The Sayers Swindle (A Book Collector Mystery) (28 page)

“Trust me.”

“Better if you trust me. You said it’s your fault that we’re here in the first place.”

“Well, you’re the one who can’t mind her own—”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“Running your fingers on my neck. I told you—”

“I’m nowhere near your neck. What kind of a person do you think—?”

“Well, if you’re not—” Then I knew it really was the worst-case scenario. I was fighting for my life and simultaneously living through emotional turmoil
and
an arachnid invasion. My arms flailed wildly in the darkness.

Smiley shouted, “Stop screaming and jumping around. We need to work on getting out of here.”

“But I hate spiders. I hate them. Help.” I managed to get a grip. Smiley was right. Work on how to get out. Don’t think about spiders. Or him. “Are you all right?” Smiley said from a safe distance.

“Yes. We just need to get to one of the windows.”

“Hurry. How long do you think it will take for that pan of oil to ignite?”

“She set it up to accelerate a fire without looking like it was deliberate. The pan was quite full. Maybe it won’t catch right away.”

He said, “Yeah, well, once the fire starts, this old place will go up in no time. After that we’ll have a couple of minutes. Tops.”

“We need to get to the windows.”

He said, “Where are the windows?”

“Stop pressing against me.”

“Sorry, sorry. I can’t see anything and I don’t know how to avoid you.”

“Work it out. I’m thinking if we can knock a hole in a window—”

“What window? Where?” Smiley sounded grouchy, not like him at all, but the threat of death can do that to a person. Forgivable.

I said, “There are at least two windows along the driveway side of the house. If we find them and break the glass, one of us can crawl out and get help.” From my memory of the size of the windows, I figured I would be the one crawling.

“Fine. Let’s find them.”

Not so easy in the dark. I said, “We have to get oriented.”

Smiley said, “I just banged my knee on something. A dresser maybe?”

“There’s a worktable in the middle of the room. With a ton of craft stuff on it. Right. So the wall with the windows visible from the driveway would be on our left. We were facing the front of the house as we came down the stairs and didn’t turn.”

“We don’t have all the time in the world, so let’s give that a try.”

We felt our way, slowly, painstakingly, toward the far wall. It was a relief to feel the dank cement walls. “We’re feeling for a window frame,” he said.

“I know that. Please stop breathing on me.”

“Believe me, I’m not trying to.”

“I think the windows must be fairly high.”

“I’m aware of—wait. I feel a frame!”

I moved my hand around the area where he seemed to be. Sure enough. A frame.

“So there are curtains covering the window. Karen was paranoid about people seeing what she had down here.”

“Not so happy about that right now,” he said.

“I hear you, but—yes! There’s the curtain. Feel it?”

“And I’m yanking it off.” That clatter that followed must have been the curtain rod hitting some empty paint cans, before landing on the packed earth floor. I couldn’t see the cloud of dust from the decades-old curtain, but it stung my eyes and clogged my throat. Soon we were both coughing. Bad news indeed.

I gasped for air and tried to say, “We still can’t see out. What’s going on?”

“Bars,” he said, before giving in to a hacking cough.

I felt. Sure enough. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes. This window is barred.”

“I didn’t notice bars before. Of course, I wasn’t looking for them. But anyway, we should be able to see outside. Oh, wait! There’s something else blocking out the light on the other side of the bars, not just this incredibly dusty curtain.”

“That has to be it,” he said.

The Kelly family does not give up. “Let me see if I can find the lock on the bars.” Too bad I wasn’t quite tall enough to do that. No choice but to ask Smiley. “Can you feel a lock?”

There are not too many simple household locks that I couldn’t open with the right tools. I chose not to mention that to him.

“Well?” I said after too much time had passed.

“Nothing. I can’t feel a lock. I think it’s been screwed into the frame.”

“That’s bad.”

“Real bad.”

“But what goes in must come out. If we can find the place where it’s screwed in, we can unscrew it.”

“With what?”

“Do you have a screwdriver on you?”

Who has a screwdriver on them? I didn’t have my lock picks either. There was probably something to use on the worktable, but who could see it?

I said, “Why are you making that noise?”

“I’m trying to squeeze my hands through the bars, so I can get rid of the paper or cardboard or whatever it is. But they’re too big, or the bars are too close together.”

“Let me try. My hands are smaller.”

“Don’t get stuck,” he said. “We need to be able to move around.”

I may have snorted. “And trip over things?”

I heard an “oof!” And an “ouch.” “Right,” he said.

The good news was that I was able to squeeze my hands between two of the bars. The bad news was it wasn’t paper on the windows. I could have ripped paper and pulled it through. No, this window had to be covered with a piece of cardboard and it wasn’t going to come without a fight. I struggled and pulled. Just made things worse. “Okay. I don’t know what I’m thinking. It won’t come in. Easier to push it out,” I said. “What can we use that’s narrow enough to fit through the bars, but strong enough to break the glass? Is there a hammer there?”

“You mean is there a hammer here in the pitch-dark?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. Is there?”

“Not that I can feel. We need something long and narrow and tough enough to push through the cardboard and break the glass.”

I moved backward and started an avalanche of stuff. I went flying forward with a wail. I banged my knee on something hard and jagged and scraped my palms as I landed on the earth floor. An image of the cold packed earth in a grave flooded my mind.

