Part 33: Cellar Triptych

Previously in the Vines Inquiry— As the gang waited for Her Call to come through the radio, Frank and co. understood why a Carlisle Parks Dept. truck had been parked in the Big House’s drive all day— Cougars. Starving and mad, the wild cats came into the parlor through the unlocked door and immediately made their intention known. It left the gang with only one choice: Run.

Sprinting down into the manor’s maze-like cellars, the trio quickly got separated with no choice but to keep fleeing. Soon, the darkness was their only companion.

Blevin was good at sports the way a conveyor belt is good at moving things from Point A to Point B. He didn’t want the intricacies explained to him, didn’t need to understand the more complex maneuvers. He was goal-focused, hard-working and thrived in a repetitive environment.

So, in a sense, he was lucky to already be lost by the time Harlow was forced to improvise their route. 

After falling down the cellar stairs behind them, Blevin ambled up and started running as fast as he could, figuring Harlow and Frank must have taken the same path. After five minutes, he was beginning to think that maybe he’d made a wrong turn. 

“Or that they ditched you,” he said aloud. A redundant detail, of course. Blevin was an…external man.

He jogged on at a steady pace, turning right if possible at corners, and double-timing it up and down the subterranean stairs as he reached them. A trickle of blood (iron-dense breadcrumbs, if he could be so playful) followed behind. His stomach ached during all of it; part from still needing to pee, and the rest from not being able stop and look at all the Inquiry history that was on full display. 

Portraits of the entire Vines line. Reliefs from ancient tombs. He’d jogged through the same archive twice, trying to read as many titles as he could without slowing down. A collection of “Vines, Winfrey. Journals” spanned four decades and three shelves while the sum total research of someone named Paul Sunderson had been unceremoniously shoved into the corner. Blevin was giddy with all of it. He could almost smell that new pencil scent that accompanied each fall. 

“Keep going. This will all still be here in a few days.” 

He wished Frank or Harlow were there. He knew the latter wasn’t his biggest fan, but she had a rightful claim to this room if the photos in Rochester’s book were unaltered. Sure, the more Blevin learned about the Inquiry, the clearer it became that not exactly every little piece of it was perfect; but name a construct that was besides the pilot episode of “The Nanny.”

No matter how flawed, he still felt like he shouldn’t be there alone. Didn’t have the right to be there. 

“No, no. Bad thoughts. Not useful thoughts. One more lap around this room, and then we pee. Where am I supposed to go? The foyer!” 

He ignored the exit out of the archive and turned to do another tour of the Memoirs section.

Meanwhile, the divot-eyed cougar, perched high on a shelf, crouched; waiting for just the right time.

Harlow called back to Frank, but it felt like yelling into outer space. An evacuated auditorium. There was a lacking, the opposite of the pop she felt when someone walked into the bar after it had been abandoned for hours. She wanted to slow down, but couldn’t risk it. Her hands scraped along the walls in the lightless tunnels beneath the manor. All the while, her mother’s appeal during their phone call at McCroy’s echoed in Harlow’s head.

Oh, baby. LoLo. Please don’t go up there.