by Ruth Moose
I felt my chest tighten, my breathing get shallow and fast. Panic. I must not panic, I told myself. There had to be a way to get up to that window.
If there was a ladder here, I could climb to the window, break it with something and climb out. No ladder I could see. If I could find even some rickety old table, I’d chance a climb on it. A table of any sort I could stand on. No table.
But there was something: the whole wall at the end of the root cellar was floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with jars of canned vegetables and fruits. At least I wouldn’t starve. But how old were those canned goods? I bet Verna hadn’t had a garden or gone to a Farmers’ Market for fresh vegetables in a lot of long summers. I’d be taking my life in my hands to touch anything from any of those jars even if I could get them open, which I doubted.
So here I was locked in a dim, earthy-smelling root cellar that had one very secure metal door out and a teeny tiny way-up-high square of a window. I could yell my head off and nobody would hear. And nobody would have a reason in this world to come check anything in this cellar. If it was winter somebody might be scheduled to deliver coal for the old furnace. But there would be big doors that opened out so coal could be unloaded in. I looked. No chute, no big doors, so the furnace must not be coal. Or wood. Or the first gas one ever made. This one was a monster of a furnace and I didn’t dare try to break loose some pipe to hammer at the window even if I could get high enough to do so. Didn’t think that was the route to try.
I told myself I would not start to cry like a six-year-old. Big girls don’t cry. They pull up their jeans and take on the task at hand.
I was locked in the last place anybody would come to look. I should have left Ida Plum a note. I should have packed my cell phone somewhere on my body. I remembered some commercial for something that ended with the line “Don’t leave home without it.” Maybe that should apply to cell phones, but I was only going next door! Who would think to take their cell phone if they were only going next door?
I mentally kicked myself for ever, ever coming down those stairs in the first place. Dumb move. If I ever got out of here, Ida Plum would scold and scold. But now, just thinking about her voice, her scoldings made me tear up. Wimp, I told myself. I’d take the scoldings if I could just get out of here. “Lord,” I said to the ceiling, “if you get me out of here, I promise—” What? Anything. Everything. Whatever.
I looked around again. Water heater, furnace, wall of canned food.
Floor-to-ceiling jars of green beans, of course. This was Littleboro. Corn, tomatoes, okra, lima beans and a mixture of all four called vegetable soup, which my grandmother made at the end of the canning season. Soup mix. Fat lot of good all this was going to do me now. Then I touched one of the shelves. Metal, like the door, and probably the newer of anything in the house.
A metal shelf would hold me. No rot. But this was a set of shelves and I could not make a ladder of them. Even if I emptied them and propped them against the wall under the window, I couldn’t climb them. They’d be flat against the wall. If I leaned them against the wall to try to make them into a sort of makeshift stairs, I’d fall through.
I felt under the closest shelf. A plastic clip held it in place. I could take out all the clips, then I’d have individual shelves. And boards, not shelves, but boards to make stairs. Boards are what you build stairs with.
Row by row I unloaded the shelves. I stacked a platform of jars wide and long, laid a few shelves across it. I’d made myself a base to make a set of stairs. Stacked more jars on top of that, then another shelf, until I had stairs. Steps up. Up, up and out that window, I said to myself. I stood back and looked at my creation, my inspiration, my salvation. I could climb to the top, break the window and crawl out.
Slowly, slowly, the jars rocking a bit under me, I took one stair step up, then another, higher, higher.
Now I held my breath, reached out and touched the window. I felt a latch. I wouldn’t have to break the glass. The latch was rusted as heck, but I pushed and pushed on it until I felt it give. The window opened. I breathed good, clean air and smelled sweet, green, growing grass. I gave myself a mighty hoist, pulled myself up and through, crawled out that little window that was just wide enough. I belly flopped onto God’s dear earth, stood and brushed myself off.
“Rabbit,” I said, “wherever the hell you are, you are not worth it.”
