Sinister Sanctuary

by Colleen Gleason

  Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.

  So tonight would be a clear one, and he would get that much closer to home safely.

  “Are you afraid of heights or something?” Oscar had walked back to stand next to her, jolting her from her fanciful thoughts.

  “No. Not really. But it’s a little disconcerting, being up this high with only that tiny railing between me and the ground.” Teddy couldn’t control a little shiver as she brushed loose wisps of hair from her face. The wind was riffling Oscar’s short, bright hair and molding the light cotton shirt to his arms and shoulders like the hands of a lover.

  To prove to herself she wasn’t nervous, Teddy stepped out from the doorway and approached the railing next to Oscar. It was hardly more than a metal pipe strung around the parapet, just above waist height, fixed every four or five feet with an iron bar.

  And the ground was a loooong way down.

  “So someone jumped or fell from up here?” Oscar said. “Or was pushed,” he added, giving her a sidewise look.

  “Would be an easy thing to do,” she said, gripping the railing. “One little shove by the villain, and over they go—”

  Crash!

  Already a little on edge, Teddy pivoted wildly at the loud, violent sound, sending the binoculars around her neck slamming into Oscar’s belly. “What the—”

  But the wind had simply blown the glass door shut.

  She looked at Oscar, ready to apologize for being so jumpy, when she saw his expression. Arrested was the only word to describe it.

  He muttered something and started to move toward the door. His brow was furrowed and his mouth set.

  “What is it?” she said, squishing herself up against the (safe) side of glass wall as he edged past her on the narrow ledge.

  “How did that happen?” he said, more intelligibly now.

  “The wind,” she replied calmly. Wasn’t it obvious?

  He shook his head as he reached for the door handle. “No. It couldn’t have been the wind—it was coming from a different direction. It couldn’t have—well— Bloody hell.” He froze, his hand on the door handle.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s—stuck. Locked. Or something.” He shook it hard, rattling the door in its hinges, but the handle didn’t turn and the door didn’t open.

  Teddy’s heart was in her throat. “You’re teasing me, right?” Forgetting her nervousness about the narrow railing, she pushed her way over to him.

  But she didn’t even have to try the door handle once she saw the expression on his face.

  “We’re locked out,” she said, her voice high. “We’re stuck up here. Ohmigod, Harriet is never going to believe this!”

  Four

  Didn’t it just figure?

  This was what happened when you did something nice for someone, Oscar thought with a mental roll of the eyes. There you have it.

  He should have just left Teddy Mack to her own devices—in her own room, with her bloody laptop and her agonized moans—and then he wouldn’t be perched up here like a stranded eaglet.

  Those thoughts rushed into his mind, then out again just as quickly. At some point, he’d probably laugh about the situation.

  Once they got down.

  If they got down.

  “Uh, let me check the other doors,” Teddy said. Her voice was steady, if not stretched a little thin, and she seemed relatively calm.

  “You go that way, I’ll go this way,” Oscar suggested.

  But when they got to the opposite side, each met the other with a grim expression—and neither needed to speak the obvious.

  “Okay, now what?” Teddy said. “Do you have your cell phone with you? Maybe we can call someone. My cousin lives in Wicks Hollow—”

  “No.”

  “Damn.”

  They stood there in silence, and Oscar leaned against the glass enclosure that kept them from escape. If he had something to break the glass with, that could work—but he hadn’t seen anything during his walk around the perimeter of the lantern room. The walkway was clear of any debris, tools, or anything useful.

  “Any other ideas?” he said.

  She rattled the locked door vigorously, but it hardly moved. The glass lantern was extremely well built to stand up to the worst of nature’s elements. Nothing was going anywhere.

  “What about breaking the glass?” she suggested. “Maybe with a shoe? Mine are too flimsy. What about yours? Or do you have a belt with a heavy buckle that might do it?”

  Unfortunately, he was wearing soft canvas slip-ons, and no belt. “I don’t have anything that would do it. But the binoculars might work.”

