The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  ‘Yes,’ they said in unison.

  ‘Good.’

  Vincent waited until Sam’s eyes closed drowsily not long after. It was time. He folded up the sleeves of his shirt until they were at his elbow. He moved Sam’s arm to an angle and held his wrist gently.

  Even under the influence of the Oxy, Sam flinched as Vincent began working. He rotated Sam’s arm in a continuous motion, ignoring his muffled groans. Vincent was thankful for the Oxy. Without it, Sam would have been writhing in pain.

  Vincent kept rotating Sam’s arm until his own became sore from the effort. It took minutes of continuous motion until they finally heard a soft pop. Sam’s arm joint was back in the socket.

  Vincent checked Sam again. Sam flinched when he touched the upper arm. It was swollen. Probably a broken humerus bone, which he knew sometimes happened in tandem with shoulder dislocations. Vincent removed his undershirt and tore it into strips, tying them together to make a sling, immobilising Sam’s arm.

  When he was done, Vincent put his overcoat over Sam, who was shivering despite the heat. He propped Sam’s feet up on his briefcase, which he pressed upright against the wall so that it didn’t fall over. He put another folded coat under Sam’s injured arm to elevate that as well.

  ‘I think he’ll be alright now.’ Vincent sounded more confident than he felt. Even if Sam’s vitals returned to normal, he needed to get X-rayed and checked by a doctor soon in case there was a bleed or other complications. For the moment, Sam’s pain was under control and he was in a deep sleep. That was better than nothing.

  Vincent’s skin was slick from sweat. The stream of heat pouring out of the ceiling vent was relentless. Vincent didn’t put his shirt back on, leaving his chest bare. It was cooler that way.

  ‘The only thing that seems to work in this place is the heating system,’ Vincent muttered.

  He was in severe pain himself. He had knife-like pains in the front of his head. Probably a seven out of ten, if he had to rate it. He would have loved an Oxy to alleviate the pain, but he was pretty sure that he was concussed. Under those circumstances, it was better to stay awake. He put his head in his hands to dull the throbbing in his skull.

  When he was able, he lifted his head and watched the red letters expand and contract on the screen until they started looking like an optical illusion. ‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt,’ he murmured. The words flickered on the white screen.

  Though I speculated, I never knew exactly why Vincent chose me to help Cathy pack her dead daughter’s apartment. Maybe it was because I was the most junior member of the team. Or perhaps he sensed my sadness. It hung heavily over me.

  Vincent had no idea that Lucy and I were friends. I had never understood Lucy’s insistence on keeping secret something as mundane as two colleagues getting together for downtime after work, but I’d always humoured her paranoia on that front. I figured it was another one of her many quirks.

  Following her death, I felt uncomfortable about making our friendship public. It seemed opportunistic. Attention seeking. I didn’t want to fall into the category of colleagues who hadn’t given Lucy the time of day when she was alive, but were claiming to have been her greatest friends and supporters once she was dead. Jules, Sam and Sylvie did just that after years of being cruel towards Lucy in their own inimitably vicious ways.

  Vincent called me into his office a week or so after Lucy’s death. His invitation was unexpected and unusual. It did not bode well. In my role I usually dealt with Sam or Jules on day-to-day issues, or Sylvie when she deigned to talk to me. They were the ones who spoke directly with Vincent.

  I entered his office hesitantly and with trepidation. I was afraid that he’d called me in to tell me I was fired. About 30 per cent of graduates never made it past the first year and I was close to reaching that milestone. Most disappeared within months. They were either fired outright or performance-managed out of the firm. Sometimes they’d get nothing for their bonus, which was another not so subtle way of the firm showing them the door.

  ‘Sara,’ Vincent said grimly, tossing his horn-rimmed reading glasses on a pile of folders. I sat down on the visitor’s chair by his desk. I braced myself for bad news. He sat back and watched me from behind his desk. ‘I need a favour.’

  ‘Sure,’ I responded with relief. ‘Anything you need, Vincent.’

