The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  Lucy looked up from the book at Vincent. ‘You want to know how I came to that conclusion?’

  ‘I am curious,’ answered Vincent.

  ‘I read about the deal in the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing the Nash equilibrium against real-life situations. I thought this deal would be a solid case study, so I took both company’s annual reports for the past five years, compared them to industry reports, and ran various projections of their potential share prices depending on how a deal was structured and global metals prices. I can show you the calculations if you’d like and run you through some of the numbers.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have time right now,’ said Vincent. ‘Come and see me before you graduate. We’ll talk then.’

  ‘I graduate in two weeks,’ answered Lucy.

  ‘Well, then come and see me in two weeks,’ said Vincent, handing Lucy his business card. That was the only card he gave out at the event.

  Vincent lay face down on the marble elevator floor like a felled giant. Sylvie crawled over to him in the dark. She grabbed his arm and ran her hands down it until she reached his wrist. There was a steady pulse.

  ‘He’s alive.’

  Sam heard the relief in Sylvie’s voice as he lay motionless on his back, staring into the void. Every time he blinked, Sam wondered if he was dead. There was no difference between having his eyes open or closed. Everything was black.

  He was afraid to move. He could tell that his shoulder was resting at an odd angle. He moved his arm and was immediately overcome by a wave of pain so excruciating that he fainted.

  Sylvie stood up clumsily from the floor. She ran her hands across the walls to navigate to the steel elevator doors. She found the control panel and pressed the red emergency button at the bottom repeatedly. Nothing happened. The button felt loose, as if it wasn’t connected to anything.

  When, after a half dozen presses of the button, there was no response, Sylvie slammed her palms against the metal doors. ‘Help us! We’re stuck! Help!’ she shouted. She pounded her palms furiously against the steel panels, filling the elevator with a frantic beat of metal percussion. ‘Someone help us! We need an ambulance!’

  ‘Nobody can hear you,’ Jules said. ‘Help me pry open the doors – they might hear us if we call down the elevator shaft.’

  They each took a door and tried to push them open, but it was harder than they’d expected. The doors were stuck together like glue. Sylvie put her hands into the groove where the doors met. She winced with the effort of trying to pry them open. With every bit of her strength she managed to break the suction that kept the doors together. She wiggled her foot into the small gap. She and Jules used the weight of their bodies to push the doors away from each other. As they did, a gust of cold air immediately hit them from the draughty elevator shaft.

  ‘Help!’ Sylvie shouted through the gap. ‘Help us!’ All they heard was the echo of her voice. It sounded thin and pitiful.

  Jules pointed his phone’s flashlight through the gap. He hoped to see the outlines of external elevator doors, which they might force open as well to get out onto whichever floor they were stuck on. Instead of external doors, all he could see was concrete.

  ‘I’m sure they’re sending people to get us out,’ said Jules, with more confidence than he felt.

  ‘Do you hear anyone coming to rescue us?’ snapped Sylvie. ‘Because I don’t. I don’t hear a goddamn thing.’

  She stopped talking so they could listen. The only sound they heard was the whirr of the vent as it poured out streams of heat, and the whine of steel cables holding up the elevator. That was hardly reassuring.

  ‘I’m going to sue them. I’ll sue whoever owns this shitty escape room. I’ll sue Stanhope for sending us here. I’ll sue the owners of this building. I’ll take them all to the fucking cleaners,’ Jules ranted.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  Jules stopped talking. It was Vincent. He was awake.

  ‘Are you alright, Vincent?’ asked Sylvie, squatting down to check on him. ‘Is anything broken.’

  ‘Just my head,’ joked Vincent weakly. He sat up and rubbed the back of his head. ‘Jules, stop chasing ambulances for once in your life. Threats won’t get us anywhere. How about we all focus on getting out of here.’

  Vincent grabbed the handrail and lifted himself to his feet. His hands shook from the physical effort that it took to rise. When he was standing, he was hit by a rush of dizziness. He felt his legs buckle under him. It required every bit of strength that he could muster to stay upright.

