Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 88215 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88215 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
“Why haven’t you?” Zelda asks.
“I’ve been…preoccupied.”
A big yellow lab comes bounding out from the weeds with a snake in his mouth, tail swinging proudly from side to side. He’s only got one eye.
“Have you met The Warden?” Zelda asks, leaning down to scratch behind the lab’s ears. She takes the black snake from his mouth. It’s still alive, hissing and showing its fangs. “Oh hush,” she says, plucking the snake from his mouth and tossing it over the railing. “He lost his eye fighting a snake. Looks like he still hasn’t learned his lesson.”
The dog comes over to me next, resting his head on my lap. He closes his eyes and sighs as I scratch his neck. He’s obviously not one of those dogs who needs time to get used to new people.
“The Warden?” I ask, patting his head in long slow strokes. The dog makes a noise that sounds curiously like purring, keeping his eyes closed. “That’s his name?”
Zelda chuckles. “Every prison needs a warden. I named him before I realized that he’s about as stern and watchful as a baby bunny. Good at catching snakes though. Now, if he would just kill ‘em instead of trying to be friends with them…”
My mind wanders back to Smoke.
The dog isn’t the only one who needs to learn that lesson.
I shift in my chair. The Warden glares up at me with one eye open as if to say he doesn’t appreciate being jostled around. I scratch between his ears some more, and his eye closes once again. His hind leg bounces off the floor in appreciation.
“He’s downright menacing,” I joke.
“Not all who appear menacing are what they seem,” Zelda comments. I know instantly she’s talking about Smoke. I stop petting the dog who only stays a second more before darting into the yard to lay belly up in the grass under the bright sun, long tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.
“I’m not so sure about that,” I say. I feel disappointed and stupid and rejected and then stupider still because the whole thing is ridiculous. I’m a captive who’s about to be offered up for slaughter, not some girl whose been ditched before prom.
“Did Smoke tell you how we met?” Zelda asks, then, without waiting for me to answer, adds, “Of course, he hasn’t.”
She sets down her knitting and looks out to the yard where The Warden is now scratching his back against the grass in some sort of weird lying down dance, shifting his hips from one side to the other with his legs up in the air.
“Smoke was just a boy. About nine years old. Barney, my late husband, was a retired Navy man. He found Smoke covered in blood and dirt, wondering around the prison yard. He was half starved to death, and his eyes…his eyes were all wrong. Barney called me over, and I tried to coax the boy into the house, give him a bath and some food and shelter but he looked at us like he was a wild animal. He lunged at me with a knife. Thankfully my husband punched him before he could reach me. Knocked him out cold.”
She laughs like it’s a fond memory and not the opening scene of a horror movie where everyone dies in the end and the serial killer heads to another town to start his murdering spree all over again.
“What happened after that?”
“While Smoke was passed out, I bathed him and washed his clothes but they were so flimsy they fell apart in the wash, so I mended some of Barney’s things, altering them on the fly so they’d fit him. I placed some food by the bedside. When he came to, he disappeared again. The food was gone off the nightstand, but the clothes were still on the foot of the bed.
“Where did you find him?” I ask. On some level, I’m beginning to identify with the kid she’s describing, and it’s sitting like a rock in my gut.
Zelda sighs, knitting her brows together, still disturbed with whatever it was she was recalling. “He was under the porch in the crawlspace. Naked. Eating the beef stew and biscuits with his hand like a wild animal. He was shoving it into his mouth so quickly he was choking.”
“How did you get him to come out?” I ask, my heart squeezing for a young Smoke.
“He came out on his own, after a while. He let me dress him, but he didn’t speak, just watched me like I was an alien. We tried to get him to tell us who his parents were. When we couldn’t get it out of him, we decided to call the police, but he must have heard us talking about it because he was gone before they arrived.”
The Warden leapt up when a bird landed in the yard. He barked and chased it back into the weeds.