Authors: Barbara Allan
Walking around big old empty buildings has a certain built-in creep factor, but—despite a core skepticism of anything mystical—I had a real sensation that something was wrong here, that something (all right, I’ll say it) sinister was in the dust-mote-floating air.
And a sense that we were not alone.
I turned to speak to Mother, but she had disappeared.
At least she’d taken her
purse
with her.
Fighting panic, knowing Mother was as capable as any small child of wandering off unattended, I nonetheless ran to the back where I had seen her last, my footsteps echoing off the hardwood floors like machine-gun fire.
“Mother! …
Mother!”
Suddenly a door next to the stairs flew open, and Mother stood framed in the archway, adjusting her girdle.
“Well, the girl’s not in here,” she announced, adding, “By the way, I wouldn’t use the toilet—it doesn’t flush.”
I waited for her to approach me; then I took her by both arms, firmly, and my eyes locked on her buggy ones. “Mother … please stay with me …
don’t
go wandering around.”
“Of course, dear. But you can’t blame a girl for having to tinkle.”
I let go of her. “Well, you didn’t have to scare the piss out of me doing it!”
She gave me the reproving “language!” look.
I sighed and said, “Okay, now you’ve tinkled—any other urges or impulses, check with me, first, before acting on them.”
“You’re treating me like a child!”
“Right … now stay with me.”
And admittedly there really was little difference in taking Mother out these days and Jake at age three—I’d have been better off with Sushi.
I sighed. Swallowed, not relishing the dust taste. Then I said, “Let’s check upstairs.”
Taking the lead, I navigated the narrow paths between antiques, some stacked on top of each other. We were nearly to the stairs when Mother shrieked.
I spun, hair on the back of my neck standing up straight. “What is
it,
Mother? What’s
wrong?”
Mother pointed to a particularly ugly bowl on a table. “That carnival glass—it’s marked at seventy-five dollars! Anyone can
see
that it’s chipped.”
My eyes tightened to where I couldn’t see much, and what I could see was red.
“Mother
—can you
please
behave?”
Mother frowned, half cross, half hurt. “Have you been taking your medicine?”
“Have
you?”
Mother, indignant, snapped, “Certainly,” sounding just a little like Curly in
The Three Stooges.
I let out yet another sigh, a very, very long one. Then I said, “Okay—okay. We’re both properly medicated. So let’s both just settle down.…”
We climbed the stairs, which were wide enough for us to do so side by side.
Near darkness awaited. The second-floor ceiling lights were off, and with the storm brewing outside, the row of windows facing the street offered little help for our vision. Those windows rustling with wind, however, did aid and abet our fear.
Up here, very little of the merchandise had been cleared out, a looming armoire looking like a large tombstone, and an ornate floor lamp a skeleton. A row of grandfather clocks stood like weird figures staring at us from the darkness, waiting to strike. Suddenly this was a graveyard of antiques, and I shivered.
“Tanya?” I called out.
Silence.
“
Tanya!”
Mother, her eyes searching the vast, dim expanse of furniture, said, “Maybe she’s in the basement.”
“But we came
in
that way.”
“We didn’t look around, though … and there are lots of rooms down there.”
She had a point.
“Let’s do it,” I said, fighting crankiness and not succeeding terribly well.
As Mother moved away from me, I asked, “Where are you going now?”
“The basement.”
“The stairs are over there …”
Mother’s condescending expression granted me dispensation
for being young and foolish. “Why climb down two flights of stairs, when we can take the freight elevator?”
“Maybe … because we don’t know how to use it?”
But Mother had already disappeared into the darkness, her voice emerging to say, “I do, dear. Nothing to it!”
Managing not to bump into anything, moving down an aisle of strange shapes like Snow White through the scary forest where the wicked witch sent her to die, I caught up to Mother at the elevator as she was about to enter.
“Mother!
Stop!”
As she took a step into dead air, I grabbed her arm, and for one heart-stopping moment, I thought we were both going to tumble down the shaft!
But I also had hold of the retracted wooden gate, and with some difficulty pulled us back, where we collapsed on the floor in an undignified (but at least alive) pile.
