Tea Cups & Tiger Claws

by Timothy Patrick

  At 9:00 AM on the final day, he sat on the bench in his cell, stared at the guard station, and waited to be called for his one o’clock hearing. Ten o’clock came, and then eleven. He asked a passing guard what time he’d get transported to the courthouse. He told Mack to ask his lawyer. At twelve noon he asked again, this time the guard said they were doing the paperwork right then. That sounded good; paperwork primed the pump for everything around there. But then nothing happened. At one o’clock he started making a ruckus.

  To the unsmiling guard who sauntered down to his cell, Mack said that he had to get to court immediately. The guard again mumbled something about paperwork, and Mack went into his cheesy jailbird routine. He said he knew his rights and he demanded to be taken to his hearing. The guard took a deep breath, looked down his nose at him, and said, “Do you want to go to court or do you want to go free?”

  “What?”

  “Veronica Newfield says you didn’t kidnap her. The D.A. is dropping the charges.”

  That’s how Mack got out of jail, into Roger Millington’s blue Cadillac, and up to Sunny Slope Manor’s front gate, where the two men stared for a moment. The place looked different. The gate had been moved in about twenty feet and had a new camera mounted to the adjoining brick column. A new guard house, a miniature replica of the manor’s tower, stood next to where the gate used to be. A man with a holstered gun and a navy blue uniform slowly got up from a stool in the new structure and approached the car. No more electronic keypad entry for Dorthea’s new castle; she had armed guards.

  Without any pleasantries, the guard, who had a southern accent, checked a clipboard, told Mack he didn’t work there anymore, and that he had no business on the premises. When Mack said he wanted his belongings, the guard got disturbed, like he’d just witnessed a two-eleven in progress of the worst kind. Then he went back into the guard house and picked up the phone.

  “That guy needs to lay off the Dragnet,” said Millington.

  After a brief phone conversation, he returned and said, as if delivering a Supreme Court decision, that Mack had been cleared to retrieve his belongings—by escort. Soon after that an electric cart with two more gun toting guards buzzed down the long driveway. Mack said goodbye to Millington and, under the suspicious eye of Joe Friday, walked through the gate and got onto the back of the cart. The guard in the passenger seat then got up and sat back down next to Mack.

  On the way up he saw newly planted poles outfitted with security cameras lining the long driveway. A large wooden spool of electric cable lay by the side of the road, as well as a pile of construction debris. When they came abeam the manor, he looked for Sarah’s Mustang but only saw a limo. A new building, still under construction, stood at the far end of the manor, next to the library. Ernest, dressed in a safari outfit and with a rifle on his shoulder, marched back and forth across the front lawn. Things had changed.

  “What’s up with the new building?” asked Mack.

  “That’s the new security center,” blurted the driver. The other guard, the one sitting next to Mack, cleared his throat and stared unhappily at his co-worker.

  “Have you seen Sarah Evans around?” asked Mack. “That’s Veronica’s cousin and I need to tell her something.”

  Neither guard said a word this time.

  When they pulled up to the wrangler house, Mack jumped off and headed for the door before being cut off by the guard who’d been seated next to him.

  “Your stuff’s been boxed and loaded into your truck,” he said, as he handed Mack the keys and nodded toward his truck. The other guard got up and stood next to the cart. Mack walked to his truck, got in, and started the engine. He looked up at the manor and thought about how he’d like to crash through the door, grab Dorthea by her turkey neck, and squeeze it until she talked. When one of the guards got impatient and started walking toward him, he slowly pulled out of the driveway and drove up the hill He looked again for any sign of Sarah and then continued on down the other side and out the gate. Throttling Dorthea might’ve felt good but that didn’t make it smart. He needed to stick to his plan, to check the answering machine for a message from Sarah. It sounded lame, he knew, but it was all he had.

  He drove down to Sarah’s house, backed into the driveway, and dropped the tailgate. The first box he grabbed had a giant M written on it in black marker. That’s a big help, he thought. Must be stuff from the M room. It held his beat up pots and pans. The next box had a giant O on it and held records and a record player. What idiot packed this stuff? Probably Mr. G-man from the front gate, who used a secret code to keep Mack’s Hank Williams records from falling into enemy hands. Why couldn’t there be a plain old B box—as in bedroom—where he’d kept the answering machine?

  The next one had the number 417 on it, plus the name F. Prince written near the bottom corner. I’m glad you’re proud of your work, mister, but I don’t think you’re quite ready to graduate from moving and packing school, thought Mack. Good old number 417 held clothes and bathroom stuff, of course.

  He got frustrated and started to slide boxes, some marked, some not, to the edge of the tailgate, where he opened them, and dumped the contents onto the driveway. The occasional sound of breaking glass didn’t faze him, and he soon had the answering machine in hand. But he didn’t have an outlet. He tugged on the garage door. It didn’t budge. He tried the back door. No luck. He walked down the driveway to the front porch where he found an outlet to the left of the front door. He plugged it in and a bright red number two started flashing. He pushed the button, heard a beep, followed by his mother’s anxious voice warning him that the man on the news said that California might fall into the ocean, followed by another beep and his mother reminding him not to forget his dad’s birthday, followed by a long beep. End of messages.

