“You know,” Gertie said, “they should make a special Louisiana Fitbit edition that tracked that stuff. You should get double or triple steps when fleeing for your life.”
“If that were the case, we’d have racked up enough steps for two lifetimes,” I said.
“I sometimes feel like I’ve lived two, so that would work out fine,” Ida Belle said. “Shall we try to wade through this mess?”
I pulled gloves out of my backpack and handed sets to Gertie and Ida Belle. “I wish I had thought to bring trash bags,” I said. “We could have cleaned up as we went along. I hate to think of Molly’s backyard turning into a battlefield for wildlife.”
“The food will be gone soon enough,” Ida Belle said. “The paper, unfortunately, will blow away with the first decent wind.”
Thunder boomed so loud I almost jumped, and I looked up and saw storm clouds rolling over the top of the cypress trees. I stared at the sky in dismay.
“Or it will get beaten into the ground by a torrential rainstorm,” I said. “I thought the forecast said no rain.”
“Heat thunderstorms,” Ida Belle said. “They come up fast and leave fast, but they can be a doozy.”
“I remember,” I said. “I just keep hoping Mother Nature will forget about them. We’d best get to work before anything useful is destroyed.”
We took off in three different directions, picking up and scanning anything that looked like a piece of an envelope or statement. Small containers that still had shipping labels. Basically, anything that might have a name on them. I’d located a ton of shipping boxes and several envelopes but all of them were addressed to the catering business. I figured that would be the case but still, Molly had to have a personal bank account, legal documents for her business, tax filings, and the like. But it was probably our luck that none of those things had been mailed in the past week.
I reached the edge of the marsh, close to the bayou, when I heard something moving through the brush. It didn’t sound big, so I assumed it was another raccoon. I left my pistol in place and crept into the line of cypress trees, hoping to snag an envelope I’d spotted clinging to the top of a bush. The bush had thorns, so I carefully reached up on my tiptoes and leaned forward just a tiny bit where my fingers barely clenched the corner.
I heard the noise again, this time from the bush I was perched above, but now it sounded like something bigger. I snagged the envelope and shoved it in my pocket, then took one slow step backward, pulling my pistol from my waist as I went. Before my foot touched the ground, the bush exploded with action and the source of the noise rushed out at me.
Rats! Huge rats!
Chapter Eight
I turned around and ran like I was going for a gold medal in the summer Olympics. I hated rats. I’d seen them clinging to too many bodies when I was overseas and if I never saw one again, it would be too soon. I glanced back, hoping to see empty grass but instead, the entire horde was racing right behind me. What the heck was happening?
I fired over my shoulder as I ran, hoping to scare them back into the marsh, and Ida Belle and Gertie whirled around, their eyes huge as they surveyed the current and ridiculously awful situation that was transpiring.
And also hurtling right at them.
“Run, Fortune, run!” Gertie yelled, and I had a flashback to that Tom Hanks movie she’d had me watch. I had the advantage of two good legs but the disadvantage of more pursuers, and they apparently weren’t scared of gunfire.
Ida Belle and Gertie must have approved of my reaction because they set off toward the house in front of me, but it didn’t take me long to catch up. When we reached the driveway, I stuck my pistol back in my waistband and did a flying leap, pulling myself up onto the top of Molly’s van. Then I dropped and reached down to help haul Ida Belle and Gertie up.
I felt my knees burning and realized the top of the van was probably about two thousand degrees due to the sunlight that had just disappeared behind the storm cloud. We all stood there and watched the flood of nutria as they caught up, then breathed a sigh of relief as they continued past the van and across the driveway into the marsh on the other side.
“What the heck was that about?” I asked.
Ida Belle shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“It looked like a crazy scene from one of those Jurassic Park movies,” Gertie said. “You know, where all the plant eaters suddenly race off because a meat eater has arrived.”
I stared at Ida Belle and her eyes widened. We whipped around to look back at the trees we’d fled, just in time to see a huge mama bear with two cubs come racing out of them.
“It’s T. rex,” Gertie said.
“Flatten!” Ida Belle yelled and dropped down onto the hot metal.
I dropped beside her, cringing as the metal burned through the thin cotton I was wearing. I tucked my arms behind my back and kept my head lifted, noticing Ida Belle and Gertie were doing the same. We looked like a lineup for handcuffs on one of those reality cop shows. But the burns could be fixed with some aloe vera. Maybe a skin graft. A single bear claw across your body left it shredded beyond repair.
“Why don’t these things ever happen in the winter when we’re wearing jeans and jackets?” Gertie asked.
“These things aren’t supposed to happen at all,” I said. “I’m starting to believe in curses. On me, one of you, this town, the local wildlife…something is clearly wrong.”
“It’s just another day in the bayou,” Ida Belle said, looking completely relaxed. I swear, if she were a smoker, she would have pulled out a cigarette and lit up.
“How is it there’s a killer bear coming right toward us,” I said, “and you’re lying there like we’re sunbathing, but you were scared to marry Walter?”
“I wasn’t scared,” Ida Belle said. “I just wasn’t ready.”
“Well, it wasn’t because you hadn’t found your perfect dress,” Gertie said.
“Shhhhh,” Ida Belle said. “She’s getting close.”
We all went silent and I heard the bear lumbering toward us. I prayed that she’d go past with her cubs, chasing the trail of tasty nutria. Did bears eat nutria? Now that I wasn’t able to ask, I desperately wanted to know. But at least we’d solved the mystery of how the trash cans disappeared. Mama probably hauled them into the woods to give her babies a snack. And with Molly running a catering business at her house, I imagined her trash cans had a fair share of goodies.
The bear slowed and I silently cursed. Could she smell us? Probably, right? Heck, it was July in southern Louisiana. Humans could probably smell us over in Mississippi, and it didn’t help that we were all wearing gloves that had been holding stinky paper. I looked at Ida Belle and now I could see the worry in her expression. We were sitting ducks. Pistols might take the bear down, but how quickly? And we couldn’t outrun her, so making a dash for the boat was out. I could send a text but if she decided to attack, no one would get here in time to help. And where was that rain that kept threatening to come down? At least that would help with the smell thing, not to mention the burning skin thing.
Deciding it was better, at least, to let someone know where to start looking for bodies, I eased my phone from my pocket to send Carter a message that we had a life-and-death emergency at Molly’s house, knowing full well that if we lived through this, I’d never, ever hear the end of it. That whole trailer hitch story of Ida Belle’s wasn’t even going to fly.