He grabs my face, his thumb and forefinger straddling my mouth, digging painfully into my jaw. “Did you tell her?” He stares into my eyes, and I truly hate this man. It isn’t even about the videos. I think I’ve hated him for years. I used to think him stupid, but he isn’t. He’s evil. He’s manipulative. He’s a liar. He glares at me, and I don’t think there is anything to stop him, right now, from killing me. Has he ever loved me? I look into his eyes and try to find the man—the boy—I fell in love with. The one who had blushed when I called him sexy. The one who had cried when his mother died. The one who held my pregnant belly in his hand and beamed at me as if I was incredible. Somehow that man had filmed all of those tapes. He had whispered in children’s ears. He had pulled up their skirts. If I could kill him right now, if I wasn’t this pathetic, blubbering mess of pain and emotions—I would. I try to pull myself together, I try to look into his eyes and speak, but I can’t. He sees the truth before I even open my mouth to lie.
“You haven’t.” He releases my jaw. “You haven’t told anyone.” He reaches down, his hand rough as it passes over the front pocket of my pajama shirt, then crudely gropes the sides of my pants. There are no pockets on the drawstring pants, no place to put a phone, though I rarely carry mine around. He pinches the back of my thigh and I squeeze my eyes shut from the pain. I can’t cry. I need to pull myself together and reason with him.
“It wouldn’t matter if you had.” He straightens. “No one would believe you. Not without evidence, not with your history.” He reaches for my face and I wince, surprised when his fingers are almost gentle in their caress of my cheek. “My crazy girl,” he says. “That’s what they say.” Something in his eyes spark, as if he has an idea, and my stomach drops. “My depressed, crazy, girl.” He almost whispers the words.
“She’s bringing her back,” I blurt out the lie, my mind frantically trying to work through a scenario where he won’t, right now, hurt me. “They went to a movie. They’ll be back in an hour.” Would an hour be enough time to reason with him? To calm him down until the moment when I could run away? I let out a silent prayer of thanks that my mother never answers her phone, her hearing too eroded to pick up on the tinny chirp of the cell phone she often forgets to charge.
He steps down the first step and then the second, yanking at my hair, my hands scrambling to grip the spindles of the stairs before I am dragged down them.
“Get up.” He orders. “Walk.”
I get up. I get up and allow him to drag me forward, my bare feet stumbling on the steps, the kitchen slowly appearing through the haze of my tears. What is he doing? Where is he taking me? What is his plan?
We make it to the garage, the door shoved open, the concrete cold against my bare feet, and I understand when he reaches the utility room. The panic room. We had laughed when we saw the real estate listing. Who really needed a panic room? And in the garage? Why wouldn’t someone just get in their car and drive away? Also strange was what had been inside the so-called “Panic Room”. The hot water heater, washer and dryer. “It’s a utility room,” Simon had argued with the real estate agent. A utility room with an impossible-to-break-through door. It used to have a code. We used to be able to step into our utility room and arm the door. It would lock, and nothing could get in. Not fire, nor toxic gas, nor an army of home invaders.
But a punch code had been too risky. If Bethany had wandered down there and locked herself in… we would have had to tear down the walls to get her out. So we’d removed the punch code and put a normal lock on the door—one with keyed access on both sides, one impossible for Bethany to accidentally (or purposely) lock. The key is hung on a nail high above the light switches, and we lock and unlock the room when it isn’t in use. The impenetrability of the room has come in handy. We had all of our files inside that room, the left wall a line of cabinets. All of our photos. Our passports and stock certificates—anything deemed irreplaceable. Now, he shoves me inside, and I stagger to my feet, all of my manuscripts coming into focus, the original pages that I sweated and cried over, in neat stacks on the shelves. Will I die in here? The possibility hammers at my subconscious, and all I can think about is Bethany. Growing older and never knowing. Developing curves under his watchful eye. Unprotected. Unaware. Until it is too late. I fling myself at the doorway and collide with steel, Simon slamming the door closed.
