There wasn’t a second she didn’t feel like she was running out of breath. But as long as Angie didn’t look at the body, she could keep from getting sick. There was the smell, sure—the putrid cross between rotting meat and sewage, this strange overwhelming sweetness almost like perfume—but it was the sight of him. Knowing the source of the smell made it unbearable. She was trapped in a room with a dead man. There was no way to couple with something like that other than to push it as far from her mind as she could. Force herself not to look. Believe it’s not there.
As soon as she’d heard the bolt latch on the outside of the door, she knew she’d hear Dwayne Brewer coming when he returned. The thought of doing what she was told, trusting him that everything was going to be okay, never crossed her mind. If he was the man who killed Darl, if he was capable of something like that, then he was not someone to take at his word.
The room was dark and damp and as she made her way around the space with the lamp, she checked for anything she could use. Shelving lined all but the back wall, a freestanding set of shelves pieced together from apple crates in the center of the room. Ball jars loaded with vegetables—green beans, okra, corn and tomato succotash, pickled cucumbers and onions—sat dusty on all but the pine slab where Dwayne had set the groceries. Loose boards leaned against one corner of the room, a ripped bag of nails at the base of the wall, a bucket filled with old rags and a rusted section of chain.
Watching the flame waiver inside the lamp, an idea hit her and she took one of the jars off the shelf, popped the seal, and emptied a quart of beans onto the floor. The oil lamps were lined up on the pine shelf, their wicks extinguished to save oil. She took one of the lamps and slid the globe free. In a second, she had the burner out where she could empty the oil from the font into the jar. All she needed now was a torch, something she could light when she heard him at the door. A scrap section of two-by-twos rested with the boards in the corner of the room, and she wrapped its end with a piece of rag and soaked it with oil. Emptying one more lamp into the jar filled the glass to the brim. She’d keep these things together, and when she heard him, she’d light the torch. Set him on fire like a brush pile.
There was nothing to do now but wait, and that was the hardest part. The unanswerable question. The waiting. How long would she be trapped in that room? How long would the food and water last? How long had she been there already? How long before someone started looking for her, and how long after that before they found her, and what if they didn’t? What if this was where she was going to die? The questions and the unknowing boiled into panic and Angie fell against the wall and buried her face in her hands. She tried to push those questions from her mind because hope was the only thing to prevent breaking and she refused to break. Not with this child in her belly. Not as long as there was breath in her body.
It had surprised her how happy she was when that first pregnancy test she took in the Walgreens bathroom came back with that little plus sign, and when the next three came back the same, and when her doctor looked at her and said, “Yeah, you’re pregnant,” with a stoic expression because he wasn’t sure how she’d take it because not everybody took it well. Despite how scared she was, she was happy.
She hadn’t told Calvin, and wasn’t sure how he’d react. She hoped he’d be happy, but how could she be sure? How could she be certain of anything anymore? If what Dwayne Brewer said was true, everything she thought she knew lay in a heap of ashes. How could the same man who opened his doors to her so that she could go back to school be capable of covering up a killing? How could he bury a secret like that inside himself? Again, she tried desperately to push all those questions away. She was going to be a mother. She kept telling herself that—I’m going to be a mother. Saying it aloud, “I’m going to be a mother.” There was nothing else now. Nothing mattered but the child.
She was tired and it was hard to keep her eyes open, but she was scared to sleep. If she dozed off for a second, she might miss her only chance. The thing about fighting sleep, though, is that the mind has its own idea. Delirium starts to build and you tell yourself you can close your eyes for a second and so you do. You open your eyes and everything’s fine and so you close them again, this time drifting a bit further. No one means to fall asleep behind the wheel. It just happens. And that’s where Angie was headed, washing between wake and dream, and soon she was almost there.
Suddenly she was roused by a sound moving across the floor on the far side of the room. With her eyes adjusted to how the dim lamplight pulsed against the cobble walls, she saw a shadow race across the floor. A rat ran the length of the wall, hopped onto the man’s shoulder, and disappeared into a crack between the stones. For a second she wondered if she’d imagined it, if that animal was some sleep-deprived vision. But as she stared at the hole where the rat had vanished she could see the space was real. There was a dark gap cut between the stones where mortar should’ve been.
If he can get in, then I can get out.
Pushing herself up from the floor, she crossed the room and knelt to look at where the rat had burrowed into the wall. She pressed her hand flat against the stone and felt around in the hole, a space slightly bigger than a walnut, cold and wet against her fingers. Scratching with her fingernails, the mortar crumbled away into sand. She clawed at it then, raking her fingertips against the coarse concrete until her nails chipped, her skin rubbed raw and numb. When she couldn’t use her hands, she used one of the nails from across the room. She gripped the nail like a knife and dug at the mortar, relentless and steadfast. Her knuckles were bloodied but eventually she chipped an inch or more deep all the way around the stone.
She scanned the room for something to pry the rock loose from the wall. All that she found was scrap wood, a long section of two-by-six split down the middle with bent nails. Bracing the corner of the board against a cobblestone edge, she kicked down hard and split the board in half. One end was full, the other a jagged shard that she stabbed as far back into the hole as she could to try and leverage the rock free. She worked the stone from different angles, but the wall was ungiving and as she strained with all her might the wood snapped in her hands and a splinter pierced clean through the ring finger of her left hand. Blood ran to her wrist, trickled down her forearm, and dripped from her elbow. She held her wrist in disbelief and fell to the ground with her legs tucked beneath her. Her eyes filled with tears and without control she cried out in pain.
There was something that settled in the pit of her stomach right then, something that said, Quit crying and get up. Grabbing the splinter by its base, she grit her teeth and ripped it free. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her hand, the blood puddling in her open palm, but she buried the pain deep and didn’t make another sound. She wiped the blood against her skirt and turned back to the wall. You’re going to get out of here for this child, she thought, the world having taken on a singular meaning. Nothing mattered outside of what she carried.