Trace Their Shadows by Ann Cook Page A

pain.
    She murmured, “Just look what I’ve done to you.”
    “Wasn’t you. Moccasins are night hunters. Shouldn’t have come without a gun.” His own eyes glazed. She could barely hear his voice. “Sylvania warned us.”
    Brandy remembered. Sylvania had said water moccasins were the biggest danger in the lake. Because of them, she didn’t go to the boat house.
    Brandy turned off the flashlight. The moon had gone behind clouds building in the west. She sat in darkness. A bullfrog——or maybe a ‘gator——bellowed. Around them crickets and night insects whirred and trilled.
    Supporting John’s head against her lap, her gaze strayed to the fourth floor dormer windows. She had glimpsed a shape there when she pulled away from the boat house. Now it was too dark to see. Behind her under the floor in the dark and the dampness the skull lay waiting. Was there a connection, a danger?
    Finally in the distance she heard the brief squeal of a siren and a few seconds later, the crunch of tires in the parking lot. Next door the Dobermans set up a storm of barking. She could hear them now, rushing along the fence. She eased John’s head back onto the cushion, and seizing the flashlight, signaled wildly. At that moment a figure emerged around the left wing of the house.
    “Over here!” she called. “We need help!”
    But before she could swing the beam to the left, she heard a voice from the opposite direction. “Sheriff’s Office,” it said. “Deputy Martin. What’s up?”
    Confused, she focused the light to the right and picked up a uniformed deputy striding toward the boat house, ignoring the dogs that lunged along beside the barrier of chain link, and following the beam of his own flashlight.
    “Cottonmouth bite!” Brandy shouted. “Emergency!”
    The deputy half–slid down the slippery bank, grasped a pier railing, and stepped onto the platform. Squatting on his heels beside John, he tilted back his hat and shone his light on John’s hand. The wounds were now puffy and almost black.
    He gave a low whistle. “Son–of–a–gun. Got you bad. Looks like you took good care of him, little lady.” He stood up, a tall well–made man of perhaps thirty with the sunburned complexion blond people often have in Florida. To Brandy he looked like a saint.
    “I’ll get on the horn pronto,” the deputy said. “EMS will carry him to Leesburg Regional.” He jumped down into the weeds along the shore. “I’ll be sure they bring anti–venom.”
    As he started toward his car, Brandy called after him, “Isn’t there another deputy with you?” The figure she had seen on the lawn to the left had not arrived.
    He looked back over his shoulder. “No partner tonight,” he said. “Just me, Miss.”
    Brandy swung her light across the lawn under the dormer windows, highlighting the pale, straight trunks of the cypress, the stretch of ragged grass, the boarded up alcoves of the first floor. In the warm night she shivered. Nothing else was there. Perhaps the first figure had been her imagination.
    When the flashlight beam began to fade, she switched it off and knelt beside John. “Hang in there,” she whispered. “The troops are on the way.”
    In silence they waited until the matter–of–fact form of Deputy Martin re–emerged along the right fence. He swung back up on the pier. “I’ll need to see about that skeleton the sergeant reported.”
    Brandy nodded toward the open boat house door behind them. “In there, deputy,” she said. “I think the moccasin went into the lake, but be careful where you walk. In places the floor’s almost gone.” A few minutes later she heard the creaking of boards as he moved around, then his low whistle. He must have seen it.
    He eased his way back outside. “I’ll secure the place as soon as the response team gets here,” he said. “Odd place for a burial, all right.” He tugged a small spiral note pad and pencil out of his pocket. “We got a little time. I guess I ought