Her Captive (Redwater City Fire Dept. #2)

Chapter 2

EVANGELINE

Iwake up because the house feels wrong.

It's the smell first. Not the smoke, not yet.

Something under the smoke, the way copper sits under blood.

A heat in the air that the house isn't supposed to have.

The air in this house is always sixty-eight degrees in autumn and sixty-six in winter and Daniel sets it that way because Daniel sets everything that way.

The sheets on my skin should be cool. They aren't.

I open my eyes in the dark. The west guest room ceiling is above me, the tray plaster molding Daniel's decorator picked out of a catalog in the second year of our marriage.

I don't sleep in the primary suite. I haven't slept in the primary suite since the spring, and Daniel hasn't asked me to and I am grateful for that. I sleep across the hall from the east wing, one wing away from him, in a room I've made small and plain and mine. The bed is a queen. The sheets are white cotton. There are no flowers in here because Daniel doesn’t like them in the house. I have considered disobeying him, but I haven’t. Yet.

I sit up.

The smell sharpens the moment I sit up. Not the sheets. The air. Something heavy under the door.

I get out of bed.

The hardwood is warm under my feet. Not hot. Warm enough that I feel it. I walk to the door in my nightgown, white silk, calf-length, the one Daniel bought me in Milan five anniversaries ago and that I still wear because he notices when I don't. I put my palm flat against the door.

The wood is hot.

I take my hand back and the first bad thing happens inside my chest, a small fast animal trying to get out.

I don't let it. I've been married eleven years to a man who watches me the way men watch horses at auction, and I have learned to keep what moves in my chest off of my face.

I step away from the door. I cross back to the bed. I pick up my phone from the nightstand.

The screen lights under my thumb. Five percent battery. No bars.

No bars.

I hold the phone closer to the window as if the window is the reason.

I walk it around the room. Corner, corner, corner, nothing.

Daniel has a cell booster installed in every room of this house because Daniel takes calls from people who live in time zones I will never see.

The booster is in the ceiling. I can see the little LED behind the vent if I look up at the right angle.

The LED is off.

I put the phone down. There is an intercom on the wall by the light switch, a little flat panel with buttons for every room.

I cross to it. The primary suite button.

I press it and hold. Daniel. I press it again.

Daniel. The panel doesn't light. I press master kitchen, I press staff quarters, I press garage, I press every button on the panel in order and nothing lights and no voice answers.

The intercom runs off the house electrical, not the cell booster, not the landline, and the intercom is dead.

I pick up the landline on the desk. I lift the handset to my ear and listen for the tone and there isn't one.

The line is dead. The two things I have for contacting anyone outside this house are both dead at the same time and at two in the morning.

I have never been a stupid woman, and I am not one now.

I know what it means when both phones go at the same time.

Someone has done this.

I cross back to the door and I pull my hand away before I touch it the second time because the wood is hotter now than it was a minute ago.

Smoke is coming under the door in a low grey line, moving fast, confident, the way water moves when a pipe bursts under a sink.

I watch it and my eyes sting. I turn the brass knob and push.

Heat pushes back.

The hallway beyond my door is a moving orange, the runner along the floor already glowing at its edges, and a wave of black rolling across the ceiling like weather.

The stairwell at the far end is gone. Just gone.

I can see through to the stones of the landing wall and the stones are wet-looking and red.

Daniel is down that hallway. Daniel is on the east wing, two doors past the stairwell.

I don't think about him. This is the first thing I notice about myself in the three seconds I stand with the door open: that my husband is in the burning east wing and my mind does not turn toward him. My mind turns toward the window.

I close the door.

I close the door and I put my back to it and I slide down to the floor because my legs are not doing what I'm telling them to.

The silk of my nightgown catches on a splinter in the baseboard.

The smoke is still coming under the door and I can feel the warmth of it on my ankles like bathwater that has sat too long.

There is a towel rail in the ensuite. There is a bath across from it. I get up.

I soak the towel in the tub. I roll it and press it to the base of the door.

I do this the way a person does a thing they have read in a magazine once and never expected to need.

The rolled towel goes dark at the edges almost instantly.

I take a second towel. I drag it through the water and wrap it around my mouth and nose and tie it behind my neck the way a girl ties a scarf.

My hands are shaking. I watch them shake the way I watch a horse shy at a fence. I tell them to stop and they don't.

I go to the window.

The guest room faces the front lawn, the long pale stretch of grass that runs down to the fountain and the iron gate.

Beyond the gate is the service road and beyond the service road is the treeline and beyond the treeline is forty miles of hill country between this house and another living person who knows my name. I put my hand on the window latch.

The latch doesn't move.

I try it again. It doesn't move. I look at it and I see the small brass key lock sunk into the frame and I remember.

The windows all have keys. Daniel had them installed after the break-in at the Petersens' house three summers ago.

The keys live in a drawer in Daniel's study.

Every window in this house locks from the inside and opens with a key I do not have.

I pull the window sash up with all of my weight against it.

Nothing.

I stand there in my nightgown with the wet towel across my face and I look through the leaded glass at the long pale lawn, and I understand it then, the way a cold room is clear after a bath.

I am going to die in this house. Not because of the fire, not entirely.

Because of the keys. Because of the cell booster.

Because of the phone line. Because someone has turned this house into a closed shape and I am inside it.

I scream.

I am not a woman who screams. I have not raised my voice at anyone in this house in a decade.

I scream at the window and I beat the glass with the heel of my palm and I put my face close to the pane and shout help at a lawn that has no one on it, at a gate that has no one behind it, at a driveway that hasn't seen a car pass since eleven.

And then I see him.

A shape at the edge of the trees. A man, I think, from the size. Dark clothes, dark cap, standing in the black of the treeline at the top of the service drive, completely still. I can't see a face. I can see the shape of shoulders. I can see that the shape is looking at me.

