Lies That Bind Us(63)

I have found the sandal I threw away and now sit there beside it in the dark, clutching my broken hand to my breast, waiting for the pain to subside and wondering why now, of all times, my desperate mind keeps straying back to my dead sister.

And Mom.

My memories of her are astonishingly brief and few. I have photographs that I used to get out from time to time in an effort to remember more, but the pictures have eaten all other memories, like the last fat fish in the tank, so that now all I can remember are the pictures. A couple of decades later I still weep for her, but I don’t know what exactly it is that I’m missing, and it is the idea of the loss itself that drives my grief. Of my sister Gabby, there is even less.

I sit there, listening to my breathing, trying to decide if the pain in my useless hand is subsiding, and I decide eventually that it isn’t. I’m going to have to function without it. I did this to myself to get free. It was crazy not to use that freedom now that I had it.

I get unsteadily to my feet, wonder briefly if there might be any use in holding on to the sandal, and decide there isn’t. Too flimsy to use as a weapon. Even considering that is alarming, and as I move quietly to the door, I find myself wondering with a new and different dread if I am going to have to fight my way out.

“Where were you when the accident happened?” asks Chad in my head.

Not now, I say to myself. I don’t want to do this now. I can’t. It’s not relevant.

“Are you sure it’s not relevant?” says Chad, and this is not memory anymore. He’s in my head talking to me now.

“I was at school,” I say, the words actually coming out in a rough whisper.

Stop thinking about this, I insist to myself.

I am at the door now. I don’t think it is locked. I have been trying to escape for what feels like hours, trying to get away from a man who will certainly kill me if he finds I have gotten out of the manacle.

Focus!

The door is cold to the touch, solid and wooden. I hold my crippled left hand behind me and reach for the handle with my right. There’s a metal latch, the kind with a lever you press with your thumb while pulling the handle.

It will make noise.

No, I think. It won’t.

He has come in twice now, and I didn’t hear the door latch either time. I make the decision, take a breath, and push the lever. It moves so smoothly and silently that for a second, I don’t realize that the door has opened.

Oiled, I think, and that gives me a moment’s pause because it suggests deliberation. Whoever has done this to me planned it.

For almost a minute I listen for footsteps, movement, breathing. Anything. When I’m as sure as I can be that there’s no one standing on the other side, I pull the door open. It should feel good, this escape from the cell, but any relief that action brings stalls immediately as I find the darkness as thick out there as it was inside.

I have no idea where I am.

I move forward, right hand out in front of me, bare feet sliding along the floor, feeling as they go. It feels like stone flags, old and a little uneven, gritty and unswept underfoot.

The villa’s cellar.

That still makes sense. I try to orient myself but have no idea which way I’m facing. I take a step, then another, and my outstretched hand runs into something cold and solid.

Another stone wall.

For a second I feel panic and despair rising. My cell was inside another small locked room? But then I move to my right, my left shoulder brushing the wall, my wounded hand pressed softly to my chest, and there is space.

Not a room, then. A corridor or passage.

That’s better, at least until the word passage settles in my head, combines with the darkness and sense of being underground and emerges, less comfortably, as labyrinth.





Chapter Twenty-Four

It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded like it was right outside my door, the sound a high and rising wail that chilled my blood. It was wordless, an abstract keening, and as I blundered out of bed and pulled a robe around me, I tried to decide if the root of the sound was fear or pain.

I had the door unlocked and was through it and into the night-black hallway before I stopped to think of my own safety. The power was still out, and I had come upstairs by the light of a stuttering candle that I had blown out as soon as I got into bed. It sat, cold and forgotten, on my nightstand now as my fingers flicked stupidly at the light switches and got nothing. The cry came again, but it wasn’t right outside my door. It was one flight down.

I stumbled down the tower staircase, hand on the bannister for guidance in the gloom, and rounded the corner. The screamer was on the landing, a pearly ghost in the dark, shrieking like a banshee.

Gretchen.

Almost immediately another door kicked open, and someone came out with a flashlight, its beam flitting around and making the darkness wherever it wasn’t seem all the deeper.

“What the fuck?” said someone. Brad, I think. The person with the flashlight.

“Gretchen?” said Kristen’s voice, soothing and calm. “What’s wrong, honey? You have a bad dream?”

She might have been talking to a three-year-old. In the leaping and uneven flashlight, I could just make out Gretchen, her hair down and ragged around her shoulders, clad in a faintly Victorian nightdress, staggering away from her open door and throwing herself against the opposite wall, as if trying to get as far from her room as possible.