Deadly Touch - Heather Graham Page 0,69
hut areas. A friend of his is a wonderful seamstress, makes some amazing shirts. I love her use of color.”
As they moved away from the show toward an area with several little shops, Raina could hear a strange grunting sound and she smiled. Alligators out in the canal.
“They sound like pigs,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you think so?”
He grinned, looking at her. “I suppose. I just always knew what they were. Maybe pigs sound like alligators.”
She laughed. “Maybe.”
“Hey, chat Linda up when we’re in there, okay?” he asked.
“Uh, sure,” Raina told him. “You know Jeremy so well, you know that he’ll be there?”
“I know Jeremy well enough to suspect he’ll be there,” he told her, a small smile curving his lips as he shrugged. “I called him on my way out to you and the horses to make sure he’d be here.”
They reached the chickee. Most of the visitors to the village were watching the show; the kiosks were quiet.
Jeremy was at the back of the little kiosk, sitting on a folding wooden stool next to a woman Raina presumed to be Linda. She was dressed in a long, colorful skirt and a blouse with an incredible array of colors with different bands of color offering different designs. Her hair was long and straight, a beautiful pitch-black. She stood, seeing Axel, crying his name out softly and rising quickly to come and greet him with a hug. Stepping back, she looked at Raina, waiting for an introduction. Jeremy was already up and on his way over. He quickly welcomed Raina and introduced her to Linda, whose last name was Cypress.
“Common enough among Miccosukees and Seminoles,” Linda explained. “We all have a ‘clan’ name, Axel is Tiger, and I’m Cypress...and Andrew is Osceola. Of course, Osceola is a hero to all of us, a truly great man!”
“Captured under a white flag of truce, to the discredit of the US military at the time,” Raina said.
Linda nodded. “You know some history, huh?”
“Always fascinated me. And I was appalled once, up in St. Augustine, by the castillo, when a guide—a guide!—said he’d been executed. I mean, the way he was captured—dreadful. But the US didn’t kill him. He died of disease.”
“Yes,” Linda said, “and his doctor was his friend, but the silly man took Osceola’s head to study and use it to scare his children into good behavior by sticking it on their bedposts!”
“His son-in-law did the same,” Raina said.
“And then the man’s office burned, and Osceola’s head was lost. I mean, I don’t think he was using it anymore at that point, anyway.”
“True, but historians and anthropologists believe they could better understand him—and his heritage—if they just had his head!”
Linda turned to Axel. “I like this girl!”
“I love the culture,” Raina said. “And your clothing, your shirts and blouses and skirts—these are beautiful,” Raina said.
“Well, thank you,” she said.
Axel spoke up then. “Jeremy, you got a minute? I want to take you down memory lane.”
“Sure,” Jeremy said.
As they walked away, a pair of tourists sauntered up to the kiosk.
“You speak English?” the man asked Linda.
Linda smiled. “Why, yes, I do.”
“Oh, great! Can you give me the price on a few of these shirts? So unusual. I mean, we’re used to leather and big feather headdresses!” the woman said.
“The clothing you see here really didn’t become popular until the early twentieth century,” Linda told them pleasantly. “Before then, we dressed a great deal like your basic Eastern woodland tribe. But we do love beads and colors, and I do love my work.”
“Lovely. Do you cook traditional food? I mean, what do you do for dinner?”
Linda kept smiling. “Frankly, on many a night, I order out for pizza.”
“Oh!”
“You might really enjoy a visit to the museum,” Linda said politely. “We Miccosukee—and our fellows, the Seminole—adapted to hiding in the Everglades, going deeper and deeper to avoid deportation and death. It’s interesting to see all the different ways people came. We welcomed many a runaway slave back then, too, so you’ll find many dark Miccosukee and Seminole Indians. And yes, we do have some traditional foods—we used kontí root and other food sources we found here—but we are certainly aware of most of the conveniences of the twenty-first century.”
She hadn’t stopped smiling.
When the couple had paid for a shirt and a blouse and moved on hopefully to the museum, Linda lost her smile at last.
“I think I was supposed to greet them with ‘How!’” she said.
“Well, at least they’re out here, and maybe they’ll learn something,” Raina