“Trust? How can I trust you when this whole conversation is built on a lie?”
They pull up to Riley’s apartment.
“The answer is still no,” Riley says. “I don’t want to draw any attention to myself. I already have enough of that.”
“I can protect you from it.”
“You couldn’t then, and you can’t now.”
“That’s not fair.” Erin frowns at her. “I did protect you. I got you the best lawyer I could find. A lawyer strong enough to get a hung jury. A lawyer strong enough to prevent the DA from refiling charges!”
“Not that. I meant from everyone else.”
“I couldn’t do it all!” Erin looks injured. “But I damned well tried. You know I did.”
“I’m—” Riley throws both palms against her temples and rapidly shakes her head. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m upset . . . Can we . . . Can we just leave this alone?”
Erin’s expression says it all. Exasperation. Aggravation.
Disappointment.
Nothing new.
“Look, I’ll call you later,” Riley says as a way to cap the conversation more than anything else.
She opens the car door, steps out, and walks away, once again leaving so much unsaid between them.
It’s a lonely trip to her apartment.
Inside, she sits at the kitchen table, concentrating on her coffee cup while repeatedly rotating it in its place.
She messed up.
Why does everything I do drive a wedge between us?
Erin isn’t the enemy. She was trying to help, and what did Riley do? She became flustered. She flew off the handle.
I’m such an ass.
She’s never been quick on her feet, acts even slower when she feels trapped. The past several years are unmitigated proof of that, her disagreement with Erin only piling on more evidence.
She grabs her phone and dials Erin’s number but after only one and a half rings gets dumped into voice mail.
Rejected.
“Hey, it’s . . . it’s me . . . Look, I’m sorry for overreacting. I know you were only trying to help—you’re always try to help—and I didn’t mean to . . .” She lowers the phone, stares at it, then tries to figure out how to undo damage levied on a relationship that has already taken too many hits.
She lifts the phone and, through a cracked whisper, says, “This is so hard to say . . . I feel lost, really lost. Like everyone is against me. Well, everyone except maybe you . . . Wait. Not maybe you. I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was . . .”
I’m rambling.
“Never mind . . . Anyway, I just want you to know how much I appreciate everything you’ve done. And I’m sorry . . .”
She clicks off the phone.
That didn’t go so well. Nothing is going well.
She takes stock of her front door, the jammer she recently bought for it.
And calls the locksmith again.
16
On her return from the grocery store, Riley walks by the shut-in’s apartment and notices another newspaper tossed out of reach.
She’s about to move on when an unexpected surge of empathy washes over her. She can certainly understand what it feels like to be trapped in a world you can no longer tolerate. And to be completely honest, lately she, too, has had an urge to hide inside and never come out.
She gives further thought to the woman who keeps herself imprisoned behind a closed door, wondering if she’s perhaps found a peaceful moment in an otherwise unsettled life. She moves closer to the door, thinks about what horrible event might have happened to make her neighbor give up on the world. To lose all faith in it, to crumble beneath its crippling weight.
She raises a hand to knock on the door. She stops, swiftly withdraws the hand, then transfers a few food items from one bag to another. This time, she follows through with a knock.
No answer.
Riley places the newspaper inside the shopping bag. She ties it to the doorknob.
Then walks away with a deep ache in her chest.
17
It’s 8:16 p.m., and Riley has been to her living room window three times to see if Ms. Confident, with her privileged car and her privileged life, has come home for the day.
Make that four.
She grabs the remote and clicks on the TV. She tries to shift focus, but somewhere between a documentary about penguins in Antarctica and a dog show in New York City, she again finds herself looking out her window at the lamplit blacktop.
Still no sign of the Mercedes.
The woman was already home by this time last night, so she obviously doesn’t leave work at the same time every day, maybe even likes to do a little partying afterward.
Riley sticks by the window and considers another possible explanation. Could Ms. Confident have come home earlier and parked someplace else in the lot? Maybe the spots aren’t even assigned and she has a preference for that one. Had she been parking there only out of convenience to unload her large portfolio made of expensive-looking leather?
She scans the rest of the lot through her binoculars but sees no sign of the Mercedes elsewhere.
She goes back to the couch and starts flipping through channels. Nothing catches her interest, so she again goes to the window.
And the spot is still empty.
This back-and-forth window watching is starting to feel a bit obsessive.
Outside near the parking lot, she decides, would be a much better vantage point from which to assess the situation.
Riley splashes through puddles on her way to the other lot, keeping mindful of her surroundings and her potential stalker, who could be spying on her from somewhere between the folds of a rain-soaked night.
I’m not doing the same thing, she argues to herself. It’s not like I plan on playing games with her butcher knife.
At about twenty-five yards in, she runs directly into an obstacle she’d forgotten about: the six-foot wrought iron fence that divides the two lots. She walks along the fence line, and a few minutes later spots a gate.
A locked gate.
She examines the keypad, which holds a secret combination that will grant entry into Ms. Confident’s fairy-tale world. It looks pretty high tech. She circles her vision through the lot as if some solution may be waiting for her. Through the gate, she sees an older well-dressed woman leave her car, then start toward the building.
