Some of the boys at the bar found it hard to understand, but Earl still had feelings for his wife. There were a few good years, especially the ones when Earl had a well-paying job as a truck driver before the company went bankrupt. He’d saved a little money, certainly not a fortune, but it was enough to buy the Pirate’s Den and start his own business, something he’d always wanted to do. At first, Marilyn would drop by in the evenings and chat with him and the customers. She liked having someone to talk to living out in the country like they did. But she didn’t like the taste of alcohol, never did, and as time passed, her evenings at the bar ceased altogether. Instead, Marilyn stayed home and ate…and ate. It hadn’t really bothered Earl that much when his bride began to put on the pounds, Earl liked his women with a little meat on their bones, but when the flab around her middle started stacking up like firewood, and pleasingly plump turned to grossly obese, Earl found himself avoiding his wife as much as possible. Marilyn made no attempt to curb her calories. Any cooking done in the house, when she had the energy, was mostly pies and cakes with a double batch of brownies for the weekend. Suggestions of a diet were met with “You could lose a few pounds yourself, ya know,” which Earl had to admit, was true.
Over the years, her mood and temperament had changed from fun loving and quick with a laugh, to one of grouchiness and constant criticism for not providing her with the finer things in life. But Earl continued to cling to the memories of their happier days and had promised himself that he would care for Marilyn as best he could for as long as she needed it, despite her moods and tonnage. That didn’t necessarily mean that he wouldn’t stray a little in the sex department if the opportunity presented itself. He might be getting on in years but he did get the urge now and then. The sight of those shapely female figures swinging their little butts around in front of the jukebox or bending over the pool table had caught his eye on several occasions. Thinking back, he could still visualize that one little filly that got so drunk last Thursday night, the young one in the short denim skirt.
*****
Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. Melissa opened her eyes. The light at the rim of the cellar door was brighter now, barely perceptible but definitely brighter. The sun would be up soon. She’d lost track of how many times she had closed her eyes during the night and counted out the seconds that added up to minutes before first light, but it helped to pass the time. At one point, she had made a silent vow to never again complain about mornings whether it was for early school buses or her chores on the farm or her mother urging her to get ready for church on Sunday. Never before had a morning taken so long to arrive or looked so good. Never in her eighteen years on earth had she spent a more miserable night, shivering, thirsty, and her empty stomach now among the top three priorities of the new day, coming in right behind escape and a big drink of water. Sleep had come in snippets at best, her aches and pains denying any comfort, the intermittent rustle of leaves snapping her awake, and the ever present sense of dread that her rapist could return at any moment and finish her off. God, the thought of dying in this hole, cellar, or wherever she was, was unthinkable. And what kind of hole was she in anyway? She’d thought about it a lot during the night. If it was old fashioned root cellar, wouldn’t there be more shelves? Melissa couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when Grandma Millie had taken her down the steps of her own root cellar and proudly pointed out all the food that was stored there. There were three tiers of shelves if she remembered right, all lined with things like carrots and squash and crockery filled with sauerkraut. Bins were piled high with potatoes while onions hung in bunches from hooks nailed into the corner posts. Mason jars packed with something red—beets she supposed—took up one entire shelf. Seemed like there was some squash and turnips too.
