CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Thia
The venom of a brown widow spider is six times more powerful than the venom of its cousin, the black widow. But unlike its darker relative, the brown widow’s first response to a threat is to retreat, rarely biting unless direct contact is made. Attacking is its last option.
A last resort.
Kind of like me.
I had more in common with the spider that killed my little brother than I did with Bear.
Sheriff Donaldson wasn’t ever in his office until after three pm. The town of Jessep may have been big in land mass but we were small in population, so small in fact that our town sheriff only worked part time.
Jessep was one of the oldest towns in Florida and being old meant a lot of its laws had been written a long time ago. One of its charms is that those laws hadn’t ever been revised, leaving all sorts of backwards southern rules on the books.
Under Jessep law, men were not permitted to wear women’s clothing, but it didn’t stop there. More specifically, the punishment for those men caught wearing satin strapless gowns would be much more severe than those caught wearing knee-length skirts.
Showering naked was also a big no-no. Oral sex, even between married couples, was strictly forbidden as well.
It was illegal to sing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit. The rule makers may not have liked singing at all because it was also illegal to sing to a goat.
Even on the goat’s birthday.
It was illegal for a single woman to parachute on Sundays.
I peddled back into my backwards hometown on a bicycle I’d found in the garage, an old blue beach cruiser with a tattered orange flag attached to the back of the seat. I’d rode all the way back to Jessep without stopping, my need to put distance between me and Bear and my desire to face what I had coming to me head on propelled me forward, faster and faster I’d pedaled until I’d finally slowed when I turned down the road with the Welcome to Jessep sign, Population 64. I’d meant to go straight to the sheriff’s office but it was only two o’clock. I hadn’t meant to go to the house but before I’d realized it, I was still on the bike with my feet on the ground staring at the yellow crime scene tape that had dispatched on one side and was now floating in the wind.
I walked slowly up the path, taking the bike with me. I didn’t plan on getting off or walking up to the porch or sitting in the old rocking chair inhaling the smell of rotting citrus.
But I did.
The afternoon rains had turned my mother’s blood on the side of the house from fresh red to pale brown. Anyone who didn’t know what happened there would have just thought it was a mud stain.
But I knew what happened here.
What I didn’t know was what was going to happen next.
That’s when I saw it.
The spider.
I stood on the rickety porch holding an old straw broom with a broken handle. I watched as it turned over a small black bug using a few of its many long and striped legs. It was lingering under the fascia, minding its own business, wrapping up his lunch, while I stood only feet away and planned its imminent demise.
The sun was beginning to set, one of the only hours of the day when the weather was tolerable and right before the summer rain settled in for its evening cry above Jessep.
I understood how it felt to want to be left alone and for a brief moment I contemplated sparing the spider the death sentence, but quickly changed my mind.
One just like it killed Jesse.
It had to die.
It seems I was good at killing things.
I set up our old rusty ladder and climbed up to the top, positioning the end of the broom handle over the innocent spider who had no idea what was coming. “Sorry little guy,” I whispered, right before I crushed him into the corner. Over and over again I hit and hit and hit him, crushing him into oblivion. I killed that spider over and over again and kept killing it until my hands were bleeding from the splintered broom handle and tears ran down my face, long after what was left of the spider fell from the end of the broom and into the grass.
“Miss Andrews?” a man asked. I gripped the top of the ladder with both hands to maintain my balance, and dropped the broom. It fell onto the uneven porch and rolled off the side into the grass.
A very tall man stood on the dirt drive holding a manila folder and a handkerchief that he kept using to wipe the sweat off his red face. He was wearing a wrinkled grey suit and a sideways smile.
“I’m sorry Miss. I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said in a proper southern accent. If his clothes weren’t a dead giveaway for not being a local, his accent would have done the trick. “I’m looking for a Miss Andrews?” the man asked again, holding up the file to shield his eyes from the sun as he watched me climb down from the ladder.
“Who wants to know?” I asked, turning around to wipe my eyes, picking up the broken broom handle from the grass and tossing it back onto the porch.
“My name is Ben Coleman and I’m here on behalf of The Sun…” I didn’t need to hear him finish his sentence to know why he was there. The Sunnlandio Corporation were vultures and assisted in my mother’s downhill decent into crazy before falling off the side and taking my dad with her.
