by Ali Brandon
“B-but, he is—was—your friend.” Keep him talking. Buy some time. “Why would you kill him?”
“Let’s just say that my old buddy Curt found out that my relationship with the building inspector’s office was a bit more . . . involved . . . than he thought. Toby and I had a few profitable little projects going on the side that didn’t include him. Curt wanted a cut, and after all the work I’d put in, I wasn’t inclined to share. Things got out of hand after that.”
“But why bring me here so I could find Curt’s body?” she pressed him. “Why not bury him in the basement, too?”
“Because it was a hell of a lot easier to have him found murdered with you to back up my story than to try to hide the body.”
Barry gave his head a disgusted shake.
“Unfortunately, that kind of plan only works well once. Oh, and thanks for the tip about Bill Ferguson. If the police decide they don’t have enough evidence against Hilda, I’ll be sure to tell your detective friend that I overheard Bill threaten Curt more than once. With any luck, maybe we can pin your disappearance on him, too.”
With that, he made a show of glancing at his watch and added, “Like you said before, daylight’s burning, so why don’t we get this over with? Remember, I’ve got a funeral to go to in Connecticut.”
Once again, he advanced on her with grim purpose. Limbs quivering, Darla stubbornly began moving in a circle away from him while trying to avoid yet another hole cut through the subflooring. She vowed as she did so that first thing tomorrow—if she made it to tomorrow—she was signing up for self-defense classes. But for now, her only strategy was to keep the man from backing her into a corner. Pinned against the wall, she would be helpless. If she could keep on moving, just like in a chess game, she might still be able to slip past him and avoid a fatal checkmate.
Barry, however, knew what she was doing.
“You’re not going to win this one, Darla, I promise you. The harder you keep fighting, the worse it’s going to be for you—”
He broke off with a curse to dodge the roll of duct tape she had snatched from the floor and flung at him. The tape merely bounced off him, but she didn’t care. She took her chance and dashed toward the door. He made a grab for her arm and caught her coat sleeve, but an instant later she had pulled the same trick he’d done with Hamlet and shrugged out of her coat, free again. She was almost to the door, and out of arm’s reach now.
All except for her hair.
As she flew by him, Barry snagged his fingers in the long locks and jerked, stopping her short with a painful snap of her head that made her stumble against the doorjamb. He jerked her again, and this time her temple smacked squarely against wood. Momentarily stunned, she almost fell.
And then she was choking, her fingers helplessly scrabbling at the hands that were wrapped around her throat, cutting off any hope of screaming, any chance of breathing. Barry had won, just as he’d promised. Before the day’s end she would be joining the luckless Tera in a shallow hole that would be covered again by bricks and plywood.
Unless James managed to convince the police that Barry had something to do with her disappearance, then that would be the end of it. Once Reese and his people searched the basement and found nothing, Barry would be free to plaster over the basement door as planned, guaranteeing that no one would find them, or discover Hamlet’s battered body stuffed away in the ancient boiler. Barry would finish his remodel and sell the place to someone else . . . someone who would not know that a man had once been murdered within those damp subterranean walls, and would never guess that two women had followed him there in death.
But as she teetered on the last edge of unconsciousness, accepting her fate, the pressure abruptly released, and she dropped to the ground.
TWENTY-TWO
DARLA FELT THE SPLINTERED FLOOR PRESSING INTO HER cheek as she struggled for air, her vision little more than a red blur. Through the sounds of her gasps, she was aware of a distant pounding that wasn’t just her throbbing head, and then ripping sounds.
“You were right, your friends have come looking for you,” she heard Barry’s furious voice from what seemed a long way away. He loomed in suddenly to slap something cold and sticky over her mouth before wrapping her wrists and ankles together with something that held them immobile.
“You wait all nice and comfy here. I’ll talk to them and then be back to deal with you in a minute.” Then he was gone, shutting the door after him and leaving her lying in a heap.
