In Harm’s Way - Ch. 3-4

Excerpt from rough draft of In Harm’s Way by Pat Otterness

Chapter Three

????????????By the time Hiram noticed the absence of his dog and made his way to my house in search of him, I had flipped through several of the iris catalogs and made some tentative selections. I didn’t hear Hiram arrive, but Wolf’s keener ears flicked to attention well before Hiram came into view.

????????????“Woof!” said Wolf, greeting Hiram with enthusiasm.

????????????“There you are!” said Hiram to Wolf, wagging a finger at him. “You’re a bad boy to go off like that.”

????????????“Woof!” said the unrepentant Wolf, wagging all over.

????????????“You missed a treat,” I said. “Wolf gave Demon a ride he won’t soon forget.” Laughing, I told Hiram how Demon had leapt on Wolf’s back to punish him and had the adventure of his life. “I wish I’d had a video camera in hand. It was hysterical.”

????????????“Was he hurt?” asked Hiram.

????????????“No, just befuddled,” I said. “He’s a tough little cat.”

????????????“I meant Wolf,” said Hiram, looking anxiously at his new dog. He parted the thick fur on Wolf’s back, looking for abrasions.

????????????“You’ve got to be kidding.” I pointed to the heavy ruff of fur that belted the big pooch. “Where cat claws are concerned, that pelt of his is the equivalent of a Kevlar vest. Demon can’t touch him.”

????????????“But Demon was hitting him. Demon hits?hard!”

????????????I rolled my eyes. “Get real, Harm,” I said. “Wolf didn’t even know the cat was unhappy with him. He thought it was a game.”

????????????Hiram sank down onto the grass beside my chair and picked up a catalog.

????????????“I don’t think you should sit on the grass, Harm,” I said. “Chiggers.”

????????????He gave me a blank look.

????????????“Tiny little biting insects that will make you itch like crazy,” I added - to no avail.?Oh, well, I thought,?learn it for yourself. Hiram was wearing shorts, too, which just opened up the possibilities.

????????????Which ones are you getting?” asked Hiram, indicating the iris catalog he was holding.

????????????“Look on the order sheet,” I said. I took the catalog from him, opened it to the order sheet, and handed it back. “You can check the index on page 19 to see what page the pictures are on.”

????????????Hiram settled quietly to the task, making occasional exclamations of delight as he found the new varieties I had chosen. Wolf stretched out fully on the grass and slept.

????????????“Did you see my pods?” said Hiram, after a while. “Over by the fence along the road?”

????????????“No, I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “Did you get very many?” I still had my head in a catalog and didn’t much want to be distracted.

????????????“There are ten, I think. Big ones. I wish I knew the names of the parents. When they were blooming, I knew which ones I’d crossed to each other, but now that the blooms are gone, they all look alike.”

????????????I looked up, considering his dilemma. “The first thing you should do,” I said, “is tag your pods. I have some tags in a basket in my living room that you can use. Why don’t you go get them? And a pencil, too.”

????????????I went back to studying photos and variety descriptions in the iris catalog I held, while Hiram … and Wolf … set off for the house. Too late I called out, “Don’t let that dog in my house, Harm!”

????????????I knew, of course, that my warning had come too late.?At least he’s supposed to be house trained, I thought, as I waited for Hiram to return. And waited. And waited some more. I continued looking through the catalog.

????????????“Umm … Chat?” said a voice I knew too well. A Hiram voice.

????????????I looked up at him, noting his look of distress. “Yes?” I said.

????????????“Umm … we have a problem.” Hiram squirmed, shuffled his feet, and looked back towards the house. “I can’t get him to come out of the house,” he said.

????????????“Why not? You’re bigger than he is.”?Marginally.

????????????“It’s the cat food,” said Hiram. “He found an open bag of dry cat food.”

????????????I was already in motion. The kitchen door hung open, and I darted in, expecting the worst. Sure enough, my new five-pound bag of Kitty Kibbles lay empty in the middle of the kitchen floor. Loud slurping noises came from the direction of my bathroom. Wolf lifted a cheerful visage from the bowl of the toilet as I approached, and his tail wagging.

????????????“Bad dog!”?I shrieked.

????????????The tail stopped wagging, and fell submissively between Wolf’s legs.

????????????“Out! Now!”?I grabbed Wolf’s collar and led the cowering behemoth through the house and out the kitchen door. “Take him home!” I ordered Hiram. “Tie him up!” I slammed the door in Hiram’s startled face, and turned away. There was a moment of silence, and then a tap on the door, not loud but insistent. Tap! Tap, tap, tap! I turned back to the door and opened it, only to find an apologetic Hiram. “What?” I said.

