Dixie Divas (30 page)

The obvious conclusion was that someone had hit me in the head, stuffed me into a dark closet, and left me there. But I had no idea why.

“Bitty,” I whispered in case whoever had done this still lurked in the dark, “are you here, too?”

There was no answer, so either Bitty was still unconscious, or—no. I just couldn’t even contemplate that possibility. Maybe she’d escaped. Tears stung my eyes.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I dared to move. It could have been just a few minutes, but it felt more like hours. Finally I began to explore a little bit. The wall behind me felt like old brick, that rough, uneven surface new bricks don’t have. Damp old brick. Like in a basement. Sanders’ basement? Or had I been moved elsewhere? I had no idea how long I’d been out. Maybe I’d been left for dead. The dent in my scalp oozed blood, but maybe the cool temperature kept it from being worse.

When I gathered some nerve, I rolled to my knees and felt around on the floor. Oval-shaped objects were piled everywhere. They rolled beneath me and felt vaguely familiar. I realized what they were about the same time as my right thumb slid inside one of them: rotten potatoes, of course. Coupled with the overpowering stench and squishy goo, my weak stomach rebelled. I promptly threw up. That certainly didn’t help anything.

After a few minutes to recover, I wiped my hand on my jacket, stood up, and then headed in the opposite direction. Potatoes rolled under my feet when I stumbled along, half-crouched, the pitch black around me pressing down until I wanted to scream. Maybe I would have screamed if I hadn’t worried my attacker might still be close.

Slowly I became aware of sound seeping in from somewhere. Other than my own rasping gulps of air through my mouth so I didn’t choke on the heady aroma of rotting potatoes, and the thudding sound of my heart in my ears, this was the only other detectable noise in the darkness. I held my breath and listened.

Furtive scratching noises came from nearby. It was hard for me to judge distance when I had no internal compass point, so I just crouched in the pitch black darkness and tried to focus. It was a sound I’d heard before, but I just couldn’t place it. Plumbing noises? Was this the root cellar under Sanders’ house? Old boards creaking, maybe? If my head hadn’t throbbed so badly, the answer might have come to me sooner.

Not until I heard a tiny squeak did I realize what I heard—rats. Now, while I’m not one to scream at the sight of a mouse, or usually even a snake, rats and spiders are entirely different. I have heard more than my share of rats eating people stories, and seen the results of brown recluse spider bites for myself, and as far as I’m concerned, all rats eat people and all spiders are brown recluses. Logic and a certain amount of education on these creatures assure me that this isn’t true. I really don’t care.

After realization came paralyzation. I was as rooted to that cellar floor as one of those potatoes. I’m not sure if I even took a breath for a while.

But when a squeak came from very close, and I felt something move past me in the dark, I became uprooted and unglued. I screamed. Very loudly. Over and over, while I did a panicked dance that totally destroyed half a bushel of rotten potatoes, my Nikes, and the eardrums of every rat in a quarter mile radius. I’ve been told I have a very piercing scream. No doubt, glass goblets shattered all over Marshall County.

The bad thing about all this was that my screams hurt my own ears; the good thing was that I was heard above ground. In a few moments, a door above me opened and light flooded in. I didn’t care who opened it. If it’d been an armed terrorist with a machete between his teeth and an Uzi under his arm, I’d still have launched myself up and out of there like a rocket.

Apparently, the propulsion speed of a panicked woman who is twenty-pounds overweight is greater than the resistance of a man weighing a solid one hundred-ninety pounds. I flattened my liberator, first with the force of our collision, and second with the stench of rotting potatoes clinging to my hair, jeans, and Nikes.

In my zeal to leave behind rats and darkness, and with the thought at the back of my mind that my liberator could also be my assailant, I scrambled to my feet and kept going. Behind me, I heard this horrible gagging sound, and spared a glance over my shoulder as I sprinted toward the front of what I recognized as Sanders’ yard. Recognition hit at the same time as a stitch in my ribs. I stopped, breathing heavily through my mouth and pressing a hand to my left side.

“Dr. Coltrane?”

I think he said something like “Gaghghh,” which I took to mean, “Yes, nice to see you.” I walked back to where he lay on his back looking up at the sky and holding a hand over his nose and mouth.

