Garage Sale Stalker (Garage Sale Mysteries) (13 page)

CHAPTER 24

H
ow long had
Jennifer
sprawled unconscious in the blackness before a first pinpoint of awareness pricked her numb mind?

She lay perfectly still, eyes closed, neither asleep nor awake, floating between levels of consciousness. She sensed remote attachment to her body, though no muscle movement verified it.

Was this the passage from life to death, the transition into the spirit world? Was this how that final separation of body and spirit actually felt?

Her mind stirred again, more vigorously this time. Blurred images intruded, too fuzzy to clearly discern. Motionless, Jennifer perceived increasing connection with her fingers, her feet, her eyelids, wondering if her brain could still direct their function from the unworldly dimension she’d already entered. Did a lingering bond remain with the body she left behind, like the amputee detecting sensations in the empty space where his missing limb once grew?

Fear flashed uninvited across her mind as her senses sharpened further, followed by a jolt of alarm…
a house, a man, a dog.
Why couldn’t she bring these vital images into focus? Unless…unless remembering would thrust her back to a place so frightening that she must hide inside amnesia’s protective cocoon.

Her eyes moved behind their closed lids but registered no hint of light beyond. Taking a shallow breath, she searched the inhaled air for meaningful odor. Nothing! She strained acutely to hear any sound. Silence!

Barely opening her eyes and finding only more darkness, she blinked wide open. Pitch-black! No sound, no smell, no light! Where was she? How did she get here? Was she alone? Was someone nearby who could help, or had someone put her here deliberately because… She extinguished that dangerous unfinished thought!

Moving her fingertips slightly, she felt cloth between her hands and her body. Was she dressed? Barely twitching her toes, she thought she felt shoes upon her feet. She placed her fingertips on the surface where she lay. Wood?

Even these tiny movements revealed a powerful ache toward the back of her head. No light, no sound, no smell. Sensory deprivation and wood beneath her and pain in her skull. What did it mean?

Then a lightning bolt of sheer dread slashed through her confusion. Was she buried alive? That would explain this. Was she inside a coffin?

The murky memory of a news story crossed her mind. A psychotic buried his victims with only a few hours of air to breathe and then left police obscure clues to find his prey before oxygen ran out in their ghastly underground tombs.

She winced at the undeniable facts confronting her; they pointed to her suffering that same grisly death. She stiffened as waves of terror clutched her mind and body. Reacting violently to the doom of suffocating in a coffin beneath six feet of leaden earth, she gasped as a full-blown panic attack overwhelmed her. Her pulse fluctuated wildly, causing her thumping heart to feel enormous inside her chest, its thunderous pounding reverberating in her ears. Sweat coated her skin and she trembled, unable to catch her breath. The headache throbbed violently as nausea twisted her stomach, forcing acidic bile upward to sear her throat and mouth. She swallowed frantically to avoid vomiting and drowning in that awful fluid.

Shaking in the unrelenting grip of acute claustrophobia for long minutes, at last her hysteria lessened. Gradually her ragged breathing evened and she lay in the dark, exhausted and terrified. She fought to wrest control of her emotions so her mind could reason undistracted.

Wherever she was, what could she
do
about it? Had she the courage to explore her surroundings and face whatever fate that knowledge revealed?

She lifted her hands into the inky space above her, fearing what they might feel. Six inches, twelve inches and then even higher into the darkness, fully extending her arms and fingers but touching nothing. Dropping them back to her chest, she struggled to process this information.

A coffin needn’t take a funeral casket’s conventional shape. One could exhaust the oxygen and perish in any airtight enclosure like a refrigerator or a vault—coffins just the same.

Cautiously, she inched her fingertips down and across the wooden surface on which she lay, exploring away from her body to either side, one hand width, then another and then something unexpected and baffling.

