Over Her Dead Body(75)



My brother squeezed in next to me. He tugged on the lever, pushed on the door, and I pushed along with him, and it was entirely, exhaustingly, maddeningly futile.

“What the fuck?”

I suddenly flashed to Schr?dinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment we’d studied in my sophomore philosophy class. Stuck down here, in this hermetically sealed box, to the outside world, we were both alive and dead. Alive because we were, at least for the moment, still breathing and our hearts still beating. Dead, because in a matter of minutes, the toxic gas that had killed Mom was going to kill us, too.





CHAPTER 64




* * *



CHARLIE


At first I thought everything was going to be fine. Being trapped in a five-hundred-square-foot box with a dead body made me a little anxious, but my wife knew we were down there; I figured it was only a matter of time before she came to look for us. But when five minutes turned into ten turned into twenty, the frightful reality emerged: that door hadn’t closed by accident, my wife wasn’t coming to save us, and I had no one to blame for my sister’s and my imminent death but myself and my Stupid Lie.

When it became clear we couldn’t go out the same way we came in, Winnie and I split up to search the bunker for another way out. Our hermetically sealed hideaway was fifteen feet underground, which meant there were no fire exits, no back doors, no windows. There was a vent, but I could barely fit my arm in there, never mind my whole body. I couldn’t even send up a smoke signal, because, as we were about to find out the hard way, that vent had a baseball stuck in it—a complication that was neither inconsequential nor surmountable. This place was as secure as a bank vault. Which was great if there were hostile armies overhead, but catastrophic if the hostile party who had lured you in intended for you to never come out.

Mom had set the closed-circuit TV monitor—the only apparent connection to the outside world—on the kitchen counter. I wasn’t a tech guy, but I ascertained it was getting a live feed through the cable that ran into the bunker through a rigid copper pipe. There was no ethernet cable, no router, no Wi-Fi, and no cell service down there. And even if there were, it wouldn’t have mattered; my cell phone was on my bedside table two stories above my head.

I stared at the monitor to see what was happening inside Mom’s house. The rooms were arranged in a four-by-four grid. I could see the living room, dining room, library, and study in one grid, and the kitchen, music room, parlor, and front hall in the other. There were also two four-by-four grids of the outside: four cameras in the back, showing various angles of the garden, woods, and toolshed, and four in the front showing the driveway, side yard, and front porch.

“There’s no way out of here,” Winnie said as she emerged from the bedroom.

“I know,” I said glumly. “That’s kind of the whole point of this place.”

“Why hasn’t Marcela come to check on us?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I just shook my head like I had no idea. But Winnie knew me too well.

“What’s going on, Charlie?” And I owed it to her to tell her the ugly truth.

“I told her we got the money.”

She looked at me blankly. “And?”

“She thinks with all of us dead, she’s going to be rich.” And her confusion turned to disbelief.

“Are you saying . . .” She stopped. Because she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

So I said it for her. “That she locked us down here? Yes.”

Winnie shook her head. “No way, no fucking way.”

“I told you we were having problems—”

“A lot of married couples have problems—they don’t try to murder each other!”

“A lot of married couples don’t think their husband and his sister just got ten million dollars.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Winnie insisted. “She’s your wife, the mother of your kids.” All that was true, but there was another layer to this that Winnie didn’t know. So I told her.

“She’s having an affair,” I said. I had known my wife was cheating on me ever since she came back from the house of an “overwhelmed new-mom friend” freshly showered and with a botched cover story. My wife hadn’t bothered to notice that I was Facebook friends with that “overwhelmed” new mom and knew not only was she not overwhelmed, she had spent the day at Disneyland.

“OK, sorry, and that sucks, but it still doesn’t mean she would try to kill us.” I didn’t want to believe it, either, but that door was closed, and we hadn’t closed it.

“With the three of us dead,” I reasoned, “she gets her money and a new man. Someone better than me.” I felt like a total dick that I’d let myself believe I could ride my mother’s money to some picture-perfect life—playing in a band, surfing every morning, married to the hottest girl in town. What had I done to deserve any of that? One might argue that being left to rot alongside the mother who only loved me as conditionally as I’d loved her was a fitting end for both Mom and me.

“I’m so sorry, Win.” I could accept my tragic fate, but there was no accepting that I was dragging my sister down with me.

“Oh, Charlie,” my sister said, pulling me into a hug I didn’t deserve. “Before you go thinking you’re the only sorry-ass piece of shit here, I have a confession, too.”

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