The Outsmarting of Criminals: A Mystery Introducing Miss Felicity Prim (27 page)

“
Olivia, might I have a word with you in private? It’s rather urgent.”

“Of course, come right in,”
Olivia Abernathy said dubiously. For her, the only truly urgent matters concerned getting the right listings.

Miss Prim sat opposite
Olivia at the latter’s large, imposing desk. “I think you may be acquainted with a friend of mine, Miss Dolly Veerelf?”

Olivia
shook her head. “No, I don’t know anyone with that name.”

“But I feel confident that she has spoken with you.”

“Miss Prim,” Olivia said in a disapproving tone, “it’s my business never to forget a face or a name.”

“So you did not speak to anyon
e named Dolly Veerelf yesterday or last night?”

“No, I did not.”

“I wonder if I might ask you to look at a few snapshots? You may recognize her.”

Miss Prim removed the small photo album from her handbag and flipped to a photo showing her and Dolly, taken by Zoroastria at Doctor Poe’s office a few months earlier. The two friends smiled broadly at the camera, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

Olivia recognized the younger woman instantly. “Her? Oh, yes. But her name’s not Dolly. It’s Nellie. Nellie Oleson.”

Nellie
Oleson? Wasn’t she the snippy girl from
Little House on the Prairie
?

“I’d be most grateful if you could tell me a little about your dealings with her,
Olivia.”

“Not much to tell. She came in with her husband a week or so ago. They were
looking for a short-term rental. The husband has a temporary assignment in Litchfield, I believe. I have a few properties that are stubbornly not selling, and the owners have agreed to rent them by the month. I set the Olesons up in a nice little farmhouse. Between you and me, it’s on the wrong side of town, or it would have sold long ago.”

“Do you remember her husband’s name?”

“As I said, Miss Prim, it is my job never to forget a face or a name. It was Benjamin. Benjamin Oleson.”

Benjamin
Oleson? Could this be the secret identity of Benjamin Bannister, graduate student of magical realism at Columbia University?

“This may be a strange question,
Olivia, but did the couple look … content? Happy? Or was there a strain?”

“Most definitely content, Miss Prim. When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you know who’s happy and who isn’t.”

Miss Prim’s head was spinning. First Kit’s revelation, now this.

“You don’t happen to have a photo of Benjamin
Oleson, do you?” Miss Prim asked.

“Of course not, Miss Prim. I take photos of houses, n
ot of people.” Her tone implied,
Because houses matter
.

“I think you may have misunderstood,
Olivia. You may have assumed his last name was Oleson because that was the woman’s last name, but I don’t believe they are married. I believe his last name is actually Bannister.”

“I suppose you may be right, Miss Prim, though I do not usually make mistakes like that. You wouldn’t believe how
sensitive
people can be.”

“Oh, dear,” Miss Prim sighed. “If only there was a place we could go to find a photo of him. Then you could confirm his identity so much more easily.”

“Do you know what he does for a living?”

“H
e’s a graduate student at Columbia University.”

“L
et’s see if we can pull him up on the Internet. There’s bound to be a few photos.”

“The
Inner Net?”

Olivia
Abernathy looked at Miss Prim as if to say,
Are you mad, woman?
But she held her tongue and instead began clacking on her keyboard.

“H
ere he is,” Olivia said. “Benjamin Bannister, Ph.D. candidate. Yes, that’s him, all right.”

“
Olivia, would you mind giving me the address of the house you rented to Benjamin and Dol—Benjamin and Nellie? That would not be a breach of professional ethics, would it?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, you’re not exactly the dangerous type, Miss Prim. Wait a minute
—is Nellie the woman you picked up at the Two Oaks train station last night?”

“It’s a long story,
Olivia. But I promise that once I get to the bottom of things, I will return and give you all the details.”

Olivia
Abernathy seemed satisfied with this assurance.

“The address is 50 Pierced Arrow Lane. Pick up Milford Road off the south side of the square and take it about a mile into the country. Look for a dilapidated red barn
—the town really
must
do something about that—and then make the next right onto Iroquois Road. About half a mile down, you’ll get to Pierced Arrow. Make a left, and it’ll be the last house on your left.”

Trapped

There
had
to be a reasonable explanation, Miss Prim reasoned, throwing the Zap into a lower gear to pass a Hummer that was blocking her way. She hoped with all her being that the explanation would be innocent and harmless, but as she raced through the streets of Greenfield, she felt less and less hopeful. For years she and Dolly had been the best of friends, the closest of confidantes. There was no good reason for Dolly to hide her plans to rent a house in Greenfield or to give Olivia Abernathy a phony name. No, Miss Prim feared that Benjamin was in quite a bit of trouble and that he had somehow pulled Dolly into his difficulties.

Was Dolly being held against her will?
Miss Prim thought the possibility quite likely and applied her foot more forcefully to the Zap’s gas pedal.

S
he would proceed with caution and would
not
get herself into any situation from which she could not extricate herself. But Dolly’s safety was paramount, and Miss Prim would do whatever was necessary to ensure it.

Pierced Arrow Lane dead
-ended at a picturesque field. From her seat in the Zap, Miss Prim looked at the house Dolly and Benjamin had rented. It was a small, charming red farmhouse, probably built in the 1920s or 1930s, its windows adorned with white lace curtains. A barn sat at the end of the driveway, its huge wooden doors tightly closed. A line of pine trees separated the driveway from the adjoining property to the left. The house was neither pristine nor dilapidated. While it did not appear to be lived in, nor did it appear to be deserted or neglected.

