“How do I turn the light down?”
“May I?” She crawled forward, reaching out her hand for the phone. He reluctantly set it on her palm. After touching the screen a few times, she brought up the dialer and turned the brightness almost to zero. “We just need enough to see by. Even the screen light uses up a lot of the battery.”
He didn't comment, neither arguing nor conceding.
“Okay.” She stood and turned around, finally able to see what she was doing. Toto walked in a circle around her feet, mimicking her movements, as if he were going to help her deconstruct this place. “Let's see how we get out of here.”
She scanned the room, looking at the shelves and the walls behind them. On the other side of the room, two walls were dirt. She whipped back to the wood.
“Okay. The wood goes up the ceiling. The dirt walls go to the outside edges of the house down here, but this wall … the one directly opposite the steps… is wood. Interesting.”
The planks were old. Cedar, maybe? They were rough from not being sealed and from years, or maybe decades, of being down in the cool, dry cellar space. Walking over, she touched the wall first, then pushed on it.
Her own shadow got in her way. Though she'd adjusted, and the light was a thousand times brighter than the dark, the illumination the phone provided was still dim. Joule stepped aside, getting better light on it, and then reached out and tested the wall, pushing on it again. She commented as she went, thanking God for an engineering degree.
“From what I saw before we ran down here, it looks like the cellar is in this corner of the house. And the house itself has outside walls, here, and here, and here.” She traced the dimensions above her head, making a line with her finger that ended at the thick post in the corner. It anchored that edge of the house above. Definitely old construction. The foundation was raised a little bit, if she remembered correctly. So she added, “The dirt walls down here are the edges of the houses and these two—” she pointed, “—are wood, holding back the dirt from under the house.”
Considering that fact, she traced her finger up one of the pieces of wood and then began knocking as she got higher. “Yep. This covers an entry into the crawlspace under the house!”
“Okay?” Jerry asked, as if to say what good was that?
“The cellar doors are blocked.” She turned, hands on hips. “The walls are dirt and unless we have a method to tunnel out, we’re not going to make it. Honestly, I'd be tempted to tunnel out right next to the cellar doors. But that’s the place most likely to be blocked.”
Because what would fall directly on the cellar doors and not also block the space beside them? They could tunnel out and be just as stuck as they currently were for the effort. Not a good bet. “However, if we head the opposite direction, then we can get under the house. From there, we should be able to get out.”
“Won't we just be trapped under the house then?” he asked, still not having moved from his seat on the bottom step.
Joule shook her head. “Crawl spaces have to have entries and exits.” At least, they did by modern housing codes, but she didn’t mention that. “There should be a doorway to the outside—probably small, but a door!”
“What if it's blocked?”
“It could be, but what if it's not? What if there's another place in the skirt where we can push our way through? And if we can't get out that way, we might be able to find a door up into the house. Some places have one. Lastly, if we really are trapped there, maybe we can bust our way up through the flooring.”
This time she could see Jerry's skeptical response.
“We can't get out that way.” She pointed to the cellar doors, still shut tight despite their removal of their brace system. “And you don't seem to think the Larkins are coming back to find us.”
When he tipped his head this time, she noticed the odd expression.
“What?”
But he only shook his head.
Joule decided it was best to ignore him. He wasn't going to be the brains of this operation. She could hope he would join her and do the work, but apparently she was on her own to get started. She was tall, but not tall enough. So she looked around and, spying the wooden toolbox under the steps, she headed over to drag it back.
Quickly she quit that effort, realizing it was far too full. But that was good. There had been hand saws, the little crowbar, rusty screwdrivers and more. All of which would be good for busting their way out of here.
She looked up where the wood met the reinforced ceiling above them. How much space was there under the raised foundation of this house? It might be a full crouching area, or merely enough room to army crawl. And the space she had to work in might depend on the size of the I-beams that held up the subfloor. But Joule corrected herself: A house like this probably wasn't constructed with MDF, non-squeak I-beams. And that might make it easier to break out of.
She emptied the toolbox, making it lighter, and began the work of dragging it across to the other wall. She wedged it into a space between two of the shelves, and looked again at the potatoes, root vegetables, and other boxes stored there. If she was feeling it, she might look inside them later.
Testing her weight, she stepped gingerly onto the box. Then, as she decided she trusted it, she reached upward, knocking on the wood again. She was surprised when one of the old one-by-eights fell off into her hand.
The board appeared to have been nailed in place once upon a time, but now she turned it over and saw the nails had been bent back, rounded and hammered down. The piece had been merely set in place, balancing by gravity, to make it look like it was still part of the wall.
This would make it easier to break through, she thought. Now that she had a hole, she could reach behind the other pieces and more easily pry them out.
“Can you help? Bring the phone?” she asked Jerry. She turned around carefully on her uneven perch, startled to see the light was already moving and he was handing it to her.
She lifted the dim screen and aimed it toward the hole, not wanting to put her hand onto a bed of rattlesnakes or rats. But as she looked into the now lit space and saw what was in there…
It wasn’t an animal.