But with the exception of the single plank on the back wall, there was none of that in Melissa’s cellar. And Granny’s cellar had a mound of dirt on top, not a hard metal door like this one. So, not a root cellar then. It could only be a storm cellar, a shelter from tornadoes, common in Oklahoma. Shelter? Melissa thought of the irony. It’s sure not a shelter for me, more like a grave. She shook her head of the thought. Alright then, it’s a fraidy hole. So why are there no people around? Nobody would spend the money to make a fraidy hole and not build it close to the house. It wouldn’t make sense. So why didn’t she hear anyone; no voices, no tractors firing up for a day in the fields, no trucks going out to check the cattle, not even a barking dog? Either the people who lived here were gone for the day or…no one lived here, and maybe not for a long time either. The only sounds so far had been the traffic from a road somewhere, and not much of that. The other sounds, the ones in the leaves on the floor, had become so numerous that Melissa had finally figured out what they must be, what was making that erratic rustling, scurrying noise all during the night; not an evil imp, not a vampire with blood-stained fangs, no animals to bite her toes off while she slept. Mice, it had to be field mice, a perfectly logical explanation. Not that having a mouse run across her bare foot wouldn’t scare the bejesus out of her, but just knowing what was back there, back in the darkest part of the fraidy hole, and she was pretty sure of it by now, was a gargantuan relief. Mice were common around a farm and Melissa was a farm girl. Seeing a mouse in a grain bin was like seeing a cow in the pasture, they were ubiquitous, especially on the Parker place as Albert would not allow a cat on the property, mouser or not.
“Sneaky little bastards, they’re always under your feet,” was her daddy’s feeling about cats. Melissa had a cat once. It had appeared from nowhere—as cats tend to do—and was concentration camp thin. Melissa fed it milk and table scraps—no way would Albert spend money on cat foot—until the cat looked reasonably healthy, its coat of light orange fur as shiny as new copper. Not a day went by that Albert didn’t cuss the cat, even kicking at it a few times, and when it failed to appear for its regular feeding one morning, Melissa knew, but couldn’t prove, that her dad had done away with her pet. When she accused him of the dastardly deed, Albert denied it, but he wouldn’t look her in the eye either.
The more Melissa thought about her cat, the angrier she became. It began in her belly, moved up, and stuck in her throat. All at once, she let it go, throwing her head back and screaming at the concrete ceiling. “My dad-dy,” she spat, drawing it out as if she could yank the word from her mouth, toss it to the floor, and stomp it, “is one sorry SON OF A BITCH! It felt good to say it and she felt better for doing so, but it would do no good to cry about it now; she had to get back to the problems at hand.
“Yep, that’s what I got, mice, no doubt about it,” she said aloud, her voice now calm and even. At this stage of her captivity, Melissa, having grown accustomed to the echo in her tiny chamber of horrors, was speaking all her thoughts aloud. Sometimes she answered her own questions, lunacy to some, but in her case, it was the closest thing to having someone to share her misery. As if on cue, a movement caught her eye, and there it was, scampering along the base of the wall, barely noticeable, as it dashed toward the stairs where Melissa sat.
“Ah ha! I see you, you little bugger.” The rodent stopped, head up, nose and whiskers twitching, homing on the sound, sensing the air for danger.
“You want out little fella? C’mon, over here to the steps. Look, there’s a crack at the top, just your size. Go for it.” The mouse would have none it, no matter the sincerity of the invitation, and did a u-turn back to the shadows. Melissa allowed herself another smile, one of the few since her imprisonment.
“All right, now I have some real company down here, even if you are only a mouse.” A scene from an old movie came to mind, The Bird Man of Alcatraz starring Burt Lancaster. A man in a stark cell, almost like her little prison but with better light, had befriended a fallen bird. Birds became his passion and made his time in prison more tolerable. Melissa wasn’t sure if she could make friends with a mouse though. She took one last look through the crack and descended the stairs.
“
Okay, mouse, I doubt that I’ll be here long enough for us to become best friends, but you should have a name anyway. But not Mickey, that’s way too corny and besides, you look like a girl to me. How about Lulu? What do you think? Say again? I didn’t hear that, but I know you can hear me. Tell you what, if Lulu is fine with you, sit tight and don’t make a sound. All right then, Lulu it is. Now I don’t want to be rude, us having just met and all, but I can’t sit around and talk to you all day, I’ve got work to do.”
Returning to the top of the stairs, Melissa took a wide stance, her back solidly against the door, and pushed with her legs, for what seemed like the millionth time, but with the same results. The door would not move beyond the two to three inches it had on the very first time she shoved it.
“Well, shit,” she said, her frustration growing with every attempt. Again and again, over and over, bang, bang, bang the door slamming against the rod or the bolt or the lock or whatever the hell was holding it on the other side. Another thought. “Maybe someone will hear the noise and take a look.”
