Bank Owned

by J. Joseph Wright

  “They’re nuts. And you should stay clear. Go to the Starbucks in North Plains.”

  “North Plains is twenty minutes down the road. I need my caffeine before that.”

  “Then I’ll make you coffee,” he sifted through the big box on the kitchen table. “Damn coffeemaker’s in here somewhere.”

  “Brian, what’s wrong?” she forced him to stop by placing a hand on his wrist. “Why are you so nervous?”

  “It’s just…” his mind spun with images. Swirling and swirling. The night before, when he swore he’d heard someone in the bedroom with Angie. Her moans of profound desire. Unfathomable depths of pleasure…and pain beyond measure.

  “It’s just what?” she begged. She saw the faraway look, and shook him out of it.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, but wasn’t convincing anyone. She knew better.

  “No. Something’s really bothering you.”

  “It’s this house—”

  “What about the house?”

  “Angie, can’t you feel it?” he sat at the table with her. “I mean, you said you’ve been seeing things, strange things.”

  “I have,” she told the truth. “I swear I see someone. An old lady, maybe, I don’t know,” she pointed at the hall connecting the pantry to the kitchen. “She walks right there, goes by so fast I can’t see much of her. But she’s there. I know it. And you know what else? I think she’s carrying a…baby.”

  “A baby?” he didn’t know what to think.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I believe you believe,” he tried to be tactful, given the touchy subject matter. To his surprise, and admitted delight, she wanted to talk about it.

  “I do,” she felt euphoric. “I really do. Don’t you see? It’s a sign. This house is telling me it’s okay to try and have another baby, Brian.”

  “The house is telling you?”

  She smiled. “The house is telling me,” her happiness faded not a twinkle as she took a bite of cold sweet and sour chicken.

  7.

  Brian wanted to pound on the keyboard, but he knew that might wake up Angie. Even though the master bedroom was upstairs, noise traveled in that old house like gossip in church. The internet connection wasn’t a source of frustration anymore. He’d gotten the US West guys out to fix it. His problem resided with Larry, the zipper supplier who refused to ship to Miami. Long story short, Larry was now his former zipper supplier, and finding a new zipper supplier proved more difficult than expected.

  At 5AM, after two hours of scouring every lead, he contemplated giving up and just going back to bed. He could snuggle up to his wife for at least an hour, maybe get a head start on that ‘trying for a baby’ thing. The idea became too appealing, and next thing he knew, he was slipping off his sweats and climbing under the sheets, melting against Angie’s warm curves. He wanted to kiss her all over, to take his wife right then and there. His desire turned into compassion when he heard her soft, rhythmic breath. Falling asleep next to her seemed the best thing to do, the only thing to do.

  Angie awoke to her alarm at six, just like she did every morning, now. She used to get up at seven, but that was when she lived an hour closer to work. It came as a surprise when she found her beloved husband, cuddled up to her like a newborn. He had his hand on her breast and his leg wrapped around hers, and he made her want to attack him right then and there. But he looked so peaceful. Snoring a little. Head flat on the pillow. Lips parted and scrunched. So cute. She got up silently and dressed in the spare room she used as a walk-in closet, ate a sensible breakfast of Cheerios and toast, and got out the door on time, for a change.

  Two steps down the walkway, she heard something that shuddered her very bones. A desperate and innocent wail, communicating only suffering and immeasurable heartbreak. She followed the sound up the back steps, through the covered porch, and inside, where, quickly, she noticed it was coming from the basement.

  She didn’t pause to get Brian or anything else. The crying went unabated, growing worse, more urgent, more pained. She couldn’t imagine what was making such a noise, and when she got to the bottom of the brick and cement space, she found nothing but a single, old incandescent light bulb, dangling at the end of a power cord. For such a beautiful house, it had an ugly basement. Dirty floor. Cracked, mismatched walls. Open rafters where spiders reigned supreme. Normally, she never would have been caught dead in such a place. But the crying. It drove her, took control of her, forced her forward, stumbling in the dark, knocking over old paint cans and boxes filled with what sounded like silverware. She found her keychain in her purse, and used the small but powerful flashlight to see where the noise was leading her—to a shadowy corner, and an improvised shelf made of cinder blocks.

  The crying stopped, and she saw something shift in the shadow on the bottom shelf. She had to clutch her chest to stop her heart from pounding through it. Somehow she mustered the courage, and moved ahead again, this time pointing the flashlight at the thing that had stirred. Her blood froze when she saw two glowing eyes.

  “Oh, my God!” she stepped back. Then the eyes blinked and she heard a distinct and strong purr. A warm, enthusiastic caress against her ankle took away all doubt. “Marmalade! What’re you doing down here?” she picked up and held the cat face-to-face. “You scared mommy!”

  The kitty purred louder, then wriggled free, dropping to the floor and heading back to the spot where Angie had found her, on the first shelf of the makeshift cabinet, scratching where the wall met the floor.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at down there?” she knelt closer, aiming her mini-light into the tiny space where the cat focused its interest. She made out a straight edge where there shouldn’t have been one, and followed with her light all the way up to another edge, then across and back down. There she saw hinges. A door! Then, the biggest shock. The crying started up again, and it wasn’t Marmalade. No question about it. She knew that sound anywhere. A baby. Alone and confused. Scared and cold. Somewhere on the other side of that door.

