The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  The kitchen door slammed open. At first I thought it was Michael—who had called to say he was on his way over to develop a game plan for the inspection—and my heart jumped, but then I saw it was Beth.

  I hadn’t spoken with her since Gram’s will became family knowledge, and I had no idea how she was going to react to losing the house. I watched her progress across the kitchen and dining room with apprehension. I could tell by the shuffle of her heels on the hardwood floor that she was bummed out, and I scanned her face for signs that she was mad at me. There were none. She just looked devastated.

  Beth’s eyes grazed over Trina and the paperwork. “Do you have a minute, Lee?” Her voice was dull with pain.

  I nodded and pushed myself up from the floor. “You got this under control?” I asked Trina.

  “Sure,” Trina said without acknowledging Beth’s presence, a mask of willful blankness covering her face. Trina didn’t like Beth, and given some of the careless things Beth said, I wouldn’t have expected her to. It took some time to understand Beth, to learn to appreciate hen she had a good heart—and now she was hurting.

  I met Beth’s gaze and smiled as warmly as I could. “Want some tea?” I asked her, then looked over at Trina. Trina pulled a piece of gum out of her backpack and shook her head.

  Beth didn’t answer, but she followed me into the kitchen. She dropped sluggishly into the couch and sat silently as I put on the water. Her eyes were large and dark against her pale face, and she was staring at the hands in her lap as if they didn’t belong to her. It was disconcerting to see her so still. I busied myself with the tea-making, trying to figure out what I should say.

  “I feel so bad that she didn’t trust me,” Beth finally whispered, a tear running down her left cheek. “My own grandmother …”

  I put down the teacups. “Oh, honey,” I said, sitting next to her and putting my arms around her. “Gram was always too hard on you. I told her that lots of times.”

  “Guess it didn’t do too much good.”

  I pushed back a wisp of hair that had fallen to her forehead. “You know Gram wasn’t big on taking advice. Mom always says that once Gram makes up her mind, nothing is ever going to get her to change it, so it’s a waste of good time and energy to even bother.”

  “My mom used to say the same thing,” Beth allowed with the glimmer of a smile.

  “She was a stubborn ol’ coot, our grandmother,” I said, hoping to nudge a laugh out of her.

  Instead, Beth burst into tears. “I wish she wasn’t dead.”

  I rested my head on Beth’s shoulder. “Me too,” I said. “Me too.”

  We stayed like that for a while, sharing our sadness, our connection, letting the tears run until they were ready to dry up. Beth’s tears dried first. “My one consolation is that Gram didn’t completely lose faith in me,” she said. “She didn’t completely cut me out of her will.”

  I swiped my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.

  Beth reached into one of the cartons that was still sitting open on the floor. She pulled out a child’s pink dress, used it to wipe her face, then handed it to me. “I talked to Jan Rosenthal—Gram’s lawyer—she told me about Michael and Trina. I guess you must already know.”

  I glanced up to see if Beth was going to use the inheritance against Trina, but, at the moment, she was too distracted by her own misery.

  “A bunch of other people too,” she continued. “The Lexington Historical Society, some blind woman she used to read to, the library.”

  “What about you?”

  Beth sighed. “Jan said the will stipulates that I get first pick of the furniture, and if you’re ‘unable or unwilling’ to take Harden House, then it reverts back to the way it’s always been.” Beth tried to smile, but didn’t quite make it. “I guess if she really didn’t trust me, she wouldn’t have taken the chance that you might not want the house.”

  I turned the little dress around in my hands. Was this Beth’s way of asking if I was willing to give up Harden House? Did she think I didn’t want it? I worked the dress until the sound of ripping cloth startled me. I had torn a seam in the skirt. “Beth, I don’t know what to say. I really—” I began.

  “No,” Beth interrupted. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want you to change anything. I don’t want this old house—this old flea trap—I’ve got a perfectly nice house of my own that’s air conditioned and has instant hot … It’s just that I, that I just … I just feel so bad.” She started to cry all over again.