????????????“Umm,” said Hiram. About those tags? For my pods?”

????????????“Take Wolf home first,” I said. “Tie him up. Then come back and I’ll give you some tags and show you what to do with them.”

????????????“I’m really sorry,” said Hiram. He gave me a beseeching look, then turned and called to Wolf. I watched until the man and his new best friend disappeared around a curve in the road.

????????????By the time Hiram returned, I had brought in my iris catalogs, written the necessary checks, and prepared my orders for mailing. I was applying stamps to the envelopes when I heard his knock on my kitchen door.

????????????“Come on in, Harm,” I called from the living room. “I’m in here.”

????????????“Wolf is acting funny,” said Harm as he entered the room.

????????????“What do you mean, funny?” I said. I thought eating a whole bag of cat food and drinking the toilet dry was probably normal for Wolf.

????????????“On the way home,” said Hiram, “he kept sniffing the road and growling. Then he just took off running, so I ran after him. He went straight to that place where Chance buried his dog Raja, and started digging with his claws and growling something fierce. I had to drag him away, and he whined and fought me the whole way home.”

????????????“That is a little odd,” I said, “but dogs do like to dig. Funny he’d pick that place, though.” I set the order envelopes on the desk beside my computer and went to look for the tags I’d promised Hiram.

????????????“Label them one through ten,” I told Hiram as I handed him the Avery manila shipping tags with reinforced holes. You can attach the tags to your pods with the wire ties I’ve used to replace the string ties they came with.”

????????????Okay,” said Hiram, “but I still won’t know which pod is which.”

????????????“Don’t be too sure,” I said. I have photos of the varieties that were blooming along that fence. I turned to my computer, and located a file designated “scenic shots”. As I clicked from shot to shot, Hiram’s eyes widened in enjoyment.

????????????“This is great!” he said. “I wish I had a digital camera.” He drank in the string of visual images I had taken during bloom season, watching for a sighting of the barbed wire fence where his crosses had been made, and where his pods were currently awaiting identification.

????????????“There!” said Hiram as a new image opened up on the screen. “Can you make it bigger?”

????????????I magnified the image a few times, and Hiram studied the placement of various blooms. “I need to go outside a minute,” he said. “I need to see how my pods are situated along the fence.”

????????????“I’ll come with you,” I said, reaching for my digital camera.

????????????In minutes, we were back inside, making a large paper printout of the photo I had just taken of pod placement along the fence. After that, by location alone, it was easy to identify the pod parents of Hiram’s crosses. Hiram claimed he remembered which varieties he had used as pollen parents in each cross, and he jotted notes on a paper printout of the earlier photo that showed the blooms. We didn’t have the seedling numbers of the plants, of course, but I had a pretty good idea which crosses each of them had come from. I made appropriate notations to that effect on Hiram’s tags and he trotted out to affix them beneath his pods, which he knew he could harvest about 60 days after they had been pollinated.

??????????I was back in the garden, beginning to shovel more compost into the wheelbarrows when I heard the barking. It was distant … from the direction of Chance and Hiram’s place … and it was distressed. Wolf, no doubt. What had he gotten himself into now? I listened for a few minutes, but the barking continued, followed by whining, then by howling. I dropped my shovel and went to investigate.

CHAPTER FOUR

????????????I could hear Wolf barking far up in the woods, a place I’d never gone.??I didn’t want to go there now, either, but Wolf was clearly in distress.??His barking was becoming more and more frantic.??I eyed the barbed wire fence between me and the woods.??I had seen Chance and Harm pull apart the strands and slip through barbed wire before, but I’d never done it myself.??I pictured myself impaled on the sharp barbs, howling for help much as Wolf was doing.??If that happened, how long would it take for assistance to arrive?

????????????Grasping two middle strands between barbs, I stretched the wires apart and struggled to slip between them.??Straightening up too soon, I found my tee-shirt and my flesh hooked on a rusty twist of wire.??With an exclamation of displeasure, I jerked myself free, feeling the tear of shirt and flesh, followed by a dribble of blood trickling down my back.??I added a tetanus shot to my mental?to-do?list, and trudged up the hill in the general direction of the howling dog.

????????????When I was a child, I loved the woods.??Even now, I loved the?idea?of woods.??Adulthood had brought me a growing awareness of snakes, spiders, and poison ivy that waited in the woods for the unwary.??I knew there were bears and wildcats, too, but not many.??They frightened me less than more likely encounters with snakes or coyotes.

????????????I made plenty of noise as I crashed through the underbrush, hoping I’d frighten away any unfriendly wildlife that lay between me and the howling dog.??At last I saw him in the distance, and he saw me.??The barking stopped, the tail swished, and he gave a welcoming “Woof”.