Wham! Wham! Wham! Pushing, pushing, pushing, until her aching ribs could take no more, her heaving chest aggravating the injury. “Okay, Lissa, take a blow. You got all day. Lulu?” she said, calling to the back of the cellar. “You wouldn’t happen to have a glass of water back there would you? Huh, didn’t think so. Water, that’s what I need. All right, from here on, water is going to the top of my priority list. So now that water has precedence, what should you do about that Lissa?” She had no idea of course, but stared out the crack beneath the door, hoping for inspiration. The sun itself was not yet visible, the angle was wrong, but as she was about to go back to her cot and rest awhile for another go at what she had now dubbed as The Great Escape, a tiny gleam of light appeared. There, right in front of her, not an inch away, was a single drop of dew clinging to a blade of grass, catching the light, a pinpoint of brilliance that to Melissa, looked for all the world like the eye of God.
Easing her index finger out and oh-so-carefully touching it to the dew, she brought the moisture to her tongue. The gesture was mostly symbolic, doing nothing to actually quench her thirst, but that minuscule bit of liquid, the coolness of it, the touch of it, made it more than just a drop of water, it was a drop of hope. And there were others, four, five, six, hanging there, just beyond her fingers.
“I need something, a stick maybe.” She found one, about six inches long, and with smooth bark. It lay next to the wall where she had seen the mouse. She inspected it, then using the hem of her shirt, wiped it down, hoping the mouse hadn’t peed on it. She went back to the stairs for another try. The stick didn’t work very well, dropping more water than it held. After a few futile attempts, she gave up as most of the dew had evaporated anyway.
“Well, that was something at least, wasn’t it Lulu? By the way, what are you drinking? How are you staying alive down here?” She tried to remember if her biology class had anything about field mice and what they eat. “I think you eat seeds, grain for sure, but what about bugs? There’s no seed down here, none that I know of anyway, so are you wining and dining on insects and worms. You like worms, Lulu? How about centipedes? Bound to be a few centipedes around. Question is, could I eat one if I was starving, or a worm?” She shuddered at the thought of something alive and wiggling on her tongue. Then, from some dark recess of her brain, another thought. What about the mouse? There’s an appetizer for you. She put her hand to her mouth, the mere idea of eating a rodent making her stomach roll. Yuck! Definitely a last resort, definitely.
Her thoughts returned to the door, the maddening door that refused to move. She could see a hasp, or part of one, midway down the length of the metal. It was about two inches wide, also metal, a very study metal, with no hint of giving way. What was holding it? That was the big question. And how in the world could she knock whatever it was loose when she couldn’t even see it?
“Let’s think about this Lulu. I need a tool of some kind, something to bend, something to reach out and over the top of the door so I can take a few whacks at whatever is keeping the latch closed. Any ideas? No, no, a stick won’t do, you silly thing. We don’t have a stick bent like that. So, what do we have to work with? We got a jar, we got an army cot, we got a chair, a few skinny sticks, and a lot of leaves. That about cover it girl? What’s that? You say that if it’s a padlock up there, were screwed anyway? Kind of wish you hadn’t brought that up. How bout’ we take a look at this ratty old lawn chair?”
The chair looked to be a Made-in-China Walmart special with frayed green and gold webbing that had seen better days. The aluminum frame was twisted and bent and one of the plastic arm rests had a crack through the middle, but all in all, it looked sturdy enough to hold someone of reasonable mass. Melissa inspected the design. There were three main sections of tubing forming the “legs”—two U-shaped for the front and rear and one more for the back rest. A couple of shorter pieces bracing the contraption together, should have been fired long ago for dereliction of duty. A series of rivets held the framework more or less intact and it was the rivets that got the girls attention.
“These joints look weak to me, Lulu,” she declared.
She put the chair on its side and placed one bare foot on the front section, then got a good grip on the upper leg of the front U and pulled. The chair held.
