In Death's Shadow

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I looked Nick Pottorff straight in the eye. "Who the hell are you?"

Mrs. Bromley crossed her arms over her bosom and glared at him, too. "And what do you want with us?"

Pottorff ignored her, keeping his eyes on me. There was no flash of recognition, thank goodness, just a hint of ill-concealed amusement. "Your friend, here, she's been a busy little bee with her camera."

"She's not my friend. She's my mother," I lied smoothly.

"I'm president of the Ginger Cove garden club," Mrs. Bromley pouted. "I was photographing the tulip beds, for heaven's sake, and the next thing I knew, this thug-" She glared at Chet so fiercely that he actually backed away.

"Nice try, Mom." Pottorff held out his hand and helped Mrs. Bromley alight from the van.

He offered me the same assistance, but I kept my hands to myself. If I actually had to touch the loathsome toad, I knew my fingers would drop off. "No thanks. I can manage."

When my feet hit the ground, I nearly collapsed. My left leg had gone to sleep. I pounded on it with my fist, trying to get the circulation going again. "Are you all right, Mom?"

Mrs. Bromley's smile was unconvincing. "As well as could be expected, dear."

We were standing on the spotless concrete floor of a modem, three-car garage. Except for the van, it was empty. No tools lined the back wall, no paint cans, no old snow tires, no broken-down bicycles or rusty shovels. A Stepford garage. It wasn't natural.

Pottorff extended an arm and bowed slightly, like a headwaiter about to escort us to our table. "Please, follow me."

With Chet bringing up the rear, we followed Pottorff up a short flight of stairs, through a mud room where winter coats and rain slickers hung on hooks in an orderly row, into an eye-poppingly gorgeous gourmet kitchen. Valerie would have loved this, I thought. As we trooped past a high-tech appliance island, I stole a glance out the window, hoping to recognize the neighborhood, but it was impossible. Nick Pottorff's house, if this was his house, had been built on a heavily wooded lot. Through a thick canopy of leaves I thought I caught a glimpse of water, but I couldn't be sure.

Chet prodded me in the back. "Move along, lady."

Pottorff opened a door next to an antique Dutch cupboard and led us down a flight of stairs.

I feared we would find a dungeon at the end of it, or a dark, dank basement, but the stairs were broad and carpeted, and when we reached the bottom, we found ourselves in a luxurious family room right out of the pages of House Beautiful. A sixty-inch HDTV plasma screen was mounted on one wall, flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. To our right was an extensive bar of carved oak, modeled on an English pub. At least two kinds of beer seemed to be on tap, as well as a wide range of hard liquor, if the number of bottles on display was any indication. A beveled mirror reflected the light from a Tiffany-style tight fixture, and mounted above the mirror was the piece de resistance: a copy of Goya's Naked Maya. From her vantage point over the bar, the Maya enjoyed a view of a massive stone fireplace.

"You have a lovely home." My voice dripped acid.

Pottorff turned and studied me without smiling. "Please, give me a moment." He lifted a key from a hook mounted next to a decorative chalkboard that had "Happy Hour" painted on it, then ambled down a short hallway, at the end of which was a door made of dark wood, inset with etched glass.

I squinted. Curlicues and dolphins, I thought, or maybe they were mermaids. Hard to tell.

Pottorff unlocked the door, turned and waggled his fingers in a come-hither way.

With Chet at our backs to hustle us along, we toddled down the hallway past a glass front refrigerator filled with beverages. Like at 7-Eleven, only fancier.

"Please. Wait in here," Pottorff said, stepping aside.

"Wait for what?" I asked.

"Please." He opened the door wider.

"But it's a wine cellar," I said, stepping with some reluctance into the room.

Nick Pottorff turned to Mrs. Bromley. "Your daughter has remarkable powers of observation."

"And it's cold in here," Mrs. Bromley complained. "We don't have sweaters."

"Wine cellars are maintained at fifty-five degrees," I informed Pottorff. "Like a cave."

"Are you a tour guide now?" Pottorff grinned, revealing a row of crooked teeth. "You aren't going to be in here all that long," he said.

"You hope," added the despicable Chet.

Pottorff scowled. "Shut up, Chet, and get the ladies a blanket."

Chet turned and sauntered down the hall. With his back to us, I noticed the gun for the first time, tucked inside the waistband of his khakis. I felt my lunch beginning to crawl back up my esophagus. Chet returned in less than a minute carrying a red plaid blanket he'd snatched from the back of a leather sofa; I'd noticed it in the family room when we walked by. He tossed the blanket into the room, where it landed on the floor in an untidy heap.

Pottorff left, making an elaborate production of closing and locking the door behind him. The only light in the room came through the glass pane in the door. I managed to retrieve the blanket and drape it over Mrs. Bromley's shoulders.

"Whose house is this, do you know?" she whispered.

"I wish I did. Not Nick Pottorff's, surely. Every time I've seen him, he's been wearing the same brown suit. I doubt he could afford a place like this."

"His teeth need work, too," said Mrs. Bromley. Next to me, she shivered. "Jablonsky, then?"

