A Person Unknown WHN: Caged Chapter 9/11

 Caged

Chapter 9

 

 

Johnny struggled to open his eyes.  The light was fading but he could make out a pile of blankets, a bucket and a pitcher.  He knew the space too well already, having spent time in it when Lucrece had hidden him there.  But that time, there’d been a ladder to climb out.  He tried jumping up and managed to get his hand flat on the underside of the wood of the hatch cover but it didn’t budge at all.

He tried shouting but no-one answered.  In the end, his throat sore from shouting and various aches and pains from his fall making themselves known, he sat on the pile of blankets and tried to think things through.

First, he took physical stock of himself.  He was bruised – shoulder, hip, knee down one side, but he knew from the way he’d been able to move around that nothing was broken.   He undid the conchos on his pants leg and unwrapped the cloth his brother had bound round  his calf.  The bullet hole in his leg was not quite closed, which is why it had started bleeding when that damn heavy reel of wire had fallen on him, but it didn’t look inflamed or to be infected at all. Even the bruise was beginning to fade, so that was all a plus.   

A plus in what?  Some ledger of things over which he had some control?  Things that weren’t utterly baffling?  Just why had he fallen in the first place?  Sure, he’d felt dizzy, and she’d lunged at him and maybe she put a hand on his shoulder and shoved, but it was like he couldn’t make any move to stop himself.  He hadn’t grabbed anything, not even the ragged end of rope that had fallen across his face before – he’d just fallen.  Perhaps that was why he’d not hurt himself too much.  He’d not had time to tighten his muscles, and he’d rolled away before he blacked out. 

But if those were the pluses in this imaginary ledger, then what were the minuses?  He had enough trouble with Murdoch’s leather-bound instruments of torture but at least he knew what the numbers were, paying in or paying out. 

He was trapped, as securely as the wretched animals caught in cages far too small for them, bound up and doctored by a girl who’d taken back the rabbit he’d found and then declared he was mistaken.  Why had he kissed her then?  And promised he’d be back?

Shadows in the darkening storeroom were closing in on him as questions crowded his mind.  He shifted to lean back against the dirt wall of the store, trying to follow his thoughts.  The trains of logic he was used to considering were completely escaping him.  What was she trying to do?  Cure him of not loving her?  Force him into marrying her just to escape?  Bore him to death?  He had water, he wouldn’t freeze and he had enough patience to last out, at least until Scott came back, that was for sure.  He’d tested his patience over and over in the past and never found it wanting. 

The answers to his questions led him back time and again to only one conclusion.  Lucrece’s view of the world was very different from his own.  He hesitated to label her crazy, as he had done once before.  She seemed like she knew exactly what she was doing and he’d followed along like a little lamb.  Maybe he was the one who’d lost his mind.  He’d been feeling a kind of fog in his head and it sure made it hard to find any answers that didn’t swirl away from him as soon as he thought of them, or circle back to that same idea: that she was crazy and he was lost.

It was getting towards full dark when he looked up at the hatch.  One gap was wide enough to frame the evening star.  How many times had he watched that appear as he had waited for the right moment to strike, or the right moment to shout out, or even the moment someone took over his watch and he could curl in his blanket and go to sleep? 

Something had caught his attention, a noise or a movement.  He stood, easing his legs and massaging his hands as if in preparation to fight back.  There was a metallic rattle, perhaps a chain being moved, then a lock being opened.  The hatch was pulled open. 

“Johnny?”  It was Lucrece, holding a lantern in one hand and his handgun in the other.  “You still there?”

“Where else am I going to be?” he responded.  How was he supposed to have escaped?

“Didn’t you drink the lemonade I left you?”  She put the lantern down and reached behind her, then began to lower a bucket down to him.

Johnny tried to see the connection between her first question and her second, but couldn’t make sense of anything.  If he could just jump up and pull down on the bucket … The gunshot near deafened him. 

“What you do that for?” he shouted.  “Damn near killed me!”

“You shouldn’t have moved like that!  Now move slow, and you can have the canteens in this bucket.  You know I’ll shoot you if I have to!  Don’t go askin’ no questions!  I’m doin’ what I hafta, like Mamma said, to get myself a good husband that’ll care for me and her.  Now, I got food for ya too.  All you hafta do is stay down there a while longer and it’ll all sort itself out.”

Johnny reached up slowly.  She had the bucket on a rope.  Inside were two canteens.  He was thirsty and hungry, and his head was clear enough that he could see she meant what she said about shooting him if she had to.  It was not the time to work out where she was going with whatever scheme she had in mind. He took the canteens and she hauled the bucket back up, then she threw down an old feed sack.

