The cart went down the hill next, finally crashing to one side with a loud crunch.
Bert poked her head up, spitting snow from her mouth.
What had just happened? Had Flannigan just tried to run her down? “What kind of psycho puts himself in that much danger to take someone out?” she gasped, standing up and catching her breath.
The kind of psycho who was a murderer.
Almost as if to confirm her thought, she saw a figure stand up from the turned over cart. He didn’t seem too beat up and neither did the car. However, as he looked up toward her, she saw him clutching something in his hand—and it looked like a hefty wrench.
Bert didn’t wait another single second to see what would happen next if he managed to catch her.
Bolting inside the theater building, she rushed down the hall, pulling out her phone at the same time and calling Harry. “Come on. Pick up, pick up,” she begged.
It went instantly to voicemail. “No!” She quickly left a message. “Flannigan, the security guard on campus here. He just tried to run me over. He’s the killer.” Hanging up, she jammed her phone back in her pocket and considered her possibilities.
She could try to run back out to her car, but that would involve running past him.
There was no way she was going to do that.
She could try and hide in a room, but what if he found her? What if he had keys to the whole campus? It wouldn’t be unheard of.
Then she thought of Shiv. “Oh my,” she wondered out loud. What if he tried to go for Shiv next?
Bert quickly ran to the stairwell and went to the second floor, crossing The Fish Bowl toward the room she’d seen Dale working on the day before. Shiv had to be there.
Pushing the door open, she leaped into the room.
The whole place was decked out like a fancy dining room for Thanksgiving dinner. The fake walls had all been set up, painted to look like wood molding and bookshelves. A fake fireplace even let off heat. A long table dressed with an elegant cloth and all the fake food Bert had seen the day before sat at the center of the room.
Then, the biggest surprise of all. Sitting at the head of the table, all tied up and with her mouth gagged, was Shiv.
Chapter Ten
In the next instant, there was a loud and ear shaking slam. Bert yelped, turning to see that the door had been shut behind her. Rushing forward, she checked the knob. It was locked tight. Shiv whined quietly behind the gag.
“Oh, honey,” Bert sympathized, hurrying around the table and loosening the white bandana around her mouth.
“It’s a trap, Bert. This is a trap.”
“Well, I figured that out when we suddenly got locked inside,” Bert admitted, getting to work untying her friend’s hands. “Flannigan chased me in here.”
“Huh? Flannigan?”
“Yes. He tried to run me over. When he missed, he came after me with a wrench.”
“Has the whole world gone insane? Are Dale and him in on this whole thing together?” she asked.
Bert finished loosening the restraints and stood up. “Dale? What are you talking about?”
“He asked me to come here. When I arrived, he knocked me out. I woke up tied to the chair. He texted you on my phone.”
Bert’s mouth hung open. “They’re working together? Of course. How else could someone get in here to kill Ronnie and not be noticed by Dale’s app? He was covering up for him.”
“But that still doesn’t make sense. Why work together? As far as I knew they hated each other,” Shiv pointed out, going over and trying the knob herself. Still locked.
“Who knows? In any case, we need to get out of here. Who knows what they could be planning?” She dug out her phone and dialed emergency services. The call dropped. “What the heck?”
“This building is notorious for terrible cell service. It’s all the old brick and stone walls,” Shiv told her.
She handed the phone off to Shiv. “You keep trying. I’m going to try and figure a way to bust through this door.” She began looking around the room for something heavy she could possibly break the knob off with.
However, just as she started, a familiar sound kicked on. It was the same buzz she’d heard from the speaker the day before. Then she remembered standing over the heater in the entryway of the building. “The vent,” she declared.
“What do you mean?” Shiv asked.
“That sound. Dale said he put that little speaker into the vent system to make it echo. The vents in the building are huge. Maybe we could climb through to get out.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. We’d barely fit.”
“We have to try,” she said, pulling on one of the false walls. “Help me.”
“On it,” Shiv agreed. They heaved together, and it came apart, revealing the real wall behind it and the speaker.
The two women were surprised to see some sort of metal tunnel connected to the vent and reaching a section of the fake wall that appeared to have a secret compartment. Obviously, part of the puzzle.
“What is that for?” Shiv said.
“Who cares? Rip it off.” They pulled it free, revealing the opening beneath the vent.
“Ready?” Bert asked. “You go first.”
