
He nods. “Sure, out in the woods. Sometimes I find one of them down this far, but it’s not too normal. We see more cottonmouths and copperheads around the water.” Maynard’s thorough. He examines the inside of the mailbox with the light of his cell phone before saying, “Okay, you’re clear. I’ll get this little beauty back to my lab.”
“Lab,” I repeat.
“I’m a herpetologist. I milk snakes. That’s how we make the antivenin,” he says. “There’s always a demand for it out here in the country. You see any more of them, or any other kind of viper for that matter, you give me a call. I’ll find him a good home back in the woods where he won’t bother anyone once we’re done with him.”
I nod, still not taking my eyes off him. Professor or not, he’s now my primary suspect. Though what the hell he’d get out of scaring the shit out of me, or seeing me bitten, I have no idea. He doesn’t seem to have any personal grudge. I’m not getting any vibe like that from him at all.
He’s loading the snake into his truck when the forensics team—well, one middle-aged guy in a baggy windbreaker—rolls up in an old Jeep. The forensics guy shows me ID without me asking for it, in a move so natural he probably does it in his sleep. Speaking of that, he looks dog-tired, but he asks me intelligent questions and writes things down, and he’s dusting the mailbox for fingerprints, when Kezia Claremont pulls up just a couple of minutes after. She’s driving her personal car without the lights and sirens, and I’m glad about that; our neighbors are surely already gawking at the parade of activity. I’d rather not give them more to gossip about if possible.
“Hey, Beto,” Kez says to the forensics guy, and he waves without looking up. She’s still wearing what I think of as her work clothes: a plain navy pantsuit and a white blouse, with her detective shield clipped to her waistband. Gun concealed under her jacket. If she’d been home already, she’d have swapped out for jeans and a comfortable T-shirt. “Snake’s gone, I guess.”
“Off to a happy home, according to—” I check the business card. “Professor Maynard. What do you know about him?”
“Why?” she asks, then answers her own question. “Skill sets. Right.” She shakes her head. “Take him off your list. There are at least two dozen hillbillies around here who handle snakes just fine, and they’re more likely to be mad at you.”
There’s no point in asking why, but I do anyway. “Any particular reason?”
She shrugs. “Well, let’s start with you being from out of town and go from there.”
“I’ve been living at the lake for—”
“I’m an outsider, and me and Dad moved to this place upward of twenty years back,” she says. “If you weren’t born in these parts, you’re not from here. For some that’s enough. Then add on the rumors, the internet bullshit . . . I’ll be honest, it could be anybody.”
“Great.” I’d been hoping to end this day less paranoid, not more.
Kez moves forward to study the mailbox. “It fastens securely, right?”
“Yes.”
“No way that thing got in there accidentally.”
“Nope. And it could have bitten Sam, or the kids. It was just good luck I was the one who opened it. If it had been Connor or Lanny . . .”
“It wasn’t,” she says. “So let’s focus on what did happen, not what didn’t. At worst, someone just tried to kill you, though I expect the county DA would plead that right down to criminal mischief. He isn’t your biggest fan.”
“No kidding,” I say. “I’m surprised he hasn’t indicted me for standing here too long.”
“Well, you know what they say about a good DA: he can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Lucky that ours just isn’t that good.”
I have to laugh, because Kezia doesn’t usually smack-talk law enforcement, but she has a special contempt for District Attorney Elroy Compton. So do I. He’s a silver-haired white man whose trial record consists almost entirely of convicting black defendants in a county racked with a mainly Caucasian-driven meth and prescription-drug trade. He pleads out the white offenders, naturally. They’re “good people at heart,” and other such shit, no matter how violent and depraved their crime. Their church members will vouch for them. Their parents are fine Christians. The usual refrain.
It reminds me painfully of those years I blindly believed in my monstrous ex-husband, unable—or unwilling—to see the truth right in front of me. Sometimes I think half the world has sunk into the same state of denial. And that makes me angry.