Chapter 49 Frankie Is Awake
Frankie Is Awake
Six hours later, Frankie’s eyes burst open in the water.
She is awake but she cannot move, her body numb and bluing. She cannot remember anything since the concrete steps.
Around her is pink, the pink of home; she is not in a strange house, she is not trapped in Anna’s basement room, she is in her own home, in the main bathroom.
A wave of relief courses through her. She is home. And yet—
She cannot move.
For a second, she wonders if she has sleepwalked herself here, into the tub. But then, with sinking dread, she recalls the reflection of the figure behind her on the concrete steps, the white-hot pain in her scalp. But the figure is a blur, a man certainly, but it was impossible to tell more.
Frankie can barely feel anything, not her legs, nor her arms, nothing. Her thoughts slip and slide away from her as she tries to grasp them; they mix and meld, like a fever dream. Did the figure look like Matt, or Greg, or Richard, Will, Ben? No, Ben was her ex-husband….
Her thoughts swirl away from her like the breeze from the open window on the water.
Her eyes move to look at her body, or at least what she can see of it from the angle her head is cocked at: her skin is almost translucent; she must be cold but she cannot feel it.
She notices she is wearing different underwear, something she bought herself years ago for Valentine’s Day. Nausea rises up inside her as she realizes she has no idea what has been done to her. Beyond the high window above she sees distinctly crisp morning light. There is a night unaccounted for—
And where is Anna? What happened to Anna?
She wonders if Anna is dead, if she herself is dead, here in the bath, and that is why she cannot move.
No. This is not what death would feel like, she muses, her thoughts as fluid and strangely calm as the water around her. There must be a way out of this, she tells herself.
And yet, she realizes, whoever did this would not have left her like this if there was a way out. Unless he is still here, and hasn’t quite finished with her.
Her eyes roll to the door. The lock lever is pushed down, the door locked from the inside. Strange, she thinks. She stares at it for a long while, then blinks. He has locked her in, and made it look as if she has done it herself.
Her eyes wander the rest of the room, looking for more.
And then she sees it. Her missing sleeping-pill container is positioned prominently on the sink. Through the clear, brown plastic bottle, she can make out only one pill remaining inside.
Horror, cold and sticky, fills her gut: the bottle was half-full when she got it four days ago.
Her numb body, her evaporating thoughts, now make sense.
She has woken during her own staged death.
But that is good, she tells herself, before the building terror threatens to blind her with panic. It’s good that I’m awake, because if I am awake, there has to be a way out, she hollers back at the sickening reality screaming inside her head.
The tap drips, she looks at the ripples on the water, and she blinks—her mind now blank. What was I just thinking about? It was important, wasn’t it? She cannot recall.
If only she could focus her thoughts.
A skittering noise from above suddenly draws her eyes upward, to the small, open window.
She catches a glimpse of gray fur beyond the mottled bathroom window’s glass, the skittering beginning to have meaning; it is the sound of claws on guttering, guttering that runs the length of the roof’s edge.
Someone has been out all night and is hungry. Someone is always hungry and always needs feeding.
Blue squeezes his thick-set, fluffy body through the thin gap in the bathroom window above, and balances precariously on the thin window ledge before half tumbling, half leaping down into the room.
He lands with an undignified, uncharacteristically panicked, scramble into the sink basin, sending the almost-empty pill bottle clattering to the floor.
Blue catches himself and rearranges his position and leaps from the basin edge down to the floor where he begins to nonchalantly lick his paws. After a moment, his fall forgotten, he looks up at Frankie and meows resolutely. He wants her to get out of the bath, go downstairs, and feed him.
Frankie does not move. Blue stands, circles, and leaps back up onto the sink edge to get a better view of her.
Frankie feels emotion explode up inside her, her vision blurring, as her eyes fill and overflow. She cannot feel the warm tears that slide down her cheeks and mix with the cold bathwater.
She blinks away the blur of it, eyes stinging, and, as her vision clears, she sees it: dangling from the fur around Blue’s neck is the gaping black aperture of the camera she put on him hours ago.
In Frankie’s mind, the mist clears enough to allow in a wisp of clarity: the memories of what she set in motion before she left home for Matt’s house.
The new camera collar, the time-sensitive email—it all comes flooding back to her with such force her pulse spikes and her eyes blur once more. There was a plan.
Blue is filming her. The camera sees her. And if the camera sees her, then someone else can see her, too.
A noise catches in her throat, low and animal, as Frankie realizes that she isn’t going to die here like the couple who perished in this house before her.
Blue looks up from his paws at the unfamiliar sound. He looks at her, sniffs, and lets out a burbling meow of acknowledgment.
Someone will come, she tells herself. Someone will come.