  I meant that sincerely. I was acutely aware that if he hadn’t hired me, I’d probably still be waiting on tables at Rob Roy. He knew it too, I could tell. Sometimes I think that’s why he chose me – he liked the thought that I would have a debt of gratitude that would make me eternally loyal. That’s how strongmen built their empires.

  ‘I promised to send Lucy’s personal items to her apartment tomorrow. Her mother, Cathy, will be packing up before the movers come,’ Vincent said. ‘I imagine that will be quite traumatic for her – Lucy died in that apartment. Would you mind helping Cathy? Give her a shoulder to cry on, if she needs one? She has nobody else to help … it was only the two of them.’

  Vincent cleared his throat. ‘I’d consider it a personal favour, Sara. You don’t have to do it. It’s way out of the scope of your job. Of course we could arrange for a moving company to help her pack, but I don’t think that’s the sort of help Cathy really needs. It’s emotional support.’

  ‘I’m fine to go,’ I reassured him. ‘What time should I be there?’

  ‘A driver will be picking up Lucy’s personal items tomorrow at ten. I’ll arrange for him to swing by your building on the way. Thank you.’ He turned his eyes to his computer screen. The conversation was over. I headed towards the door.

  ‘Oh, one other thing, Sara,’ he said, as I was about to walk out. I turned around, holding his office door open as I waited for him to speak.

  ‘If you see any papers or files in Lucy’s apartment that belong to the firm, please make sure you bring them back to the office. We don’t want any confidential information floating about.’ Vincent’s eyes were on his screen. He didn’t look at me as he spoke.

  ‘No problem,’ I said, before closing the door.

  I arrived at Lucy’s apartment the following morning dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, holding a box of Lucy’s things from her desk at Stanhope. The apartment door was ajar. I pushed it open. Lucy’s mother was sitting motionless on a sofa in the corner, a mug of steaming coffee cupped between her hands. She looked like a wax figure in a museum. Her eyes were empty. And sort of broken.

  Cathy obviously hadn’t done any packing. I had seen the flat boxes from the moving company in a pile on the landing outside the apartment. She hadn’t even cut the twine binding them together.

  ‘Who are you?’ Cathy asked numbly when she saw me standing on the threshold.

  ‘Vincent asked me to come by,’ I said by way of introduction. ‘I’m Sara. Lucy and I were colleagues. I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  Cathy nodded slowly in acknowledgment before noticing the large box in my arms. ‘You can put the box over there.’ She indicated a place on a rug next to the dinner table.

  ‘Thank you, Sara. It was kind of you to come,’ she said when I was done. ‘Can I make you a coffee before you go?’

  ‘There’s no need, thank you. I had coffee earlier. Besides, I didn’t come only to bring you Lucy’s things, I’m here to help you pack. Only if you’d like the help, of course.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but surely you have more important things to do?’

  ‘I don’t, actually,’ I responded. In actual fact, I had a forty-page report to finish by the following day. But I couldn’t think of a single thing more important than helping Cathy. ‘What would you like me to do first?’

  ‘I don’t really know where to start.’ Cathy was floundering, bewildered. ‘I’ve left it very late. I should have started packing days ago, but the police still had their tape up over the door and they wouldn’t let me in …’ Her voice trailed off. She looked down at the floo
r where a small pile of discarded police tape lay. ‘When the police finally gave me access, I was busy dealing with the medical examiner and funeral arrangements.’

  Lucy’s funeral was a private ceremony. Her remains were cremated. Vincent attended, but nobody else from the firm was invited.

  ‘You never think about everything that needs to take place when a person …’ She couldn’t bring herself to utter the word. ‘I arrived an hour ago. I was determined to pack without getting emotional,’ said Cathy. ‘The landlord needs me to clean out the apartment by the weekend. When I came in, I didn’t know where to start. And that’s when I noticed.’

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘That Lucy’s things seem to have been disturbed.’

