One Big Bat

by Risner, Fay

  “In bed,” Diane said.

  “Do you think it would be all right to wake her up and get her to help me?” Briceson asked rather meekly which pleased me.

  Whatever Diane was going to say never happened.

  A gangling framed man in a western getup slid out of the hole and landed on Paul sitting on the foot of the bed.

  As Paul tumbled to the floor, he yelled in a frantic voice, “Help me!”

  “Y'all get out of my way. I'm gettin' out of here,” growled the stranger, rolling away from Paul.

  The tall, thin man shot to his feet and started for the door. Paul gripped the bed and stood up. He jumped on the man and lost the broom as he wrestled with the man.

  I slid off the bed and picked up the broom. The broom as a weapon wasn't so funny now as I tried to figure out how to whop the guy as hard as he'd kicked me and at the same time miss my brother-in-law. I slipped this way and that, trying to keep from getting bumped as the men fought.

  “Briceson, get in here,” I screamed. So far Paul was holding his own in the tussling match.

  “Follow the voices,” yelled Diane.

  When Paul twisted the man's back toward me, I drew the broom handle back over my shoulder and swung. The smack the broom made when it connected with the back of the burglar's head was loud. The contact was right on, cracking the broom handle like a broken bat after hitting a home run.

  With satisfaction, I watched the intruder slumped to the floor. Seeing him lifeless was as good as I was going to feel tonight unless he had a heck of a headache when he came to. My thought as I slumped to the floor and leaned back against the bed was I'd got my revenge for what he did to my face.

  “You stay here,” ordered Briceson over his shoulder to Diane as he burst into the bedroom.

  “What took you so long, Briceson? Do I have to do everything by myself?” I scolded.

  Diane couldn’t stay away. By the time she reached the door, the noises had stopped. She peeked from around the door frame, afraid to come in.

  Briceson's mouth dropped open as he stared at the blood splattered war zone. He stepped over the fireplace poker, baseball bat, a broken broom and tennis racket to place handcuffs on the unconscious man.

  “Wasn't it nice of us to leave you the easy part? Do I have to do everything by myself when I'm wounded?” I quipped as the handcuffs clicked shut.

  Briceson actually looked concerned. “You look awful. What happened to you, Detective?”

  I shrugged. It hurt too much to talk, and my energy was draining from me.

  Paul picked up the top half of the broom handle. He aimed the broken end that looked like a spear at the trap door. “That man has been hiding in our attic.”

  Briceson jerked the man over and slapped his face to wake him. “What’s your name?”

  The intruder looked away.

  “You want to press trespassing charges against this man?” Briceson asked Paul.

  “Oh yes, for breaking and entering,” Diane said from outside the door, still peeking in.

  “How about assaulting a police officer and the house owner,” I added.

  “All right, then you’re under arrest. I’ll read you your rights,” said Briceson to the trespasser.

  “Briceson, I'm pretty sure this is, Jacob Longfellow, the murderer the sheriff department is looking for. You know the one that killed the turkey confinement owner,” I said. “So handle him cautiously.”

  Diane rushed to Paul, giving the guy on the floor as wide a berth as she could without tripping over her weapons. “How bad are you hurt?”

  “That guy gave me a wallop on the back of the head when I looked in the attic. He just now tried to get away from me when he dropped out of the attic and landed on me. Guess he heard the squad car siren and knew he was cornered up there.” Paul staggered, holding the back of his head. “Fighting with him didn't help me any. I'm dizzy.” Ashen faced, he wobbled until he plopped down on the foot of the bed.

  The bed shook, causing pain to vibrate through me. I groaned.

  “Sorry, Renee. I didn't mean to make you hurt any worse,” Paul apologized.

  The door bell rang.

  “That will be the ambulance,” Diane said as she limped away.

  The paramedics rolled a gurney down the hall and stopped at the bedroom door. When they looked in they decided that was as far as they wanted to take the gurney. With all the debris on the floor there wasn't any place to park. “Where do we start first?”