“Are you all right?” I asked, peering down at him.

Brown eyes blinked above the edge of his hand. “‘Tand ober dere,” he said, and gestured downwind. I nodded and continued to breathe through my mouth.

“Have you seen Bitty?” I asked as I moved to one side, and still holding his hand over his face, he nodded.

“Ad p’lith thtation.”

“She’s at the police station? Is she all right?”

“Fahn.”

Relief made me want to sit down, so I did. Right there on the rutted clay by Dr. Coltrane. I saw that his eyes were watering. Or maybe he was crying. He sat up to look at me, and that’s when I saw the blood coming from under his hand.

“You’re hurt.” My deductive powers were obviously returning. “Take your hand away so I can see.”

He shook his head. “No ‘fense, bud oo ‘tink.”

“Well, I’ve been in a root cellar with rotting potatoes. And rats.” I shuddered at the last. “Do you think your nose is broken?”

“No,” he said, making it sound more like
doe
. “Jut bleedink.”

He pulled something out of his pocket, and I saw that he wore a white doctor’s coat under a windbreaker. When he’d pressed a wad of gauze to his nose, he held his head back and pinched his nostrils, and after a moment, the bleeding stopped. He took a cautious breath, turning his head to keep from inhaling essence of potato.

Now that I was out of the cellar, knew Bitty was safe, and felt a little more secure, I said rather indignantly, “Someone locked me up down there.”

Dr. Coltrane wiped away the last traces of blood and put the gauze into a bag he pulled from another pocket.
Always prepared
flashed through my mind. Maybe he’d been a Boy Scout.

“I had assumed you weren’t in there by choice,” he said, rather testily, I thought.

“What gave me away? My screams?”

“Certainly that, but the board stuck through the outside handles was a good clue.”

I looked over at the cellar doors. It’s one of those root cellars that looks like a storm cellar and may even have been originally used for that purpose. Double wooden doors can be pulled closed from the inside, and when shut from the outside, are kept shut by sticking a board through bolted-on iron handles. It’s right behind Sanders’ kitchen, back where pokeberries and bitterweed grow rampant, almost obscuring it from sight. Trampled weeds and piles of scuffed-up dirt were evidence of recent exploration, however.

When I looked back at Dr. Coltrane, he was gazing at me with what seemed to be a mix of awe and revulsion. Maybe he was just awed I could be so revolting, or at least smell that way.

“Your cousin thinks you’ve been abducted, you know,” he said. “The police are putting together a search party. Horses and everything.”

“So why aren’t you with them?” I heard myself ask, and could cheerfully have bitten my tongue right in two at the implication he should be searching for me.

He smiled, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’ve been helping Frank Dunlap with some of his cows in the pasture he leases from Sanders. Just thought I’d come over and check things out until the police could get here.”

“How’d you hear about it?”

“I’ve got a CB in my work truck. Helps out when there’s no cell phone signals. We need to call Sergeant Maxwell so he won’t be out beating the bushes for you. Besides, it’ll be safer if we get away from the house.”

I went with him to his truck parked out on the road in front of Sanders’ house, and leaned against it while he made the call. At least Bitty hadn’t been hurt. How had she escaped? And just who had hit me in the head and why? The only rational explanation was Sanders. He knew Bitty had seen the senator in his foyer, and while that detail wasn’t supposed to be released yet, odds were everyone in Marshall County already knew Bitty Hollandale had found her ex-husband with his head bashed in long before the police found his frozen corpse in her wine cellar.

Staring at the house, I wondered if Sanders was staring back at us. If he was angry that I wasn’t dead, and that Bitty had somehow escaped.

“It was Sanders,” I said when Dr. Coltrane got off the radio. “He locked me in the cellar.”

“You saw him?”

I shook my head. “No, but who else would have done it? No one else has a good enough reason. My ex, maybe, but last I heard he’s gotten a new job in Boise. Probably picking potatoes or selling insurance.”

Mention of the potatoes made me think of something. I looked over at Dr. Coltrane, who had reached into a cooler in the back and taken out two Cokes.

“You know, I’ve smelled piles of rotten potatoes before, but this time, it’s especially bad. Do you think they’ve fermented? Maybe there’s a still down there. You know—to make vodka or something.”

