A Quiet Death

by Marcia Talley

  A whimper. ‘No.’

  ‘OK. I’m going to call for help. Hang in there.’

  I reached into the pocket of my jeans to retrieve my iPhone, but it wasn’t there. I patted all my pockets, front and back. No luck. I leaned against the doorframe, momentarily confused. I distinctly remembered slipping the phone into the right back pocket of my jeans when I got out of my car. Where the hell had it gone?

  The toilet paper, Hannah! Your daredevil dive across hall, like one of the Flying Wallendas, but without a net.

  Shit!

  I staggered down the hallway to the bathroom, sank to my knees and began pawing through the piles of debris that littered the area. My phone hadn’t landed in the Tupperware container of toothbrushes, dental floss and mint-flavored floss picks. It hadn’t slipped under a tipsy stack of Architectural Digests going back to 1978. It wasn’t nestled among the jumble of brand new towels and washcloths, still wearing their price tags, now strewn across the beige shag carpet.

  I collapsed against the wall in dismay. I had been traveling at high velocity when I took that header, and so had my iPhone. It could have ended up anywhere among all the rubbish.

  ‘I’ve lost my cell phone, Lilith. Do you have yours?’

  ‘It’s on the dresser, but I can’t reach it from here. My ankle’s pinned.’

  Great.

  At that point my choices were two. Leave Lilith and drive out to look for help, or stick around and try to rescue her myself. I decided to stay.

  ‘All right, don’t panic. Are you near the door?’

  ‘No, I’m over by the television. My ankle’s under the television!’

  ‘OK, stay put. I’m going to get this door open if it’s the last thing I do.’

  I stepped back and studied the situation. Lilith’s bedroom door opened in, so the hinges were on her side of the door. So much for Plan A: hammering out the hinge pins and simply removing the damn door.

  On to Plan B. It took me a few minutes to move a heap of mail-order catalogs aside – Harry & David’s Fruit of the Month Club! 1994! – clearing a spot in the hallway where I could sit down. I took a deep breath, braced my back against the wall, placed the bottom of both feet against the door and pushed, hard, so hard that my legs began to tremble. The door rewarded me by moving a scant two inches.

  I got down on my hands and knees and slid my hand inside the room, feeling around carefully for the obstruction, expecting something big, a chair for example, but the first thing I touched was a shoebox, then a book, then a pillow, then something square and flat that could have been a picture frame. Keeping my hand through the crack, I stood, feeling my way slowly up, higher and higher, obstruction after obstruction.

  ‘Tell me what I’m working against, Lilith!’

  ‘Shoeboxes, blankets, sheets and a bookcase, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Keep your head down!’ I wrapped my hand around something soft near the top of the pile and threw it as hard as I could toward the far corner of the room.

  One object down and how many thousands to go?

  I sent another object flying, then another. After every ten tosses, I shoved on the door. At the end of five minutes it had moved another half inch, no more.

  Breathing hard, I rested my throbbing forehead against the door in frustration. There had to be another way. ‘Lilith! Do you think I can get in through the bedroom window?’

  ‘Oh, Hannah, I’m sorry. The previous owners nailed the windows shut. And I never got around to, to . . .’

  ‘Never mind. Just keep your head down.’

  After a bit more work, the gap in the door had widened enough so that I could start pulling smaller items – shoes, handbags, cross-stitch embroidery kits – out into the hall with me. I was working on a decorative pillow which gave up the fight with a soft sucking sound, when somebody called out, ‘Anybody home?’

  I recognized the voice at once. Jim Hoffner, making his promised appearance. As much as I despised the man, I didn’t take the time to engage in any confrontational banter. ‘Hoffner! I need help. Lilith’s trapped inside her bedroom and the door is jammed. I can’t find my cell phone. Can you call 9-1-1?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I stood up, pillow in hand. I stared at Hoffner as he weaved down the hallway in my direction, his yellow windbreaker shining like a beacon in the dark. I took his ‘sorry’ to mean he didn’t have his phone.

  ‘OK, but you’re a strong guy. Help me break this door down, will you?’

  Hoffner simply glared. ‘Where are Chandler’s love letters?’

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ From her bedroom prison, Lilith sounded like a little girl lost.