“Excuse me!” Riley yells to her. “Ma’am?”
The woman glances over her shoulder at Riley, who meets her gaze with an innocent, frustrated expression. She points to her building and says, “I recently moved here and was helping an elderly friend at the apartments across the way. I must have dropped that slip of paper where I wrote down the entry code. Would you mind?”
The woman looks at Riley’s grungy building, looks at Riley, then appears to be thinking, probably attempting to make the connection work.
She comes to the gate and punches in the keypad numbers.
Riley steps through and with a grateful smile says, “Thank you so much.”
“Not a problem. The code is eight-six-three-four. Make sure to put it in your phone this time so you don’t lose it.”
“I absolutely will,” Riley says, committing the numbers to memory.
The woman takes off.
Several feet into the lot, Riley spies an underground parking garage. She can slip through if someone opens the security grille to drive in. But as she turns back around, distant headlights blind her.
The red Mercedes drives by and proceeds to its regular outside spot. Ms. Confident exits her car, then hustles around to the trunk. She looks much the same as before—still wearing blue jeans, still wearing a T-shirt, and still with her hair pulled into a ponytail. She must put in long hours if she’s not partying after work. But where would she work in such casual attire? The Gap? Not with the expensive-looking portfolio bag she carries, and certainly not with her fancy car and apartment.
Th
e woman scurries through the rain and toward her building, and Riley’s curiosity urges her to follow at a safe distance. Another keypad waits at the main entrance. She punches in some numbers. A mechanized lock disengages, the double doors swing open, and she glides through.
Riley wants to see what the woman’s extravagant, beautiful world looks like inside and hopes the entryway code matches what she’s already memorized. She gives it a try. The doors open. She’s in.
As expected, the building’s interior is lovely—no, it’s beyond that. Multistory, hexagonal mezzanines surround a stony waterfall on the main floor, complete with tumbling greenery.
She definitely doesn’t work at the Gap—not unless she’s the CEO.
Riley watches a resident punch in a code that opens her door, while another exits, allowing his to automatically lock upon closing.
“Good evening, Ms. Light.”
Riley switchbacks to the left and finds her target. Ms. Confident greets the man who, judging by the gold tag on his blazer, works in the building.
Ms. Light. A last name.
The woman enters a room filled with mailboxes. About a minute later, she walks into a glass elevator, which swiftly floats toward the upper levels. Riley shifts positions for a better view and sees the elevator stop at the ninth floor. Light strolls out, then moves along the mezzanine. At her apartment, she pauses for a moment and, without warning, looks over the balcony. Riley freezes. Although it’s difficult to tell, the woman seems to be looking directly at her. Riley dodges for cover behind a six-foot planter with plenty of girth. A few moments later, she peers out, but the woman has disappeared into her apartment.
She hurries toward the mail room. Inside, she takes a gander at the rows and rows of shiny, gold mailboxes. Residents breeze by in the lobby. Her luck could run out if someone discovers she doesn’t belong here. She spots a trash can, waits for the hallway foot traffic to slow, then shovels through a sea of circular ads. After fishing out a blue envelope, she holds it up to examine the label.
SAMANTHA LIGHT
A first name.
A grumpy-looking middle-aged man walks into the mail room, sees Riley studying the envelope, and gives her a suspicious look. She tries to disarm him with a smile. It doesn’t work. Time to get out of here, so she fast-tracks out into the lobby and through the exit doors.
Outside, she inspects her immediate surroundings, then approaches the driver’s side window of the red Mercedes. On the slight chance that it was left unlocked, she gives the car door handle a gentle tug.
It was not. The alarm protests with a scream, and she breaks into a fast clip, fully aware that running will only make her stand out. After gaining a safe-enough distance, she looks over her shoulder in time to see a security guy rolling his golf cart toward the red Mercedes.
But even worse is the vague human figure she sees on her way back to her building, ducking into the formless night.
18
Riley wakes with a start.
An alarm wails. A thin layer of smoke crawls across the ceiling. At first, she doesn’t recognize the sound or the smell, then her senses kick in.
She hurtles from bed and grabs clothes on her way to the living room. Between the alarm’s bleats, she hears the frantic pounding of feet and mad shrieking in the hallway.
The moment she opens her door, her faculties are overloaded. The alarm is deafening. People run through black, soupy smoke spilling out of one of the apartments. Riley is about to join the escape downstairs when her conscience niggles at her. She spins around, rushes back down the hall.
At the shut-in’s apartment, she places an ear against the door and hears the woman’s quiet whimpers. She starts pounding.
“Open the door!” she shouts, banging harder. “You have to get out!”
She glances down the hallway—it’s almost completely clear of people, smoke growing thicker—and all at once, she knows time is at a higher premium.
But the woman behind the door still doesn’t respond, and those quiet whimpers have metamorphosed into pleading sobs. Even a deadly fire can be no match for an agoraphobic’s paralyzing terror of the outside world.
“Please!” Riley shouts, coughing on smoke. “Please! At least come to the door! I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to. I promise! I only want to help!”