  I wrapped her in my arms and rubbed her back, smiling at her reference to air conditioning and the instant hot water dispenser she had at her kitchen sink. Beth was a character, there was no doubt about that, but I felt bad too.

  Michael found us like that when he walked in a few minutes later. He stood at the door, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Hey,” he said uncertainly. “Hope I’m not interrupting.”

  I wanted to run to him and let him hold me while I wailed out all the unfair and unbelievable things that had happened since I had last seen him. But I didn’t, I just gave him a small smile over the back of Beth’s head.

  It was Beth who took control of the situation. “We’re done,” she said, standing and throwing Michael a forced smile—which was a pretty good imitation of the real thing considering the circumstances. “We’ve had our crying and our girl bonding and now we’re all done. Come on in and sit down.”

  Michael looked at me.

  “There’s only so much bonding two women who have known each other their whole lives have left to do,” I assured him.

  Beth patted my shoulder and then turned to Michael. “We were having tea,” she said. “Want some?”

  Michael said he did, and we poured four cups of tea—despite Trina’s earlier turn down—and went into the west parlor to discuss the inspection. Trina drank the tea once she had it in her hands, and the four of us spent over an hour working out a plan that would have everything ready in less than a week. It was going to be tight, but Trina said she could come out over the weekend, and Michael thought he could get his piece together if one of us was willing to complete filling the tunnel by Sunday morning, when the cement contractor was scheduled to arrive.

  I participated in the conversation—even made suggestions and volunteered to do tasks—but I felt as if I weren’t really there. How could I care about the inspection when Gram was dead and the cops thought Trina killed her and Beth was so unhappy and the charm bag had disappeared and Michael was so concerned and sweet? How could I not care about my grandmother’s final dream?

  The four of us tromped downstairs to assess that situation. “Jud’s doing us a huge favor by coming in on a Sunday,” Michael said when we reached the old cellar. “And if we don’t have it ready for him, I’ll be screwed with Lexington Cement and Gravel for years—not to mention the time and a half you’re paying for him and two of his guys.”

  It was slowly dawning on me that I was the only one who didn’t have a hard and fast excuse to avoid the task. Michael’s mother was having surgery in the morning—the doctors had finally decided a bypass was necessary—and Michael’s crew was committed to another job through the end of the month. Beth was working all day at Zach’s school, had a “no-excuses-accepted” business gala to attend that evening with Russ and claimed that on Saturday she was completely booked with back-to-back baseball games and a fund-raiser. Trina’s time was more than absorbed by the paperwork. That left me and the promise I had made to my dead grandmother that I would see her project through.

  “There’s no one you can get to help out?” I asked Michael. When he said no, I turned to Beth. “How about your endless list of helpful servants?”

  “I could try,” she said dubiously. “But everyone seems awfully busy this spring.”

  “High school students?”

  “None I can think of.”

  “All right, all right,” I said reluctantly. “I’ve got to go into work in the morning, but I guess I can get ba
ck here by noon and start in on it.” Michael gave my shoulder a grateful squeeze and promised he’d be over as soon as he could get away from the hospital. We tromped back upstairs.

  Trina went back into the west parlor and Beth lingered in the cellar for a few minutes, which gave me the chance to tell Michael I just wasn’t up for our dinner date tonight. “I know it was my suggestion,” I said, “but can we do it some other time? There’s just too much going on, and I’m completely wasted. I’d be lousy company.”

  Michael looked at me closely. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  I didn’t answer right away. “Not now,” I finally said, although I did want to. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  He ran his finger along my jaw line with the same gesture he had used yesterday, and I felt the same shiver of excitement. “Leave a message on my machine if you change your mind,” he said. “But, either way, I’ll see you here tomorrow night—afternoon, if I can.”

