Sticks and Stones Read online

  Leo and Greg were into some sort of harangue about Mary Shelley, and Denise was clearing away her work when I popped down to the main floor. Leo tried to get Denise and me to trek off for Thai food, but Denise was bushed and on her way home, and I still had some notes to go over before I left.

  “What are you doing out of your hutch then?” Leo demanded.

  “The upstairs toilet is on the fritz again. I’m heading down to the basement.”

  “Will you lock up then?”

  “Sure,” I called back to him as I trooped through the kitchen to the basement door. Greg was still in his office, but Denise and Leo headed out as I switched on the light for the stairwell to the bowels of the House.

  Bathrooms aren’t pleasant getaways at the best of times, but the basement loo in the House wouldn’t even qualify as a cell in Alcatraz. It was a small room with a small cracked porcelain wall sink and a very old toilet. Three rolls of toilet paper were lined up on the reservoir, and a small mirror hung crookedly over the sink. Some former occupant of the House had put up a sign to the effect that one’s mother would not be by later to clean up. Someone else, presumably Leo, had left a three-year-old copy of Books in Canada on the floor beside the throne. I leafed through it for lack of anything better to occupy my mind. This was not the place to think about romance.

  After a few moments, I heard footsteps on the stairs. I turned down the corner of the page on the article about Maggie Siggins and shouted, “I’ll be right out, Greg.”

  Instead of Greg’s reply, I heard some scraping outside the door. It couldn’t be Greg; he was too well mannered to stand outside a bathroom door. There was someone out there, though. The noises weren’t the usual house-settling noises. It sounded like something was being dragged across the floor. Right, and I was cast as Jamie Leigh Curtis in one of her ­earlier roles. I had a sneaky suspicion who the casting director was.

  “Leo?” I wasn’t going to rise to his sophomoric attempt to scare me. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands before I spoke again. “Ready or not, here I come.” I turned the doorknob.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  “Leo,” I brayed, “this is not funny. Let go of the knob.”

  The knob suddenly moved under my grip, but it still did nothing to get the door open. I heard footsteps going quickly up the stairs.

  “Leo, damn you. Let me out of here!”

  No answer, but the footsteps sounded farther away, and then there were other muffled noises I couldn’t place.

  I was fuming. I kept trying the doorknob, as if it would suddenly allow me egress, and when I realized how futile that was I began to pace in a small oval. I couldn’t even sit down, seeing as how the toilet was institutional with a black half-seat rather than lidded.

  After a few minutes of pacing I sat down on it anyway. I was so frustrated I began to cry, which only served to awaken fear. Someone had locked me into the basement toilet. No one I knew would actually do this sort of thing as a joke, not even Leo.

  So this was very likely someone I didn’t know. Or someone I didn’t want to know.

  I searched the small room, inventorying my surroundings for some sort of exit plan. I had just picked up the toilet brush tucked behind the commode in an old cut down bleach ­bottle, when the lights went out.

  The dark was absolute, and I heard myself whimper. I was locked in the dark, and there might be a murderer at the ­controls. I hunched over, in what was likely some psychological attempt to make myself small and unnoticeable. As if he didn’t know exactly where I was.

  It wasn’t until I heard the front door slam that I allowed myself to breathe.

  19

  I HAD NEVER CONSIDERED FEAR OF DARKNESS to be one of my phobias, but this was an inky blackness with no residual light. I held my hand in front of my face and succeeded in hitting my head with the toilet brush.

  Long ago, as a teenager, I’d been on a hike with others at the summer camp at Naramata Centre out in the Okanagan. The leaders had taken us to an abandoned U-shaped railway tunnel to experience total blackout. We linked arms and walked to the center of the tunnel, using the rails as our guides. Some of the others had expressed fear of the ­blackness, but I was more concerned about the snakes sunning themselves on the rocks at the other end, and was happy to return the way we’d come. This experience felt the same. I was deprived of sight, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be seeing what lay beyond in the light.

