It’s time to go home, Kate thought, after Alan had finally left. Back to England. She placed a hand on the kitchen countertop to steady herself.
She felt George’s voice rising in her head, his words starting to form, and she managed to stop him from speaking to her by pacing the kitchen floor.
I should never have left the country. I should never have left my parents’ house. Not to go to university, not to go on holiday in the Lake District, not to go to London, and definitely not to travel to Boston. Bad things happen to me.
Bad people happen to me.
Kate poured wine into a water glass. She carried it from room to room in the apartment, checking window locks and looking into closets. Her hands shook with adrenaline, and her heart tripped along in her chest, but she was okay. One more night in this cavernous apartment filled with shadows, and she could head home—back to her parents’ house—never to leave again. She checked the front door lock and looked out into the quiet hallway. A murderer had stood outside Audrey Marshall’s door with the intention to kill her. And then he’d gone inside and done it. Killed her with his knife. Mutilated her.
She looked for a long time out into the hall, contorted by the peephole into a tunnel with curved walls. She expected someone to turn the corner and make an appearance at any moment. Sanders the cat. George Daniels back from the dead. Corbin Dell back from England. Alan stalking her from the front door instead of from the back. But nothing happened. The well-lit, carpeted hall remained empty.
She went online and looked at airfares for returning to London. She began an e-mail to her parents telling them she was coming home, but didn’t finish it. She could do it tomorrow, after she booked something, when it was all finalized.
She looked at the Rachael Chess articles again online. That must have been who Alan was talking about when he mentioned the other woman who had been killed. So Jack had been doing his research as well.
She went back to the kitchen to get more wine, but the bottle was empty, and she poured herself a glass of milk instead. She brought it to the den and turned on the television. The old movie channel was playing a film that she knew pretty well, because it was one of her father’s favorites. I Know Where I’m Going! starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. She curled up on the couch, rested her head on two oversized pillows, and attempted to let the black-and-white images soothe her. She kept thinking of Alan, though, behind the door in the kitchen. Seeing him, visibly drunk, standing there, Kate thought she was about to die. It was George Daniels all over again—another man come to kill her. Although George, for all his rage and craziness, had never been a drinker. In fact, whenever Kate had more than a couple of glasses of wine, he’d start to get mad at her, asking her repeatedly why she needed to drink so much.
In the film, the woman played by Wendy Hiller was desperately trying to get to the Scottish island where her fiancé was, but a storm had trapped her on the coast, where she’d fallen in love with another man. She was trying anyway, in a small boat, and a whirlpool was pulling her to her death. Kate pulled the comforter on top of her. The movie ended, and another immediately started up. Pygmalion. Another Wendy Hiller. She thought of her father, who would love this movie channel that only showed old films. She started watching the film, but she had to pee, and her jeans were uncomfortably tight. She forced herself to get up and walk through the living room and past the kitchen to the bedroom, where she changed into pajamas, peed in the en suite bathroom, and brushed her teeth. She passed back through the bedroom, where the strong moonlight through the window cast strange shadows in the twisted sheets of the bed. This apartment is haunted, she thought, and walked briskly back toward the den, lit in flickering black and white from the massive television.
Leslie Howard was standing in the rain, secretly listening to Wendy Hiller’s cockney accent as she was selling flowers.
Kate didn’t remember falling asleep. It felt as though one minute she was watching the television, wondering if any of the actors were still alive, and then her eyes must have shut, and she was suddenly in the world of the film, the voices part of her dream. The couch was swallowing her, and she was on the brink of sliding into the true blackness of sleep when the dream shifted, and there was a hand pressed against her face, and she felt herself rising back up from the depths, jerking awake, but the hand was still there, pressed hard against her mouth, another hand gripping her shoulder.
This is real, she thought and began to struggle, fully awake.
The room was dark, the television still on, and the man who held her was making shushing sounds. It wasn’t Alan. She could see razor-cut blondish hair and the line of a square jaw, and she could smell his sweat, stale and powdery. Her heart was beating so fast that her chest hurt, and tears sprang to her eyes. The man about to kill her was a stranger, although he was vaguely familiar, as though she’d passed him on the street or seen him in a dream.
He was speaking in a low whisper. “Kate, please listen to me. It’s Corbin. It’s your cousin. I am not going to hurt you. I need you to be very quiet. There’s a man in this apartment and he’s a very bad man. Shhhh. If you scream, or make a noise, he’s going to come in here. I need you to hide, and then I can go deal with him. Nod if you understand.”
Kate shook her head. Only half the words had made any sense to her. Was it really Corbin, or was he lying? How was he here, in the apartment? She thought of trying to bite his hand, but it was pressed hard against her mouth, her lips flattened against her teeth. She could see the man’s eyes, darting furiously over the edge of the couch toward the dark interior of the rest of the apartment. He looked scared. It is Corbin, she thought, recognizing him from pictures she’d seen.
“Shhh,” he said again. “You have to trust me, or we are both going to die. Do you understand?” His voice had become more urgent, cracking almost, and Kate nodded this time, deciding that she needed to do what he said. He’d either kill her or he wouldn’t. It was happening again—not with Alan, the way she’d thought earlier—but with some man she had never met.
After feeling Kate nod, Corbin looked her in the eyes. He loosened the hand around her mouth, but didn’t remove it. “Do you believe me? You have to believe me.”
She nodded more, and took a deep breath.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” Corbin said, but his eyes were still darting toward the hallway. “Do you know about the closet in here?”
“No,” Kate said in a cracked whisper through his hand.
