Gluten-Free Murder (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 1)

by P. D. Workman

  Erin didn’t like the sound of labyrinthine caves, even if William Andrews wasn’t using those caves for his nefarious business. “We’ll find another cave to explore,” she said to Vic. “Okay?”

  Vic didn’t look happy about it, but she nodded. “I have another one in mind.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  ERIN WOKE UP IN blackness. Her head was pounding and when she shifted her position, a wave of nausea washed over her. She tried to force her way through the fog in her brain to remember where she was or how she had gotten there. She was lying on her back.

  Was it time to get up and start her baking?

  She couldn’t hear her alarm or see her clock, so she decided it was not.

  She wanted to put her hand up to rub her head, but she couldn’t seem to control her hand properly so she gave up

  She wasn’t sure if her eyes were open or closed. Everything hurt. It was quiet and dark, so she went to sleep.

  The next time she awoke, she knew she had been lying there for a long time. It had to be time to get up. She tried to turn her head to look at the clock. The pain that ripped through her head like a knife left her gasping with shock and pain.

  What had happened?

  She was cold down to her bones.

  The darkness hadn’t lifted at all.

  Without moving again, she evaluated her position. She wasn’t lying in bed, like she had initially assumed. She was lying on something hard and gravelly. Had she slipped and fallen in the back alley?

  Without turning her head, she tried to open her eyes and look around her. But her eyes were already open and she couldn’t see a spark of light. No streetlights, no stars, nothing.

  She was blind, then.

  The pain in her head and the blindness meant that she had fallen and hit her head. She’d hurt herself badly.

  Had she left the shop to put out the garbage, and had slipped and fallen?

  Erin floated in and out of consciousness, unable to focus on a single thought.

  She couldn’t have slipped and fallen at the store. If she had, then Vic would have come looking for her.

  She could kill you in your sleep.

  Piper had warned her more than once.

  You don’t know anything about her.

  Vic was the prime suspect in a murder investigation. There was a reason for that. Rejected by her favorite aunt because of her gender identity, Vic had retaliated. She had plotted to kill her aunt or had been surprised by her while hiding in the basement and somehow been able to trigger an allergic reaction. She had taken away Angela’s autoinjector. The tall, strong girl would have easily overpowered her older, unwell aunt, either before or after an allergic reaction.

  Erin could hear Vic’s words in her head. It was easy.

  It wasn’t Vic. Erin’s brain rebelled against the idea. Vic was a gentle, nonviolent person. Whenever she had spoken about Angela, it had been with sadness, not anger. The voice in her head could not be Vic’s. It was someone else.

  Because she had heard those words.

  It was easy.

  She was becoming more convinced that she had not fallen down outside of the shop. She had been hit. But it didn’t feel like she was lying in the parking lot. She lay on a surface that was as hard as rock, but not as flat as the parking lot behind her building. There were loose bits of rock on top of the surface.

  But the air was too still. And it was too dark. She had to be inside.

  Why would there be rocks inside?

  Erin tried to wet her lips, but her mouth was as dry as cotton and she couldn’t work up any spit. Her lips were sore and cracked. She tried calling out anyway.

  “Hello? Is there anybody there?”

  Her voice was weak and odd in her own ears. Why did she sound like that?

  The room was large, like a cathedral. Her voice, as quiet as it was, echoed off of the hard walls. Was it possible she was in a church? Paved inside with large flagstones, built out of rock? Why would she be in such a place?

  Her face felt like a mask. Like it was made of thin plastic pulled taut. She could feel a pull on her skin whenever she moved her mouth.

  There was a warm, foul smell in the still air.

  “Hello?” she tried again.

  There was no answering voice. All she could hear was her own trembling words and the voice in her head. The one who said it had been easy. Killing Angela had been easy, like squashing a particularly disgusting bug.

  Erin tried again to move. Not her head, because that was too painful. Not her hands, since they didn’t seem to follow her instructions properly. She stretched out one booted toe to prod first at the air and then at the wall beside her, trying to sense what she could about its shape.

  It was rough and irregular. But she could tell little more through her boot.

  Why was she wearing boots?

  The darkness again became overwhelming. She had to fight back the urge to throw up. There was a dizzying swirl of vertigo and she passed out again.

  She was in a cave.

  That was what came to her the next time she surfaced. It was cold and dark and hard with vaulted ceilings. A cave. Buried somewhere underground.

  She couldn’t remember how she had gotten there.

  Where was Vic? If Erin was there, Vic must also be there, somewhere beside her in the darkness.

  “Vic? Vic, are you there?”

  Her voice echoed again. But there was no answer. Erin squirmed around, looking for some sign of light. Listening for Vic’s breath in the darkness.

  Nothing.

  How could she be there without Vic?

  They had become separated. Had they made different turns down a labyrinthine tunnel? Had Erin fallen over a cliff and Vic had gone back for help?

  Vic couldn’t have hurt Erin. She was sure of that. The voice still buzzed in her head. It was easy. But it wasn’t Vic’s voice. Erin couldn’t be sure whose it was. She had met so many new people since arriving at Bald Eagle Falls. She couldn’t recognize all their voices.

