The Cane Mutiny (20 page)

T
he rear rooms of the house exhibited none of the bravado so evident in the rest of the mansion. The floors were covered with either cheap linoleum or carpeting so threadbare it was no longer possible to distinguish woof from warp. The faded wallpaper hung in flaps, as if the house was shedding its skin from the inside out.

I needn't have worried. The good folks of Shelby, North Carolina, are famous for their inquisitive minds, and C.J. was no exception. Soon she was pulling me along, delivering a running commentary on the various rooms.

“And this must have been the maid's quarters, because it's the room nearest the kitchen with a bed. But either she was the world's worst housekeeper or someone's been rummaging through her stuff.”

She was right. The covers looked like they had been torn from the bed, not just thrown back, and
clothes were hanging out of drawers, and dangling from hangers in an open armoire. It reminded me of my children's rooms when they were teenagers.

“But Abby, see how her shoes are lined up neatly inside the armoire? What's with that?”

“Maybe she—”

“Ooh, now look at this; see how the carpet doesn't match here? This used to be two rooms. Look, the wallpaper doesn't line up either. Having the armoire here is supposed to help disguise that—ooh, ooh, look behind it, Abby! That's some kind of secret door.”

“It looks more like a big hole. Maybe a wall safe went there.”

My buddy has muscles that would be the envy of many a metrosexual. She pulled the heavy piece of furniture away from the wall, raising a cloud of dust motes from the mismatched carpet.

“Abby, it's not just a hole in the wall. Look, it's a tunnel of some kind.”

“So
that's
where the tunnel starts.”

“Abby, have you been here before?” She sounded crestfallen.

“No—”

We heard the voices at the same time, and C.J., bless her younger heart, was the first to react. I didn't mind being pushed into the tunnel, but I
did mind having the door slammed in my face. And with C.J. outside.

I held my breath. It was a habit formed some forty years ago. A precursor to hide and seek. If you held your breath and closed your eyes, you were invisible. If you were already invisible, like I was now, then you were doubly safe.

The voices grew louder, and I could pick out C.J.'s, but individual words were hard to catch. “…because, you see…with three eyes…wrong to marry a goat?” C.J., bless her oversized brain, was trotting out her Shelby stories. Whomever she was addressing was either mesmerized by the tall gal's tall tales or fleeing the room in order to protect their sanity. The voices grew dim, and then I couldn't hear anything except for the pounding of my heart.

My hands searched the door in the darkness, finding only splinters. I pushed, first with my hands, then my back. Finally my feet. Not an ounce of give.

I rapped softly on the door with my knuckles. My heart rapped back, but no C.J.

“C.J.?”

Nothing.

“C.J.! Can't you hear me?”

By now the dead over in Mount Pleasant could hear me, but apparently C.J. could not. Unless—
my heart skipped a noisy beat—my dear friend, and soon-to-be sister-in-law, was no longer capable of answering.

They say that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. What they don't say is that it is darn hard living up to a proverb in utter darkness. I started by crawling away from the door, but soon discovered that the flooring beneath me was littered with nails and rough scraps of wood, even some broken glass. Safer, and much quicker, progress could be made by moving upright, scraping my lead foot sideways, pushing aside the debris as I went.

The air was stale and hot, reminding me of what it was like in the great pyramids of Giza that Greg and I visited on our delayed honeymoon. There, at least, there were overhead lights to illuminate the steps and a rope to hang on to. Here there were overhead cobwebs to drag through my hair, and the business end of nails and staples whenever I reached out to catch my balance. Funny how one's sense of balance, like one's hearing, dissipates in the dark. Or was that while nude? Was balance affected by nudity as well? Did darkness affect sanity? If I hadn't already been stark raving mad upon climbing into Alice's wooden wonderland, surely I was by now.

Ahoy there! What was that on the horizon.
Light? Perhaps another door? I moved faster, buoyed by hope that soon faded. The light was coming from a hole only the size of a quarter. And to get to it, one had to first squeeze into a leathery cone—no, not a cone, the warthog head! This was the same warthog head I'd caught Roberta Stanley peering through. I wiggled into place, until my left eye was lined up with the socket made empty during the Colonel's move to Charleston.

