“What is it?” she said, squishing herself up against the (safe) side of glass wall as he edged past her on the narrow ledge.
“How did that happen?” he said, more intelligibly now.
“The wind,” she replied calmly. Wasn’t it obvious?
He shook his head as he reached for the door handle. “No. It couldn’t have been the wind—it was coming from a different direction. It couldn’t have—well—Bloody hell.” He froze, his hand on the door handle.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s—stuck. Locked. Or something.” He shook it hard, rattling the door in its hinges, but the handle didn’t turn and the door didn’t open.
Teddy’s heart was in her throat. “You’re teasing me, right?” Forgetting her nervousness about the narrow railing, she pushed her way over to him.
But she didn’t even have to try the door handle once she saw the expression on his face.
“We’relocked out,” she said, her voice high. “We’re stuck up here. Ohmigod, Harriet isnevergoing to believe this!”
Four
Didn’t it just figure?
This was what happened when you did something nice for someone, Oscar thought with a mental roll of the eyes.There you have it.
He should have just left Teddy Mack to her own devices—in her own room, with her bloody laptop and her agonized moans—and then he wouldn’t be perched up here like a stranded eaglet.
Those thoughts rushed into his mind, then out again just as quickly. At some point, he’d probably laugh about the situation.
Once they got down.
Ifthey got down.
“Uh, let me check the other doors,” Teddy said. Her voice was steady, if not stretched a little thin, and she seemed relatively calm.
“You go that way, I’ll go this way,” Oscar suggested.
But when they got to the opposite side, each met the other with a grim expression—and neither needed to speak the obvious.
“Okay, now what?” Teddy said. “Do you have your cell phone with you? Maybe we can call someone. My cousin lives in Wicks Hollow—”
“No.”
“Damn.”
They stood there in silence, and Oscar leaned against the glass enclosure that kept them from escape. If he had something to break the glass with, that could work—but he hadn’t seen anything during his walk around the perimeter of the lantern room. The walkway was clear of any debris, tools, or anything useful.
“Any other ideas?” he said.
She rattled the locked door vigorously, but it hardly moved. The glass lantern was extremely well built to stand up to the worst of nature’s elements. Nothing was going anywhere.
“What about breaking the glass?” she suggested. “Maybe with a shoe? Mine are too flimsy. What about yours? Or do you have a belt with a heavy buckle that might do it?”
Unfortunately, he was wearing soft canvas slip-ons, and no belt. “I don’t have anything that would do it. But the binoculars might work.”
“On television it always looks so easy to bust through a glass door or window,” she said sadly, giving him the field glasses. “But it’s not. I did some research on it for a book. It’s pretty impossible, actually.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do.”
