The third door down was the vegetable cooler and Sadie pulled up on the handle to open the heavy door. She shivered in the cool air as she stepped inside and reached up to pull on the chain connected to the single lightbulb. The storage room lit up, showing a less than impressive array of miscellaneous vegetables in open boxes along most of the shelves that ran the length of the room. A rank smell caused her to crinkle her nose—someone had left cabbage around for a little too long. More appropriately, they had likely left everything in here too long. A woman who didn’t know how to cook wouldn’t know how to rotate vegetables the right way either. Shame.
The door shut with a thud that made her jump and turn around. It was heavy, and likely on a spring hinge that would ensure the door closed on its own accord so the cool air stayed in. But she tested the handle to make sure it would open, which it did. Relieved that she wouldn’t be stuck inside, she ran her hands up and down her arms in an attempt to erase the goose bumps that had popped up all over her skin. It wasn’t exactly cold, not like a refrigerator, but compared to the kitchen, which was on the warm side, the vegetable pantry was a definite change in temperature.
Sadie scanned the shelves, noting that she would definitely need to add fresh produce to her ever-growing grocery list. Though she had a long repertoire of recipes, not one of them called for limp cabbage, rubbery celery, or mushy acorn squash. Mrs. Land must have just kept what they were going to use in the refrigerator, basically ignoring this walk-in all together. However, despite its limitations, on a shelf to her right she found onions and next to them a small open box holding several papery bulbs of garlic. As a whole they looked a bit frightening, but after picking through them, Sadie found some of both that would work just fine—though she’d want to be sure and have some fresher ones picked up before she fixed lunch. As she picked up the onion, her eyes moved to something wedged behind the box. Something long and black and non-vegetative.
She moved closer and then reached forward, almost touching the object before a prickling of recognition made her pull her hand back and suck in a breath. The poker?
Immediately she told herself it couldn’t be the poker, what would it be doing here? And yet in the next instant she was moving boxes until she could see the full length—brass handle and all. It was the poker—or at least a poker. But what poker other than the one used to hold John Henry to the wall would be hidden in the vegetable pantry? Hidden anywhere for that matter. Grant had presumably gathered all of them up yesterday—and yet one was right here, hidden behind the garlic.
The cold was forgotten as she let her eyes travel slowly down the three-foot length of metal. The handle was just as she remembered it sticking out of John Henry’s chest, and the shaft ended in a deadly-looking point, with a barbed hook four inches from the end—exactly like the others Grant had laid out on the floor of the library. She tried to imagine how someone managed to rip that hook back out of John Henry’s chest, but the thought made her sick so she pushed it aside as a rush of adrenaline heated her skin.
She had to call the police—they would have to take her seriously now. With the onion still in one hand, she backed toward the door. The history of disappearing objects and people in this house made her want to throw caution to the wind and lay hold of her evidence, but there might be fingerprints or DNA and she didn’t want to tamper with it. Just before reaching the door, she turned, pulled up on the handle and pushed against the weight of the door with her shoulder.
It didn’t budge.
She took a step back, pulled on the handle again and pushed a second time, using all her weight and strength. It was a heavy door, and she was no gladiator, but when she tried to push it open a third time without success, she began to get nervous. It had opened without a problem when she’d tested it a minute earlier. She backed up and looked along the seam of the door, wondering if there was a latch or something on the inside. But she saw nothing. She jiggled the handle, pulled and then pushed, shook it, then slammed her shoulder against the door with a grunt, but nothing happened. Heat flushed through her as she realized that she was locked inside. The next thought that entered her mind was whether she was locked in by accident or design?
Chapter 22
~
It was frightening to think that someone would want to lock her inside, but she could not discount it anymore than she was willing to see only that possibility. It could very well be a sticky door that the staff knew to be cautious of. Never mind that she’d tried the door when she first entered the walk-in and it had opened without a problem.
She took a breath to calm herself, determined to be rational, and then knocked on the inside of the door. “Hello?” she called. “Hello? I’m stuck in here, please open the door!” She placed her ear against the cold metal in hopes of hearing something on the other side, but either no one was there, or the thick door prevented her calls for help from getting through to the other side. She growled deep in her throat. This was so annoying. She wasn’t scared, really—not about being inside the cooler. It wasn’t cold enough that it would kill her, but being in here was keeping her from the things she had to do—report the poker, finish breakfast, cook the crumpets. She jiggled and pushed and pulled the handle and shoulder-slammed the door for another five full minutes, until her shoulder was aching and her breath was coming in puffs and she finally admitted that there was no way out other than someone on the other side of the door letting her out, which naturally led to the reminder that someone may have wanted to trap her in the first place. But why they would want her locked in a cooler instead of making breakfast was just bizarre. “There’s crumpet batter in the oven!” she yelled, banging her fist against the door. “I’ll be madder than a plucked hen if it ends up going to waste!”
