Stone Cold

by Dean Crawford

  A wide, sweeping staircase ascended opposite the front door to the upper rooms, while to her left and right were doorways to adjoining rooms. Either side of the staircase were passages leading toward the rear of the house. The foyer itself was larger than her and Stephen’s apartment and much higher. An ornate chandelier style light, with faux candles, dominated the ceiling above her. Kathryn reached out for a bank of switches on the wall near the alarm system, and the chandelier glowed into life and illuminated the grandly decorated foyer.

  Dark wood panels, tastefully subtle magnolia painted walls, modern art canvasses adorning the corridors. A bouquet of flowers on a glass table, a couple of expensive looking American Contemporary Art magazines tossed casually alongside the vase in the way that nobody ever does unless they actually want people to see them.

  Kathryn followed the left hand passage, her sneakers making no sound on the polished tiles as she moved past the staircase. To her left, an open door led into a spacious office where a widescreen monitor stood on a mahogany desk with a wireless keyboard. No wires or cables. A roller–ball mouse was set into the surface of the desk alongside a glossy black phone. Everything polished and perfectly aligned, more like a show home than a working office.

  On the wall, a picture of Stephen and his wife on a paradise beach somewhere, him in shorts and shirt, her in a long, flowing dress that looked as though it were some kind of native attire, like a sarong, all flowing waterfall shades of blue and green that matched her eyes. Kathryn studied the image of the woman for some time before moving on.

  Kathryn moved into the kitchen at the rear. Granite worktops, black–tiled floors and ice–white cabinets and décor. Everything was flawlessly polished, dusted and tidied away. Kathryn figured the place was disinfected every day and probably fumigated by the Centre for Disease Control once a week. Even the chiller was bigger than Kathryn’s shower.

  She crossed the kitchen and followed the other corridor back toward the foyer, passing on her left a doorway that led into a beautiful games room. A billiard table in the centre near an ornate chess–board with carved ivory figurines of goblins, kings, dragons and princesses.

  Kathryn walked back into the foyer, an unsettling nausea poisoning her innards as she turned left and walked into a grand dining room. A long, immaculately polished table with ten seats: four down each side and two at each end. Lovely soft carpets, indirect lighting casting soft patches of light across the walls, a mirror–polished serving set arrayed in the centre of the table.

  Kathryn stared at the table for a moment and then moved back across the foyer and into the room on the opposite side of the house.

  In Kathryn’s apartment, Stephen had once used a cushion to demonstrate how it was possible, just, to swing a cat without touching the walls. In Stephen’s other house, she would have been able to demonstrate how it was possible, just, to throw a cat the length of the room.

  A giant, cream leather sofa and two matching armchairs were still dwarfed by the wide open lounge that led onto broad French windows at the far end of the room. A faux mantelpiece contained a fireplace into which was set a glossy–black screen that she guessed was probably some kind of electrical fireplace.

  Above it, set into the wall, was what looked like a three–thousand inch plasma screen. Miles more soft carpet, a smoked–glass coffee table large enough to lay down on, scattered with more sickeningly modern art catalogues and magazines and a telephone wired to what looked like a modem or similar. A canvass was mounted on one wall that looked like thirty deranged chimpanzees had hurled coloured paints at it for half an hour, yet was probably worth more than Kathryn earned in a year.

  Kathryn felt a pinch of grief sting the corners of her eyes as she turned away and walked back to the staircase. She switched off the lights, just in case somebody showed up, and stared up at the staircase for several long minutes before she finally walked up the steps one at a time and turned onto the landing.

  She could see in the half–light that there were several bedrooms, most with the doors shut, but two large doors opened out onto what could only be the main bedroom. She walked across to it and stood in the doorway.

  Like everything else in the damned place it was overbearingly large. The bed was big enough for Venus Williams to practice serving on. An on–suite that Kathryn could not be bothered to look at was visible through an open doorway and looked to be larger than her bathroom anyway. Walk–in wardrobes featured on both sides of the bed.