It was now almost pitch-dark and I was exhausted. I limped across the backyard and through the wall of overgrown hedges to the Dixie Dew, a bath to get off the grime and mold, years of accumulated dirt. All I wanted was my soft, clean bed and a good night’s sleep. Maybe whoever at the trashion show had called this a “dead burg” inhabited by dumbheads had a point. Root cellars be damned.
Chapter Seventeen
Monday morning Ida Plum came in the back door saying she’d been by the jail to take Reba some underwear but nobody was there. “Gone,” she said. “That cell was as empty as my pocketbook.” Ida Plum liked to work Sundays but I had been the one to work yesterday. I had to make her take time off during the week to compensate. She said weekends were lonely for widows.
She was earlier than usual and we didn’t have to start doing breakfast yet. Breakfast was at eight a.m. and not a minute before. No self-respecting guest would cruise downstairs and stand outside my dining room’s French doors before eight a.m. Not unless they’d alerted me verbally the night before or when they checked in or left a note on my desk or bedroom door.
Ida Plum said the door to the jail cell in the basement of the courthouse was not only open, but also hanging loose on its hinges. If Ossie had assigned someone to stay with Reba, they’d left. Had somebody sprung Reba or had she jiggled the door and found the whole thing rusted to the point where mere touch could make the door fall open?
The question hung between us when Malinda popped in on her way to work at Gaddy’s. Not a lot of business this early, Malinda had said, but somebody had to be there on pharmacy duty. Plus she could catch up on paperwork in the quiet.
“So where do you think she is?” Malinda asked after Ida Plum repeated her story about Reba being out and on the loose. Malinda put whole wheat bread in the toaster, opened the refrigerator for some of the mock strawberry jam made with strawberry Jell-O and figs. Tastes better than the real thing. I’d made jars and jars of it last summer with the bounty from my grandmother’s fig tree. Not a bush, this fig was a tree that almost blocked the gate to the backyard. I loved figs raw, washed with dew and resplendent on a plate for breakfast. Or with cheese for a four o’clock snack. I loved figs plucked straight from the tree to my lips. I made the jam for guests at the Dixie Dew because it was such fun and so very, very easy.
“Anybody try looking for Reba at her tree?” I asked, pouring coffee into blue mugs. Dixie Dew guests got china cups and saucers. Kitchen people got mugs, beakers the British called them. They actually kept coffee hot longer.
“Looked empty when I drove by,” Ida Plum said. “Not a thing was flapping from the limbs.” The three of us shook our heads. Reba liked to air her laundry on the limbs. Clean or dirty, she flew it like flags.
We drank coffee, standing at the center island, until I said, “If you two will sit down, I’ll tell you what happened last night and how I came very close to not being here this morning.”
“Tell,” Malinda said. “I just hope it doesn’t involve slime pits.” She was referring to one of our former unpleasant explorations.
“No slime pits,” I said, “just a root cellar from hell.”
They took chairs at the table and waited while I told of my latest escape, my triumph over terror—not to mention how I never planned to darken another root cellar the rest of my sweet little newly renewed life.
“Nothing broken?” Ida Plum asked politely, but her tone said “you idiot.” “Oh, you give me such worry and grief and I wish your grandmother were here to scold you. What in the world ever possessed you to go into that house?”
Malinda rolled her eyes. She
knew me and she also knew if I’d called her she would have gone in with me. Malinda was always open for an adventure and Littleboro didn’t offer a lot of them. I tried to describe Verna’s house inside.
“So old Verna is a hoarder.” Malinda laughed. “Who would have thought it? Or who would have thought otherwise? One look at the house on the outside and you’d know it. My mama makes sure her front walk is swept every day. She’s even taught Elvis to handle a broom. She says a lot more people see the outside of your house than will ever see the inside and you better keep it clean.”
“Good boy,” Ida Plum said. “And good mama.” She patted Malinda on the head. “Both of you.”
“I had to make my bed every morning before school,” Malinda said, spreading jam on her toast. “My mama believes in tough love.”
