Fundraising The Dead

CHAPTER 30

It took me a moment to figure out what had happened. Doris had just locked me into a very small dark place in the basement, and Charles was nowhere around. I picked myself up off the floor, turned around, and sat, my back against shelves. Then I clamped down hard on the incipient panic attack.

I was not claustrophobic; I was not afraid of the dark. Good. So now it was time to use my brain and think. For starters, I knew where I was. Despite not having spent much time down here, I knew every corner of the building, since I had written more than one grant proposal begging for money to upgrade our lovely but aging 1900 building. This was the former wine cellar, an artifact of the glory days when the Society was run like a gentlemen’s club, and those gentlemen liked to have a place to lay down their vintage port, the perfect accompaniment to perusing old documents. Needless to say, the space had not held wine for a very long time; now it held miscellaneous crap. It was located in the farthest corner of the basement, far away from any human traffic, and, as I knew well, it was well insulated.

As the product of an earlier, simpler era, it also had no internal light switch… and no ventilation. I squashed another moment of panic and tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I forced myself to look carefully around-any pinpricks of light visible through a crack? Nope. But no doubt Doris had turned off the lights in the room outside, and there were no windows in there, either. It felt cold in the room but was probably only around fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit; big deal-nobody froze to death at fifty-five degrees, although they might be uncomfortable. It was the possible lack of air, not the temperature, that was a bigger problem, I thought. It seemed unlikely to me that the room was hermetically sealed, and even if it had been once, the heavy metal door had warped from its own weight over the years, so it was letting in a little air. And anyway, weren’t there plenty of stories about miners trapped underground in air pockets, who survived for days? All I had to do was avoid strenuous exercise and breathe slowly, slowly… easier said than done, of course, when trapped in the dark in a basement where nobody ever came.

Now, what did I have to work with? I had carried my purse with me to the basement, so I did a quick mental inventory. I had my keys, with a mini-flashlight on the keychain, but I wasn’t sure how old the battery was and how long it might last-best to keep that in reserve. A half-empty box of Altoids-oh, goody, sugar. Kleenex, Band-Aids, my wallet-sure, like I was going to work my way out of here with a credit card. Not likely. Cell phone.

Cell phone! I grabbed it out of its little pocket, flipped it open, and pushed the button to turn it on. Come on, come on, I urged it. Its small screen provided a surprising amount of light, though maybe it was just in contrast to the absolute darkness around me. Finally it woke up and started searching for its service area-and found nothing. And then I remembered that I was in the bowels of a concrete-and-reinforced-steel structure, surrounded by metal shelves, in a room with a theft-proof metal door, with a subway track running beneath me. Of course it wasn’t going to find a signal. Reluctantly I shut it again, conserving its light-I might want it later, if only for a little company.

What now? I pulled out the flashlight and flicked it on, so I could survey my dungeon. The feeble beam swept over more metal shelving, stacked with old books, outdated piles of Society publications, and miscellaneous junk. Unfortunately, no former visitor had left a handy sledgehammer for me to use to batter my way out. Nor a pry bar, nor anything else that might have an impact on the sturdy walls and door. I swiveled the light toward the door; no interior handle or keyhole. OSHA would be appalled, but the building had been constructed in a different era. And I didn’t know how to pick a lock anyway-another skill I had been meaning to acquire.

Think, Nell, think! That’s what you’re good at!… Yeah, you and Butch Cassidy, and look where that got him. I made myself as comfortable as I could against the shelves. I had left Marty a phone message. Good for me. But I had no idea where Marty was and when she might listen to her messages. Assume the best case: she came home, immediately played her messages, and heard that Charles asked me to meet him here. So, eventually she’d expect me to report back about what he wanted. But when? Would she start calling me later today? Would she wait until tomorrow?

Again, best-case scenario, she would get worried late in the afternoon when I didn’t answer at any of my numbers, so she’d start checking around. She’d call the Society, but no one would answer. Say Marty could track down Charles; he would profess ignorance of the whole thing. I had mentioned Doris in my message to Marty, so maybe she would try to find Doris -who would also profess ignorance, and who knows what phone she had called from. But Marty had my message, and if both Charles and Doris stonewalled her, she would know something was wrong. The problem was, how long would it take her to figure all this out?

Maybe she would call James. But didn’t agencies have to wait until an adult had been gone forty-eight hours before getting involved in a search? Still, at least Marty and James knew what was going on, what was at stake. They would have to be concerned when I disappeared and didn’t show up again. Certainly by Monday, when I didn’t appear at work, right?

