gloved hands covered in mud and muck. “Later? Officer Osceola has offered us his home as a rest stop. I’m assuming you came from his house?”
“We did. We’ll see you there later, then,” Axel told her.
They skirted the area, riding on by. The workers all stopped for a minute to wave them on. When they were past them, Raina asked, “If she was a friend of Peter Scarborough’s, wouldn’t the police have interviewed her already?”
“They might have. But there wouldn’t be much. Not if you just talked to a casual friend. She wouldn’t have appeared on any kind of a ‘person of interest’ list, I don’t believe. Think about it—the number of people the average person might see on any given day. In a big city at least. You might see the same clerk at a grocery store and chat with them often or the same folks in line at a coffee shop. Questioning anyone and everyone a person might see is exhausting and never complete. I don’t know if she can help us or not. The first hours when a person is discovered missing or dead are always the most important. But when that fails, you have to dig a lot further. On this, following the trail of Jennifer Lowry was most important. Now, we have to look more fully at all of the victims,” Axel said.
“And we’re going to the village because...?”
“Because I haven’t been there yet, and I want to talk to Jeremy.”
“You don’t think that Jeremy—”
“No. I don’t,” he said.
She fell silent for a minute, aware he thought someone they knew was involved in some way. But she couldn’t believe her friends were involved.
“My group—we were all just kids when Fran Castle disappeared.”
“I know.”
“Jordan behaved strangely, but he was truly stricken when he learned Jennifer Lowry had been killed.”
“I know.”
She fell silent again; he didn’t appear to be in the mood to talk.
The trail, she thought as they rode, was beautiful. In a strange way, of course. The trail itself followed spits of hardwood plateaus, while around them there was water, the eternally moving “river of grass” that made up the Everglades. There were birds in every color as they moved along—cranes, egrets, owls, hawks, and they came across one great blue heron, dead still and standing on one leg in the water as he eyed his terrain, awaiting a meal.
At one point, they passed a few adolescent alligators basking on the embankment.
Axel started to warn her to keep a wide berth, though it was unlikely they would attack something as large as the horses.
She knew to keep her distance. They rode by without the alligators so much as moving.
They had taken a different route to the village. The customary entrance was off the Tamiami Trail, and there was an outpost where a lone Miccosukee man of an indeterminate age sat in the middle of a chickee playing a game on his smartphone. He obviously knew Axel; he said hello and assured them it was a fine place to leave the horses.
As they arrived via a back road, they came upon a man seated by a small pool with exotic birds. He raised a hand in greeting to Axel, and Axel waved back. They moved on to a large pool where a man in a typically colorful Miccosukee shirt was on a podium, talking about alligators while a second man was in a paddock with an adolescent alligator of about six feet.
The village also offered several “chickee” type structures occupied by men and women all dressed in the multicolored shirts and skirts that were typical to South Florida Native Americans.
But the pen where the man was working with the alligator had drawn most everyone’s attention.
“We don’t wrestle alligators, though that’s what most say. We love our alligators here, and we demonstrate what they’re capable of,” he was telling a crowd of onlookers. “They have always been an essential part of the ecology here in the Everglades. But people enjoy a look at the giant mouths of our native creatures.”
A cry of awe went up in the crowd as the man in the paddock opened the alligator’s jaw with both hands, and demonstrated his ability to put his own head within the creature’s mouth and then safely withdraw it.
“I think Jeremy might be in one of the little chickee kiosks,” Axel said. “They’ve opened a nice air-conditioned shop at the entry where they sell tickets, but there are still men and women working some of the little