by Laura Greene
No answer. No help comes to rescue her either.
This is not good, she thinks. This is really not good.
She tries to call Amy, but her service is completely gone in this mysteriously dark room. In such a large mansion. How will Amy find me? She wonders. The time on her watch says it’s thirty minutes after the tour ended. Tina didn’t think she was in there for that long. Letting out a deep sigh, Tina sits down, briefly, to think of another plan.
With her phone, she turns on her flashlight and traces her steps back down the unstable stairs to take a look around. Maybe there’s another way, she thinks. There’s a hallway to her left, and along the wall, she sees something flash up high – it’s a small window just below the ceiling. The window is small enough to say there’s a window, but not to see any use in it.
She tries to flash her light at the window incase someone walks by and sees the light glowing through the window. Her flashlight reflection is quickly bounced back into the dark room by the decorative lights outside.
I need another plan, she thinks.
Something scratches the floor near her, scurrying past. Tina instinctively shines her flashlight at it and it’s a rat. She screams and runs from where she was, up the creaky stairs, and resumes her loud banging again.
No help comes her way; no sound either.
Tina recalls something Nick told her in passing. Marble House has secret floors. It was built with a secret floor on every level so that the servants could move around the house without disturbing the guests. It bothered Tina at the time, given the history in America of slavery and the mistreatment of its citizens, but she kept it in mind. Now, which floor am I on?
While she was admiring the artwork and historical sites in Marble House, she got a little distracted, but she must have gone up to at least the third level.
Up until now, she has been avoiding walking down the hallway. She doesn’t know where it leads, if it’ll be nearer or further away from help; but now, it’s her only option.
With her trusty flashlight, Tina begins her escapade down the mysterious hallway. The foul smell of stench and mold overpowers her senses. Taking breaths sparingly, she breathes through her mouth. To her right, she sees a pile of old bed sheets that must have been abandoned some years ago.
Has anyone even made it down here in recent years? She dares not speak her question out loud, lest an answer that she does not want to hear returns.
With each step, she makes sure her feet are stepping on the ground. After the rat she saw, Tina does not want to awaken any more members of the rodent family.
She ponders how a place so immaculate and amazing on the outside can be so wretched beneath it all. The same could be said about the characters of the assailants who came after the girls at Hartford.
One feeling of comfort settles on her mind, her gratitude for recharging her phone battery while she was on the plane. If not for that, she would be walking in utter darkness.
All she wants to do is find another entrance. If she can find her way back to the main floor, she can make her way out of the mansion.
Right now, Amy must be looking for me. She looks at her phone again, no bars. Her network is completely lost.
She passes an old, molded sink hanging by its hinges. It’s dusty and probably has not given a drop of water for more than ten years. If she didn’t know how the rest of Marble House looked, she would think this was an abandoned site.
Then she hears muffled noises ahead. Quickly, she jogs to the sound, again, watching where she steps, and the sound becomes a more audible groaning. Shockingly, she finds a person bundled in multiple clothes, tied to a chair, with a sock gag wrapped around their mouth. A closer look reveals who sits swaddled under all the sheets. It is Nick.
Forgetting the rats that scared her minutes ago, Tina runs to Nick and wraps her arms around him. His eyes bulge out of the cloth with tears of hope and relief to see her. Tina watches as the tension leaves his body, while he exhales and his shoulders deflate.
Before long, she has the sheets unwrapped from his body and he is free. “How long, Nick?” She asks.
Before he can answer, Tina watches him cough, clear his throat and stretch his jaw. She can tell he has been without water or reprieve for some time. She holds him up as he tries to stand and his muscles take some time to adjust to movement.
“Si… Since I left the school.” He finally says.
Hearing his voice, is a sweet relief to Tina; holding him is yet another privilege that she thought for a time she had lost, and then, she kisses him passionately. She did not think she would ever get to do that, and now she has. “I’ve been meaning to do that.”
Nick is still weak, but he looks at her with his bright eyes and smiles in response.
Still holding onto Tina for support, she sits him back down to give his legs a break, and she says, “You’re okay now. You don’t have to fight anymore.”
Chapter 3
“Look, you can’t stay down here. I’m going to get help.” Tina says, then she shouts, “Amy!”
Nick, with unexpected strength, grabs her arm and whispers a firm, “No.”
“You need to get help Nick.”
“We can’t...” Nick begins, “I’m not sure we can trust her yet.”
“What do you mean? And why didn’t you tell me that you were investigating this case already? I saw the receipt from that Mayweather P.I. company. It was dated before I arrived.” Tina’s concerned demeanor promptly changes to frustration.