The boar's head reeked of preservatives and animal essence. It was like pulling a dirty sock over one's head, an activity in which I engage in only sparingly. But I could see down into the room. And I could see C.J.! And the Colonel. They appeared to be alone, except for the menagerie of mangy beasts mounted on the paneled walls.

Their voices were muffled by the thick skin of the warthog, but as long as I separated the thudding of my heart from the sound mix, I could hear most of what they said.

“Be sure and tell Miss Timberlake how much I appreciate the fruit basket. That woman is top drawer all the way. A real looker, if you ask me.”

“Ooh, Abby looks okay if you squint.”

If you squint?

“And a good sport too. Don't get me wrong, Miss Cox. Roberta Stanley was the love of my life,
but that boss of yours could really get my heart racing.”

“Only if it was attached to a Nascar entry.”

“Hey!” C.J. whirled. “What was that?”

The Colonel was clearly confused as well. “Perhaps an echo. These rooms are much too large to suit me. Now with Roberta gone—Miss Cox, are you seeing anyone?”

My future sister-in-law patted her dishwater blond hair with a hand the size of Rhode Island. “Shame on you, Colonel Humphrey.”

“I think you misunderstand me, ma'am. I merely wish to employ you.”

“You do? As what?”

“As my housekeeper. I know you sell antiques, but look around. Everything here is antique, including myself—har har. Who better to look after them? And if the title housekeeper bothers you, I'd be happy to change it to whatever you'd like. Domestic engineer? Har har.”

“How about curator? No, make that head curator.”

“Perfect. So it's a deal?”

“What would you pay me?”

“I'll double whatever you're making now, and medical coverage.”

“Dental too?”

“Okay, but not vision care. The so-called designer frames they sell these days are ridiculously priced. Designer this, designer that, what's the point of all this designer stuff? And you know what really takes the cake? Designer paper towels. How can something you use to wipe up spills and then toss in the garbage possibly be called designer?”

“Ooh, but I just love the ones with the blue ducks and tulips on the borders.”

“You're a hard sell, Miss Cox. Okay, I capitulate, you can get designer glasses. But only one pair a year. I'll have my lawyer review your benefits package with you. So then, we're all set?”

The big gal cocked her head. “Hmm. I'll have to give the little one a chance to top this offer. Can I get back to you in a couple of days?”

“Take your time. Worthwhile things are worth waiting for, my mama used to say.”

That did it. “She's taken,” I yelled, a half octave lower than normal in an attempt to disguise my voice.

The Colonel, bless his geriatric heart, looked like he'd seen a ghost. And C.J., the ungrateful turncoat, looked as confused as a hen that had been put to work incubating duck eggs and soon discovered that her faux progeny loved to swim. You could have knocked her over with a steel feather.

“That's right,” I bellowed, “this is your conscience speaking.”

C.J. was looking wildly around the room. “My conscience, or the Colonel's?”

“Wait just one cotton-picking minute,” the Colonel said. He raised his cane and headed straight for the warthog head.

In my haste to exit the warthog, I caught my hair on a snatch of metal webbing used by the taxidermist to retain the head's peculiar shape. I struggled to disentangle my hair, but in so doing thrust myself even farther into the head. With a loud groan the unlucky beast pitched forward, before ripping off the wall altogether. I felt a hard jolt, then a lesser bump, and then retreated back into darkness.

S
he's coming to,” I heard C.J. say. “Look, her beady little eyes are beginning to flicker.”

I purposely flickered my beady little eyes for a moment or two longer than necessary, before even attempting to sit. The foul-smelling warthog had apparently landed square across C.J.'s broad shoulders, and being a rather ancient specimen—the hoofed creature, not my employee—split in two, eventually depositing yours truly on the hardwood floor.

“How many fingers can you see?” the Colonel asked, and held up three digits so crooked that, to my beady eyes, they at first looked braided.

“Twenty-four,” I said, just to be obstreperous.C.J. pulled back one of my eyelids, as if that would tell her something. “Guess again, you silly goose. No one has twenty-four fingers. Not even Granny Ledbetter.”