  He was glad for the dark. They couldn’t see him like this, weak as a baby. He put his hand to his temple. His head ached awfully.

  ‘The clue that came up before the elevator crashed. It’s familiar,’ Vincent rasped.

  ‘Not to me,’ said Sylvie. Jules looked up at the words still on the screen. ‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it before either,’ said Jules.

  ‘I’m sure I have,’ said Vincent, putting his hand to his temple again to stop the pounding that made clear thinking impossible. ‘Don’t any of you know where it’s from?’

  ‘What does it matter? The escape room has obviously malfunctioned,’ said Jules. ‘Answering another stupid clue isn’t going to get us out of here.’

  ‘It matters,’ answered Vincent. He didn’t know why, but he knew that it mattered.

  A policeman and a grief counsellor brought the suicide note to Cathy three days after Lucy’s death. They expected that she’d open it and read it in their presence so they could comfort her.

  She offered them coffee. They politely declined. They hung around for a while longer, sitting on the edge of the sofa and making small talk. She clutched the letter in her hand so hard that her knuckles turned white. Even standing at her living room window, watching them drive off into rush hour traffic, she made no effort to open the envelope.

  When they were out of sight, Cathy put the unopened letter inside a book on a shelf in her bedroom. A part of her still hoped that, if she didn’t read the letter, it wouldn’t be true. Her daughter might still walk through the door and explain how it was all a big misunderstanding.

  Cathy opened the letter three days later, not long before dawn after another sleepless night. She realised through the haze of insomnia that she would never sleep properly until she’d read Lucy’s last words.

  She climbed out of bed and found her way in the grey of night to her bookshelf. The book she’d placed the letter in was called The Grand Secrets of Chess Masters. It had been a present for Lucy’s ninth birthday.

  Cathy opened the envelope sitting on the edge of her bed. The paper inside was folded with razor-like precision. She wouldn’t be the first to read it, the police had told her they’d opened the letter and made a copy for their investigation. She’d bristled at the thought that others had read Lucy’s last words before she’d seen them.

  Cathy swallowed hard as she unfolded the paper. Her hands trembled. Lucy’s familiar tight handwriting blurred as tears welled in her eyes. She wiped her tears on the polyester sleeve of her nightgown. Cathy curled up on her bed with the letter pressed to her chest. She felt lost and alone. Dawn broke over her neighbour’s rooftop laundry line.

  Later that day, after considerable thought, she telephoned Vincent and asked him to meet her the following morning. There was something she wanted to ask.

  Vincent suggested they meet at a cafe in midtown, near the optometrist where Cathy worked. Knowing Vincent, he chose the sterile cafeteria-style cafe deliberately because he wanted to avoid a scene and wasn’t sure what Cathy wanted, or how emotional she would be.

  A slow news week had kept the story of Lucy’s suicide in the media spotlight. One newspaper published what it called an ‘expose’ on the real life of bankers, the pressures and long hours that led to them dying young. Stanhope was not happy. It hated publicity at the best of times. It especially hate
d gratuitous tabloid stories that cheapened the exclusive cachet of its brand.

  As Jules had predicted, there had been something of a backlash at the firm against Vincent after Lucy died. He was the one who’d hired Lucy. Mentored her. He had to bear some responsibility for the consequences of her death, and any resulting damage to Stanhope’s carefully cultivated image.

  But from Cathy’s point of view, Vincent was the only one at the firm who acted decently, helping her after Lucy died. The only other contact she’d had from Stanhope was a brusque personnel manager who called her about Lucy’s life insurance policy and pressured her to collect Lucy’s things from the office because she said there was nowhere to store it.

  ‘Thanks for meeting me here.’ Cathy was visibly nervous when she sat down with Vincent. His stony expression and flint blue eyes could be intimidating. She was in her late fifties with dark curly hair and glasses with bright purple plastic frames. ‘I know it’s out of your way, and you must be very busy,’ she said, flushing as she realised that she was blabbering.

  ‘Anything I can do to help,’ Vincent reassured her. ‘Tell me, how are you doing?’ His eyes were filled with concern.

