by Elise Sax
“He called me old!” Tilly yelled.
“This is my property, and you’re all trespassing!” Rockwell yelled, extricating himself from his place against the wall. He gave his attackers a wide birth and dusted off his clothes.
“He’s wearing my clothes,” Boone said. “I can’t believe the sonofabitch is wearing my clothes. I’m going to kill him.”
“You’re all trespassing, and I’m going to have you forcibly removed!” Rockwell continued. “Sheriff, do your job and arrest these people!”
Amos approached Rockwell. He tipped his cowboy hat back off his forehead and paused, as if he was going to say something earth-shatteringly important. Everyone gathered in to hear him.
“Mr. Dare, I can’t remove these people until I have the proper paperwork that proves you own this property,” Amos said.
“Ha!” Tilly yelled, pointing at Rockwell. “You don’t have the proper paperwork, so get your ass off of Matilda’s property.”
Amos raised his hand to shut Tilly up. “However, as Matilda’s husband, you do have the right to stay here without being molested,” Amos continued and narrowed his eyes and looked at each and every one of us, slowly.
“What a pussy,” Boone said, loudly. “Amos, you’re always taking the easy way out. Take a stand for once. This man has stolen from everyone in town. Arrest his ass, now.”
“As I’ve already explained, my wife was the one who was stealing,” Rockwell said, sounding perfectly reasonable. “She’s unstable, you know. I can get the hospital’s records about her sent directly to you. She should be in an institution right now. At the very least, she should be medicated.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this again!” I said, enraged. I was practically foaming at the mouth with anger. “This guy is a murderer. He gaslighted me, put me away, and tried to kill me. He’s a convicted murderer.”
“Exaggerations,” Rockwell said.
“Amos, he’s wearing my clothes,” Boone said.
“My wife gave me these clothes,” Rockwell lied. Everyone turned to look at me. Here we go again. Rockwell was great at making people think I was crazy.
“He chopped a man into little pieces, and he was having an affair with the man’s wife,” I said to Amos.
“Don’t you talk about Fanta!” Rockwell yelled at me, finally losing his cool. “It’s because of you that she left me.”
“She left you because you’re a psychopath!” I yelled back at him.
“No, you are!” he yelled back.
“No, you are!”
“No, you are!”
We went back and forth for a while before Boone pushed past me and got into Rockwell’s face. “I’m going to kill him,” Boone growled.
“No, you’re not,” Amos growled.
“Yes, I am,” Boone growled.
There was a lot of growling.
“Sheriff, arrest this man. He threatened my life,” Rockwell demanded.
“Oh, shut up!” Amos and Boone yelled at him in unison.
“Would you stay out of this? It’s none of your business,” Boone said to his brother.
“Oh, yeah? How about my wife? Was my wife any of your business?” Amos said to Boone.
“Oh, wow. This is getting good,” Adele said.
“Keep taking pictures,” Silas told Klee.
“What do you mean, was your wife my business?” Boone asked, growing defensive.
“You were the one who found her. What was that about?” Amos demanded.
“What’s going on? Arrest him!” Rockwell demanded.
Tilly shoved a jar under Rockwell’s nose. “Here. Smell this. Go on. Give it a deep sniff. Fill your lungs with it.”
Amos and Boone lunged for each other, and the dogs ran excitedly to them to witness the tussle. Meanwhile, Nora jumped back in her food truck and revved her engine. Adele picked up her branch and threatened Rockwell with it.
It was total chaos.
I was hit with a strong wave of fatigue. All of a sudden, everything was just too much for me. It was all weighing on me at the same time, every last person and thing. I felt like I was being crushed into the ground.
Needing to get away, I walked through the gate and kept walking through the courtyard of the house and out into the forest. I walked for miles between the trees, wandering and not caring if I got lost. I just wanted to get away from everything.
Chapter 14
I wandered for a long time. It took that long before I stopped hearing the war going on at my house. Even the dogs had stayed behind to watch the action, but I couldn’t handle it any longer. I was happy that my friends were on my side, helping me against Rockwell, but I knew there was an innocent girl out there somewhere who needed me, and I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that I could best Rockwell at his own game.
I was sure that I would eventually be able to divorce him, but chances were that I would lose everything in the divorce. And then what would I do? Even though I had recently used my bowling technology and floral management degrees, I didn’t think they could get me a paycheck out in the real world. Ditto my leisure studies degree.
I loved working at the Gazette, but I was hardly a reporter yet. I still had a lot to learn, and I wasn’t sure that I had the talent for it.
I worried about what would happen to the dogs and the house and Tilly. And then there was Boone. I would lose him, too.
I was devastated about the losses, but I felt guilty about being devastated because my priorities should have been with the poor girls who had tried to contact me from the afterlife to help them with the killer.
Why did I keep getting distracted from finding the killer and saving the girl?
I had announced that I was going to unmask the serial killer today, but who was I kidding? There was no way I was going to do that. It was already the afternoon, and I was nowhere.
