“Hey,” Alan said after Hannah stopped talking about the dream, “do you remember that time you were a camp counselor and I came up for the weekend?”
There was a pause. Alan could hear one of her kids—it sounded like Izzie—laughing in the background. “I guess so. I think so. Oh yeah, Mom and Dad made me take you so they could go to the Cape alone.”
Alan didn’t remember that part. He said, “You know, that was the first time I saw a naked girl. I spied on her through a hole in the wall.”
“What? A counselor?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ha. Do you remember who it was?”
“I don’t know if I ever knew her name. She was kind of chubby.”
“Was it Allie something?”
“I never knew her name, but I think she turned me into a pervert.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Because I was spying on her, without her knowing I was doing it.”
“Oh God. You and everyone else at that pervy camp. All the walls had knotholes in them. She probably knew she was being watched. Look, as much as I’d love to hear more creepy stories from my drunk brother, I’ve gotta go. Call Mom, and don’t be a fucking stranger.”
When Alan finally left the pub, it was filled with after-work drinkers. The darkness outside somehow shocked him. It was colder, too, and Alan, wearing only a T-shirt, was nearly shivering by the time he reached 101 Bury.
Maybe because he was drunk, or maybe because of the peculiar light that night, the apartment building seemed taller than usual, towering behind its gate. Moonlight reflected on the slate roof of the next building over, and across the street, a homeless man was trying to keep warm in a doorway. Low lights were on in Kate’s apartment. During the walk, he’d decided that he needed to see her no matter what. He needed to find out why she’d left his apartment without saying goodbye. He needed to tell her what he’d learned from Jack, and he even wanted to tell her how his sister had called, and he’d finally told her the big secret about what he’d done at her summer camp, and she’d barely cared. He walked across the courtyard and through the lobby, nodding toward Sanibel, and wondering if the doorman even noticed that he was taking the stairs toward the north wing and not the south. He walked down the hallway, aware, peripherally, of Audrey’s door and of what had happened in that apartment, but focusing on Kate’s door. He was about to knock, but stopped himself. What if she didn’t answer? In fact, why would she answer? She hadn’t earlier in the morning, when he’d known she was just on the other side, probably looking at him through the peephole. Alan formed a different plan.
He went back to the stairwell and walked all the way down to the basement level. He passed through the fluorescent-lit basement, thankful that it was empty, then found the back stairwell that would lead to the kitchen entrance to Kate’s apartment. At least, he thought it would. He was always leaving that entrance unlocked in his own place and was hopeful that Kate had as well. At the very least, he could talk with her through the door without having to stand in the hallway. He could say his piece.
He climbed to the top of the steep, narrow stairwell and quietly tried the knob. It was locked. He was about to knock when he had an idea. Sanders the cat was always scratching at his own back door, trying to get into his apartment. He wondered if he’d done the same here. Knowing it was a terrible idea, but deciding to do it anyway, Alan half knocked, half scratched at the door. And waited.
He heard faint footsteps in the kitchen, and then the door was being opened, and he was looking at Kate’s horrified face. He quickly put his hands up, stepping across the threshold with one foot. “Please let me in,” he said, willing his voice to sound harmless.
Kate pressed a hand against her chest. She was pale, as though all the blood had drained from her face.
“I need to talk with you. I can do it from here, but we need to talk. I don’t think you should be in this apartment. You should be in my apartment.” The words weren’t coming out the way he’d planned.
“You’re really drunk,” Kate said.
“I know. I know. I met Jack, and he told me all about Corbin and he got me drunk.”
“Who’s Jack?”
“Jack. Jack. That guy who was friends with Audrey that you told me about. On the street. You met him on the street.”
Before answering, Alan began to move farther into the kitchen. Kate jumped back, said, “No, no. Stay there.”
Alan took a step back. “You’re not scared of me? Oh no, you’re scared of me.” He felt terrible, and kept apologizing.