????????????Here, boy!” I called.??“Come here, Wolf!”??Maybe I wouldn’t have to venture further into the brush.

????????????More wagging, but no other movement.??I noticed a chain attached to his collar. He must have caught it on something.??As I continued up the hill, wending my way between small trees and large, I heard something approaching from the other direction, and it sounded?big.??Maybe I?was?afraid of bears, after all.??I looked around for some easy avenue of escape.

????????????Just then an angry voice rang out in the forest.??“Dammit, Woof!??You no-good son-of-a …”??Chance Cassidy broke off as he spotted me among the trees on the other side of the dog .??“Well, hi, Chat,” he said.??“What are you doing up here in my woods?”??He seemed taken aback at finding me in an unexpected place.

????????????“Guess,” I said, nodding towards the no-longer-barking dog.

????????????“Oh!” said Chance.??“You come to help Woof.”

????????????“I think his name is Wolf,” I said.

????????????“That’s what I said,?Woof.” Chance gave me a puzzled look.??“Maybe you misheard.”?

????????????I left that remark alone, and moved in closer to see why Wolf couldn’t break free.??I patted the dog’s big, drooling head, and ran my hand along the chain, trying to follow it to its source.??Chance moved in closer and together we cautiously parted brush and wended our way between trees.??My hand, sliding along the links of chain, came to a halt against some kind of metal barrier.

????????????“That’s odd,” I said.??“It looks like someone has chained him to a …”

????????????“Dag-nab-it!”?said Chance, or words to that effect, only worse.??“Harm tied this beast to the drainpipe!”??Red-faced, he struggled to disentangle a lengthy section of … sure enough … an aluminum downspout from someone’s gutter.

????????????“What would a drainpipe like that be doing up here in the woods?” I asked, a little slow on the uptake.

????????????Chance looked at me as if I were demented.??“He?drug?it here!??That blankety-blank?Woof?done pulled the drainpipe right off my house and drug it here!”

????????????“Oh,” I said.??“Where?is?Hiram, anyway?”

????????????“He went off to town with the truck.”??Chance shook his head.??“Said he’d promised to help some lady at the Almost Home place.??Volunteer work, he said.”

????????????Ah, Ava!??She was a fast worker.??I grinned to myself, and set about helping Chance disentangle the dog and the drainpipe from the heavy brush and vines that held them fast.??There was a clank of metal as Chance released the chain that tethered Wolf to the pipe.??Together my neighbor and I struggled to pull the long tube of aluminum free of weeds and brambles that seemed hell-bent on holding it captive forever.??Chance had begun to cut through the undergrowth with a pocket knife as sharp as a machete, and progress was being made.

????????????“Drat!” said Chance.??“I’ve dropped my knife.”??This was followed by a guttural mumble.

????????????“What?” I said, leaning closer.

????????????“I said, can you help me FIND IT?” he bellowed.

????????????So engrossed were we in the search for the knife that at first we failed to notice the departure of a certain canine.??It was only the swishing sound of chain being dragged rapidly through brush that alerted us to his escape.

????????????Chance said something unrepeatable, while I set off in pursuit of the dog.??Chance reluctantly abandoned the search for his knife and followed along behind me, shouting, “Here, Woof!??Here, boy!” in tones that would send any clear-thinking animal running headlong in the opposite direction.??As luck would have it, though, we were dealing with Wolf, instead.

????????????“Woof!” he said cheerfully from some unseen spot ahead of us.??“Woof, woof!”??We could hear the scratchy sound of digging, and soon we could see Wolf in action.??Paws flying, he flung dirt in every direction as he re-opened loose soil in a hole that had clearly been recently filled.

????????????“Wolf!” I said.??“No!??Stop it!”??To my amazement, the big dog obeyed me, dropped to his stomach on the newly turned earth, and looked hopefully to me as if for a reward.

????????????Feeling that he?did?deserve a reward for this unexpected obedience, I groped in my pocket for the lone liver treat I had found in the trunk of my car after Hiram had removed his belongings.??I held it out to the big pooch, who snarfed it down in an instant, and gave my hand a wet slurp.

????????????By now Chance was bellowing a litany of invective against the dog, who ignored him with a calm placidity I found admirable.

????????????“What could be buried here?”??I said to Chance.

????????????“My dog,?Raja?– that’s what,” said Chance with feeling.??“This is where I buried my poor old Raja.”??He began smoothing the dirt back into place over the dog’s grave.??“Then that poor excuse for a Sheriff’s Investigator come out and dug him up again, like a damn fool.”

