Marcia Talley - In Death's Shadow

"Gail makes eight," she muttered when I'd finished my story.

"Yes, and if we don't want to be numbers nine and ten, we need to get ourselves out of here! If Pottorff killed your friends at Ginger Cove, and Gail, and Valerie, I don't think he'll have any qualms about offing a middle-aged woman and her meddlesome mother."

On the other side of the door the television had come on, so loud it could blister paint. Chet had figured out how to work the DVD player and was watching a movie, Twister , from the sound of it. A storm came howling out of every speaker in the room.

I padded across the tile floor and tried the door, just in case, but it was securely locked.

"Hand me my purse, will you, Mrs. B?'

I extracted my Visa card and slid it along the crack between the door frame and the lock, but a metal flange prevented the edge of my card from reaching and tripping the latch. "Shit!" I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, resting my back against the tasting table. "He must have some valuable wines in here. It's locked up like Fort Knox."

"No need to whisper, dear," she said. "Chet's not going to hear anything over that raging storm!"

"The door's glass," I observed. "Wanna break a few bottles?"

"I'd break all the bottles if I thought it would help, but we'd have to get by Chet, and he has a gun."

So Mrs. Bromley had noticed the gun, too.

"If only we had a window." I surveyed the room again, but wine racks covered every floor-to-ceiling inch. If there were ever any windows in this part of the basement, they had been covered up during construction.

Mrs. Bromley pointed up. "Hannah, that air conditioner has to exhaust out to somewhere. Could it be installed in a window?"

I jumped to my feet. The woman was brilliant! "Help me," I said.

Standing directly under the air conditioner, I pulled a bottle out of its slot and handed it to Mrs. Bromley, who set it on the floor. Working as a team, I pulled another, and another, handing the bottles off to her. Bottle after bottle, I reached higher and higher, until I had cleared a ladder of makeshift toeholds. Then I started to climb.

"Be careful!" Mrs. Bromley called after me.

Once at the top, I held on with one hand and studied the air conditioner, a Whisperkool. I wanted to shut off the cold air that was blasting into my face, but the controls were locked behind a Plexiglas panel.

The Whisperkool itself was secured to the wall with long metal bolts. Above it, though, a wooden panel had been fitted into the space between the top of the air conditioner and the ceiling. It was what lay behind that panel that looked promising.

Holding onto the air conditioner with one hand, I moved my foot gingerly to another toehold and leaned as far forward as I could to examine the panel. I poked at it with my finger. It didn't budge. I grabbed the top of the Whisperkool and pulled down. The panel moved a fraction of an inch. Encouraged, I jiggled the air conditioner up and down and was elated when the panel responded, admitting a welcome sliver of daylight.

A muffled "Yay!" drifted up from below.

"If I can just work this panel loose, I think I can reach the window!"

"Will we be able to climb out?" she asked.

"I don't know, Mrs. B. The air conditioner might be in the way."

I continued jiggling the air conditioner up and down, up and down, like a kid on a pogo stick. The sliver of light became a slit, and the area I was working in grew marginally brighter, but it was slow going, and I was afraid I might pull the air conditioner clean off the wall. If the falling air conditioner didn't kill us outright, then Chet would probably finish the job when he came in to see what we had been up to.

"Mrs. B, look around down there and see if you can find me a corkscrew, something I can pry with."

"Right." I heard a drawer slide open, then another and another before Mrs. Bromley said, "The only corkscrew he seems to have is one of those pull-screw models, and it's mounted on the tasting table."

"Damn!"

"How about this?" From my perch, I turned carefully and looked down into Mrs. Bromley's upturned face. She was holding up a wine funnel.

"Let me give it a try." Holding tight and fighting vertigo, I stretched my hand down. On her end, Mrs. Bromley stood on tiptoe. I captured the funnel between my index and middle fingers and tucked it under my arm. When I was securely in position in front of the air conditioner again, I examined the funnel. The spout was curved, but it was made of sturdy stainless steel.

Holding the funnel end, I used the spout to dig around a corner of the panel. I made a hole, then rammed the funnel between the panel and the wall and pulled. I moved to the opposite corner and did the same.

Hoping to speed things up, I ran my fingers over the wood, feeling for nails I could work on. I never thought my fingers were particularly sensitive, but even in the dark I could tell that the panel was attached with screws, not nails.

"Mrs. B! I need a screwdriver."

If only this guy hadn't been so modern, I complained bitterly to myself. I didn't ask for much. Just an average, run-of-the-mill corkscrew with the name of a liquor store stamped on the side and a stainless steel, foil-cutting blade that folds up inside.

I heard drawers opening and closing again. "I'm not finding anything."

"A cheese knife?"

"No, nothing." A cabinet door opened, then closed. "Wait a minute! How about this?" She held up a thin piece of metal about a foot long. "I think you dry decanters on it. It's got a plastic tip." She grunted. "There, I got it off."

The drying stem was the thickness of a chopstick, much thinner than the funnel. It fit perfectly in the narrow space I had created between the panel and the wall. I crammed the rod in and yanked it toward me.

"It's coming!" With a screech, the screws began to surrender and the wooden panel started to pull away from the wall. I worked my fingers around behind it, stuck the rod in and pulled again. Suddenly, the panel came off in my hands. I waved it in the air like a trophy, and turned to smile at Mrs. Bromley. She stood below me, silently clapping her hands.

Behind the panel was a nest of wires and white plastic duct work. With growing excitement, I tore away the duct work to reveal the window.

It was six inches tall, large enough to accommodate the air conditioning exhaust, but not nearly tall enough for a human body to pass through.

"Damn, damn, damn!" I didn't realize I'd been sweating until the sweat started to cool on my forehead. "Oh, the big F-word!" All the other words I thought of contained four letters, too.

"It's too small, isn't it?"

"Yes," I whimpered. "We could sneak in a pizza, maybe."

"Come down, Hannah. You did your best."

So Pottorff wouldn't be aware of what I had been doing, I shoved the panel back into place, pushing the damaged corners in as best I could. Then I backed down the wall, carefully avoiding the wine bottles that Mrs. Bromley had arranged in neat battalions on the floor.

Outside the room, Chet was still watching Twister . From the sound of it, Cary Elwes was about to get his, or maybe the cow had just flown by. We were about to replace the wine bottles in their slots when the room outside suddenly grew quiet. I held tight to Mrs. Bromley's hand, hardly daring to breathe.

Chet's shadow darkened the door. He seemed to be listening, but we kept quiet. Chet grunted, and his shadow moved away. We could have frozen to death in there, for all he cared. I heard the refrigerator door slide open and the clink of bottles. Chet, it appeared, was helping himself to a beer.

A minute later Chet crawled back into the fury of the storm and we began to relax. "Just in case we don't get out of this, Mrs. B, I want you to know how much your friendship has meant to me."