The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  Blais didn’t seem to know. “Was anyone else in the house at the time?”

  “Trina. Trina Collins. She’s a young woman who works—worked—for Gram. Helping her with paperwork and stuff.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  While she was writing down the address, Langley asked, “Why was a woman from Roxbury doing paperwork for your grandmother?” When I explained about SafeHaven and SafeHaven furlough, he and Blais exchanged glances. “I see,” he said.

  But I knew he didn’t. “This has nothing to do with Trina,” I told him. “She may be a recovering drug addict, but she’s doing really well, and she really liked Gram—they were good friends.”

  “Good friends,” Langley repeated.

  “They swapped books.”

  Another shared glance.

  “Recovering drug addicts do read books,” I said. “They do have friends.”

  “Was anyone else here with you, besides Mrs. Barrett and Ms. Collins?” Blais asked smoothly.

  I sighed. “My cousin Beth—Beth Conyers, she lives in Wellesley—was here in the morning. She had lunch with us, then left to bring her son to a baseball game.”

  “Who made lunch?” Langley asked.

  “Trina did,” I said before I realized the implications of my words. “But that doesn’t mean anything—”

  “Were you and Ms. Collins with Mrs. Barrett all day?” Blais interrupted.

  I took a deep breath and tried to remain calm. “I went into work for a couple of hours after lunch, and Trina stayed here with Gram. I got home about three. It was right after that that I, that I,” my voice shook, “that I found her …”

  “And you’re sure Ms. Collins was still here when you returned?”

  “She was in the other room doing paperwork.” I waved to the west parlor. “I talked to her.”

  “And exactly how long were you on the premises before you discovered that your grandmother was dead?”

  Dead. My grandmother was dead. But Gram was still here. She was here in her arrangement of dried flowers on the mantle, in her afghan, in her collection of family pictures on the Chippendale table. I could still feel her. Maybe the idea of an afterlife wasn’t as scary as I had thought.

  Michael put his arm around me and patted my shoulder awkwardly. “Is this really necessary?” he asked. “Couldn’t you wait to do this for a couple of days?”

  I squeezed his hand.

  Langley cleared his throat. “I know this is a difficult time,” he said, “but it’s important for us to get as much information as we can as quickly as possible. Memories are faulty, and it’s a known fact that the more time that passes, the less chance there is for a satisfactory resolution.” His Adam’s apple bobbed wildly. “So, Ms. Collins was alone with Mrs. Barrett for a good portion of the afternoon?”

  I stared at him. He sounded as if he were reciting lines of dialogue he had learned at the police academy in a class entitled, “How to Investigate a Murder.”

  “Now just a minute—” Michael began, but I stopped him by standing. This fishing expedition was over.

  “I think we’ve answered enough questions for one day,” I said, surprised by the strength of my voice and the smooth certainty of my words. “I can assure you that neither Trina nor my cousin Beth nor myself had anything to do with my grandmother’s death. It’s an absurd concept, and it just isn’t true.”

  The detectives didn’t argue; they stood and Langley snapped his notebook shut. “We’ll probably need more information at some point,” he said. “Most likely from all three of you.”

  I held out my hand to him. “We’ll be sure to have lawyers.”

  “I doubt that’ll be necessary,” Blais said. “But we would like to take you up on that offer to see your grandmother’s medications.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Beth raked her hands through her hair; it whirled wild and out of control around her face. “I can’t believe it,” she said for the third time in two minutes. “I can’t believe I was just interrogated by the police. It was horrible. Just horrible.”

  I poured two glasses of wine and sat down at the kitchen table across from her.

  Beth gulped the wine as if she had been starved for liquid for days. “Boy, that woman detective was a real bitch, wasn’t she?” She refilled her glass. “And that outfit! I don’t know what was worse, the polyester jacket or her pointy little teeth.”

  I had to smile. Beth’s obsession with appearance was apparently undaunted by the horror of her interrogation. “I don’t trust her either.”

  “She thinks Trina did it.”

  “They don’t think anyone did anything—he said it was just procedure. To follow up.”

  “There is the missing bracelet.”

  “Sounds like you’re the one who thinks Trina did it,” I said, my sympathy quickly switching over to annoyance. “You’ve been reading too many of Russ’ magazines. Just because Trina’s black and lives in Roxbury, you figure she’s got to be a thief and a murderer? Do you really think she’d hurt Gram?”

  “There’s a bit more to it than—”

  “No there isn’t. We don’t even know that anything was stolen or that anyone was murdered. And even if we did, what sense would it make? Say Trina took the bracelet—which she didn’t—why would she kill Gram? She’d just give it to some fence and pocket the cash.” I stopped abruptly. Give it to some fence. I supposed I had to consider the possibility that Trina had taken the bracelet. In many ways she was still just a kid, struggling with a new sobriety, with new rules and a new life, trying to withstand the temptations that surrounded her. The bracelet had just been lying around, and there was the influence of “pretty boy” Lionnel to consider. I thought about Kiah’s reservations. But even if Trina had taken the bracelet, I knew she hadn’t hurt Gram. “Did you tell the cops about the bracelet?”