  I ignored Lilith and answered Hoffner instead. ‘How the hell am I supposed to know? I returned the letters to Lilith. You can ask her that question yourself, after we get her out of there.’

  Hoffner’s eyes narrowed dangerously. When he raised a hand, I flinched. I pointed at my eye. ‘I’m already working on a hell of a shiner, Hoffner. You planning on giving me a matched pair?’

  Hoffner kicked a pile of wicker baskets out of his way and strong-armed past me. He began pounding on Lilith’s bedroom door. ‘Where the hell did you put those letters?’

  Her answer was simple. ‘In a safety deposit box.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘They’re mine, Mr Hoffner,’ she shouted. ‘Why should I tell you?’

  ‘Fuck!’ Hoffner spun on his heel and careened down the hall, scattering Lilith’s things in his wake. Instead of leaving by way of the kitchen, though, he hung a right into the living room where I could hear him crashing about in frustration, swearing, giving every profanity in his vast vocabulary an airing before giving up and leaving via the back door, the way he had come.

  No way Hoffner could make the mess in the living room any bigger than it already was, so I ignored his rampage and focused on the bedroom door. ‘I think he’s gone,’ I told Lilith after a while.

  The gap between the door and its frame was now about twelve inches. I tried to squeeze my body through sideways, sucking and tucking and regretting, when it didn’t work, that I’d eaten three pancakes for breakfast.

  Push, grab, toss.

  Push, grab, pull.

  I stopped work for a moment to catch my breath, inhaled deeply, smelled smoke. A neighbor burning early fall leaves, I thought, or cranking up the wood stove to ward off the morning’s chill.

  ‘Hannah? Are you still there?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  Just for the sake of variety, not because I thought it would work, I leaned against the bedroom door and tried shoving it with my back instead of my shoulder. Suddenly, something on the other side gave up the fight, the door yawned open another two inches and I was able to ease myself through.

  I found myself standing knee-deep in a jumble of boxes and loose clothing. The bookshelf I’d been working against lay askew, its top butted against the footboard of the bed.

  ‘Lilith? Where are you?’

  From around a lopsided aluminum rack hung with plastic-covered dry cleaning, a tiny hand waved like a flag of surrender. ‘Over here.’

  I found Lilith, wearing pink silk pajamas, lying on her side between the bed and the window. It was immediately obvious what had happened. The elderly television stand – a K-Mart blue light special, unless I missed my guess – had collapsed, sending a DVD player, a cascade of DVDs and the television itself forward, pinning her legs.

  I waded closer, slipping and sliding over plastic storage containers that shifted dangerously under my feet. The television was an ancient, wedge-shaped model, housing a giant cathode ray tube. It was still connected to the DVD player by old-style audio and video cables, snarled and tangled like a platter of colorful spaghetti. I kicked clothing aside until I was standing on solid floor, bent my knees, wrapped my arms around the massive set and tried to raise it. ‘Ooof!’ I said, defeated. ‘Damn thing weighs a ton.’

  Bracing my back against the footboard of the bed, I shove
d the television up and aside with my feet, freeing Lilith at long last.

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ Lilith breathed. She dragged herself into a sitting position.

  I kneeled down to check my friend for damage. Both her shins were scraped and bleeding, her left ankle purple and beginning to swell. I touched the ankle gently. ‘Can you move your foot?’

  Wincing, Lilith rotated her foot. ‘It hurts, but I guess it’s not broken.’

  ‘Let me help you out of here.’

  ‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Lilith wept as I pulled her up until she was leaning against me, her injured leg crooked behind her. ‘I didn’t want anybody to see this terrible house. Nobody will understand, and I can’t explain.’ Tears streamed down her face.

  ‘Can you put weight on your foot?’

  She tried it, yelped. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Bad idea,’ I said.

  ‘No, I can do it.’ She set her foot down experimentally, winced. ‘Lend me a shoulder?’

  With Lilith’s arm draped around my neck and my arm around her waist, we hobbled toward the bedroom door with me kicking obstructions aside like autumn leaves.

  ‘I smell smoke,’ Lilith said. With her free arm, she pointed. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Look!’

  Tendrils of smoke drifted through the narrow opening I’d made between the door and its frame.