  “Vic? Victoria? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  Shouting took a lot of effort and Erin was left panting afterward. Was she low on oxygen? Were there heavy gases in the chamber, replacing the oxygen in her lungs with something her body couldn’t use? Erin moved her shoulders, feeling for a backpack of equipment. She couldn’t remember whether they had agreed to get small oxygen canisters or not. Vic had wanted to be prepared, but Erin had insisted that they’d better not be going anywhere dangerous. They didn’t need oxygen if they were sticking close to the surface in well-ventilated caves. Who had won? Had Erin given in and paid for oxygen, just in case?

  It didn’t matter, because she didn’t seem to have any gear. If she’d had a backpack when she entered the cave, she had somehow become separated from it. Lost it going over that cliff, maybe. Or maybe she had put it down while they had a snack and something had happened to distract her from putting it back on again.

  Erin blinked her eyes, trying to keep herself awake. But it was impossible. The periods of sleep or unconsciousness were frequent, her periods of consciousness brief. She bit the inside of her cheek. She could barely feel it. She tried to pinch herself, but her hands were not working.

  When she awoke again, Erin concentrated on her hands. Why were they not working? Had she put them out to catch herself when she fell, breaking her arms? It didn’t seem likely. The worst pain in her head was in the back, not the top or the front. Surely if she landed on her hands, she would have broken her nose. But the goose-egg was on the back.

  She had movement. Left, right, up, down, in, out. Her fingers seemed to be opening and shutting, though they were numb with cold, so she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

  “Then what’s wrong?” Erin demanded out loud, trying to force her brain to process the problem and come up with a solution.

  She moved them again. Left, right, up, down, in, out, wiggle.

  She tried moving just her right hand, but her left stayed
with it. She tried moving just her left, but her right moved in parallel. When she tried to pull them apart, she only got resistance and she couldn’t separate them.

  Erin closed her eyes. What did that mean? What did it mean if her hands would only move together, never apart?

  It took a long time for the answer to make its way to the surface.

  Her hands were tied together.

  And that couldn’t be an accident. She hadn’t fallen over a cliff and tied her hands together. Somebody else had tied her hands together. They weren’t splinted. It wasn’t because she was injured. Someone had tied her up.

  Erin tried moving her feet. Similar to her arms, she had a range of motion, but they stuck stubbornly together. Her ankles were also tied together.

  Erin swore. It sounded funny, her little voice in all of that empty space, swearing. As if there were someone to hear her or care. Nobody was there. Nobody cared what happened to her.

  The only person who cared what happened wanted her to die.

  Erin couldn’t think of any other reason she would be tied up and left in a dark cave with no equipment. Someone wanted to kill her.

  Not a person like William Andrews, who did things with his hands. Someone who didn’t want to stab or shoot or throttle her. The kind of person who would rather just stand by and watch her die. Or leave her there without waiting to see how long it took.

  The kind of person who had taken Angela’s autoinjector and left her there to choke to death in the cool basement of the bakery.

  Erin’s brain moved creakily. Each thought and deduction was an effort of will, not the effortless flow that she normally experienced.

  Not Vic. It hadn’t been Vic who had killed Angela. It wasn’t Vic’s voice she could remember hearing. Someone else.

  Erin groaned.

  Every time she awoke, she had to remember again. She had to force herself to remember where she was and why, and to try to sort out who had done this to her and how she was going to get out of it. And by the time she could get that far, she had started to fade again, her body and her brain in too advanced a state of shock to do anything about it.

  She tried to raise her head. It was excruciating.

  There was a fine balance between forcing herself to move in order to wake up and pushing herself so hard that she blacked out again. She had to move only a fraction of an inch at a time, then wait for the pain to subside to a more bearable level, and then make another infinitesimal movement.

  She swore again, with the pain this time.

  She wasn’t going to save herself lying on the hard ground trying to make sense of what had happened to her. It didn’t matter whether or not she could solve Angela’s murder and figure out who had hurt her and left her there to die.

  What mattered was moving. Finding some way to get herself out of there. Underground, she was just going to freeze to death. Shock would kill her. Or the swelling of her brain inside her skull. Was that what was making it difficult to breathe?

  She had raised her head just enough to know that she still couldn’t see anything. And as long as she was lying on her back, she was not going to be able to move. She needed to change her orientation, not just move her head.

  Easier said than done.

  She felt a little more awake and alert with her head raised. But moving her whole body was going to take a lot of work.

  Her hands and her feet were each tied together, but she was not hog-tied. And her hands were tied in front of her body, not behind. That meant it was conceivable that she could crawl, hitching forward on hands and knees, if she could slither onto her belly.

  Conceivable, but maybe not possible.

  She tried to turn over, but her body didn’t follow the instructions from her mind.

  Erin stretched her arms out in front of her, then let them drop slowly to the side, trying to use the pull of gravity to help inch her body over. Her shoulder lifted off of the rocky ground, but she needed more.

