All of a sudden, Vera realized that the firm dirt path beneath her had become soft. No, not soft—gone completely! She paddled desperately in thin air for an interminable moment, and then fell, down, down, down.
Vera hit hard ground without warning and groaned at the pain of the impact. She took a few deep breaths and then slowly opened her eyes.
She was at the bottom of a very deep hole in the middle of the woods. The sides were perfectly vertical and very smooth, the consistency that of wet clay. Vera took a step and her paw nudged a large, springy pine bough that had fallen down the hole along with her. A few more were scattered about.
She’d literally run into a trap. The pine boughs covered the opening of the hole in the middle of the narrow path. If she’d been walking at a normal pace, she likely would have spotted the trick and moved off the path to make her way through the brambles to continue on. But the mysterious creature had moved fast, though not so fast that Vera would lose track of it and give up the chase.
“I’m an idiot,” she said out loud. The close, soft walls of the pit absorbed the sound, making her feel even more alone.
It now seemed clear that Vera had been lured out to the woods by the anonymous note left under her door at the inn. Surely, if Officer Ambler had sent a note, she’d have signed it, and probably offered to come with Vera. She knew what cops were like!
“Oh, Orville’s going to be so mad,” she said. Hadn’t he warned her about exactly this sort of thing…running after a lead without talking to anyone else first?
Well, she did it anyway, and now here she was, in a hole in the middle of nowhere, and no creature knew where she was except for the one who had put her there. Oh, no, she thought, looking up at the circle of sky above her. What if it came back to finish her off?
“Help!” she shouted, as loudly as she could. “Help! Is anyone there?”
She tried to climb the walls, but her paws sunk into the muddy surface, sending her sliding right back down to the floor, ruining any progress she might have made.
“Help!” she howled again, knowing that no one was likely to hear her.
Vera tried to calm herself and think rationally. She was a small fox at the bottom of a very deep hole, and there was no way to climb out. She couldn’t count on Orville or Lenore realizing that anything was wrong, as she was not expected home until the end of the next day! Then Vera brightened. Kitty St. Clair knew that she was planning on visiting Thomas Springfield’s abandoned cabin, because Vera asked her for directions. But her spirits sunk once more. Kitty would not miss Vera until at least dinnertime, and perhaps not even then, since she’d assume her guest was simply out and about town.
Panic rose in Vera’s chest. There had to be a way out of this mess. She took several deep breaths and tried to compose herself. She had been in dangerous situations before. She could figure this out.
She picked up one of the pine boughs. Could she break it into pieces and jam the wooden stakes into the walls, creating a series of pawholds on the way up to the surface? She gnawed at one end of the bough, having no other method of cutting. Ugh! Sticky sap and the worst sort of ginny taste! Grimacing, she kept at it.
Then, she paused. Very faintly, Vera thought she heard a creature calling her name.
“Vera?” a voice demanded. “You out here? Helllooooo?”
“Yes!” she answered, her voice quavering at first, then growing as she put her heart into it. “Yes! Who’s up there? I’m down here in the pit. Watch your step!” The last thing she needed was another body down here with her.
“Vera!” the voice said, much closer. “What are you doing down there?”
She looked up to where the voice was coming from and spotted the brim of a fedora.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she muttered to herself. It was none other than the persistent Bradley Marvel. He must have asked Kitty where Vera went and then followed the same directions. Well, any port in a storm…
“I need to get out of here!” she yelled up. “You need to find a rope, or fetch Officer Ambler or something. Hurry!” Vera had not forgotten the creature who led her into this trap, and it was still quite possible that it would return.
“Oh, I know what to do,” Bradley said, shrugging out of his trench coat. “A scene just like this occurred in High Stakes, the third Percy Bannon book. He goes to the jungle nation of the tiger queen…very gripping, you must remember it?”
“Sorry, I’m a little distracted right now,” Vera replied through her clenched jaws (this was not fully the result of irritation with the author for assuming she was familiar with his entire oeuvre—she also had some pine sap stuck to her teeth).
“Understandable,” he said kindly. “Anyway, it goes like this. The tiger princess had fallen into the pit—it’s actually called a tiger trap, did you know?—and Percy finds her. He used a rope made out of his coat and scarf and shirt to lower down to the pit. Great image, don’t you think? My publisher wanted