Nick can tell he has some explaining to do, but he just smiles because she looks so cute when she’s mad.
“This is serious. I thought you were dead, or worse yet, a bad guy.”
Nick chuckles, then coughs. Before Tina can get annoyed at him, she realizes what she just said and also laughs.
“You’re still in trouble, and I want an explanation, but I need to get you out of here first.” Tina looks around to see if there’s anything they can use or a way they can exit. “Do you know how to get out of here?”
“No, I was knocked out and I woke up here.”
Tina worries she may not have arrived at that floor by accident after all, but maybe thrown in there somehow also. Then Tina remembers, “The window. It might be our only shot.” She sees leftover pieces of metal from some construction work, some pots near the sink and a small ladder.”
“I have an idea. Can you get up? I’ll need your help carrying all this over there.”
“Yes.” Nick pulls his weight up against the chair and when he stands up, he balances better than the first time he stood up.
They gather their resources and bed sheets that were wrapped around Nick. As they walk, Nick’s breathing is heavy and shallow, but as long as he is walking, Tina just stays close enough to help if he loses his balance.
Nick tries to explain where he was in his investigation.
“You don’t have to say anything just now. Save your energy.”
“It’s important. So...” Nick continues, “so you got my message.” He says with a raspy voice, then he clears his throat again.
“What message?” Tina asks. “Wait, you sent me the address?”
“Yes. I didn’t know how else to send it without alerting the wrong person. I knew you would put the clues together.”
“Clever. What happened?”
“I had just figured out Charlie was involved and I was going to confront him to come clean, when he abducted me. He took my phone, my wallet and that’s all I remember.” He pauses to take a breather. Tina stops next to him. “When you first came to the school and I met you, Tina, I still had to talk to Janet. That’s when I started seeing how serious things could get. I set up an emergency text on a burner number. The idea was, if I didn’t make it back anytime I was following up something, it would alert you of where I was in the investigation.”
“But why didn’t you say anything?”
They continue walking. “At first I wasn’t sure who I could trust. Amy didn’t w
ant to involve any publicity at the school, even the police were kept at bay, then you showed up all of a sudden? It was all too sketchy for me, that is until I got to know you.”
“So, it really is Charlie. I figured that out, but I’m not sure if he’s working alone yet.”
“Me neither. He was alone when he abducted me.”
They walk up to the stairs, Tina climbs the steps and tries to bang on the wall again, no answer. She tries to press around the door, incase there’s a secret button, nothing.
“There’s no use. You said when you came in you didn’t sign the guest book?”
“No, I just showed my badge.”
“Well, the only search they’ll do is for a guest who didn’t exit the building after signing the book. And if you and Amy didn’t sign in, there’s no record of either of you being here.”
“So, what if Amy is also in trouble?”
“We won’t know until we get out of here.”
Something still doesn’t seem right to Tina. She feels like she’s so close to the truth but something is not lining up correctly. “The window is so high, what if we wait until they open up again tomorrow?”
“We can’t. They closed today for the holidays. They won’t open again until after the new year. By then we might starve.” Nick chuckles, “I know I could kill for that reuben I had at Mademoiselle’s.”
Tina steps down from the stairs and pats Nick on the back, “I guess the window is our only option!”
“Wait, that little thing?” Nick looks up with trepidation. “Please tell me you’re the one going up.”
“Nope, you are. Until you’re stronger, it’s better that I support you down than the other way around.”
“Yikes!”
Tina commences to wrap the old sheets around Nick again.
“Just when I was starting to miss these old rags. Are you sure they’ll hold?”
“Sure, it’ll be just like summer camp. You trust me don’t you?” Tina says as she ties knots the same way she learned at camp.
“You, I trust, but these old linens, I’m not so sure.”
“Here, help me put these up against the wall.” Tina hands Nick a chair and she grabs a ladder. She tightly binds both items together with some nails and a hammer that she found in the back. Inside, she prays they’ll hold together.
“Have you done this before?”
“I don’t think you need to see a doctor anymore. I have the old Nick back.”
“And you’d better not let me go again.” Nick says, with a cheeky smile and his arms wrapped around Tina.
“I won’t.” Tina says as she smiles back and leans in, feeling comfortable in Nick’s arms. “Now, climb up, I’ll support you.”
“It’s still dark out there. How do you know how high we are?”
“I’m guessing we are on the third floor.”
Nick sighs, “Okay, can you hand me the hammer?” He breaks the window open then clears the opening of glass shards.
“Here’s the rope. Tie it around you a couple of times. Make sure it’s tight.”