“What is your name?” The Colonel was clearly concerned that I might sic a personal injuries lawyer on him.

“Wighelmania Ledbetter,” I said weakly. C.J.'s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “Auntie Wighelmania Ledbetter?” I'd learned early on in our friendship that the big galoot had an aunt with an even weirder name than Mozella, my minimadre's moniker.

“I'm one and the same,” I croaked.

“But you don't look a day over sixty, and my Auntie Wighelmania will be ninety in September.”

I sat up. “Thanks a lot, C.J. It's me, Abby, and I'm not even fifty.”

She grinned. “I knew it was you, Abby. Did you hurt yourself?”

“Nope. Thanks for breaking my fall.”

Now that he knew I was okay, the Colonel was not amused. “You've destroyed my warthog, Miss Timberlake. Do you know how much it will cost to replace it?”

“No, but I'd be happy to look for one on eBay.”

“I see. Will the one purchased on eBay have been shot by me—a single shot, mind you—while on safari to Tanzania with my first wife, Esmeralda?”

“Hmm, probably not.”

“Most assuredly not. Miss Timberlake, at the very least you can refrain from being a smart-aleck.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now tell me what you are doing in my house, and in that stuffed animal in particular.”

“Well, we brought you a fruit basket—”

“Abby, he knows.”

“He does?”

“I told him everything. But I made him promise not to tell anyone that I work for the CIA, and that you're my flunky.”

“I
am
?”

“Which still doesn't explain what y'all were doing in my house. Surely Roberta's murder is not of national interest.”

“With all due respect, sir, she was found on your property, which lies near the harbor. The entire coastline is of national interest.” Of course I felt terrible alluding to the dead in my boldfaced lie, but frankly, I am far too cute to spend time in the slammer.

“Abby,” C.J. whined, “you're supposed to let me do the talking.”

“Sorry, sir. Sometimes I get carried away.”

The Colonel, whose shoulders had been sagging in grief, stiffened.
“Sir?”

“Oops, did I say that?”

“Indeed, you did.”

“Apparently Agent Coccyx didn't tell you
everything.
”

C.J. laughed. “Ooh, Abby, you're so silly. That was Cousin Mortimer Ledbetter from Middlesex—”

“Ladies!” The Colonel's voice boomed like a cannon, rattling the windows. “Enough of this nonsense. You have until the count of three to explain your presence. One, two—”

“I found a skull in a gym bag that was in the storage shed I bid on Saturday and the two stupidest policemen who ever lived had me arrested but my husband got me out and then I learned the skull belonged to a female gorilla but before that your maid and maybe lover chased after me to the seawall and tried to tell me something very important but that night she was murdered and the police came to ask me questions again so I start thinking this must be connected somehow and asked more questions of my own and learned that you were a big game hunter who sold endangered animal parts to a broker in Hong Kong and then this very same broker's daughter has her life threatened so then I come back here to look for some answers and that's when C.J. bless
her oversized heart finds a secret passageway which I get trapped in and the next I know I land on top of her—” I started to black out.

“Bravo, Miss Timberlake. I do believe you hold the world's record for the longest sentence.”

I could tell C.J. was shaking her head just by the breeze it created. “Nuh-unh. You should read Joseph Conrad.”

The Colonel chuckled. “Actually, I have. It was reading the
Heart of Darkness
that inspired me to visit Africa. It was also my cure for chronic insomnia.”

“Hey,” C.J. said, “you don't sound mad anymore.”

“Sir,” I said, “I mean you, sir, Colonel, not her sir, because she isn't one, does this mean you won't call the police?”

“Let's just say I'm willing to put that on hold for a moment while I consider the situation at hand.” He rubbed his chin, his eyes half closed, as if his movements had been scripted for community theater. “Well, Miss Timberlake, I must say, you certainly have a problem. But before I address it, and what I think your options might be, I would like to make a few things perfectly clear.

“First, I stopped hunting over forty years ago when I realized that certain species were headed
for extinction. I resent any implication by Ms. Wou-ki that I might still be involved in illegal animal trade. And the second is, well—I think I know who killed Roberta.”