  Kathryn walked across to one of them, the side that she knew belonged to Stephen’s wife by the romance novel and small box of tissues on her bedside table. Kathryn slid the doors open and like the Tardis it opened out and a light came on automatically to illuminate its cavernous interior.

  Clothes, clothes and more clothes above endless orderly ranks of shoes. Enough fabric to dress the population of Spain, enough footwear to make a queen blush. Kathryn edged into the wardrobe, ran one hand along the impossible soft and clean dresses and business suits hanging in their hundreds. As she surveyed them, a flash of blue caught her eye. She moved toward it and parted the dresses to reveal waterfall colours flowing down a dress.

  The dress that she had seen in the photograph, in the office downstairs.

  Kathryn ran her hands down the fabric a few times, and then with a flourish she grabbed it off the hangar and rolled it up under her arm.

  The temptation to take fire and sword to the entire house was overwhelming, to burn it to the ground as she danced in the garden before the raging inferno of Stephen’s secret life while singing happy songs and laughing manically as the police arrived. Maybe there was an expensive car in the double garage she had noticed on the way in, something that she could douse in paint or drag her keys down. Or perhaps she could take a chainsaw to Stephen’s no–doubt equally expensive clothing collection.

  On an impulse she hurried across the room to the other wardrobe and yanked it open.

  Smaller than the first, a light came on to reveal a few rows of suits, most of them dark in colour. A half–dozen pairs of polished shoes along with countless sneakers. Some jeans and shirts, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Only one thing caught her eye.

  One of the suits had two thick, gold bars high up on the shoulder. She stepped toward it and pushed the suit aside to see a pair of gold wings pinned to the breast. Above the suit, on a shelf, was a smart looking cap with identical wings embroidered onto the front.

  Kathryn blinked. For all the world, the suits looked like the kind that an airline pilot would wear. For a few moments she wondered just how much money Stephen must be making in his other life, and the means by which he was able to call her from cities many hundreds of miles away and yet burn no fuel getting there was finally explained.

  Finally, Kathryn understood. Stephen was not seeing another woman: it was Kathryn who was the other woman. Kathryn was the affair.

  Kathryn turned and walked out of the wardrobe, and then moved across to Stephen’s wife’s bedside table. She opened it, and inside lay what was unmistakeably a woman’s diary. Excitement pulsed through Kathryn’s stomach as she lifted the diary out, and she made herself comfortable on the edge of the bed and opened the first page.

  It was perhaps a mark of the woman that there were no doodles of flowers, or clouds, or any sort of absent–minded sketches that usually adorned a woman’s diary, including Kathryn’s. No. This diary was more like an itinerary, a series of formal lists detailing events as though they were being spilled out in binary code.

  Sold two canvasses, both below auction price.

  Lunch at Travelli’s. Melinda worried about her kids, poor souls, both poorly with flu.

  Dinner out, alone again. DH on late duty, probably. Did not enjoy being leered at by men in the bar so left early.

  Kathryn spent almost an hour leafing through the pages of the diary, delighting in its revelations. She reached the end and closed it just in time to hear the distant sound of a car pulling up outside the house
as a flare of headlights swept through the bedroom.

  ***

  25

  Kathryn’s heart leaped up into her throat.

  She rushed out of the bedroom, only just remembering to shut the wardrobes behind her as she ran for the staircase. She was half way down when she realised that there was no chance that she would be able to slip out of the house before whoever it was outside got to the front door.

  Half way down the staircase and with panic running like poison through her veins she heard the slamming of a car door that sounded as though it came from right outside the front of the house.

  Kathryn whirled and dashed back up the staircase and then ran out of sight as she heard the sudden crunch of keys in the front door and it swung open behind her. She crouched down on the landing and tried not to breathe as she heard footsteps on the tiles of the foyer downstairs.

  She heard the front door slam loudly and a set of keys crash down onto the glass table in the foyer. The soft beeping of the alarm system was silenced by what sounded like angry jabbing at the keys and a muffled shut the fuck up.