"That'd be my guess. It's fancy enough for Fishing Creek Farm, although I didn't have the impression that Chet was driving in that direction. Whoever he is," I mused, "the guy's got money."

In the light coming through the glass pane, I could see Mrs. Bromley's worried face. "Help me find a light switch," I said. We ran our hands along the walls on both sides of the door, without success. "Must be on the outside," I grumbled, angry at myself for feeling defeated by a simple thing like a light switch.

Mrs. Bromley spread the blanket on the floor and sat down on it, leaning back against the stout leg of a tasting table that dominated the center of the room. She patted the floor next to her. "Sit, Hannah. Let's consider our options."

To tell the truth, I didn't think we had many options, but I plopped down next to her anyway. We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes while my eyes gradually became accustomed to the semidarkness.

At home, my "wine cellar" consists of six pine shelves that Paul brought home from IKEA and banged together in the pantry. Mrs. Bromley and I were being held captive in the kind of wine cellar you read about in Wine Spectator. I knew that nobody actually owned a wine cellar like this, except movie stars and dot-com kings.

"I'm going to case the joint," I told Mrs. Bromley. I stood and worked my way clockwise around our prison, running my hands along the wine racks like a blind man. They were smoothly polished and made of wood. To the left of the door, diamond-shaped bins lined the wall. When I turned the corner, my hands met more bins, then an alcove that included a small sink set flush with the countertop-marble, from the coolness of it. I reached up. Stemware was suspended from racks mounted overhead; when I touched them, they tinkled like wind chimes. This had to be a decanting table.

I moved on past the decanting table, where there were more bins, mostly with single slots, extending straight up to the ceiling, ten feet or more above my head. Set into a niche near the ceiling was an air conditioner that kept the wine at a constant 55 degrees, as I suspected. Even in the dim light, I could distinguish the two saucer-sized air vents that blew cool air into the room.

Suddenly inspired, I grabbed a bottle by the neck and eased it out of its slot. I stuck my hand into the slot up to my elbow, hoping I'd discover the walls were made of Sheetrock or something equally flimsy, but my fingers met only rough, cold stone.

I plopped back down next to Mrs. Bromley. "Well, that was the grand tour. Now what do I do?"

"I'm sorry, Hannah. This is all my fault."

"Not entirely your fault," I assured her. "I'm the one who lit the fire under Jablonsky, remember?"

I studied her profile, and even though her chin was quivering, I asked her the question I'd been meaning to ask for several hours. "I thought you were staying in Chestertown at a B and B! How did these creeps find you?"

Mrs. Bromley lowered her head and stared at her thumbs. "I changed my mind. I didn't go to Chestertown."

"Mrs. B!"

"I just said I was going to Chestertown so you wouldn't worry about me."

"So you planned to go after Chet with your camera?"

Mrs. Bromley nodded miserably.

I had toyed with the idea of not telling her about Gail, but this didn't seem like the time to begin keeping secrets from one another. "Mrs. Bromley, we're in real danger here." I informed her of Gail's murder, skipping over the details about my finding the body.

"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."

"I feel the same way, Hannah."

"I just wish I could get a message to Paul. The last time I talked to him, he made me promise not to leave the house. When he gets home and finds me gone, he's going to kill me." I chuckled ruefully. "So to speak."

I reached for my purse and started rummaging.

"What are you looking for, dear?"

"Something to write with. I want to leave Paul a note, if they-" I swallowed, unable to continue.

For want of something better, I located my checkbook and tore a deposit slip out of the back. It would have to do. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I wrote Paul a note that came straight from my heart.

When I finished, and had pulled myself back together, I turned to Mrs. Bromley. "Where should I hide it?"

Mrs. Bromley didn't even pause to think. "You could empty out a wine bottle, put the note in, and recork it."

"I like that idea."

"I used it in a novel once. The Broken Promise."

"Really? I don’t know how I missed that one. When we get out of here, I'll have to read it." Tucking the note into my pocket, I crossed the room. Starting at the lower left-hand corner nearest the door, I counted nine slots up and seventeen over. I pulled a wine bottle out of the slot and carried it over to the door so I could see the label more clearly.

"Michael LeBois Pinot Noir Santa Maria Highlands 2001," I read aloud.

"Sounds complicated, but lovely," Mrs. Bromley said.

"I'm sure he's waiting for this little beauty to mature." I took the bottle over to the decanting table and positioned it under the corkscrew. "Well, too effing bad!" I pulled down and rammed the corkscrew home. I lifted the handle to release the cork, then held the bottle over the sink.

"Want a taste?"

"Are you kidding?"

I tipped the bottle to my mouth. "God, this is good." I took another swig and swished the wine around in my mouth before turning the bottle upside down and watching every last ounce of Michael LeBois's finest gurgle down the drain.

I rolled my note into a tube, stuck it in the bottle, and replaced the cork, pushing it all the way in with my foot. Then I returned the pinot noir to its proper slot.

"In case something happens to me, Mrs. Bromley, remember: nine up and seventeen over. It's my birthday."

From her position on the floor, Mrs. Bromley looked up at me and smiled. "Under the circumstances, Hannah, don't you think it's time you started calling me Naddie?"