Bone Valley (28 page)

When the gyp
sludge hit Tampa Bay and the big fish kill-off started and the bay stank and the fishermen and the tourists all fled and the economy took a hit and the citizens raised holy hell about the stink and the mess, Official Government did what it always does in a crisis. Its personnel pointed fingers and hired lawyers.

Everybody was suing everybody, while the DEP and the environmentalists and marine scientists went to work trying to salvage the life of the bay.

Olivia even tried to get some smidgen of justice and grab me a piece of the legal action by convincing her conservation group to hire me to sue somebody for the big, stinking mess on their behalf, but despite all the research that Rachel and I did, we couldn’t find an angle. Angry citizens just don’t have any standing in the law to sue the officials of a bankrupt corporation—or anyone else—for killing off an entire marine waterway.

However, failing on that project didn’t stop me from trying to keep alive the goals of Angus and Miguel. That’s why Olivia and I were out at the Antheus land at dawn with little Baggies of panther poop and the plaster casts of the cat’s paws that Miguel had hidden at Olivia’s. We intended to put the casts to good use.

I held the barbed wire down as Olivia crawled over it. Then she did the same for me. We walked a bit in the thickets and the heat before I gave voice to something I’d been very curious about.

“So, okay, Olivia,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me you were hiding Miguel?”

“Oh, Lilly, I thought he might have killed M. David, he and Angus. I didn’t want you to be in a position to have to lie to the police, or to turn him in. I was the one who told Miguel and Angus to hire you as their attorney, and I didn’t want you getting hurt because of it.”

Noble, but fishy, all at the same time.

Pushing on the fishy part, I asked, “Why’d you send them to me after M. David was killed?”

“Because when they told me M. David was dead, I was afraid they’d done it, and so I brought Angus right to you—Miguel had to go do something, but agreed to come by the law offices later. See, I wanted them to hire you on the orange-defamation case, but also I knew you’d know how to help them, no matter what they’d done.”

Oh, frigging great. So it wasn’t all some giant, stupid coincidence that pulled me into the multiple orange-grove-sales-profits murders. It was one of my best friends, in a misguided attempt to help her fellow environmental soldiers, and, perhaps, an overinflated belief in my abilities.

Signaling a change of topic, Olivia asked, “You lonesome now that Jimmie’s living with Dolly?”

“No, Jimmie and Dolly come over all the time. But I’ve got to say, first that woman steals the affections of my dog and then Jimmie.”

“You’ll survive.” But Olivia smiled with sympathy.

“Sure. Hey, and I’ve still got Rasputin.” Though the blue jay was grown now, and eating bugs on his own, he’d sometimes fly onto my patio table in the evenings, where I’d feed him a trail mix bar while I drank my wine. Sometimes he’d even sit on my shoulder.

“And you and Miguel…you think you’ll ever hear from him again?” Olivia’s tone was soft, motherly.

“No,” I said, though I still entertained fantasies. “Do you think you’ll ever hear from him again?”

“No.” But Olivia blushed. Though she had denied it when I finally point-blank asked if they had ever been lovers, if I were Fred the lawfully wedded husband, I’d keep my eyes open. Fred, who let his wife bring a fugitive into their house for hot meals, hot showers, and naps in the guest bedroom, seemed entirely too trusting for a grown-up, especially one who made his living in the practice of law.

But before I could pursue Miguel further with his blushing den mother, Olivia changed the subject. “So, what about you and Philip? Bonita tells me he sends you roses about once a week.”

“I don’t know. First I’ve got to—” I was going to say I had to get Miguel totally out of my system, but all that lust and the cursed lure of the promise of what might have been was all way, way too sappy and high school for me. So I finished by saying, “I just need some time and space.” The classic cliché of the can’t-commit crowd.

“I think the boy has potential,” Olivia said.

I wasn’t sure if she meant Philip or Miguel, but decided to go with the bird near the hand, and not the one on the lam. “Well, then, let’s see if Philip will agree to take rotating weeks for putting out panther poop and faking the tracks.”