Shiv was reluctant but agreed. “Okay,” she said squatting down near the hole. Just as she got near, however, something small, black, and furry lunged out at her. Screaming, she threw herself back, falling into Bert and driving them toward the opposite wall of the small space.
Both women stared with unbelieving wide eyes at the thing perched along the edge of the vent. It was a spider, about the size of a tarantula. It was rearing up, raising its front legs and exposing some very sharp, ivory and black fangs that dripped with venom.
“Oh, my gosh, what is it?” Shiv whispered, not wanting to draw the nightmare closer to them.
“Who cares? It’s a huge spider and I don’t want anything to do with it.” She was busy looking around for something, anything large enough to smash the thing if it came charging their way.
However, something else distracted her.
The door to the room opened revealing Flannigan standing there. “Come on. Get out.”
The women didn’t hesitate to ask why he was letting them out of the death trap and instead bolted for the door and out onto the balcony of The Fish Bowl. “Close it, close it,” they screamed at him.
He obeyed. Finally turning toward, them with an exhausted look on his face. “What’s going on?”
“Shouldn’t we be asking you that?” Bert demanded.
“Why did you help us?” Shiv asked.
His eyes narrowed in confusion. “I came into the building and heard the ruckus. I just unlocked and opened the door.”
“What about killing us? You had us in there with a killer spider. You were working with Dale,” Shiv insisted.
However, based on the man’s expression, Bert was beginning to think they were wrong, and Flannigan had nothing to do with the murder at all.
“Dale? That psycho cut the brakes on my campus golf cart.”
“He did?” the women gasped in unison.
“I saw him hunched over it early this morning but didn’t think anything of it until I lost control down the hill and couldn’t stop.”
“Nearly hitting me,” Bert snapped.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he defended himself.
“What about the wrench?”
“I think Dale was using it and left it in the cab,” he admitted.
The women looked at each other, realizing what had actually happened. The real killer was still out there. “Where is Dale?” they both wondered out loud.
Chapter Eleven
“Thankfully we caught him at the airport trying to get on a last-minute flight out of the state,” Harry revealed the next day as he, Bert, Shiv, Wyn, and Carla all sat around one of the tables in Pies and Pages. They were splitting an acorn squash pie between them as well as a large pot of hot chocolate. “If you hadn’t tipped us o
ff, Bert, we wouldn’t probably wouldn’t have gotten him in time.”
“Well, I was lucky the message even got through,” she admitted.
“It’s true. That building is like a black hole for cell phone service,” Shiv said.
“So, he wasn’t working with anyone? He killed his girlfriend all on his own?” Carla asked.
Bert sipped from her mug. The chocolate was rich, made from real melted down candy bars. “Yep. Turns out he’d snuck a pet funnel web spider into the country when he moved here.”
“One of the deadliest species of arachnid in the world,” Harry added.
“What kind of psycho keeps a deadly animal as a pet?” Carla said.
“Someone who is also willing to kill their girlfriend for breaking up with them,” Harry pointed out.
“And tried to kill a man whom he saw as competition.”
“Flannigan got lucky, that’s for sure. That crash could have been much worse,” Harry said.
“I heard he’s moving up in the world,” Bert said.
Harry gave an unamused half smile. “Unfortunately, yes. The chief is hiring him on as an official beat cop now that he helped out on this homicide case.”
A little while ago she would have begrudgingly congratulated him on his promotion, but now that he’d saved her life, she couldn’t do it. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Yeah, but now I got two pompous self-absorbed Flannigan’s on the squad. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get a murder rap before the year is out.”
“Don’t even joke,” Bert said, giving him a playful slap on the arm.
“So, was the whole room a set up from the beginning?” Wyn asked, taking a bite from her pie.
Harry drank his hot chocolate. “It seems so.”
“They’ve been on the rocks since the beginning of the semester when Dale started hanging out with Diana so much. Then, when other guys started showing interest in Ronnie, he lost it.”
“Possessive much?” Wyn sneered.
“In any case, he had a whole system connected to his phone, it seems. It controlled the gate on the spider’s cage to let it out when he wanted. The whirring on the speaker was meant to draw the spider’s attention and get it to crawl into the slot in the fake wall.”
“Which was part of the puzzle,” Shiv added.
“And where poor Ronnie put her hand to get a clue to get out of the room,” Bert noted.
“Anyway, he thought he was smart and wouldn’t get caught. When the spider crawled back into its cage in the vent, he was able to retrieve it without any of the police noticing by crawling in from the basement. After all, we didn’t look deep into the vents, only at the room,” Harry explained.
“Wow, how elaborate. He must really be off his rocker.”
“He is. Turns out, he is a wanted criminal in Australia for killing his last girlfriend and her lover she was cheating on him with. Same method, too. Used his pet funnel web spider.”
“Why couldn’t that thing have bitten him,” Bert sighed, finishing off her pie and standing up. Walking into the kitchen area, she stood over the sink to wash her dish.
She was surprised when two large arms wrapped themselves around her from behind. “How are you doing?” Harry whispered in her ear.
“Well, I’ll probably have nightmares about spiders for a month, but I’m good otherwise.”
“Hey, there was something I tried to ask you the other day before we got interrupted by all this mess.”
She set her dish in the drying rack and turned to face him, embracing him in return. “What is that?”
He licked his lips nervously. “I was wondering,” he paused, drawing out Bert’s suspense, “if you wanted to have Thanksgiving Dinner at the retirement community where my mom is.”
Bert blinked a few times. “You’ve never mentioned your mom before.”
“Well, she’s ninety-eight and still kicking, surprisingly. She’s been asking to meet my new girlfriend.”
Suddenly, Bert felt like a teenager all over again. “Do you see her often?”
“Every week, if I can.”
This was a whole new soft spot of Harry that Bert had never seen before—a man who still loved his mother deeply and visited her frequently.
“What would we be having?”
He chuckled. “Whatever they’re serving there. So, turkey, boxed stuffing, cranberry sauce in the shape of a can.”
Bert pulled him tighter, smiling warmly. “If it’s with you, Harry, it’ll be a happy Thanksgiving for me.” Leaning in, she kissed him. “But there is one condition.”
“Which is?”
“I have to get all these darn pies done or I’ll be up a creek.”
They laughed together.
Also by Carolyn Q. Hunter
Diner of the Dead Series
Book 1: The Wicked Waffle
Book 2: Battered and Buttered Waffle
Book 3: Sinister Strawberry Waffle
Book 4: The Wayward Waffle
Book 5: Pumpkin Pie Waffle
Book 6: Turkey and Terror
Book 7: Creepy Christmas Waffle
Book 8: Birthday Cake Waffle
Book 9: Spooky Sweetheart Waffle
Book 10: Eerie Irish Waffle
Book 11: Savory Spring Waffle
Book 12: Benedict Waffle
Book 13: Scary Sausage Waffle
Book 14: Murderous Mocha Waffle
Book 15: Red Velvet Waffle
Book 16: High Steaks Murder
Book 17: Hole In One Waffle
Book 18: Fireworks and Waffles
Book 19: Games, Ghouls and Waffles
Book 20: Waffling in Murder
The Wicked Waffle Series
Book 1:Hot Buttered Murder
Book 2: Bacon Caramel Murder
Book 3: Thanksgiving Waffle Murder
Book 4: Christmas Waffle Caper
Book 5: Buckaroo Waffle Murder
Book 6: Wedding Waffle Murder
Book 7: Cactus Waffle Murder
Book 8: Zombie Waffle Murder
Book 9: A Very Catty Murder
Pies and Pages Series
Book 1: Killer Apple Pie
Book 2: Killer Chocolate Pie
Book 3: Killer Halloween Pie
Book 4: Killer Thanksgiving Pie
Book 5: Killer Christmas Pie
Book 6: Killer Caramel Pie
Book 7: Killer Cocoa Pie
Book 8: Shamrock Pie Murder
Book 9: Killer Easter Pie
Book 10: Killer Cheesecake Tart
Book 11: Summer Smore Murder
Book 12: Maple Nut Murder
Book 13: Tea, Thyme, and Murder
Book 14: A Harvest of Murder
Dead-End Drive-In Series
Book 1: Sisterly Screams
Book 2: Moans, Mummies and Murder
Book 3: Blue Eyed Doll
Book 4: Movies and Murder
The Cracked Mirror Series
Book 1: The Biker and The Boogeyman
Author’s Note
I’d love to hear your thoughts on my books, the storylines, and anything else that you’d like to comment on—reader feedback is very important to me. My contact information, along with some other helpful links, is listed below. If you’d like to be on my list of “folks to contact” with updates, release and sales notifications, etc.… just shoot me an email and let me know. Thanks for reading!
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Killer Acorn Pie Page 7