Chapter 23
Dora Jones talked in her sleep, too.
Savannah could hardly believe it. But no sooner had her mother-in-law dozed off than she began chattering away. Unfortunately, the topics of the woman’s nocturnal mutterings were no more interesting than her daytime subjects.
Dirk rolled toward Savannah, and the simple movement produced a cacophony of creaks and moans from the flimsy roll-away bed.
“This wasn’t the worst day of my life,” he said, “but I think it’s in the top ten.”
“I hear ya.”
“Close the door, Richard,” Dora said from the other side of the dark room. “You left that screen door open again. I can hear it squeaking. I asked you to oil the hinges. Remember? Yes. Last week. Might have been last month when I asked you to clean the air conditioner.”
Richard replied with a roof-rattling snore.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Dirk said, pulling her close.
“You always say you’re sorry,” Dora replied. “But that doesn’t get the hinges oiled, now does it?”
Suddenly, Savannah started to laugh.
Yes, it was a laugh that bordered on hysteria. But it was either that or cry, and crying would just give her a headache, which she didn’t need on top of everything else.
Dirk nudged her. “You’re laughing, right?”
“Yes. Might as well,” she said. “On this bed, with your parents five feet away, we certainly can’t fool around.”
He chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “After the day you’ve had, I’m touched that you even considered it.”
She moved her palm over his bare chest, delighting in the smoothness of his skin and the bristly roughness of his chest hair.
“I almost always think about it,” she told him, her voice deep and throaty. “But sometimes it’s a case of ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’”
“I hear ya. Right now I don’t think I could even—”
“Eeeeeeeeee! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Eeeeeeeeeeee!”
Savannah shot straight up and out of bed like a circus performer being fired from a giant cannon.
In the middle of the floor, she gyrated violently, performing a strange, highly vigorous, nonrhythmic dance.
Dirk leaped out of bed, too, and tried to grab her, but she was flailing her arms in the air so wildly that she caught him in the eye with a vicious right cross.
Holding his eye, he began to dance up and down and yell, too.
“What the hell’s going on?” shouted Richard as he flipped on the table light. He jumped out of bed and hurried to his son and daughter-in-law. “What’s the matter with you two? What happened? Are you hurt?”
“Hell yes, I’m hurt!” Dirk said, his hand over his eye. “My wife just slugged me, and for no damned good reason!”
Dora slept on, but commented on the event. “Richard, those cats are making a racket in the back alley again. Could you do something about that?”
Richard grabbed Savannah by her shoulders and shook her. “Savannah! Honey, what’s wrong with you? Why did you hit Dirk?”
She could hardly breathe, let alone speak, her teeth were chattering so hard.
But finally, she eked out one word. “Sp-sp-spi . . . der.”
“Spiders are good for us,” Dora muttered, rolling onto her stomach. “They catch and kill harmful bugs.”
Savannah froze, then whirled toward the bed.
Suddenly, her mind cleared, her thoughts began to actually form sentences again. “There are no bugs that are more harmful than spiders,” she told her sleeping mother-in-law through gritted teeth. “They are little monsters. That’s all they are. Hideous beasts! The only thing they’re good for is squashing. Squashing them until they are nothing but a tiny, wet spot on the floor or sidewalk or pavement. Squash, squash, squash!”
Someone knocked on the door, and they heard Ryan ask, “Is everybody okay in there?”
Richard walked over to the door and opened it a crack. “No,” he said. “My son and his wife are having a domestic dispute.”
“Oh?”
Savannah could hear a world of disbelief and amazement in Ryan’s one syllable.
“Has . . . has anyone been harmed?” John asked.
“Yes. Dirk has a black eye.”
“Oh, dear.”
She could tell that John was equally amazed by this strange turn of events.
“Can we offer any sort of first aid?” John wanted to know.
Richard turned and looked back at his son, whose eye was growing blacker by the moment. “If you can lay your hands on some ice, that’d probably be a good idea.”
“Straightaway.”
Savannah walked back to the roll-away bed and with thumb and forefinger, delicately lifted the pillow by its corner. She peered beneath it.
Nothing.
Peeling one blanket and sheet back at a time, she gradually stripped the bed. But she found not one hairy leg of the offender who had dropped down from the ceiling and landed on her bare arm.
She went into the bathroom, took off her nightgown, and shook it vigorously.
Still nothing.
She slipped the gown back on and returned to the bedroom. She was just in time to see John’s arm, handing an ice bucket through the partially open door.
“Hope all is well,” she heard him say. “Let us know if you need us to help . . . to intervene . . . or whatever.”
