her eyes up to catch sight of the thing that seemed to be considering making a nest in her hair,” Novalene answered. “I grabbed the broom from Keelan. The way she was swinging it around, she could have put out one of Bailey’s eyes, and then I coaxed it into crawling off the girl’s head and onto the broom. I started out toward the bathhouse to flush it down the toilet, all the time praying the damn thing didn’t clog up the plumbing. When I was about halfway there, it jumped off the broom. I didn’t know those things could move so fast. One minute, it had hunkered down and was enjoying the ride across the yard, and the next, it was gone.”
“Thank goodness the one we found was hiding under the bed and not on Carmella.” Jayden used a wooden spoon to point to the wall where Tiffany’s drawing of the tarantula hung. “I bet Bailey appreciates the art in that picture a lot better today than she did when Tiffany put it up there.”
“No doubt about that,” Novalene agreed.
“God, what a morning,” Diana said as she came through the door, likely for coffee if Jayden knew anything. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never seen a tarantula. I swear that Tiffany jinxed us by hanging that picture up in here. One showed up on the Sunshine Cabin porch this morning. Remember me tellin’ y’all that Rita was my alpha girl when we first got here? Well, when that spider hopped up on her leg, she did some kind of fancy footwork. The other two girls took off in a dead run toward the exercise yard with Rita right behind them, trying to shake the thing off her pants before it made its way up toward her shirt. If I hadn’t seen the spider on her, I would have thought she was trying to learn some new steps.” Diana poured herself a mugful of coffee.
Had the one pinned to the board in the corner of the living area in Daydream Cabin come back to life? Jayden began to wonder if there was such a thing as zombie spiders. She made a mental note to check that evening to see if Carmella’s tarantula was still there.
Diana took a sip of her coffee and went on. “Lord, I hate two things in this old world, and spiders are both of them. The damn thing jumped from Rita’s pants right over onto Violet’s bare arm once they got to the morning exercise spot. She fainted dead away. Just dropped like a rock with every one of the other girls standing at attention for fear they’d get a demerit if they broke ranks. The spider took off for the bushes while I got her revived. I told her that she didn’t have to go on the hike this morning since she had fainted, but she insisted that she was fine. You got a new story about the spiders, Jayden?”
“Nope.” Jayden pointed to the picture on the wall. “Our bad boy is still pinned to a board, and the picture up there on the wall is the only thing left to attack us.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure, I bet every one of these girls remembers that there are tarantulas in these parts, and they think twice about their behavior once they go home,” Novalene said.
“Bless their little hearts,” Jayden said. “They’ve lived an entitled and totally sheltered life. Someday they’ll look back on this and appreciate the fact that they got the opportunity to turn their lives around.”
“But today isn’t that day. I bet they check under their beds and in every corner before they go to bed tonight,” Novalene said. “Truth is, I intend to do the same thing in my room. Spiders or anything that crawls, including snakes, give me the heebie-jeebies.”
Diana shivered. “Me too. I don’t like those things, but a mouse or a rat will put me to running in high gear a lot faster than that. How do those big old things get into a cabin anyway?”
“I think our spider came through that little tear in the spacer where the air conditioner hangs in their bedroom,” Novalene answered.
Jayden pulled the biscuits out of the oven and set the pan on the buffet line next to the scrambled eggs, sausage, and blueberry muffins. “Do you think Lauren tore the plastic to let the smoke out when she was there?”
Novalene shook her head. “No, she was cracking the other