What Are You Wearing to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I slammed on the brakes. We fishtailed on the gravel. I fought the wheel and managed to roll into a pine tree instead of the child. I was shaking too hard to move.

  Martha scrambled out. “What are you doing out here, young lady?”

  Anna Emily held up her arms. “Can I go home with you?”

  “You certainly can. What do you mean by going out of the house in the middle of the night? Without even a coat!” She picked up the child and wrapped her inside her own coat so tightly that she squealed. Martha brought her back to the car and held her in her lap while I backed away from the tree, hoping I’d done no more damage than bend the fender, and headed toward the house. I didn’t say a word about seat belts. We were so close we could see the lights.

  When we turned in, Ridd came up from the barn and Joe Riddley came out onto the back porch. Three small people clung to his pants.

  When I climbed shakily out, Natalie let go of Joe Riddley and more flew than ran down the steps. “Me-Mama! Anna Emily is lost! Nobody can find her. She’s not in the house—” She jumped into my arms and flung her arms around my neck. Accustomed to Cricket’s weight, I felt like I was holding air.

  “It’s okay. We found her.”

  Her head whipped around and she saw Martha climbing out with her sister. “Anna Emily,” she warned, “you are gonna get a whipping. You know you’re not supposed to run off like that.”

  Anna Emily buried her face in Martha’s neck and didn’t say a word.

  The sheriff called out the bloodhounds, and they literally treed Grady Handley in two hours. “Got him up in the branches of a pine hardly big enough to hold his weight,” the sheriff told me when he woke me up at one thirty and asked if I’d come down and hold a hearing.

  “You charging him with murder?” I asked when I got there. “You better have some real good evidence.”

  “At the moment I’m charging him with trespassing and interfering with a crime scene, but I’m urging you to deny bond until we can investigate the murder charge. I want him where I can get to him for questioning.”

  Grady was not at his best for the hearing. His pants were torn and his shirt filthy, and he still had leaf scraps in his hair. He also looked plumb exhausted. The only time he roused from a stupor was when I asked, “How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty!” His face was white, his skin taut over his skull. “I never killed her. I was mad, sure, but I never killed her!”

  “You aren’t being charged with murder, son. Sheriff, repeat the charges.”

  When they were read, he shrugged. “I was there. You both saw me. I guess I can sleep in jail as well as anywhere else tonight.”

  When it was over, I told him what I would have said to my own sons. “Go get some rest. Things ought to look better in the morning.”

  I hoped it was true.

  Martha called early the next morning. “I just overheard the oddest conversation between the girls. It sounds like they’re worried about a dog. Anna Emily said, ‘Daddy angel will feed him,’ and Natalie said, in that exasperated tone she gets with her sister, ‘Daddy angel doesn’t even know he’s there. He’s Uncle Billy’s dog. He’s gonna starve.’ Then Anna Emily said, ‘Good. He can’t eat us up.’ I went in and asked what was the matter, but Natalie said, ‘Nothing’ at the same time Anna Emily said, ‘Mama said not to tell.’ I didn’t see or hear a dog, did you?”

  “No. Go and ask them what kind of dog they have and if we need to feed it. Maybe a direct question will work.”

  Martha came back in a minute. “They didn’t want to tell me, but I got the information. He’s big and black, according to Anna Emily, and Natalie says he lives in the basement and only barks if somebody tries to go down there. Then he eats them up.”

  “No wonder they’re terrified of Lulu and Cricket Dog, if that’s what they’re used to. The place is pretty isolated, so Robin may have felt she needed a guard dog. It’s odd that he didn’t bark last night, though, don’t you think?”

  “And I didn’t know the house had a basement.”

  “Come to think of it, the floor creaked under me last night, which means it’s not on a slab. I’d have guessed a crawl space, but if there is a basement, there could well be a dog in it.”

  “Ridd and I have to teach Sunday school this morning,” Martha said. “Could you and Pop go over and check? If Buster has a deputy stationed there, he could let you in. You might want him to go down with you, in case the dog is as fierce as the girls say he is.”