The relief that goes through me is animal.

I slap the window. I slap the window with both hands.

I scream please and please and here and here and I don't know that I'm crying until I taste salt at the corner of my mouth through the wet cotton.

I flatten my palms to the glass so he can see me.

So he knows I'm alive. He is far. He is shadow.

He is a shape at a treeline, and he is the only human being in my field of vision, and my whole body is reaching for him across the dark lawn the way a hand reaches for a railing going down stairs.

The shape doesn't move.

I wave. Both hands, across my body, the way a child on a beach waves at a boat. I pound the window again. I press my face to the glass and I can feel the heat coming off it now, coming through it, the glass a thing that used to be cool and has started to become a hot thing slowly.

The shape watches.

The shape watches me. Count of four, five, six. The shape turns a little, as if looking toward the east wing, then turns back, then watches me again, and then is gone. Not moving away. Gone. Stepped back into the trees in one motion so complete that I cannot tell if I imagined it.

I stop screaming.

I put my forehead against the glass. The glass is warm. I have never felt a window this warm in my life. Behind me in the house something falls. Something large. A chandelier, maybe. A beam. The sound comes up through the floor and into my knees and I put my hand on the wall to keep standing.

He saw me.

He saw me and he left.

I have spent eleven years married to a man who does things for reasons I'm not allowed to ask about and I know the shape of men who do things for reasons you are not allowed to ask about, and the shape I just saw is that shape, and the shape is gone.

I stand at the window and I understand.

Daniel has not been having a good year. I have not been allowed to know why, but the phone calls at three in the morning and the closed door of his office and the new private security and the way he went quiet every time the attorney general came up on the evening news, these are things I was not allowed to know and I knew anyway.

I have been the woman in the next room for eleven years and the woman in the next room learns by osmosis.

Someone is angry with Daniel. Someone has been angry with Daniel.

And tonight someone decided the anger was going to be resolved.

I was not on the list.

I was not on the list and here I am, in the wing of the house that wasn't supposed to be used, and the man at the treeline has looked at me and seen me and turned around and gone back into the dark because I was not on his list and he does not improvise.

I slide my back down the wall. The wool throw from the bed is on the floor beside me and I pull it up over my shoulders even though I am not cold, because the throw is the last thing in this house that my mother gave me, the last thing in this house that smells like a person and not like lemon polish and money, and I want it on me when it happens.

The smoke is a ceiling now. It's a ceiling coming down.

I watch it come down and I find that I am very still under it.

The thought is very clear. It stands up in me the way cold stands up.

I am collateral.

My knees give out and I hit the rug and the wet towel peels back from my mouth and I cough.

Smoke is in the room now, a grey layer rolling along the ceiling and starting to come down.

I pull the towel up again. I stay low, the way a child learns in grade school.

Get low. Stay low. Cover your face. I crawl to the window.

I sit under the window with my back to the wall.

Something in the hallway shifts. The door thuds the way wood thuds when the frame around it has started to warp. I can hear the fire now. It isn't a roar. It's a steady, hungry exhale, the sound of a thing that is eating the house one timber at a time and is patient about it.

I look at my hands. The left one is bleeding.

I didn't notice. I hit the window hard enough to split the skin across the outside of my palm and I am bleeding in a thin red line down my wrist onto the white silk of my nightgown.

I watch the red and I watch my wrist and I think about how much of me there is and how little is going to be left.

I think about the fact that nobody who loves me knows where I am, and then I correct the thought, because nobody who loves me exists.

Nobody who loves me exists.

My mother has been dead for nine years. My father lives on Long Island with a woman he cannot bring himself to marry and he calls me twice a year.

I have two friends who are not Daniel's friends and one of them is in London and the other one stopped returning my calls in May because she was, I think, tired of the way I sounded on the phone.

My husband is probably dead already and he has never loved me.

He loved the idea of me. He loved how I look in an evening gown.

Not even the staff are in the building. The security shift goes home at midnight and the dogs are never allowed inside. There is nobody coming.

I put my head down on my knees and I wait.

The smoke gets lower. The house keeps eating itself.

Somewhere down the west hall a door latch gives and I hear the hollow thump of something heavy falling through into a room it shouldn't be in.

A picture frame maybe. A section of ceiling.

I don't know this house by sound. I have lived in it for eleven years and I have never listened to its bones.

I think about all the rooms I'll never be in again.

The primary suite I stopped sleeping in.

The rose garden Daniel had installed for me the first summer and didn't let me choose the plants for.

The kitchen where I made scrambled eggs twice in a decade because there was always someone paid to do it.

The study with Daniel's keys in a drawer.

I think that the room I'm going to die in is the room I chose, that I made small and plain and mine, and there is a small cold satisfaction in this that I want to feel something about and can't quite reach.

I sit under the useless window in a wet towel and a bloodied nightgown and I wait to die, and I am not afraid of it the way I thought I would be, and that is the strangest thing I know about myself, that at the end of thirty-six years the main feeling I have is surprise.

Surprise that this is it. After all the times I might have considered killing myself, in the end I’m surprised that it's a stranger's choice, and not mine, that's going to end me.

Surprise, also, that I am relieved that someone else has done it for me.

I admit that to myself in the dark of the room with the smoke coming down and the fire finding the frame of the door, and once I admit it I cannot unadmit it, and it is the last honest thing I will ever think in this house.

I am relieved. I am relieved to be done.

I am relieved to not walk down a staircase in a beautiful dress with Daniel's hand on the small of my back one more time.

I am relieved to not sit at the foot of his table one more time.

I am relieved to not have my name said the way he says it, like a password he'd rather forget.

I am not sorry.

The fire finds the door.

I hear the hinges give.

I close my eyes.