by Megan Goldin
Jules had decided some time during the night that Vincent had lured them here deliberately. That he was the architect of some twisted Machiavellian plot to lock them together in the tiny claustro phobic room. An escape room from which they’d been unable to escape. Why, he didn’t know. Who knew what Vincent’s motives were, he was always a step ahead of everyone.
‘What are you thinking?’ Vincent asked. Jules was running down the last of his phone’s battery by shining the flashlight at the ceiling.
‘There must be an access hatch. Don’t you think? If we can open it then we can get onto the roof of the elevator, maybe get a phone signal to call for help. We can’t just keep sitting here like lambs to the slaughter.’
Jules was right. If his head didn’t hurt so badly, Vincent might have thought of it himself. Since he was several inches taller than Jules, he rose to his feet and reached up to touch the ceiling. It was made of large decorative silver tiles, mounted into a frame to create a false ceiling. It was easy enough to remove a tile by pushing it from the frame and for Vincent to pull himself up. Using Jules’s flashlight, he examined the brushed steel ceiling until he spotted the square outline of a hatch near the back.
Moving beneath it and removing another tile, Vincent pushed at the hatch door with his hands. It didn’t budge. Nor did it loosen when he pummelled it with the metal-tipped corner of his briefcase. Vincent looked around for something he could use to pry open the hatch door. There was nothing that would do.
Eventually, he took the only piece of metal he could find, his house keys. He tried to shove a key under the rim of the hatch door to break open the seal. Deep down, he knew it was pointless, but he felt compelled to make an attempt. He tried several times and almost snapped his key in half.
When he accepted that wouldn’t work, more out of desperation than anything, he wrapped his white handkerchief around his knuckles and punched the latch to try to loosen it.
It made no difference. The escape hatch didn’t budge. It must have been locked from the outside to prevent elevator passengers from doing something stupid, like climbing onto the roof, where they might be electrocuted or fall to their death.
Vincent sat down, panting heavily, as he unwound the crumpled cloth from around his fist. The handkerchief was stained red and his knuckles were raw and bleeding.
‘This place is like Alcatraz,’ Jules said.
When I got back to my apartment after Chicago it was dark and cold. And devastatingly empty. For weeks I’d been looking forward to being wrapped in Kevin’s reassuring arms upon my return home. He wasn’t there. He had texted me when I was already at O’Hare, waiting for my flight, to tell me that he had to fly to San Francisco for an emergency meeting with a client. ‘Sorry,’ he wrote with a sad emoji. I texted him back an emoji of a broken heart.
‘I’ll fix it on Friday! Promise!’ he wrote back.
I headed to the bathroom, where I had a long hot shower and luxuriated in being home again. I put on pyjamas and made a dinner of a grilled cheese sandwich, which I ate cross-legged on the couch while I watched a mindless reality TV show.
Before bed, I unpacked my suitcase and put everything away except for the box of childhood keepsakes that my mother had given me.
I opened my hall closet to find somewhere to store it. Folded sheets, towels and blankets jammed up every shelf except the bottom one, which was packed with random junk. I cleared away two bottles of wine and a pack of toilet paper. My box didn’t fit in, there was still something taking up space at the back of the shelf.
I pulled it out and immediately realised that it was the box that Cathy had asked me to store for her months ago. I had packed it away out of sight and forgotten I ever had it.
I cut the seals of the box and removed a layer of bubble wrap. On the top was the Fleetwood Mac record that Lucy had left for me. Underneath were a pile of Lucy’s sketchpads. I flicked through the top one and found sketches Lucy had done on the streets of New York. There was one of a busker playing saxophone at the entrance to a subway. Lucy had captured the crush of people moving past, and a man lingering behind to listen. She’d drawn a skateboarder riding low on his board in a park, and an old man selling hotdogs from a cart.
At the bottom of the pile of sketchpads was a thickly bound journal with a purple velvet cover. Inside was a handwritten inscription: ‘Lucy, may you use this journal in good health and with great success as you embark on your new journey at college. Love, Mom.’