  Beth came up the stairs just as Michael was leaning over to kiss me. We leapt apart, and Beth looked both pleased and guilty at her intrusion.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said breezily and headed for the west parlor. “As you were,” she called over her shoulder.

  I heard her say something to Trina, then the slam of the front door. We listened to her car pull out of the driveway, then Michael touched my cheek and he left too.

  Trina knew there was some weird shit coming down in that old house. Real weird. The cops knew something was up too, but they thought it was her. It never occurred to them it might be something much weirder and more sinister than a sister with a lot of baggage.

  Lee was starting to wonder too, but Lee was wondering about a lot of shit these days. Trina had caught her checking out her pupils, and although it had made her mad at the time, when she thought about it, she couldn’t hardly blame Lee, not with Kiah and the cops filling her with their negative thoughts.

  The cops didn’t appear to be at all concerned with the low-life cousin, but they did have part of an eye out for Lee, who wasn’t half bad, even if she wasn’t tuned into a lot of shit you would’ve thought everyone would be tuned into. Trina knew the man had a whole eye out for her, and that her main gig now was to make sure she got off his scope because suddenly it was like her ticket was being dropped from heaven. Things had changed, and she might not have to wait out an inheritance everyone seemed motivated to keep from her. Maybe there was a God.

  Trina felt bad about how it was gonna look for Lee when she showed up gone after Lee had been going to bat for her with Kiah and the cops, even offering to get her hooked up with fat-cat Dannow.

  But she also felt bad about Hendrika and Clara and a shitload of other stuff. And Trina knew feeling bad about something didn’t make it any different than it was.

  I didn’t move from my desk all morning, furiously attacking all the work I had ignored for the last week, trying to catch up on enough of it so I wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving to go home and dig. Oh goody. Digging in the cellar. My favorite thing.

  I sorted through the mess in my in-box—filing a few papers, throwing away a few more, restoring most to where they had been—and returned the most pressing calls, but I kept an ear open for the intercom announcing that Mike Dannow, who hadn’t returned my call from yesterday, was on the line. Kiah had promised to talk to him this morning to make sure he called today, although she was cool to the idea of Dannow representing Trina. “The guy’s pro bono slate is full into the twenty-second century,” she said. “Who’s going to pay him? Pretty-boy Lionnel? You?”

  When the intercom finally buzzed, it was Trina, not Dannow. “You got to get your ass home right now, girl.” Trina was usually careful not to use street language when she talked to me, and I knew this wasn’t a good sign.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. “What’s wrong?”

  “The man,” she said.

  “The man?” I repeated to stall for time, although I knew exactly who she was talking about.

  “The cops,” she answered with exaggerated patience. “That little lady with the sparklin’ personality and the—”

  “Blais and Langley.”

  “Yeah. Them. They were here.”

  “But they aren’t anymore?”

  “He went with her in the ambulance, but there’s another one—”

  “The ambulance?”

  “She got herself hurt. They were going into the cellar when one of the stairs came loose and she fell.”

  Those steep, narrow steps, no railing … “Is she okay? She’s not? She isn’t?”

  “Nah, that kind always pulls through. Her leg was bent all around, and she was making a shitload of noise. Pissed as all hell. Said someone did it on purpose.”

  “Did what?”

  “Screwed with the stairs. The uniform said it looked like someone pulled out the nails so the next person who came down would get themselves hurt—maybe even killed.”

  Someone pulled out the nails? I thought about angry creatures caught in a netherworld, neither here nor there, frustrated and enraged, fighting to keep what they believed to be theirs.

  “Did they accuse you of doing it?”

  “Not directly,” Trina said. “But I got the distinct impression they’re leaning that way. Said whoever did it was covering up the evidence against her.”

  “They had a search warrant?” I was surprised I was asking such logical and reasonable questions when my mind was racing with such illogical and unreasonable ones.

  “You don’t think I’d let them in without one, do you?” Trina demanded indignantly. “You told me they were coming with one, so when they showed it to me, I told ’em it was cool. But now that they know I knew, they’re busy digging my grave.”