CHAPTER 25

T
hough in denial, se
venty-six-year-old
Jeremy Whitehead had become just like the insufferable, tyrannical father he’d despised. Nor did he realize how his father’s relentless criticism produced the lifetime inferiority complex which crippled Jeremy emotionally and socially. Like that hated father, Jeremy viewed life through a highly judgmental, ever intolerant, always impatient prism.

Despite Ginger’s efforts to share her jollier outlook, whatever leveling balance his wife introduced evaporated with her untimely death five years earlier. Semi-reclusive now with Ginger gone, he thought of himself as a fine-looking, reasonable, intelligent older man who had high expectations and suffered no nonsense. That neighbors viewed him as a beak-nosed, sparse-haired, hunch-shouldered and obnoxious grumpy old man interested him not at all.

“Others” deserved responsibility for whatever diffculties befell him, never Jeremy’s own actions. To salve his inferiority complex, he needed to find and criticize someone even more inferior. And he’d created a dandy:
incompetent drivers
! They and the traffic snarls they dependably produced constituted a very
personal
affront to him. Of late, this “calling” bordered on obsession.

Though he excluded himself from this group, in fact his driving skill, reaction time, eyesight and memory were poor and waning. But to ensure his own virtue, he rationalized that his close calls stemmed from other drivers’ obvious inadequacies.

When stickers appeared on trucks and commercial vans inviting “Tell Us How We’re Driving” plus a phone number, Jeremy immediately recognized his obligation, if not his mandate! A clipboard with a string-attached pencil lay inches from him on the front seat of his car. He’d reported hundreds of “bad” drivers to their commercial dispatchers and his incessant calls to DMV and Fairfax County police gave him default name recognition.

“Who do you think you’re honking at?” Jeremy shouted regularly from his precariously weaving car, for he drove while simultaneously writing down other people’s license numbers. “Shaking your fist at me proves you’re not only a bad driver, you’re a rude driver.”

His off-road activity in the few first-floor rooms he still used in his modest two-story house narrowed to sleeping, eating and watching the tube while he snarled disparagingly at TV newscasters, “Aw, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” His on-road excursions consisted mainly of visits to different grocery stores and gas stations to find the cheapest prices; these simple trips lengthened by his increasing inability to find his way straight home.

Lost once more while returning home from an errand, he shouted loudly inside his car to no one. “I pay my taxes, damn it! Can’t a citizen expect easy-to-see, easy-to-read signs and the same familiar streets? Criminal how this county allows so damn much new development that a man can’t find his way around any more!” Jeremy ranted on, noting at the next
readable
sign that he had turned onto Winding Trail Road. “Worse yet, all this expansion means even
more
traffic. And hell, if there isn’t another example just ahead of me.”

Even on this narrow back road he wasn’t alone. A white Cadillac Crossover sped along the curves just ahead of him until, without warning, the car stopped to turn so abruptly that Jeremy slammed on his brakes and skidded to a ragged sideways halt.

“Damn you,” he shouted at the vehicle, grabbing his clipboard to record the offender’s license number. “I’ll report you before this day ends!” He shook his fist at the driver of the white SUV, which paused where it turned in the gravel driveway. “You’ll be sorry!” he yelled, his threat bouncing unheard against his closed car window.

With his usual thoroughness, Jeremy read the street number on the mailbox and wrote on his clipboard “3508 Winding Trail Road, VA tag YRDSALE,” oblivious that his own car dangerously straddled the middle of the road near a hazardous blind curve.

At first the license plate made no sense to him until he connected it with the big YARD SALE sign at the driveway entrance of 3508. What a damned fool license plate! What was the world coming to? Yard sale, indeed!

By the time he reached home an hour later via an unsettlingly circuitous route, two other traffic incidents superseded this one on his clipboard. Winding Trail no longer filled his immediate focus, but neither was it forgotten.

CHAPTER 26

I
n the total blac
kness
where she lay, Jennifer concentrated awareness into her exploring fingers. Still shaken from the panic attack, she calmed enough to reason that she
must
try to understand where she was.