Richard just nodded, then closed the door and handed the bucket to Dirk.
It was when Dirk lowered his hand from his eye to accept the ice, that Savannah realized the extent of the damage she had done to her beloved.
His eye was not only black, but nearly swollen closed.
“Oh, sugar!” she said. “I really got you a good one there! I’m so, so sorry.”
Distraught and guilt-ridden, she ducked back into the bathroom and hurried out with a hand towel. She wrapped some of the ice in the towel and started to move toward Dirk with it.
“No!” he said. “Stay away from me. You and your damned spiders. Sheez, woman. I never saw anybody go as nuts as you do over a helpless, little bug. You need some of that aversion therapy that Dr. Phil talks about. God knows you need help!”
“I do not! A lot of people are afraid of spiders. They aren’t helpless at all. They bite, you know. Some of them are venomous.”
“Very few. For the most part, they’re a lot more afraid of you than you are of them.”
“That isn’t possible. I nearly had a heart attack.”
“You have a stupid, unnatural fear of them.”
“Do not.”
Dirk grumbled under his breath as he applied the ice pack to his ever-increasing bruise.
She ventured back to the bed and began her search again. She knew she wasn’t going to find the cursed thing. Once the cursed creatures landed on you, they always just evaporated.
Until, of course, you turned the lights back off, and then they would rematerialize and bite you with their murderous venom and kill you in the most painful, horrible way possible.
She picked up her pillow from the bed, inspected every inch of it, and then beat the daylights out of it. Tucking it under her arm, she walked over to her wounded husband and placed a loving kiss on his cheek.
“I apologize for injuring you, darlin’. I hope you feel better soon. I forgive you for suggesting that I have a psychiatric disorder and need professional help.”
Her indignant little speech delivered, she marched to the door.
When she opened it, Dirk said, “Savannah, it’s dark out there. Where do you think you’re going?”
“To sleep in the Bronco, of course. Heaven knows I can never sleep in that bed again.” She headed out the door. “Irrational fear, my butt.”
* * *
Eventually, Savannah figured out how to lower the seats in the Bronco to provide a hard but flat sleeping surface. The space was far from roomy. She managed to find a halfway comfortable position, lying on her side. She couldn’t even think about stretching out, but as long as she was in a tight, fetal position, it worked.
As tired as she was, she figured that as long as she was horizontal she’d be able to sleep.
But it was cold, and she could practically feel the temperature dropping by the minute. She wished she’d brought a blanket, but of course that would have defeated the whole purpose, since the spider would have been lurking in its folds.
Waiting. Fangs bared.
In spite of the cold, she was so tired that she was about to drop off, when she heard it.
A unique, spine-tingling, bloodcurdling, ancient sound. A sound that had struck fear in the hearts of mankind since the dawn of time.
A wolf’s howl.
It was soon followed by another and another, until the dark woods behind the motel rang with it.
Savannah shivered as the sound went through her, colder and more chilling than the cold of the Alaskan night.
That was when Dirk knocked on the Bronco’s window and scared her half to death.
In a heartbeat, she flung the door open, welcoming him inside.
As he crawled in next to her and wrapped his warm arms around her, he said, “Wow, it’s sure snug in here.”
“Especially for full-sized folks like you and me.”
“It’s cold, too. Babe, is there any way I can talk you into coming back inside?”
“No,” she said, her voice quivering.
“I didn’t think so.”
Before she knew what he was doing, he had enfolded her in a blanket, wrapping her tightly.
“No!” she objected. “That’s not one off our bed, is it? That spider could still be—”
“Sh-h-h,” he said. “It’s from my parents’ bed.”
“Really? You wouldn’t lie to me about something like that, would you?”
He laughed. “I might. But I’m not. Dad offered. Said we’d freeze out here without a blanket, and you’d never stand for using one of yours.”
She snuggled into the blanket and against him. “I love your dad.”
“He loves you. So does his son.”
“Obviously.”
They cuddled for a while, enjoying the warmth of each other’s bodies, listening to the wolves howl, an owl hoot, an eagle scream, and the wind blow around them.
“Alaska’s kinda cool,” he said.
“That’s what I was just thinking myself. Now that you’re out here with me, that is. By myself it was spooky, but now that you’re here, it’s like we’re part of it all. Part of nature.”
His lips traced a line of kisses from her mouth down to her throat. His hands moved slowly beneath the blanket, then under her nightgown, exploring her softness, enjoying her warmth.
“Since we’re all alone out here,” he whispered, “and becoming one with nature . . . whatcha say we do the ol’ Grizzly Bear Hump?”
“Gr-r-r-r . . .”