Mary Anna Evans - Faye Longchamp 06 - Strangers by Mary Anna Evans

Author:Mary Anna Evans
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery: Thriller - Archaeology - Florida
ISBN: 1590587421
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2010-05-02T22:00:00+00:00

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Then she resumed crawl-walking, an activity that no pregnant body should ever be asked to accomplish.

***

Angry words spilled down into the retention basin where Betsy and Faye were trapped. The two women stood at the bottleneck where the basin overflowed into the creek, and the word “overflow” spelled bad news for Faye. The basin was designed to behave like the bathroom sink in the house where Faye grew up.

There had been a little hole in that sink, a couple of inches from the top. If little Faye wanted to float her toy boat in the sink, she could stop the drain and fill it up. But if she filled it too full, the water would flow into the hole. Try as she might—and scientific little Faye had tried hard, resulting in wet floors, high water bills, and spankings—she couldn’t fill the sink to the brim and she certainly couldn’t make it overflow.

This basin had been designed to hold most of the stormwater that flowed off this large piece of property, which was a lot of water. During an ordinary thunderstorm, the water level would rise, then it would go down later, as the water soaked in and evaporated. But during some major event like a hurricane, it was possible that the basin would fill up, run over, and flood all the pretty houses that hadn’t been built yet. So the stormwater engineer had designed this thing so that excess water would flow down the creek.

It was too bad for Faye that this engineer had decided the water needed to be up to her waist before it overflowed. Because this meant that she had to haul herself up to an earthen ledge that struck her at waist-level. She had to do this silently, so as not to attract the attention of the armed man above her. And she had to do it quickly, because the angry voices were getting closer.

She looked at Betsy, nodded, then placed both hands on the squishy ledge and pushed hard. All this accomplished was to lift her feet off the ground, where they flailed, trying and failing to gain a toehold. Digging in with her knees to try to lift herself up to creek-level accomplished just as little.

Fortunately, Betsy had been pregnant—four times, if Faye remembered the conversation correctly. Faye suddenly felt the older woman’s shoulders beneath her feet. Betsy had squatted beneath her and was slowly standing, using the strength of her own legs to lift Faye to where she needed to be.

Faye felt her swollen belly clear the top of the bank and shoved herself forward face-first into the creek, holding her left arm high enough to keep the phone clear of the water. Reaching back to help, she only needed to give Betsy’s arm a gentle yank before they were both lying in the mud, wondering how hidden they really were. Faye was ever-so-grateful for her preferred work garb, olive-drab Army surplus cargo pants and a matching t-shirt. Betsy was behind her, but Faye couldn’t remember seeing her in a bright color.

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