But Monday was a day away. Did I have enough air for that long? And how long would it be before somebody did a full search of the building? Nobody ever came down to this corner of the basement; there was no reason to come down here, maybe not for weeks. Maybe some future renovation would reveal my rotting corpse-or would I be mummified by then? How long did that take?

Stop it, Nell, I scolded myself. I decided to assume the best of all possible worlds: that Marty would worry sooner rather than later, that she’d demand that the FBI and the Philadelphia police do something immediately (and that she had enough clout to make that happen), and that they would be thorough and look in every nook and cranny of the building, and they would find me soon. Very soon.

I thought about looking at my watch to see how long I had been sitting here, trapped, but that would be a waste of precious flashlight power, and it had probably been no more than half an hour anyway. So, Nell, let’s examine the curious question of why Doris locked you in the wine cellar.

What did I really know about Doris Manning? She was at least ten years older than I was, and had worked here ever since Charles had started. Had he brought her with him from an earlier job? I couldn’t remember. She was very good at her job, and she was in a position to know everything about the building and operations. She had never married, and she obviously worshipped Charles-it was clear every time she looked at him. It was something of a joke among the rest of the staff. Although to be fair, Charles did nothing to encourage her; he just accepted her adoration as his due. She would do anything for him…

Like kill?

Oh my. I started to run the mental video of the gala. Had I seen Doris then? She had been invited, of course, but she was such an invisible sort of person that no one paid her much attention. She could have been there throughout, or she could have slipped out and done almost anything-including kill Alfred. He knew her and would’ve had no reason to be afraid of her. Doris could have asked him to check something in the stacks, maybe for a member, and he would have followed her willingly. Even eagerly-anything to get away from that party he hated. And it wouldn’t have taken much strength to whack Alfred on the head with something heavy or to shove him into the metal bookshelves. Based on the push she had given me, I had no reason to question Doris ’s strength. And nothing ever ruffled her-she would have walked calmly away from Alfred’s cooling corpse and gone about her business, without a hair out of place.

But why? What possible motive could she have to kill Alfred? But for that matter, what motive could she have to lock me in here? It had to come back to her adoration of Charles. No doubt she would have picked up some whispers of missing documents. We all knew she tip-toed around the place eavesdropping on conversations. Maybe she’d overheard me talking with Alfred. Heck, for all I knew, she was Charles’s fence. Somebody had to arrange for negotiations with those under-the-radar collectors, and I knew for a fact that Charles was clueless when it came to computer programs, let alone mailing packages. Doris always handled it all for him. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me.

The question I really didn’t want to ask myself was, what did Charles know? He couldn’t have known how much Alfred knew, because Alfred hadn’t told anyone except me, and then Marty. Even so, what had Charles thought when he heard that Alfred was dead? Did he never once consider that faithful Doris might have been involved? Or had he carefully avoided even thinking about it?

Which at the moment was moot. How the hell was I going to prove any of this, locked in the basement? Knowing Doris, she would purge all records of anything remotely incriminating, if she hadn’t already. By the time anyone found me, all the evidence would be long gone. Did she know that Marty knew the whole story? I went around and around with my reasoning. If I had really loved Charles, how far would I have gone along with his schemes? Luckily I would never have the chance to find out: the only thing I had done right lately was to dump him. At least my moral compass seemed to be working. I wasn’t so sure about my brain.

When I had said good-bye to Charles, I had said I wanted something more in my life than he was willing to offer. I guess what I meant was someone. I had opened my mouth and that was what had come out, unscripted. Did I believe it? I did. I thought of Alfred, all but caressing Cassandra, his computer, and gathering his little trinkets in his small apartment. Or Doris, giving everything she had to her low-level job and worshipping the man she worked for, who took her slavish devotion as his due without giving her a second thought. What did I want? I liked my job, loved history and tending the bits and pieces of it that had survived. But I had to admit, it would be nice if there was someone who cared about me. Someone who would notice if I went missing for a few days-or forever.

I don’t know how long I sat there in the dark, just thinking. I might have shed a few tears about the abysmal mess I’d made of things. Every now and then I worried about the air, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it. There wasn’t enough room to get comfortable, but I thought I remembered that the air would be better down low. Or maybe that was in case of fire. Still, I might as well lie down and conserve energy. I put my purse under my head for a pillow, wrapped my wool jacket around me, and curled up in a fetal position to wait.