looked absolutely ridiculous on any other woman her age but that seemed perfect for her; a riotously flowered blouse that must certainly have been hand-sewn but would have passed muster in any made-to-order store; sturdy boots of the same brand as my own (not a surprise, since she had taken me shopping shortly after the furor over Alix’s death had subsided and instructed me in the relative merits of half a dozen possibilities); and her own wide-brimmed floppy hat. Her over-sized handbag hung loosely from its shoulder strap.
She waved a cheery greeting as I pulled up at the fence, but I thought I saw a certain grimness beneath her welcoming smile.
I had barely pulled to a stop before she was at the car door, had opened it, and was settling herself in the passenger seat, cinching her seat belt with a dexterity that would have put a woman thirty years her junior to shame.
With one hand she gestured—rather imperiously, perhaps, but I was used to her mannerisms—back down the road.
“Head on into town. The Ellises live just on the other side.”
Since the road dead-ended at Victoria’s fence, it took me a couple of minutes to maneuver the car around, but finally we were aimed in the right direction. I hit the gas and we took off down the road.
Victoria didn’t say much. At first she sat ramrod stiff, clutching the top of her handbag, which told me that she was far more concerned about whatever we were about to confront than she was willing to admit.
Something was wrong, seriously wrong.
I knew her well enough to understand that when it was time, she would tell me everything I needed to know. She was normally a fountain of information, at times downright chatty, but today she seemed more taciturn than I had ever seen her.
We continued toward Fox Creek—“down-mountain” as the natives would have said—until we passed Estelle and Edgar’s place. Not too far beyond that point, the landscape altered noticeably. The pines and firs we had been threading through thinned out at the same time that the vista ahead broadened and flattened to reveal a long, fairly narrow valley between two stretches of mountains. It was perhaps ten miles across before the further range began again, first with a few small foothills—brown and sere in the late summer heat—then more abruptly with granite walls approaching the vertical and stands of evergreens clutching for life in the thin, scattered patches of soil.
In between lay acres of fertile farm land, sectioned here and there by graveled roads that gave access to a few distant homesteads, usually a house, a barn, and a few scattered outbuildings.
We passed one or two such places and, since the road was becoming both more level and more easily passable, I had begun to speed up a bit—nothing hair-raising, mind you, but substantially more than, say, what one would expect of a Sunday afternoon sightseeing jaunt.
Moving for nearly the first time since she sat down in the car, Victoria suddenly rested one hand on my arm and said, “I think you’d better slow down, Lynn dear.”
“I’m not really speeding...,” I started to say but she tightened her grip on my arm with one hand and pointed toward the road ahead with the other.
“I really think you should slow down. You wouldn’t want to hit that.”
I stared ahead. And saw nothing, except a long, thin twig straddling the middle of the road.
A four-foot-long twig...that abruptly moved.
I must have nearly screamed—a combination of taut nerves because of the as-yet unnamed emergency that was so serious that Victoria didn’t even want to speak about it, and the sudden movement ahead as the twig raised its narrow, glistening head toward us and began to coil the rest of its long, lithe body.
“It’s nothing to worry about, dear. Just slow down and give it a chance to save face and get away. Remember, it’s more frightened of us than we are of it.”
Yeah, right.
I slowed.
Almost as soon as the car began to lose forward momentum, the twig—that is, the snake uncoiled and, moving in sinuous curves that held a curiously off-putting beauty and grace, slipped over the rough ruts and disappeared into a thick bank of white-flowered vegetation in the borrow-pit.
I knew those plants.
Queen Anne’s Lace.
After Victoria’s and my earlier experiences, I recognized the good Queen, and I tendered Her Majesty a good deal more respect and attention because of that. She and her dastardly cousin, Devil’s Plague—more familiarly known in the Fox Creek area as Western Water Hemlock, a fatally poisonous plant.
But that, as they always say in the books, is another story.1
Without realizing it, I had been holding my breath the whole time, until the smooth tip of the snake’s tail finally disappeared into the shadows. I let out the pent-up air with a distinct whoosh and turned to face Victoria.
“That wasn’t a rattlesnake, was it? I didn’t see any rattles or anything.”
She laughed again, the same water-over-stones light rippling laugh that still held a hint of something shadowy.
“That, my dear, was merely a kingsnake. Poor fellow was probably just resting after a long night hunting, and our noise startled it. By now it’s probably halfway home for a long day’s sleep, or maybe scouting out in the marshy areas for a final bit of a snack.”
“Poisonous?”
“Not at all. In fact, most of the boys around here, and probably more girls than would care to admit to it, have had a baby kingsnake as a pet at one time or another. For insects and worms and birds’ eggs—when they are lucky enough to find any—they are lethal. For us humongous humans, absolutely harmless.”
I couldn’t help it. In spite of the growing sense of something being wrong somewhere, I laughed this time.
Laughed and shook my head.
“I think, Victoria, that I’ve had just about enough of your royalty up here in the mountains.”
She looked momentarily puzzled.
“Kingsnakes scaring me half to death. And Queen-weeds trying to poison people.”
“Queen...? Oh, yes. Right.” She smiled to let me know she caught the joke. But it was a thin smile.
We were passing the final few patches of open field before entering Fox Creek proper. We clattered over an ancient iron bridge that spanned Fox Creek—unlike so many places back home, especially housing developments with pretentions to grandeur, up here, if something was called “Creek” you could pretty well bet that there would be a creek somewhere nearby.
The water was lower than it had been in early June but still higher than would be considered normal for this time of year, I was told by the folks who had spent their lives here. Summer heat coupled with the final spate of irrigation before harvests had siphoned off some of the earlier flow. Rocks showed in the middle of the channel, mossy and green a few weeks ago but now looking as if they had been thatched with ragged, clotted straw.
In a truly dry year, the locals assured