  I was all for calling the deputy and asking him or her to feed the dog. Hungry dogs can be mean, and big black dogs have never been on my favorite-creatures list since one took a chunk out of my arm when I was eight. However, when I called, the sheriff was home getting some well-deserved rest and the department was short-staffed and short-tempered after their long weekend. A grumpy deputy informed me that feeding dogs wasn’t in their job description. He would instruct the person assigned to watch the house to let us in, but that was all they could do for us that morning.

  I promised myself to remember his cooperation the next time he wanted me to come down to the detention center in the middle of the night.

  The only dog food we had was for Lulu, since Joe Riddley had left his yard dogs down at Ridd’s when we moved. As I carried the bag to the car, along with a bowl for the food and another for water, Lulu uttered sharp objections to her food going somewhere she wasn’t invited.

  Joe Riddley started back to the house. “Be back in a minute. Wait here.”

  It was nearly five minutes before he came out carrying a plastic sack. “Sorry. I had to microwave it.”

  “Microwave what?”

  “A treat I brought.”

  “You think he’s going to object to a diet designed for a small, elderly beagle?”

  Joe Riddley grunted. “If he hasn’t eaten since Friday, he may settle for a diet of small, elderly judge.”

  “I am not elderly.”

  “You’re not thirty any longer. I mean it, Little Bit. I want you to stop getting involved in these investigations. It’s hard on you and equally hard on me. I’d like to have some years when I didn’t have to worry myself sick about what you were going to do next.”

  “I’d like some years when I knew we were going somewhere fun. I’m not asking for six-month cruises around the world, although I wouldn’t object to one. But how many good years do you think we’ve got left to travel overseas? How long will our stamina hold out—and our health? Not to mention our stomachs. Besides, I heard somewhere that once you are seventy-two, you aren’t allowed to drive in foreign countries.”

  “I’ve never hankered to drive in foreign countries.”

  “I have. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stop looking into murders if you’ll promise to take me somewhere special each year. How’s that?”

  “I’ll have to think about it. Meanwhile, when I walked Buster to the car yesterday morning, I borrowed some cuffs again. Don’t forget I know how to use them.”

  What I had forgotten was my promise to Cricket.

  All right, I vowed when I remembered it. As soon as this murder is solved, I’ll stop for a while.

  Marriage, I have discovered, is a process of shaping each other by decisions you make. You can’t set out to change your husband, but if you change yourself, he changes, too. Who knew? Maybe Joe Riddley would change into a world traveler.

  He pulled into Robin’s yard. The way the deputy sat up straighter when we drove up beside him, I suspected he’d been napping, but he was parked so he blocked the drive for anybody coming in. He recognized us and lowered his window.

  “Have you heard a dog barking?” Joe Riddley asked.

  “Haven’t heard a thing, but it’s been freezing here all night, so I had the windows up. Only action I’ve had was a car that turned in around two a.m., got me in its lights, and backed out. Another—or the same one, I couldn’t tell—came around six, saw I was here, and disappeared. Here’s the front-door key. Be sure to lock yoursel
ves in. Since you’re here, I’m gonna go get some breakfast. I hope you won’t leave before I get back, but if you do, be sure to pull the door shut behind you and lock it.”

  “No problem. We’ll wait until you get back.” Joe Riddley was already climbing out. He reached into the backseat for his plastic bag.

  We went in through the front door and I pointed out the antiques in the two front rooms.

  “We aren’t here to admire the furniture, Little Bit.”

  “No, but while we’re here, I want to look at the bedrooms. I didn’t get to see them last night.”

  After I had, I wished I hadn’t. One contained a lovely walnut bedroom suite that could have been two hundred years old. As Buster had said, though, the room was a mess. Obviously Robin—Roberta, I corrected myself—had tried on several outfits before she found one she liked. The pillows still bore the imprints of two small heads.