I was surprised to see the journal contained ink drawings instead of the reams of writing that would usually appear in a personal diary. Rather than describing her thoughts, Lucy had drawn pictures, sometimes with short captions or other writing in thought bubbles. It looked like a graphic novel of Lucy’s life.
There were many entries, spanning Lucy’s college years and her time at the firm. I found a sketch of Vincent and Lucy sitting by the window of a café, drinking coffee. She’d written ‘Mentoring my mentor’ along with the date, which was around the time that she started at the firm. I found a sketch of me next to a snow leopard, together with the word ‘Trust?’
Some pages had multiple sketches, made over the space of months. Other times, Lucy devoted an entire page of her journal to a single event. Every entry, no matter how small, had a date. The last entry was over two facing pages. It was the only entry that was not drawn in black. Lucy had drawn it with a red pen. It was dated two days before she died.
Lucy had drawn herself cowering in the corner of an elevator. Surrounding her were demons in suits and ties with sharp tails that emerged from under their jackets, and twisted hate-filled faces and claws that seemed to be reaching out for her. It made me shudder. A speech bubble emerged from her mouth. Inside were the letters ‘SOS’.
The adjacent page was filled with tiny writing in the same red ink. It was completely unintelligible. Lucy’s own private language.
Eventually I prepared for bed, still thinking about that drawing and the strange writing, when it suddenly hit me. I took the journal and held it in front of my full-length mirror. Lucy’s incomprehensible words made perfect sense. She had adopted Leonardo da Vinci’s mirror writing technique.
I read her words facing my mirror. When I was finished I rushed to the toilet and retched until my throat was raw.
We had a meeting with the executive team over the merger. Eric gave them figures that were all wrong. They were going to make the wrong decision and risk $80 million in projections that had not been properly adjusted. I had to say something. Vincent wasn’t there. If he had been he might have noticed my discomfort. Sam was on the other side of the table. I kept trying to catch his eye but he ignored me. I had to speak up. I tried to be diplomatic. Not my best skill. I said something like: ‘I’m sorry Eric but those figures have not been adjusted. The correct adjusted figures indicate a potential $11 million loss.’ Everyone turned to look at me. Eric flashed me a look that frightened me. Nobody has ever looked at me with such hatred.
Later, after lunch, I was coming out of the restroom when he slammed straight into me and pushed me back into the bathroom. It happened so quickly. ‘Listen you fucktard,’ he said. ‘Don’t ever embarrass me in public again.’ I nodded. I was too terrified to speak. Eric put his hand inside my shirt and squeezed my nipple so hard that it hurt. ‘You need to learn to shut your mouth.’ Then he walked out. My legs shook so much that I sunk to the floor. Someone came into the bathroom to use the toilet. I pretended that I’d dropped something and left.
Later I took Sylvie aside and told her what happened. She told me to play the game, ‘suck it up’. She told me when she was a teen model a photographer had groped her while arranging her swimsuit, and she put up with it. She said no one can go up against Eric Miles, that I should forget about it and move on.
The next night, I stayed back for a late meeting. It ended around 9 p.m. I returned to my desk to finish my work. After a couple of hours, my eyes became blurry. I couldn’t read my computer screen properly. I fi
gured I was tired and packed up to leave. The office spun as I walked to the elevator. I felt dizzy and unsteady on my feet. The elevator arrived. I stumbled inside. The doors closed behind me. The other passengers pushed me from one to the other. ‘Fucktard,’ they kept saying. I wanted to tell them to stop but couldn’t speak. My throat was paralysed. I felt hands touching me. Tugging at my hair. Pushing under my bra. Hands everywhere. Touching me in ways I didn’t want to be touched. I curled up on the floor and shut my eyes until everything was black.