I walked for another hour through the forest when all of a sudden, I tripped when the boot for my broken toe got hooked on something. I fell to the ground hard. I stayed there for a moment, slightly stunned. Then, I searched my body for injuries. I had some scrapes and bruises, but overall, I was fine.
My boot was still hooked on whatever had tripped me. I unhooked it and inspected my broken toe. It was still black and blue and swollen, but it didn’t look any different than before I had tripped.
“What the hell is that?” I asked out loud. I had figured that I had tripped over a fallen branch, but it turned out to be something man-made. I wanted to shine the light from my phone on it, but I realized I had left it in my purse in the car.
But I could make out the thing that had tripped me, even in the low light. Yes, it was man-made. It was some sort of tube, about six inches in diameter, open to the air, and it was sticking out of the ground.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my arms sprouted goosebumps. I got on my knees and started to dig around the tube with my hands. But there didn’t seem to be an end to it. I dug about a foot, but the tube kept going underground.
I stood up and took stock of where I was. “My house is over that way,” I said out loud, pointing to the right. “Does that mean I made it near where Amy’s body was found?”
It did. I was only about a half mile away from where Boone had discovered her body. I was in the thick forest on the side of a mountain. I knew that above me somewhere, Rocco lived, and Mabel wasn’t far away, either. But what else was near here?
More importantly, why would someone need an air tube sticking out of the ground in the middle of nowhere? I looked at the ground by my feet. Something was underground that needed air.
Or someone.
A dungeon. An underground bunker. I had been there in my dream. I had seen where the killer kept the girls. I knew what it looked like. Was I standing on the ground over it right now? There had to be an entrance somewhere close.
I spun around, looking for a door, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just wilderness. My heart was pounding, and I willed mys
elf to calm down.
“I can’t help anyone if I’m not in control of myself,” I said. I took a few deep breaths, in through my nose and out of my mouth. I knew that I had found the serial killer’s lair, knew it more surely than I had known anything else, and the excitement of that fact was making my blood rush through my veins.
I decided to do a grid search of the area in order to find the entrance to the bunker. I searched through the forest without finding anything, when suddenly I reached a little clearing, and in the clearing, was an old shack.
I gasped loudly and slapped my hand over my mouth, in case I would be heard. The shack had remnants of white paint on it, but it was now almost completely dilapidated. In fact, it looked like it had been abandoned, but I knew that someone was living there. There was evidence of habitation everywhere, from a dripping hose in one area outside to a compost heap in another area.
There didn’t seem to be anyone home, though. I listened for a while under the cover of the trees. There wasn’t a sound of human life anywhere. I walked carefully to the house, cursing my broken toe for not letting me tiptoe.
I held my breath as I walked. It was only a short distance to the front door, but it felt like miles. I remembered what Silas had said about folks not locking their doors, and I said a silent prayer as I turned the knob.
Sure enough, the door opened, and I let myself in. The house was old and musty. It hadn’t been updated for at least seventy years. There was a small sitting room with an ancient sofa and two armchairs covered in stained, faded chintz fabric. A small television sat on a coffee table. The sitting room led to the kitchen, which was clean but looked like a scene out of the Grapes of Wrath. There was a hutch for the plates and glasses, and pots and pans hung from the ceiling. The oven was an old gas contraption, and the refrigerator was nothing more than an icebox.
I found three small bedrooms at the side of the house. The first was the master bedroom. There was a double bed with an iron headboard in it. The mattress visibly dipped down in the middle, and a handmade quilt covered it. There was a small dresser next to it with a cracked mirror attached. There wasn’t a single photo anywhere.
The next small room looked more lived in. It had an unmade single bed with a Batman comforter crumpled up in a ball at the foot of it. There was another small dresser, and I opened a couple of the drawers. I found simple, cheap men’s clothing inside. A couple short-sleeved button-down shirts and some tighty-whiteys that should have been thrown away years ago.
The third room looked like a free-for-all room. It didn’t have a purpose except as the dumping ground for unwanted things. I found gardening equipment, a couple of old suitcases, and various tools and odds and ends. This was the only room with a closet. I opened it.
The inside of the closet was immaculate. There was a hook for everything, and everything was on its hook.
Every scary, sadistic, torture device that a serial killer would need.
I gasped and slapped my hand over my mouth, again. I inspected the cache in the closet. There was duct tape and shackles. Handcuffs and gags. There were bottles of something mysterious and a whole host of other scary stuff.
Eureka.
I had found the bastard.
I took a step back and took inventory. That’s when I realized there was something odd about the back wall of the closet. I pushed aside some things and ran my hand over the wall. “Holy hell, it’s a door,” I said.
But there was no way to open the door. I knocked on the wall, listening for a change in the sound to find out where it opened from, when I heard a woman scream. The sound was faint and far away, like it was coming from behind the wall and down below.
Oh my God. I had found the bunker. I knew where the girls were being held.
“Help!” I heard a woman scream after I knocked on the wall.
“I’m coming!” I screamed back.
“Help!” she screamed again.
I clawed at the wall, but it was no use. I couldn’t figure out how to get beyond it. I retreated from the closet and picked up one of the gardening tools, planning on pounding my way through the wall.