  “On television it always looks so easy to bust through a glass door or window,” she said sadly, giving him the field glasses. “But it’s not. I did some research on it for a book. It’s pretty impossible, actually.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you do.”

  He looked at the binoculars. “They’re rimmed in rubber, and that glass is about three inches thick.” He shook his head. “I doubt they’ll work.” He gathered up the strap, wrapping it around his wrist, and, pretending he was holding a baseball bat, swung.

  Thunk.

  “Not even a crack. Not even a mark on it,” Teddy said, peering closely at the glass.

  Oscar was still considering options. “And there’s not enough room up here to even get a good running start, or even a strong enough kick—”

  “No, that’s too dangerous. It’d be so easy to fall right over the rail.”

  “I suppose we could try and shout—make some noise. Maybe someone out on the lake will hear us.” But he knew that was a dubious option at best, considering the closest people were miles away.

  “Worst-case scenario, if we can’t figure out any other way to get down, we can wait till my cousin shows up.”

  “Oh,” Oscar said, his heart lifting a little. “Is he coming over tonight?”

  “No, not tonight. Tomorrow morning sometime. To drop off a few books for me to sign for a friend of his.”

  “Tomorrow morning.” Oscar tried, and failed, to keep the dismay from his voice.

  “Yeah. Around nine, he said.” With a long, sighing sort of groan, she sank to the floor. Leaning against the glass wall behind her, she faced the sunset. Drawing her feet up near her body, she tucked edges of her sundress modestly over her knees. “Well, at least we have a nice view.”

  But the sun was going down—more quickly now, for it was halfway below the horizon. Oscar estimated another thirty minutes of light once it was gone, then they’d be stuck up here in the dark—with the temperature dropping. It could get quite cold, up this high and so near the lake. He glanced at Teddy, with her bare arms and the teeny-tiny straps that did nothing to protect her shoulders or upper chest.

  Still. The view was incredible. The blazing sun had become a ball of orange, shooting out streaks of color as it disappeared.

  Oscar walked around the perimeter again, hoping for a tool to magically appear, or an idea to manifest—waiting for something to present itself.

  And the whole time, he kept telling himself: there was no way the wind had blown that door closed.

  Finally, after rapping as hard as he could on the thick glass panes—and giving them a few solid, awkwardly placed kicks—in a last-ditch effort to find a weak or loose one, he sank down next to Teddy. There was only a sliver of sun left, and shadows had begun to arrange themselves on the ground below. His arm brushed hers, and even through his cotton shirt, he could feel the chill of her skin instead of the warmth he’d expected.

  “You’re already cold,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. “And it’s going to get even chillier. The wind is picking up.”

  Oscar shrugged out of his shirt and pushed it at her, feeling the rush of the cool breeze over his bare skin. It felt good—now—but if they didn’t get off here soon, it would soon be uncomfortable. But he was glad for the lowering light t
o hide the faint flush he felt warming his cheeks when Teddy turned to look at him. Her eyes were wide, and, for once, she seemed speechless.

  She took the shirt, still gaping at him like she wasn’t certain how to respond. Finally, she said, “You obviously don’t spend all your time in a lab, Dr. London. It is doctor, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  She pulled the shirt around her shoulders, then stuck her arms in the sleeves. “Yes to doctor, or yes to not spending all your time in the lab?”

  “Yes to the actual question, not the implied one,” he replied, a little uncertain how he felt about this—this banter…and the fact that she’d very obviously noticed that he did, in fact, not spend all of his time in a lab and did, in fact, do the occasional push-up and pull-up before his daily five-mile swim. Not that he was Arnold Schwarzenegger or anything like that…but he sure as hell wasn’t flabby.

  Teddy nodded, the quirk of a smile on her mouth. It was, Oscar realized suddenly—mainly because it was difficult not to, due to its proximity—a very nice, very kissable mouth. Not that he had any intention or interest in kissing it; he was still in love with Marcie, still mourning the loss of that relationship.