I don’t remember anything else except opening my eyes as the doors slid open. I stumbled drunkenly out into the lobby. I burned with shame that I hadn’t fought them off. I didn’t say anything to the security guard. All I wanted was to go home and scrub myself in scalding water. After my shower, I went to the closet to find something clean to wear. Everything seemed dirty. Disgusting and dirty just like me. I tried to call Sara. No answer. Eventually I called Sylvie and rambled incoherently down the phone. I think I was crying. She said she would come to my apartment. I let her in and told her what happened. She said it was probably traders who were too drunk to know what they were doing. She told me not to talk to anyone, that Stanhope doesn’t like employees who lodge complaints. She told me to stay home. She would cover for me at work. She handed me some capsules she said would make me feel better. I hate medication but I was desperate to stop feeling this way. I took the capsules. They haven’t helped. All I want to do is crawl up in a ball and die.
It had been almost a full day since they’d been trapped. A tomb, Jules had called it. The longer they stayed, the more it felt like he was right. They wondered if they’d ever get out.
There was no way to escape. Vincent had established that the hatch to the elevator’s roof was sealed and locked. The elevator’s steel doors faced the sheer concrete wall of the shaft. The escape room clues seemed pointless. None of them had the faintest idea what the last clue, which was still on the screen, even meant. They’d called, screamed, shouted and pled for help for hours. All to no avail.
Their best hope was that they had to wait until Monday morning, when the building would teem with people returning to work. Surely then someone would hear their calls for help. That was almost forty hours away.
‘There’s nothing we can do for the time being except sleep,’ Vincent said. That was easier said than done on the hard floor in the sweltering heat.
They envied Sam, who was in a deep Oxy-induced sleep with occasional moments of drowsy wakefulness. At which point Vincent would give him another tranquilliser to get him back to sleep. They lay in a row trying to sleep, lulled by the drip of condensation from the ceiling.
Vincent was consumed by thoughts about what they’d need to do to survive until Monday. He had a single bottle of water and two energy bars in his briefcase. If he carefully rationed the water then it would suffice for the four of them until Monday morning.
The heat, which had worried Vincent for some time, had become a less pressing concern. They’d found a way to control it by intermittently forcing open the elevator doors and letting in the cold air from the elevator shaft.
Vincent’s main concern was keeping Jules and Sylvie in line. Their patience was wearing thin. He was relieved when they both fell asleep because he could let his guard down at least for a moment.
Soft snoring grunts came from where Jules lay, in the corner. Sylvie lay with her legs folded under her as she breathed softly in her sleep. Vincent could feel the skin of her legs against his own. Her sophisticated floral perfume was a welcome relief from the stench of the stuffy elevator. He fell asleep to the touch of Sylvie’s skin and the sweet smell of her body.
Jules woke in the dark with one thought on his mind. He needed a drink. And not water, though his throat was parched, but a stiff drink. A whiskey. Or vodka. Or maybe even a rum and coke. Hell, he’d settle for cough syrup if it had a high enough alcohol content.
He knew he should be thinking of ways to escape. He was good with electronics, if he could concentrate he could figure out a way to activate the control panel or run a wire to get a cellphone signal. But he couldn’t focus without a drink.
He castigated himself for not taking more of the miniature bottles of booze from the chauffeured car that had brought him over. He’d had many opportunities to drink over the previous weeks and always stayed strong. Client lunches matched with vintage wines. An aged Scotch opened at a dinner party. A client meeting at a Russian vodka bar. He’d held firm to his pledge to stay sober.
Surely, he thought, if he could resist the temptation of a 50-year-old bottle of Scotch then he could get through a car ride without being tempted by the relatively mundane contents of a limousine mini-bar. As time passed in the thick congestion of traffic, his eyes kept drifting to the drinks cupboard set into the door next to him. What might they have stocked? He told himself it didn’t matter, he wasn’t drinking any more. But after another stubborn red traffic light, he figured he’d have a quick look. Purely out of curiosity.
He opened the minibar door and saw two dozen or so miniature liquor bottles arranged in neat rows. He figured he might as well see what type of vodka they had. As it happened, there wasn’t any. That would have ended things if Jules hadn’t noticed an assortment of unfamiliar whiskey. He was a sucker for whiskey, although he drank it rarely since the smell stuck to him like an oil rag.