I wondered what kind of mother Verna would have been if she’d had children. Or what it would be like if that house were filled with the ghosts and voices of children and children’s children instead of crap? What I saw sure was crap. To the ceiling. Wall-to-wall crap. Front-door-to-back-door crap. Downstairs-to-upstairs crap, though I hadn’t gone upstairs. Some things you know without seeing.
“I can’t believe Verna lives in such a mess.” Ida Plum poured us more coffee. “Nobody could, would live that way if it’s as bad as you say.” She raised one eyebrow at me. “It’s not healthy.”
“It’s worse,” I said. “A fire hazard. Mold. Dirt. It’s where dirt goes to die. Couple of dump trucks need to haul that unbelievable houseful of god-awful away to the nearest landfill.”
All this had gotten us off the subject of Crazy Reba’s jailbreak and my crawling-out-the-window caper. “You don’t believe me?” I said to Ida Plum. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Malinda stood, brushed crumbs off her white lab coat. “I’m not taking a chance on getting near any of that … bleeping awfulness.” She hesitated long enough I knew she wanted to say the word that was the perfect description of the contents of Verna’s house. I also knew it was a word Ida Plum considered beneath both Malinda and me to use. Not to mention Ida Plum’s own vocabulary. So I didn’t fill in the blank for her.
She waved goodbye and was gone in a flash of white.
Ida Plum looked at the clock. “We got time if you are bound and determined to show me what I think can’t possibly be as bad as you say.”
She liked to challenge my imagination at times. Rein me in, she’d say, when I got too carried away or too excited. “Hold your horses,” she also liked to say. Maybe that’s what I should have said to Reba when she was hysterical, except that guy’s body was enough to make anyone hysterical. I was surprised I could be so calm myself. But then this wasn’t my situation. The crusty, hairy, smelly guy on the picnic table certainly wasn’t the man in the driver’s license photo. And DMV photos didn’t lie, or get “enhanced” in any way, did they? A real puzzler, with Reba, me and Mrs. Angry Truck Driver Wife all involved. Life just couldn’t stay simple, could it? It was so complicated right now it made me dizzy. Or the dizziness could have been from mold in that root cellar, and here I was going back into the house of mold, but this time I was staying upstairs.
Chapter Eighteen
Before our foray next door, just in case some Dixie Dew guest should decide to wander downstairs before the appointed hour, I made more coffee and put it on the warmer in the dining room. Ida Plum took in the toaster, bread and jam. I felt we had the bases covered for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, which was longer than I wanted to be in Verna’s house.
We pushed our way through hedges that hadn’t been trimmed in years, grass up to our knees, stepped past the window that had been my escape from the root cellar and on up the rickety back porch steps. At least there were rails on each side, rails that seemed loose from the very steps they were supposed to anchor. They wobbled under my hands. Verna could have grabbed one and gone tumbling over if she ever used them. I guessed she’d decided to go and come from the front door long ago.
The screen door was only half-screened with the lower part loose and curled. And the back porch was full of old clothes and stacks of yellowed newspapers. Cans, bottles and jars gathered in a corner, unwashed. The ones I’d seen earlier in the garbage can had been clean.
Ida Plum held her hand over her nose and mouth. I led her to the kitchen, which in some ways was not as bad as some of the other “awfulness.” It was full of empty frozen food boxes and plastic containers. Here the containers had been washed and stacked up according to shape and size. That was interesting. A bit of order. But the stacks reached the bottoms of all the cabinets and covered the countertops. Verna had made an attempt at recycling, bless her untidy little heart. We wove our way down a narrow path into the next room and the next.
For all I knew, whoever had locked me in the root cellar could be back in the house. But with Ida Plum we were two against one. Between us, with me still smarting about being shut in such a place, my anger would boil up and we could take the rascal. If it had been meant as a prank, and I didn’t think it was, it wasn’t funny. The person could have been planning to come back later and let me out. Or not! Ever! I shivered at the thought. So here I was back at the scene of the horror, but not quite. With Ida Plum I felt confident, come hell or whatever else. I didn’t say this, but I squared my shoulders and we pushed on, threading our way through what seemed like a tunnel. I kept my arms close to my sides for fear that if I brushed against a stack of stuff it would come tumbling down on me. I’d be as buried in this rubble as I almost was in the root cellar.
