Chapter 16
I turn and go crashing through the clubhouse.
Inside, the rain is thousands of sharp fingers jabbing the roof, the windows, the walls, jabbing at me.
This way, Henry. She went this way. The sky pulses purple with lightning, ratting out my ascent on the stairs.
Henry bangs up behind me, a tremendous force that avalanches the three-story structure and sends books flying off shelves and my teeth rattling in the sockets of my gums. He says my name.
I wish he would shout it, frenzied and furious.
But he sounds calm. Like everything that happens next is natural and inevitable. No reason at all to panic.
The gun room is on the third level. That’s what I am going for. But I’ll never fucking make it. I duck into the game room and slam the door closed, turn the dinky little lock. Immediately the door handle begins to strain and jiggle. “I’m going to get this door open in two seconds, Faye.”
I spin in a circle, whimpering. The game room was made the game room because it has those little clerestory windows that wrap around just under the ceiling and the little kids can’t reach them and crawl out and fall to their deaths.
I can’t reach them either, and even if I could I wouldn’t fit through.
Henry is throwing his huge body against the door, and that’s when I see it.
A door-shaped seam in the wall, peeking out from behind a chair.
I shove furniture out of the way and unlatch the lock.
Inside, I find a small storage space cluttered with junk and reeking of mildew.
I twist my head and see a tunneled space and, on the other end, the gloomy sky that is still somehow lighter than it is inside, and I realize this strangely shaped room used to be somebody’s bedroom, that I’m looking up through a chimney.
The door is cracking and splintering behind me, and I stack whatever I can find.
Encyclopedias. A decaying cloth suitcase.
I flip over one of those old sleds with the metal runners.
I put one foot on top of my pile, then another.
Miracle of miracles, it holds. Chimneys tend not to be straight.
I know this because of the fireplace in my house, the one with the crack that PT immediately recognized.
The crack is superficial, we’ve had it inspected, and I refused to restore the brickwork once PT told me the story of how it got there.
It spikes diagonally like a wave in an abnormal EKG reading, and though my husband has been a proponent of gutting the whole wall anyway and building out into the yard, I’ve gotten him to agree to an annual inspection to ensure the damage does not become structural.
It feels like bad luck to do anything about it until we have to.
One day our assistant couldn’t be there to meet the technician, and the guy roped me into a conversation from which I couldn’t politely extract myself, and so now I know everything I never wanted to know about chimneys.
They’re designed with these little shelves inside; that’s how he gets up there to clean everything out.
I reach and feel the ridging like one of those polyester bumps on a climbing wall at a gym, and I pull myself up one step, then another, and is a part of me disappointed that Henry didn’t catch me?
Above the clatter of the storm rises a snappy mechanical sound, later I will understand it was the metal hinges of the door splitting in two.
A strong hand snaps closed around my ankle, and as I go down, I get that butterfly feeling in my stomach, like I am riding a roller coaster, one last thrilling shot of euphoria before it all turns to black.