  Beth shook her head and continued to stare into the depths of her wine glass; the mascara around one eye was smudged and her face was pasty. “At first they thought it was me.”

  “That’s just their style. That’s what they do: try to intimidate. I’m sure they never really believed you did it.”

  “They were grilling me, especially the bitch, about inheriting Harden House. About how much it was worth, about all the ‘valuable antiques.’”

  If they had “grilled” Beth—although given its source, “grill” was most likely a bit of an exaggeration—I wondered how the interview with Trina had gone. I was sure it hadn’t been pretty.

  Beth raised her head and her eyes were glazed, but they contained a gleam that hinted that the real Beth was still there. “Now you tell me,” she demanded, “what could those two possibly know about antiques?”

  “Did you tell them about the Lexington Historical Society?”

  Beth slumped back into her chair. “Yeah, but that didn’t impress them much. What impressed them was my alibi.”

  “Your alibi?” I felt like we were in a bad television drama. This was getting way, way out of hand.

  “The young cop told me that if it was poison, then it was some kind of fast-acting stuff. He said whoever gave it to Gram had to have done it within an hour of when she died.”

  “How could they possibly know that?”

  “He said the lab didn’t know exactly which poison it was yet, but that their first guess was something called … Oh, I don’t remember, it was some fancy chemical name, but it causes a real high fever, real fast, hallucinations and then respiratory arrest. ‘Rapid onset,’ he said.”

  “There was obviously a mistake at the lab,” I insisted, although the similarities between the symptoms Beth described and the facts of Gram’s death were impossible to ignore. “Lab errors happen all the time—apparently, a lot more than they let on. The cops also said it could’ve been some kind of interaction between the prescription drugs she was taking.”

  Beth shrugged. She looked horrible: disheveled and weary, almost old. I figured I probably looked similar, but it was a much
greater divergence from normal for Beth, and I felt a rush of compassion for her. Despite the different ways we lived and dressed and viewed the world, we were family, and we were sharing a grief only family can share.

  I reached out and pushed a piece of hair behind her ear. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about what happened the afternoon Gram died,” I surprised myself by saying.

  Beth jerked her head up.

  “It’s not really anything,” I back-peddled. “I mean, nothing all that important. That’s why I didn’t tell you before.”

  Beth’s blood-shot eyes were large and her hands trembled slightly.

  I twirled my wine glass on the table. “Remember how I used to walk in my sleep when I was a kid?” Who but your family knew the peculiarities of your youth? Who but your family allowed you those peculiarities and let you move on?

  “Dotty Aunt Hortense.” Or didn’t allow you to move on.

  “No one knows for sure that Aunt Hortense walked in her sleep.”

  “Just that she talked to the walls.” Beth took another drink of wine, and I checked the level in the bottle. Although Beth had never abused anything but diet pills—and that was only because of the obsession with thinness her mother had instilled in her during her chubby childhood—I saw the devastating effects of substance abuse on a daily basis.

  I corked the bottle and put it in the refrigerator. When I sat down, I said, “Well, the other night I did it again—walked in my sleep, I mean. And after all these years it was really strange …” I paused and looked at Beth, who just stared back at me. “I woke up in the cellar.”

  “Lee …”

  “I dreamed there was black man down there. A big man, really big, with a shovel and a scruffy looking cast on his leg. Light-skinned—and very handsome.”

  “Did you talk to him, Hortense, dear?” Beth flashed me her evil grin. “What did he have to say?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Beth. He was digging.”

  Beth sobered. “You mean like Gram?”

  I nodded.

  “But I don’t understand …”

  I sighed and told Beth about Gram’s last moments, about her battle with no one, about her confusion and her fear, about my confusion and fear.

  When I finished, Beth polished off her wine and went to the refrigerator to get the bottle. She added a little to my glass and refilled hers, sat down and looked at me for a long time. She held onto her glass as if it were a stabilizer. “Are you suggesting Gram had the crazy gene after all? That she was perfectly sane for sixty-nine years and then went bonkers?”

  “No.”

  “So then you’re saying you think Harden House is haunted? That a ghost killed Gram?”

  “Or that maybe she was scared to death by one.”

  “You realize what you’re implying? If you believe Gram was scared to death by a ghost then that means you believe in life after death, in the eternal soul and God and heaven and hell and all that shit.”

  I shrugged.

  “Angels and harps and pearly gates? God sitting up there checking in to see if you’re naughty or nice?”

  “That’s Santa Claus.”

  “Does that make it more or less absurd?”

  “It might sound absurd now, discussing it rationally, now, here, but at the time, when I was watching Gram, I mean, I don’t know, Beth, it was so real. I couldn’t actually see anyone trying to take her shovel away, but I could see that Gram was fighting with something, someone, who was real.” I felt the stirring of the awe I had experienced that afternoon, of that odd astonished sense of terrified fascination.

  “Or real to her.”

  “I guess.”

  “That Langely guy said that this poison could cause hallucinations.”

  “Gram wasn’t poisoned.”