  That was it, his master plan, a product of forty eight hours of hard concentration. What an idiot. He should’ve wrung Dorthea’s neck when he’d had half a chance.

  When he rounded the corner on his way back to the garage, something in the flowerbed caught his eye. It had daisies and butterflies on it…like Sarah’s hippy purse. Sarah’s purse! He grabbed it in nothing flat and recognized it without a doubt. He’d seen that purse a hundred times, had made fun of it two hundred times.

  Then reality hit. For the last several days he’d been fearing the worst but had never stopped clinging to hope. Even as the painful facts continued to stack up against Sarah, he’d hoped for them to turn into a harmless set of strange circumstances, or a silly misunderstanding that everybody laughed about after she came home safe and sound. Even if it had been little better than a desperate, fairytale kind of hope, this orphaned purse now took away even that. Sarah didn’t accidently get lost, or fly to Hawaii to recharge, or go away to care for a sickly aunt. Somebody had taken her.

  A slip of paper stuck out of the unzipped purse. He pulled it out. One side had a receipt and the other had some note signed by an F. Prince. Wait a minute, he thought, he’d just seen that same name written on one of the moving boxes…unless all the worry had done a number on his brain. He went back to the pile, turned over a few boxes, and, sure enough, found F. Prince, written plain as day. And just like that, like an unstable mental patient, his emotions made another wild U-turn. He didn’t know F. Prince from Adam, and the note didn’t make any sense at all, but finding that name in both Sarah’s purse and on the box had to be more than a coincidence. For good or bad, it had to mean something.

  He trampled over clothes and books and cans of food in his search for boxes that had writing on them. Besides the mysterious name, he had two Os, an R, an M, and the number 417. Ok. What did it mean, or, better yet, what did it spell? Room? Moor? No, it had to be room. Room 417…but besides Sunny Slope Manor, none of the buildings in town had four stories…except the hotel. Dorthea Railer’s hotel.

  He jumped into his truck and sped away.

  Chapter 31

  Sarah stood as close to the table as her shackle allowed, peered through the da
rkness, and tossed the lasso at the apple core. It missed, off to right of the target. She reeled it in, aimed, and tossed again. Another miss. She’d caught it once, but the lightweight loop, made from the yarn of her mom’s orange sweater, had slipped over the top when she tried to pull it in. Now she had some of Bob’s broken bones twisted into the yarn to add weight.

  The kidnapper had never come back. Sarah wondered if maybe Queen Dorthea had told him to let her starve to death. She’d been down there without food for three or four days, she didn’t know for sure. Her water had almost run out, too.

  At first she’d kept her head together. She sharpened the bone and thought about what needed to be done. And repeatedly told herself to be brave. After a couple days, though, the hunger pangs clawed their way from the pit of her stomach to the top where they dug in for a serious protest, and she started to think about prime rib and pepperoni pizza and fried chicken. And a withered apple core left behind by a lunatic kidnapper.

  Bull’s eye. The loop had it surrounded. She gently pulled. The apple core slid and rolled along obediently. Then it came to a joint in the table and stopped. With a few jiggles of the line, it came out and rolled to the next joint, where a few more jiggles brought it to the edge of the table. Now she could go easy or rough. Easy meant a gentle tug, a fall to the floor where it hopefully bounced forward, and then throwing the lasso over it again to bring it the rest of the way. If it bounced backwards, though, under the table, she’d never find it in the complete darkness of that part of the room. Rough meant trying to jerk the fish all the way into the boat. She’d definitely lose it in the darkness but stood a good chance of having it land somewhere nearby. She gave the line a quick, strong tug and then waited for the slightest clue as to the outcome. Nothing. She got down on her hands and knees and groped around until she found the pathetic little prize, the pursuit of which had consumed who knew how many hours of her life.

  She rubbed off the dirt and eyed her next meal. Her mom used to give thanks for every meal…and for everything else too, even dumb things like sunshine and good grades and finding the car keys. Now Sarah had a few things to add to the list: food, light, blankets, bathtubs, and toilets. She’d be happy to thank God all day long for those things…as soon as he gave them to her.

