Red Mourning, page 21
part #2 of Rosie Casket Cozy Mystery Series
Eldritch and I said nothing.
“I can not hear you both,” Dimitri said. He turned the camera around so the screen lit his face. “The cave will flood, yes?”
“Ayuh,” Eldritch said.
Dimitri lowered his camera, the light disappeared, and all went dark again. I felt a rush of air beside me and Eldritch let out an “oomph.”
“Mr. Eldritch!”
Eldritch was doubled over. Dimitri had punched him in the gut.
“You’re a turd,” I said.
Dimitri grabbed me, spun me around, shoved me against the rocks, and twisted my arms behind my back, hard enough to make my shoulders scream. He pressed his weight into me, my cheekbone grinding into the cold stone.
“Shhhh,” Dimitri said and touched my hair. “You have beautiful, fiery hair. I would love to see this hair on camera. Of course, with that face, a seven at best, we’d have to cut off your hair first, maybe make it into a wig for a much prettier lady. Do not get your hopes up, Rosemary. You have no future in the magazines.”
“Let me go,” I said, my teeth scraping the rock.
There was a zip, zip, like the sound of duct tape, and Dimitri tied my wrists together.
“This is a special kind of tape. We use it when we are shooting peectures and we need to stop the highlights down, like on chrome bumpers or other shiny objects. In case we forget to remove the tape, it will disintegrate. It eese very earth-friendly. If anyone finds your body in the next few days, there will be no evidence that you have been tied up.”
He ripped off more tape and bound my ankles.
“Leave Mr. Eldritch alone,” I said. “He is not involved in this.”
“I heard about that little stunt you pulled last time,” Dimitri said. “Getting all those little lawyers to scream at once was very clever. But it won’t happen this time. There will be no screaming tonight.”
“Why don’t you just kill me now?”
Dimitri thought about it for a minute. “It is like squashing spiders. I do not like it when they crunch. It is easier to put you in a container and let you die alone.”
With that, he ripped off another piece of tape and put it over my mouth. I tried to scream, but my lips were sealed and the scream got lost in my throat. The edge of the tape was touching my nose and it stunk like wet hemp and I could barely breathe.
“Let’s go back to the tower, old man,” Dimitri said. In the dark, there was a shuffle, a scrape, and then all went quiet after their footsteps faded.
I screamed in my chest as loud as I could, but all that came out was a muffled whimper. I sank down against the wall, defeated while the cave went drip, drip.
Not two minutes later, my butt was cold. And wet.
The water was rising.
Chapter 36
Whatever chance my eyes had of adjusting to the darkness and making a basic sense of my jagged surroundings had been destroyed by Dimitri’s flashbulb.
Still sitting in the rising puddle, I drew my knees to my chest. My teeth chattered hard enough to make my glasses wiggle down my nose. My hands were bound, so I had to press my face to my knees to keep my glasses on.
No one but Eldritch knew I was down here. Even if by some miracle Mettle didn’t hate my guts—especially after I sent him pictures of his girlfriend making out with the bad guy—he would never find me.
Heck, no one in Dark Haven knew this place existed, not my foster father, nor anyone else in town, not even that lousy Captain Herrick. Under any other circumstances, I would have relished the idea of a place that was all my own, a little corner of the universe where I could curl up and hide when things got lousy and I could wallow in self-pity and lose myself in a pint—of Ben and Jerry’s, mind you.
Except, the very beauty of a secret cave now heralded my very doom.
And poor Eldritch was made to suffer. Rosemary Casket, blunder queen, had put his life in danger. Again.
Frustrated and quaking with anxiety, I screamed into the tape. I screamed so hard my throat got ragged.
But the effort produced nothing more than a tortured mumble.
In a flashback to last spring, I pictured the rising water swallowing me. I relived the extraordinary pain of sucking seawater through my nose—far worse than inhaling horseradish, it exploded my sinuses like taking a big whiff of a lit fuse.
I shook all over, both from the cold and from anger. Soon, my anger would turn to grief and then to utter despair. In less time than it took for a lobster to boil, I would cycle through all three stages of being left for dead by an evil jackass. First rage. Then despair. Then coma.
Even if I could manage to stand up again and hop around like a blind jack rabbit, I had no idea where I was going. I would bounce into the walls and break my glasses.
And even if I could somehow manage to get back to the main cavern, given my rotten luck that one time I had gambled at a fraternity casino night, I’d choose the wrong path, circle around nine times, and get lost in the caverns.
Dante had nothing on me.
Something slithered past my ear. My heart charged into my rib cage and I gasped into the tape, but I couldn’t find any air, just sticky fibers on my tongue.
I sucked fright through my nose and sprang to my feet with a heretofore unknown agility. Fear had given me superpowers, at least temporarily, and I hopped away from the slimy thing like a cricket trying to escape a boot.
With my feet bound together, I teetered on the verge of face-planting into the rocks and shattering my teeth, so I had no choice but to keep hopping.
I hopped and hopped with no clue where I was going.
After what I thought was a safe distance from the slithering thing, I stopped and leaned against the rocks and tried to force some kind of rationality. If that slithering thing had been a water snake, then the puddles were rising faster than before.
