Dolled Up to Die (31 page)

But even if the police quickly figured out that her body in the river was no accident, it would be too late. She’d already be dead.

“So all I have to do is keep you hidden until I can get you down to the river.”

Apparently silence here was working the same way Uncle Joe said it did when someone was being questioned. Most people felt a compelling need to fill a silence, even if it wasn’t to the person’s best advantage. Not that knowing more in this situation was any advantage for Cate. All it did was start a quiver in her stomach that threatened to send her into a full-body quake.

Rolf knelt down and lifted the blue bedspread as if checking for under-the-bed bogeymen and monsters, but she could see, as he obviously did, that there wasn’t enough space to shove her under there. And the only bogeyman was out here.

“Hey, I’ve got it!”

He left her standing there, obviously confident of her inability to hippity-hop to escape, and a moment later she heard the door to the carport open. The duct tape felt as if it were cutting off circulation to her hands, but she could move her arms and wiggle her fingers.

She hopped over to a four-drawer dresser and studied the items scattered on top. A small pile of change. Four quarters,
a dime, and three pennies. A sock with a hole in the heel. Two red-striped hard candies. A box of tissues. A pocket calculator. Could Nancy Drew or Jessica Fletcher turn any of that into a weapon or way of escape? Cate couldn’t.

But hadn’t LeAnne said Rolf had both a landline and a cell phone? If she could just get out to that phone, and dial 911 . . . How to dial it momentarily stopped her. But she’d do it with her elbow or her tongue if she had to! She was frantically hippity-hopping out to the living room to find the phone line when he came back from the carport with a stepladder and screwdriver in hand.

He met her at the bedroom door. “Going somewhere?” he inquired. He pushed her aside and she teetered on her taped feet as he answered his own question. “I don’t think so.”

He set the ladder up in an inside corner of the bedroom, climbed up on it, and used the screwdriver to remove the screws on a small panel overhead. The ceiling was plywood, not sheetrock, the screws hidden in the textured beige paint, and the panel had a layer of pink insulation attached on the attic side. Then, as if Cate were a sack of onions, he threw her over his shoulder and hauled her up into the attic. She heard the dress rip as they went through the opening. In the dim light coming from the bedroom below, all she could see was a steeply slanted roof and a pink sea of more insulation.

He plopped her down somewhere between the panel and the back wall, breathing hard himself now. “That ought to hold you while I keep everyone busy so they won’t have time to come looking for you.” He leaned over to check her duct tape bonds in the dim light. “Too bad you’re going to miss the wedding. But that dress isn’t looking too good anyway.”

Language wouldn’t have been possible, Cate realized, if God hadn’t given us movable lips, and hers weren’t moving. Not that Rolf’s monologue really needed a response.

“None of this would have been necessary, you know, if ol’ Kieferson hadn’t gone all high and mighty. It wasn’t as if his hands were so pure and spotless.”

Rolf disappeared back through the opening down to the bedroom, and a minute later the dim light in the attic disappeared as he fastened the panel in place. A brief silence, and then she heard a dull thump when he bumped into something taking the ladder outside, and then a second thump of the door closing.

For a moment she thought about what Rolf had said about Ed Kieferson. Ed’s hands weren’t pure or spotless, but he’d gone high and mighty. About what?

She’d have to figure that out later.

If there was a later.

 27 

The attic smelled dry and stale and hostile, not cozy and friendly like the attic back home when Cate was a little girl crawling into her secret place to read on a rainy day. And this attic was also claustrophobic, as if the unseen roof above were relentlessly moving down to crush her.

Determinedly, she pushed it back and reinforced the push with a deep breath.

She wiggled her toes, then her fingers. They were all there and moving. Good. Although at the moment wiggling them seemed an ability about as useful as Octavia doing square root calculations in her head.

Because the bottom line was that even if her fingers and toes could tap out Morse code, she was still stuck here. Tied up and trapped until Rolf came back and took her to the river. She fought down the panic threatening to engulf her.

What do I do, Lord?

She waited hopefully, but no big voice boomed out that help was coming, and all she had to do was sit there and wiggle her extremities until it arrived.

Instead, what came was a voiceless push.
Don’t just sit there, do something. Let the Lord help.

If she could get to the panel that opened down into the
bedroom, maybe she could shove it off with her feet. She’d have to fall through the opening, but she’d be out of
here.

She wrestled her body in that direction, bumping over rafters and flopping into the hollows of insulation between them. Over the second rafter she heard the dress rip again. Definitely no presidential balls for her in this gown. By the third rafter, her skin itched and burned from fiberglass insulation prickling inside her dress and between her toes.

By the fourth rafter, she realized she should have counted rafters when Rolf brought her up here. Because now she had no idea where that escape panel was. She angled her body around so she could thump her feet on the bedroom ceiling below, but nothing gave way on the sections she tried.

She had to stop and rest for a moment. Which was when she heard rustles and squeaks from a corner. Mice? There were
mice
up here, and any minute they’d be running over her as if she were some newly discovered mouse playground. But she also realized the darkness wasn’t quite as dense as it should be. There was a lighter oblong at the far end of the attic, on the back side of the house. A window!

She rolled and twisted and scooted toward it. Her tied-together feet tangled in the dress, caught a toe in a tear, and ripped it further. Several times the wig snagged on something, and finally it pulled away from her head.

There’s your playground, mice. Go for it.

Finally she was at the window. She twisted her legs sideways so she could peer out. If the glass had ever been cleaned, it wasn’t within the last decade, but the sight was glorious anyway. Dark sky dusted with stars, moonlight, rows of grapevines, light from Lodge Hill filtering through the trees!

Yeah, a great view. But she was still trapped here.

With sudden determination, she twisted around, lifted her
bare feet, and smashed through the window. Shards of glass peppered her legs, but cold night air flowed into the attic.

For a moment, déjà vu rolled through her. She’d been here, done this, on her one other murder case, when the killer locked her and a friend in a third-floor closet. She’d gotten away then, but that time her mouth and wrists and ankles hadn’t been taped into uselessness. And she was no Houdini able to slither out of all restraints.

Some ideas, Lord?

She lay on her side against a rafter and tried to scrape the duct tape off her face. Had Houdini ever had to cope with duct tape?

But she did have those wiggly fingers. She sat up again and tapped her fingertips together. Rolf was a killer. He’d efficiently used a gun on Ed Kieferson and an Oriental sword on Celeste. But could he have made a mistake when trussing her up? Wasn’t it written somewhere in the Bad Guys Book of Rules that you tied a victim’s hands in back of her, not in front?

She put her hands to her face. Her palms were mashed together, which meant her fingers weren’t in good position for creative walking, but she managed to snag the end of a strip of duct tape. She couldn’t get a good grip, but she pulled and felt the strip slowly peel away from the other strips on her face.

Hope surged through her. She got a finger-lock on another strip and pulled again. This time she was down to skin, and she out-squeaked the mice.

She’d had her legs waxed once, and after the burning, my-skin-is-gone feeling, she’d vowed that even if she got to be hairy as King Kong, she’d never wax again. She hadn’t that choice with the duct tape now, because this wasn’t about smooth legs, it was about her life. She gritted her teeth and
pulled three more times to finish the job. She checked the results with an air-kiss and a jaw wiggle. Yes, everything worked.

She could smell smoke from the old grapevines smoldering on the burn pile at the back of the vineyard. No . . . She sniffed again. This scent was sharper, not so clean and sweet smelling. She stuck her head out the window. A wisp of smoke rose above the line of trees. Someone, tired of waiting for the buffet, had decided on a weenie roast in the fireplace? Or some exotic delicacy Robyn had ordered for the buffet had caught fire?

Apparently no one had missed Cate yet. She didn’t hear her name being called into the night. Which was a little insulting, wasn’t it? Apparently she could be kidnapped by aliens and zapped off to some strange planet, and no one would even notice. But Rolf had said he was going to keep everyone too busy to look for her . . .

She finally made the connection. Smoke—fire—Rolf!

A frantic bite at the tape holding her wrists told her she wouldn’t be able to chew through it. But she managed to snag the end of the tape in her teeth and slowly, oh so slowly, unwound it. She took only a moment to rub her numb wrists and hands before freeing her ankles and feet.

She used a hold on the window frame to lever herself to her feet. She had to hunch over, because the ridgepole above her wasn’t high enough to stand upright, but she stomped each foot a couple of times to bring back feeling.

She’d broken out of that locked closet by making an escape line using clothes hanging in the closet, but here there were no convenient racks of cocktail dresses and sweatpants and Hermes scarves to tie together.

But she could rip strips off the dress and make a line to lower herself to the ground!

She’d just made the first tear when she heard the last noise she ever wanted to hear. The door downstairs closing. Rolf was back.

No time to construct an escape rope. She peered out the window again, leaning over to look down this time. A bare wall dropped straight from the window to the ground, no foot- or handholds. Below, old lumber was stacked against the house on the left side, a pile of discarded motorcycle parts on the right. If she didn’t hit dead center between them—

Dead center. She shivered. Poor choice of words.

Shouts from Lodge Hill made her look that way again. Flame! But now she could hear something ominously closer. Rolf was working on that ceiling panel. She closed her eyes for a last moment of prayer—
I need your help now, Lord!
—used her fist wrapped in insulation to break out the remaining shards of glass, and climbed backward out of the window. The dress caught on something, and she ripped it free.

Bits of glass clinging to the window bit into her arms and hands as she let herself over the edge. Her toes scrambled for footing, but there was nothing. Finally she was clinging only by her fingers, her bare feet dangling in nothingness.

Where was a nice, boring day as a PI when you needed one?

She remembered Mitch mentioning that voice-activated, wristband cell phone. He’d said it might come in handy if she were ever clinging by her fingertips somewhere. She also remembered her blithe response: she didn’t need one. She’d been there, done that, and she didn’t anticipate dangling by her fingertips anytime in the near future.

Famous last words. Apparently window-hanging was her PI specialty.

Except a moment later, she wasn’t hanging. One hand slipped, then the other, and she was falling. Bumping and thumping. Sliding, scraping, and scratching. Her fingers
clutched for handholds that weren’t there. Her toes grasped for footholds that didn’t exist. But her dress, billowing and tangling like a deflating parachute, snagged on everything, jerking her this way and that. One foot banged into the pile of motorcycle parts, and she heard the crash of metal as her own body crashed into the ground.

The impact rattled her from toes to teeth, and she just lay there, shooting stars crisscrossing her eyes and her ears ringing. But a moment later she realized the stars were inside her head, and she couldn’t see. She couldn’t see! No sky, no moon or stars. The impact had done something to her eyes—

She flailed frantically, and suddenly her vision came back. No, she hadn’t been blinded. She’d just been tangled like a bridesmaid mummy in the dress.

Thank you, Lord.

But what she could see was Rolf leaning out the window and looking down at her. For a moment she thought he might jump right down on top of her, but he disappeared, and she heard him crashing across the rafters.

How fast could he get down here? Faster than a speeding bullet?

She scrambled to her feet, snatched up the gown hanging in tattered ribbons around her, and careened toward the line of trees, unmindful of her bare feet. Rolf had to go around front to get out of the house. She had a head start on him. She’d tried out for track when she was in high school. If she could just beat him through the trees—

A frantic twist of head showed that even with a late start he was no more than thirty or forty feet behind her. And gaining. Oh yeah, she remembered now. She hadn’t been fast enough to qualify for the track team.

She tried to scream, but she was running so hard that she had no breath left for yelling. She burst through the trees,
and the flames flared into full view, eating like some blazing demon into the back side of the Reception Room. Sirens wailed in the distance.

Cate’s frantic gaze took in guys in tuxedos with a hose, Jo-Jo’s waving arms directing them where to fasten it. Rolf was so close now she could almost feel his breath.

But if she could just get a few feet closer, he wouldn’t dare attack her in full view . . .

She let go of the gown and raised her arms to wave for attention. The tattered gown fluttered and trailed around her. Her feet tangled in a torn strip, and down she went. She screamed as a weight fell on her back. A hand covered her mouth to silence her scream.

But this time she reacted before it could clamp down.
Bite!
She bit, clamping down on a finger. Not a great experience, she realized, but she forced herself to hold on. Rolf shrieked in what she irrelevantly thought was a rather unmanly way.

But Rolf had a new technique too. He whacked her alongside the head with his other hand, and she let go. Before he could grab her again, she scrambled away, digging in with fingers and elbows and toes. She chanced a frantic glance backward, then blinked and sat up.

Strips of bridesmaid gown tangled like celadon tentacles around a male figure rolling on the ground trying to escape them.

Cate struggled to her feet, yelling now, waving her arms. “Help! Help!”

A tuxedoed figure spotted her. He ran toward her. She pointed to Rolf, still draped in bridesmaid gown remnants but now rising from the ground.

Mitch didn’t ask questions. He took one look at Cate’s bedraggled condition and leaped on Rolf. They both went
down in a tangle of flailing arms and legs, jeans on top one moment, tuxedo the next.

Another tuxedoed figure ran up and stared for a moment, and then Lance leaped into the fray too. Three thrashing and twisting bodies and arms and legs.

A fire truck roared around the far end of Lodge Hill. A police car followed, then another fire truck. The trio on the ground rose like some six-legged monster draped in tangled strips of celadon. Cate stood there in her own knee-length tatters of what was once a bridesmaid’s gown.