  ‘I take each day as it comes,’ Cathy answered, her voice unsteady. ‘It sounds trite but I don’t know any other way to keep going. It’s like putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually you realise that you’re walking, but you don’t know how you managed to move so far and you’re not sure where you’re going. That’s how it feels right now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply, but his voice was thick with sympathy. A waitress stopped to take their orders. He ordered a coffee. Cathy asked for a double espresso. Caffeine had become her crutch.

  ‘I wish I’d known that Lucy was going through a hard time,’ Vincent said, once the waitress left. ‘I would have done anything to help her.’

  ‘Lucy visited me the day before she died. I was blow-drying my hair when she came in. She dropped off clothes and other things she was donating to a charity store and left,’ said Cathy. ‘It was my last chance to see her and all I cared about was fixing my hair.’

  ‘You can’t blame yourself, Cathy. You had no idea. None of us did.’ His voice was drowned out by the clatter of cutlery as a waitress served a table nearby. ‘I understand that Lucy left a note. Did it give any indication of her state of mind? Was Lucy depressed? Worried about something?’

  ‘You can have a look yourself. I have it here.’ Cathy took the note from her bag and handed it to him.

  Mom, please forgive me. It’s not because of you. You were the best mother I could have hoped for. It’s always been a struggle for me to fit in and now I am tired of trying. It’s time for me to go. I never said it enough but I want you to know that I love you. Your loving daughter, Lucy.

  ‘Don’t you find it strange?’ Cathy asked, when Vincent finished reading the note.

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Lucy was never very affectionate. She didn’t use words like “love”. I always knew that she loved me, but she never used the word. She hadn’t called me “Mom” for years, just “Cathy”. And she never cared about fitting in. She once told me that there were too many interesting things to learn about in this world to care about what other people thought.’

  ‘I never realised that she wanted so much to be accepted,’ said Vincent, still thinking about the note.

  ‘That’s exactly my point,’ said Cathy, raising her voice slightly. ‘Lucy didn’t give a damn about whether she fit in or not. That’s what’s so strange about the note. It’s all wrong. Lucy didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body. Her mind didn’t work that way. Believe me, I’m her mother.’

  ‘You don’t think she wrote the note?’ asked Vincent, slightly incredulous.

  ‘It’s Lucy’s handwriting. She definitely wrote the note,’ Cathy said. ‘It’s just that the language … They’re not her words. I feel like someone – this is going to sound crazy – that someone dictated it to her. I don’t believe that she wrote it of her own volition.’

  Vincent said nothing as he digested her accusation. The inscrutable expression on his face did not betray whether he thought hers were the emotional words of a grieving mother still in denial or if he thought there was some truth in what Cathy had said.

  ‘Have you told the police about your concerns?’ asked Vincent finally. He picked up his teaspoon and stirred his coffee while he waited for Cathy to answer.

  ‘I read the note for the first time yesterday. I called the police right away. I told them the note was overly emotional, that Lucy never communicated that way. That it was totally out of character for Lucy to write phrases like that. It just didn’t ring true.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said that people sometimes get sentimental when they write suicide notes,’ she answered.

  ‘Maybe that was the reason,’ he said, looking at her steadily.

  ‘Maybe.’ She shrugged, without much conviction. ‘Did Lucy ever confide in you about anything troubling her at work? I need to know what she was going through before she died, because none of this makes sense.’ Cathy’s shoulders shook from deep heaving sobs. ‘I have to make sense of this. And no matter how hard I try, I can’t do it.’

  Vincent poured Cathy a glass of water and passed it over to her, watching as she drank. It was only when she’d calmed down that he began to speak again.

  ‘I was Lucy’s mentor and we did talk regularly, but always about work. Never anything personal. I was actually away in the weeks before this happened. My only contact with Lucy was when we had team teleconferences. It’s hardly the ideal way to gauge someone’s mood, but I didn’t have any sense that something was wrong.’

  ‘What about someone else from the office? Is there anyone else she talked to?’

  ‘Lucy kept herself to herself,’ said Vincent, simply.