Smiley was right there. Speed of light sort of thing, not that we had any light. He did his best to help me up, inhibited by my own attempts. We grunted and pushed. I may have snarled.

“What happened?”

“I must have tripped over the stupid curtain rod. Wait—the curtain rod!”

He said, “We have to do this together. I don’t know how sturdy this rod is, but if we both grab tight and lunge together, we might be able to do it.”

Lunging together sounded like it might have its downside, but I agreed. We managed to grip it and to practice a bit.

“On the count of three,” he said and we lunged.

“Let’s try it again.”

After five lunges, we felt the pop. If you’ve ever broken a piece of glass you know how easy it is to break it when you don’t want to, but if you ever do really need to shatter glass, that’s a different story.

There was the satisfying crash as the glass hit the asphalt driveway. The cardboard flopped out on top of the glass.

It was dark out already, but there was enough light from the streetlight in front of the Cozy Corpse to dimly illuminate the section of the basement closest to the window.

Our eyes met. “We’re still stuck because of those bars,” he said.

“But now we can see enough to find something to pry them off.” We glanced at the curtain rod, but it was now beyond use for anything, let alone a crowbar.

“Let’s check those screws,” he said, peering at the frame. “I’ll try to find something to use for that.” A second later he said, “It’s still too dark to see over here.”

“There are matches on the shelf. And there are candles. I’ll light one.”

“We don’t need more fire. Why don’t we just yell for help?”

“Because . . . You’re right. We can try to attract attention. Especially with the crabby neighbor. He was outside when I got here.”

“Help! Fire! Please help!” We both yelled at the top of our lungs. “Help! Call the fire department! Call the police! Please!”

A man’s voice came back. “Help yourself.” Then we heard the door slam.

What now? What would Wimsey do? He certainly wouldn’t engage in an argument. Way too smooth for that. On the other hand, Wimsey wasn’t here and I wasn’t sure how happy I’d be if I was in this situation with someone who was wearing a top hat and a monocle. Just seemed wrong, that’s all. Wimsey also had his “man” Bunter with him as an assistant. Smiley wasn’t much of an assistant. He wanted to run the show.

“How can we get their attention?”

“I told you he was nasty.”

“There must be some way.”

“It would probably take a Molotov cocktail tossed in their yard.”

“What?”

“That’s it! We can do that.”

“That’s an incendiary device, Jordan.”

Suddenly he was very cop-like.

“I know it goes against what you stand for, but dying down here in this spider hole goes against everything I stand for too.”

“Point taken. What do we need?”

“Something flammable, a rag and the matches. That should get their attention.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before.”

“Absolutely, I’m just that kind of girl,” I snapped defensively.

“No need to yell. It’s just that you know how to make one.” He raised his hands in surrender.

“Are you serious? Everyone who’s ever seen an action movie could figure it out. Stop arguing and let’s find the right kind of bottle.”

“What’s the right kind of bottle?”

“I don’t know. Big enough with a narrow neck? I think that’s the key. Let the pressure build up. There were wine bottles on the craft table. And grab the Mason jar with matches from the shelf.”

“I got the matches. And how about this one?” he said, brandishing what looked like an empty wine bottle with a candle in it.

“Too wide for the bars, I think,”

“There are others. This one’s better. More slender. But we better double-check it.” A quick test showed that we could fit the bottle through the bars.

“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s pick up the pace. Gasoline?”

Of course Karen had not been foolish enough to keep gasoline in her firetrap cellar. Just paint stuff and . . . Yes!

“Turpentine!”

We yelled it simultaneously, which was a weird form of togetherness.

“Now what?” I said.

“You’re the one who knows how to make these things.”

“Obviously I just know what I’ve seen in the movies.”

“Okay. Grab a rag.”

“I don’t see any rags—”

“The curtains!”

The ripping noise was almost drowned out by the coughing racket as we ripped the curtains into strips, stirring up a storm of dust.

“Let’s just hope for the best,” I said, probably the first time anyone has said that before tossing an IED.

He said, “We have to light it outside and make sure there’s no chance it can bounce back on us.”

“Well, I know that. My hands will fit through the bars. I just need to be calm enough to throw it at the target.”

“This looks like a chair. It’s sturdy enough for you to stand on.”

“Now to figure out where to throw it, not that we have a lot of choice. That garbage can looks good to me, and it will attract the neighbors’ attention.”

“And it’s not close enough to the house to set it on fire.”

“They’ll call the cops in a New York minute, maybe before they call the fire department. Let’s do this thing.”

Pulse racing, I held the bottle and he lit the trailing fabric.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, sounding like my uncles just before one of their “outings.”

The arc of the bottle with its flaming tail was glorious to watch and, indeed, my uncles would have been proud. It soared through the air and landed with a splat in the closest bag of leaves by the near edge of the neighbors’ yard. Wimsey couldn’t have done better with all that cricket playing.

“Good going,” Smiley said. “I’ll probably lose my job over arson.”

“But maybe not your life. Anyway, blame it on me. I led you astray.”

His round, pleasant face hardened. “That will never happen. It’s on me.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake—”

The
whoomph
of the leaves put an end to the conversation. Seconds later, the nasty neighbors banged open their back door. He started yelling and swearing. She screamed long and loud.

“Call 911, you stupid woman,” he shouted.

The scream stopped abruptly.

Smiley said, “If we’re lucky, it will only take a couple of minutes for the first responders to get here. We might make it.”