Page 43 of Stone Blind
Inside the notecard in Helen’s handwriting, he read the caption and nearly howled with laughter.
“Jay, I kept one of these pics for myself. It’s in my wallet. When anybody asks to see our kids, I’m going to whip out this photo of your pal Colt and tell them here’s a pic of our kids—they are sleeping.” Helen
He leaned back in his chair, taking a long swig of the lemonade. He chuckled. “This woman nicknamed my junk Colt,” he said, needing an extra second to gather himself. A moment was taken to go over the envelope to look for the clue for the location of the next message. He came back to the image of his member.
“Yeah, burning this right now,” he said, rising to make his way to the kitchen. A twinkle came to his own eyes when he realized Helen knew he’d want to burn the photo. The game was afoot.
“She’s batshit crazy, and I’m going to marry that woman first chance I get,” he said laughing. “This is gonna be good.”
OXFORD, OH – THE HOMEof Lemon, The Poisons Specialist
Helen arrived in Oxford, Ohio, the hometown of Lemon and Miami University. It was a college town of about twenty-two thousand with lots of coffee shops, young people on cell phones, and in her estimation, the perfect place to be invisible. It was a little after eight a.m. when she arrived at the cedar covered home and pulled around back to park. In the yard, she didn’t know what to make of what she witnessed.
A storm must have come through during the night. Fallen leaves and branches littered the yard, and a chunk of the roof of an outbuilding was missing its head. However, it wasn’t the buildings that caught her attention.
There were four people. The one in center was Lemon, looking rather pissed off, holding a large pickle jar with the heads of two vipers. To her left stood two teen girls who bore no resemblance to either Lemon, each other, or the man who stood holding the spade. Based on Lemon’s reaction to the blood on the spade, the gentleman must have been the one to remove the heads of the visitors in the jar. He looked up at Helen.
His eyes made her stop walking, but just as quickly as he spotted her, he dropped his head.
“Hmmph,” she said, coming closer. “Lemon.”
“Cranberry,” she replied. “These are my wards, Bria and Ayanna.”
“And the man?” Helen asked.
“I don’t know this son of a bitch who came in here and killed my babies,” Lemon said, angry enough to have spittle leave the corners of her mouth.
“Listen, lady,” he said. “I was trying to get out of the storm. I went into the barn thingy, the roof came in, the cages broke, and those snakes are not indigenous to North America. I reacted and kept them from escaping.”
“Who is going to help you escape from me? Do you know how valuable those were?”
“Do you know how deadly those were?” the man asked, adjusting his stance from an alpha to one of contrition.
There was a lot happening here, and Helen didn’t know what the hell was about to happen, but it sure beat being at Slow’s in that house. This place had energy. Lemon was a fiery one and the man would prove interesting. The girls, they were another story, but she had three months.
“Where should I drop my gear, and what can I do to help?” Helen asked, looking at the man again, who once more made eye contact, then dropped his eyes. “Interesting.”
- Fin-