  Digging.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As I dodged the traffic crowding Dudley Square, I couldn’t quite quell the uneasy sensation that I was somehow responsible for Blais’ broken leg. I knew it had been an accident, an unfortunate accident, and that while it was true I had never wished the detective well, I had also never wished her ill. Her fall had nothing to do with me or Trina or Harden House or a ghost who inhabited the cellar. It had just happened. Things do just happen.

  A few blocks beyond the square, I saw a lone little girl wearing a cloth coat at least three sizes too large for her slight frame. She crossed the battered asphalt, clutching a plastic lunch box and dragging the hem of her coat through the dirt. Sadness emanated from her like a bad aura. She was headed toward Garrison Elementary and was at least four hours late. Watching the tiny, dispirited form, it was clear her problems were far greater than mine. And far more real. There was no ghost, no one had killed Gram, and the police were mistaken about the broken step. In a structure as old as Harden House, hands—incorporeal or human—weren’t necessary to cause a stair to fall apart. The stair was quite capable of falling apart all by itself.

  But as I watched the little girl being swallowed by the oversized door of the school, I once again heard the voice from my dream. “Sarah,” the man had called out. “Please help my brothers.” And although I knew he was just an errant flicker of my subconscious mind, I couldn’t help but wonder if Sarah had been able to do as he had asked: if his last dying wish had ever been realized.

  May 14, 1868

  Papa is dead, and I have returned to Harden House. I feel little sadness at his passing and little joy at my homecoming. While I was gone, Papa became a great Colonel in the War Between the States, with many battles to his credit, but he lost his final battle to a flesh wound that never healed. Ironic that he too died of a gunshot. Ironic and fitting.

  It has been more than eight years since I was sent from Harden House in disgrace, and more than eight years since I last spoke with you, dear diary. I found you just where I had left you, hidden beneath the brim of Mama’s pink-and-white hat, nestled in the bottom of a box at the back of her closet. Silas’ charm bag was there too. I placed the charm bag around my neck and shall wear it to my grave.
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  Much has changed since I left this place—a wrenching war has been fought in our great nation, with many lives lost and many freedoms won—but also, little has changed. Silas is still gone from me, now just bones huddling beneath the house, and only the merciful Lord knows where my poor Levi may be.

  I now know the Lord is far less merciful than I once believed. A merciful Lord would never have taken my child from me nor allowed a man such as Silas to die before knowing Emancipation.

  May 20, 1868

  I am now twenty-seven years old, a spinster with much less ahead than behind. My brother, Caleb, too, has grown old, odd in his ways, and is without a wife. I presume he shall remain as such to the end of his days, as shall I. Perhaps the neighborhood children will grow frightened of us over the years, telling each other tales of the eccentric Mr. and Miss Harden, who busy themselves plotting ways to capture and torture small children. I smile sadly as I write these words, both because they are so fantastic and because they may become true.

  Harden House is uncommonly still after Cousin Hattie’s boisterous household, which was always full of children and servants and much comings and goings. I think I prefer it thus in my middle years, although I do miss the children, most especially Roderick, who reminds me of my own sweet Levi.

  My time in Ohio, where I was “Auntie Sarie,” as Baby Emma took to calling me from my first afternoon, is already far distant—eight full, long years, yet now fleeting and dreamlike. From the first, Cousin Hattie was kind and strove to include me in her busy life, but I was so dull at calling and dinner parties that, after a season, she finally yielded and allowed me to remain at home with the children, which is as it would have been either way, as the War ended social living as we knew it.

  Cousin Hattie was never told the true reason for my extended visit, and although she may have guessed at a portion of my secret, it is certain she could never have imagined the horrible depth of the truth. It would have been a great relief to be able to reveal the bleakness that dwelled within me to such a kind soul as Hattie, but, of course, this was not possible.