“Oh, c’mon you piece of crap, let go.”
Another yank, this time putting her back into it. With a sudden snap, the arm piece broke away.
“That’s more like it. Now the other side”
Another yank, harder still, ignoring the pain in her side. Snap! Two more jerks while standing on the seat and “YES”.
Proudly, she held the aluminum tubing over her head as if she had just won an Olympic medal. She then did a little circle dance, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Another sharp pain reminded her to stop such foolishness and she wondering if a rib were cracked. Sitting on the cot, the celebration over, she held her prize, turning it over and over in her hands, thinking.
After a few minutes, “I got an idea, Lulu.”
She placed one side of the U on the floor, steadied it with her right foot, and using her weight, pushed on the other side. There was a satisfying give to the metal so that instead of a ninety degree angle, she had something closer to a forty-five.
“Let’s give it a try,” she said, climbing the stairs. She slipped the tubing through the crack and then rotated it to an upright position. She swept the tube back and forth over the hasp, but encountered nothing, and brought it back inside.
“Angle’s wrong.”
This time she used the wooden stair steps for leverage, wedging the tube between two of them, and made an adjustment, increasing the bend.
“Little more, little more, oops, too much, back a little... ”
The thin aluminum, unable to cope with the strain, cracked and broke, the piece tumbling down the steps, one hop, two, hitting the floor and settling in the leaves, almost buried. Exactly like Melissa Parker.
Chapter 14
Harley was hungry. The sun was up, his dog bowl was empty, and Lester was still in bed, snoring. Something wasn’t right, the feeding routine interrupted. The dog took action, strolled to the bed, and gave Lester the cold nose, right on the lips. The sheriff gave a half-hearted swipe at whatever was disturbing his slumber, his sleep-fogged brain guessing it was a housefly. With no further response, Harley gave him some tongue, wet and slobbery, leaving a wide swath of dog drool across Lester’s cheek.
“Oh, damn, what?” Lester cried out, wiping his hand through the slime. “Harley, you sum bitch.” Lester grabbed a corner of the sheet and wiped at the saliva. “You’re flirting with the dog pound, you know that don’t you?” Harley did not reply.
Awake now and in the bathroom, Lester called out, “Did you not see me come in late last night? Hell, I get what, three, four hours sleep, and here you come along, licking dog germs all over me. I hate to think where that tongue’s been. Are you listening
to me out there?”
The dog was hanging on every word, but only for the ones he recognized like hungry or go. Until then, he would wait and watch.
Lester went to the closet for a clean uniform, his last one having been thrown in the washer in hope of getting the blood stains out. He thought he remembered his wife saying to use cold water for blood and that’s what he’d done, hoping he hadn’t ruined it. The money for a new uniform would come out of his own pocket. That was just plain wrong, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it except complain to the county commissioners. He made a mental note to do just that at the next opportunity.
In the kitchen, he put in grounds for a full pot of coffee thinking he would need the caffeine for a jump-start and to make it through the day. He gave the dog a look.
“You hungry?”
Harley heard his favorite sound, sprang to his feet and did a few quick head rubs on Lester’s leg, hoping the man would stay focused and get him a can of meat from the cabinet and not the dry stuff. The kibble was tolerable, but barely. The show of affection was working (as it did every time). Lester had a can opener in his hand and with a few quick turns of the handle, Harley had his first meal of the day, beef chunks in gravy was how the label described it. The bowl was licked clean before the empty can made it to the trash.
“All right dog, you quit botherin’ me now. I got work to do.”
Lester poured a cup of coffee and took a chair at the kitchen table next to the wall phone, and entered the number for the Parker place from the Boise City Area directory. Imogene, her voice weak and quivering as to be almost inaudible, confirmed that Melissa was still unaccounted for with no word of any kind. Lester assured her that the Office of the Sheriff was doing all it could and that he was calling in the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation today. Lester thought he heard a thank you before the line went dead but he wasn’t sure.
Fraidy Hole: A Sheriff Lester P. Morrison Novel Page 10
