Written by RF Wilson – Fair knew that the longer he waited for something to happen, the opportunity for his adversary to act recklessly increased. He pulled the small .38 pistol from his waist band and moved quietly toward the hidden room, stood to one side of the opening and pushed the door with his foot, assuming this would get the attention of anyone inside. The door moved six inches. There was no response. His weapon at arm’s length in front of him, he kicked at the door again, leaned into the open space, saw no one. He looked across the room at the tunnel opening and moved that way.

As soon as he was close enough to see up along the rails, he heard a voice.

“Alright, Fair. That’s close enough.”

Squinting, Fair saw what appeared to be a body with two heads, a gun held out towards him.

“I believe who we have here is the erstwhile detective, Winston Fair,” one of the heads said. “That right, Fair?”

Fair said nothing.

“Come on, Fair. Say something. I’ve got someone here who is, dare I say it, dying to meet you. Aren’t you, Phyllis? Say hello to Mister Fair, Phyllis. Or, I suppose you can call him Winston.”

The other head spoke, a wavering woman’s voice. “Hello, Mr. Fair.”

“OK. Now, the thing to do, Fair, is to keep that weapon where I can see it.”

Fair kept the pistol aimed in front of him.

“Good. Good. Now, lay it down right there in the tunnel opening in front of you.”

Fair briefly considered the options. He could retreat out of the room, out of the house, wait for the guy to come out. Eventually, there would have to be a confrontation.

“Hey, Fair. I would hate for something untoward to happen to the lovely Ms. Rivers here. But I’m getting impatient. When I’m impatient, I get impulsive.”

That’s two of us, Fair thought. “Okay,” he said, and lay the pistol on the ground.

“Good,” the voice, which Fair was sure was the man calling himself Tom Daltry, said. “Now, back away from the tunnel entrance.”

Fair could see it happening in his mind’s eye. Daltry would come out using Phyllis for a shield. They would back out of the room and close Fair in. He had to get out of the room first.

Daltry and Phyllis came out of the tunnel into the room as Fair slipped back into the basement. The man yelled, “Fair! I’ve still got the woman. I don’t feel like dragging her around as a hostage. You want to play chicken with her as the prize? Come on. Let me see you.”

Fair knew it was a gamble, but Phyllis was much more valuable to Daltry alive than otherwise. He stood behind the fake bookcase and waited, wondering if the guy would come on out with Phyllis as his hostage or slip back through the tunnel. If Daltry knew the woods at all, he could disappear in them, hang out till this all blew over. After hearing steps come toward the door and the door shut, he leaped up the basement stairs, ran out of the house toward the woods, to a place the he thought was close to the tunnel opening. He pushed through the undergrowth, into stand of rhododendron, kept pushing, afraid he may have misjudged, stopped, took a breath, got his bearings, moved a little to his left, pushed through some more shrubs, saw what he was looking for. The hatch to the tunnel had not been re- camouflaged since he and Sgt. Timmons had been here. He waited. Impatiently. Worked more on his breathing.

Ten minutes passed before he saw the small door in the ground move. He knew they’d have a tough time with it. A hand appeared, feminine, slim. He stood close.

The woman wriggled herself up and out. Her eyes bulged when she saw Fair with his finger to his lips. She nodded.

“Don’t you go off anywhere,” the voice from below bellowed. “You’ll get lost if you go in those woods.” The man’s hands came out, his gun leading the way, then his forearms. He hoisted himself on his elbows, had half of his body out of the hole, when Fair slammed the lid down. “Jeezus,” the man cried, dropping the gun.

“Phyllis, pick up that man’s weapon, would you, please?”

After Fair called Sheriff Addleson and told him what had happened, he turned to Phyllis. “Think you can drive my old truck? It’s a stick.”

“I grew up on a farm, Winston. Drove trucks and tractors since I was big enough to sit on my father’s lap behind the wheel.”

“Good. Mr. Daltry and I will ride in the back. The Weaver County Sheriff wants us to transport Mr. Daltry to the county line where he will be met by Weaver County deputies. Then we can go to the courthouse so you can give your statement about the events.”

While waiting to give her formal statement, Phyllis told her story to Fair. “You know there was that terrible storm when I was showing Tom the house. We went back to his truck and were almost down to the main road when he told me to take a blindfold out of the glove compartment and put it on. Up to then he’d been nothing but a gentleman. Even flirting a little, I thought. I asked him what was going on. He said it was a surprise. I said I really wasn’t comfortable and he told me to shut up. It was a real Jekyll and Hyde thing. He stopped the truck, reached over and opened the glove compartment. There was a blindfold, lying atop a gun. He glared at me and said, ‘Put it on.’ I thought, oh, my gosh, what have I gotten into? I put it on, afraid of what would happen if I didn’t.

“After we got to the main road, we turned right and went up a hill. That was Dick’s Creek. We stopped at a house where I took the blindfold off. It was a small, rustic kind of place. Three other women were there, all of whom, I found out, I had been abducted by Tom.”

Television trucks were setting up shop outside the courthouse. Fair recognized some of the newspaper reporters who had arrived.

“This is a busy place,” Phyllis said. “Do you suppose there’s any chance of getting a drink of something, maybe some iced tea.”

“I think there’s a machine somewhere,” Fair said. “That okay?”