“Hang on, I’m coming,” she heard Barry’s voice drifting up to her through the holes in the floor.
Get up, the familiar voice in her head shouted, though it was hard to hear it over the roar of blood in her ears as her pulse raced. She tried to force her body to comply, dragging her knees to her chest so that she could shift her bound legs beneath her and prop herself into a sitting position. But even that small effort made her head spin.
Through the haze she heard the now-familiar shriek of hinges that was the front door opening and realized she had only a few moments to try to pull herself together.
Focus! James knows something is wrong . . . that’s why he’s here . . . don’t let him leave without finding you!
Her vision began to clear, and she realized in relief that while Barry had used duct tape to bind her wrists, in his haste he’d left her arms in front. She could rip the tape from her mouth and scream for help . . . or could she? As her dizziness subsided, she saw that the tape covered not just her wrists but her hands as well, plastering them together in a prayerlike pose that left all but her fingertips immobilized.
Frantically, she began scrabbling with her fingernails at the edges of the silver tape on her face that stretched almost from ear to ear. As she did so, she was aware of voices drifting up to her, the holes in the floor channeling the sound to her as clearly as if she was in the same room.
“Uh, hi,” she heard Barry say, his tone one of friendly bafflement. “I wasn’t expecting guests.”
“We are looking for Darla,” came James’s chilly response. “I spoke to her on her phone less than thirty minutes ago. She said she was here, and that she was on her way back to the store. Unfortunately, she never arrived.”
“Well, I—”
“Quit stalling, Mr. Eisen.”
This voice was Jake’s. Thank God James had had the sense not to come alone!
“You’ve got about three seconds to tell us where Darla is,” she threatened, lapsing into cop mode, “and then I’m calling 9-1-1 and Detective Reese, in that order. One, two . . .”
Darla could hear the steel behind her words and knew that Barry had met his match. But the man didn’t seem inclined to admit it.
“Wait a minute,” he replied, sounding confused. “Darla was here, yes. I heard her talking to you, Mr. James. But then she left in a hurry. Didn’t she call to tell you what happened?”
“I tried calling her on the way over,” James replied, “and I got no answer.”
Darla had finally loosened a corner on the tape gag. Now she began tugging on it, tears springing to her eyes as the top layer of her skin seemed to pull off with every inch of tape that she managed to dislodge. Had she been able to get a better grip, she would have ripped it away in a single agonizing motion. Instead, she was forced into this slow torture.
“Mr. Eisen, you look like you’ve been in a fight.” This was Jake’s voice again, sounding colder still. “You mind telling us how you got blood on your neck and your shirt sleeve?”
“I’m trying to explain.”
Now, Barry sounded politely exasperated, and Darla could picture him giving them a deprecating shrug.
“Darla came over here looking for her cat. She got a call from you”—Darla assumed he was indicating James—“and said it was an emergency at the store. But as she was leaving, we heard a cat meowing out by the Dumpster. We ran to check, and it was Hamlet. He was injured. His back leg looked pretty messed up. We assumed he’d been hit by a car and crawled there to
hide, like cats do.”
“Hamlet’s, like, hurt?” The incredulous voice belonged to Robert, who had apparently rounded out the posse that had come in search of her. “Where is he now? Where’s Ms. Pettistone?”
“She took him to the emergency vet. I had to crawl between the container and the house to get him out, and that’s how I got scratched up.”
Barry’s voice was rueful, the nice guy who’d tried to help out and gladly paid the price for it. And even worse, Darla thought in despair, the ex-debate captain’s story sounded reasonable.
“I told her I’d call a car service so she could take him to the vet, but she said her own car was parked in the garage nearby, and it would be faster for her to go get it.”
“Why didn’t you go with her?” Jake’s tone was accusatory, disbelieving. “How was she going to drive and carry a hurt cat all at the same time?”