????????????I remembered when Sheriff’s Investigator Vaughn had made a fool of himself, doing that very thing. He’d brought a forensic team all the way from Richmond to excavate this very hole, looking for a missing woman who was presumed dead.??Vaughn was still in big trouble with the Sheriff over that expensive mistake.

????????????“Odd that Wolf would want to dig here, too,” I said.

????????????“That Woof is an odd critter,” said Chance, glaring at the innocent-looking pooch.??“Can you take him home? I need to go look for my knife.??I can get the drainpipe out of here by my own-self.”

????????????I nodded and grabbed the long chain attached to Wolf’s collar.??Wolf surprised me by trotting obediently at my side as I picked my way through the dense vegetation and down the steep hill towards home.??I stepped gingerly, but hoped any snakes, coyotes, or bears could hear us coming.

I tied Wolf to a big silver maple in my yard, and spent the rest of the afternoon at a task I dearly hate – weeding.??Gardens in rural Virginia don’t have those ladylike weeds that can be plucked out daintily with your fingers.??Weeds here at Bonne Chance Iris Gardens are rooted at the earth’s core.??I’m convinced of it.??Hacking with hoe and mattock may chop away the surface layer, but like the many headed Hydra, they are not long deterred.

????????????I’m Charity Chance, by the way, Chat to my friends.??Bonne Chance Iris Gardens is my baby.??I breed tall bearded iris here in what used to be the back of nowhere, before hordes of iris growers and hybridizers flocked to Nelson County and set up their new gardens along my stomping ground, Dancing Creek Road.??Chance Cassidy, and more recently his friend, Hiram Jones, were among the incomers.

????????????My peaceful, idyllic solitude had gone the way of the cuckoo when spring bloom season erupted with murder and mayhem.??I was now, thanks to the bodies found in my creek, on a first name basis with half the Nelson County Sheriff’s deputies.??One, in particular, was hard to forget: Sheriff’s Investigator Jordan Hunt.??Just saying his name brought a blush to my cheeks.??He and I had waged a verbal war throughout the month of May, as he tried to find a murderer, and I tried, in my own way, to help.??Often red-faced, arrogant, and impatient, he pushed all my buttons.??His command for me to keep out of his case made me as contrary as I’ve ever been.??And yet, there was something about him that was addictive.

My itch for Jordan Hunt was like chicken pox.??It was an itch that begged to be scratched, but I knew that if I did, it was sure to leave a scar. Jordan and I had scared each other pretty badly the one time we tried for intimacy.??I felt like a bird in love with a fish.??No matter how great the passion, a fish can’t live out of water and a bird can’t live in it.??It wasn’t about the feelings.??It was about the lifestyle.??We continued to eye each other with yearning … well I eyed?him?with yearning.??I can’t speak for what Jordan Hunt was feeling.

????????????Actually, I was now?more?frightened than Jordan.??His idea of protection had been a Benadryl tablet to protect himself from an allergy attack in my cat-hair infested house.??A trip to the far-off drugstore for a different kind of protection would have broken the mood for sure.??I hadn’t been willing to forego what might have been my only opportunity for intimacy with the Sheriff’s Investigator to drive twenty miles for a condom.

????????????I was repenting at leisure.??As I counted the days until my iris seedpods would be ripe enough to harvest, I also counted days on another calendar.??Talk about?scared.??A baby didn’t fit anywhere in the plan I had for the rest of my life.??The thought of starting over with an infant when I had so recently evicted my last chick from the nest and off to college was devastating.??My ex-husband, Harrison Kace, was expecting a mid-life baby with his young wife Hermione.??He had been horrified to learn of her pregnancy. For the first time, I was feeling some genuine sympathy for his predicament.

????????????I had barely caught a glimpse of Jordan in the weeks that followed.??As one of only two Sheriff’s Investigators in Nelson County, he was kept busy solving local crimes.??Investigator Vaughn had been hired to help lighten Jordan’s load, but it hadn’t worked out that way.??Vaughn was a loose cannon, adding to, rather than lessening Jordan’s work load.??Rumor had it that Vaughn had been dumped from another, more self-respecting Sheriff’s office in a nearby county just at the moment when permission was granted for a new Nelson County hire.??That, and the fact that his cousin was a board member, made Vaughn’s appointment a done deal before Jordan or even the sheriff had a chance to check him out.??Nothing like a little hometown nepotism to complicate things for the Sheriff’s Office.

????????????The sheriff was still sitting on his hands, biding his time, but he had blasted Vaughn for wasting departmental money on exhuming the dog, Raja.??I had a gut feeling that Vaughn’s secret mission here on Dancing Creek had nothing to do with law enforcement.??I hadn’t told anyone about seeing him trying to sneak past my house, but I planned to keep my eyes open.??If he was up to no-good, I was going to call him out.