Slowly, she turned and looked at Jerry. “You have got to be shitting me.”
49
Joule had reached into the opening and grabbed the package before she really thought about what she was doing. Now she stood there, holding a wrapped brick of what she was pretty sure was either cocaine or heroin.
As she turned around to face her trying companion, the look on Jerry's face told her all she needed to know.
“It looks like this isn’t much of a surprise to you.” She ground the words through her teeth and barely held back from throwing the brick at him.
In her imagination, it smacked him in the chest and exploded into a white cloud of accusation. But even as she envisioned her rage playing out that way, she also envisioned poor little Toto getting high on whatever this was. And then Jerry, too.
Sober Jerry was enough of a bitch to deal with.
She turned around and set the brick back down in its original position, as though that would erase her finding it and touching it. Then she turned back.
“What was that?”
Jerry shrugged.
Though she was tempted to get off the box, as it was slightly less than stable, Joule was currently enjoying being taller than Jerry. So she crossed her arms, cocked one hip out, and asked, “No, really. What is it?”
He shrugged again, but this time added, “I think it's cocaine.”
Another thought occurred to her. “Is it cut?” God forbid it was pure. If she’d thrown it at him, she might have killed one or all of them.
“I don't fucking know!” he replied.
“You don't know much, do you, Scarecrow?”
This time he blinked at her. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Oh dear God.” She was down here with her tiny kitten, trapped in a cellar with the leader
of the protests and—what? a kilo?—of cocaine.
Her brain was rapidly snapping the pieces together. Click. The heavy bolting on the hinges, the reinforced door, and the nice, new padlock over the very old green paint now made more sense. It wasn’t obvious enough to look like they had completely fortified the place. But it was enough to let her know now that, yes, they had done a good bit of it.
Click. The second thing that snapped into place was when she'd asked him if the Larkins would come home and let them out. This was why he wasn't willing to just say, of course they will. Because who would leave someone trapped in their cellar and not let them out after a disaster? Drug runners, that’s who.
Click.
“The other farm earlier—the one where we got the tractor—them, too?”
Jerry shrugged yet again. She remembered thinking it was a little odd that there was a farmhouse with no farm. There were no fields plowed and no animals mucking about, just open space that seemed to go fallow.
The last thing didn't fit quite so neatly, but it was a question she had to ask. “Are you part of the supply chain, Jerry?”
He shook his head quickly.
He wasn't. Thank God.
Joule huffed out a breath and listened as, beside her, Toto did it, too. That was fucking adorable, and she needed some fucking adorable right now.
Hell, she figured the drug runners probably didn't want Jerry any more than she did. He had a little too much God and not quite enough brains. “Then why were you there?”
“There?” He didn’t seem to understand the question.
“Where we met. On the other farm.” When he didn’t answer right away, she explained more of her thinking. “You’d driven there with your truck. After the first tornadoes hit.”
“Why were you there?” he asked. Not the most brilliant counter.
And Joule almost smacked herself in the face out of exasperation. He was going to require her answer. “Because I was trying to ride out the tornado in a ditch off Highway 183 when the funnel picked me and my friend up and threw us different directions. I woke up in a field east of that farm. I don't know how much later.”
“Whoa!” His mouth and wide eyes were equally open. “You were actually in the tornado?”
“Yes. Jerry.” She punctuated each word, because he still hadn’t answered her question.
“So why were you there on the farm, then?” He beat her to the punch, but Joule figured feeding him information might get him to return the favor.
“I started walking. I found a stream, and then I heard a truck on the road. I screamed for help, but they went past and didn’t see me. So I checked the farm for people and there you were.” She took a breath and steered back to the place she wanted to be. “So the question is, Jerry, you had a truck, and you picked that place to wait out the storm. Why?”
“I wanted to check it out.”
“Check what out?”
“I was just curious if the tornado had … revealed anything.”
“So you just drove to that farm to see if there was cocaine around and … got stuck?”
He sounded sullen this time. “Well, I didn’t expect another twister to steal my brand new truck, now did I?”
Obviously, he hadn’t.
“I didn't see anything there either,” she admitted. She sure as hell would have had a different reaction if the first farm had revealed taped up, plastic-wrapped bricks of drugs lying around instead of tuna cans, cereal, and sports drinks.
Jerry just looked at her, waiting for the next question. He wasn’t volunteering any information, though she couldn’t tell if he was specifically holding back or if he’d just run out.
She needed more. “What were you looking for? Were you going to steal a brick of cocaine and sell it yourself?”
He shrugged yet again.
Oh, good Lord. “Well, Jerry, this cements it. We have to get out of here. Give me your phone.”
“I thought we were supposed to preserve the battery.”
“We're gonna preserve it the best we can, Scarecrow. But we need it for this.”
“Stop calling me that!”
“Then stop acting like it!” She bit off the rest of her rant. “Sooner or later, the Larkins are going to come back and probably kill us both if they find us down here with their cocaine. So I hope you had a lot of battery when this started.”