  Stephen.

  Kathryn, her heart still pounding in her chest, huddled over the stolen dress she still gripped in her hands as she heard the figure below her step away from the alarm. Moments later the foyer and landing were flooded with light as the chandelier and what seemed like every other light in the house blossomed brightly into life.

  Kathryn remained still, forcing herself not to move and perhaps betray her presence. She had to make a decision.

  The first, and most honourable choice, was to stand at the top of the stairs with her hands on her hips and demand to know what the hell was going on. Play the stricken fiancée, the enraged and wronged girlfriend, the downtrodden, insulted woman of wrath. Who was also the illegal trespasser and near–lunatic.

  She scratched that option off of her list. There was no telling what Stephen would do. In fact, she realised with some alarm, she knew virtually nothing about Stephen. He had been living two lives for years and she had never known a thing until now.

  Kathryn’s train of thought led her to option three: get the fuck out of the house as fast as she could and never, ever come back again.

  The sound of heavy, angry footfalls coming up the staircase galvanised her into action. Kathryn withdrew silently along the landing and realised that she had nowhere left to go but back into the master bedroom.

  She bit her lip in frustration as she hurried back into the darkened room and looked desperately about for somewhere to hide. The underside of the immense bed looking wonderfully inviting, as did the walk–in wardrobe of Stephen’s wife. Indecision swamped her mind as panic constricted her throat and clenched her stomach in a painful spasm. Kathryn shuffled around the bed and away from the door.

  To her horror, in the darkness, she realised that she had not shut the wife’s walk–in wardrobe door properly and that a sliver of light was visible beneath it. Kathryn gasped, but there was no time now to reach the door and hide inside, or even shut the door properly. Stephen was walking along the landing, breathing heavily as though irate. Kathryn dropped onto the thickly carpeted floor and rolled beneath the bed, holding her breath as Stephen’s feet appeared in the bedroom doorway.

  There was a brief hesitation and then she heard his voice ring out like a claxon.

  ‘You stupid bitch!’

  Kathryn clenched her eyes shut tightly as she realised that Stephen must have seen her. The light in the bedroom burst into life and she flinched as Stephen’s feet stormed toward the bed.

  Kathryn opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘How many times did I tell you?’ Stephen growled.

  Kathryn’s mouth hung open in silence as Stephen stormed past the bed and slammed the wardrobe door shut. ‘Close the fucking wardrobe doors!’

  Kathryn held onto the breath she had taken as Stephen’s feet turned and walked back to the bed. She saw him stand there for a moment, heard what sounded like a tie being ripped off and tossed onto the bed. Then a shirt.

  Stephen’s pants dropped to his ankles and he lifted his feet one by one and removed them. Then his socks were torn off and finally his shorts were flung across the room.

  ‘Useless bastards,’ she heard him utter. ‘Useless fucking bastards, the lot of them.’

  Stephen turned and padded away toward the en–suite, his bare feet slapping the tiles as he walked in. Kathryn let the breath she had been holding slip from her lips as she heard the sound of the shower being turned on. Slowly, carefully, she began to edge toward the far side of the bed, determined to remain concealed as much as possible until she could make her dash for the bedroom door and out of the house.

  She heard a clatter of bathroom implements being scattered angrily about as she crawled from beneath the bed and hunkered down alongside it. She peeked over the top and saw clouds of steam billowing from the en–suite, Stephen’s clothes scattered across the bed along with an open briefcase filled with cell phone, spare clothes, notebooks and what looked like some kind of pills.

  Kathryn edged toward the briefcase and reached out for the pills.

  The cell phone suddenly trilled and vibrated on the bed as though screaming for Stephen. Kathryn almost yelped with fright and shoved her hand over her mouth as she heard Stephen shout from the en–suite.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  She heard Stephen’s feet slap against the tiles and she ducked down flat behind the far side of the bed again as she heard him burst back into the bedroom. Stephen stormed across to the bed and she heard him rifling through the briefcase for his cell phone. His heavy breathing and irritation vanished as she heard him take a single, deep breath.