Her right hand traced a vertical wooden wall rising at a 90-degree angle, but her left hand discovered empty space beyond the wooden pallet on which she lay in the dark. Baffling!

Cautiously, she curled her left hand over the edge of that pallet, finding a 90-degree angle going
down
. If only she could see in this cursed blackness!

Lifting onto her elbows, she raised her left arm carefully over her head, her fingers searching for a ceiling. Finding none, she pushed into a sitting position, still touching nothing above her but aware of pulsing pain in her cranium. When she felt the back of her head, her fingers touched a tender baseball-size lump. Pressing it added sharp arrows of pain to the persistent dull ache there. Was the crusty stickiness in her hair blood?

Her head throbbed and her back ached, but why? The dog. Did he knock her down? Did she whack her head? Was she unconscious? If knocked out, she wouldn’t remember being brought to wherever this was. From dealing with her children, she knew a head blow could produce a concussion requiring bed rest. But her need to understand her surroundings superseded bed rest and besides, she might not have a concussion at all.

Using both hands, she traced the wall upward as high as she could reach and fanned her hand in circles to determine its contours. The pallet where she lay and the wall behind it were made of the same wooden slats!

Turning on her left side and reaching down as far as she could, she felt the side of a platform that dropped away. Wooden slats again! Sitting up slowly, she dangled a foot downward until it touched something flat. The floor?

Her throbbing head forced her to lie down again but she considered what she’d learned: a platform of wooden slats, with the same slats rising horizontally up the wall in back and down to the floor in front. A wooden bench in a black room?

Piecing together the events before she wakened in this dark place, she knew she was put here deliberately. So the way
in
could be the way
out
. But where was the way in?

Exploring in darkness was risky, but if she was very careful... Sliding to the floor, she felt her way blindly along the base of the bench until it abutted one wall and then back-tracked to where it touched the opposite wall. From garage sales, she knew the distance between her outstretched thumb and little finger measured 7 1/2”, so she counted how many times this hand measurement fit the bench from one wall to the other. Six and a half hand lengths times 7 1/2” equaled about 48”, so the bench was roughly four feet long and filled one entire end of the enclosure.

Now the dangerous part. Complete blackness hid sharp obstructions, broken glass, creatures, filth or holes, maybe as deep as a well! She winced at these possibilities, but complacency felt the same as cooperating with that deranged man.

Who knew what lay ahead? Maybe no food, no water, no light and no release—ever! At least now she still had energy to think and act, albeit within the limitation of her confined prison. Mercifully, she wasn’t tied up, giving her the illusion of at least some control.

Cautiously feeling every inch of the way along each wall, she mapped the perimeter of a roughly 4’ x 6’ rectangular room, about 5’ 2” high, because her head brushed the ceiling when she stood on tiptoes and she knew she was that height.

The wooden bench covered one end and at the other she identified two items by blind feel: a lidded bucket and a roll of toilet paper. The center of the room remained a mystery.

Next, she crawled through the blackness along the now familiar perimeter, brushing her hands in large exploring circles across the floor and up the walls. That’s where she felt the outline of a door, locked, of course. On the wall near the door, she felt something sticking out of the wall. Like using Braille in the dark, she felt its shape and guessed at what it might be. But even if it were, did it work? Oh please, she whispered, oh please let it work!

CHAPTER 27

H
oping she’d guessed right,
she rotated the little stick on the side of the gadget and held her breath.

At the sudden illumination, her eyes narrowed reflexively while adjusting to this welcome contrast from the ink-black room. She blinked at a small plug-in night light! Tears of gratitude trickled down her cheeks.

Hardly believing such luck, she brushed away her tears to study her surroundings for the first time. Indeed, a small, rectangular room with a door in one wall, no windows, no shelves, and empty except for the bucket toilet at one end and the wide wooden bench at the other. A concrete floor sloped down slightly from the base of the walls toward a 3” wide open drain in the center of the room. She pounded on walls but they were thick enough to be solid. Was this a sauna? If so, could he turn up heat to a stifling, murderous level? What happened when she breathed all the oxygen out of this enclosure’s air? And where was this box that explained the total blackness and lack of sound? Underground? Was she buried alive after all?

