The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  “I’m fine, thank you.” I had to stall for time, and false pleasantries were all that came to mind.

  “I put liquid cocaine in her milk that day at lunch,” Beth said conversationally, as if she were telling me how she liked her coffee.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. She could have been speaking in tongues. Maybe she was.

  “I read in a book on poisons that milk slows down the absorption process,” she continued.

  It still wasn’t registering. “Absorption process?”

  “That’s why the police never considered me a suspect,” she said proudly. “That’s why I left right after lunch. I knew no one but Gram would drink the milk.”

  “Milk.” Now I understood. Beth was speaking English, and her words and their implication were all too clear. She had read a book about poison. Dentists used liquid cocaine for surgical procedures. Gram was the only one in the house who drank milk. “Russ,” I faltered, then tried again. “You got the cocaine from Russ.”

  Beth smiled. A teacher with a slow pupil who had finally caught on. “You might say I ‘borrowed’ the keys to the drug cabinet in his office.”

  I didn’t know what was worse, that Beth had killed Gram or that she had planned it so thoroughly. Then another sick link, another insane piece of a lunatic’s puzzle, smacked me between the eyes. “And because it was a street drug, it made Trina look even guiltier.” This was beyond belief, beyond understanding, beyond anything I had ever imagined could happen in my world.

  “Dumb luck,” Beth admitted with a self-deprecating wave of her shovel. “I admit I wanted to set Trina up—that’s why I put Gram’s bracelet in her backpack—but I’ve got to be truthful with you here, the cocaine connection was just a lucky break.”

  “… Got to be truthful with you here …” Beth’s words echoed through my brain. “… Just a lucky break.” She was a madwoman, far crazier and more deadly than I had ever imagined. This was much more than Dotty Aunt Hortense. This was true danger. My eyes involuntarily darted around the room.

  Like a lion at the kill, Beth smelled my fear. Keeping her eyes on me, she assumed the stance of a fighter, holding the shovel in front of her as both barrier and weapon. She began to dance a wide circle around me, as if in a boxing ring, her back to the wall. Her eyes were an inky black, almost completely dilated; they never left mine. “I’m sorry it had to come to this,” she said in a soft, sorrowful voice, as if she actually believed what she was saying. “If Gram hadn’t changed her will, this never would’ve happened, but she did what she did, it was her decision, and it’s beyond me to undo what’s she’s done.” Beth’s self-delusion was unfathomable. Did she really believe Gram was responsible for her own death?

  I gripped the screwdriver and turned as she circled, keeping pace with her every movement, holding her in my sights, biting my lip against the thunderbolts of pain shooting up my leg.

  “I’ll give you the house,” I offered, finally understanding that Beth was capable of anything. Of everything. The terror that filled me as I watched her slow, crazed circuit, was stunning. I wondered how long a person could live with such fear. “I’ll sign it over to you tomorrow,” I pleaded. “However you want it. Whatever you want.”

  Beth paused under the safe room’s dangling floorboards. She pursed her lips in a gruesome mockery of serious consideration, then shook her head. “Too late now,” she said with a resigned sigh. “If only Gram had done that in the first place this—” She froze. All color drained from her face.

  I turned and followed her gaze. I had thought the fear that filled me was the greatest a human being could experience and still survive, but now I knew it had been just a prelude. I clung to the sawhorse as if it could save me from being drowned by the terror that towered before me.

  He was real.

  As real as I. As real as Beth, and most likely, even more dangerous.

  He stood in front of the tunnel, throwing a long and solid shadow over the earthen floor. Shirtless, he was taller and thicker, stronger, more ominous, than I remembered. He had a ragged cast on his leg, a shovel in his powerful hands, and he stared at Beth with a loathing that could easily precede murder.

  I tore my eyes from him and looked at Beth. If she didn’t see him, maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe this was just another one of my nightmares. But if it was a dream, Beth was having the same dream as I.

  “Who?” she stammered. “What the hell …?”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t speak. My world was listing so far off kilter, I could barely stand. Beth had killed Gram. Ghosts were real.

  The ghost raised his shovel and started toward Beth, who stood completely paralyzed with incomprehension and disbelief, or maybe, in this case, belief. His muscles rippled as he moved closer to her, molten iron steeled with hatred. He wasn’t ephemeral, and he wasn’t transitory: there was nothing ghost-like about him. He was a man, an angry man bent on destruction. And it was clear he could accomplish it with ease.

  For the most fleeting of moments, I thought I should just stand back and let him kill Beth. She surely deserved it. But I couldn’t. “No!” I cried. “Stop!”

  Again, it was as if time had slowed to half-time. The ghost, the man, halted in his course toward Beth, and slowly, with the grim tediousness of inevitability, turned toward me. Every muscle and sinew of his being radiated a deep, all-consuming hatred, and when the searing enmity of his gaze fell on me, I knew I was dead.

  “Please,” I croaked, although I had no idea what I was pleading for. My life, I supposed. “Look,” I pointed to the charm bag that lay where I had left it for him this morning. “I brought you your charm bag.”

  His expression softened, and he mouthed the word, “Sarah,” although no sound came from his lips.

  Just as in my dream, he believed I was Sarah Harden. And from the expression on his face, it was apparent he loved Sarah and would never allow anyone to hurt her. For the second time in as many minutes, I thought about how easy it would be to just let him kill Beth, but I said, “Don’t hurt her. Please.”

  He picked up the tattered charm bag and placed it around his neck.