I don’t hear the rustle of his keys.
I don’t know if he said something else to me.
I don’t hear anything through the six-inch steel walls. But I can feel the shudder of the knob in my hand. I can feel the resistance as I try to twist it. Locked. I step back from the door; the scream fading before it even hits my throat. The room is completely soundproof. It’s the place we put chirping fire detectors that won’t shut up. Bethany once called it magic, its ability to completely shut off noise. I called it creepy. Right now, it is terrifying. I open my mouth and force breath in and out.
I lift my head, my eyes tired from reading, my hand aching from writing. Inside my chest, my heart hammers, and I am torn between the urge to walk away and the need to finish this. Can I go through this all in one sitting? Can I relive this horrible day all at one time?
Part of me is afraid.
The other half of me knows that this is the only way. I have fallen into the snake pit, and I can’t rest, can’t stop. I have to fight my way through all of the memories, before the poison in them kills me.
I flex my fingers, working the muscles in them, popping my knuckles and stretching back the phalanges, one at a time, until the blood flow returns. I get off the floor and move to Simon’s desk, stretching to the right, and then to the left, before settling down on his chair. Turning to a fresh page in the notebook, I return to hell.
MARK
“Call Charlotte Blanton. Find out if she’s from North Virginia.”
He remembers the tight pinch of her features, the panic in her eyes. He thinks back, through all their chapters, and tries to connect this strange new name to their story.
He opens a web browser and types in her name, adding in the New York Post and submitting the search. The screen goes blank, then her profile appears. He clicks on the link and, within thirty seconds, has a phone number and email address.
Settling back in his seat, he pulls his cell phone from his breast pocket and opens the flip phone, one that makes his daughter roll her eyes and officially brands him as technologically-inept. Pressing in the number, he lifts the phone to his ear.
“Charlotte Blanton.” A crisp efficient voice, yet still one dipped in youth.
“Charlotte, my name is Mark Fortune. That name probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but I’m calling on behalf of a friend. Helena Ross.”
Silence. A long pause. Clearing of a throat. “Yes?”
“She had a rather odd question for you. She wanted to know if you are from North Virginia.”
Another long pause. “May I speak to her?”
Mark glances in the direction of the room Helena had disappeared into. “She’s in the middle of something right now. I can’t interrupt her.”
“Huh.” The woman sounds as if she doesn’t believe him, as if he’s intentionally keeping her away.
“She’s a writer,” he tries to explain. “It’s hard to—”
“I know what she is.” Her voice was so cold, so cruel, that he blinked. “I know what she is.” What. What was Helena? A writer. Or was the woman referring to something else?
“Are you from Virginia?”
“I’m from Tennessee, Mr. Fortune.” She pauses. “But my family lived in Wilmont, Virginia for two years when I was ten. That’s what Mrs. Parks is referring to.”
Parks. Her married name, though she didn’t now use it. But something in the sneer of Charlotte’s voice… there is a history between the two women, that much is suddenly clear. He backtracks, wanting to be out of this conversation, before he says
or does the wrong thing, before he stumbles onto a bed of fire ants and causes an issue. “I appreciate your time. Thank you.”
“I’d like to speak to her.” She speaks before he has a chance to end the connection. “Can you make sure she calls me?”
“I’m not sure anyone can make Helena do much of anything,” he admits. “Especially not me.”
“At least ask her. It’s very important that I get her side of things. Before my article.”
An article. The threat flares his protective instincts, and he straightens in his seat. “An article,” he says slowly. “About what?”
“That’s what I’d like to talk to her about. Please ask her to call me.”
She ends the connection and he slowly closes the phone, spinning the chair toward the door, and thinking.
He is destroying the evidence. Or hiding it. He could put it all in his car and drive anywhere, throw it in a hundred dumpsters, or bury it in fifty different places. There is that land we own, two hundred acres up in New York—the place he goes on hunting weekends. He could hide it there, or rent a storage unit or burn it all.