  She’d participated in yoga and workout classes before. How many times had she performed boat pose without worrying about anything but how long she could keep her core tight and hold the pose without shaking? She’d never had to worry that she was going to pass out and let her head go crashing back to the solid rock beneath her. She’d never had to worry that her arms and legs wouldn’t both obey her brain’s instructions at the same time.

  And her legs and arms had never been so heavy.

  They didn’t feel like her own arms and legs. They felt like they were tied, not just to each other, but to the ground. Pressing one shoulder into the ground, Erin managed to get her conjoined legs up off the ground, and then shifted them to allow them to lower to the ground, turning her body in the process.

  She was sweating when she was finally lying on her side instead of on her back. Sweating, clammy, and shivering all at the same time.

  Erin tried to control her breathing. She didn’t like the raspy noise that was coming out of her. Her head was spinning again with the new orientation and she just wanted to put her head down and rest.

  But she was afraid that if she did so, she would pass out again. And maybe she wouldn’t wake back up. She needed to move.

  Erin held her hands in front of her chest and tried to maneuver one leg around and to twist her body onto her belly. It took a few tries, ages and ages. But she was still awake and finally in a position to move away from the spot she’d been lying in. How long had she been there? Minutes or hours? Or days? There was no way to measure the passage of time.

  She had pictured herself crawling on hands and knees. But the reality wasn’t so pretty or well-coordinated. She was more like an inchworm or like a baby commando crawling. Unsteadily. She couldn’t move her arms and legs in tandem. She couldn’t get right up on her knees and elbows. She could just inch and squirm forward, listening to her breath rasp in the pitch blackness.

  Erin had never seen such darkness before. It wasn’t just the lack of moon or stars or any visible shapes around her. It was as if the world had ceased to exist at all. There were no shades of light or dark. It was as if her vision had been completely taken away from her. And with a head injury, that wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Perhaps something in her eyes or brain had been damaged beyond repair.

  She didn’t know whether she could call it progress. She stayed against the wall, using it as a guide to keep her going in a straight line. She kept bumping into it with her body or shoulder, trying as hard as she could to keep from banging her head into it. If she banged her head, she wasn’t sure she would ever wake up again.

  It wasn’t Vic. It wasn’t Vic. The mantra kept running through her head as she wriggled and inched along.

  Then where was Vic? Was she lying there somewhere in the darkness too? Erin couldn’t hear Vic breathing. Did that mean she was dead, or in another cave? Or had she become separated from Erin and was looking for her? Or had she gone back to get help?

  What if Vic were more badly hurt than Erin was and needed her help?

  She had to keep pushing herself. No matter how exhausting it was and how impossible it seemed. She didn’t know whether she had one hundred feet or several miles to crawl before she got out of the cave. She didn’t know what in direction safety lay, but she put that out of her mind and just kept moving. If she stopped, she wouldn’t get anywhere.

  Then suddenly, there was nothing in front of her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ERIN’S ARMS DANGLED IN empty air and she took all of her weight suddenly on her chest and stomach, nearly knocking the wind out of her. She froze.

  She swore.

  She only had to move backward a bit. Readjust her direction and crawl along the edge of the precipice until she reached another wall. Or another precipice. Eventually, she would find solid ground that led away from the cliff edge.

  For a few minutes, she lowered her head and tried to fight off the tears and fatigue.

  She didn’t have the time to feel sorry for herself. She didn’t kn
ow how long it would be before her body succumbed to the shock or the concussion. She might have only minutes before her time was up. And Vic might need her.

  It might be too late for both of them, but Erin had to believe that there was still some chance of survival. She couldn’t just give up and let her life trickle away into nothingness. She hadn’t had an easy life, but she wasn’t ready for it to end. Not when she had just started up a new business. And made new friends.

  And she had a cat.

  What would happen to Orange Blossom if she never returned home? There was no shelter, just the vet, who would give the cat a few days and then put him to sleep. Erin couldn’t let that happen.

  She crawled along the edge of the cliff, terrified she was gong to overbalance and roll over it. She kept her body as flat to the ground as she could.

  “Vic?” Would her voice carry all the way down to the bottom, if Vic had fallen or slid over that edge? How far down was it? A few feet or hundreds? “Vic, are you there?”

  There was still no answer. Her voice sounded lost in the darkness, reaching far out before it was stopped by the walls of the cavern.

  “Why did we have to go caving?” Erin muttered, as she squirmed along. “Spelunking, then. It’ll be fun, Erin.” She affected a falsetto. “It’ll be an adventure. Adventure, my foot! I could live without an adventure like this!”

  She stopped for a moment to get her breath back. She could barely move an inch at a time and her breath was as labored as if she’d been sprinting. Another inch or two and she had reached another wall. Erin turned, following the wall, leaving the precipice behind her.

  Erin muttered to herself, “Remind me never to go in another cave again.”

  She realized she had passed out again. How long this time? With no way to tell the time, she felt like it had been days. When had she last eaten? Her lips were cracked and her tongue swollen.

  And when had she actually slept, rather than just passing out where she lay? She was worried she didn’t have much time left.

  It was so easy.

  Erin heard the words as clear as a bell. Like the woman was still right there beside her.