He took time to make his selection. He chose a Scotch and drank the contents of the bottle in one long gulp. The warmth spread through him as the town car made its way through the gridlock of uptown Manhattan. He immediately felt more relaxed, the stress and pressure lifting from him. Four intersections later, he desperately wanted one more drink. He resisted. He had a meeting. The clients would smell the alcohol on his breath.
He wrote an email and reread a report. His eyes kept drifting back to the drinks cabinet. He convinced himself that one more bottle wouldn’t make a difference. He drank that down in a single go too and placed both empty bottles in his briefcase. He would keep the miniature bottles as souvenirs of the very last alcohol he ever drank. He was contemplating drinking a third bottle when the driver pulled up outside the lobby. ‘We’re at your destination, sir,’ he said.
Sitting in the dark elevator, Jules regretted not taking that third bottle. And a fourth. God, he could almost taste the smooth amber on his tongue. He’d do almost anything for a drink. It would make him forget about his empty stomach and aching body. It would drown out Sam’s pathetic whines of pain. It would block all the memories that assaulted him in the lonely darkness of the elevator.
He didn’t want to think of his dead mother, or his ex-wife, who only spoke to him through $800-an-hour lawyers, or his estranged father, or the string of nameless lovers since his marriage breakup. Or all the people he’d hurt over the years.
I was sick to my stomach that night as I grappled with what happened to Lucy. She had been attacked; sexually assaulted in the office elevator. She’d obviously been drugged. From that point on, she had no chance. Lucy had been utterly defenceless once she was in the elevator. She’d have been disoriented, trapped and terrified.
Eric Miles must have been behind it. It was his revenge on Lucy for making him look like the stupid ass that he was. I knew enough about Eric to know that he was a coward’s coward. He would have paid off – or threatened – others to carry out the assault. I doubted he was there in person.
I felt crushed by the weight of the responsibility of finding Lucy’s journal. If I brought her assault to light it would kill my career at the firm. My salary supported not just myself but also my mother in her expensive retirement home. I still had my dad’s medical bills to pay off. His funeral expenses to cover. I couldn’t risk losing my income.
Lucy was dead. It happened a long time ago. There was no way to right the past.
On the flip side, I was outraged by what had happened. Lucy deserved justice. How could I possibly allow Eric Miles to get away with what he did?
I dialle
d Kevin’s cell. I badly needed his advice. I assumed that his flight had landed in San Francisco by now, but his phone went straight through to voicemail. I didn’t leave a message. Besides, I realised there was no point consulting him over the phone. Kevin was a cautious lawyer. He would never discuss an issue of this delicacy over the phone. I’d have to wait until he returned on Friday. Five days of waiting.
I arrived in the elevator lobby of our office tower just before 7 a.m., holding a takeout coffee from the gourmet coffee truck a half block from the office. By chance, Jules, Sam and Sylvie were all there too, holding their own coffees.
We all tended to arrive by 7.30 a.m. to catch up on overnight emails and do any work required to prepare for our first round of conference calls with our European offices, which began at 8 a.m. The elevator doors opened. We stepped in all looking like cardboard cutouts of corporate high-flyers. Neatly groomed in pressed suits and polished shoes with all the accoutrements and arrogance of our profession.
‘You’ve been gone a while, Sara. How was Chicago?’ Sam asked as he texted on his phone.
‘Her dad died.’ Jules butted in before I could answer Sam’s question. ‘That’s why Sara was in Chicago.’
‘Oh shit, I forgot,’ Sam said. ‘My bad. Condolences, Sara.’
I noticed Sylvie and Jules deliberately grazing the fingers of their hands as they stood side by side. I wondered how long they’d been sleeping together. I looked up and Sam winked at me as if we shared a secret.
‘What’s been going on with you, Sylvie?’ I asked. Sam smirked. I realised the question was provocative, given what I’d just witnessed.
‘I’ve been in London,’ Sylvie said. ‘In fact, I’m heading back tomorrow. But Vincent and I are presenting to a client this afternoon.’
‘I thought he was away?’ I said.
‘No, he’s here today,’ said Sylvie. ‘He flies to Frankfurt tonight. Why do you care?’