I squawked at her: “You can see a
chip
in some
carnival
glass at
fifty feet
—but you couldn’t see that
elevator
wasn’t there?”
Mother, alarmed, said, “But … but the gate was open! The gate shouldn’t be open if the elevator’s not waiting.…”
I spotted a mag-light hanging on a nail, got up, and fetched it. Then I knelt on my still-shaking knees by the edge of the elevator shaft and beamed the flashlight upward.
“There it is,” I said, “just above us—I think it’s stuck in between floors.”
Mother, still seated on the floor, huffed, “Whoever used that elevator last should have been more careful. It would have served them right if I’d fallen!”
Deciding not to dignify that with a response, I couldn’t help directing the beam downward into the yawning mouth of our near-fate, to morbidly assess what would have been waiting for us.
For one thing, we would have had company.…
“And when I see that Tanya,” Mother railed on, “I’m going to give her a stern talking—”
“I wouldn’t bother, Mother.” I gulped. “She … she’s down there.”
“Where?”
“Right where you said she was—the basement.”
Mother crawled over and looked down the shaft where the flashlight’s beam revealed the limp, twisted body of the store clerk.
“Oh dear,” Mother gasped, and touched her bosom delicately. “She must have made the same mistake
I
almost did … fell down there by accident.”
“Accidental, like Clint Carson’s body waiting in the road for one of us to run over … accidental like our gas fireplace getting turned on in the summer and our house blowing up … accidental like my hospital roommate dying after I traded beds with her …
that
kind of accidental, Mother?”
Mother thought for a moment, then, absurdly, “You’re suggesting she was pushed, aren’t you, Brandy?”
“Yeah,” I said dryly. “That’s what I’m suggesting. And I’d suggest, now, we call the police.”
“That,”
came a deep voice from the darkness, startling us,
“won’t be necessary.”
Officer Brian Lawson emerged from the gloom and stood a few yards away; his gun was drawn—not quite pointing at us, but not quite
not
pointing at us.
Where he had come from, I couldn’t say. I certainly hadn’t heard him approach. Maybe he’d been hiding in the dark the whole time; if so, he knew how to minimize his breathing.
And yet I’d had that sensation that we weren’t alone here.
Several things clashed in my mind, not completely formed thoughts, just snippets:
Wild Cat Den, Mia, meth, Carson, Lawson …
Had my knight in blue armor had something to do with the death of Tanya?
Mother said, “Thank goodness you’re here, Officer! That poor woman is lying at the bottom of the elevator shaft.”
I got to my feet and helped Mother up. “Yes, it’s a good thing you happened to be here,” I said, putting no suspicion in my voice, but remembering that he’d happened to be patrolling in the area at the very time our house blew up.
Taking Mother’s elbow, I gently guided her away from the open mouth of the shaft.
Lawson, his gun still aimed in our general direction, wore a decidedly nasty expression—damn near a sneer. “You girls just can’t stay out of trouble, can you? Had to continue sticking your noses in.”
I huffed with forced indignation: “I don’t know what you’re talking about! We’re here on business … to pick up some antiques we had here on consignment.”
He was at the edge of the elevator now, body turned so that his torso faced us while he looked down, grimly. “Looks like somebody consigned Tanya to the bottom of this shaft.”
I kept working at indignation, but it wasn’t flying. “We just happened to find her, Officer—right now. You must’ve seen us!”
Lawson stepped a few feet away and talked into his shoulder—some of it was official numbers that I frankly can’t remember, sort of
Adam-12
cop-speak; but he seemed to be calling the death in.
Then he swung back toward us. “You two’re coming with me.”
“Where?” Mother and I asked.
He didn’t answer, but motioned again with the gun. “Get going.”
Was Mother as afraid as I was?
If so, she hid it well, demanding, “Young man, are you arresting us? If so, on what charge?”
He ignored this and just said,
“Move.”
“Move
where?”
I asked.
“Downstairs,” he said, and thankfully holstered the gun. “My car’s in back.”
I took Mother’s hand. Were we going back to the station—for another round in the “Interview Room"? Or was Lawson a dirty cop, up to his badge in meth and other drugs and the murder of Clint Carson?