  “With Renee.” Paul pointed at me. “I think her nose is broken. She's lost a lot of bunch of blood. I'm just dizzy from the lump on the back of my head.”

  “My big left toe's broken I think from the way it hurts if you have time to look at it,” Diane said.

  Briceson suggested, “Mr. and Mrs. Logan, I can take you to the hospital in the squad car Mrs. Logan if the ambulance can handle the detective. You can sit up front with me and the prisoner in back. We'll drop him off at the police station on the way.”

  “Thanks,” the paramedic said.”That sure would help us out.”

  I was stuck in the hospital two days with surgery to my nose. Apparently, it was leaning like the Tower of Pisa toward my left cheek. Now once the swelling goes down and the bruising leaves, my face should look more like me.

  Paul was told to take it easy for a few days. He had a concussion, and Diane was hobbling around with a black boot on her foot until her toe mended which take weeks.

  The following weekend, as much as Paul hated to go up in the attic, he felt well enough to venture the climb. Armed with a tennis racket for bats and the flashlight, he slid open the trap door.

  He pulled himself up and flopped onto the attic floor.

  “Hey, Paul, you better flash the light around to make sure Longfellow doesn't have a friend hidden up there,” I called.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you have a weird sense of humor, Renee?” Paul snapped, peering out of the opening at me.

  To prove he was right, I grinned up at him.

  As much as Paul protested, I noticed afterward he waved his flashlight in every direction, searching in the dark corners before he ventured away from the opening.

  Diane climbed on the dresser and stood with her head in the opening as she watched Paul walk in a stooped position on the rafters.

  I stayed next to the dresser.

  The beam of the flashlight wavered here and there as Paul searched the area for bats. “I’ll be,” he gasped from a far corner of the attic.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did you find the bats?”

  Paul's voice sounded muffled, coming from a far corner. “As a matter of fact, I just about stepped on three dead bats. From the smell, I'd say they expired sometime back. Longfellow must have killed them.”

  “That's the first good thing I've heard about that man,” I quipped.

  Paul laughed. “You want me to hand them down to you, Diane.”

  “Don't you dare!”

  “All right, I'll lay the bodies by the outside attic door where I can get them later. Well, the nerve of that man. You’ll never believe what else I just found. That guy tapped our electricity. He had a small fan up here by a quilt he used for a bed. He must have been here a while.”

  “Mercy, that’s a creepy thought,” replied Diane.

  “I heard that fan start up one night and told myself it was the refrigerator,” I said.

  “I’ll carry this stuff over to you, Diane. You hand it down to Renee,” Paul said.

  He handed Diane the small fan. As she handed it to Renee, she looked irritated. “That burglar had a better fan than we do. His oscillates.”

  Paul came back to the opening. He handed down two flashlights. “He had light as long as the batteries lasted anyway.”

  “Actually, he didn't have one of those for very long. It was the one I threw at him just before his boot kicked me in the face,” I said.

  Diane inspected the flashlights. “The other flashlight may be the one I keep in t
he kitchen. I should check to see if it's still in the drawer.”

  On the next trip, Paul brought a quilt wadded up in his arms and handed it to Diane.

  She sputtered, “T -- this is just awful. My grandmother’s precious quilt. I kept it on the top shelf of the closet, because it's a keepsake. The nerve of that man helping himself to my grandmother’s quilt and getting it dirty.”

  As I spread the quilt, with decades old print squares and triangles, out on the bed to look at it, I said, “Hey, how did you get a quilt that belonged to our Indian grandmother? I don't have one.”

  “If I recall right, Mom said the first one of us girls to marry got the quilt since it was the only one she had,” Diane said. “I guess Indian Grandma wasn't a prolific quilter.”

  “So this belonged to our Indian Grandma.” I folded the quilt up. “Better you have it than me if it belonged to her. Mom always tries to poke our Indian heritage off on me.”

  “The quilt was not all Longfellow was guilty of taking,” said Paul with a chuckle. “I know what happened to the food you said was missing. There are wrappers from the lunch meat and empty chip bags up here.”