  ‘Wait here.’ I escorted Lilith to the bed, shrouded by mountains of clothing except for a small, semi-circular nest she’d dug out for herself. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  Heart pounding, I eased into the hallway, stumbled along, following the smoke down the hall and into the kitchen.

  ‘Jesus!’ The passageway leading to the back door was engulfed in flames, the boxes it had contained burning brightly, buckling, collapsing in on one another. Flames licked greedily at the stove. Was it gas or electric? I couldn’t remember.

  On the floor near the refrigerator, a stray issue of Life magazine from December 1989 smoldered, its cover gradually blackened and curled, the image of a smiling Jane Pauley transformed bit by bit into a negative of gray ash.

  Did Lilith have a fire extinguisher? I gripped the back of a kitchen chair and laughed hysterically. Of course she had a fire extinguisher. Maybe two, maybe a hundred! Somewhere under all this crap!

  In the kitchen, the heat was intense. A wall of flame blocked the back door, our only exit. Somewhere in the basement, a smoke alarm began to scream.

  Keeping my head low, I made my way to the bathroom, scooping up a couple of towels along the way. I tossed the towels in the bathtub and turned on the shower, soaking them with water. When they were thoroughly wet, I returned to the bedroom where I’d left Lilith.

  ‘That crazy bastard set your kitchen on fire,’ I told her, my voice urgent. ‘Here, you may need this.’ I draped a wet towel over Lilith’s head, put one over my own head, then grabbed her by the hand. ‘We’ll have to go out through the front door!’ I croaked, dragging her down the cluttered hallway after me. ‘Keep low. Crawl if you have to.’

  When we reached the perimeter of the living room, I dropped her hand so that I could use both of mine to shove boxes aside. ‘Help me!’ I yelled when I noticed that Lilith had simply plopped herself down among the ruins. ‘We’ve got to get to the door!’

  ‘That’s my new coffee-maker!’ Lilith moaned as I sent one biggish box flying into the piano. Seemingly oblivious to the smoke and the heat, she held another box in her hands and was gazing at it, looking morose. ‘This is a tide clock!’

  I knocked the box out of her hands. ‘Lilith!’ I screamed. ‘Screw the tide clock! We have to get out of here!’

  It seemed like hours, but it probably took only a few adrenaline-fueled minutes for Lilith and me to clear a path to the front door. It was then that I understood what Hoffner had been doing while he was crashing around Lilith’s living room. He’d engaged the deadbolt. Stolen the key.

  Son of a bitch!

  I began searching desperately for an object I could hammer against the living-room window.

  Maybe all of Lilith’s junk was working in our favor, I thought as I floundered around, flinging boxes aside. I didn’t know how long it would take for the fire to consume all the magazines and newspapers that were stacked in the back hallway, spilling over into the kitchen. What worried me was the smoke, swirling, growing thicker, gathering in a dense black cloud that pushed against the ceiling, descending more quickly than I thought we had time for.

  ‘Lie down on the floor!’ I yelled to Lilith. I yanked the drapes off the windows, grabbed a lamp, shade and all, and took a swing. The lamp shattered, but the window remained intact. ‘Shit!’

  From her spot on the floor next to the front door, Lilith coughed. ‘Fireplace poker!’

  ‘Where?’

  With one hand covering her mouth, she used the other to point toward the far wall. With all of Lilith’s goddam rubbish in the way, the fireplace and its tools might as well have been in Siberia.

  My clothing clung to me, wet and hot. My skin smarted. I surveyed the room, eyes stinging, spotted what I thought might be a coffee table under a mound of quilts and thrashed my way toward it. I swept the quilts aside, pulled the table toward me and flipped it over. A cheap table, thank God, with screw-on legs. I wrenched off one of the legs and was crawling toward the window with my head protected by the wet towel when someone began pounding on the outside of the front door. ‘Mother! Mother! Are you in there?’

  ‘It’s Nick!’ Lilith croaked.

  I didn’t have a second to waste in wondering how Nicholas had gotten there. I pressed my cheek to the door. ‘Nick! The deadbolt’s thrown and we don’t have a key. Can you break down the door?’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Lilith cried. ‘There’s a spare key in the flowerpot!’

  ‘Did you hear that, Nick?’ I shouted. ‘Spare key! Flowerpot!’