“How does she live in this house?” Ida Plum whispered.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back, even though I didn’t know I was whispering. Or why we were both whispering.
“Where?” Ida Plum said in a normal voice. “Where does she live in this house? Which room?”
“I wish I’d brought a flashlight,” I said. The hall was dark and several of the rooms so full we couldn’t push open the doors. In a way I was thankful we couldn’t get in or even see in. This house was a landfill inside! One’s own personal landfill and Verna was living in it.
“She must sleep upstairs,” I said, and started up a path narrowed by stacks of books on each step. “Careful.” I reached a hand back to Ida Plum.
The upstairs hall landing had a bit more room to move once we got past some bureaus and chests. On one hall chest a lamp burned. A flicker of hope, I thought, in this upper level of Verna’s hell.
Three doors down we saw a door that seemed to be slightly open.
“There,” I said. “That must be her bedroom.”
Ida Plum said, “She surely can’t come back to this house. With an injured ankle, she’d never be able to climb these stairs.”
We heard something that sounded like faraway music, very dim, very faint. We looked at each other.
“That room?” I pointed. “It must be coming from there.”
We edged closer. On tiptoe.
I eased the door open wider and saw someone sitting upright in bed, a huge old four-poster, tester bed, with a crocheted netting canopy on top. The woman in the bed looked like one of those pictures in a child’s storybook of Little Red Riding Hood, the grandmother or the wolf in ruffled nightcap and bedclothes. A small TV flickered on a dresser across the room.
The person in the bed turned toward us, waved an arm as if to say, “Come in. Come in.”
It wasn’t a wolf in grandma’s clothing. It was Reba!
“Reba?” I croaked out. “Reba?”
Ida Plum grabbed my elbow. “Is that you? Reba?”
Reba sat like royalty, a dozen pillows propped behind her. Had it been Reba who shut that cellar door and ignored my knocking and calling? The Reba I knew, the old Reba, would have opened that door in a minute.
This Reba was eating something. Something white and tall that looked sticky. She licked her fingers. “Good,” she said. “Good cake.”
It looked like her wedding cake, the one I’d baked to practice for
Ossie and Juanita’s real wedding. Reba’s was going to just be for a party where she could wear her white dress and we’d all pretend there had been a wedding. All she’d know was party and cake, but here she was helping herself to the cake ahead of time.
The cake I had slaved over for two whole days, making icing roses and swirls and scrolls and scallops. Even if we knew Reba’s wedding was never going to come off, I figured we could eat cake and I’d know what had and hadn’t worked when it came time to make the one for Ossie and Juanita. Never hurt to practice something that in the past I’d mostly only watched my grandmother do.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
Reba walked two fingers down the faded wedding ring quilt, sewn in a beautiful old pattern of pinks and blues. I thought, How appropriate. Of course Reba wouldn’t know the pattern. I was glad I had not made the cake chocolate.
Reba slid the covers back and got out of bed. “You want some cake?” She wore one of Verna’s long nightgowns and a ruffled shower cap on her head.
“When did you get here?” I asked. Reba’s could have been the footsteps I heard when someone shot that bolt in the lock and trapped me in the root cellar.
“I found the key, the key, the key and unlocked. I unlocked.” She clapped her hands. She was into locks and keys these days. Like a child locking and unlocking a door, it was a game to her. I wondered if this was the first time she had unlocked a house to get in. Mostly she went in unlocked doors and until lately that had been most of the doors in Littleboro.
“I put cake down, unlocked the key.” She danced around on bare feet.
Maybe that was when I was in the root cellar. Had she been the one to bolt the door? Locks and keys were one thing, but a bolt was another. And if she hadn’t done it, who did?