Murder is on the Clock

by Fran Rizer

  The next thing I heard was a loud scream. It came from me. The next thing I felt was skin tearing as I crashed through a rotten step. I grabbed the stair above and stopped my fall with the top part of my body sticking out of the hole in the wood. From my arm pits on down, I was suspended over whatever was beneath the stairway.

  I don’t know which one of them reached me first because Tyrone grabbed one arm just as quickly as Mr. Douglas got the other one. They attempted to pull me upright, but my perky behind caught against the splintered step.

  “I think our best bet is to enlarge the opening before we pull her out. Tyrone, can you hold her up while I run to get a tool out of the van?” Mr. Douglas said.

  Ty nodded, moved up to the next step, and turned around to face me. Holding onto the arm he already held, Tyrone grasped my other wrist—the one Mr. Douglas was holding. Mr. Douglas let go and started downstairs.

  Tyrone lost his balance squatting on the step above me.

  He dropped me.

  I fell on my back and landed on a hard surface below the stairs. It wasn’t a long plunge, but it did knock the breath out of me. I could hear the kids upstairs yelling for Mr. Douglas while Tyrone called my name as he wiggled and squirmed his way through the hole and down to my side.

  “What in the (not a kindergarten curse word) is this?” he said.

  I began to sit up and Ty gave me a gentle shove back down.

  “Don’t move,” he said, “until we know how bad you’re hurt.”

  “I’m sure I have a few scrapes, but everything seems to be working.” I wiggled my hands and feet.

  Tyrone asked, “How about your neck, your head, your back?”

  “All okay,” I said, looked up, and rolled my neck like some females do when they’re irritated.

  When I moved my head, I saw what Tyrone had seen when he lowered himself and I twisted myself over to a sitting position to get a better look.

  The room was small. The floor was unfinished wood. The ceiling slanted from about ten or twelve feet high on one end to a very acute angle on the other. Directly in the middle, a little nearer the highest part of the ceiling than where I fell, was a tiny table.

  No, it wasn’t really a table. It was an upside-down bushel basket. In the darkness of the enclosed space with no windows, what sat on top at first appeared to be a white pumpkin surrounded by fresh roses. Focusing harder, I saw that the flowers surrounded not a pumpkin, but a skull, and that some of the roses were not just wilted, but completely dead.

  “Looks like someone already started decorating for Halloween,” I said.

  “That’s not funny,” Ty snapped. “There’s a door on this wall. Let’s get out of here.” He looked up where Mr. Douglas was attempting to widen the hole with a saw. “Hold on,” Ty called. “We’ll see where this little door leads.”

  Of course, when he said “little door,” I thought of Alice in Wonderland—that table where she found the food and drink that made her grow to a giant and then shrink to mouse-size. This door wasn’t that small. It was shorter than I am though, and I’m five feet, four inches.

  Ty helped me from the floor. He turned the knob and pushed. The door opened. I confess I was holding my breath, scared of what we might find.

  Squeals of teenaged joy welcomed us. The students stood in the entrance hall on the other side of the door. They’d been gathered at the foot of the stairs just a few feet from the door. Mr. Douglas joined us, apologizing for not replacing the step I’d fallen through.

  “It’s lucky that room or closet is beneath the stairwell,” he said. “Otherwise you might have fallen all the way to the crawlspace beneath the house.”

  “Mr. Douglas,” Ty interrupted, “I think you should take a look at what’s in that room. Did you set up a fake skull planning to take us in there and scare us?”

  “I didn’t even know that room existed. I’ll take a look.” He pulled the door open wider, stooped, and entered. After only a minute, he stepped out with his cell phone in his hand. “I’m calling the sheriff,” he said.

  “The sheriff is out-of-town,” I told him.

  “Then nine-one-one will send a deputy. That’s not a Halloween skull in there. It’s the real thing—a human skull on the basket and several other bones, including ribs, a pelvis, and femurs lying under a burlap sack in the corner.” He frowned. “I want all of you outside. Tyrone, you get the first aid kit and see if you can clean Miss Parrish’s cuts and bandage them until we get her to a physician.”

  “I don’t believe I need a doctor,” I said.

  “We don’t know what’s been in that room beneath the stairs, and you have open abrasions. I insist that you go directly to the emergency room.” He looked around. “Are you willing for Tyrone to drive your car?”

  I hadn’t let anyone drive that car since I bought it—not even Wayne, but I said, “Certainly.”

  Before Ty finished bandaging, the deputy arrived and asked, “Is she supposed to be a mummy?”

  I laughed. “No. My enthusiastic young friend here is covering every cut and scratch.”

  Tyrone looked embarrassed and almost spun the Vette’s tires when we left. I was sorry the deputy and I had teased him.

  My chauffeur slowed down and smiled as he said, “I didn’t bandage your booty. I bet it’s scraped through your jeans because it caught between those splintered boards.”

  “Don’t worry about my behind,” I said. “I’ll guarantee there’s not a scratch on it. I’m wearing my fanny panties.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a little padding back there that’s part of my underwear instead of part of me.”

  “That’s why the junk in your trunk is perkier some days than others?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Callie, I’m growing up.”

  This was getting a bit embarrassing for me, so I changed the subject. “Ty, do you have any idea what we saw back there under those steps? Was it some kind of Gullah thing?”

  “I’m not sure, but it’s bad. Whatever or whoever put those bones there is evil.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR Fran Rizer’s fiction, published in the USA and Canada, has been read worldwide. She won a Porter Fleming Award in Fiction, and her first six novels were Callie Parrish mysteries which were nominated for SIBA, Edgar, Agatha Christie, and other awards. She is a featured author on the SCETV series, A Literary Tour of South Carolina, an instructional writing program offered to all South Carolina public schools. In addition to the cozyesque Callie Parrish series, Rizer is the author of the thriller KUDZU RIVER—A Novel of Abuse, Murder, and Retribution.

  Rizer lives in central South Carolina near her two sons and grandson. Readers are invited to correspond with her directly through email at franrizer@gmail.com, visit with her at FranRizer.com, and like her on Facebook.