  We could hear Paul scattering items in the man's stash of garbage

  “I'll need a trash bag to put all this trash in.” He was quiet a second. “The nerve of that man!”

  “What is it now?” Diane asked.

  “He drank my beers,” Paul groused.

  “Well, at least now he knows it wasn't you and me that drank them,” Diane whispered to me.

  That made me chuckle.

  “I just found our cool whip box. It's empty now,” Paul exclaimed.

  “Longfellow probably bought those cigarettes I smelled him smoking with your car wash change,” I joked.

  “That's not all,” Paul said, appearing at the hole. “Remember that box of orange juice that you accused me of emptying, and another box you thought I took. Here is proof that I'm innocent.” Feeling vindicated, he handed Diane an empty orange juice box.

  Diane rolled her eyes at me. She knew it was going to be a long time before Paul quit rubbing in the hard time she had given him. If he ever did.

  Epilogue

  Diane's words kept ringing in my ears. “You're off duty when you're staying with us. That means you don't have to get up in the night to play cop around here.”

  Yeah! Right! I guess I can't blame my sister for getting it wrong this once. She didn't know she had a murderer living in her attic. How often does that happen?

  One night when Jacob Longfellow prowled around the neighborhood, thinking about breaking and entering to steal what he could carry off, he noticed the attic door open that Paul hadn't fixed. He climbed on the deck and stood on the table to hoist himself into the attic.

  Seemed like a good enough place to hide out rent free. He hadn't thought about the fact that Paul would eventually put a door over the attic opening and lock it.

  Not that the locked door was much of a problem when there was the attic opening in the smaller bedroom. He made himself at home on the main floor when Diane was out of the house and at night after we went to bed.

  He ate what he wanted, used the bathroom and even showered. By reusing the dirty towels already used by Paul and Diane, they never knew the difference.

  When he wanted to leave the house in the night, the man unlocked the front door and went on his excursions. He made sure to get back into the house before daylight so he'd be hid in the attic.

  If the owner of the turkey confinement buildings hadn't came in on Longfellow in his office, he probably wouldn't be dead now. Longfellow only meant to rob what cash he could find in the office, but he didn't want to be caught so he bashed Rudd's head in.

  Longfellow had used Diane's kitchen flashlight for his walk out in the country to the turkey confinement buildings. He got careless and forgot to turn the flashlight off as he passed my window on the way to the front door.

  I didn't have a chance to see what I thought was a peeking Tom, occupied like I was with the venetian blind. How he managed to slip passed our bedrooms unnoticed that night I'll never understand.

  I guess Longfellow could hear our conversations well enough to know he'd have to get out of the attic by the weekend. He knew once Paul found all the evidence of his staying there that he wouldn't be able to come back.

  The night I followed Longfellow to the bedroom he was flat on the floor, hiding between the bed and the dresser when I checked the room. After I went back to bed, it was his bad luck that he hurried to get through the attic opening and kicked the picture off the wall.

  The next time in his scramble to get hid, he let insulation spill out on the dresser. If we hadn't found Jacob Longfellow when we did, he'd have been gone by the time Paul went bat hunting on the weekend.

  About The Author

  Fay Risner lives with her husband on a central Iowa acreage along with their chickens, rabbits, goats and cats. A former Certified Nurse Aide at the Keystone Nursing Care Center in Keystone, Iowa, she now divides her time between writing books, working in her flower beds and the garden and going fishing with her husband in their boat.

  Fay writes books in various genre –a historical mystery series, a western series, an Amish series set in southern Iowa and two books for Caregivers about Alzheimer's. She uses 12 font print in her paperback books and 14 font print in her novellas to make them reader friendly.

  Her books have a mid western Iowa and small town flavor. She pulls the readers into her stories, making it hard for them to put a book down until the readers sees how the story ends. Readers say the characters are fun to get to know and often humorous enough to cause the readers to laugh out loud. The books leave the readers wanting a sequel or a series so they can read about the characters again.