My fingers brushed a cylindrical shape. It rolled away from me with a rattle, and my body forgot that it wanted to sneeze and give away my hiding place. That felt like another pill container. One with an actual pill in it.
I stretched my arm back and out until my shoulder screamed at me. I had to reach it. Quietly. The running water from the tap had hopefully covered the sound it made, but it wouldn’t cover the noise of me whacking a body part off the underside of the bed trying to reach it.
My fingers connected a second time. I strained an extra half an inch and closed my pointer and middle finger around the bottle like pinchers. I brought it up to my face. It was a pill bottle, and it looked like at least one pill was still inside, maybe two.
Clement must have dropped it accidentally and hadn’t been able to find it again. Being that close to the end of the bottle, he’d likely simply called in a refill rather than bothering to waste too much time hunting for it.
Now all I had to do was get it, and myself, out of here.
The tap in the bathroom stopped running, and Darlene’s footfalls approached the bed.
My body felt like it was trembling from the inside out, all my organs processing too fast, like I’d had twice the amount of coffee I normally drink. She couldn’t possibly know I was here, right?
Her footsteps turned into shuffles. The bed above me squeaked, and her feet disappeared.
Not good. Almost worse than her finding me here. She was crawling into bed, presumably to read, since she hadn’t turned off the lights.
I couldn’t lay here all night. I couldn’t even lay here for another hour. My body would cramp up, forcing me to move—which she’d hear—or I’d sneeze from the dust—which she’d most definitely hear. And I’d stupidly turned my phone off. There was no way to turn it back on and text Mark for help without her hearing me.
This is why lawyers don’t break into houses and hide under beds, Nicole, I could almost hear my mom saying.
If I was in a movie, I’d throw something across the room and the bad guy would fall for it and think someone was where my item hit. Sadly, I doubted that would work in real life. I might be trapped here a very long time.
I tracked the minutes ticking by on my watch. A half hour passed, and the cramp in my lower back felt like I’d been run over by a lawnmower. Mark had undoubtedly tried to call me by now, and was probably panicking over the fact that my phone would be going straight to voicemail.
Maybe if I moved quietly and stayed low to the ground, I could crawl out of the room without her noticing me. She might have already drifted off or be so engrossed in what she was reading that she wouldn’t catch the motion out of the corner of her eye.
I inched closer to the edge of the bed. I shifted my leg out first, and then reached out with my arm.
The doorbell rang, and I wedged myself backward as fast as I could.
Darlene got up off the bed. I wasn’t fast enough. As she came around the end, my shoe still stuck out. I laid as still as possible, even holding my breath.
She didn’t look to the side or down. Thank you, Lord.
This was my chance. I didn’t know where the door on the other side of the hall led, but it had to be better than staying under the bed. Worst case, it went into another bedroom, and I’d be trapped there until Darlene fell soundly asleep.
I wriggled out as quickly as I could without making too much noise and picked my way across the floor to the bedroom door. I’d wait until she actually answered the door before I made my break for it. That way I could be certain of where she was.
It felt like it took her twice the normal time to cross the house. Or maybe she’d been at the door for a while and was checking the peephole before opening it. For a moment, I wondered if she locked the door while she was home alone, even though she didn’t lock it when she was away.
“Can I help you?” Darlene’s voice carried from a distance.
“I’m the county medical examiner.”
My feet stopped working for a second. What was Mark doing here? He seemed to be speaking at twice his normal volume.
Then my brain caught up. He was here because he was worried about me. If Darlene had me tied up somewhere, he wanted me to hear him and make noise to let him know where I was.
I wouldn’t be doing that. Thankfully, his arrival gave me the distraction I needed.
I scurried across the hall while Mark was telling Darlene he needed to confirm what temperature they kept the house at because it influenced time of death. And could she tell him where the heat sources were?
The source of the heat didn’t matter, but Darlene wouldn’t know that, and the longer Mark kept her talking, the better.
I eased open the door across the hall, silently praying it wasn’t a windowless storage room.
On the other side was their garage, and in it sat the car I’d seen before. No wonder Mark hadn’t called to warn me. I hadn’t realized the Dodds had two cars.
Before Mark ran out of things to say, I slipped through the door and closed it behind me. Then I ran to the door that led outside.
My car was parked in such a way that I couldn’t climb into the passenger seat. I’d have to crawl into the back on the driver’s side.
I did a hunched run along the edge of the garage and sprinted the two steps through the open space between it and my car. As soon as I hit the back bumper, I squatted down and frog-walked to where I could reach the door handle. Thank goodness no one was around to see this.
I opened the door just wide enough for me to crawl into the back, onto the floor. The overhead light blinked on, but there was nothing I could do about that. Hopefully Darlene was distracted enough by Mark’s questions that she didn’t notice.
Having to keep hidden meant I couldn’t watch for Mark to return. I’d only been in the car for around thirty seconds when the driver’s side door opened and Mark slid in.
He hit his fist into the steering wheel and pulled out his phone, presumably to call me.
“Don’t turn around,” I whispered.
He cursed softly. “I was worried she’d chopped you up with one of the museum axes and hid your body parts in buckets in the basement.”
“I think that only happens in horror movies.” I shifted around, but couldn’t get comfortable. Whoever designed cars with that weird bump in the middle of the backseat floor clearly hadn’t considered how it would feel if someone needed to lay on it. “Besides, they don’t have a basement as far as I could see.”
Mark put the car into drive. “You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are,” he said, but he couldn’t completely hide the smile in his voice. “How did you get into the car?”
