The Plain Old Man by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

the rest could go scratch themselves.
    She’d forgotten what an intriguing place the potting shed was. Here was where Hosbin had been wont to whack Aunt Emma’s rootbound plants out of their pots and put them into bigger ones, or else pick up a big knife and chop the root ball into sections to create a whole family of plants where one had been before. He’d explained at vast length why a good potting soil should contain both rich humus and sharp builder’s sand. Sarah had never been able to figure out why he’d called sand sharp. To her, it was plain gritty.
    She went rummaging through the drawers Hosbin had always kept so tidy, finding lots of staking twine and plant labels but no small squares of glass to protect the ransom note. Here was a notebook he’d recorded his bulb plantings in, she could slip the note between the pages. French hyacinths had been his main preoccupation in 1952, evidently. She was trying to read the neat handwriting by the dim light that filtered through the small, high, none too clean windows when the sack went over her head.
    At first she thought it was just a blueberry net that had fallen off an overhead shelf. As she tried to push it away from her face, though, the cloth was yanked down over her arms, her hands grabbed from behind and tied together somewhat ineptly because she was putting up the best fight she could manage. She did land one good kick on her assailant’s shins, but she had her old sneakers on so it couldn’t have hurt much. All it accomplished, apparently, was to annoy her attacker. He, or a pretty strong she, grabbed Sarah by the shoulders, spun her around till she was dizzy, then suddenly let her go.
    She didn’t fall, but she staggered and gave her knee a crack on the drawer she’d left open. By the time she got her balance, she’d heard the door slam and realized she was alone.
    Of all the hackneyed, melodramatic tricks to fall for! It must have been the writer of the note who trapped her, but why? An amateur, surely. Her wrists weren’t even tied tight, she could wiggle them back and forth. Some of that old staking twine, she’d bet. That shouldn’t be hard to break. She felt around till she encountered a tool of some kind—a hoe, she thought—and rubbed the strands against its sharpened edge until they parted. Then she pulled off the sack and tried the door. It didn’t budge.
    That didn’t surprise her. She’d left the key lying on the counter, having retrieved it in the first place from its not very inspired hiding place on a nail around the corner. Sarah hoped her assailant had left it sticking in the lock outside instead of chucking it away in the compost heap or somewhere. Getting the locksmith out here to cut another would be a nuisance and an expense. She was Kelling enough to mind such things.
    As to getting out of the shed, that was no great problem. Hadn’t her jailer thought of the windows? They were inconveniently high, to be sure, and pretty narrow but then so was she. Sarah got the ladder she’d just brought back, set it against a window that she was almost sure didn’t have raspberry canes planted underneath, and went to work.
    The window was the kind that swings open from the bottom on hinges and gets propped up with a plant stick on hot days. This one clearly hadn’t been opened since Hosbin retired and went home to die some fifteen years ago. Aunt Emma was still mailing his pension checks to a village in the Cotswolds and still getting back notes saying hers of recent date had arrived safely and hoping she was well with respectful compliments. Sarah blew about half a swarm of dead bees off the narrow ledge and climbed back down to find something to pry with.
    It wasn’t much of a struggle, actually, though she felt like a letter going through a mail slot. She did lose a few square inches of skin from her back when her jersey rode up as she squirmed her way over the sill. She’d been right about the raspberry canes, fortunately, but