  Still hoping for something to happen.

  “What was that?” Teddy said. Every time she moved, he caught a fresh whiff of her scent—the fresh, peachy, flowery one he’d noticed this morning.

  “What?”

  “That sigh. It wasn’t an ‘I’m stuck up here, what am I going to do’ sigh. It was…sad. In a different way than ‘I’m stuck on the top of a lighthouse with a neurotic writer’ sad. Our situation isn’t sad, per se,” she said. “It’s just really inconvenient—I mean, at least you have an easy way to pee from up here if necessary. Not so me, so if I have to go, you’re going to need to look the other way. And it’s possibly dangerous being up here, but not really—unless we get a bad thunderstorm. But the situation’s not really sad.”

  It took Oscar a moment to extrapolate what she was saying—did the woman ever string a sentence together with fewer than twenty words and too many clauses?—and then he wasn’t certain how to respond. Had she really mentioned urinating over the side of the railing?

  Finally, he ventured: “It was hopeless. Not sad so much as hopeless.”

  “Your sigh?”

  “Right.”

  She shifted next to him, and her arm brushed against his. Pretty soon, he wouldn’t be able to see her expression—nor she his—and that might be a good thing.

  “I’m guessing you were thinking about your ex. What was her name?”

  “Marcie. With an i-e.” He suspected she’d appreciate that detail, being a writer and all. Unless she was the type of writer who couldn’t spell.

  “With an i-e.” She sounded pleased with that information for some reason. “For a short time, I was Teddy with just an i. I never tried the i-e version, because I figured the singular i was enough to make my point. My parents had messed up my life by giving me a boy’s name, so I rebelled by trying to make it more feminine. I even put a little heart for the dot of the i when I was in middle school—I’ll bet your Marcie did that. Most girly-girls did, and I’m guessing your Marcie is a girly-girl.”

  Oscar blinked. He tried to keep up with her—he really did—but there was just so much there…and yet her speech was entertaining, in a strange popcorn-like way. “A girly-girl? What makes you say that?”

  She made a noise that sounded like a giggle-scoff. “You seem like the type to go for a girly-girl, that’s all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I know lots of girly-girls, and some of them are my closest friends. I don’t really consider myself one because…well, because I hardly ever do my hair or put on makeup because I rarely see people with my job. I live in yoga pants and tanks, with heavy sweaters in the winter. And I definitely don’t get my nails done—can’t type worth crap with long fingernails.” She let her head tip back against the wall. He suspected the mention of typing made her think about her unfinished book.

  However, Oscar had managed to pull one bit of information from that long thread. “Your real name is Teddy, not Theodora or anything like that?”

  “It sure is. I considered changing my legal name to Theodora at one point, but in the end, it didn’t really matter. I would always be Teddy. With a y.” She rolled her head along the glass wall to look at him.

  It was still light enough for him to see her smile, and to make out the shape of her eyes in the shadows, and the way her brows rose to emphasize her words.

  “You don’t need makeup or fingernails,” he heard himself say. What the hell? “I mean, you look fine. I mean, pretty. More than just fine.” Oh, bloody hell. Shut up, Oscar.

  “Why, thank you,” she said, her smile growing bigger. And warmer. He swallowed hard. “That’s very sweet. So, since we’re stuck up here for the foreseeable future, why don’t you tell me about Marcie? Since you were giving such a hopeless sigh about her only a few minutes ago. I’m guessing a hopeless sigh means you’re still in love with her and harboring the thought that something might actually happen so she doesn’t get married, and instead comes running back to you.”

  Uh. Wow.

  Oscar blinked again, but before he could figure out how to respond, she was talking again, “I’m a storyteller, Dr. London—I’m always filling in the details of backstory and subtext. Yours is pretty obvious, though.”

  “Right.” Good Lord, was he really going to be stuck up here all night with her?