I gave another tiny hop and got a big splash. Indeed, the myriad pools had joined together now, like amoebas swallowing amoebas, and the cold wetness was enough to prune my toes.
I couldn’t just stand here and wait to drown. I needed to do something.
But what?
A buzz. In my pocket. My heart gasped. My phone. I could see the tiny glowing square through the fabric of my jeans. Maybe I could wiggle it high enough out of my pocket to use the glowing screen to find my way.
The phone rang three times.
But then it died.
“Whoever you are, please call back, please call back,” I mumbled through the tape. “If you’re Matt, I retract every mean thing I ever said to you. I’m sorry if I tried to meddle in your relationship. If anything, you should be the one who meddles. It’s in your last name. Sorry, bad joke. And I’m sorry I tried to steer you away from that conniving, murderous ho-bag. I’m sorry I let my jealousy get in the way of our friendship. If I ever get out of here, I will make it up to you. Whatever you want, Mettle. Whatever you want. I promise.”
The phone rang again.
“Oh thank the Lord.” I wanted to smile, but couldn’t smile with my lips taped together. Guided by the dim light of each ring, I hopped over to one of the rocks, squatted, and wiggled my thighs against the hard surface, trying to work the phone up to the top of my pocket so the screen peeked out and gave me more light. If anyone came down the passageway right now, they’d think I was trying to get freaky with one of the stalagmites.
After a minute of awkward calcium-humping, I got the phone far enough up my pocket that I could see half the screen.
But after four rings, it died again.
I stood there, hearing phantom buzzing in my ears, desperately hoping I wouldn’t hear the tone indicating that the caller had given up and left a voicemail.
“Please Lord, if it’s you, Matt, don’t leave me a message. I hate that. Keep trying to reach me. Please call again. Please. I’m here. I’m down here, maybe right beneath your feet. I need you.”
The phone rang again. If my lips hadn’t been sealed, I would have kissed any rock blunt enough to resemble Mettle’s chin. If I was lucky and my guardian caller didn’t give up, I had maybe three more rings to find my way out. And yes, after that horrendous hen-house wingding, the proper pronoun for my angel was “he.”
The phone rang again. The tiny square in my pocket illuminated the path ahead and I hopped past an outgrowth of rock. In the passing light, the rock looked suspiciously like Mick Jagger (I’ll call him Mick Jagged) and then, in the illumination of the last ring, I turned around and was confronted by the three passageways that Eldritch and I had confronted on our way down.
The phone stopped ringing. Once again, I was plungered down the toilet hole of complete darkness.
“Please. Whoever you are, call me once more. Just once more. Be my angel. Please.”
Another ring and the phone lit up. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Whoever was calling me was persistent. But I couldn’t waste any time wondering what kind of benevolent stalker was calling me so relentlessly.
I had to make a choice.
Each path led toward pure darkness. I had a one in three chance of choosing the path that led back to the surface. The other two paths led to either a miserable drowning in the harbor or to a slow starvation deep underground.
I couldn’t dither. This was my only chance. I had to be decisive.
Unfortunately, I never made decisions quickly. I dissected every passing thought down to the syllable. Did I go left? Or go right? Given that the Latin word for left hand was sinistra, a feminine noun meaning sinister—
Turn your brain off. Listen to your gut for once.
The heck with it. I went left. I hopped down the left tunnel. My phone rang twice more, the light faint, but strong enough to see the rocks ahead. I took the biggest hops I could muster, the splashes high enough to reach my chin.
One ring left. My hopping form was reflected more and more clearly as the water got deeper and deeper.
No, no. This was wrong. Bad choice.
I panicked. I was headed right for the harbor. I stopped hopping, hoping my angel would call me back just one more time.
But he didn’t.
I stood there teetering in the belly of the cave.
“Please call me back.”
The water rose halfway up my shins.
“Please?”
But there were no more calls.
I was in the same portion of the cave that I had been trapped in last spring. If Eldritch had been able to re-light the lamp, I might be able to see the red glow of the fissure and swim my way out, but with Dimitri in the picture that wasn’t going to happen.
I couldn’t turn around and go back, not without the light, or I’d get completely disoriented…
My only chance was to stay facing the same direction and try to brave the cold harbor water. I was committed now. Literally. With my arms and feet tied, I might as well have been in a straight jacket.
I hopped forward. Then hopped again. And again. The water got deeper with each hop. It covered my knees, my jeans soaked and heavy. After each hop, my chest heaved from exhaustion, worse than those six weeks as a teenager when I broke my toe and had to hop up the stairs in my foster-father’s house.
The water, freezing cold, was slowing me down and sapping my strength. I paused, squatted, gathered my resolve, and made one more jump.
But I had barely moved a foot when I smacked into something solid. There was a loud clang and I rebounded and fell back onto my tailbone with a terrific splash.
I grabbed a last snort of air before my face went under. I squirmed, rolled over, and twisted onto my knees and strained my abs to break the surface. With my head free, I sucked air and salty water through my nose. My wet hair was pasted to the side of my face and my heart was screaming as if I were zipped in a black body bag and my air was running out. I wanted to open my mouth and take a deep gulp of air, but the tape wouldn’t let me.