Ben Coleman didn’t seem to notice the crime scene tape floating in the wind. He stood on the driveway on a Tuesday night, wearing a wrinkled grey suit and dripping so much sweat it looked as if he’d been caught in the rain storm that I could see in the distance but hadn’t yet come.
Ben approached and extended his hand to me. I folded up the ladder and walked right past him toward the shed on the side of the house. “You can leave Mr. Coleman, I know why you are here and I want nothing to do with it.” I set the ladder in the shed and shut the door.
I could smell the approaching rain before I could see it. I used to make fun of my dad for saying he could smell the rain, but as I got older I could feel the shift in the air and I learned to recognize the sweet pungent zip of fresh oxygen before the clouds rolled in, turning off the stars and changing the night sky from black to grey. “Miss Anderson, I just need to go over this with you. We have the groves best interest at heart.” Ben said, holding out the folder toward me.
I laughed. “Did you have my parents’ best interest at heart when your company cancelled the contract the grove had with Sunnlandio since the 60’s? Because I would ask them if they felt like you had their best interest at heart but I can’t. And judging from the look on your face you know why I can’t. So for whatever reason you are here, go sell it to someone else. I’m not interested and on top of that I don’t have time. I have a meeting with the sheriff.”
The wind picked up, zipping around the house, blowing my hair into my face. Ben’s suit jacket blew open as he continued to follow me on my way to the front of the house.
That’s when I spotted his gun.
Either he was the kind of businessman that was used to southerners shooting at him or he was no businessman at all.
The rain was already drenching the open field next to the house, it was only a matter of seconds before it found its way over. “Cut the shit, Mr. Coleman. If that’s even your name. What is it that you want?”
“I need you to come look at this file. Tell me what you think. It’s an offer to buy the grove. A generous one at that.” He held out the manila file.
“Get off this property right now and take that with you,” I warned.
“You’re going to make me have to play hardball with you, Miss Andrews. I was willing to make you a proper offer, but you leave me no choice. Since you weren’t yet eighteen when your parents died and they had no living will on record this property isn’t yours and it won’t be yours until it goes through an expensive and rather lengthy court process. And I hate to state the obvious but without a contract with a distributor like Sunnlandio the grove isn’t worth anything anyway. There is also the little matter of you potentially going away for a very long time and I assume that’s what your little meeting with the sheriff is about. But we at Sunnlandio would rather we take care of this now and we rather put the money up front then wait for the judge to deed us the property.”
That’s when the gravity of the situation hit me, what evil lurked in suits and ties and concealed their misdeeds in folders and briefcases. “That’s why you did it? That’s why you cancelled my parents’ contracts isn’t it? To devalue the land then screw them over with some bullshit offer?”
“Miss Andrews, I don’t make those decisions, but I will admit that the law is on our side here. We’re just trying to streamline the process by having you sign off.”
“I’m not even eighteen yet, I can’t sign anything,” I said.
“Your birthday wasn’t two days ago on July the twelfth?” Mr. Carson asked, flipping open his file and reading off the date before closing it again.
I missed my own birthday?
The wall of rain came, soaking everything in its path, including the man in the suit who stood his ground, smiling as his hair flattened to the top of his head. “I am going to court tomorrow to file the offer with the probate judge and demand that the grove be properly appraised. You can either sign off on this now or ready yourself for a battle that you’re not going to win. A battle you can’t afford.”
The law in on our side.
The law is on our side.
I saw red. So much red that I wished that a lightning bolt would come out of the sky and strike this suit wearing creep right off the driveway. Ben set the folder on the porch and flashed me that smug smile again and a salute of all things before heading back down the driveway. “Mr. Coleman?” I asked sweetly. He turned back around. “Yes, Miss Andrews?” he asked, shouting above the sound of the pouring rain.
“Did you just say that the law is on your side?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Well then,” I dialed in the code on the lock on the heavy porch box and the hinges sprung open. I removed what I needed off the hooks connected to the underside of the lid. Unlike the older one I’d risked my life with when my mother and I played Russian Roulette, this one worked on the first pull every single time. “Did you know that here in Jessep, anyone can shoot someone on their property for no reason at all?”
“You wouldn’t,” he said, not with fear in his voice. With challenge. He held his hand over his jacket, but he knew he didn’t have time to go for his gun.
One step is all it took.
He took one step forward, calling my bluff.
I pulled the trigger.
“Welcome to Jessep, Mr. Carson.”