No car sat in the driveway, a fact Miss Prim found heartening. The farmhouse was not walking distance from the Greenfield town square. To live here, one would need a car; and the fact that there was no car in the driveway meant that Dolly’s
captor was likely not present.

Unless, of course, the car was in the barn.

Miss Prim turned the Zap around and parked it halfway down the road. This way, anyone looking out of the front windows of 50 Pierced Arrow Lane would not see the car. She grabbed her handbag, slung it over her shoulder, and began briskly walking toward the farmhouse. Oh, how she wished for cover of night, which would have allowed her to remain undetected! But it was broad daylight, and strategies must be adjusted accordingly. She pulled her shoulders back and adjusted her gait to give any onlookers the impression that she was simply a New England matron out for her daily constitutional.

Remaining alert to
her surroundings, Miss Prim used the pine trees lining the driveway for cover as she made her way to the barn. The structure had no windows in the front or along the tree line—Miss Prim began to feel disappointed—but two windows near ground level at the back of the barn allowed her to peer in. She’d expected to find—what? Drug dealers divvying up cash? A flotilla of antique cars? A counterfeiting operation?—but instead she saw an empty barn through sparkling dust motes.

What should her next
move be? The rules of criminal outsmarting required her to scope out the remainder of the property, but skulking took time. Why not just go to the front door, ring the bell, and see what happened? Maybe Dolly would open the door and answer all her questions. Or, perhaps, the front door might be unlocked, and she could enter the house easily.

S
he purposefully strode toward the front door, again to convey the impression to passersby, or nosy neighbors, that she was a resident, friend, or invited guest. With a quick stab of her finger, she rang the doorbell. She heard its deep chime resounding through the house, but nobody answered.

Miss Prim put her ear to the doorjamb to listen for footsteps. But the only thing on the other side of the door
was silence.

But wait
—what was that sound? Not whispers, not talking, but—a muffled, prolonged scream? Was someone locked in the recesses of the house? Had the captive heard the doorbell, and was she now screaming to get the visitor’s attention?

She tried the d
oorknob. Locked tight.

Her sense of urgency increased
, Miss Prim walked along the driveway, looking for possible points of entry into the house. There was one window, but it was much too high for her to reach, and the side entry door was securely bolted.

At the rear of the house, a set of wooden steps led to a good-sized
outdoor deck. Miss Prim climbed the stairs and looked through the door into the kitchen. Deserted. She tried the doorknob. It wouldn’t budge.

Miss Prim
looked around helplessly at what she would have, under other circumstances, considered a charming outdoor space. Clay flowerpots along one side of the deck were abloom with zinnias and marigolds. A table with a patio umbrella sat in the center of the deck, awaiting guests for a summer barbecue. Even the milk box was charming, a throwback to more innocent times.

Then it her: what every person inte
nt on criminal trespass remembers, if she has a brain in her head. Rare is the homeowner who does not hide a house key somewhere on the property. She glanced at the barn, but no—that would not be the best hiding place for a spare key. She hadn’t hidden her spare key in the barn on her own property. If she’d been locked out of the cottage at night, she would not have wanted to stumble through the dark yard and into the barn (an archetypally creepy place) to retrieve the key. To avoid such a scenario she’d hidden the key close to Rose Cottage.

First she searched the milk box.
Dozens of clothespins, but no key. She looked under the welcome mat in front of the door: earwigs, but no key. She felt around the window frame and was rewarded with small chunks of dry, broken putty, but no key. She got on her knees to look under the picnic table, hoping to find a key taped there, but she found only spiderwebs.

As she rose to her feet she spied the flowerp
ots.

The spare key was not under the first flowerpot, nor under the second or third. It was under the fourth.

Rejoicing at her luck and/or intelligence, Miss Prim grabbed the key and returned to the door. She slid the key into the lock—it went in marvelously easily—and twisted it. The bolt disengaged with a satisfying
click
, and within a moment Miss Prim was inside the house.

The
house’s interior was much like its exterior, neither well kept nor neglected. It was really quite impossible, Miss Prim thought, to determine whether anyone was living here. A refrigerator stood to her right. She opened the door to see if it held any food. It did. The light blinked on when she opened the door, so the utilities were live, which meant the house was most likely occupied.

She paused to listen. Yes, she still heard
desperate noises. They emanated from somewhere farther into the house and below her feet. The basement?

Following her ears, Miss Prim
tiptoed into a hallway. The wooden floors were creaky, but she felt sure that she and the captive were quite alone. The air was much too dead for someone to be watching her from close by.

Along the hallway she encountered a substantial door
locked with a heavy padlock. A door to the cellar?

She knocked
on the door. “Dolly? Dolly, can you hear me? It is I, Miss Prim.”

Miss Prim heard a sob. “Oh, Miss Prim! How did you find me? You’ve got to get me out of here.”

“I shall, dearest. There’s a padlock on this door. I must find a way to get it open.”

“H
urry, Miss Prim. Please.”

Miss Prim examined the padlock. It was large, heavy, and intimidating. Perhaps steroid-crazed bodybuilders might be able to crush it with their bare hands, but she lacke
d the necessary brute strength.

How convenient it would be if
she could find a spare key to the padlock. But would a captor really leave the key to his captive’s cage accessible to anyone who decided to snoop through the house? This was one of those situations where criminals were inconsistent, Miss Prim thought. On the one hand, criminals were highly intelligent and would never do something so stupid as to leave a key in plain sight. On the other hand, criminals were also human and could be expected to slip up eventually. On balance, Miss Prim decided that searching the house for a key was a good idea, mostly because there was no other way she could defeat that heavy lock.