But the sound of the front door’s doorknob turning stopped me in my tracks. He was back! He was coming inside! I clutched the gardening tool in my hand, ready to take him on in a fight, but then I remembered that he was a psycho killer, and I was a woman with a medical boot on my foot.
Fear and panic raced through my body, like they were competing with each other about which one was going to kill me first.
Hide. Hide now.
I looked around, but there was nowhere to hide. No bed to hide under. I couldn’t hide in the closet because he was sure to look there. My eyes fell on a suitcase, and I remembered something that had recently happened in town. If it can work for a criminal, it can work for me, I told myself.
As quietly and quickly as I could, I opened a suitcase and folded myself into it. I zipped myself in, leaving only an inch open so that I could breathe.
I could hear the front door open and close. The sound of footsteps got closer to me. He was walking slowly, pausing at each room. Damn it. He must have known I was there, and he was looking for me.
But if I just stayed quiet, he would never find me. I would wait it out until the night when he was asleep, and then I would sneak out and call the sheriff’s department. It was a good plan, unless the man I was hiding from turned out to be the sheriff.
I took slow, shallow breaths, careful not to make a sound. I was folded into a pretzel in the suitcase. My limbs were cramping, and my toe was hurting, but I was determined to stay hidden in the suitcase for as long as it took.
The footsteps got closer, and I knew he was in the room.
Oh no. I’m going to die. I’m going to be murdered in a suitcase.
I willed myself to calm down. I willed my heart to stop pounding in my chest. There was no way he would ever think to look in the suitcase, I told myself. Who would ever think to look in a suitcase? Only a deranged, busybody, no-good nosy person would think to look in a suitcase.
The suitcase moved a little, and I wasn’t doing the moving. Oh, no. He found me. The zipper started to unzip. It was only a matter of seconds before I would be face to face with the killer and probably only minutes away from being dead.
I planned my attack. The second he finished unzipping the suitcase, I would spring into action and attack him, I decided. But my body was cramping, and I knew that he would get me before I could ever hope to spring into action.
I was doomed.
The suitcase was unzipped and then it was opening. I shield myself with my hands to fend off any initial attack.
“Matilda?” I heard.
The voice didn’t sound like a serial killer. It sounded familiar, and…more feminine. It was a woman. Huh? I never thought that the serial killer could be a woman.
I realized that my eyes were closed, and I opened them. Standing over me was Gladie Burger my friend and matchmaker from Cannes in California. Her curly hair was standing up in a frizz all over her head. She was wearing jeans and a turtleneck, and she didn’t seem surprised to see me hiding in a suitcase in a shack in the middle of nowhere.
But I was surprised to see her.
“Gladie? Are you the serial killer?” I asked.
“No, I’m still a matchmaker.”
She helped me out of the suitcase. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
She tapped the side of her head. “This blasted third eye wouldn’t leave me alone. It told me to come here and save you.”
“It did?” Gladie’s grandmother was a famous psychic matchmaker back in my old town of Cannes, and Gladie had only recently inherited her abilities to know things that couldn’t be known.
Gladie nodded and threw up her hands, like she was saying whatcha gonna do. “I told Spencer that we were going on a romantic vacation to New Mexico and that I promised to be naked for long stretches of time, so he agreed to come,” she explained. “He’s back in town, helping
law enforcement break up a fight between a stuffed giraffe and a film crew. I guess Goodnight isn’t very different from Cannes.”
I hugged her tight. “I’m so glad you’re here. I thought I was a goner. We need to save the girls from the serial killer. Will you help me?”
Gladie pulled a hacksaw out of her purse. “That’s why I brought this.”
We went right into action to save the girl. Gladie sawed her way through the door, and we managed to push the rest of it open. We climbed through the back of the closet to a narrow tunnel that had been cut out of earth and rock. A dim light bulb hung from the ceiling.
Gladie and I walked through the tunnel until we reached some stairs that led down to a wider opening. At the bottom of the stairs, I spotted something, and I picked it up.
“A flower,” I said, looking at it.
“What does it mean?” Gladie asked.
“It means that I know who the serial killer is. I know everything. Oh, Gladie, I’ve been so stupid. I’ve been so incredibly stupid. He’s closer than you think. Yes, he was closer than I thought. I was blind. He hid in plain sight, and I was blind.”
“But now you know,” Gladie said. “It comes to me like that, too.”
“Help!” A woman screamed. Gladie and I ran in the direction of the scream and found several cells carved into the mountain. It was just like I had dreamed it.
We found two women imprisoned there. One of them was the hitchhiker. I had found her in time. She didn’t look like she had been harmed yet, but she was understandably terrified. The other woman had been there longer. She was skin and bones, and she was wearing dirty pajamas. She didn’t say a word, and I figured she was either too weak to speak or she was drugged. Both of the women were young and blonde.
“Get us out of here!” the hitchhiker cried. Their cells were padlocked, and there was no way that a small hacksaw was going to cut through them.
“There must be a key in the house somewhere,” I said, studying a padlock.
“I hate this part,” Gladie said from behind me.
“What part?”
“The part I knew would happen.”