“Calm down. Breathe through your nose. You can do this.”
Freaking out was sapping my energy. I had to relax. I was going to need every shred of strength and courage I could muster to attempt a swim through the fissure.
Chapter 37
Like some kind of tortured penitent, I was on my knees, waist deep in the cold water, my ankles and wrists bound, my head bowed. I was surrounded by loud dripping sounds and it made me think of holy water dripping from a font.
But instead of praying, I thought of the swimming lessons my mother had forced me to take at the local YMCA when I was little.
She had said the lessons would make me comfortable in water, an essential life skill. Forced practice usually didn’t translate into comfort, but this time, she had actually been right. I went to swimming lessons once a week for a year, growing less fearful and more confident with every passing month—at the embarrassing expense of shoulders that expanded like grow monsters with all that time spent in the water.
Prior to that I had spent most of my life inside reading, so my tiny lungs had struggled to finish a full lap. The only way I survived those long afternoon practices was by imagining I was holding a book instead of a kickboard. While my face was in the water and I kicked feebly, my brain was busy narrating its own internal audiobook.
Yet, despite four years of learning the breaststroke, the sidestroke, the front crawl, and the backstroke, I still hadn’t progressed enough to graduate from the YMCA program because one stroke still eluded me.
The butterfly.
A component of the butterfly was the dolphin kick. With both ankles together, you were supposed to whip your whole body in one fluid motion. It was supposed to originate in your toes, follow through your hips, and undulate through your torso. With a polished technique, good swimmers could move faster underwater than freestyle on the surface, even without the use of their arms.
Sadly, despite all that practice, I was not a great swimmer. I wasn’t good at anything physical. Like my feeble attempts at dancing, I could never coordinate my limbs and my hips. My feet always split apart and I would end up doing a lame bent-kneed flutter kick that stalled my speed.
Even at eight years old, I was the laughing stock of my lessons. The seven-year-old girls would line up on the edge of the pool and laugh and point at the red feather boa as it splashed and spasmed in the throes of gangly futility.
Finally, when I was nine, I decided to take a stand against the lessons. Even without the butterfly kick, I had enough. My mother couldn’t make me do it anymore. The last place I wanted to go on a Wednesday after school was to that dank, indoor pool, especially when the library had opened up a new young adult section.
“But I know how to swim!” I had protested. “I don’t need to know the stupid butterfly kick.”
“Someday all the skills that you’ve accumulated from then until now will come together and form a little Play-Doh ball of opportunity.”
“That’s a lousy metaphor.”
“Mark my words, Rosemary, you won’t find success by excelling in any one skill, but you will find it in the unique combination of your different attributes. That’s where you will thrive. How many little girls have cool red hair and can read as well as you? Not many, see? Among redheads, you are in a league of your own. All you have to do is focus. As soon as you stop overthinking it and let your body do its thing, you will succeed.”
Now that I thought about it, her advice sounded suspiciously like Matt Mettle’s.
Don’t overthink it. Trust your body.
I blinked my wet hair out of my eyes and a tepid tear ran down my cheek and carved through the cold.
I wondered what kind of advice my birth father would give.
Whoever he was.
I wondered about him less and less frequently over the years, the desire to know him growing hazier by the month.
My mother had been right. It was time to finish what I had started. Perhaps, I had never learned the dolphin kick because my feet kept splitting apart. Perhaps, if the different parts of my body were forced to work in unison rather than fighting each other for dominance, I could actually perform the kick.
All I had to do was get my emotions and my brain in sync. If I was going to swim through that fissure, I had to focus all my energies in the pursuit of a single goal. There could be no internal audiobook while I was kicking.
I closed my eyes—not that it mattered in the darkness—and tried to think back to that night when Phyllis had locked me in the cage. When she came in with the flashlight, the walls had been slick and solid. The only part of the cave that her light didn’t reach had been on the far edge, behind William Bearing’s chains.
That meant if I turned thirty degrees to my right, I would be facing the fissure. I imagined I was facing midnight and turned to three o’clock.
The water was still rising and was up to my ribs now. Once I committed to the swim, there was no going back. I took a series of deep snorts, both to flush the anxiety from my system, and to flush my lungs with oxygen before taking the deepest plunge of my life.
In. Out. In. Out.
Soon, I was hyperventilating and lightheaded, my lungs stretched for one last, giant breath.
I sucked air through my sore nostrils, my lungs expanding so large they hurt my ribs, and then I pushed off my knees and dove forehead first into the cold, black water.
Chapter 38
The pool in the depression at the base of the cave was swelling as the incoming tide rushed through the fissure. I whipped my feet, followed through with my hips, and found a surprising degree of progress. The kick wasn’t perfect, but I was moving forward against the current and that was all that mattered.
Without my hands, I couldn’t feel the rocks in front of me, nor I could I see, so I would have to probe for the fissure with my face. My glasses ripped off my nose and disappeared behind me, but I kept on kicking.
