Dressed to Die by Beverly Connor

Author:Beverly Connor [Connor, Beverly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Suspense
ISBN: 9781581822465
Publisher: Cumberland House
Published: 1997-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

LINDSAY LANDED ON her feet, jarring her entire frame, and collapsed to the ground. For a moment the breath was knocked out of her and she gasped involuntarily, trying to get her lungs working again. In the next moment a wave of pain went up through her bones. When the pain left and she caught her breath, she stood up on shaky legs and looked around her. She was surrounded by dirt walls.

“Oh, damn, not again,” she cried and looked up through a round hole at sky and tree canopies. “The well. Damn, I forgot about the well.” Why, she thought, hadn’t they filled it in? “Damn.”

She stood on the dry well bottom of soft earth and forest litter and tested her legs. She felt her arms. She seemed to be all right. She had landed on her feet, and her skeleton had absorbed the shock of the fall. Had she landed on her side, she might have been seriously injured.

How to fall correctly was one of the things her mother taught her. “You will fall off your horse sooner or later,” she had told her. “Try to land on your feet. If you are going over headfirst, you need to break your fall with your hands, so don’t have your reins wrapped around them.”

Once, on the rare occasion of her mother teaching a riding class, she was giving the same instruction to a little boy. The boy’s father overheard her and came marching over. “Don’t teach him to fall!” he had shouted at her. “That’s teaching him to fail!” Her mother looked at the man for several moments, raking her gaze over him from head to foot before she spoke. “That’s the stupidest philosophy I’ve ever heard. Falling isn’t a failure. It’s obeying the laws of gravity when you get thrown off balance. Are you going to explain your school of thought to the horse?”

Her mother, however, had given her no instructions on getting out of a well. “I don’t suppose anybody’s up there?” Lindsay shouted. Her question was met with silence.

The old well was less than twenty feet deep. If the dirt walls weren’t too soft, she could climb out. Lindsay felt the sides with her fingertips. The walls felt like sandpaper-hard earth. It probably wouldn’t cave in on her, but it might be hard to get hand- and footholds. About four feet from the top, she saw a root growing from the wall. That could be good. She fished in her pockets and only came up with a quarter. She had left her keys in the Rover, and her pocketknife was in her purse.

“I’m going to have to start wearing a tool belt everywhere,” she said aloud. Damn, she hadn’t told a soul where she was going.

She took the quarter and began scraping a toehold. The earth was hard, not impossible, but it would be slow going. She dug toeholds up the side of the wall as far as she could reach, aiming for the root.

Lindsay

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