Tulle Death Do Us Part by Annette Blair

background. Certainly the storm had passed. Maybe by hours. Likely, this
was
the place they’d gathered after the scavenger hunt to determine who won the “game.” I distinctly remembered not needing my sea legs, and this place did indeed smell of the briny sea.
    I could see better now—a dilapidated warehouse, rubble on the floor, like a couple of broken old chairs, one overturned, an old rubber tire with a cat curled inside, an ancient filthy sink in the corner. Likely the same gathering place, the loner’s tux suggested it could be the same night, or perhaps he’d been to a wedding. One indisputable fact: time was definitely toward morning.
    For certain, the others were gone; they’d left the jubilee that had taken place the night before.
    Tuxman paced and swore. “Just one small hiding place?” he begged loudly toward the rafters in a voice I did not recognize from my previous visions. His cry echoed and bounced as if pummeling him with the mayhem of the night.
    He punched a column, bent over and swore at himself, and examined his bloody knuckles. Proof of self-recrimination, to my mind.
    He touched the same column, felt along the joint he’d smacked, turned toward the center of the rancid depot, and shouted as if his favorite team had scored.
    He fetched a wooden toolbox, or carrier, from a closet with a door split vertically down the middle. He moved like he knew this place. He then made for the center stairs.
    As he climbed, he cackled—no other way to describe the self-satisfied sound—as he caressed slapdash handrails made of fat, jointed pipes, maybe three inches in diameter. The construction of the railings reminded me of anything made with Tinkertoys. Or metal plumber’s pipe.
    In some cases, two pieces made one upright or two formed one span from upright to upright. Likely built during the Depression, they were a good indication of the way people made do with whatever they could get their hands on. In our neck of the woods, you never discounted anything built in this piece-by-piece way as having arrived in parts, over time, from the subbase.
    Tuxman looked nefarious, working in tails on a T joint halfway up a dirty, worn, raw-wood stairway. He’d chosen a spot where two pieces of handrail met an upright. He cursed plenty until the T finally gave and fell,
clunk, clunk, clunk
down thestairs then with a pipe-meets-cement clang onto a dust-caked, greasy floor.
    Another string of curses ensued as he failed to access the inside of the pipe. The two handrail pieces met atop the upright, blocking his access.
    I saw his dilemma.
    “The idiots who built this should be shot!” he snapped.
    I really did not recognize Tuxman’s voice.
    A distant whistle scared the fiberfill out of us both. Tuxman jumped like he’d nearly had a heart attack, which caused him to fall halfway down the stairs. One leg caught around a rail and his head hit the floor. Then a
whoosh
shook the rafters and grime rained down on him, as he lay there in openmouthed shock.
    I’ll confess to a spark of amusement as he spit and coughed and swore, and then pulled himself up and together and got back to work.
    What shook the building had been a train that had rushed by, of course. First of the morning would be my guess. The mill must sit alongside the tracks, as most of Mystic’s old mills did. Once upon a time, the railroad would have been their prime shippers.
    Tuxman wiped his face, pulled on his tails, got all dignified again, and hung on the upright like a monkey. With his whole body, he pulled the top toward him while pushing against the bottom, and when it moved the slightest bit forward, he took something from his pocket, a small item that looked to be wrapped in a petticoat piece, and slipped it into the pipe. Then he added two more objects, both wrapped, to the hollow pipe, one longer and narrower than the others.
    With a relieved sigh, he pushed it back into place, and resecured the T joint with the tools. Good as new, except