Firefighters burst from the stairwell, then plow through a dense wall of smoke. Another follows behind—she takes one look at Riley and shouts, “Hey! You! Out of this building! Right now!”
Riley ignores the order, pounds harder. A few seconds later, the peephole flickers with light. Pushing a strand of hair away from her face, she tries to tame her out-of-control panting and yells, “Can you hear me okay?”
“Yes . . . ,” the shut-in says, voice so tiny that Riley can barely hear it.
A crashing noise—the firefighters breaking down a door.
“Okay.” Riley swallows back against her own rising panic. “Look, I know how hard this must be for you, how scared you probably are, but you can’t stay here. Do you understand? You have to get out.”
“I can’t!”
“You can. If this fire spreads, you’ll die! I’ll help you. I’ll be there the whole time.”
No answer.
“Listen,” Riley tries again with firmness. “I can be a horrid bitch when I want to. I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise! Okay?”
A four-second pause, then quietly, through tears, “Okay.”
Progress.
“I’m Riley.”
“W-Wendy.”
“What do you say, Wendy?” Riley angles her head away to cough. “Are you ready?”
The lock sluggishly jiggles, and Riley steps back, using this opportunity to size up what’s going on down the hall. The smoke has turned white. One firefighter comes around the corner, but before she can see what he’s doing, Wendy’s door cracks open.
“I’m right here,” Riley assures her, extending a hand. “Come on out. Go ahead . . .”
The door opens about six inches farther to reveal a trembling woman in her early fifties, skin the shade of a peeled potato and smoky-blue eyes that launch in every direction.
Riley gives her a fast nod of encouragement. The two women’s gazes connect, and Wendy’s expression changes. It’s the look of fading fear, or thankfulness, or—
“The flames are out!” a firefighter shouts to someone at the bottom of the stairwell. When Riley looks back, Wendy’s expression has again changed, this time falling into a burdened state of relief.
Riley offers Wendy a consoling smile—she appears grateful before slowly regressing inside her apartment.
The door closes.
19
Morning.
The air tastes and smells like burned lumber. The hallway carpet is still damp from the emergency sprinklers and covered in a flurry of scattered ashes. But the situation could have been much worse.
Riley’s section of hallway suffered a fair amount of smoke damage and will require new paint and carpeting. As for the other half, it didn’t fare nearly as well. After the flames were extinguished, she went outside to speak to a firefighter, who told her the apartment where the blaze started needs to be gutted. Management has moved fast: the remaining residents in that wing are being relocated until the mop-up is complete and the apartments are restored to livable states. As if this place wasn’t bad enough, there’s the weighty and stubborn odor of scorched soot to further bring down the mood.
She stops at Wendy’s place to check on her, studying the crack beneath the door. There’s no sign of movement, no sound coming from inside. She leans against the wall and slides into a seated position on a less dirty section of carpeting—maybe it’s because this spot seems reassuring. Maybe it’s because she’s starting to feel this woman’s pain in a visceral way. Much like Wendy, she understands that life here on the outside can be very frightening.
“I’m feeling you,” she mutters, face planted in hands, fortitude wearing thin. “I was t
rying to rescue you, but I’m starting to think it’s me who needs to be saved. You might have had the right idea all along. It’s better inside.”
“Don’t be so sure of that.”
Her head jerks up.
Wendy continues speaking through her closed door. “I’m thinking you’re the one who got it right.”
“What do you mean?”
“My phobia nearly killed me last night. I’d give anything to be where you’re standing.”
“Then what’s stopping you?”
Wendy pauses for a few seconds, then softly says, “Fear.”
“Of what?”
“Don’t want to talk about it. But you’re different than me. You don’t have that fear, and I keep being a damned slave to it.”
Riley’s laugh is rueful. “You probably wouldn’t say that if you knew me.”
“I already do.”
“No . . . No, you don’t.”
“Maybe not completely, but I’ve seen what I need to.”
“We’ve hardly spoken, and you rarely open your door.” Riley runs her finger along a dirty scratch in the wall. “What could you possibly see?”
“Well . . . during the ten or so years I’ve been trapped inside this apartment, you’re the only person who’s bothered to notice I exist.”
“And here’s me, wishing people would forget that I do.”
“Why? Are they doing something to hurt you?”
Riley stands, straightens her shirt, and says, “Don’t want to talk about it.”
“Touché,” Wendy says, unable to conceal her stifled laugh.
20
It’s been a few days since Riley left her sister that apology message and still no response. Obviously, Erin hasn’t heard about the fire; low-rent blazes rarely garner much media coverage. That said, it’s anyone’s guess when she’ll be back in touch—once she is, they’ll move on to the next phase. Erin will call and ask some random question to test the waters, Riley will play along, and that will be that.
She slides the phone into her back pocket in case Erin decides to call, then begins laying out Clarissa’s clothes for the day. She likes doing this, enjoys the way it makes her feel, how it affords her the opportunity to reminisce about better times. Somewhere between twelve and thirteen, Clarissa began fighting her on it, arguing that she was old enough to pick out her own wardrobe. Jason—the consummate family mediator—had laughed about the disagreement.
What She Doesn't Know: A Psychological Thriller Page 5
