Read Online Jezebel's Blues by Barbara Samuel, Ruth Wind - Free Book Online Page A

various other possessions neatly resettled in the heavy canvas pack. Her sadness lightened a notch, but only a notch. The idyll was over. Her drifter was moving on.
    She rose and went to the window. Beneath a sunny morning sky, the ground was muddy and strewed with debris of all kinds, put patently, perfectly visible again. A flock of crows picked gleefully through the mud, cawing and chatting and fluttering over the rich finds.
    Her sense of depression broke, and she whirled, stopping only to pull on her shoes in clumsy haste. She flew down the stairs and headed for the open front door, anxious to be once again outside, breathing fresh air, feeling the sun on her arms, the wind on her face.
    But in the living room, she halted, stunned, her feet sunk in mud.
    “Good heavens,” she breathed.
    She had known, intellectually at least, that water had covered every inch of the house downstairs. She had known things would be ruined, that essentially, she would have to replace everything.
    She had not even begun to imagine the complete, utter
mess
.
    Mud, twigs, rocks and unidentifiable sludge clung to everything—the furniture and tables, the walls and windowsills and doors. On the floor, the returning water had left swirling footprints of thick silt.
    And the smell! She covered her mouth and nose with her hand. It smelled like river water and sodden wood and old carpets; like sewage and stagnant wells.
    From just outside the window, a bullfrog croaked, loudly. It startled her and she moved toward the sound.
    “Celia! Don’t move!” Eric’s voice sounded behind her, its husky tones sharp with warning. “Stay where you are.”
    Celia froze at the implicit danger in his words. Her mind raced. River water, silt, bullfrogs, snakes. Snakes. Her flesh squeezed on her bones and she shuddered inwardly.
    “Don’t move one tiny muscle,” Eric warned quietly. A soft weight crossed one of her feet, then touched the other. The weight slid with warm, sinuous ease over her shoes. It seemed to go on and on and on. Tears sprung to her eyes as she clenched her fists tight at her sides and gritted her teeth until she thought they would break.
    “Keep still, sugar,” Eric said, his voice slower now, more seductive than she’d ever heard it. “One more minute.”
    There was a sudden loud thud and Eric made a peculiar grunting noise. “All right, Celia. You’re safe.”
    It took a minute to unfreeze all the rigid muscles, but Celia creakily turned. At the sight of the creature that had crawled over her feet, now quite obviously dead, she nearly fainted.
    “What is that?” she squeaked.
    “Haven’t you ever seen a water moccasin?” he asked, nudging the body with the shovel he’d used to kill it.
    She stared at the mud-colored body, horrified. It was nearly five feet long. No wonder it had taken so long to cross her feet.
    She whirled and ran outside, her skin crawling, her stomach heaving. The bullfrog croaked again, and in blind terror, Celia climbed onto the porch railing, clinging to the slippery post rather than take a chance on another snake showing up.
    Shivering, she crouched there. She heard Eric come outside, then felt his presence behind her. “You’re all right now,” he said.
    “That’s what you think,” she said, but her voice was steady. Slowly, her quaking nerves returned to normal and she became aware of the absurd picture she made clinging to the porch railing like a little girl in an oversize dress with unbrushed hair. She looked around the porch, saw that it was empty and gingerly stepped down, trying to reclaim her dignity. “Thank you,” she said, head bent.
    “I hated to kill him.”
    Celia choked. “Why?”
    “He just got lost. Wasn’t his fault old Jezebel threw a temper tantrum and left him stranded in somebody’s house. ” Hands on his hips, Eric looked at the body of the snake, which he’d tossed out into the yard. “Problem is, he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak