A Killer Christmas Party

by Nicole Ellis

  “Did you kill Mila?” I asked, inching closer to the desk.

  She sneered. “She asked me too many question about the medications that Lenny and Albert were taking. Then she told me that the residents suspected something was wrong. I had to get rid of her.”

  “But why have her hang to death?” Desi asked.

  “Well, that wasn’t my intention. I’d planned a simple heart attack to make it appear that she’d died of natural causes, but when I was making my rounds that night, I saw her come in the side door. She was stumbling a little and I could tell she’d been drinking. When I saw her grab the ladder from the maintenance shed and drag it over to the back of the building, I knew it was too good to be true.” She laughed. “I waited until she was messing around with the lights and grabbed it out from under her. I thought she’d fall, but the lights caught her around her neck.” She shrugged. “It all worked out in the end.”

  “Except the part about the police figuring out it wasn’t an accident,” Desi said.

  Nurse Fluge scrunched up her face. “That was unfortunate.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have moved the ladder,” Desi said helpfully. “If you’d left it there, they’d never have known.”

  While she had her attention, I felt blindly around to my right, hoping there would be something I could use against our captor. Nothing.

  Nurse Fluge smacked her hand with the ax again. “Let’s go.”

  We didn’t move.

  “Now,” she shouted.

  Desi and I inched toward the door and she let us move past her into the hallway, but blocked our way back to the stairs. She had us march down the hall until we came to the last door in the hallway.

  “Go in.”

  I put my fingers on the old-fashioned round doorknob. The scarred metal was cold beneath my hand when I twisted the knob. It squeaked as I eased it open. Nurse Fluge’s headlamp revealed a room that was slightly larger than the room with the desk.

  “Sometime this year,” Nurse Fluge said. When we didn’t move, she pushed first me, then Desi into the room and slammed the door shut, locking it from the outside with a key.

  “Jill?” Desi said, her voice sounding far away in the pitch black. “Do you still have the flashlight?”

  “Yeah. Hold on.” I flipped on the Maglite and swept it across the room. We were locked in a ten by ten space with a wooden storage rack on one side and a few bins along another wall. The walls were made of stone and mortar. The light hit a pile of clothing in the corner nearest the rack and we moved closer.

  “That’s Delilah.” I could taste the fear in my mouth. I turned the light to a wide focus and let it shine upwards, illuminating much of the room.

  “Is she …?” Desi said, frozen in place.

  “I don’t know.” I knelt down beside the elderly woman and felt for a pulse on her neck. “She’s alive.” I ran the light over her. “She’s got a goose egg on the back of her head that’s going to hurt when she wakes up, but otherwise looks ok.”

  “Other than being locked inside a cement room in the Basement of Doom?”

  I shrugged. “It’s better than the alternative. Besides, maybe someone will find us down here.”

  Desi gave me an incredulous look. “Seriously? Who’s going to look for us down here?”

  “Maybe Nurse Fluge will come back.” I was trying to think positively, but everything I came up with fell flat.

  “Who are you kidding? She’ll be halfway to Canada by now. And why would you want her to come back anyway? Not that it matters. We’re dead. Face it.” Desi paced the room, tugging on the doorknob until her fingers turned red, then slumped down against the wall. “Blueberry scones, chocolate donuts, cheese Danishes.”

  Her claustrophobia was kicking in. If we didn’t get out of here soon, she’d be a basket case. I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket. As I’d expected, there was no service in the basement, but maybe it would come in handy later.

  Next to us, Delilah stirred.

  Jarred out of her trance, Desi crawled across the floor to sit down beside her and stroked her forehead. “It’s ok.”

  Delilah tried to sit up, but only succeeded in slumping against the wall. “My head.” She touched the back of her head and her fingers came back bloody. “Oh my.” She pushed herself up to a seated position. “Nurse Fluge. I followed her down here and she hit me with something. But where are we now?”

  “No clue,” Desi said. “Somewhere at the far end of the basement. We followed the trail of Life Savers you left behind and then she got us.”

  Delilah frowned. “I’m sorry, girls. I never meant for you to get hurt. I dropped the candy on the ground so I could find my way back if I got lost.”

  Desi put her hand on Delilah’s arm. “Don’t worry about it. If it hadn’t been for your Life Savers, we’d never have found you.”

  The elderly woman nodded feebly, then looked at the walls. “It looks like a cellar or something.” She slowly turned her head to check out the rest of the room. “This must have been a storage cellar.”

  I picked up the flashlight to see if there was anything of use in the bins. Nothing but dirt. “Nothing good.”

  “Well, I always said I’d be happy to die in this house. I didn’t mean like this though. But I’m old and if it’s my time, it’s my time.” Delilah looked at us. “You girls are so young though. You have families and whole lives left to live.”

  I bit my lip to stop from crying. Images of my kids and Adam flashed through my mind. Adam would look for me, I knew he would—but could he find us?

  I took a deep breath.

  “Someone is going to find us,” I said firmly, trying to convince myself as well as the others that we’d be all right. “We just need to be patient.” A slight fear that Nurse Fluge would come back and kill us ran through my mind, but I suspected she was long gone.

  Desi looked at me with skepticism but went along with it. “Delilah, why don’t you tell us more about what Ericksville was like when you were young. I’d like to hear more about this building too.”

  Delilah leaned against the wall. “Well, like I told you before, it was built in 1902 as the Ericksville Heights hotel.”

  “It must have been a gorgeous hotel.” Thinking about the hotel in its heyday gave me a little comfort.

  “It was,” Delilah said. “Or so my mother told me. When she was a kid, everyone was in awe of the hotel. People from all over the world stayed here—wealthy people, famous people, it was even rumored that a president spent the night here.”

  She regaled us with stories about her mother working at the hotel as a chambermaid while she was a teenager. “But then the Great Depression hit and people stopped coming. The hotel was sold and the new owners, who were rumored to be rumrunners, turned the hotel into a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients.”

  “I wonder what it was like to live in the era of Prohibition.” Desi pulled her knees up to her chest. “You always hear about the speakeasies and such. It must have been so glamorous.”

  “Do you really think the owners were rumrunners?” I asked Delilah.

  Her smile gleamed in the meager light. “I know they were. My mother was a beautiful twenty-year-old when the hotel changed hands, and for a while, she dated one of the young men who worked in the sanatorium, ostensibly as a driver. She soon learned what he really did for a living.”

  “Wow.” Desi stared at her wide-eyed. “I bet this was one of their storerooms.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. They’d have needed somewhere to keep the liquor,” Delilah said. “You know, I heard stories about there being a speakeasy in downtown Ericksville, right where that little curio shop is on Second Street. I’ve always wondered if it was real.” Delilah proceeded to tell us more about the history of Ericksville. Before I knew it, another hour had passed. Her skill at weaving tales of the past had almost made me forget we were locked in the very cellar that we were romanticizing.

  I stood, running my hand over the rough stonewor
k. If these walls could talk. I checked my watch. We’d been missing from the party for a couple of hours already and no one had found us.

  “What time is it?” Desi asked.

  I told her and she sighed. “They should have been looking for us by now.”

  “I’m sure they are.” I laughed. “Tomàs probably has every cop in a hundred mile radius looking for you.”

  She tried to smile. “And maybe all of the Coast Guard’s boats too.”

  I pictured the Coast Guard searching the bluffs below the retirement home, searching every nook and cranny. Inspiration struck and I ran my fingers along the wall.

  “You’re not going to be able to dig us out of here with your fingers,” Desi said.

  “I know.” I continued what I was doing until I reached the wall with the storage unit. In Nancy’s house, they’d hidden a door to the basement behind an armoire. Maybe there was something behind this one. “Desi, help me move this?”

  “Why? Are you planning on stabbing the walls with pieces of wood you break off of there?”

  “Nope.”

  With much huffing and puffing, she helped me ease it to the left. She stood up and rubbed her back. “At least I’m warmer now from all that exercise.”

  I took the light and examined the wall. I could just make out a thin rectangle that was different from the rest of the masonry.

  “Seriously, what are you doing?” Desi asked. “We’re not in the South, so there’s probably not a branch of the Underground Railroad here.”

  “No, there’s not.” I pressed on the stones until a particularly long one gave way and the door swung open.

  21

  Delilah pushed herself up from the ground and walked shakily over to the hole in the wall. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “I’m feeling a little left out here,” Desi said, pouting.

  “It’s a rumrunner’s tunnel. That’s how they smuggled the alcohol into the sanatorium.”

  Her eyes widened. “So all we have to do is follow it out?”

  “I don’t know.” There were cobwebs hanging from every crevice in the tunnel, but the wooden support beams looked surprisingly sturdy for being ninety years old. “I don’t know if it’s safe. Or the other entrance could have been boarded up after all of these years.”

  Delilah nudged me aside and took the flashlight, examining the wooden beams. “It’s good.”

  “How do you know?” Desi asked.

  “I’m a carpenter’s daughter. I know good woodworking and this was good woodwork. It’ll hold.” As if to prove her point, she moved past me and entered the tunnel, holding on to the sides to keep her balance without the walker.

  Desi sighed. “I’ll go first. Maybe that will keep the claustrophobia at bay.”

  She stepped in front of Delilah, who handed her the flashlight without complaint. I brought up the rear as we made our way along the tunnel. It seemed to slope slightly downward, but nothing significant. Other than some broken bottles, the dirt path was fairly clear of debris.

  I still wasn’t sure about the safety of the tunnel, but we didn’t have much choice. Delilah seemed to be doing ok and was using the sides of the tunnel for support. After we’d been walking for a while, a metal door blocked our path.

  “Do you think it goes out to the water?” I asked.

  Delilah answered me. “Maybe. Or it could go to another house even. We’ll have to find out.”

  “If it even still opens.” I was more nervous now than I’d been all evening. If this didn’t work out, we were out of options. There was no way I could pull another exit out of thin air.

  Desi looked at me. “Here goes nothing.” She pulled on the door handle and nothing happened. She tugged on it again and it creaked open a hair. “I think it’s stuck on something.”

  I scanned the ground below the door. Over the years, dirt had come down from the tunnel’s roof and formed a door stop. I kicked the dirt aside with the toe of my good black flats. “Try it now.”

  This time, the door opened about a foot. We gave Delilah the flashlight and she moved to the side to allow us room. Desi and I both yanked on it with our full body weight and managed to create a gap big enough for us to fit through. I gulped the fresh air scented with recent rain and stepped out the door into the pitch black night.

  “Where are we?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Desi whispered back.

  “Why are you girls talking so quietly?” Delilah asked, as she aimed the light ahead of us.

  “I don’t know. It seems spooky out here.” I spun around in a slow circle. “We’re in the woods I think.”

  “I hear the water close by though.” Desi cocked her head to the side.

  “I bet we’re in the gulch that runs along the side of the Ericksville Heights grounds.” Delilah ran the flashlight along the trees in front of us. “See the slope? The water is that way.”

  “Hey, maybe my phone works now.” I pulled it out, but still had no bars. “Maybe we can get a signal down by the water where it’s more open.”

  Desi looked up the hill. “Better than going up.”

  She was right. The foliage was thick and I wasn’t sure we could safely make it up to the top in the dark.

  I glanced at Delilah. “Will you be ok out here without your walker?” Not that her walker would be of much use with all the brush.

  She stepped forward tentatively. “I think I’ll be fine. I keep the walker around most of the time in case my leg gives out, but it’s been better lately.”

  We started down the hill with Desi in the lead, then Delilah, then me, much as we had in the tunnel.

  “Ouch,” Delilah cried out. She tumbled to the ground and grabbed her foot.

  We stopped immediately. “Are you ok?” Desi asked.

  Delilah tested her foot and ankle by rotating them in small circles. “I think so.”

  We helped her up and she winced.

  “Do you think you can make it to the water?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m tougher than I look.”

  Desi laughed. “I don’t think we doubted that for a minute. You’ve been through a lot today.”

  We climbed over fallen trees and rocks that the recent rain had made slick. Desi and I took turns helping Delilah, and we soon made it to the beach.

  The tide must have been out, because there was a stretch of sand showing above the water. I didn’t see any boats out on the water, but the sparkling lights of Willowby Island across the way were a welcome sight. Delilah sat down on a log to rest while I tried my phone again. I had bars of service!

  With trembling fingers, I punched the buttons. When the emergency dispatcher answered, I told her we were at the bottom of the gulch next to Ericksville Heights and we had an elderly woman with us who wouldn’t be able to walk out of there.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but did you say you had an elderly woman with you?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Yes. It’s a long story. We were kidnapped by a nurse at Ericksville Heights Retirement Home—Diana Fluge Marice. She may be on the way to Brazil. The police need to find her—she tried to kill us. Tell them Desi Torres is with us. Her husband Tomàs is a police officer for Ericksville.” I gave her the rest of our names and the other information that she requested.

  When I was finished, the dispatcher said in a calm voice, “The police and aid crew are on their way.”

  I hung up and sat down on the cold sand with my back against the log. We’d been running on pure adrenaline for so long that I hadn’t had a chance to internalize any of what had happened. We’d just been locked in an over one-hundred-year-old cellar and escaped via a tunnel built by people smuggling rum into the country. I’d thought the biggest thing that might happen that day would be to find out more clues about Mila’s murder. How wrong I’d been.

  “Is that a boat?” Desi pointed to a bright light in the water. I peered at it as it came closer to the beach. Sure enough, Ericksville had deployed their small police boat t
o help us.

  The rescue workers beached the boat and an EMT jumped out, carrying a bag. “Is someone hurt?”

  Desi and I pointed at Delilah. I was half-afraid she wouldn’t admit that there was anything wrong with her, but her ankle must have been bothering her more than she let on because she let him examine her.

  He signaled to the boat driver. “She’s ok, but I’ll need help getting her into the boat.” He turned to us. “Are you two ok if we take her back to the marina? There wasn’t enough room on the boat for the police to come with us, but they’re waiting back on shore. We’ll come right back for you.”

  “We’re fine,” Desi said. “Go. Get Delilah somewhere warm and safe.”

  He set a battery-powered lantern on the beach. “We’ll be back soon.”

  The boat roared away from the gulch and disappeared around the corner.

  Desi and I looked at each other over the white light emanating from the lantern.

  “Well, this has been an interesting day,” she said.

  “No kidding.” I looked out at the water. “What do you think Tomàs and Adam are going to say?”

  “They’re probably not going to be too happy. But it genuinely wasn’t our fault this time. We were trying to find an elderly woman.” She smiled. “Plus, Will’s no longer a suspect now—or at least he won’t be once we have a chance to tell the police what happened. And my mom never found out that he was a murder suspect.”

  “Maybe they’ll have been so worried about us that they won’t care.” I looked at my phone, just now realizing I could call my husband and let him know we were ok. I dialed his number and waited for it to ring, but he answered as soon as the call connected.

  “Jill? What’s going on? Are you ok?” Adam asked. “Tomàs called and said to come down to the marina—that something had happened to you and Desi, but that you were fine. I’ve was so worried when you didn’t come home.”

  “We’ll be at the marina soon. We’re fine, don’t worry. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.”