Poison Branches

  Poison Branches

  by

  Cynthia Raleigh

  Copyright © 2016 by Cynthia Raleigh. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to CRaleigh@cynthiaraleigh.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination. Locales or public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, institutions, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Colin Lawson

  Poison Branches / Cynthia Raleigh

  Electronic ISBN: 978-1310660504

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1539301523

  To my husband, Greg, for making it possible for me to have the time to write; to Debby: for all the years of shared experiences, without you, life would be much less exciting; and to my cousin, Chad, thank you for sharing your knowledge and love of genealogy.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  About the Author

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  There will be a very last time we see each person we know. Sometimes we realize it, sometimes we suspect it, but many times we have no inkling that we will never see this person again. Then there are the times we can only hope for it.

  Chapter 1

  The cemetery was dutifully quiet and sad. The rain had nearly stopped. Amy was aware of the irregular plop and slap of fat raindrops as they drooped and fell heavily from the leaves of the many surrounding trees to the leaves flattened to the ground during the storm. The sound made it feel cold to her even though it was near the end of August.

  She focused her dull stare on the new grave. The sodden dirt, piled high in the center, had turned to muddy chunks. Stray pieces of grass flecked the mound, along with a dirty and torn artificial flower from another grave. It had to be from someone else’s grave. This one didn’t have flowers from a funeral home gathered around the mound protecting it from the elements. It was bare and stark; the body traveled straight from the mortuary to the cemetery. Only a temporary marker was in place. It was a cheap-looking, thin aluminum plate with the last name and year of death stamped in low relief. The black paint meant to highlight the letters and numbers was already smearing, as though it had been applied moments before the rain started. Amy wondered if there would be a headstone. Not likely, and in a few weeks, this cheap aluminum plate would be blowing out into the field beyond the cemetery, the mud would dry and settle, and eventually the grass and weeds would grow back over the turned earth.

  Amy laid the small bunch of flowers she had picked up at a grocery store onto the center of the grave. A few simple flowers: a couple each of daisies, chrysanthemums, carnations, and what she thought might be zinnias. Was that right? She didn’t know. It looked garish, wrapped in tissue paper in the color of green that seemed to appear mainly on golf courses and sports fields with fake turf. There was no vase to turn upright to hold the flowers, but that was alright, the vases were usually stuck from being jammed in crooked or the chains were tangled up in roots and mired in mud, and if they did come free of their subterranean home, they never seemed to fit straight in the toothed setting. But no, this grave didn’t have that.

  She glanced around the cemetery. It was rural, not consistently cared for, and had some areas that were wild and overgrown. It was surrounded by a mortarless stone wall, which continued through part of the cemetery interior. There was a Victorian style family plot enclosed by an iron fence. The fence was still standing but had a dull, powdery appearance and was brick red with rust. There were two obelisk type stones within the enclosure, one of which had toppled over and was strangled with vines. Blackberry bushes grew higher than the remaining upright stone and then bent over it preventing any intrusion by the curious who might want to read the names. The grass in the cemetery had been mown, but judging by the stacks of brown matted grass heaped throughout the cemetery and stuck to the surface of the lower stones, it had been the only time that season. The person responsible for the mowing had obviously hurried the job; there were long patches of grass at the edges of most stones where the mower had taken a sloppy turn and not bothered to go back for the missed parts.

  She was surprised there were still interments being made here; most of the stones were pretty old. It looked like most of the ones in this section were from the 1930s.

  But there it was, the grave of someone who was the same age as herself, whom she had known for three-fourths of her life. They had gone to school together, had been close friends at one time, even shared an apartment for a while between high school and the second year of college. Those days were long gone and seemed like someone else’s memory. Not all of them were good.

  Amy turned toward the cemetery road and her car. The road was gravel but most of it had scattered and the lane was rutted down into the hard clay. There was a ridge of scrubby grass growing in the center. She had pulled over partially onto the verge to park in case another car came through, not that it was likely. As she neared the passenger side of her car, she saw headlights in her peripheral vision. They weren’t moving, so she continued to her car, rounded the back and up the side. As she pulled open her door, she glanced back to her right at the car. The lights were still on and she could just detect the silhouette of someone sitting in the driver’s seat. It looked like an older car, long and ungainly; the type that had a hood nearly as long as her entire car. There were four round lights, two headlights and two smaller lights. It may have been tan, or beige, or some other nondescript color. It was hard to tell under the crusting of dirt and rust.