Kate said, “It’s okay. I know you’re sorry. Tell me about Jack.”
“I saw him this morning coming out of the building—”
“Coming out of where? Out of here?”
“Yes. Right after the police arrived. I didn’t recognize him, but he was looking up at your window, so I followed him and he caught me and then we were talking. We went to that bar you and I . . . St. Stephen’s, and he told me about his theory, how Corbin’s a serial killer.”
“What do you mean a serial killer?”
“He said that there was this other girl that Corbin murdered. She was also mutilated, and he’s sure that Corbin killed Audrey, and I just don’t think it’s safe for you to be in this apartment all by yourself.”
“If Corbin killed Audrey, then he’s not going to come back here, is he? That wouldn’t make any sense.”
“Then you’re going to stay here? Tonight?”
“Alan, I’m sorry. I think we rushed into things last night, and it was . . . for me, it was a mistake. No, let me talk. Let’s meet tomorrow, okay? For coffee or something in the morning, and we can talk about all of this. But not now. Not while you’re like this. Okay?”
It was the expression on Kate’s face as she said okay that made Alan realize he needed to leave. She looked like she was about to cry. Alan, without saying anything, turned and walked back down the stairwell, pressing his palms against the walls to keep himself steady.
Back in his apartment he lay on his bed, shoes kicked off, jeans and T-shirt still on. When he closed his eyes, the room tilted. When he opened them, the world stood still. He kept them open as long as possible, trying to reassemble in his mind everything that had happened that day, everything that had happened recently. He closed his eyes. The room tilted again, but backward, and Alan slid into a deep, troubled sleep.
Chapter 25
It’s time to go home, Kate thought, after Alan had finally left. Back to England. She placed a hand on the kitchen countertop to steady herself.
She felt George’s voice rising in her head, his words starting to form, and she managed to stop him from speaking to her by pacing the kitchen floor.
I should never have left the country. I should never have left my parents’ house. Not to go to university, not to go on holiday in the Lake District, not to go to London, and definitely not to travel to Boston. Bad things happen to me.
Bad people happen to me.
Kate poured wine into a water glass. She carried it from room to room in the apartment, checking window locks and looking into closets. Her hands shook with adrenaline, and her heart tripped along in her chest, but she was okay. One more night in this cavernous apartment filled with shadows, and she could head home—back to her parents’ house—never to leave again. She checked the front door lock and looked out into the quiet hallway. A murderer had stood outside Audrey Marshall’s door with the intention to kill her. And then he’d gone inside and done it. Killed her with his knife. Mutilated her.
She looked for a long time out into the hall, contorted by the peephole into a tunnel with curved walls. She expected someone to turn the corner and make an appearance at any moment. Sanders the cat. George Daniels back from the dead. Corbin Dell back from England. Alan stalking her from the front door instead of from the back. But nothing happened. The well-lit, carpeted hall remained empty.
She went online and looked at airfares for returning to London. Sh
e began an e-mail to her parents telling them she was coming home, but didn’t finish it. She could do it tomorrow, after she booked something, when it was all finalized.
She looked at the Rachael Chess articles again online. That must have been who Alan was talking about when he mentioned the other woman who had been killed. So Jack had been doing his research as well.
She went back to the kitchen to get more wine, but the bottle was empty, and she poured herself a glass of milk instead. She brought it to the den and turned on the television. The old movie channel was playing a film that she knew pretty well, because it was one of her father’s favorites. I Know Where I’m Going! starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. She curled up on the couch, rested her head on two oversized pillows, and attempted to let the black-and-white images soothe her. She kept thinking of Alan, though, behind the door in the kitchen. Seeing him, visibly drunk, standing there, Kate thought she was about to die. It was George Daniels all over again—another man come to kill her. Although George, for all his rage and craziness, had never been a drinker. In fact, whenever Kate had more than a couple of glasses of wine, he’d start to get mad at her, asking her repeatedly why she needed to drink so much.
