Page 7 of Hiss and Make Up
Not that she was thinking about moving in with Scott. Er, Marc. Not at all.
Crap. Her head was pounding in this heat, no thanks to the healthy dose of wine and self-pity she’d had the night before. She needed ibuprofen and a nap.
Marc shook his head. “Denise and her family live here. She called me over this morning when she found the…uh…snake.”
Yup, this was the Scott she knew.
She grinned. “I should have known it was you. Still chicken, huh?”
He rolled his eyes. Suddenly she was twelve again, arguing over who would carry the frog to school in their backpack.
Marc swept his arm to the side and pointed at a large shed. “In there.”
After leading her across the pea gravel walkway, Marc opened the big wooden door. The shed was huge, but it only contained three kids’ bikes, a half-empty bag of ant poison, and an ancient quart of oil.
And a dead snake curled in the center of the cement floor.
Sierra squatted beside it and shook her head. What a mess.
She uncoiled the snake and stretched her hands along its back down to the end of it. The tail seemed to be missing too.
“So you’re still living in Lafayette?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes stayed on the remains in her hands.
“Keep in touch with anyone from back then?”
“No.” She bit her tongue so she didn’t ask him how Kassie Bergeron was doing these days. There was no way those words could come out of her mouth without sounding petty or jealous. And she wasn’t. Either of those. Mostly. “Look, do you want me to figure out what this snake is or not?”
A pang of guilt hit her when she snapped at him, but it wasn’t like she could think with him yapping at her the whole time. And she really didn’t want to stroll down memory lane. She shouldn't be thinking about him at all—past or present version.
Besides, they’d had their chance.
She examined the coloration and pattern. Brown, with dark gray and light brown bands covering the length. Due to the damage Marc had inflicted on it, that was all she had to go on.
“Is this where you found it?” she asked, turning to find him still in the doorway, staring at the ceiling.
He looked down at her squatting beside the snake and flinched. “No. In a deck box.”
She frowned at what was left of the snake. She’d hoped to finish here quickly and get on with her day, but it didn’t look like that would happen now. She was missing one key piece of snake evidence.
Marc ran his hand over his head, shaking his curls. “Dang thing was in with the kids’ toys. It’s a good thing Denise found it in there instead of one of them.”
Sierra stood and wiped her hands together. There was only one place she could go to figure out what this was.
“Show me.”
* * *
Sierra surveyed the surrounding properties. The Bayou Teche sat past a hundred yards of open fields and tall, skinny trees flanking the water. It was possible to have a rogue snake in a yard, but that kind of thing wasn’t as common as most people think. Not in an area with a steady stream of activity from kids and dogs and cars.
When she first examined it in the shed, she couldn’t identify it with any confidence. He’d bashed the poor thing beyond belief. It was even worse in person than in that blurry photo. But she’d found the key clue inside the deck box—the yellow tip of its tail left behind when Marc hacked at it with a shovel. He explained how he’d stabbed in there, then slid it out on the end of the shovel to finish the job on the ground. Only bits of scale and skull remained mashed into the dirt and grass after he scooped the carcass away.
She twisted the tail between her fingers as she walked the property line. Her eyes avoided the bayou banks to her left and all the memories they held. Years of navigating around water oaks and cypress trees. Balancing on the muddy edges. Pulling each other back from the edge. Their own game of chicken, which she always won.
Her instincts now told her that someone was playing a more dangerous game out here.
Unless some minor flooding had disturbed its natural habitat, a water snake wouldn’t want to wander this far from the bayou. September had been pretty dry so far, so that ruled out that theory.
