The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

If you walk straight back into our woods, you will eventually walk out into the orchard behind us where the owners rarely come up. A driveway continues up the hill and ends at the outdoor wood-fired oven of the woman there who’s a bread baker. Her place adjoins 10 mostly wooded acres where, a dozen years ago a tree fell on a 5th wheel trailer, crushing it and its renter to the ground. The victim’s legs were pinned beneath the maple and the temperature was below freezing, but after who knows how many hours of agony, he managed to reach the revolver he kept in the nightstand beside his deathbed and shot himself in the head.

This is not the horror story I’m going to relate, but it is the same property. Two days ago some neighbors were taking a stroll on this 10 acres, one of them being Bob who had put $15,000 down on a potential purchase, meaning to add to his own 5. Another trailer was now on the property, rented to an itinerant truck driver, and they had ventured in to have a look, figuring when he didn’t respond to a knock on the door, that he was on the road and wouldn’t mind. So they walked past the trailer and into the woods. (Cue the creepy soundtrack.)

Just beyond the trailer they stepped over a cedar nurse log and noticed wire screen covering a hole in the ground, which, it turned out, was the hatch cover to an underground bunker that apparently went for some distance out of their sight. Odd, they thought, but having no flashlight, they resisted the urge to go down into the darkness. (In the movie, of course, they would go anyway.) They dropped the camouflaged screen back into place and planned to resume their investigation of the property, (music crescendo, rustling leaves, barking dogs in the distance) and see in the shrubs nearby a sleeping bag.

If you’ve seen any horror movies at all, you know NOT to walk over to that sleeping bag which looks like it has a sleeping tenant inside, albeit the end is duct-taped up and the bag looks pitched haphazardly into the bushes. Bob and the boys, apparently do not watch that genre of movies. They walked over and proceeded to undo the duct tape. (The music is a shrill near- scream with a bass heartbeat beating faster and faster, closer and closer.)

And then … they open the sleeping bag. Inside there’s blood everywhere and of course, a human body, a woman judging by the leopard bra. With her head decapitated. In the woods they hear motion and think they hear someone running off. Someone who had been watching them the entire time!

So … we have a monster in the woods now. No police have contacted us, no notices have given us warning. We heard from a friend on the sheriff’s call and from the baker who was at a dinner with us last night on whose property a high heeled woman’s shoe was found. State patrol, Island County sheriffs, a task force parked in her driveway. They were looking for more bodies and they were going to go down in that underground bunker. The island is narrow down here on the South End, about a mile across and few houses on the interior all the way down to the Head. It’s tough going in there but an easy exit onto the highway or up to a vacant house or one of ours.

Whatever is going on, it isn’t over. We have our doors locked and plan to keep them locked until someone finds the murderer. You think it can’t happen in the bucolic country, think again. We certainly are.

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