The Alibi Man

Chapter 67

The moon was bright as Lisbeth walked along the dirt road. She didn’t know what time it was. Time didn’t matter. She had been walking for quite a while, though, she thought.

She had never walked into the wild countryside alone. The idea would have frightened her. But not Irina. Irina would have laughed at her fear of snakes and alligators, and teased her into going. Irina knew how liberating it was not to feel fear. Lisbeth was only just beginning to learn what that meant.

She knew where she was going because the location had been described in great detail over the last few days among riders and barn hands, on the news. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, to go to the place where Irina had been found, where her body had been destroyed. It was no less a holy place than any other for her.

She had worshipped Irina. Irina, so smart, so sophisticated, so bold, so brave.

She had loved Irina as she had never loved anyone in her life. She had needed Irina. Irina had been her big sister, her best friend, her… her mentor. Irina had been everything Lisbeth was not.

Lisbeth had tried her hardest to follow in Irina’s footsteps-to be casual, and careless, and carefree, and elegant; to look life in the face and grin a wicked grin.

It would have been so perfect, if only it could have been just the two of them.

Funny, she thought. When she came to South Florida she had such very different ideas about what she wanted from life. She had wanted what she had been taught to want-a husband, a family- even though she had known from past experience with men that there were no happiness guarantees, that love could be a hateful, frightful thing.

And she had learned that lesson all over again… and again… and again…

Irina had taken her under her wing. Irina had been her one true friend and her protector-or so she had thought.

Never in her life had Lisbeth been with-or thought she would ever be with-another woman. She had been raised to believe that was wrong. But with Irina she had felt right, and safe, and, Midwestern guilt aside, happy.

Lisbeth paused along the trail to bend over and cough and to struggle to fill her aching lungs with air. She sat down for a moment’s rest on a cypress stump.

The night was clear and warm. Teeming with life, if a person cared to notice. She did. She listened to the frogs and the squawks and ratchet sounds of the marsh birds.

It was, of course, the animals that could be neither seen nor heard that came with the most danger in them. Love was an animal like that. And jealousy. And hurt.

Lisbeth sat on the stump along the oily black canal, waiting for them to come to her.