Her eyes searched across the nearly empty room for a makeshift tool to pry the door open. Nothing! Weary, she sat on the floor to take stock of this crazy situation.

Had she lost consciousness at another stranger’s house, they’d call 9-1-1, cover her with blankets and make her comfortable until help arrived. Contrast that with the deliberate dog attack and
imprisonment in a cell.
No mistake, she was in terrible trouble.

Think positively, she counseled herself! Her car cell phone was turned on, though admittedly not working properly. Hadn’t police located and rescued a car-jacked child because the mother’s cell phone in the seat beside the infant broadcast a beam law enforcement could follow? This madman surely turned off or even destroyed her cell phone, so that wouldn’t help. He also had her purse, address and keys. Now her whole family was vulnerable, as well!

With a wrench of longing, she ached for her dear Jason and pictured the sweet faces of her five children, one by one. Would she live to see them again? Even worse, would they fall prey next to this man’s insanity?

Stop thinking about
those
things, she counseled herself. Concentrate on positive things! What about her car’s OnStar service? Did it include a stolen car tracking feature? If she didn’t return home for dinner, wouldn’t Jason call the police? Could they track OnStar to her car at that house with the yard sale sign where they’d find Wrestler and make him tell them where he put her?

Unless
he disabled it, which he would if he could. Or did OnStar only work with the motor on? She’d never tried it with the ignition off, but how could it work without power? Doubtful.

Her brain-storming continued. This yard sale was not advertised, leaving no newspaper trail to follow. Turning into that driveway was impulsive. The only tangible evidence that the sale ever existed was the hand-painted sign at the road, which was surely removed immediately after her capture. Nobody had any way to know where she was!

So… no cell phone, no OnStar, no trail to follow. No rescue! This left only one alternative: escape! And how in the world could she do that? She knew nothing about this weirdo, his motives, his past or his plan for her. If logic wouldn’t help, did survival here depend upon chance? She’d heard that chance favors the prepared person, but how could she prepare for
this?

Could she distract him? Could she startle or surprise him? Could she talk him out of whatever he planned to do? Could she throw him off guard? Could she learn what makes him tick and somehow use that to…?

Her thoughts shifted to a new worry. Jennifer instantly recognized Wrestler after the graphic impression he made upon her at two garage sales. Did he also remember her since she angered him on both occasions? But wait! She’d worn a scarf on that bad-hair day and used only lipstick due to haste that Saturday morning. Might her natural hair and daytime makeup look different enough that he wouldn’t recognize her?

Interrupting her recollections, the throb at the back of her head forced her again toward the wooden bench to lie down. She eased down at one end and surveyed its length, wondering the best way to curl up while protecting the bump on her head and the ache in her back. She thought longingly of her sumptuously comfortable pillow-top mattress at home and wondered if she’d ever delight in its softness again.

By now her eyes adjusted well to the subdued light, allowing her to see more detail than at first. Staring at the bench, she realized all its slats appeared uniform except for the top board of the backrest, where a V-shaped nick had been cut into it. The off-center nick looked deliberately carved. But why? And why had something so irrelevant even caught her attention; because she had time on her hands or because alertness might save her yet?

Something glinted toward the back of the bench. She looked closer. Wedged down between the slats and nearly invisible except for the accidental angle of light falling upon it, lay an object. Using her thumbnail, she tried unsuccessfully to coax it out. Had it fallen there accidentally or was it pushed deliberately? About to give up, she remembered the safety pin used to close her slacks when a button popped off just before she left home this morning. With the pin’s sharp point, she dug and dug at the thin metal object, at last prying it out.

Taking it over to the night light, she bent down to examine it. A strangled cry escaped her lips. Her eyes opened wide with shock. Misshapen but clearly recognizable, shimmering in her open palm, lay one of Tina’s distinctive earrings.