  Beth took another sip of wine, then leaned toward me. “You know, I saw part of this show on PBS last week about this well-known hot-shot scientist who goes out to houses that are supposed to be haunted with all sorts of fancy equipment. He records ghosts.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  “Well, there were a lot of fuzzy pictures with weird shadows and shit. Some very weird noises. But there really wasn’t anything you could put your finger on and say, ‘now there’s a ghost.’ But, of course, that’s not what he said. According to him, he had proved the house was actually haunted.”

  “But you didn’t think so?”

  “I don’t know,” Beth said. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “I got the impression that the man in my dream came from a long time ago. Maybe from around the time of the Civil War.”

  “You mean like he was a runaway slave? From the Underground Railroad days?”

  I smiled wanly.

  We sat in silence for a long time, then I said, “But it doesn’t make any sense. If Harden House is haunted, then how come we didn’t know it before? If the ghost’s been around since before the Civil War, where’s he been for the last 150 years?” I knew I was contradicting myself, but this topic compelled contradiction.

  Now it was Beth’s turn to flip-flop. “You knew he was here. You’ve always been afraid of the cellar.”

  “I was afraid of a woman with iron teeth, not a ghost.”

  Beth shrugged. “Well, if it wasn’t the ghost who killed Gram, maybe it was Trina.”

  I was suddenly very tired. “No one killed Gram,” I said, resting my forehead in my hands. “She just died, that’s all. People do.”

  *****

  After Beth left, I wandered around the house, lost in a haze of unanswerable questions. Nothing made sense, and the slight tilt of the wide pine floorboards didn’t do anything for my sense of balance. It was late and I had had one hell of a day. I only hoped I’d be able to sleep.

  As I turned off the kitchen lights, I wondered again what Beth planned to do with Harden House. I couldn’t imagine her living here—there was no master bath, no garbage disposal and no central air, none of the amenities that Beth considered necessities—and it would be a pricey second home, especially when it was only a fifteen minute drive from her first home. I knew nothing about inheritance taxes and wondered for a moment if the taxes would be too steep for Beth and Russ, if they would have to sell the house. But it didn’t seem likely; even with all the economic ups and downs lately, I was pretty sure Russ did extremely well. Between his dental practice and apparently bulging stock portfolio—if the time he spent in front of his computer bore any relationship to his returns—they would surely be able to come up with the cash. But I supposed either way, it was possible I’d be looking for a new place to live.

  I paused in the long dining room and stared at the old molding that ran along the edge of the ceiling. It was chipped in places, missing for a two-foot stretch over the fireplace, but mostly intact, amazing after all those years. The house had stood before the Civil War and would presumably stand many years more. The things we built lasted so much longer than we did.

  Or did they? Could the soul of a man survive 150 years? I walked into the entrance hall and climbed to the first landing. I unhinged the hidden door to the safe room and peered in; it was dark and smelled of dampness and lumber and something that had once been alive, but now was dead. It smelled like the cellar, but more so. I closed the latch and sat on a stair. If the soul of one runaway slave still existed, then did all souls live beyond the death of the body? But if the souls did survive, then where were they all living? Where were they now?

  I headed up to my bedroom. This was nuts. Ghosts were no more plausible than angels and harps and pearly gates. Perhaps even less.

  I was standing in the dining room, looking at the molding that ran around the edge of the ceiling. It had been recently painted and glowed in the light from the fire, which roared from within a huge open hearth, much larger than the fireplace I knew. I was alone, and the silence of the house was thick with waiting; it enfolded me like an unwanted, oversized shroud. I didn’t like it.

  Shadows flung themselves from t
he fire, licking at the edge of the rug, brushing the wall. They wavered and slithered and mutated themselves. Changelings. Elusive and cunning. I didn’t like them either.

  But I knew the silence and the shadows were not what I feared. There was something else. Something lurking, huddling, burrowing, hiding. A secret. A horrible, horrible secret. Here. Waiting for me.

  Despite my overwhelming desire to stay where I was, to allow the unknown to remain unknown, I was pulled out of the dining room and through the west parlor. It was as if I was being propelled by a force outside my body, for I didn’t move my legs, yet I walked. I walked into the entrance hall and up the stairs to the first landing.

  I didn’t want to open the door to the safe room. I didn’t want to see what was in there. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Yet I did. My fingers, of their own volition, tweaked the hinges and the door fell toward me. The smell of death and decay rose like a living phantom, wrapping its fingers around my face. I turned away. I wouldn’t look. I wouldn’t. Yet I did.

  I peered through the small opening and gasped: there was no safe room. The door opened into nothing, and all I could see was the earthen floor of the cellar far below. Then I heard a moan and saw a flicker of movement. It was the man. The man from my dream, illuminated as he had been before by an eerie green glow from the field-stone. He lay on the ground, and his blood darkened the dirt around him. He had a huge wound in his chest, gaping and gleaming and raw. A shovel lay at his side, turned up, open and beseeching, clumps of earth still clinging to its mouth.

  Another moan.

  I cried out in alarm and he turned his head slowly toward me.

  “Sarah,” he called, his voice a hoarse whisper. “Please help my brothers.”

  I was terrified and wanted to run from the house, to tear screaming into town, to the police station, to somewhere filled with people, light and commotion, somewhere that was safe. But the man was alive. He was real and he needed me.