“Vodka?” He laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised at much of anything lately, but I can’t see Sanders putting a still down there for vodka. Pure grain alcohol, maybe. Moonshine. Vodka is a far stretch.”

“Hmmm. I just wondered how he’s managed to support himself, you know, keep the house in good repair without any money. And of course, living with a cellar full of rotten potatoes can’t be too pleasant. Why would he do that if he isn’t using them for something?”

Dr. Coltrane nodded thoughtfully. “Sanders is a strange one. Cared about his dog, though.”

“I heard his dog died of natural causes.” When he hesitated, I wondered if I’d trespassed on client privilege—which made me wonder just how Bitty had really come up with all her information about Tuck—and said quickly, “Not that it’s any of my business, but since I’m the one who found Tuck in the chicken house, I could tell he’d suffered some violence.”

“Ah. Well, yes, he did, but it was post-mortem. He’d already died from complications of liver disease.”

“So . . . someone hit him with something
afte
r he died?”

“Yes. Car tires.”

That sounded gruesome, and I tried not to think about Sanders running over his own dog.

“Well, obviously it unhinged Sanders enough to hit me in the head and lock me up in his cellar,” I said.

Coltrane straightened from where he’d leaned against the truck hood. “You’ve been hit in the head?”

“Yes, and contrary to some reports, it didn’t happen when I was a baby.” Talking about it made me reach up to touch the dent on the back of my head. The blood had dried, but my hair felt stiff.

Dr. Coltrane set down his Coke and despite my protest, examined the back of my head. Or more specifically, directly over my right ear. Then he made me sit down on his lowered tailgate while he got out gauze and some yellowish-red antiseptic that he probably uses on cattle, and he cleaned up the hole in my head and said it seemed superficial, long but not deep.

“You’re fortunate. It could have been worse.”

I looked at the squeeze bottle he still held in his hand. “That stuff isn’t going to make me start mooing or anything, is it.”

He grinned. “Maybe. Or you could start howling at the full moon.”

“Oh, no problem. I already do that. I have very healthy lungs.”

His grin widened. “So I’ve noticed.”

I wasn’t sure how he meant that, so I paused. No doubt, he meant that he’d heard me screeching loud enough to peel wallpaper. The other, more physical meaning referring to female attributes, couldn’t be what he meant. Could it? Then his gaze flickered to my chest and back up.

My face got really hot, and I didn’t know whether to be indignant at the obviously sexist, chauvinistic remark, or be glad he’d noticed something besides my wild hair, potato scraps, and
eau de decay
fragrance. It called for action, so I decided to go with deafness, and switch topics.

“I’m just glad Bitty’s all right. Are the police on the way?”

To my shock, Dr. Coltrane reached a hand toward my chest. My reflexes were fairly quick and I grabbed his wrist just as he flicked away a bee hovering over potato remnants on my tee shirt. He looked a little startled, then chagrined.

“Oh, sorry. I saw that bee about to settle on your collarbone and didn’t think.”

All suspicions of potential ravishment evaporated, and I tried to think of something clever to say that’d smooth over the awkward moment. What came out was less than clever, but didn’t stray too far into idiocy.

“I’m glad you weren’t stung.”

He smiled, and while I was thinking how really nice and warm his eyes are, a wonderful chocolate color, sirens blared down the road, getting closer. All I could do was smile back, and I let go of his wrist even while I admired the corded strength in his arm. Good thing we’d decided to just be friends, or this man might upset my complacent apple cart.

Sergeant Maxwell himself unfolded from a police car, and got out straightening his hat as he ambled toward us. Other officers fanned out, obviously knowing their roles, some with guns drawn, and others in black gear reminiscent of a
TACT
squad. A little overkill, I thought, for an old man in his late seventies. Then I remembered the dead senator and my own attempted murder, and I felt less sympathetic.

Bitty had already told the sergeant why we were there, though I’m not at all sure she told everything, and that she’d come back from chasing her dog to find me completely gone. When I hadn’t answered her calls for me, she’d panicked and fled.

“Good thing,” I said, “or she could have been down there with me.” I shuddered at the memory of the cellar rats and that horrible rotten stench. “Wear boots when you go in there.”