Nick does this then squeezes through the window, one of his muscular arms catching on the side as he does. “I may be the chaplain here, but I hope you’re also praying that this frail rope holds.”
“More than you know.” She hands him her phone for light, then says, “Here we go!”
Tina climbs up the ladder and slowly releases the line as she lowers Nick down the side of the mansion.
“Looks like this is the backyard. Are you sure, we won’t get caught?”
“You said everyone is gone for the holiday right? And we’re in the back. No one will look here.” Tina says as she groans slightly, trying to support all of Nick’s weight.
“Easy, easy does it.” Nick guides Tina with his eyes firmly planted on the ground incase his bottom has to hit it.
“I… am. How far off the ground are you now?”
Nick shines the flashlight below him, “Another floor; maybe a few feet, I can’t really tell in the dark.”
Sudden;y, the trusty linen breaks between Nick and Tina; it sends Nick hurling to the ground, bottom first; then, it knocks Tina off the ladder and onto the floor below. She hears Nick yell as he falls, then the sound of rats running in the dark. She doesn’t have her phone anymore. Tina lunges to her feet, she feels for the ladder and jumps up two or three steps. Soon the sound of rats diminishes.
Tina climbs up the ladder to check on Nick. “Are you okay? Nick, are you there?” There’s no answer.
Worried that he may be seriously injured from the fall, Tina leans out of the window, until her feet are barely touching the bottom of the chair.
She holds herself up in the air with her arms. “Nick?” She sees a glimpse of the linen piled together on the ground below, but Nick is gone.
Chapter 4
“Nick!” Tina calls out below her. “Where are you?” Ten minutes have passed since he fell to the ground and there is still no sign of Nick.
Did he fall and get hurt? She wonders. Is that why he’s not answering? Tina wants to convince herself that is the reason he is not responding, but she knows that he would have fallen where the linens landed and she would still be able to see him mixed in with the linen.
Unfortunately for Tina, he is not there. If he was going to get help, he would have been back by now. She feels like the biggest fool. Did I fall for the oldest trick in the book? Her heart is pained and she still can’t see in the dark because he also has her phone.
This is too much heartache for Tina. She steps down from her ladder to wipe tears from her eyes. These past few days have been an emotional whirlwind for her and she is now finally pausing to process it all.
She curls her head in her hands for a moment and thinks back to her transformational moment on the bridge. I said I would not allow fear to stop me from going after what I want in life. She signed off on that bridge and she is going to follow through.
Nick may not be around anymore, she may not have her phone, but she is not going to let this dungeon of a mansion be the end of her.
With a deep sense of purpose and assurance that she can overcome her circumstances, Tina stands back up on the ladder. She wipes her eyes, leans over the window and with her loud, bellowing, Bostonian accent, she shouts, “HELP! Anybody there? Help!”
Tina does not let up. She is determined to get the attention of someone, anyone. They could be walking on the street or driving with their window down; even if it takes until the morning, she will be heard.
“Uh… do you plan on waking all the neighbors up?” A voice comes from behind her.
She cannot explain it, but this voice makes her heart skip. She turns around to see a male figure with light shining from behind him and blinding her view of his face. “Nick!” Face or no face, she knows Nick’s voice. Tina climbs down the ladder and meets a sheepish Nick halfway across the room. “You! How could you? You had me worried!” She slaps his arm playfully.
Nick laughs. “Hey, what did I do? I thought you’d be happy I came to rescue you.”
“You big goof, you had me worried! I didn’t need saving, I needed to know you were not dead.”
He places his arm around her and walks her up the staircase and back into the study where she disappeared from. Then, he says, “I think you and I will be great together. Don’t you?”
“Yeah, if we can make it through this, we can make it through anything.” And with those words, they shut away the secret floor of Marble House, never to return to it again.
“So, how did you get back in? I thought they closed for the holidays.”
“I have my ways,” Tina pretends to go for his arm again, “Okay, okay. Just stop with the violence, he jokes with her. “Some of the students once told me a way to get into the building without paying an entrance fee. I didn’t think I would ever need to use it until today!”
“My hero.” Tina says sarcastically, though deep down she is grateful Nick saved her from the mansion.
/> “I could really go for that reuben sandwich round about now.” Nick says as he rubs his belly.
“Seriously?” Tina turns to him and looks right into his eyes. “I guess you haven’t eaten in a few days.” She thinks for a moment, then asks, “Did you see Amy when you came in?”
“No, I didn’t even see her car outside. But, I picked this up on the stairwell.” It’s the paper clip Tina gave to Amy earlier in the evening. A lump forms in her throat.