In the film, the woman played by Wendy Hiller was desperately trying to get to the Scottish island where her fiancé was, but a storm had trapped her on the coast, where she’d fallen in love with another man. She was trying anyway, in a small boat, and a whirlpool was pulling her to her death. Kate pulled the comforter on top of her. The movie ended, and another immediately started up. Pygmalion. Another Wendy Hiller. She thought of her father, who would love this movie channel that only showed old films. She started watching the film, but she had to pee, and her jeans were uncomfortably tight. She forced herself to get up and walk through the living room and past the kitchen to the bedroom, where she changed into pajamas, peed in the en suite bathroom, and brushed her teeth. She passed back through the bedroom, where the strong moonlight through the window cast strange shadows in the twisted sheets of the bed. This apartment is haunted, she thought, and walked briskly back toward the den, lit in flickering black and white from the massive television.
Leslie Howard was standing in the rain, secretly listening to Wendy Hiller’s cockney accent as she was selling flowers.
Kate didn’t remember falling asleep. It felt as though one minute she was watching the television, wondering if any of the actors were still alive, and then her eyes must have shut, and she was suddenly in the world of the film, the voices part of her dream. The couch was swallowing her, and she was on the brink of sliding into the true blackness of sleep when the dream shifted, and there was a hand pressed against her face, and she felt herself rising back up from the depths, jerking awake, but the hand was still there, pressed hard against her mouth, another hand gripping her shoulder.
This is real, she thought and began to struggle, fully awake.
The room was dark, the television still on, and the man who held her was making shushing sounds. It wasn’t Alan. She could see razor-cut blondish hair and the line of a square jaw, and she could smell his sweat, stale and powdery. Her heart was beating so fast that her chest hurt, and tears sprang to her eyes. The man about to kill her was a stranger, although he was vaguely familiar, as though she’d passed him on the street or seen him in a dream.
He was speaking in a low whisper. “Kate, please listen to me. It’s Corbin. It’s your cousin. I am not going to hurt you. I need you to be very quiet. There’s a man in this apartment and he’s a very bad man. Shhhh. If you scream, or make a noise, he’s going to come in here. I need you to hide, and then I can go deal with him. Nod if you understand.”
Kate shook her head. Only half the words had made any sense to her. Was it really Corbin, or was he lying? How was he here, in the apartment? She thought of trying to bite his hand, but it was pressed hard against her mouth, her lips flattened against her teeth. She could see the man’s eyes, darting furiously over the edge of the couch toward the dark interior of the rest of the apartment. He looked scared. It is Corbin, she thought, recognizing him from pictures she’d seen.
“Shhh,” he said again. “You have to trust me, or we are both going to die. Do you understand?” His voice had become more urgent, cracking almost, and Kate nodded this time, deciding that she needed to do what he said. He’d either kill her or he wouldn’t. It was happening again—not with Alan, the way she’d thought earlier—but with some man she had never met.
After feeling Kate nod, Corbin looked her in the eyes. He loosened the hand around her mouth, but didn’t remove it. “Do you believe me? You have to believe me.”
She nodded more, and took a deep breath.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” Corbin said, but his eyes were still darting toward the hallway. “Do you know about the closet in here?”
“No,” Kate said in a cracked whisper through his hand.
“There’s a false back in it. It’s where my dad kept valuable things. Press your hand all the way to the right and push. You’ll hear a click and it will swing open. There’s enough room for you to hide there.”
Kate, not even realizing it, was shaking her head again, saying “no” into Corbin’s hand. He continued:
“Just stay there until I come back to get you. If I don’t come back, then just stay there longer. He won’t find you, and eventually he’ll give up. You have to trust me, okay?”
“I can’t,” Kate said. She felt tears sliding down her face. She breathed in deeply through her nose, her chest swelling. She thought for a moment she might start laughing.
“You have to,” Corbin said. “You’ll be safe. I promise.”
