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.