You’re still relatively mobile. You can hop on one leg while using your free arm for balance and maneuvering.
“[H]e took out the toilet seat so I couldn’t hit myself over the head and drown, and he took out the toilet paper so I couldn’t bend the bars roll out the - roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape.”
Good point! Zsofia, make sure he takes her purse so she doesn’t have any money to spend in the shack.
You can fashion a working rope out of toilet paper.
How about a hot water heater. A 40-gallon tank will have more than 325 pounds of water in it, so she can’t pull it over easily. Eventually she’d be able to shimmy her arms to the top of the tank, but then she’d have to overcome the hot and cold water pipes, along with the vent at the top. But if there’s a conveniently located pipe wrench, nothing’s impossible.
Ass-cape.
and it was about 4 or 5 hours later that Alice, remember Alice? Alice came into the thread and with a few nasty words to **BrotherCadfael ** bailed us out of cafesociety and took us back to the OP.
Glances around apartment, bedframe or bathroom plumbing fixture in here.
Bed frames are often surprisingly easy to disassemble - mine looks huge and heavy (four poster solid cherry rice bed) but it’s just held together with gravity.
Cast iron Clawfoot tub, to one of the feet.
The feet are usually detacheable, but only via a nut that rusted solid sometime in the fall of 1923. Your captive is not going to be able to pick the tub up in order to free herself.
Especially if the captor fills it with water first.
Oh, now that is perfect. Unusual in a man’s fishing retreat, but not impossible.
Unless she drains it.
Well, if she’s thirsty…
Should I just stop posting today, Gary?
The average fishing shack I’m familiar with couldn’t hold anybody for long, handcuffed or not. If the shack itself is supported on piers (posts in the ground), that might be the sturdiest thing available. If the shack has plumbing, maybe an iron pipe would be sturdy enough. But a fishing shack would probably have some rope or strong cord around. Just hog tie the girl to immobilize her. But if Jeopardy is on, just take the girl with you. She’ll be so focused on escaping you’ll do way better than her, especially in the Famous Psychopath category, and feel really smart. Of course if she keeps her cool, she’ll wait until you’re overconfident, then make you look stupid in her strong categories, then you’ll fly into rage, she’ll jump out of the way and grab the loaded speargun off the wall and hit you square in the chest at point-blank range. Then she’ll run out of the shack, while you, in a maniacal rage, chase after her. You should pick a dark and stormy night to do this.
To see how mystery authors before you have handled this, check out Bill Pronzini’s “Shackles”, where the detective hero is kidnapped and imprisoned by a leg iron attached to (a floor bolt?). His escape plan necessarily involves a rather lengthy term of imprisonment…
Lawrence Block wrote a novel in which a protagonist was to be kept imprisoned indefinitely in a remote cabin via cuffs/shackles (this, like the previous example, featured Planning Ahead on the part of the captor(s)), not serendipitously finding something solid in the cabin to chain the prisoner to*.
Block also wrote a short story in which a person was scheduled to be secured to the floor with a hefty amount of SuperGlue. It was not revealed how that turned out, so maybe you could steal the idea and follow through.
*I vote against the towel rack in the bathroom.
One that occurs to me: gas fireplace pipes. It’d be reasonably secure if the chain runs through the grate as well as around the pipe. On our fireplace, the grate has a pair of U-shaped clips at the back, which hold the grate to the floor; in order to remove it, you’d need to lift the back wall of the fireplace (heavy ceramic panel, pretty difficult in handcuffs), hold it up while sliding the grate back to free the clips, and then slide yourself and your cuffs (grate still attached) off the side of the gas pipe. Could make for a pretty good struggle.
Or just rip out some wallboards or plaster and cuff her around a stud. Hey, that might make a good one: her hands are on the other side of the wall, so she gropes around for something to free herself, and finds…however you want to proceed from there.
If the shack has a hot water heater, cuff them around the hot water pipe coming out of the top.
If they break the pipe, they get scalded with hot water.
Let’s see. Our killer is experienced and has prepared ahead of time to secure his captive.
It would take about 5 minutes to screw an eye bolt into a wall stud or wooden floor.
As far as escape, she could have dislocated her thumb when she was younger and can now move it in and out of socket at will, unknown to her killer. Or, knowledge of her fate could motivate her to do it anyway. I know it would me.
If you can screw a bolt into a stud you can unscrew it. I considered that and discarded. 