Chapter 15
950 Words
Autumn lay in the guest room and could not sleep.
It was past midnight and the house had gone completely still around her. She knew its sounds by now—every single one of them. The way the heating system ticked when it kicked on. The quiet knock of the pipes somewhere in the walls. The faint hum that came up through the floor from somewhere below, a sound she'd stopped trying to explain away two weeks ago.
She knew all of it. And none of it was what was keeping her up.
Her brain just wouldn't stop.
She thought about her grandmother. Clara Calloway was seventy-one years old, and she lived alone in a small white house in upstate New York, checking her email every Sunday on the old laptop Autumn had set up for her two years ago.
She was patient about how emailing worked. She didn't understand it entirely but she checked it every week without fail, and if there were messages from Autumn, she read them carefully and sometimes printed them out.
She would have gotten the emails Gabriel sent from Autumn's account. She would have read them and believed them because why wouldn't she? They would have sounded like Autumn. He was good enough at everything else so he would have been good at that too.
Her grandmother thought she was somewhere in Europe right now. She thought Autumn was safe and busy and having the kind of adventure she'd always wanted her granddaughter to have. She had no idea that Autumn was fifteen minutes away, in a house with sealed windows and locked doors, lying awake in the dark trying not to fall apart.
Autumn pressed her face into the pillow. She gave herself a minute. That was the rule she'd made for herself somewhere around day three, when she'd realized that falling apart wasn't an option but pretending she didn't want to fall apart wasn't sustainable either.
She gave herself sixty seconds to feel all of it. The fear and the grief and the rage. She let it all come up and then breathe it out and put it back down.
She counted the seconds, breathing in and out. Then she put it all away and went back to thinking.
Autumn opened her eyes in the dark, thinking about Claire Donovan again and the lake behind the trees.
She'd seen it through the window in the far guest room, the one she wasn't supposed to use—a flat grey shape between the bare trunks, maybe two hundred meters from the back of the house. Frozen now. She'd noticed it early on and filed it away. She was always filing things away.
She lay still and let the thought complete itself. Claire Donovan. A lit student. Twenty-two. December. A lake behind a private property.
Her heart was going too fast. She made herself breathe through it.
She didn't sleep after that. She just lay there in the dark, flat on her back, eyes open, and she waited for morning with the particular kind of patience that isn't calm at all—it's just fear wearing a calmer face.
Something was in that basement. She was sure of it the way you're sure of things that your whole body already knows before your mind catches up. She'd known it since the first night she heard that hum through the floor. She'd known it and she hadn't let herself think it all the way through because thinking it all the way through meant accepting what it might mean.
She was accepting it now.
The question wasn't whether to get into the basement. The question was when and how.
She thought about the locks. She'd tested every door in the house that she could reach without it looking deliberate. The front door. The back door. The windows. The panel door in the hallway. The locked door off the kitchen. She'd handled every one of them carefully, rationally, and filed the information away. She knew which ones were deadbolts and which ones were coded and which ones used keys she hadn't found.
The silver key in the drawer. She'd memorized what it looked like without taking it. She'd estimated the size. She'd looked at every keyhole in the house and matched it in her head.
There was a door at the far end of the hall, past the stairs, that she'd assumed was a closet. She hadn't tried the handle yet. Not directly. She'd walked past it nine or ten times in a way that looked like she was just moving through the house, but she hadn't tried it.
Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she'd find a reason to be in that part of the hall.
She closed her eyes. Outside, the wind moved through the bare trees, and the house creaked once and then went quiet again. Somewhere below her, the floor hummed.
She didn't know that Gabriel had an appointment scheduled for two days from now. She didn't know it was the kind of appointment he'd made before he had everything in place, back when he'd still been building the plan, and that he'd simply forgotten to cancel it or work around it. She didn't know that for three hours on December 30th, she was going to be in this house by herself.
She didn't know he was going to give her exactly what she needed.
She would find out tomorrow. One day away. One long, careful, exhausting, perfectly ordinary day standing between her and the answer to every question she'd been carrying since she heard that faint hum through the floor.
She pressed her lips together in the dark.
She could wait one more day.
- Writer
