The door opened on a small landing between rickety steps going up into the dark and sturdier ones going down. The air felt dry and had no particular smell, unlike damp, moldy Midwestern basements.
She glimpsed the black cat she’d ended up tailing dashing down the battered two-by-eight-board stair with the ease and energy of a creature who can climb a tree with Velcro-strong talons. This was starting to feel very White Rabbit, only with a Black Cat.
And maybe the cat was running with the verve of having been down here before, Temple thought.
“Louie,” Temple called softly, teetering on the first wooden steps to the basement.
If Temple suffered from any one irrational fear, it would be claustrophobia rather than agoraphobia. She’d choose to be the cheese standing alone at the end of the nursery rhyme over the Ritz cracker crammed into a roll inside a wax wrapper and then sealed into a box.
She’d expected the basement to be a wide open space—dark, yes, but empty to its concrete block walls. What a decent Midwestern basement should be.
However the basement’s exposed walls looked carved out of natural sandstone and caliche, a cement-hard soil compacted by the presence of lime. And the space wasn’t as cavernous as she’d expected. Concrete block cubicles lined the outer walls, solid versions of the antique-mall display areas above, only closed in to the ceiling and locked with metal doors.
There must have been—well, count the doors on one side: twenty or so of them. Probably a storage unit for each of the upstairs sales booths in their heyday.
And the floor…it too was hard caliche, but the large central section had wooden floorboards, as if there’d been an interior room of some kind once. The condition screamed “long-abandoned”. Broken-up concrete patches along some parts of the cubicle walls looked ripped up by a jackhammer, as if the Property Brothers crew from HGTV home network had passed through to bust up the old, but never came back to install the new and finish the makeover.
Hmm. She wondered about putting a funky fifties hippie nightclub down here, with poetry readings and candles in wine bottles. A scraping sound outside the flashlight’s small beam made Temple sweep the edges of the area with pinpoints of light. No rats, no snakes. No cat either.
Great. She was hallucinating cats now. At least her soft slippers made her as silent as one.
Or maybe not. Her flashlight picked out a shadowy form. Midnight Louie pawing at a dark corner, nose to the ground, intent.
Cats only do that when there was something only they see, a crawling bug, maybe. Temple shivered. Vegas had lots of those. Scorpions, centipedes. Temple’s toes curled in her slippers to avoid even the thought of stepping on creepy-crawlies.
“Louie! Don’t bite anything that can possibly bite you back. Get away…” But Mr. Curious had to spot, sniff, paw, taste-test anything new that came into the condo, from a magazine to a centipede. And, if he could, take it apart. He could chew the metal off the top of lead pencils and then bat the extracted graphite rod around. She’d have to pursue him to recover the unsafe object.
No fast moves to be made here. The floor was deeply chipped away in places. She could sprain an ankle if she didn’t watch out. She recalled the classic catchphrase from Jaws, “You need a bigger boat.” She was pretty sure a Great White shark wasn’t lurking on land, but she knew she needed her bigger flashlight. And maybe a Fontana brother or two.
“Louie! I’m not going to leave you alone down here. It’s dangerous. Now, git. Go on!” She rushed him with a patter of steps going forward.
He wasn’t fooled. This place was full of smells and nooks and crannies only he could detect and diagnose and dissect. He was like a mad scientist loose in a nasty, decrepit, dangerous playground.
“Louie, no!” she shouted. “Now quit that and get out.” She flicked the flashlight fast toward the back stairs, wishing it was a red LED light no cat could resist, although Louie had gotten bored with an incorporeal toy that disappeared pretty fast.
Oh, boy. At times like these, when she was too committed to back out without going slowly, she wished she had a dog who would come when called.
Temple began to retreat. “Louie,” she implored. She felt her flimsy flat-heel hit a hole and flailed to keep her balance. The tiny metal flashlight slipped out of her hand. Somewhere in the dimness a small metallic clink announced where it had fallen.
“Drat it!” No, that sounded too much like “rat”. She shuffled a couple feet forward until she felt it and bent to retrieve it. Turning, she saw the steps had blackened and so had the door beyond them. Night had truly fallen.
She opened her mouth to call Louie…but heard a distant creak. Maybe from the far stairway. Temple found that sinister. If it had been caused by a footstep, had that stepper paused to listen?
Perhaps a passerby hearing her admonitions to Louie?
Someone who had come from vandalizing the Lovers’ Knot front entrance again?
The unknown person who’d hung Jay Edgar Dyson.
Katt Zydeco, who was really a comics’ super-villainess. Oops. She’d been watching too much Gotham on TV.
No, she was not going to yell or make noise again, not until she was safely out of here.
Something lifted her skirt edge. A mental Eek!
Then she felt a brush of velvet fur behind her knee. Louie! His erect tail was always getting fresh with her legs when she wore a skirt, as he moved back and forth around her ankles.
Great. He could trip her and she’d lie here unfound until global warming would have caused the Pacific to rise and swamp California and the Mojave desert…and a Great White shark would be found flailing in the tide and someone in the boat following would say, “You need a bigger flashlight.”
Temple shook off her imaginative rerun of Jaws.
She took an unsteady step forward. A phantom tail brush saluted her other leg. She moved in hopes she could bend down and capture Louie, but another step brought only another unseen brush on her other leg.
Cats may not be able to see in the dark, but they do much better than a redhead with light-sensitive skin and blue-gray eyes. Temple knew. Carefully keeping her weight on a back foot before she slowly transferred it to a new step forward, she followed Louie’s weaving path ahead of her.
Until her slippered toe stubbed something large and hard, in a totally creepy way. Ouch!
Was there now another abandoned dead body in Electra’s inherited building?
The flashlight revealed a corpse, all right, a dead body of metal with a long narrow nose of shark-like saw-teeth. Why was she seeing sharks when she abhorred the species being demonized on “Shark Week” on cable TV? She recalled a PBS special that showed a sawshark, and then remembered something very insentient, something linked forever in the public mind with the word “massacre”. A chainsaw. What was a chainsaw doing in a basement storage area? And a really nasty scissors-looking tool big enough to have pulled some real sharks’ teeth?
She stepped carefully around the hardware and over the rough floor to examine one of the steel-doored storage units. Someone at some time had wanted to keep something very much under wraps in this building.
The flashlight revealed the door’s big steel combination lock hooked over a thick latch…and showed the lock’s curved neck had been cut through and was barely dangling from the latch. The flashlight beam glinted off the cut marks. They were the bright gleaming silver of new metal, unexposed to air and oxidation. She got out the big flashlight and illuminated the nearest door locks. All either had dangling cut locks, or broken locks lying on the floor below.
This damage was fresh, it was systematic, and the fact that all the doors had been breeched meant that the searcher or searchers had not found what was being sought. Temple parked the big flashlight in her tote bag again and used both hands to pull a door missing the lock entirely open enough to thrust her hand holding the tiny flashlight through.