  They say losing one sense heightens the remaining four. I strained to hear noises from upstairs, but I guess heightened senses don’t immediately get bestowed. Either that or there was nothing to hear. I liked that thought. For a while.

  Darkness does seem to throw off one’s sense of time. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been locked in, and cursed the fashionable big-faced watch on my wrist. What I wouldn’t give, right about now for the old Timex I’d worn through high school, with its sickly green glow, or even one of those three-dollar digitals with the button light. I must have been sitting on the toilet for about half an hour or so, because my knee was starting to seize up on me, something it did after long stints in one position.

  I stretched out my legs and just about fell into the open toilet. Wouldn’t that be great? To look as though I’d wet myself when I was found. I giggled, and stopped myself when I heard the noise I made. I wasn’t sure if it was the dark, the solitude, or my psyche, but my laugh sounded a trifle manic. I didn’t want to turn into a drooling mess; what would V.I. Warshawski think of me? I wondered if a working knowledge of crime fiction would help me out of this. Could anything Sara Paretsky had written be relevant to this situation? One of her books had seen her heroine crawling through sewer ­tunnels, pursued by bad guys. Thoughts of crawling through the toilet to escape made me want to laugh again, but I controlled it. Norman Cousins might have approved, but hearing my own laughter was spooking me.

  I tried to take stock, but all I could come up with was a blocked door, and a small black room. How was I going to get out with only a toilet brush and an old issue of Books in Canada? I briefly considered breaking the mirror, but ­couldn’t think of a good reason to bring bad luck and a nasty cut upon myself. I settled well back onto the black toilet seat, and tried to recall the various schedules of the other occupants of the building. Would any of them be likely to come in on a Thursday after five p.m.? I couldn’t think of a good reason, so with a depressing shift, I started to concentrate on Friday timetables. I was shakier here, since I myself never came near the place on Fridays.

  Greg was always in, but usually didn’t come in till nine-thirty or ten. Denise had a morning class on Friday, and would come into the office prior to that for her notes, but that could be anytime from eight-thirty till ten. Leo, like me, ­didn’t teach on Fridays. Chantal was a wild card, and I ­couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen Thora on the Monday/ Wednesday/Friday shift. Chris and Lana taught evening courses, and not even the English Department slated evening courses on Friday. I couldn’t remember if either of them had a Thursday evening class this term, which wasn’t so unusual since I hardly ever saw them. The only other occupant of the House was Jeremy, and he spent most of his time at home.

  My best bet was Denise, some fifteen hours from now. How on earth was I going to keep from going crazy in the meantime? I thought about stories of prisoners reciting poems to keep them going in solitary confinement. The only poem that sprang to mind was “Hey Diddle Diddle.” Lousy advertising for an English Lit. education. I tried for something more befitting of my station in life. Rejecting Marvell as too limiting for a long stretch, I searched my mind for Shakespeare, as if quoting the bard would somehow bring Denise in quicker.

  Even though I’d just spent almost a month on Twelfth Night, I couldn’t for the life of me bring one line of it to ­memory. What sprang up instead was the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet, “Two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene …”

  Half a lifetime ago, when I’d been a stage-struck teenager
, I had been the understudy to everyone in our high school’s production of R & J. It had something to do with the fact that I had been the only girl to sign up for stage fencing who had a pageboy haircut, and more to do with a besottedness with theater and a desire to be at every rehearsal. I spent every show as a kinswoman of the Capulets praying that Tybalt would really break a leg. All the grade twelves got the speaking roles, and I fed them their lines. Ironically, when I got to grade twelve, I was cast as the lead in all three shows, but it was Romeo and Juliet that stayed with me.

  I was halfway through Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech when I heard the upstairs door crash open.