  The girls’ bedroom was a dump: stained carpet, a double mattress on the floor, a battered chest of drawers, and a television. No toy chest, no bookshelf, no stuffed animals. I was beginning to revise my opinion of Robin/Roberta as a devoted mother. She wasn’t destitute, for heaven’s sake. She’d surely had enough left over after paying bills to buy her girls a few toys and books, even if she got them at a thrift store.

  “So where’s this basement door?” Joe Riddley interrupted my ruminations.

  “I have no idea. Maybe in the kitchen?”

  It had only the door to the backyard and the one to the pantry.

  Joe Riddley went out the back door and walked around the house. “Looks like there could be a basement. The foundation is over four feet high where the hill slopes down in the back. I saw places where it looks like windows were bricked up, too, and a couple of things that look like air vents. There’s no door, though. It has to be inside.”

  Doors in the small hall served the two bedrooms, a linen closet, a coat closet, and the bathroom. Joe Riddley leaned into the linen closet and the coat closet and rapped on the back wall. Neither sounded hollow.

  “You could try the pantry, but it looked solid to me.”

  Joe Riddley saw something I had missed. “These shelves lift right out, and the floor looks like it was put down before the pantry was built. I think the pantry was built at the end of the cabinets after the house was finished.”

  He lifted out the lower shelves and uncovered a recessed handle hidden behind the shelf where the food had been. When he lifted down the silver and removed the top shelf, we saw the line of a door that had been concealed by the line of the shelf. He pulled the handle. The door didn’t open, but something threw itself against the door and gave a low, menacing growl.

  “You’ve found the dog.” I shoved him out of the way and slammed the pantry door. “What are you going to do now?”

  “The door must open inward.” He worked out the problem aloud. “The dog keeps it from opening as long as he’s there, unless he recognizes an order from his master or mistress.”

  “Who aren’t around,” I pointed out. “But why keep a dog in a dark basement?”

  “We don’t know that it’s dark, but he will be needing food if he’s been there more than twenty-four hours without attention. You get up on the counter there.” He jerked his head toward the counter next to the sink.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Climb on a chair. Oh, heck. Here.” With one motion he lifted me at the waist and sat me on the counter. “Pick up your feet now.”

  I saw what he was after. “If you think I’ll be safe from a big dog up here, you can think again. Any dog that size could stand on its hind legs, reach the counter, and make me his dinner.”

  He frowned. “I need an observer to watch the animal.”

  I wasn’t sure I was keen on being that observer, but I didn’t want him doing it, either. However, if I had to observe, I wanted to do so from as close to the ceiling as possible. “Maybe I could climb on top of the fridge. Let me try.”

  I hoisted my legs onto the counter, climbed onto my knees, and worked my way to my feet. There are times when being short has its advantages. I scarcely had to stoop to stand erect.

  Feeling like a tightrope walker, I inched along the countertop to the fridge and considered the problem. “It will be a tight fit. Will you get me down if I get up there?”

  “If I’m still around. You have your cell phone? Let me have it.” He handed me my pocketbook, and I gave him the phone. He slipped it in his pocket.

  Next he filled one bowl with Lulu’s food and another with water and set them far across the kitchen next to the dining room door.

  I was liking the looks of this less and less. “Where are you going to be?”

  “Hopefully outside calling animal control.”

  “Why don’t we call them before you let the dog out?”

  “Good idea.” He punched in the number. “We’ve got an abandoned dog down on Lower Creek Road. What’s the number here, Little Bit? Never mind, I’ll go look.” He ambled across the living room and read the number off the front of the house. I heard him say, “Yes, in a basement. You’ll be right out? Thanks.”

  He came back to the kitchen. “They’re on their way. You ready?”

  “Why aren’t we waiting for animal control?”

  “Because the animal is starving. I’d rather we fed him before they arrived. Mind your feet.”

  I pulled my feet up and sat cross-legged on the refrigerator, my back hunched to avoid the ceiling. “I’m gaining a new appreciation for what babies go through in the womb, but I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.”