  ‘I suppose the police must have gone through the place,’ I said, gesturing towards police tape still stuck on the bathroom door.

  ‘I asked them,’ said Cathy. ‘They said they didn’t go through Lucy’s closet. They said their forensics team focused its work in the bathroom, where Lucy …’ Her voice dropped off. ‘Lucy’s bedroom closet is chaotic. Not at all like Lucy. The shelves were always arranged like a department store. You do know that Lucy was on the spectrum?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I was aware.’

  ‘She was also colourblind. I’d stop by to arrange her clothes so that she wouldn’t accidentally wear clashing colours to work. I hung things in a certain order to help her know which shirt went with which suit and so on. She was vigilant about it. She didn’t want to look out of place at the office. But when I looked in her closet, there was no order. Everything was,’ Cathy paused, uncertain how to describe it, ‘flung all over the place. Lucy was fastidious. She’d never have left it like that.’

  Cathy was right. Lucy organised her closet with military precision because of her colourblindness, but also because she was inherently incapable of leaving a mess. She could only see black, white, red and pinks. She had labelled her closet shelves with the names of colours. I knew this because she had once asked me to help her put away her laundry using that system.

  I opened Lucy’s closet doors and was as shocked as her mother when I saw the state it was in. Clothes half hung from hangers. Others were tossed into balls or simply lay on the floor. The colours were all mixed up.

  ‘What else looks different?’

  ‘The bookshelf,’ said Cathy, pointing towards a white floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that took up an entire wall of Lucy’s living room.

  Lucy kept an extensive collection of books and vinyl records and CDs. They were her main indulgence. Her books were arranged by category and then in order of size. When I looked closely, I noticed that some books had been removed and then put back in the wrong place. That sort of thing would have driven Lucy crazy. She was so particular that I never dared to take a book off her shelf – if I wanted to borrow one I’d ask Lucy and she’d take it off the shelf for me.

  ‘The police think it was a suicide. If they’re right then why did I find broken glasses and dishes in the trash? Why was Lucy’s grocery cupboard a mess? She was obsessive about how she arranged everything, from pots and pans to her breakfast cereals.’

  ‘Is it possible,’ I chose my words carefully, ‘that Lucy’s emotional state was erratic before she died? That she didn’t maintain the apartment to her usual standard?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Cathy. ‘That was what was so strange about it all. Lucy was upbeat before it happened. She told me that she’d been to an exhibit at the Met and it blew her away. She was fascinated by it. She’d been going every weekend.’

  ‘That must have been the da Vinci exhibition,’ I said. Cathy gave me a strange look.

  ‘The first time she went to the exhibition, we actually went together,’ I explained. ‘She stayed until it closed and then texted me to say that she was going there again.’

  ‘So you and Lucy were friends,’ Cathy said, in relief.

  ‘Yes, we were.’

  ‘Tell me, Sara. Did something happen at work to upset her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I was working from our Seattle office in the weeks before Lucy died and we hadn’t spoken for a while,’ I answered, tearing up. Ever since I’d heard about Lucy, I had an aching feeling that if I’d been around it would never have happened. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, wiping away tears with the back of my hand. ‘I’ve come to help you pack. Let’s get to work.’

  I carried in the pile of flat boxes and assembled them with duct tape. We worked together, starting by wrapping Lucy’s crockery in newspaper. While we packed, Cathy told me about Lucy’s difficult childhood. She’d raised Lucy alone after her husband walked out on them for another woman. It hadn’t been easy for her or Lucy.

  Lucy’s teachers claimed she lagged far behind the other kids in class and didn’t seem to understand the lessons. Even as a young child, Lucy rarely spoke and almost never engaged with her teachers or fellow students. Her teachers wanted to hold her back a year, and even suggested she be transferred to a special needs school.

  That seemed strange to Cathy because, without being taught, Lucy had been able to recite the alphabet backwards from the age of two. One time, when they were in the supermarket, Lucy told her mother how much a shopping cart full of groceries would cost before it was added up at the cashier. Lucy was correct to the last cent. She was seven at the time. That’s when Cathy sent her to a psychologist to be assessed.