“I told her I’d go. Hell, I volunteered to drive her car. But the cat was going crazy. I guess I caused him some pain when I pulled him out from where he was stuck, and he didn’t want me anywhere near him. Darla said it was better for me to stay here. I should have thought to call you, Mr. James, but she said she would phone you as soon as she got to the vet.”
“I have Dr. Birmingham’s phone number in my contacts,” James said. “Let me phone her now and see if Darla is there.”
“I’ll try Darla on her cell,” Jake said. There was a pause, and then Darla could hear Jake’s voice again, saying, “It goes straight to voice mail. James, did you get the vet?”
“I reached a recording saying that the vet’s offices are closed on Sunday, and it gave an emergency number to dial. If what Mr. Eisen is telling us is indeed the truth, then perhaps they have sent Darla elsewhere.”
Darla barely heard this last, however, for she had finally tugged off the final bit of tape. Though the delicate flesh around her mouth burned painfully now where she’d lost skin in the process, her emotion was one of triumph. It didn’t matter that her hands and feet were still bound. All she needed to do was scream and her friends would come racing to her rescue. She took a swift breath and let it out again in what she meant to be a primal cry for help.
But what came out of her ravaged throat was nothing more than a whispered croak.
Horrified, Darla tried again, but with the same results. Though it had been brief, the pressure of Barry’s hands around her throat apparently had been sufficient to do some damage. In fact, the pain that somehow had stayed on the fringes of her consciousness now swept over her. Her throat felt scraped raw and was painfully swollen, the sensation far worse than the time she’d been rushed to the emergency room as a child when the strep throat she’d contracted had set fire to her tonsils and made breathing almost impossible. And that didn’t even count the raging headache from where she’d struck her head on the doorjamb.
Think! If she couldn’t make some sort of noise, Jake and James and Robert might well leave without finding her. And that meant Barry would return upstairs to finish what he had started.
Trying to hold back a wave of dread at the thought, she pounded her bound hands against the wooden subfloor. The resulting sound, however, was muffled by the tape, and the vibrations absorbed by the floor’s surface. At this rate, she’d never catch anyone’s attention two stories down. If only she had a hammer, or something with some weight behind it!
She frantically scanned the room for something malletlike, even though she knew all Barry’s tools were downstairs. She heard Jake say, “I think I should call Reese, anyhow. And we can send Robert over to the garage to see if Darla’s car is still there.”
“I agree with your suggestion,” James said. “In fact, I—”
“Now wait a minute.”
Barry’s voice had cut James short, and Darla could hear the anger in his tone.
“I don’t mean to be rude, and I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t care about Darla or her cat, but I’ve got some projects I have to finish here. I was supposed to be in Connecticut for Curt’s funeral, but one of the building inspectors was giving me a hard time about the wiring we just did. So I really need you people to leave right now so I can finish this project and get on the road.”
“We won’t be in your way,” was Jake’s flip reply. “Go on with what you were doing. I’m just going to call Detective Reese.”
“Call him,” Barry said, no longer bothering to sound like Mr. Reasonable Guy. “I’ll mention to him that you guys were asked to leave and you won’t. I think it’s called trespassing, and probably harassment, too.”
Darla, meanwhile, had spied another of the empty gallon paint cans lying near the closest wall. Not a hammer, but better than nothing. She began wriggling her way over to it, careful to avoid the hole in the floor. If this didn’t worked, as a last resort she could fling herself through that opening. Her body hitting the floor below would cause enough ruckus to bring someone running—and the fall couldn’t be any worse than what Barry had planned for her.
“Maybe we should leave, Jake,” James was saying now, and his suggestion sent a wave of panic through her. Had Barry actually convinced them that he was hiding nothing? “If Mr. Eisen wants us off his property, I think we are obliged—”
“Hey, look what I found behind the door,” Robert cut him short, his tone excited. “They look like the sticks Ms. Pettistone had in her hair this morning. And this one looks like it has, you know, blood on it!”