Once the evidence is gone, it will be my word against his. I stop pacing, the scenario so bleak that it hurts, my stomach cramping, my breath catching. I push my fingers into my side and try to calm my breathing, slow my heartbeat, to think. No one will believe me. My own mother won’t. And with the recent events—especially my visit to the divorce attorney—all of it will be suspect to the timing of my “discovery”. My discovery with no evidence. The discovery of a woman ill-fit to be a mother.
If we get a divorce, I could lose her.
If we stay together, I will kill him. I can’t live with him. And he won’t let me. He won’t let his loose thread of a wife dangle. My knowledge is too dangerous, my will too strong. If he doesn’t kill me today, tonight, this week… he will soon.
A second possibility emerges, the idea that he will take Bethany and run. When I had considered this inside the house, his hand in my hair, I had thought—rather stupidly—that he would leave me at the house, unattended and free, while he took her. I had thought that the police would catch him before he got too far. But with me locked up, he can take his time. He can destroy evidence, pack bags, and visit the bank. His name is on every account, he could withdraw it all. There is easily thirty, forty thousand in our checking account. A hundred more in savings. He could pick Bethany up from my mother’s and take off, be in Canada in six hours. Disappear in twelve. By the time I was found, if I was still alive, they could both be gone.
I can’t let him do that, do either of those possibilities. I slowly turn, my feet moving over the bare concrete, and take in my prison.
By the door, a phone jack. At one point, a cheap corded phone had hung from its stand. We’d borrowed it, put it in the upstairs guest bedroom, and never returned it. Useless.
An electrical panel, one that controls the garage, utility room, water filtration and irrigation systems. I could turn off power to the sprinklers. Same with the five thousand dollar water purification tank that Simon had insisted we needed. Take that, my pedophile of a husband. You think you’re drinking filtered water? Think again. Useless.
Our washer, a red LG behemoth with enough buttons to power a space station. Useless.
Our dryer, the second part of a matching set. Simon had been talked into paying an extra seven hundred dollars for the red color. I had gone out to the car and outlined my next scene. Useless.
Two hot water heaters, side by side. Overkill for two adults, even with Simon’s thirty-minute showers. Useless.
I turn further left, the mental task calming, my heartbeat slowing, the shake in my hands subsiding. If there is a solution in this room, I will find it.
A skinny shelving unit, one that holds our laundry detergents, cleaning supplies, and iron. A toolbox sits on the bottom shelf, alongside a flashlight. The flashlight is long and heavy, the type that, if swung properly, could act as a club. I crouch and pull it out, the weight of it reassuring in my hand. Worst-case scenario, at least I am somewhat armed. Before I stand, I look through the toolbox. Basic items. Screwdriver. Hammer. A wrench. I eye the hammer. Another possible weapon. I start to stand, then stop, thinking of something.
The wrench. I turn back and look at it. It’s not the big heavy sort. This one is more delicate, the sort that fits into a small hand like mine, its nimble pinchers designed for household screws and bolts. In a battle of strengths, it’d be as useless as a pillow. In a battle of wits… I bite at my bottom lip, an idea forming.
The Terrace. It’s a book of mine that no one has heard of. If I move three gigantic steps to the left, it will be there, among the stack of manuscripts. It is one of the eight Unpublishables, eight novels no one will ever read. They range from uninteresting to terrible. One is about a talking cricket. One is about a menopausal woman who talks to herself for four hundred pages. One is about a lonely teenager who reads on her terrace while her mother dies from carbon monoxide poisoning. The twist? She’s responsible. Carbon monoxide was the fourth attempt on her mother’s life, and the first successful one. Somehow, the book managed to be boring, while also… I purse my lips and attempt to remember the carefully worded rejection. Disturbing. Psychologically disturbing. Boring while also psychologically disturbing. I had agreed with the editor. It was boring. And disturbing. If my mother had ever read it, she would have shipped me off to the closest mental health facility and locked me away forever.