When even rage didn’t get the door to open, she finally let out a breath of surrender, all the more aggravated by the fact that she’d found the poker and couldn’t tell anyone. That thought gave her pause. If the poker was in the vegetable pantry, then someone put it here. Anxiety finally began to take root and she looked at the locked door again. Since yesterday afternoon nothing had happened as she’d expected it to and she and Breanna had encountered one strange thing after another. Was something happening on the other side of the door? Panic raced through her at the realization that Breanna was now alone in a house with a murderer on the loose. A murderer that hid weapons and locked kindhearted women in vegetable pantries. She swallowed and turned back to the room. Maybe there was some other way out.
A quick glance showed there was an air vent next to the single lightbulb on the ceiling, but although people made it look easy in the movies, Sadie couldn’t fathom how she’d get up there or through that hole. She bent over to scan the back of the wooden shelves, thinking maybe some kind of hatch or something could be behind them. She scanned the right side first, where she’d found the onions and the poker, starting at ground level and working her way up to her tiptoes so she could see on the top shelf. She found nothing but old produce. The back wall had a thick line of various sized metal pipes running across it, but no alternate exits.
On the left side she started at the top, scanning the wall behind each shelf as she made her way to the ground. There was
no hatch, access panel, or call button there either, but there were several boxes shoved underneath the final shelf, pushed against the
wall. She shook her head as she righted herself. In Colorado that would have earned a health department violation—you couldn’t put any food items on the floor. Of course home owners would get away with it. Did they need a commercial license to run an estate? she wondered.
She turned away from the boxes before pausing and turning back. There was something not quite right about them. She bent down again and looked at the boxes more closely, trying to determine what it was that had caught her attention. The first thing she noticed was that one box was for toilet paper—not something one would expect in a vegetable pantry, and as she looked closer she realized it wasn’t quite
square with the floor. Neither was the box next to it, or the box next to that one. They were all a little helter-skelter and didn’t seem pushed all the way back. There were four boxes in all, and they covered more than six feet of floor space, but not a one of them was pushed against the wall or sitting flat. There were also two boxes of toilet paper and two boxes with no name on them at all, just a series of numbers—two sets of identical boxes. None of them seemed to belong in the pantry and she thought back to the toilet paper rolls she’d seen scattered around the closet where she’d found the bottle rings.
Hesitation seemed a bit ridiculous at this point so she grabbed the first box with both hands and pulled, not expecting it to be empty. But it was, and the force she’d used to pull sent her scrambling backward into the shelves on the right side. The box in her hand wasn’t only empty, it was cut in half. She looked to where she had pulled it from the floor and felt her blood chill as the same black leather shoes she’d seen yesterday from beneath the curtain now lay unveiled, the toes pointing toward the ceiling of the vegetable pantry.
Sadie had just found John Henry.
Chapter 23
~
Help me!” Sadie screamed as she ran for the door and began pounding again, this time with far more fervor. “Please,” she screamed, her racing heart making the cold room of no consequence. “Please help me!”
As with her earlier attempts to call for help, no one answered her and no one came to her rescue. She felt her throat thicken as tears rose in her eyes. This was no time to give in to a good cry, but another look over her shoulder at those shoes made it even harder to swallow and she clenched her eyes shut as if that could somehow make everything go away. But the attempt at denial did no good; she was still locked in a vegetable pantry with a corpse and the weapon used to kill him. If that wasn’t something set to trigger anyone’s sensibilities to the breaking point, she didn’t know what was.
She banged on the door again. “Please help me,” she yelled as loud as she could, but more than ever her words seemed to be sucked into the very walls of the storage room. She had no way of knowing if anyone on the other side could even hear her through the insulation. Her fist was throbbing from where she’d hit the door so many times. She had to calm down and try to think rationally.
“Think,” she told herself. “Push away the emotion and just think this through.” She closed her eyes and focused on taking deep breaths, hoping to calm herself. Once she was breathing and thinking normally she once again considered her situation and prioritized what she needed to do.
It was a silly exercise since her only priority was to get out of here. It was so early in the morning, and no one other than Austin had been in the kitchen—Austin! Sadie opened her eyes. Would he have come back and locked her inside the vegetable pantry?
Maybe. He had been so antagonistic in the library yesterday, then the inspector said someone had told them the tip was ridiculous, and now, after talking to him in the kitchen, Sadie was a prisoner. She had to get out of here! But how?
Her whistle!
She frantically dug it out of her pocket, smiled gratefully that she’d thought to bring it, and brought it to her mouth. After taking a deep breath, she blew out all the air, immediately gasping at the shrill sound that echoed off the walls of the cooler. She put her hands over her ears and winced at the lingering ringing. In the process the whistle fell to the floor.
“Holy smokes,” she whispered, almost unable to hear herself over the ringing. That had not worked out the way she’d thought it would. She looked at the whistle on the floor, feeling betrayed.
Unless she could find some earplugs hiding among the rancid-looking rutabagas, she’d have to come up with another solution. Though she considered leaving the offensive whistle on the floor, she picked it back up and shoved it in her pocket—committing to think hard before using it again.
In desperate need of a better solution, she turned back to the room and scanned it once again in hopes of finding something that could help her—though she hadn’t any idea what it would be. She tried not to look at the shoes or think about the rest of John Henry hidden beneath the boxes, but it was nearly impossible not to look. Her chest tightened as she stared at the shoes and finally realized why it had smelled so funny when she’d come in. The thought made her stomach churn and she forced her eyes away from the decomposing corpse and tried again to find a solution to her problem. She looked at the air vent again and rejected it again, then scanned the walls and found nothing but pipes for a second time.
Pipes?
Pipes led somewhere, and they were metal, meaning they would clang and echo if struck. Didn’t she live in a house with pipes that sang whenever the sprinkler system turned on? If she could make enough noise, counting on the reverberating metal to help her do so, then certainly someone would come to investigate.
Her eyes were drawn to the poker—the only other metal object in the room. No, she told herself, unwilling to compromise the evidence. But after a quick look through the shelves—avoiding looking at John Henry—she felt she had no choice. She wrapped the apron around her hand so as not to get her own prints on the weapon, and then stood on her tiptoes in order to reach up and pick up the poker by the handle. It wasn’t very heavy. Gripping the poker firmly, she walked to the edge of the left-hand shelves—only a foot from the box covering John Henry’s head—took a breath, and hit the poker against the pipes as hard as she could. The result was fantastic; in fact she could see the pipes vibrate at the impact and her ears rang some more as the poker reverberated in her hands. After waiting for the tinny sound to disappear, she hit the pipes again, cringing at the throbbing in her ears.
And again.
And again.
And again.
She continued hitting the pipes every fifteen seconds or so for nearly five minutes, until her arms felt as though they were going to fall off and she felt sure she’d permanently damaged her hearing. Her brilliant idea no longer seemed so brilliant but she kept going if for no other reason than to keep her mind off where she was and who she was with. She was breathing hard and feeling sufficiently discouraged when she thought she heard someone at the door. She ran for it and began screaming again as she pounded on it with her free hand.
“I’m in here!” she yelled. “Help me!”
There was no answer, and not wanting to miss her chance of alerting someone, she lifted the apron-wrapped poker in her hand and hit it against the door. “I’m in here,” she said. “In the vegetable pantry.”
This time she was certain that she heard someone. “I’m here!” she shouted again, hitting the door a second time and realizing that each time she hit it, she made a dent in the sheet metal. She cringed, feeling bad about the damage she was inflicting, and yet she lifted her hand again to hit it just as the door opened.
Her own strength caused her to stumble through the door, poker in hand as she tried to regain her balance. Unfortunately she was unable to counteract the laws of physics working against her and she tripped over the bottom seal of the door, falling hard onto the tiled floor of the hallway outside the pantry door. Pain shot through her hip and shoulder, causing her to cry out as she rolled onto her back, her eyes clenched in reaction to the pain radiating through the left side of her body. After a couple of seconds she opened her eyes to look up into the glowering face of Austin Melcalfe.
Chapter 24
~
Sadie scrambled backward until she met up with the wall, then placed one hand on it to help her to her feet, the muscles of her body screaming in protest. The other hand, the one holding the poker, she held out in order to keep Austin at bay.
Austin lifted his eyebrows. “Was that you making that incessant banging noise? You’ve managed to awaken the entire household and it’s not even seven.”
“You!” Sadie said, her mind racing. “You locked me in there, didn’t you?”
Austin’s eyebrows rose. “What?” he questioned, then looked back at the door of the
vegetable pantry which was now closed. “Why on earth would I lock you in the cooler?”
“You’re the only one who was in the kitchen. I went to get a green pepper out of the pantry and someone locked me inside.”
Austin was silent, then looked at the poker. “And found a poker to defend yourself with?”
Sadie looked at the poker as well, remembering that it was a murder weapon and that John Henry was still in the cooler. Suddenly Manny appeared behind Austin’s shoulder. “Lord Melcalfe, I . . .” he said, taking in the scene that Sadie admitted didn’t look very good. “Mrs. Hoffmiller?”
“Manny,” Sadie said, gratefully. “Call the police. Someone locked me in the vegetable pantry and I—”
“I believe you said I was responsible for locking you in the pantry,” Austin cut in, his voice calm, although his face showed his irritation. “Someone implies that it could have been anyone with access to the kitchen, which, as you’ve proven, can be accessed by anyone.” He held up a pen. “I did find this in the latch of the door—but I certainly didn’t put it there.”
Aha, he was already working on a defense. Could a pen really be responsible for locking her in there? She looked at the handle long enough to see that it could work—the pen would keep the handle from being lifted. Sadie glared at Austin but then looked at Manny again. “I found John Henry.”
Both Manny and Austin showed surprise and looked immediately at the cooler door. Austin moved toward it. “Don’t open it!” Sadie barked, causing him to pause and look at her as though she were completely deranged. “Fingerprints,” she said, only realizing once the word was spoken that if she truly believed Austin was the one who locked her in, it would only be his prints on the handle anyway. She looked at Manny again, pleading with her eyes for him to do what she asked. “Please call the police; tell them we’ve found the body.” She looked down at the poker she was still holding. “And the murder weapon. Ask them to send a real detective this time.”
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