“Sure.”

When Fair returned, he asked, “Are you sure you don’t mind doing this? You’re going to have to go through it all over again.”

“No, I don’t mind. It’s helping me get my thoughts together.” She paused for a few more seconds before picking up the story. “The women wondered why I was there. They were all at least ten years younger than me, late twenties, early thirties. I’m forty-five. They’d been abducted, they said, to reproduce. They were expected to have sex with the men and get pregnant. One of the women had had two babies, one had one, the other had miscarried once. I asked them why they did it. The oldest, she seemed like the older sister of them, said, ‘Because they’ll kill us if we don’t.’ They weren’t the only women there, but the others were getting older. Most of the people up there had been there for fifteen-twenty years. What little I got to see of the place seemed like quite a sophisticated operation. Since I was older, and no longer in prime child bearing years, they wondered if Tom hadn’t taken me to be a wife.”

“A wife?” Fair asked.

“Yes. They aren’t so tied to monogamy as most of us are.”

“And all of these women were selling or renting houses. Tom got them to show them to him by themselves. Like he did you.”

“Yes. He can be very charming. Disarming I guess is the word. He gave off no hint that he wasn’t anybody but a guy looking for a house to buy. Sure fooled me. You know, if, after we’d gotten in his truck after the storm hit up there, he’d said, ‘Want to go for a drink?’ I think I probably would have. He was that kind of slick.”

She signed and shook her head. “How long do you suppose it will it be before they get to me?”

“I don’t know. I’ll talk to the sheriff, see if they can move you along.”

“No,” Phyllis said. “I’d kind of like to talk this through. See if it makes any kind of sense.”

Fair said, “I’ll stay as long as you want.”

She took another deep breath. “They untied me after the first day, although I couldn’t go out of the house. I got to fix my own food or eat what one of the other ladies made. The other women were my housemates. The next day, there was talk of the law poking around.”

“Probably after I’d showed up and was run off,” Fair said.

“This morning Tom came and blindfolded me and led me into another house and down into some kind of a tunnel. We followed that a little bit until it came out into the daylight in the woods. I had trouble walking because I couldn’t see what was under my feet. It seemed like we were following some kind of small railroad tracks. Then we went down again, into another room where Tom let me take my blindfold off. It was like an old cellar or storage room. After we were there a while, there was a knock on the door. A banging, really. Tom answered it. It was a funny little man – ”

“Shandor,” Fair said.

“They went out into the next room and talked a couple of minutes, then came back and the little man went on up the tunnel. We started to follow, but you came. I thought maybe I’d be rescued but then Tom got your gun. When you went back into the basement room, Tom closed the door, and we crawled through that spooky tunnel again. It was really hard getting out. When I saw you standing outside the tunnel, I almost screamed in relief. Then I saw you had your finger to your mouth.”

Thirty-five people were rounded up in the raid. Several more were known to have evaded capture. One of the ironies of the whole business was that several of arrestees had to be transferred to the Balsam County Detention Center because the Weaver County jail lacked the space for them all. Eventually, Sheriff Jennings, Marie Nyswander and Ernie Reese were indicted for conspiring to kidnap Phyllis Rivers.

Jerry had brought a six pack of a local Oktoberfest to share with Fair and Johnny. Phyllis had a glass of pinot noir. They were on Fair’s back deck, looking out over the farm. A late fall afternoon, bronze pine needles gathered on the ground, mixed indiscriminately with reddish-brown oak leaves.

“When did you figure out I was up on Dick’s Creek?” Phyllis asked.

“I had a map with push pins noting where each of the other abductions took place. I figured that the perpetrator intentionally did not take two women from the same county to keep the law from putting the pieces together. At first, of course, I had no idea you were all up at Dick’s Creek. But, when I figured out something was going on out there, I looked at the map again. The pins formed a nice arc with a focus in that area. Voilà.”

“It’s still hard for me to believe that Marie instigated my kidnapping to get me out of the business. Jeez, I wasn’t being that unreasonable, I didn’t think. But, she has that streak in her.”

“The criminal streak,” Jerry said.

“Well, that, I guess. I was thinking more just, well, mean. You know she’s kind of Jekyll and Hyde, like Tom. She drove a hard bargain and she could turn on the charm whenever she had to.”

Jerry asked, “How’s it going, being on your own?”

“Hard. But it’s nice not having to deal with someone whose moods you can’t predict.” She looked at Fair and smiled. “Winston’s been a great support.”

Fair said, “Burgers, anybody?”

Feelers came to Fair from several investigative services at various levels of government, all of which he declined for the moment, leaving himself open to future possibilities. With Jennings and Reese gone, Captain Pennington became the acting Balsam County Sheriff.

“You’d be the senior detective,” Pennington said when he called to encourage Fair to return. “We’ll just forget about that little incident when you turned in your badge.”

Fair thought about it. Without Jennings and Reese, it might not be a bad place to work.

THE END

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RF Wilson writes in Asheville, NC, where he lives with his wife, Beth Gage. He is the author of the novel, “Killer Weed,” recently published by Pisgah Press. His short story, “Accident Prone,” appears in the anthology “Carolina Crimes” published by Wildside Press, which has been nominated for an Anthony Award as Best Mystery Anthology of the Year.