  Nick heard. In seconds the deadbolt turned and the door flew open. A tsunami of air whooshed past us as we stumbled out of the burning house and collapsed on the brick steps, coughing until our lungs ached.

  Supporting himself on a cane, Nick backed away from us, limping painfully, face sweaty and streaked with soot. ‘We tried the front door, we tried the back! Burned my hand on the doorknob. Jesus, Jesus!’

  ‘It was Hoffner,’ I screamed, too preoccupied to wonder who ‘we’ were. ‘He’s crazy, Nick! He set the fire. Have you called 9-1-1?’

  Nick wore a soft neck brace, held on by Velcro straps, so he nodded with difficulty. ‘I came in a cab. The cabby called it in.’

  A metered cab all the way from Baltimore? How much did that cost, I wondered as I guided Lilith down the steps. I couldn’t help it. Must have been my New England genes, frugal down to the last molecule.

  After Nick had paid off the cab driver and insisted he be on his way, I said, ‘Thank you, Nick. If you hadn’t showed up . . .’ I let the sentence die.

  ‘I telephoned, Mother didn’t answer, and I got worried. Hoffner’d been acting so squirrelly.’

  Lilith and I staggered past Nick, across the driveway and on to the grass. With tears streaming down her face, Lilith watched her house burn. ‘My things! All my precious things!’

  I thought about all the ‘precious’ handbags, shoes and wicker baskets, all the indispensable toiletries, medical supplies and cross-stitch kits. The four Crock-Pots still in their original boxes, more than a dozen different flavors of Kraft salad dressing – from Asian Toasted Sesame to Zesty Italian – the sixteen-ounce bottles arranged on her kitchen window sill like mismatched chessmen. I grabbed Lilith’s arms in case she took it into her head to dash back into the inferno to try to save them. I dragged her across the lawn, forced her to sit down against a tree, well away from the blazing house.

  Out in the driveway, every door of Lilith’s Toyota stood open; its trunk yawned. Hoffner had torn her car apart looking for the letters. Mercifully, he hadn’t bothered with my Volvo.

  I was rubbing sweat and soot off my face with the
tail of my shirt, looking around, wondering where the bastard had gotten to. He had to be somewhere in the neighborhood, I knew, because his truck – GOTALAW – still sat at the edge of the drive not far from the tree where I had parked Lilith.

  I wondered if Hoffner knew about Lilith’s studio. No telling what he’d do to the studio – snap her brushes, squeeze paint out of the tubes, trash her paintings. If you had a giant yard sale, sold the entire contents of Lilith’s house, you wouldn’t equal the value of even one of her paintings, at least not in my opinion.

  A sudden movement caught my eye, a flash of yellow at the perimeter of the woods. ‘What’s out there?’ I asked Lilith who was eyeing Hoffner’s truck with murder on her mind.

  ‘A tool shed. Gardening stuff. A riding mower.’

  ‘Keep an eye on your mother,’ I told Nick. ‘Don’t let her anywhere near the house.’

  I was glancing around the yard, looking for something I could use as a weapon, when Jim Hoffner stalked into view, bold as brass, heading for his truck and a quick getaway.

  When he got within range, I flew at him like a banshee, attacking him with both fists, pummeling his chest like a jackhammer. ‘You bastard! You set that fire on purpose! We could have been burned alive!’

  Hoffner laughed, a manic, Halloween funhouse cackle that chilled me to the bone.

  Infuriated, I cocked my arm, but before I could get off a good left hook to his jaw, Hoffner grabbed me by the hair, twisted my head painfully, and threw me to the ground. His right hand dived beneath his jacket and, almost before I could blink, I was staring up into the business end of what looked like a 9mm Glock.

  ‘Bitch!’ The arm holding the big black gun didn’t waver.

  ‘Hoffner, don’t!’ Nick yelled.

  Hoffner’s lip curled nastily. ‘I have to, Aupry. Thanks to you and your big fat mouth, she knows.’

  Lilith struggled to her feet, her eyes wild, wide. ‘Stop! Is everybody crazy?’

  Nick limped toward Hoffner. ‘You can’t, Hoffner! Hannah saved my life. She called the paramedics, she held my hand, she prayed with me, for Christ’s sake, when we both thought I was dying.’