  20

  FOR ALL THE FEAR OF BEING ALONE IN THE DARK, I almost wet myself thinking my captor had returned. It didn’t help to think I was in the right room for the job. I could feel my ears straining out of my scalp to hear what was happening upstairs. The next thing I heard nearly made me weep with happiness. It was Denise. Maybe darkness makes the time really go faster, even though you think it’s slower. Was it morning already?

  “You are such an asshole, Leo,” I could hear Denise griping. “There is a bubble bath turning into soap scum on the sides of my tub at home right this minute.”

  “Darling, I will buy you a hundred white candles and you can have your very own Streisand moment. You are saving my life and I love you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “Why you don’t just put your keys on a string around your neck, I will never know. What is this, the sixth time this term?”

  “I know where they are, they’re right here by the coffee maker. I put them down to throw out the grounds. By the way, you should always use an odd number in hyperbole. Even numbers are simply too plebeian, and for some reason odd numbers are funnier.”

  They were thumping about above my head in the kitchen. I began to shout at them. It took them a while to hear me over Denise’s tirade and Leo’s rambling semi-obsequiousness. Then it took them a couple of minutes to figure out where my calls of “Help me, I’m locked in the basement bathroom” were coming from. And these were members of the top five percentile.

  They looked so shocked to see me tumble out of the doorway they had cleared of the tilted chair under the doorknob that I began to laugh.

  “Randy? What the hell are you doing down here?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, but I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life.”

  I told them my version of what had happened, which was that I had been locked in the loo by persons unknown who then turned out the light switch and closed the basement door.

  “I heard some more movement after that, but I’m not sure how long it took, or when he left.”

  Leo was about to begin on a theory of time but Denise cut him off with the suggestion that we search the House for more signs of mischief.

  “Mischief?” I rebelled against the word. “To lock a slightly claustrophobic person into a dark bathroom is not mischief, it’s diabolical.”

  Denise conceded my point and again urged us to look over the House. There was nothing untoward in the kitchen, but we had to remind Leo once again to pick up his keys. Denise didn’t budge until he put them in his pocket. It seems he had been to dinner and had got all the way home when he realized his keys were missing. He had called Denise from a phone booth to ask her to drive him back to the House to get them.

  Both Denise’s and Leo’s office doors were locked, and a glance inside each showed nothing out of place. We climbed the stairs together. Light spilled into the upper hall from my office. Denise got to the door first, with Leo right behind her. They stopped in the open doorway and then silently let me through between them.

  It was a disaster. Papers had been pulled out of my filing cabinet and strewn about the floor. My desk drawers were all yanked out, and it looked as though badgers had been snuffling through the contents. All the books had been pulled off their shelves, and several older Penguins had lost the will to be bound and had come undone in a drift across the room. The contents of my coffee cup were spilled across the papers on my desk. I heard a little moan, a diminutive version of Peter Cook’s coal miner’s sound when the great lump of coal falls on his foot, and realized I had made the noise.

  “I take it you didn’t leave it like this,” ventured Leo. Denise hit him, but his feeble attempt made me laugh. It was just as well, for if I’d started to cry, I don’t think I could have stopped anytime soon.

  “Let’s go downstairs and call the police,” said Denise with a bit of starch in her voice.

  “The police?” said Leo at the same time as I said, “Downstairs?”

  “It’s a crime scene, isn’t it? Don’t touch anything. You never know, it might have something to do with the rest of the stuff that's been happening.”

  “Why, Denise, you sound so knowledgeable. Could it be you also read something less noble than the Elizabethans?” Leo queried.

  “Well, you don’t think King Lear could put me to sleep at night, do you?” replied Denise archly.

  And with that, we trooped down the stairs to phone the cavalry.