Johnny caught it and peered inside.  More biscuits and maybe some meat?  It was hard to make out what was in there. “How long you expecting to keep me here?” he asked, glaring at Lucrece.  She was leaning down a little way, her dark hair falling over most of her face.  Could he reason with her?  “How about you let me go, and I go home and we forget this ever happened – come on, honey, there’s no sense in what you’re doing.”

“Don’t say that!  You have to be out of the way!  I got the wire written and everything!  Now, I’m just going to shut you in here,” she said.  “It’s no use you shoutin’!  Mamma can’t hear you from the house nohow.  She didn’t even hear the shot!”

And with that, she took up the lantern, put down the handgun and slammed the hatch shut.  In the sudden darkness, Johnny stood, head bowed, trying to wait out his anger and frustration, finding no words adequate to throw back at Lucrece.  Not a little girl waiting to be kissed properly, then, or visited, or presented with animals to care for.  Just his captor. 

xxxxx

He was just dropping off to sleep, huddled under the blankets, when a noise above him brought him fully awake. 

“Lucrece!” he shouted.  “Get me out of here!”

He heard the chains rattle and then there was a light above him – but no pretty face, no long black hair.  “Shhh!  Be quiet, Mr. Lancer!”

It was the old man who’d mended and painted the fence. 

“What..?”

“Quietly now!  I’m going to put the ladder down there but you need to stay where you are.  I’ll explain what I can in just a minute.”

The old man moved back and then returned, ladder in hand and pushed it over the edge of the wall and down into the storeroom.  Johnny stood ready to defend himself if he could, but the man wasn’t holding a gun on him, only another canteen. 

“Who are you?  You don’t seem like no old man now,” Johnny said, once the “old man” was standing at the bottom of the ladder.

“A simple disguise.  Here are my credentials.”  He handed over papers which identified him as Silas Brotherton, Pinkerton detective.  “We’ll have badges soon, I gather, but in the meantime, you’ll have to trust me.  We have very little time.”

“All right, Mr. Brotherton.  A Pinkerton saved my neck once.  I trust you enough to hear what you have to say.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lancer.  Now – Lucrece Normile and her mother and father moved here about four years ago.  Her father died last year in odd circumstances, and his family employed my agency to investigate.  They had reason to be worried but that’s another story.  I’ll cut to the chase.  My partner and I found the women here a week ago.  We were in town, trying to gather some evidence when Tom Nevill died.  When we found out he died suddenly with the same symptoms as Mr. Normile, I immediately went to Mr. Nevill.  And then you came into town not looking so good – shhh!”

Brotherton turned down the lantern and the two men stood, both breathing quickly, until the night sounds stilled. 

“I have to go.  Did you drink anything she gave you?”

“Yeah – lemonade.  Coffee.”  Johnny put all the random pieces together and come up with the one answer he’d missed.  “Drugged me, didn’t she.”

“Give me any liquid she gave you – we’re ready to analyse it straight away. And food.  Here, take this canteen – it has clean water.  And yes – drugged or poisoned.  Maybe the means to kill you are right in here with you.”

Johnny handed over both canteens as if he was holding two live rattlers and took the one Brotherton gave him.  Then he paused. 

“I think I’ll have to keep one.  If she comes back she might see I have only one.”

Silas grimaced.  “I guess she’ll have doctored both.  All right – keep one.  I don’t suppose you’ll drink from the wrong one, will you?”

Johnny took one back and leaned it carefully where it was in full view.  He took the one Brotherton had given in and put it on top of his blankets.

“No, no chance of that.  I like having a clear head – being drugged once got me in a whole heap of trouble.”

“There’s no food, I’m afraid.  I’ll try to get some to you tomorrow.”

“And I guess I have to stay here,” Johnny said, head clearing more and more.  “Otherwise they’ll just skedaddle.  Does Mrs. Normile know?”

“That her daughter murdered at least two men that we know of?  I don’t know.  That’s up to a jury.  I’m just here to collect evidence and then take them both to the law.  I’m sorry you have to stay here,” Brotherton said, exchanging the canteens and heading on back up the ladder.  “You’ll do best pretending you’re too out of it to speak to her, I think.” 

“How long?”

“Not more than a couple of days at the most,” Brotherton whispered, pulling up the ladder and peering down, the canteens over one shoulder and the lantern in his hand.  “Your brother’s coming back for you, isn’t he?  So if anything happens to me he’ll find you.”

Then Johnny’s world became dark again, just the very faintest lines on the floor reminding him of his cage.  Chains rattled overhead, footsteps faded away and silence descended.  He took a drink from the safe canteen, felt his way over to his nest of blankets and settled himself to wait out the last act in the melodrama in which, after all, he was only one of many players.

“Hold on,” he said out loud.  “Wire?  She said wire?”

And the puzzle of what was in the wire kept him awake and angry the whole of the rest of the night.