  ‘There was nobody at all?’ Cathy’s voice cracked as she absorbed the weight of Vincent’s words. Her daughter had struggled to make friends her entire life. She might have killed herself because of it. ‘Lucy didn’t have a single friend at work?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Vincent said awkwardly. He glanced at his watch. Cathy realised the meeting was coming to an end. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ Vincent asked.

  ‘Maybe one thing,’ said Cathy. ‘Someone from Stanhope’s human resources department left a voicemail asking me to collect Lucy’s personal effects.’

  ‘I’ll have it all sent to you,’ said Vincent.

  ‘I’d appreciate that. I’m going to Lucy’s apartment tomorrow to clear out her things. If you could have it sent over there tomorrow, I’ll pack it for the movers,’ she said. ‘The landlord’s already found a new tenant, so I have to get everything out by the end of the week.’

  ‘I could arrange for a packing company to help you,’ Vincent asked. ‘If you don’t want to step foot in there …’

  ‘No,’ sighed Cathy. ‘I’ll have to go through Lucy’s things myself at some point. Might as well get it over and done with. I’ve taken tomorrow off work to do all the packing.’ She took a sip of her coffee. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a little bit nervous about going there. It’ll be my first time there since it happened.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go alone,’ said Vincent. ‘One of Lucy’s colleagues has offered to help in any way needed, I’m sure she could come by tomorrow for a few hours. I’ll send Lucy’s personal effects with her.’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ Cathy answered. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Sara,’ he said. ‘Sara Hall. She’ll come by late morning.’

  The buzz that pulsated in Vincent’s ears intertwined with another noise. A whine of pain. Vincent scrambled across the floor towards the sound. It was Sam. He was whimpering softly like an injured dog.

  ‘Sam,’ Vincent called out in the dark. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ Sam spoke through clenched teeth. ‘Something’s broken.’


  Vincent’s old army instincts kicked in. His own injuries were forgotten in the adrenalin surge. He gently ran his hands over Sam’s body, examining him in the dark with the efficiency of an experienced battlefield medic. Sam flinched when Vincent reached his shoulder. Vincent didn’t need to see it to know that it was dislocated.

  What worried Vincent more than Sam’s shoulder was the possibility that Sam was going into shock. His pulse was weak. His skin felt clammy and his breathing was laboured and shallow.

  ‘You’ve dislocated your shoulder. It’s not a big deal,’ Vincent told him. The grim set of his jaw belied his dismissive tone. Vincent needed Sam to calm down so that his vitals stabilised.

  ‘Can you fix —’ Sam’s voice broke off as he was overcome with a spasm of pain.

  ‘Yes.’ Vincent turned to the others. ‘Does anyone have pills, painkillers? I don’t care what you’ve got, I’m not judging.’

  ‘I have some Oxy in my wallet,’ said Sam, weakly. ‘In my back pocket.’

  Vincent gingerly pulled the wallet from Sam’s pants. Inside was a photo of Kim, with their twins on her lap. All flaxen hair and pastel linen sundresses. He found a tiny ziplock bag with the green pills inside the coin compartment of Sam’s wallet. There were a dozen tablets.

  Vincent put two Oxycodone in Sam’s mouth and told him to swallow it with his spit. He figured that would probably have been enough opioids to endure an amputation. He sat next to Sam and waited for the Oxy to take effect. He’d need the others to help. It wouldn’t be easy getting Sam’s shoulder back in place in the dark and without any medical equipment.

  Vincent leaned his phone against the side of the elevator so the flashlight would let him see what he was doing. There were shards of broken glass on the floor from when Jules had kicked the mirrored wall earlier. Vincent slid the shards into the corner with his foot and sat down on the ground next to Sam.

  ‘Jules, I need you to hold Sam’s legs firmly so that he doesn’t move his body. I need traction,’ instructed Vincent. He turned in Sylvie’s direction. ‘Sylvie, hold his good arm and cradle his head as best you can. I don’t want him to hit his head on the ground and do himself more damage. Can you two do that for me?’