  At least the sky was cloudless. If a lightning storm threatened, they’d be cooked geese.

  But even with clear skies, he didn’t want to stay up here. They needed to figure out a way down. And he still didn’t understand how that door had blown closed—and gotten stuck. It just didn’t make any sense.

  He drew in a breath to say so, but then, to his shock, he began to talk. About Marcie.

  “She’s a fourth-grade teacher back in a little town near Princeton,” he said, lifting the field glasses as he spoke. There was a white forty-footer out there, with green and blue accents. It was trundling along kind of slowly. Maybe they could get the attention of whoever was on it. He pulled to his feet. “Let’s try and wave at that boat—it looks like it’s stopping out there.”

  Teddy rose and began to wave her arms, shouting. Unfortunately, she was bellowing into the wind coming off the lake, and it just tossed the noise back onto them. Oscar kept the glasses trained on the boat, which had stopped and seemed to have thrown down an anchor.

  “How far away do you think they are? Can you see anyone on it?” Teddy asked, apparently realizing that shouting wasn’t going to help.

  “No more than a half-mile. If they look over here, they might see us. Kind of late to be fishing, though…”

  “Well, why wouldn’t they look over here? It’s a lighthouse! Who doesn’t want to look at a lighthouse?”

  “But even if they see us, they’ll probably just think we’re waving to them.” He was just about to lower the glasses when something caught his attention. “There are two people on the deck… What’s that? They’re—”

  “What? Did they see us?”

  “No,” he replied, still watching the activity on the boat. “Looks like they’re tossing something overboard.”

  “What?” Teddy’s shriek was a little too close to his ear. “What is it? Ohmigod, I bet it’s a body!”

  Before he could react, she was grabbing at the binoculars. He didn’t have the chance to disengage from the neck strap before she was holding them up to her face. In an effort to avoid being strangled, he moved closer. This placed her back against him, and for a minute he was distracted from whatever was going on out on the lake. Her hair smelled really good, and the back of her calf brushed against his. It was warm and smooth, and made the hairs on his leg prickle with awareness.

  “It’s not a body,” he said, and snatched back the binoculars in a moment of self-defense—against strangulation, her proximity, and her crazy writer
ideas. “It wasn’t big enough to be a body.”

  “Well, how big was it? Maybe the body was cut up into pieces and they’re dropping parts of it all over—”

  “It’s probably just a bundle of garbage,” he said. “And, look, now they’re going away. Driving off. And it doesn’t look like they saw us.”

  “Damn.” She gazed out over the lake, squinting at the sinking sun as it still gave off some bold rays. “Who the hell would dump garbage in the lake like that? We ought to report them. Did you get the name of the boat or anything?”

  “No.” He sank back down onto the floor. “We could report them, I suppose, but they might have just been throwing—I dunno—a fishing net in the water?”

  “Did it look like a fishing net to you?”

  “No.” It had looked like a bundle wrapped in black plastic; the covering shone a little in the light. It wasn’t big enough to be a body, he didn’t think—and why was he even entertaining such a thought? People didn’t do stuff like that except in movies or books.

  Teddy sighed and sat next to him. “Well, if we ever get off this thing, we can report them. Now, where were we? Oh, right. Marcie. A fourth-grade teacher. Does she have a specialty?”

  Relieved to have a different topic—even if it was Marcie—he continued.

  “She specializes in math, but teaches cross-curriculum. She and my sister knew each other in college—Dina is six years younger than me—and they were in the same sorority. That’s how we met—she came home for Christmas one year with Dina. I’d been out of school for several years, and just finishing my doctorate, and, well—we fell for each other.

  “We dated for three years, got engaged on our third anniversary, and set the wedding date for a year ago May. And then…I don’t know…things started to change. We began to argue more, and had less time to see each other. There was a new principal at her school, and he had her working on a new curriculum for the math department, and…” He shrugged. “Between my work and hers, and the wedding plans…”