Wild Man’s Curse by Susannah Sandlin – Excerpt

A prickly sensation crossed her shoulder blades when she finally pulled into the long drive leading to the cabin. Nothing appeared out of place at the back of the house, so her unsettled feeling could probably be blamed on the weather. The sky had turned an ugly charcoal gray; even ordinary thunderstorms could be fierce here at the bottom of the world.

She gathered her bags and papers, pushed the truck door shut with her hip and made it to the protective overhang of the wraparound porch in time to escape the first raindrops. They fell in big, fat plops, slowly at first and, within seconds, so hard that visibility dropped to two feet, max.

A faint odor of cigarette smoke hung in the thick, humid air. Intent on looking for any signs of movement in the swamp or the sign of a smoker in a boat, Ceelie rounded the corner of the porch to the front of the house and didn’t stop until something wispy brushed past her nose and cheek.

She froze a breathless second before backing up. A human skull hung from a frayed rope tied onto a hook in the porch ceiling, the dirty, worn strands of fiber woven through the eye sockets. It hung low enough for her to look the thing right in the eyes, if it had eyes. About half of its yellow teeth had been broken off. It swung toward her, propelled by the wind from the storm.

A tingle of adrenaline raced up her back and across her scalp. She did a slow one-eighty, looking for anything else out of place, and dropped her bags with a clatter when her gaze came to rest on the front door.

GO HOME, BITCH.

The words had been scrawled in red. Paint or blood, Ceelie wasn’t sure. Through the heavy curtain of rain, she scanned the bayou again. Her breath hitched at…something. A dark shadow moved through the water close to the opposite bank.

Ceelie had no intention of hanging around to see if it was an alligator or a murderer. She kicked the probate papers and groceries out of the way, grabbed her purse and the plastic bag containing the knife, and raced back to the truck, digging the keys out of her pocket along the way. Once inside, she jammed down the door locks and backed out into the highway, barely missing a tanker truck racing northbound from one of the refineries.

She had to squint to see through the rain that blew in heavy sheets against the windows. People. She needed to find people, which meant going north toward Montegut. She stopped at the first public place she reached—a convenience store and gas station.

Through the Jiffy Stop’s front windows, she could see people moving around the aisles, doing business as usual, talking, laughing. A couple of kids chased each other back and forth under the awning that stretched across the front of the store, holding their arms out into the rain and squealing when they got splashed. Around her, a few other folks sat in their cars, probably waiting for the rain to slacken.

Ceelie’s heart rate slowed, although it was still far beyond normal, a trot instead of a full-on gallop. When she pulled her phone from her purse, her hands shook so badly that she dropped it on the floorboard. A card from her wallet landed beside it: Gentry Broussard’s business card.

“Call me anytime,” the wildlife agent had said.

She didn’t give herself a chance to rationalize her fear or talk herself out of asking for help.

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“Yes. I mean, no. Yes. It’s Ceelie Savoie.” God, her voice sounded like that of a frog and now that she had him on the line, she didn’t know where to start. “Somebody was at the cabin.”

Lame. So lame.

“First, are you in immediate danger?”

Ceelie looked around her. “No, I don’t think so.”

His voice was solid, warm, and dead calm. Her trembling slowed and the tension in her shoulders eased. “Okay, tell me what happened, Ceelie. Someone showed up at the cabin? You’re not there now, are you?”

“No, not there now.” She took a deep breath. “Somebody was at the cabin. He hung a skull, wrote on the door in blood. Maybe paint. There was cigarette smoke.” God, she was making no sense. She took another deep breath. For a woman who prided herself on her independence, she was coming across like a helpless victim. That thought was enough to help center her.

“Where are you now?” Over the phone, she heard a crunch of gravel, then the slam of a heavy door and an engine roaring to life. “I’ll come to you.”

She looked up at the sign on the front of the convenience store. “I’m at the Jiffy Stop on Highway 55 about a mile north of the cabin.”

“I’m on my way from Montegut. Sit tight.” He paused and it sounded like he took a curve fast. “Don’t go back to that cabin until I get there.”

It didn’t occur to her until she’d ended the call that she probably should’ve called the sheriff’s office rather than a game warden. But her heart knew what it knew, and it instinctively trusted Gentry Broussard. She’d have a long talk with her heart later, because those kinds of instincts could easily get her in a different kind of trouble.