  It was determined Lucy’s IQ was 151. Lucy told the psychologist that she was bored in class and spent most of the time doing math questions in her head. At the age of seven, she’d already taught herself quadratic equations.

  ‘The psychologist was stunned that the mute child playing on the carpet in her office had a near genius level of intelligence,’ Cathy told me as she packed the newspaper-wrapped plates into a small box. ‘You have to understand, in those days the medical understanding of kids like Lucy was nowhere near what it is now.’

  What the teachers thought was a learning delay was a propensity to internalise her thinking. Lucy was diagnosed as having high-functioning autism, which explained her poor social skills, her obsessive nature, her hyper-concentration. And her brilliance.

  Lucy stayed at her school but was allowed to drift off to the back of the classroom, where she’d work through textbooks with advanced math problems and other subjects that were years ahead of her level. The other children found her strange. The teachers found her uncooperative. They learned to leave her alone.

  ‘Sport was the only subject Lucy failed,’ said Cathy, as we began to work on the pantry. ‘She had no interest in running or kicking balls. She was clumsy and had poor hand–eye coordination. That’s why her sudden passion for sport came as a surprise to me. In some ways, it was the making of her at school,’ Cathy told me. We were tossing perishable food into big trash bags.

  It was on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in middle school that Lucy found her passion for sports. She was sitting on the sidelines, watching her classmates play basketball. The sports teacher, Mr Mason, had learned by then that Lucy was best left to her own devices. He’d stopped trying to get her to participate in sports classes.

  As Lucy watched a practice basketball game, she found it particularly interesting to calculate how many times a player would score a shot from a certain location. She began calculating in a notebook the probability of a shot going in based on the player, the location, the proximity of defenders and various other factors.

  Lucy drew up her calculations and presented them to the coach in a series of graphs. She was immediately offered a role as team statistician. They’d never before had a team statistician. It was, after all, middle school basketball.

  Lucy was so good at forecasting the outcome of various plays that pretty soon the coach consulted her on player line-ups and when drawing up plays at timeouts.

  ‘The school team went from a string of defeats to making it into the finals for the first time in a decade. A great part of it was thanks to Lucy,’ said Cathy.
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  Lucy’s experience working with the basketball team taught her the importance of social interaction. Not so much because she wanted such interactions, but because it helped her understand the benefits of being able to engage with the people around her. She won the grudging respect of her classmates. She didn’t get shoved around or teased anymore as she walked through the corridors at school.

  Lucy was a fast learner. Gradually, throughout the rest of her schooling, Lucy learned to mimic social conventions. She learned what to say in various circumstances. She absorbed the tones that one might use for those circumstances and the acceptable responses to common questions. She was still incapable of making close friends or interacting with people socially, but her role in the basketball team helped her integrate into the world.

  ‘Lucy’s journey was a long one,’ said Cathy. ‘Working at Stanhope was a daily battle. Every moment that she was there, she was outside her comfort zone.’

  ‘She never considered finding another job? Somewhere more supportive?’ I asked, thinking that the environment at Stanhope was hostile even for people who were relatively well adjusted.

  ‘She loved the work. She found it fascinating. And there was support – Vincent was good to her. He protected her,’ said Cathy.

  Cathy was packing various tin cans into a box to give to charity. I removed Lucy’s timber spice rack from a cupboard and put it on the counter. The spices were arranged in alphabetical order; cardamom, cayenne pepper, cinnamon and so on. Cathy took one look at the spices and burst into tears.

  ‘Lucy always arranged things in alphabetical order when she was stressed. Something was going on with her. I just know it. None of this makes sense.’

  Cathy pointed to a laundry rack in the far corner of the living room, which still had clothes on it. ‘Lucy’s laundry is hanging just the way she left it,’ Cathy said, looking into my eyes. ‘Why would Lucy wash her laundry, hang it out to dry and then kill herself?’