  “BRIAN!” she shouted on her way up to the bedroom. He heard her before she got to the second floor, flew from bed, and met her in stairway. It scared him to see her so scared. “Downstairs!” she panted. “In the basement!” and she ran so fast her hand slipped out of his. She was already removing the cinderblocks when he got there, flashlight in hand, wondering what the hell his wife was up to. It didn’t take long for him to see the same thing she’d seen—the vague and dust-filled outline of a door, hidden carefully behind the stack of homemade shelves.

  “How’d you find this?” he wondered aloud.

  “Never mind,” the sobbing infant drove her to work faster, removing the wood planks, tossing aside the bricks. “Just help me. There’s a baby in there.”

  “A baby!” he got on his knees and cleared away the rest of the blocks and lumber, searching for a handle, a knob, a bent screw, anything he could get ahold of and open the hidden door. “How do you know it’s a baby?”

  “Can’t you hear?” she panted. From the other side of the wall, the crying had turned to gasping, breathless and airy and distressed. “It sounds like its suffocating! Hurry!”

  Brian decided to believe her, just in case, despite having no evidence backing up her claims. He heard nothing, but that didn’t mean she didn’t.

  “Come on!” she spurred him. She thought the baby had stopped crying altogether now. Couldn’t hear a thing anymore.

  “Okay, okay,” he tried to wedge his fingers in the gaps between the door and the frame. He only got a fingernail’s hold, and that wasn’t enough. Then he searched the damp floor, looking for a screwdriver, a file, anything thin and strong. Only thing close was a paint stirrer, and that broke after about three seconds. “Dammit!” he then saw the cat nearby. That’s when his theory began to take shape.

  “What are you doing?” Angie begged, straining to hear something that wasn’t there. “Come on, open it!”

  “Shhh,” he said, placing his ear to the wall. �
��Listen.”

  She tried to control her breathing, but it was all she heard.

  “You sure what you heard was behind here?”

  “Yes,” she had no doubt. “I did. It was a baby. Behind there,” she pointed to the hidden door as if accusing it of murder.

  “Sweetie, sweetie,” he wrapped her in his embrace, one hand on the small of her back, the other stroking her fine honey-blonde hair. “I love you,” he trapped her with his deep blue eyes. She could never resist him when he was serious about it. “But what you heard wasn’t a baby. It was the cat.”

  “How do you know what I heard?” she was adamant. “It sounded like a baby.”

  “I know,” he coaxed Marmalade into coming to him. “She makes that noise…kind of a wailing sound. Did it to me earlier. Scared the shit out of me for a second. I thought she was going to wake you up, she was so loud. After a couple minutes, she just stopped. Funny cat,” he picked her up and cradled her.

  Angie stared at the strange door, half expecting the baby to start fussing again. It sounded so real. How could she have made such a mistake? “I heard the cat, too. She was howling, but this wasn’t it.”

  The more she thought, and the less rapid her heart rate became, and the more she understood the possibility of an infant being in their basement, stashed behind a hidden door, was so low it bordered on impossible. How could a baby be in there? The idea became preposterous. It was the cat. Of course. The cat. She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. I’m confused.”

  He let Marmalade jump to the floor and held Angie again. “This place is old, but it’s new to us, remember?”

  She wouldn’t let it go that easily. “But, Brian. What if it was a baby? What if it was?”

  “Sweetheart,” he gestured to the ruined cinders, the flattened shelves. “Look at this place. These things have been here a long time. Look at that door, whatever it is. I bet it hasn’t been opened in decades. There’s no baby in there.”

  “But…but I heard…”

  “You heard the cat, honey,” he said convincingly. “The cat.”

  Her head swam with mixed emotions, ripples of anxiety tempered by Brian’s logical approach. The image wouldn’t leave her mind, playing on an endless loop, over and over. A swaddle cloth wrapped tight. Chubby cheeks, ruddy and a bit grimy. Mouth wide, with gums on full display, bawling, bawling, bawling. She hugged her own chest, feeling the warm quivering bundle in her arms.

  “Angie?” he had to shake her to get her to look at him again. “You with me, sweetheart?”

  She blinked away the daydream and stared at him, still swimming with warmth.

  “Honey, you don’t look so good. Maybe you should stay home today.”

  She shook out of it, suddenly and seriously concerned about how late she’d become. She’d already had two warnings. One more and she’d be surfing the unemployment website.

  “Huh? No,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “No you don’t. You can call in sick,” he started to get a few ideas, little tingles in all the right places. “We can stay in bed all day and…you know.”

  She glanced at her watch, and her fears were justified. “Honey, I’ve got to go.”

  “No, seriously,” he gave her his most pouty, most seductive look, curling his lips into a pucker and flexing his pectorals. “Don’t you want some of this?”

  She smiled and kissed his cheek. “Of course. But later. I really gotta go.”