His eyes lit up a little bit. “I had the phone plugged into the dash. I think it was almost at a hundred percent.”
She lifted the phone and looked. He was close. Good. “We’ll do everything we can to keep this running as long as we can. And we pray the Larkins don't come back. We have to find a way out of here. And this phone is our only light that I know of.”
If the Larkins found them, Joule was pretty sure she and Jerry would wind up dead. And if the phone battery died, they died, too.
50
“I need something else to stand on,” Joule told Jerry.
They both looked around but didn't see anything.
“Maybe they won't know we were down here,” he offered up hopefully.
She almost looked back over her shoulder to give him an incredulous glare.
How on earth would the Larkins not know that someone had been down there? If she and Jerry either tunneled their way out, broke their way out from the cellar doors somehow—which they didn't seem strong enough to do—or crawled out through the crawlspace under the house, over the top of the cocaine, they were going to leave a gaping hole. The board that had been pushed into place had been pushed from the cellar side. There was no way to leave this place as though they hadn't been here.
She didn’t reply, just looked forward.
The crawlspace still seemed like the best bet, but that meant going up and over the cocaine. It meant choosing a direction and a plan and actively trying to get out. The Larkins would know, likely right away, that someone had been in their stash.
Joule decided faster was better and reached up to grab the wood planking. She pulled and tugged at it, but the old stuff was sturdier than it appeared. The one plank that had come out was the only one that was loose, and she couldn't boost up and crawl through the hole until she'd made the opening wider. She wasn’t going to be able to tear it out with her bare hands.
Stepping down from the box, she reached to the floor and scooped up Toto in one hand. With the other, she pulled the sports drink from the pocket on her pants and took a swallow. Then, because she had nothing better and electrolytes for cats had to be about the same as electrolytes for humans, she poured a small bit into the cap and let Toto take a few sips. She screwed the cap back on and scooped the kitten back up, all while Jerry watched.
“It’s your turn up on the box,” she told him, hoping it didn't break under his heft. “I need you to rip the boards out and make the space wider.”
He gingerly climbed onto the box, smart enough to place his feet at the edges and not the middle, where he might go crashing through. He reached up and grabbed the wood tightly. He’d seen her struggling with it and put his weight into the tug.
He managed to get two of the pieces out. Though the hole was noticeably bigger, it was barely wide enough for Joule, and still not wide enough for him. Jerry tried again.
He looked down, checked his foot placement, and put his hands over his head. Grabbing at the bottom of a plank sticking down into the gaping opening, he rocked it back and forth. But it still didn't want to quite give, and he wound up snapping it, leaving harsh shards like evil teeth hanging down into the space.
“I can't get the side ones,” he said without turning around.
As he checked out the pieces, Joule walked back to the space under the steps and rummaged through the tools she’d left. A smallish, square-headed hammer that looked perfectly evil caught her eye.
“Try this.” She held it up to him and then stepped back as Jerry swung. He now quickly opened up the space between the shelves.
“All right. Got it.” His triumph was her
s, too.
“Can I look?” she asked.
He stepped down, but he asked, “Why do you call me Scarecrow?”
He stood in the center of the small space, looking down in the dim light over his flannel shirt, white T-shirt, and old jeans. “I don't think I look like a scarecrow. Is it the clothes?”
“No.” Now she felt bad. “It's a Wizard of Oz reference. Just like Toto.”
He nodded slowly but didn’t comment on her choice for him. “Well, that makes you Dorothy, and you're wearing the wrong shoes.”
She almost laughed. At least he got part of it. And he was being kinder to her than she deserved. If only she had the power to get back home, all along, she thought.
Turning to the task at hand, she scrambled up onto the box and peered into the hole. She’d already touched one of the bricks of cocaine, leaving her fingerprints all over it. She was stuck down here with no method of erasing the evidence, aside from maybe wasting her drink to wash them off.
She reached in and began shoving bricks aside, her brain still following the track of washing the plastic packages of cocaine in her sports drink. Would it turn the cocaine pink?
When she’d created a wide enough space, she waved her hand back toward Jerry, asking once more for the phone. This time, she put the flashlight on.
“Hey!” he quickly protested.
But she shook her head. “Just for a second. I’ve got to see what’s under here.”
She aimed the more powerful beam into the space under the house. Two or three rats scurried away from the light, though there were probably far more. But rats didn't bother her. As long as they weren't completely rabid, they would run away from people.
What she didn't see was any light from the outside. Even if there were gaps in the skirt on the house, they might not show up at night. But it wasn’t a good sign. There was no obvious door to the crawlspace or any obvious weak area to break out of.
For a moment, she considered trying the cellar doors again, but she dismissed the thought. They had done everything they could, and the doors wouldn’t open. Unless someone had come home—someone they hadn't heard, who also had maybe gone into the house and hadn't heard them—no one had moved whatever was blocking the doors. They wouldn’t be getting out that way.
The Tempest Page 21
