Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

put on the back light so that I could find my way into the house. I hadn’t anticipated being gone as long as I had and never guessed that it would be almost nine o’clock by the time I arrived home. As my anger flared in the form of a deep flush to my cheeks, I unlocked the back door, throwing it open and entering the kitchen in a full rage.
    “Max!” I called. Upstairs, I heard Trixie’s muffled barks, coming from somewhere directly overhead, meaning that she was in the guest room. She rips the screen and she locks up my dog, I thought. I fumbled for the kitchen light preparing to lambaste Max as soon as I located her. But my next words were drowned out as a piece of tape was slapped across my mouth and a hood was thrown over my head. After that, I was flung over the shoulder of a very large man, I guessed by the cloying smell of musky aftershave and the size of his broad shoulders, who carried me out into the dark night.

Nineteen
     
    The basement was dark and musty, but with the hood off my head, I could tell it was also filled with priceless antiques, the kind you don’t regularly see at the places I shop. Although my hands and feet had been bound while I was in the vehicle that had taken me here, they no longer were. I had looked around for a pit, not unlike the one in which Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs had kept his victims, imploring them to put the “lotion on its skin” so that he could keep his ultimate skin jacket soft. I was relieved to not find one. What I found was a giant slop sink with two empty cans of Benjamin Moore paint in it, a small bathroom with a toilet (thank God) and a full roll of toilet paper in it, and a full-sized Jenn Air refrigerator fully stocked with soda, juice, and by golly, chardonnay. I was sitting in an original Chippendale chair, having exhausted myself looking for a way out, drinking a glass of dry, oaky chardonnay from a crystal goblet that I had found in what appeared to be an original Louis XIV china cabinet. I didn’t know where I was or who had brought me here, but I did know that I was extremely pleased that I had left a deep scratch in the top of the mahogany dresser on which I had leaped, trying to find a window to break.
    It hadn’t taken that long to transport me to this place, just a few minutes. So I knew that I was probably still in the village proper, and if I had to guess, I was sure that Ginny Miller had something to do with this. Heck, maybe I was even in Ginny Miller’s basement. But as I took in all of the antiques and paintings—was that an original Georgia O’Keeffe over there by the Stickley end table?—I wondered how Ginny Miller had acquired such taste and class. She was an oncology nurse and her husband a civil servant. They probably did well but not well enough to have a treasure trove of rare, and very old, furniture. And my general consensus is that people who wear spandex generally don’t have a ton of antiques in their basements. It wasn’t a proven theory, okay, but it was a guess that seemed to hold true.
    When it came right down to it, this dark, musty, and cobweb-filled basement was almost nicer than my living room. It certainly didn’t belong to Ginny Miller, driver of a beat-up Subaru and hider of recyclables.
    I put my head between my knees trying to figure out my next move. I suddenly had an upside-down yet full view of a collection of antique fencing sabers behind me. I jumped from the chair, pushing it aside, and grabbed a long and pointy foil.
    I had been kind of a shy and moody teen, so in an effort to connect me with other shy moody teens, my mother had enrolled me in fencing classes in Elmsford, not far from where I grew up. Every Tuesday, from four in the afternoon until six, I would advance, rapelle, lunge, and do a bunch of other things long forgotten in a white jumpsuit and face mask. I was a fair to middling fencer and did not make one friend. But I did fall in love with Gilles, my very French and very married fencing teacher who always called me Abigail and was not attracted to me in the least, and I never competed in any fencing competitions. Generally, fencing class had been a giant waste of time. But I did learn how to manipulate a foil and that had made my mother somewhat happy. I gripped the foil in my hands and lunged forward. Yes. This would do the trick. I still had my old moves even if it felt as if I’d dislodged a vertebra in the process.
    Movement overhead, along with the sound of