Blood from where I managed to stab Barry, she thought in satisfaction as she inched her way closer to her goal. Surely the sight of blood would convince them that something was wrong there.
“Remember, I told you the cat was hurt,” she could hear Barry counter reasonably. “We tried to make a splint with those hair things, but it didn’t work. That’s where the blood came from. She must have dropped them there.”
At his words, a shudder went through her. Once again, the man had come up with a plausible argument for another uncomfortable question. Plausible enough that the trio might finally give up and unknowingly leave her behind. She couldn’t let that happen. She had to get to that paint can before they marched back out the door again!
But this time, it seemed that her friends weren’t buying what Barry was selling.
“That story is, in the parlance, bullshit,” James replied, much to her relief. “In fact, I am beginning to think you are keeping something from us. Darla, can you hear me? Are you somewhere in this house?”
“Darla! Darla, are you here?” Jake echoed. “Damn it, Barry, you’d better spill your guts now, or I’ll let Robert use that bat of his on you!”
Barry began to argue the point, and James to counter him, but Darla didn’t need to hear any more. The important thing was that her friends didn’t believe him!
By now, she had reached the paint can and dragged herself to her knees beside it. The sweat from her palms had seeped into the adhesive of the tape, loosening its grip on her skin. Now, she could use both hands to readily grasp the bail on the paint can. Holding it by that wire handle, she raised the empty can shoulder high and then smacked it against an exposed stud in the wall.
To her surprise, the can gave off a hollow bong, almost like a bell.
Encouraged, she raised the can and swung it against the stud again, and yet again. Each time, the dull rings were louder, reverberating in the empty room.
“Wait!” Jake’s voice rose above the small hubbub that had been going on below. “What in the hell is that sound? It’s almost like a cowbell ringing.”
Darla raised the can to strike it again; then, recalling something Jake had said a few days earlier, she changed her mind. Grabbing the metal container by its edge now, she used it like a mallet against the floor to beat out a familiar two-part rhythm.
Shave and a haircut, two bits. Shave and a haircut, two bits.
“Oh my God, it’s Darla,” she heard Jake’s stunned cry. “Did you hear that? She’s the only one I know who does that stupid knock.”
“It sounds like it’s coming from, you know, upstairs,” Robert added. “Here, I’ll go look for her. Ms. Pettistone! Where are you?”
“Give me that bat, Robert. I might need it. James, go with him,” Jake snapped. “I’ll keep an eye on Mr. Eisen until Reese and his team can get here.”
Darla could hear feet pounding up the first flight of stairs, heard James and Robert call her name as doors flung open. She rang her makeshift bell again, and then again, doing her best to guide them her way. And finally, a lifetime later, the door to the room where she was huddled burst open.
“Ms. Pettistone?”
“Darla?”
Both men stared at her with looks of shock, as if they’d not really believed to find her there, and in such a state. By that point, the energy she’d summoned to drag herself across the floor and play bell ringer had begun to seep away, so that she could do little more than raise her bound hands in a semblance of a greeting.
“Watch out for the hole,” she croaked and then slipped into a state of semiconsciousness.
Vaguely, she was aware of the pair tearing the tape from her wrists and ankles, and then James carrying her down the two flights of stairs, Robert hovering protectively in front of him and carrying her jacket. They set her down again in the foyer, well away from Barry—though she had seen with surprise that he was facedown, with Jake standing over him and wielding what appeared to be a Louisville Slugger.
“Jake, any trouble here?” James wanted to know as he took off his coat and carefully covered Darla with it.
The ex-cop gave him a cool smile.
“Nope. Reese and the ambulance should be here any minute.” Then, with a glance at the prone figure at her feet, she added, “Oh, him? I had to give our friend a little pop behind the knees with Mary Ann’s bat when he tried to take off. Unfortunately, he smacked his head when he fell, so he’s feeling a little woozy right now. Robert, come stand guard a minute. I need to talk to Darla.”