In The Terrace, the girl floods the home with carbon monoxide. Her tools of death were simple: a wrench and a hot water heater.
I turn to the two eighty-gallon hot water heaters. I have everything I needed. Two huge water heaters and a toolbox. I turn and look at the stacks of manuscripts. A meticulously researched instruction manual of death. And, somewhere in those cabinets, I probably have the hot water heater’s manual.
Can I do it?
Will I?
I slide my hand around the wrench, then drop it back into the toolbox.
I don’t even know if Simon is still home. How long has it been since he locked me in—ten, fifteen minutes? It is hard to tell, the seconds stretching before me, my manic mind either moving extremely fast or ridiculously slow. If he has already left, if he is already on the way to dispose of evidence, or pick up Bethany, then I will accomplish nothing by turning the house into a poison-filled capsule. If anything, I’ll only endanger my eventual rescue party, assuming one ever comes.
I step away from the toolbox and lean against the door, my back sliding down the metal until my butt hits the floor. Lowering my head against my knees, I fight against the panic.
Then, as if a gift from God, the hot water heater comes to life.
I lift my head and stare at it, the machine humming, the sound of water flowing, and I hold my breath, wondering if my husband is simply washing his hands, or has turned on the shower.
Part of me is shocked that, right now, he would think that a shower is appropriate. The other half of me understands it completely, especially if he is going to run away with her. Simon abhors the scent of the school on him, the smell of cafeteria and teenage sweat and the exhaust from the bus pickup. His first step—once home from work—is typically the shower. And he takes his dear time in there. I once asked him what he did for thirty or forty minutes, just standing there, under the spray. He said he thought about things, that it was where he got his best ideas. I never understood what great ideas he was coming up with. Fantasy Football projections? A more efficient way to stack his beer in the fridge? Now, with my newfound knowledge, my thoughts turn dark, his “ideas”—much more sinister in their possibilities.
The water continues, and it’s been thirty or forty seconds now, definitely past the half-ass motion that he considers hand washing. If he is in the shower, I have a guaranteed half-hour where he will be at home. Add time for him to get dressed and pack up some it
ems… probably more like an hour. He won’t rush. Why would he? I am locked away, giving him all of the time in the world.
I spring to my feet and turn to the shelving, to the stacks of manuscripts there, my mind almost spasming with my next decision. Stay here and wait? Sit on my bony ass and do nothing? Or flood the house with carbon monoxide and kill him? Kill him and the possibility that he will ever hurt another girl again; kill him and ensure that Bethany’s innocence will forever be protected?
I close my eyes and work through the process. The time it would take for the carbon monoxide to fill the house. Simon growing sleepy. Lying down on the bed. Death. When I don’t show up to pick up Bethany. Mom will call. Grow worried. Come by. She will find Simon and call the police. She won’t want Bethany to see the body. She’ll take her into the backyard. The police will come. Search the house. I will be found.
I will have to tell them the truth. There’s no way they’ll believe the hot water heater malfunctioned on its own, not when I’d been locked inside the room with it.
Will the police understand? Will they consider it an act of self-defense? Or will they arrest me for murder? Even if found innocent, I might lose custody of Bethany in the process.
It’s worth it. I would rather my mother have custody of her than him. I would rather risk my own incarceration than him ever touch her, or another child. Am I too late? Has he already… I almost vomit at the thought. Surely not. Surely she is too young, surely his tastes aren’t that twisted. I close my eyes and think of every child at his school. The neighborhood full of kids that have sprinted across our lawn and dove down our slip-n-slide. Every smiling face we’ve welcomed into our home on Halloween or Easter. When she is older, we would have hosted sleepovers and movie nights. I would have gone up to my office to write. I would have left them alone with a monster and never been the wiser.
Imprisonment, losing custody… all risks I have to take. If I have the opportunity, right now, to stop him from getting to my daughter, or to any other child, I have to act.