  With a snap, she bit the apple core in half, and chewed methodically. She savored the sweet dried flesh and the bitter seeds. She relished the sensation of real food in her mouth, from the fibrous, chewy stem, to the waxy, tough skin that tickled her gums, and even the dirt that crunched loudly in her ears. It tasted good, all of it.

  ~~~

  “Dorthea wants to kill me,” mumbled Veronica, as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. “Nanny said so.” Quite a few murderers now stalked Veronica, in her drugged imagination. They floated in the air and peered through her third floor bedroom window. They conspired at midnight outside her door. Thanks to Nanny, though, Veronica now saw Dorthea as the most dangerous of the lot.

  She’d known all along, from the very beginning, that Dorthea wanted things—who doesn’t?—Veronica had just never cared enough to worry about it. Even now, with things looking worse than ever, she still couldn’t say for sure how much she cared. So what if the old lady wanted her dead. Death didn’t seem like such a bad place. She’d gotten most of the way there without any trouble at all. Why not just let go and let Dorthea have her way? It looked easy enough.

  Then again…maybe she didn’t want to die. It’s not like she’d gotten beat by something serious. She got beat at the spoiled heiress game, the very sport she liked best. This time, though, when things got out of control, nobody jumped on board the rich bitch freight train to put on the brakes, so she rode it all the way to the bottom. That didn’t mean she liked it down there. And it didn’t mean she wanted to stay there, either.

  She picked up the crayon picture from the nightstand. Underneath her first grade effort, her mom, in her usual artistic way, had drawn a little girl in a polka dot dress, go-go boots, and a cape flying through the air. “For my super girl who can do even more!!!” she’d written. Veronica carefully studied the words and ran her fingers over the three hearts that formed the dots on the exclamation points. For the first time since the funeral, as she studied that coloring book tear out, Veronica remembered her mother. She saw the things she knew so well: the craziness, the distraction, the sometimes wicked shrewdness; but she also saw, as if for the very first time, the absolutely incredible way that her mom had loved life and all the people in her life. Her mom loved life and she never loved it more than when she got to share it with those she cared about. That’s why she embraced Sarah so tightly, not because her own child didn’t measure up, but because life was just too wonderful to leave anyone out. And that’s why she refused to let go of Aunt Abbey, even though she practically lived on another planet. Her mother’s love had been huge, bigger than huge, and yet Veronica had been blind to it.

  She looked again at the picture and mouthed the words, “For my super girl who can do even more!!!” Then she put it down, wrapped her shaking hands around Dorthea’s lousy wedding present, and stood up. She haltingly walked into the bathroom and dumped the coke down the drain. Then she got back into bed and waited for the bugs to start crawling all over her brain.

  Chapter 32

  Mack stared at a “Do Not Disturb” that hung from the door of room 417 at the Park Royale Hotel. His right hand, tucked into his jacket pocket, gripped a thirty year old revolver that hadn’t been shot in a decade. He turned the door knob with his left hand, found the door unlocked, and slipped into the room.

  While his hand held the door open behind his back, he focused on the sliver of room visible to him, and looked for any sign of Sarah. He didn’t see or hear anything. Slowly he extended his left hand and guided the door to a quiet stop. The bathroom, just to the left, was dark, with an open door. The rest of the room lay straight ahead, dimly lit by a window at the far end, but because the bathroom walls blocked his view, he saw only the ends of two beds on the left, and a dresser and desk against the wall on the right.

  He stepped forward to look into the bathroom. Empty. He eased forward again, to the end of the entryway, and captured the whole room with a quick scan. Nothing. Not even a suitcase or a wrinkled newspaper. He went into the bathroom, flipped on the light, and saw fresh towels and an untouched sink top, with a neat row of hotel issue toiletries. This room didn’t look like it had an occupant at all, not Sarah, not anyone.

  Then why had the clue sent him there? Unless it hadn’t been a clue at all. Maybe they’d just been old boxes, and his fear and anger had turned a bunch of meaningless letters and numbers into a non-existent clue. But that didn’t explain how the name F. Prince turned up not only on one of the boxes, but also in Sarah’s purse? He didn’t make that up.

  He angrily threw open a dresser drawer, and then another, and another, all empty. He yanked the desk drawer off its tracks and sent hotel stationary flying through the room. He attacked the nightstand drawer, expecting nothing but the Gideon Bible, but as he turned away, a vision of Sarah’s name flew up like a dove. He fell to his knees. There, on a piece of paper underneath the Bible, he saw her name in bold handwriting. He snatched the paper, which had a key taped to it, and read:

  Sarah’s in the dungeon. Follow these instructions and you might save her.

  Use key to open basement door across from the lobby counter. Don’t let anyone see you go through the door.

  Mack didn’t have time to spare, so he jumped to his feet and ran from the room, content to read the rest of the instructions on the fly.

  Back down in the lobby, where he slowed from a dash to what he hoped looked like a motivated stroll, a uniformed lady behind the counter looked up, studied him, and looked back down. He slipped behind the partition, used the key on the lock, and opened the door. A rustic looking stairway with concrete steps greeted him. A bare light bulb burned above but didn’t throw enough light to see to the bottom. He didn’t hear anyb
ody down below. After closing the door behind him, he looked at the instructions:

  Find the long metal rod leaning against the wall by the elevator shaft.

  He scrambled to the bottom and flipped a light switch. To his left he found a few rows of shelves and stacks of boxes. Another weak light bulb lit this section but didn’t do much for the rest of the basement, which looked very large, extending past a partition made from a hanging black curtain. Straight ahead, through a break in the curtain, he made out the glow of a giant furnace against a far wall. That meant the elevator shaft probably had to be somewhere to the right. He walked to an opening, looked in that direction, and saw an area so dark that the ceiling and floor and walls, while visible nearby, quickly melted together into complete blackness. He walked through the opening, sidestepped to the right until his hand hit the wall, and used it to keep his bearing as he inched forward. After about thirty paces his hand knocked into something. It hit the concrete floor with a loud, echoing clang. Like the blind squirrel that finds an acorn, he’d found the metal rod.