Either way, I didn’t know what to do about getting Mother and me out of this situation. One could be answered with a call to Mr. Ekhardt; the other didn’t present any solution at all, unless I wanted to tackle him or something, wrest that gun on his hip out of his holster.…
I was still frantically thinking it through when we were outside, where Lawson put us once again in the backseat of the police car, which was blocking mine, blocking Tanya’s.
He stayed outside the vehicle talking into his shoulder again, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying to whoever was on the other end of the radio. After a good minute or even two, Officer Lawson got behind the wheel, slammed the door, and we headed down the alley.
Mother and I were quiet on the short ride along Fifth Street to the Safety Building. But when the car went on by, we both broke out in protest.
Fear spiked through me. “Where are you taking us?”
Mother shouted at the wire separating us from Lawson and the front seat, “I demand to see my lawyer!”
Banging on that wire with both hands, I yelled, “This is kidnapping! We haven’t been charged! You won’t get away with this!”
Mother’s cries were overlapping mine: “If you don’t pull
over, young man, we’re going to sue the city of Serenity for every cent in its coffers!”
Lawson said nothing.
Not a peep.
At the end of Fifth, we bumped over some train tracks, sped down a dirt road between a defunct tool factory and a condemned grain silo, and came to a dusty halt in front of an abandoned warehouse.
My heart was pounding.
Lawson got outside the vehicle.
“Mother,” I whispered, “after we get out, I’m going to rush him—I’m going to grab his gun and toss it to you and then I’m going to claw his eyes out.”
“Well … it’s a little rash … but—”
“But nothing—if he gets us inside that warehouse, we’re finished. He’s the one behind all this—he’s a dirty cop.”
Mother looked out the window at him, frowning, as if looking for dirt smudges and finding none. She turned to me. “A small suggestion, dear? You kick him in the nuts, and I’ll gouge his eyes out. Two are better than one.”
“Okay. Okay, Mother. We’ll go with
your
plan.…”
Lawson was about to open the door with his left hand, his gun out again, in his right.
Mother said hurriedly, “Brandy, there’s something I should tell you … something about Peggy Sue.…”
“Another time, Mother.” Lawson had his hand on the back door handle. “Get
ready.
…”
But my blue knight played it smart.
After opening the car door, he backed away as we climbed out, letting his gun do the talking.
“After you, ladies.”
Mother and I clutched hands as we walked slowly, tremblingly toward the warehouse, Lawson bringing up the rear, keeping a safe distance.
“Inside,” he ordered.
We could do nothing but obey.
The building we stepped into—once owned by a company that made office furniture—was now neglected and empty. Rusty, bleeding pipes ran the length of the high metal ceiling, the concrete walls peeling green paint.
“Mother,” I said, “I’m sorry for every lousy, selfish thing I ever did or said, and for any trouble I’ve caused you.”
“Brandy, dear, don’t talk like that. Perhaps Officer Lawson will listen to reason.”
“No, Mother, I don’t think so. And it’s my fault. I let us get in over our heads, this time.…”
“Through there,” Lawson commanded, his gun pointing to another closed door, bearing a timeworn, barely decipherable title—
FOREM N’S O FICE.
I turned the knob with a quavering, old woman’s hand—and a woman about to die is about as old as a woman can be.
The door swung inward.
Mother gasped and I just stared, openmouthed.
The office was a high-tech hideaway of flat-screen computers, security monitors, neon wall maps, and other gizmos worthy of the Bat Cave. This inner chamber was as modern as the building’s exterior was not.
Though the room was good sized, only one other person was there: a dark-haired woman seated at one of the computers with her back to us.
Mia swiveled in her chair.
She rose, strode toward us, stood, hands on hips, brown eyes blazing, nostrils flared, lips a tight, thin line—I hadn’t seen Mia this mad since camp, when I threw her Chatty Cathy doll down the outhouse toilet.
“What the hell do I have to do,” she snapped, “to keep you two morons from blowing my cover?”
A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Tip
When buying antiques and collectibles via the Internet, use the same kind of caution and scrutiny you use when snagging a pair of Louboutins.