  ‘Hello?’

  Calm. Controlled. Accessible. It was as though he had transformed into a different man in the blink of an eye. Kathryn, laying now as flat as she could behind the bed, was surprised to hear the warbling voice of the caller loud and clear through the bedroom – Stephen must have switched his phone to speaker.

  ‘I received the report about yesterday’s flight, captain, and I’m afraid we’re extremely concerned about what happened. There’s talk of the incident being investigated.’

  She listened as Stephen replied.

  ‘I’m very sorry for what happened, but I got turned away from work today because of it. Surely that’s an overreaction?’

  ‘Not these days it isn’t. Health and safety officials from the Federal Aviation Administration are already crawling all over the ATC tapes. They’re advising us to suspend you from flying duties until their investigation is complete.’

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary, it was a procedural omission, nothing more.’

  ‘That’s not how it looks here, captain,’ the voice countered. ‘You had twenty six passengers aboard when you ignored both an ATC command and your co–pilot’s warning and turned into the path of incoming traffic.’

  ‘I can appreciate that sir, but…’

  ‘We can’t afford these kinds of lapses in concentration, not from somebody with your levels of experience. It puts the airline in a bad light.’

  ‘It’s the first time it’s happened in my career, sir,’ Stephen protested.

  ‘Yes it is, you have an unblemished flight history and we want it to stay that way.’

  ‘It will, sir.’

  ‘Good, I’m glad you agree. We believe that it’s best for now if you’re temporarily suspended from flying duties until this is all over.’

  Kathryn heard Stephen snatch the cell phone from the bed and answer it directly.

  ‘That’s the last thing that I want, sir.’

  More warbling down the line. Stephen sighing heavily.

  ‘I’d rather not be sitting here all day, sir. No, I agree, the sooner this is all over the better things will be but…’ More warbling and then a resigned sigh. ‘Yes sir, of course.’

  More warbling, decisive this time, abrupt and firm.

  ‘Yes sir, I understand. Just a few
days. Yes, I’ll take it easy, thanks for your concern.’

  Stephen shut the phone off and tossed it onto the bed. ‘Asshole!’

  Kathryn, her head turned to look beneath the bed, saw Stephen turn and storm away toward the en–suite. Moments later the door slammed shut.

  Kathryn levered herself up onto her hands and knees and edged her way around the bed until she was within six feet of the bedroom door. She listened to the noises coming from the en–suite and heard the splash and slap of water on skin as she reached the end of the bed.

  Her eyes caught on the briefcase and she saw the pills she had glimpsed earlier.

  Kathryn had never known Stephen to take pills before and certainly not to carry any around with him. She leaned over the bed and peered at the bottle, and realised that it was not a bottle of pills at all but a medicine of some kind, a fluid inside. The label was printed with a name she did not recognise: Pancuronium bromide.

  Alongside the bottle, she saw a pair of syringes still in their sealed plastic surgical bags. She peered at them curiously, wondering what on Earth Stephen might be using them for, when she caught sight of a tablet computer lying inside the briefcase.

  Kathryn reached for it and quickly tapped the power button. To her relief it was still switched on, the screen coming to life as she opened the Internet and tapped in a website address. As quickly as she could, she accessed the page and logged in. Immediately, she then logged out and closed the window. She closed the lid and slid the tablet back into place in the briefcase.

  The splatter of water from the en–suite was abruptly silenced.

  Go, now!

  Kathryn lurched to her feet and hurried out of the bedroom and along the landing. She turned and descended the staircase toward the foyer, saw the front door ahead of her. The alarm system was off, deactivated when Stephen had returned home. She rushed for the door and yanked it open, felt a rush of fresh cool air wash over her as she staggered out of the house, closing the door quietly behind her before running down the garden path and out into the night.