  He went over and opened the back door wide, then reached into his bag and pulled out ground meat, dripping red. “Watch the floor,” I rebuked him.

  Instead, he deliberately squeezed the meat and dribbled red blots up and down the floor from the pantry door to the food and water bowls. Still carrying the glob of meat, he opened the pantry door, stepped inside, and leaned his shoulder against the basement door. It moved a few inches and I saw that the basement was bright with light. At least the dog wasn’t living in the dark. It wasn’t a happy beast, though. It hurled itself against the door with a snarl.

  Joe Riddley leaned against the door again and pitched a small ball of meat through the crack down the stairs, then he shoved hard against the door. I heard the dog scrabbling for footing as he fell, and then I heard him snuffling up the meat. Joe Riddley flung the basement door wide open, heaved the glob of dripping meat in the direction of the two bowls, and hightailed it to the kitchen door. A black and brown streak snarled through the pantry after him.

  “Run!” I screamed unnecessarily. Joe Riddley pulled the back door shut behind him a second before the dog reached it. My stomach ached at how close he had come to being grabbed by those powerful jaws.

  The dog propped its front legs on the door and barked furiously. He was the biggest, meanest Rottweiler I had ever seen. His coat was sleek black and tan, his shoulders muscled and strong.

  At last either he tired of fruitless barking or he scented blood, for he dropped to the ground and started licking up the drops, snuffling his way across the floor. He approached the meat warily, sniffed it, and gobbled it down. When he’d finished the meat, he ate Lulu’s food and slurped up all the water in the bowl. I had to feel sorry for the creature, hungry and alone for two days.

  “Is it eating yet?” Joe Riddley called from outside the door.

  “Just finishing,” I called back.

  That was a mistake.

  The dog’s big head whirled, his eyes red and malevolent, seeking the source of the voice. When he spotted me, he hurled himself toward my perch with a bay of fury. Saliva dripped from his jaws. His bared incisors were yellow and long.

  Clear as anything, I heard my mama tell me, “Don’t ever let a vicious dog know you are afraid. Speak in a voice of authority.”

  “Down!” I shouted. “Down, boy.”

  He hesitated, but ultimately that had the same effect as sh
aking a warning finger at an approaching locomotive.

  Again and again he leaped, trying to reach me. My world was reduced to his determined bays and the snap of his jaws. Every muscle in my body ached from terror. I drew myself into as small a space as possible, leaving no loose ends dangling in his reach.

  It was worse when he stopped leaping. He gave me a calculating look and backed crookedly across the room, eyeing the countertop. His intentions were clear.

  “Please, God, please, God,” I whispered. If he was able to reach the counter, I was finished.

  He gathered his muscles in a crouch, ready to spring. Then, without warning, he keeled over and fell with a thud.

  “Is he out?” Joe Riddley called through the door. “I can’t hear him. Is he out?”

  I was shaking too hard to reply.

  “Is he out, Little Bit? Are you okay?” I heard his hand on the knob.

  I didn’t want him coming within range of the beast, so I rallied what energy I had left. “He’s snoring.”

  While speaking, I eyed the dog warily. I expected him to rouse, shake himself, and stand for a second onslaught.

  He did not move.

  “Good.” Joe Riddley sounded like he was congratulating me on a job well done.

  “You’d better call the fire department and tell them to bring the Jaws of Life. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get down from here without them.”

  He cautiously opened the door. “You think it’s safe for me to come in there?”

  “I wouldn’t trust it. If the dog doesn’t kill you, I might. Do you know how close that animal was to leaping up to the countertop and finishing me off?”

  “I hoped he’d go out faster than that.” He tiptoed over and looked down. At the moment the Rottweiler looked like a wimp.

  “What was in that meat?” I flexed my muscles, but they would not relax.

  “The rest of those tranquilizers they gave you the last time you were in the hospital.”

  “Those things may have expired by now.”

  “Nope, the bottle said they were good for another month. They used to put you out for hours.”