Apple Turnover Murder (Hannah Swensen, #13)(81)

She peeked out cautiously and saw him standing about a half-block away, looking toward the west and shading his eyes from sun. Had she lost him? Should she stay here as quiet as a mouse and wait until he gave up and walked back to his truck?

Who are you kidding? Hannah’s mind said, and this time she agreed that it would be a bad decision. He’d search this whole area for her and find her huddled here. And then he’d pull out the knife, perhaps even the same one that he’d used on Bradford, and make sure she never told anyone what she knew.

Hannah shuddered. She wasn’t quite sure what horrified her most, the idea that he would kill her or the thought that she’d be stabbed with Bradford’s knife. In any event, she wasn’t going to hang around to find out.

Carefully and quietly, she began to work her way west, hoping the bright sun that was midway between its apex and the horizon, would blind him to her presence. She’d passed the second mausoleum when she saw it, a way that she could hide from Perry. It was the Henderson family mausoleum. She knew that because Bud Hauge had repaired the metal walleye and attached it to the front of the structure. But it wasn’t the walleye that had caught Hannah’s attention. It was the door at the side of the structure. The padlock that normally secured it was open and the door was very slightly ajar.

She really didn’t want to go in. There was nothing less appealing than a dark final resting place furnished with cold granite slabs that were decorated with spider webs and slithery, slimy things, and inhabited, if you could call it that, by dead mouldering bodies. Hannah swallowed hard, repressed a shiver, and corrected herself. The only thing less appealing than the inside of the Henderson crypt was being cornered by the man who intended to make her into one of those same mouldering bodies!

Hannah pulled the door open. It took all the courage she had to step inside, but she told herself that the dead could hurt her a lot less than the living and to get on with it.

Once she’d shut the door behind her, Hannah felt faint with fear. She stood there breathing heavily for what seemed like hours until she heard another sound, a sound that made her blood run cold. It was the click of a padlock closing outside the door. Perry had discovered her hiding place and locked her in!

A sudden dizziness came over her. It made her lose all sense of direction. She knew her feet were resting on the floor … or were they? Was up really up? Was down really down? It was the sort of total disorientation people must feel in a sensory deprivation chamber.

She had to sit down and get her bearings. But where? Even though she’d been here for several minutes, her eyes had not adjusted and it was still as black as a tomb inside. Black as a tomb? her mind asked. Just where do you think you are?

Of course she ignored it. Her mind wasn’t being very helpful at the moment. She had to concentrate on the positives in her situation. Yes, she was locked in, but she wouldn’t think about that. She was alive and unhurt, and that meant she had options. She couldn’t see, but she could still feel.

Tentatively, Hannah reached out into the darkness. Her left hand encountered a hard slightly-rounded surface. It was only a bit above chair height, and she sat down. It was a lot better than sitting on the floor with the spiders and the other crawly things, and it would be fairly comfortable if she removed the object that was jabbing her from her rear pocket. What could it be, anyway? She’d left her purse in Perry’s truck, and the only thing she had with her was …

Her cell phone! Hannah stood up in a flash and retrieved her cell phone. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? It was her salvation, her escape from danger, her passport out of here. She flipped it open, glanced at the display, and gave a moan of dismay. There were no bars, and the screen read No Signal. Spring Brook Cemetery was in a dead zone.

The cemetery is in a dead zone, her mind repeated, how appropriate. Hannah had to admit it did make sense. Why would they install a cell phone tower in the cemetery? It wasn’t as if the residents would be making many calls.

She couldn’t sit here and do nothing, hoping that someone had seen her get into the truck with Perry and would ask the right questions to track her to Spring Brook Cemetery. She was responsible for her own survival, and that meant she must find a way to get out of the mausoleum. She needed to explore her surroundings and find something she could use as a weapon if Perry came back. And if he failed to come back, she had to look for something she could use to force the wooden door open.

If only she had her flashlight! Hannah thought about it longingly for a moment, and then she remembered the cell phone in her hand. It wouldn’t make calls, but there was a light on the display. The light stayed on for only a minute and then it went off, but it would go on again every time she closed the phone and flipped it open again.

The search began with the area to her immediate right. Hannah flipped on the phone and used the lighted display to shine a dim light on a red wool hunting jacket and a hunting cap with earflaps. For a moment she was puzzled, but then she remembered that she was in Winnie Henderson’s family crypt, and Winnie had told Delores that she’d buried her husbands with their sporting equipment.

Too bad there weren’t any guns, but Winnie hadn’t been that foolish. There might be knives though. Hannah re-flipped her phone to look through the hunting coat pockets and came up with a hunting knife in a leather sheath. It was a weapon and she would use it on Perry if she had to, but it might also be useful as a tool to carve her way through the wooden door.