  From her sideways viewpoint, not wanting to obviously stare at the driver, Amy couldn’t be sure if it was a man or a woman, but they weren’t moving, just sitting still and appeared to be staring straight ahead. Straight at her. She shivered just a bit and slid into the car, set her purse on the passenger seat, closed the door, and, glancing into her rearview mirror, locked the doors.

  A cemetery can be a peaceful, reflective place when everything seems calm and normal. Let one thing get out of kilter and it becomes menacing and lonely. Amy looked down to buckle her seat belt which took a minute, having to retrieve the buckle end from between the seat and the console. Then she took a look into her outside mirror. The car was closer. It had been par
ked fully in the grass on a curve, backed under an overhanging clump of twisted cedar trees, but now was idling in the single lane of the road behind her. She could see the foggy exhaust slithering up and over the back fender of the car like someone with a cigarette letting the smoke escape lazily from their mouth and trail upward. There was lettering on the chrome frame, right above the grill: R E L S Y R H C. She could make out the shape of a person in a bulky coat and hat behind the wheel. Waiting.

  Returning her gaze to the rear-view mirror, Amy pressed her foot on the brake and put the car in gear. As she moved her foot to the accelerator, the other car lunged toward her. She saw the front bumper lift slightly higher as the occupant gave it the gas. Her right hand jerked off the gear shift at the same time as her left hand came off the steering wheel in a start of surprise. She grappled for the wheel and slammed her foot on the accelerator. Her smooth-bottomed shoes were slick from the wet grass and her foot slipped off the left side of the accelerator and jarred on the floorboard. She again looked into the rearview mirror and saw the hulking car looming right behind her. Now she could hear the roar of the engine, along with her own panicked breathing as she tried to keep her foot on the pedal and push. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly and her arms were locked straight. Just as her foot found some purchase, her tires starting to spin and throw stray bits of gravel and clumps of mud, the old Chrysler slammed into the back of her car.

  It was a huge car, the frame made of steel. As Amy fought to get a view over the top of the deployed airbag, the massive car pushed her comparatively tiny Focus forward smoothly and easily. She pulled down on the bag with both hands just enough to get a look. She was being pushed toward the stone wall that ran perpendicular to the section of road she was on. Just ahead, the road curved to the left and ran alongside the wall.

  There was not a lot of time to analyze the situation, but Amy did wonder who this person was, why they were angry at her, and why they wanted to wreck her car. She tried to grab the wheel under or around the bag to turn the car but could only grasp the left side of the wheel with her left hand. She pulled down and moved the wheel a bit, which turned the car only a small amount. She pressed down with both feet on the brake, but the wheels locked and the car continued to shovel Amy’s car along. The sound from the big car’s engine increased as it pushed harder. The small and lightweight Ford reached the shoulder as the road turned left. It bumped over the accumulated rock and grassy border. The wall came to meet the front bumper as her car was rammed into it. The airbag began to deflate. The hood of the car was crumpled.

  The Chrysler was backing up. Amy could see that a scarf or some other material was wrapped around the driver’s face and the hat was pulled down low. She could see enough to have the impression it was a man. The dirty car reversed over the shoulder and back into the lane. Amy’s hands were shaking and she tried to reach her purse for her phone to call for help. But the car wasn’t leaving. It was shifting gears. She suddenly understood that it wasn’t over and looked wildly around the cemetery for any sign of someone else. She tried to honk the horn but either the airbag blocked the way or the horn was no longer working. She scrabbled with the door handle to escape the car and get over the waist-high wall. The door opened about ten inches and stopped. The front of the door was caught behind the fender which had been shoved backward. She kicked at the door with both feet in terror and got it open a few more inches, just barely enough to squeeze out as the Chrysler came barreling back toward her.

  Amy was still holding the edge of the door when the second impact crunched the Focus into the wall and lifted the back wheels off the ground. Her arm jerked forward and then flung backward, painfully wrenching her shoulder. The fiberglass panels of the fender cracked and fell useless to the soggy ground. The buckled hood lurched backward onto the cracked windshield. Amy fell onto her knees in a muddy puddle in the grass. As she struggled to her feet, she headed for the wall. The black-coated figure stepped out of the car as steam began to rise around the edges of the enormous hood, the radiator quietly hissing.

  Amy grabbed the top of the wall and used the ruined fender to heft herself up. Once on top of the wall, she launched herself to the other side and made an awkward landing on the spongy moss, but didn’t fall. Her mouth open, ragged breaths being sucked in and out, she didn’t pause to get a good look, but she did see the man raise his arms, holding something long and dark. A strangled sound escaped her throat as she began a desperate sprint across the grass. She felt like she was running as swift as the wind but the scenery wasn’t passing by very quickly, like one of those dreams where she was trying to run but couldn’t. This part of the cemetery was very sparsely filled and the stones were infrequent or they were missing. Easier to avoid while running, but nowhere to hide quickly. And hiding behind a gravestone wasn’t going to help.