“There’s a false back in it. It’s where my dad kept valuable things. Press your hand all the way to the right and push. You’ll hear a click and it will swing open. There’s enough room for you to hide there.”
Kate, not even realizing it, was shaking her head again, saying “no” into Corbin’s hand. He continued:
“Just stay there until I come back to get you. If I don’t come back, then just stay there longer. He won’t find you, and eventually he’ll give up. You have to trust me, okay?”
“I can’t,” Kate said. She felt tears sliding down her face. She breathed in deeply through her nose, her chest swelling. She thought for a moment she might start laughing.
“You have to,” Corbin said. “You’ll be safe. I promise.”
She looked at him and for the first time they made eye contact. It was like finding a handhold on a sheer cliff. Making a decision, she nodded, calmly, and Corbin took his hand all the way off her face.
“Who is it?” she asked. “Who’s here?”
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have a lot of time.”
She followed him to the closet, her numb legs somehow operating independent of the rest of her body. He gently pushed her into its interior, filled with dry-cleaned suits hanging in plastic. “Just push, all the way to the right. You’ll hear the click,” he repeated.
“Okay,” she said, the sound of her voice coming from far away.
Before shutting the door, he whispered: “I am going to save you.” And then she was enveloped in darkness. She did as he said and pressed her hand against the back wall. It gave a little, clicked, and swung open. She stepped inside and felt around. There was a small metal handle and she pulled the door back in toward her, but not all the way. The small enclosure smelled of untreated wood and musty paperbacks. She felt as though she’d stepped back through time, into that other closet in another country, another madman on the other side, only this time she was calmer. No, it wasn’t exactly a sense of calm. It was resignation. It was over. The world had been trying to kill her in the worst way possible, and now it was finally going to do it. She gave in, the calmness spreading through her. She even pulled the false door all the way closed; the handle turned and she knew she could get out again, but maybe it didn’t matter. She slid her hands along the wood. The space was the width of the closet, wider than her outstretched arms, but it couldn’t have been more than a foot deep. With her back pressed tight against the rear wall, her breasts grazed the false door. A wave of unreality passed over, and she welcomed it. And she waited.
She listened. She could hear her own breathing and her heart in her chest, but nothing else.
How had Corbin gotten back to America? Or had he never left? No, he had left and gone to London, because Martha had seen him, hadn’t she?
He’d come back because he’d killed Audrey and now he was going to kill her, and this hiding in the closet, this other man, was all part of some elaborate game he was playing.
Or could there really be someone else in the apartment?
Was it Alan, still drunk, who’d found another way to sneak in?
Or was it finally George Daniels? Kate felt the laugh again, rising up through her lungs, and she held it down by tensing her jaw, her neck muscles almost seizing up. George Daniels back from the dead, and in another country. In some ways, she wouldn’t be surprised. As she always said to herself: he was always with her, always along for the ride.
His voice in her head: You are going to die in a closet, Kate. Giggling.
She closed her eyes, and nothing changed. The world was still black.
She tried not to think of her parents and how they would feel when they heard she’d been murdered.
She thought of Alan. Twenty-four hours earlier she’d been in his bed, allowing herself to feel something. She’d been happy, celebratory almost, that she was finally with another man. Maybe that was what George Daniels had been waiting for all along, waiting for her to finally cheat on him, so that he could finally give her what she deserved. Maybe he really was alive, and the police, and her parents, and everyone else had lied to her. For a horrible instant, she believed it.
And then she heard something. A human sound, like a grunt. Or maybe it was a scream that had suddenly been cut off. She waited, barely breathing, but there was nothing else, just the sound of the building humming and sighing around her. And suddenly she wondered if she’d heard anything at all. She allowed herself to take a breath, sipping at the thin air in the closet. She cracked the false door open a little, relieved that it hadn’t locked her in. She tapped her fingertips together, felt a sharp pain when she tapped her swollen thumb, the splinter still embedded deep in the pad. She put the thumb in her mouth and tore at the skin with her teeth, eventually sucking the splinter out. She wiped the blood down her shirt. Removing the splinter had made her feel sane for a brief moment, but now she wondered how much longer she could stay in this closet. What was happening out there?
She formed a plan, just to see how it would feel in her head. She would push her way out of the closet and move as swiftly and quietly as possible from the den to the hallway, then from the hallway to the living room and foyer, then she’d go through the door and run as fast as she could to the front desk. It was a big apartment. Corbin, or whoever else was in here, might be somewhere else. She might get free. And if she didn’t? Then at least she wasn’t cowering in this closet anymore.
Her thumb continued to drip blood, and she sucked at it some more, actually savoring the taste in her mouth.
She’d often wondered about the night that George Daniels had tracked her down in the Lake District and sealed her in the closet. She wondered whether, even if the door hadn’t been blocked, she’d have been able to leave. Not while he was still out there, but after she heard the gun go off. She’d been trapped, and there was nothing for her to do but wait, but even if the door had been open, Kate sometimes thought that she’d have stayed there forever. She’d crouched into a ball, like an injured animal, and hadn’t moved, not even when the frightened copper had opened the door and reached in to take her out. But now she had a chance to run, and she knew she needed to take it, for better or for worse.
She swung the false back door all the way open and stepped into the main space of the closet, pressing her ear to the door. She listened for a minute but heard nothing. She put her hand on the knob. She breathed in through her nose and blew out through her mouth.
She tried to remember a prayer from childhood, but all she could remember was what she learned from her grandmother to say at bedtime. She said it now, to herself, her eyes closed:
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And other things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us
Calmed by the words, her grandmother’s voice in her head, she swung the door open and stepped out of the closet into the still-flickering light of the den.