  I was too shook up to care that Leo and Denise would now know of my involvement with Steve. I pulled out his card from my wallet and dialed his pager number directly. I checked Denise’s wall clock, and was amazed to discover it was only nine-thirty. It had seemed as though I had passed more than four hours in the dark. I found myself yawning as the phone rang. I left Denise’s office number and sat in her student chair while Leo went off to start the coffeepot going. I wasn’t sure whether it was shock from my “ordeal” or the sight of my office, or sheer nervous exhaustion, but I was nodding in my chair when Leo popped back in with fresh coffee that he’d dripped directly into cups.

  “Here you are,” he announced, handing me his favorite cup, on which was printed “So what if I haven’t written much lately? Neither has Shakespeare.” The fact that he was letting me use it was, I realized, a mark of concern.

  “A hot cup of sustenance, like my Aunt Jessie always said. Although I think she was referring to gin at the time.” Leo took a slurp of coffee as punctuation. I followed suit and almost gagged on the amount of sugar he’d put in my cup. “What is this made of, treacle?”

  “It’s good for you; you’ve had a shock to the system. In a better world we’d be giving you brandy right now.”

  “A better world,” echoed Denise. I looked up at her. The weary and slightly frightened look on her face did more to make the situation sink in than anything else. I’d been operating on instinct till now. As I sat back in the safety of her office with my friends around me, I started to see the big ­picture. Someone had locked me up and ransacked my office. At any time I’d have probably felt violated. In the wake of a murder on campus and the defacement of the doors in the department, I began to feel truly frightened. Gloria Steinem would not have been proud of me. All I wanted right then was for my man to ride up and save me.

  21

  THE PHONE ON DENISE’S DESK RANG AND WE ALL jumped. Leo and I giggled as Denise answered. She passed the receiver to me, and I felt my shoulders unwind a bit as I heard Steve’s voice on the other end.

  I told him as succinctly as possible what had happened. He told me that he’d call in a crime scene unit and meet them at the House.

  “Can your friends stay with you till I’m there?”

  “Sure, I guess. You’ll be needing to talk to them, anyhow, won’t you?”

  “I suppose. Right now, I just want to make sure you won’t be alone.”

  I smiled, then saw Leo leaning toward me, trying to catch the disembodied voice through the receiver. I made a face at him, and replied to Steve, “I don’t think you'll have to worry about them sticking around.”

  Leo gave me a look of mock hurt as I replaced the receiver on the cradle.

  “Miranda, you don’t think we’re in this just for vicarious pleasure, do you? We care about your safety, darling.”

  “Give it a rest, Leo,” said Denise wearily.
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br />   Leo gave her the same hurt look I’d received. Then he sniffed a Lady Bracknell sniff, and got back to business. “And just how well do we know this policeman, Miranda?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, not only do you have his private number, he obviously has a personal stake in this as well. If we’re not intrinsic to the investigation, we’re here to keep you safe until he arrives. He cares about you.”

  He looked to Denise for verification. She nodded.

  “I can’t believe it. With all that has gone on tonight, you are more interested in my personal life?”

  “We’re your friends. We’re supposed to gossip about you.”

  “Don’t let him get to you, Randy,” Denise overrode my comeback to Leo. “Leo’s archness can be a bit too much at times, especially when you’re exhausted. And if you’re not, you should be. I know I am.”

  I looked her over. She did look tired, but she probably would look better than me after three days stranded by an avalanche in a mountain cabin. I hoped Steve wouldn’t have too many questions for her.

  We saw lights reflected on Denise’s wall and looked out to see a police car all ablaze pull up in front of the House. Steve’s car pulled in behind just as the first car cut its lights. He met two men at the base of the walk, and all three trooped up to the steps. Leo had bounced into the hall to open the door. I started to get up, but sank back, bone weary. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Let them come to me.

  Part of my mind, the editor that stands on guard for me, was considering how Steve was going to play this. It wasn’t as if we had anything to hide, but he was a policeman in front of other policemen, and my friends were hovering too. As I listened to the treads of large male feet on the front steps, I decided that I wouldn’t really be too bothered if he retained some professional aloofness. I would understand.