Vance Caldwell
Mrs. Howell_s foot
CHAPTER ONE
Rebekah opened the door that led to the tunnel under the hill. The cute little twelve year old boy by her side peeked into it, then turned around and grinned at her. His eyes descended with a cautious sensuality down the voluptuous lines of her lushly shaped body before he looked back into the tunnel and disappeared. Rebekah closed the door and went upstairs. It was an old tunnel from the cellar into a large barrel-like enclosure lined with shelves that were too old and rotten to hold anything, whatever they might have held decades ago. Then the tunnel part proceeded, probably dug later, maybe during a war or something, right through the hill.
She had a new little boy upstairs. He was busy at the moment shining leather shoes and boots in the kitchen. She had hired him yesterday and he started today. He, too, was twelve and very angelic looking, a type she didn't usually bother with, but this boy's beauty that shone with a heavenly aura around his features and his soft blond hair stopped at his blue eyes, which shined with the merriment of the very devil himself. He had been too enticing to pass up. She could only hope that he was not a goodie-goodie who ran to his mother with each little problem he had.
'How are you doing, Jim?' she asked, smiling, as she came through the cellar door into the kitchen.
'Take a look, Miss Howell!' he said, pointing at the half-finished row of shoes that were spread across the floor on newspapers. Then he looked at her with curiosity.
Here it comes, she thought. All of the little boys were curious at first as to why no one was allowed to wear shoes in the house, although there were so many shoes in need of constant shining. But he didn't ask that at all.
'That's funny,' he laughed a little. 'I didn't see you go down there, but I heard you coming up the steps so it must be the cellar.'
'It's funny?' she said in a questioning tone, raising one of her naturally thick and finely arched dark eyebrows.
'Well, I mean, in my house, when someone comes up from the cellar, that means they went down, and the last I saw you, you went out there!' he explained, pointing through the kitchen door into the hallway.
'A regular Sherlock Holmes!' she mumbled, remembering to smile and hopefully cover her surprise and concern. There were many entrances to the cellar. They all led to the same place, but she kept them as secret as possible. The door inside her own closet, a door that no one but she knew how to open, was the only door down to the secret tunnel that she ever revealed to the boys. The reason she kept it all so secret was self-protection. The door in the closet had a panel that fitted over it. When the panel was in place, no door was visible. Any little boy who spoke of such a door could be made to look foolish.
At the other end of the tunnel was a little cave, and this was blocked off very ingeniously by a rock that was raised and lowered and worked from the house by a simple lever. There was no written record of the tunnel. Rebekah's father had shown it to her when she was in her teens. Since he had told her not to tell anyone, she didn't even know if her mother knew of it. Her mother, now living with her second husband over a hundred miles away, never mentioned the tunnel, so Rebekah rather doubted that she knew of it. Her father had been dead now three years.
It had been a foolish mistake not to remember to return by the wall stairs to her closet. What had she been thinking of to make such an error? If she had ever done it before, no one apparently noticed. It was clear that young Jim Craft was a sharper youngster than she usually had. She wiggled her bare toes and decided the best thing to do about it was to change the subject.
'Let me see how you're doing,' she said, bending over the shoes. The young boy scrambled to his feet, then bent over to pick up a boot that had been well scratched before he had worked on it. It shone with barely a visible scratch at all.
'How's this one?' he asked proudly.
Then, despite her awareness that it might be a little soon but hoping to make him forget his suspicions about the cellar, she bent downwards to hug the little boy, her arms wrapping tightly around his neck to pull his delighted face warmly against the twin mounds of her ripely upthrust titties. She held him for an extended moment, almost suffocating him in the voluptuously deep valley between her tits, then gradually straightened up, her breath slightly hastened from the not-so-innocent and titillating contact.
'They've never looked so good!' she breathed. Seeing that his attention was now completely on her, Rebekah pulled away. She didn't want to get herself too excited, too soon. She did her best to maintain control of herself. There had been times when she had weakened too soon and given a child a spontaneous hug or kiss, and he had run out the door yelling for his mother. She thought she was probably better at choosing the children now. She often wished, though, that she were not so irresistibly attracted to such young adolescents. But even though she was a good twenty years older than most of them and had had considerably more experience, there was much that she and such young boys had in common, an energy, which she didn't really understand, a restlessness that was not yet focused. She would someday have to give them all up, of course. She had to start thinking about getting married. She was the end of a dwindling family. But meanwhile, she wanted to have as much of them and their sweet young bodies for which she had time.
'Want a Coke?' she asked her young expert boot polisher.
'Gee thanks,' Jim smiled and bent once more over a shoe on which he was working assiduously.
'It won't interrupt your dinner, I hope,' she said, suddenly remembering that herself. She had just let Tommy Speigle out to go home for his dinner, and in the concern over the secrets of the tunnel, she had forgotten that she had meant to send Jim Craft home, too. Tommy's parents had, for some reason, made Tommy leave his 'job' with Miss Howell, and that's why Jim had been hired. She suffered a rapid turnover in her young boys, but Rebekah had so far had no more serious problems with them or their parents.
'What time is it?' the boy asked then. He, too, had forgotten the time.
'Five thirty. What time do your parents expect you for dinner?'
'I have to be home and ready by six, Miss Howell,' he said apologetically.
'Well, fine,' she said cheerily, wishing this were a later time, a later day, and that she were dismissing him from her bedroom and not the kitchen. She could hardly wait to get at this beautiful boy's extremities! She sucked in and swallowed the saliva that was suddenly gathering in her mouth. 'Let's just pull the newspapers with the shoes right on them over into this corner, and you can just continue tomorrow.'
While they were pulling the papers along the floor, he asked, 'Gee, do you wear all these shoes?' He was all too aware of her own bare feet now and his own naked toes. He had heard that the Japanese remove their shoes before entering a house. Perhaps Miss Howell was Japanese. Her hair was very long and dark, but other than that she didn't appear to him to have any Japanese characteristics as he understood them, like yellow skin or slanted dark eyes. He didn't know whether he had ever really seen a Japanese. Anyway, someday he could ask her.
'No,' she said. 'I use them as ornaments around the house.'
He blushed. Maybe it was a smart-alecky question, he thought. 'I'm sorry,' he mumbled.
'But I'm not. You see these boots on which you did such a beautiful job?' She picked up the nearly scratchless boots. 'Let me just show you where they belong before you go, okay?'
While she was standing, holding the boots, Jim arranged the last shoes on the paper that was now in the corner between the wall and the sink cabinet in one corner of the kitchen. He happened to glance down under his arm to where her naked feet stood at the edge of the paper, close to his hand. Something about them impressed him. They were lovely, really, with their high insteps and long toes with well-manicured nails. She wore no polish on her toe nails the way his mother did. It was odd how they drew his attention. While he was watching, she wiggled her toes. He almost laughed, but feared he would say the wrong thing again or his laughter would be out of place.
Jim got up and followed her out of the kitchen into the hallway that led to the front of the house and the