  He shrugged. “I just thought that, you know, since you’ve been warming up to the idea of having a baby again, I don’t know…maybe…”

  “I hear you,” she struggled for the right way to convey her feelings. “We need to talk about this…later.”

  “No,” he snatched her waist with both hands and forced her hips against his. “Now.”

  She twisted free and started up the staircase to the first floor. “Later,” she was surprised at his passionate advance, but tried not to let it show.

  “Fine!” he accused. “Leave. I know why you want to go so bad. You want to be with HIM!”

  She stopped in mid-step, angling her head to look down into his eyes. “What?”

  “You heard me. You just can’t wait to get to work so you can be with your boyfriend. You’d rather be with him. I know it. You probably want him to get you pregnant, because maybe you think I can’t. Maybe you think something’s wrong with me.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m being stupid, huh?”

  “Yes!” she contemplated just bolting. Then she saw the look in his eyes and went back downstairs. She didn’t stop until she was right in front of him. She held both of his hands. “I want to have a baby, Brian. With you. Only with you, okay?” when he didn’t respond, she asked more intently. “Okay?”

  He looked up at her and nodded, slowly at first, then more emphatically. His frown reversed into a grateful grin, satisfying her urgency. He knew how to fake it, and she knew when to buy his act and back off. Besides, she was late already, and that long commute loomed like a quest for the Holy Grail. “Okay,” he said finally, but by then she’d released his hands and was halfway up the steps.

  “Okay, then,” she ran quite nimbly, even in heels. “We’ll talk about this tonight. Gotta go, have a good day…love you!” and she was out the backdoor.

  All the way to work, and all day on the job, the only thing Angie could think about was the indelible image, now tattooed into her memory, of a newborn, stuffed away in the dark recesses of that basement, trapped and cold and alone behind that secret door. And all day, as Brian tried to sleep, he turned and shifted, sheets swimming in sweat, head sticking to the pillowcase, feverous with thoughts and visions of his wife and that man. Mad, sweltering, dripping passion. Cries for mercy, cries for more. He shivered in his own boiling hell.

  8.

  Brian shifted in his chair and sat up a little, anything to ease his sore ass. He’d been sitting in the same position, with Marmalade on his lap like a lump of dead weight, for three hours now, and the result wasn’t pretty. He refused to get up, though. He had a lot of work to do, but that wasn’t exactly why. He couldn’t face Angie. Not right now. Not with these images of her in his head, refusing to go away. Each time he thought of her, he saw her in the arms of someone else. So he tried hard not to think about her at all. Angie, for her part, got tired of trying to reach him. She thought about bringing him his dinner, then, angered by his refusal to come and eat with her, decided to leave it out instead. Let the cat get it, she huffed, and went to bed early.

  Somewhere after midnight, just when Brian thought his ass was going to fall off, Marmalade broke from her feline coma, stood on all fours, and stretched and licked her shoulder. Then, out of the blue, she jumped away violently, using claws and using them with intent. Brian felt it through his sweatpants, and knew the cat had drawn blood.

  “Hey, that hurt, you little shit!” he watched her scurry out the door, which had been left open just a crack. After the thing had escaped downstairs, and Brian’s office became dead quiet once more, he massaged his sore thigh and made another attempt at updating his QuickBooks software. Before he touched one key on his keyboard, his heart leapt to his throat at a long, breathy moan—unmistakable and uninhibited. He knew immediately it was his wife, and was on his feet and in the hall before his awareness had the chance to catch up. It was all instinct now. First he thought Angie might have been in trouble. Someone, a stalker, a violent murderer, had broken in and made a victim of her. The closer he got, climbing the stairs with uncanny speed, the more distinctive the sounds became, and the more he realized she wasn’t scared. She didn’t want this person to leave, and he wasn’t uninvited. Her unmitigated cries of pleasure and passion made that clear. She was enjoying herself. Immensely.

  In a fit of jealousy, Brian gripped the handle on the entry, twisted hard, and ripped it open. The effect was worse than the other night. That was just a nick. This time the handle punched straight through, and lodged three inches
deep into the wallboards. He wanted to scream, “Ah-ha!” but when the door flew open and the light from the hall spilled in, he saw an empty bed. Crumpled sheets and comforter. TV on with the volume turned down. A dark bedroom. He second-guessed his own sanity for a moment, but a moment was all he had. His wife, her lustful groans of acceptance and longing, started up again, the sounds all around him. He became dizzy trying to pinpoint the source, then decided to go to the hallway. There, the noises got louder. When he went downstairs, they were louder still. And when he opened the door to the basement, all doubt evaporated. She was down there. He was down there.

  Brian flicked on the solitary light in the subterranean lair and navigated the stairs with ease. No doubt in his mind where to go, he made a beeline for that hidden door. No doubt at all the sounds where coming from in there. He wedged his fingers in the gap between the door and the frame. It opened with little resistance. So little, it surprised him, and he ended up pulling it open faster than he’d intended. He fell forward a little, and caught himself just in time to get a good look into the absolute darkness. What he couldn’t see, though, he could hear. Moaning and grunting and whining. Angie, crying ‘yes, yes…yes!’ over and over until it drove Brian to madness. He had to go in, but it was so dark.