  Amy ran toward a decrepit looking mausoleum, frequently stepping hard down into a burrow entrance or a low spot over an old grave, the stone long gone. She heard a popping sound followed by a wet thud. She didn’t turn around, but kept going. Almost to the mausoleum. She didn’t remember tripping, but at the same time as the second pop, she felt her head burning and painful as though she had fallen and hit it on a stone. The sodden, weedy ground came up to meet her face very quickly. She didn’t have time to wonder why.

  Chapter 2

  Perri Seamore peeped through her fingers just a bit so she could see the clock on the wall. Two p.m., an hour and a half to go. Too long for that “almost time” end of shift burst of energy and too little time to finish her charting. She hadn’t even given all the meds yet. ‘Oh, good grief, just get on with it,’ she thought to herself. It was the last shift of her assignment to this hospital and she was not at all unhappy. As a prn nurse, one who takes temporary assignments for specified lengths of time, Perri had the freedom to take some time off when she needed to, and that is exactly what she was doing after today, when her contract would be fulfilled.

  She had plopped down in the ergonomic chair at the nurse’s station for a breather following an incident with an elderly patient who had removed every tube and line attached to him, slinging them this way and that, and then perched precariously in the middle of his bed systematically lobbing every movable item in his room toward the door, shouting as best his worn-out lungs would allow. The IV and feeding tubes had continued to pulse liquids out onto the floor and formed a slippery mess when mixed with the large Styrofoam cup of water and paper tub of vanilla ice cream that had previously occupied the over-the-bed table.

  After dealing with the ‘I don’t want to be disturbed’ physician and prying new orders out of him, the shift finally ended with the patient calmed, all tubes reinserted, tucked up in his bed and sleeping the quiet slumber of the medicated. Why these doctors could not see that they spent more time grumbling about being disturbed, for their own patient’s welfare, than they spent just listening and giving new orders, Perri couldn’t understand. She shook her head as she walked across the smelly blacktop parking lot. She hoped the nurse following her wouldn’t be too miffed by her machine-gun style recorded report. “Oh well,” she sighed aloud, “everyone does that anyway,” as she opened the door of her car. She was glad to be done with this assignment.

  It was another steamy, airless day in southern Indiana. After the car had baked in the back forty all day, the steering wheel was blazing hot. It felt sticky, like it was melting. She wanted to put the top of the convertible down, but didn’t want the sun scorching her. “Just give me air conditioning.” Perri allowed the furnace-like air to billow out of the car before settling in the seat. She waited for the a/c to kick in and cool the interior down a bit before she pulled out of the green-lined parking space designated for employees. She grumped aloud that even with the window shade in place, the merciless August sun made the inside of the car seem hot enough to fire ceramics. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving her window cracked, even a small amount, since there had recently been some break-ins to cars parked
at the hospital. Cameras everywhere, campus security patrolling around, and thieves still managed to break into cars and steal what they could without getting caught.

  Finally, Perri was able to thread her way through the obstacle course of the hospital parking area, between islands of ornamental grasses and crusty looking begonias, to reach the main road leading away from Magnet Central Hospital. Why did they make parking lots like those maze puzzles in kids’ magazines? As she approached the stoplight it turned green and she pushed down the accelerator with the joy that comes from leaving a particularly eventful shift knowing she had time off ahead of her and that the next three days would be relaxing and fun. She was relieved she didn’t have to shut her phone off to avoid being called to come in on her days off for a while. Because no matter what, they will call. They always call.

  The car cooled down about the time Perri pulled into her driveway. She eased into the one-car stall, avoiding the mower on one side and the assorted tools and stacked plastic storage containers on the other. She hadn’t found a place for many of her belongings since she moved into this house a year ago following the break up of her two-year marriage. Two whole years. It seemed longer than that in a way.

  Perri hadn’t spoken at any length to Alan since the divorce was finalized. She’d seen him with the Girlfriend du Jour here and there a few times. Alan seemed to want to be seen and acknowledged, as though she still cared, and Perri limited her communications to grunted hellos or a nod of her head followed by a smirk. He actually thought she felt hurt seeing him out with his flouncy girlfriends. True enough, it had hurt when they were married, but not now. Alan seemed to hang on to the opinion that Perri wouldn’t be able to get along without him. ‘Well,’ she thought, ‘we all have our disappointments.’