She looked at him and for the first time they made eye contact. It was like finding a handhold on a sheer cliff. Making a decision, she nodded, calmly, and Corbin took his hand all the way off her face.
“Who is it?” she asked. “Who’s here?”
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have a lot of time.”
She followed him to the closet, her numb legs somehow operating independent of the rest of her body. He gently pushed her into its interior, filled with dry-cleaned suits hanging in plastic. “Just push, all the way to the right. You’ll hear the click,” he repeated.
“Okay,” she said, the sound of her voice coming from far away.
Before shutting the door, he whispered: “I am going to save you.” And then she was enveloped in darkness. She did as he said and pressed her hand against the back wall. It gave a little, clicked, and swung open. She stepped inside and felt around. There was a small metal handle and she pulled the door back in toward her, but not all the way. The small enclosure smelled of untreated wood and musty paperbacks. She felt as though she’d stepped back through time, into that other closet in another country, another madman on the other side, only this time she was calmer. No, it wasn’t exactly a sense of calm. It was resignation. It was over. The world had been trying to kill her in the worst way possible, and now it was finally going to do it. She gave in, the calmness spreading through her. She even pulled the false door all the way closed; the handle turned and she knew she could get out again, but maybe it didn’t matter. She slid her hands along the wood. The space was the width of the closet, wider than her outstretched arms, but it couldn’t have been more than a foot deep. With her back pressed tight against the rear wall, her breasts grazed the false door. A wave of unreality passed over, and she welcomed it. And she waited.
She listened. She could hear her own breathing and her heart in her chest, but nothing else.
How had Corbin gotten back to America? Or had he never left? No, he had left and gone to London, because Martha had seen him, hadn’t she?
He’d come back because he’d killed Audrey and now he was going to kill her, and this hiding in the closet, this other man, was all part of some elaborate game he was playing.
Or could there really be someone else in the apartment?
Was it Alan, still drunk, who’d fo
und another way to sneak in?
Or was it finally George Daniels? Kate felt the laugh again, rising up through her lungs, and she held it down by tensing her jaw, her neck muscles almost seizing up. George Daniels back from the dead, and in another country. In some ways, she wouldn’t be surprised. As she always said to herself: he was always with her, always along for the ride.
His voice in her head: You are going to die in a closet, Kate. Giggling.
She closed her eyes, and nothing changed. The world was still black.
She tried not to think of her parents and how they would feel when they heard she’d been murdered.
She thought of Alan. Twenty-four hours earlier she’d been in his bed, allowing herself to feel something. She’d been happy, celebratory almost, that she was finally with another man. Maybe that was what George Daniels had been waiting for all along, waiting for her to finally cheat on him, so that he could finally give her what she deserved. Maybe he really was alive, and the police, and her parents, and everyone else had lied to her. For a horrible instant, she believed it.
And then she heard something. A human sound, like a grunt. Or maybe it was a scream that had suddenly been cut off. She waited, barely breathing, but there was nothing else, just the sound of the building humming and sighing around her. And suddenly she wondered if she’d heard anything at all. She allowed herself to take a breath, sipping at the thin air in the closet. She cracked the false door open a little, relieved that it hadn’t locked her in. She tapped her fingertips together, felt a sharp pain when she tapped her swollen thumb, the splinter still embedded deep in the pad. She put the thumb in her mouth and tore at the skin with her teeth, eventually sucking the splinter out. She wiped the blood down her shirt. Removing the splinter had made her feel sane for a brief moment, but now she wondered how much longer she could stay in this closet. What was happening out there?
She formed a plan, just to see how it would feel in her head. She would push her way out of the closet and move as swiftly and quietly as possible from the den to the hallway, then from the hallway to the living room and foyer, then she’d go through the door and run as fast as she could to the front desk. It was a big apartment. Corbin, or whoever else was in here, might be somewhere else. She might get free. And if she didn’t? Then at least she wasn’t cowering in this closet anymore.
Her Every Fear Page 21