“Now there’s a test for a future husband—whether he’ll break the law to perpetuate the myth of a panther at a proposed mine site.”

We laughed, and made our way down to the western fork of Horse Creek. Then I laughed again, laughed at the beauty of how it had all turned out after Samantha the panther officially saved our lives.

That’s what we told everybody.

Of course, no one in Official Law Enforcement believed our story for a minute. But being a trial lawyer, I had coached my witnesses well, and we stuck to the chronicle of the events of the great night when Samantha the one-eyed panther had become an official heroine.

What we rehearsed and told them wasn’t too far off the truth, which in my experience is the best approach for a lie. We said, over and over again to various incredulous cop-type people, that the fight started outside, moved inside, moved outside again, and Samantha attacked Rayford, as he was clearly intent upon killing us all. As we told it, Josey and I had already been beat down by Rayford outside on the driveway, and Olivia, the only one without impressive wounds and cuts and bloody welts, had been tied up inside, and Rayford was cocking the trigger of the gun to send Josey and me into the netherworld, when, boom, like armed and dangerous karma, Samantha escaped from her cage and leaped upon Rayford, saving us all from certain death at the hands of a madman.

Of course, we also repeatedly explained that Rayford had killed M. David and Angus, and we were all just as fuzzy as one could get about what Miguel had to do with any of this. We never admitted for one moment that Miguel was in that house that night, and when the bomb squad dismantled Miguel’s fertilizer bomb, and, yes, found Miguel’s fingerprints, we just played dumb.

Of course, Officialdom would like to question Miguel about that bomb, except for a small hindrance, that being that they can’t find him.

And, in the official story we had made up, just in case anyone thought that we all stood around with a gun in one of our hands and watched a panther kill a man, we made it clear we had no chance to save Rayford and that, in fact, the panther had
saved us.
After all, we had the bruises, we had the trail of conflict and busted things in the house, we had each backing the other up—the unassailable, proper wife of a prominent attorney; the equally if not more unassailable, honorable sheriff ’s department investigator; and me, perhaps assailable, what with being a trial lawyer and all, but equally firm in my convictions and consistent on the details.

So, it went down like we said: Samantha the panther saved our lives, Rayford killed M. David and Angus, and we didn’t know squat about Miguel.

No, not a cop in sight bought that story. But nobody in cop-land could shake us from it, and they didn’t have any witnesses or physical evidence to show otherwise, and the media loved it. I saw to that—Samantha was the heroine one-eyed panther who had been lovingly cared for by the ailing but no less heroic Lenora. When I played Lenora into the story like a skilled publicist, donations and cards and letters came in so fast Lenora had to hire the two Episcopalian nuns to count the money, write the thank-you cards, and be her bookkeepers.

And, not only did Samantha rescue us, but she was rescued right back. After killing Rayford, the big cat had hidden from the storm under Josey’s big truck. Adam got there quickly with his tranquilizer gun and a small army of panther lovers, and she ended up getting a nice nap, courtesy of modern chemistry, and then a huge, natural, new cage—actually just a hell of a fence around an acre of Lenora’s land—paid for by Mrs. Sherilyn Moody, who told me in a ceremony honoring her for the generous gift that it was the least she could do to help the cat that killed the man who had killed her beloved husband.

Generous among the money that flowed into the wildlife preserve was a huge infusion of cash from an anonymous source, aka Delvon. Lenora is making regular payments on her mortgage and medical bills, and, not incidentally, helping Delvon launder his money.

Under the prayerful care of Delvon and the two nuns, Lenora is recovering, and though she still wears the wig of Delvon’s red hair, she’s shown me where her own is now growing back. And it’s curly, she says, and giggles.

Delvon the faithful keeps watch, waiting for Lenora to get over Angus enough to maybe love him back.

Though I am not at all certain how having my crazy brother living nearby is going to play out, I figure, oh, what the heck, at least Dolly won’t be stealing his affections and moving him in with her.