  “You’re not where you think you are,” I said softly. “This isn’t what it seems.”

  “Sarah,” he mouthed soundlessly.

  “What?” Beth whispered hoarsely. “What’s he saying?”

  I ignored her and spoke to the ghost. “You’re lost,” I said. “Lost in time because of what happened to you. What the anti-abolitionists did to you.”

  He shook his head. It was obvious that he could hear me, and that he didn’t understand a thing I was saying.

  I tried again. “When they killed you, right after you called out for Sarah to help you, to help your brothers, you got stuck. Stuck in time because your death was so awful, so needless. So wrong.”

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Beth demanded, sounding like herself once again.

  He ignored her too, looking at me as if we were the only two in the room. “Sarah?” And this time his silent word was clearly a question.

  “No,” I said as gently as I could, although I wasn’t at all certain I should admit I wasn’t his missing love. “I’m not Sarah, I’m her great-great-great-granddaughter.”

  His bewilderment transposed into stupefaction, and I was afraid.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Sarah’s been gone a hundred years.” Now that I had begun, the truth seemed the only course, and the fact that he was finally going to hear it gave me courage. “You were probably killed about forty years before that, probably right before the war began. The war between the north and south—the Civil War. The north ended up winning and all the slaves were freed when it was over.”

  He was listening carefully, not moving toward Beth or me, apparently caught between believing and not believing.

  “After the war, they changed the constitution and slavery was abolished everywhere in the country,” I continued. “So, you see, now you don’t need to finish your tu
nnel. Your brothers have been free for a long time—as have their children’s children.” But even as I spoke the words, I thought of Trina and wondered how free his brother’s children’s children really were.

  I saw the gleam of comprehension, of recognition, cross his face, the realization that I was confirming something he already knew, but had been unwilling to acknowledge. This flash was followed quickly by anger.

  “Don’t be angry,” I said, staring into his hauntingly familiar eyes. “Don’t be afraid. It’s okay to put it down, to let it go, to be with Sarah. Go to her, to your brothers. You’ll finally be a free man.”

  Before he could respond, I caught the glint of flashing metal out of the corner of my eye. Beth. I turned toward the movement and raised my screwdriver in a futile effort to ward off her shovel.

  Beth swung the shovel at my forehead, but instead of connecting with my head, it dropped to the ground at her feet. Her face was a mask of complete bafflement as she stared, stupefied, at her empty hands. A deep rumble came from above, and before she could raise her eyes, the floorboards that had been hanging over her head crashed to the ground in deluge of lumber and mortar and nails. Beth crumpled into a motionless heap.

  I dropped down next to her, the screwdriver clattering uselessly from my fingers. “Beth!” I cried, already forgetting what she had become, remembering only who she had been. I frantically pulled the splintered boards from her face and groped for the pulse in her wrist. It was faint and skittish, but it was there.

  Weak with relief, I swung around toward the man. But I found myself staring directly into the yawning mouth of the tunnel. He was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The rest of the weekend was a nightmare, and I don’t know what I would have done without Michael. Fragments of thoughts and images swirled through my brain: the light of understanding in the eyes of the man to whom I had just explained his own death, the melancholy face of Sarah Harden staring out from an old photograph, Gram wrestling with no one, a vial of liquid cocaine, a tattered red charm bag. I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t eat, and I got into talking jags that Michael and Raymond Langley and even my mother tolerated with infinite patience.

  Beth hadn’t been hurt as badly as I had feared, not nearly as badly as her self-inflicted knife wound of the previous day. So after a quick visit to the emergency room for a tetanus shot and a few bandages, I had the privilege of watching Langley place handcuffs on her wrists and put her into the back seat of his car. It was the second time in a single day I had watched someone I loved being cuffed and taken down to the police station. Trina was released as soon as the Lexington police informed their Boston counterparts that someone else had confessed to the theft of the bracelet and the murder of Clara Barrett. She went back to SafeHaven, but refused to speak to me.

  I didn’t tell the police or my mother about the man who had saved my life—the ghost who had saved my life. Only Michael knew what had really happened. He held me as we discussed it late into the night and was still holding me when the sun rose. Neither he nor I came up with any answers, just lots more questions, but I was grateful for his presence.

  My nights had been turned into days and days into nights, and when the ringing phone woke me, I guessed it was late afternoon from the angle of the sun and the sweat running between my shoulders blades. But I didn’t know which day. Monday or Tuesday? Michael wasn’t in the bed, but I could hear hammering somewhere beneath me. Fixing the floor of the safe room I had demolished. I picked up the phone. It was Ms. Tosatti at Cary Library. The boxes my grandmother had given the library had been found, and Nancy Winsten said I was welcome to them.

  “You found Gram’s boxes?” I asked, although that was exactly what she had just told me.

  “I’m on my way out, but if you stop at the reference desk someone will help you.” She thanked me and hung up before I could thank her. I had the feeling she had been hoping to reach a machine.

  I lay back on the pillow, thankful for any crust of good news, but so weary it felt as if I hadn’t slept at all. I knew that the boxes might hold some clues about my ghost, but the idea of getting up and driving the quarter mile to the library was overwhelming. Beth had killed Gram. Poisoned her. On purpose. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, yet I couldn’t quite grasp it. It eluded all logic, yet made its own demented kind of sense. Beth had killed Gram. Trina had done nothing wrong. I had misjudged everyone—including the ghost. The ghost. Another impossible concept with its own frightening consistency.

  I dragged myself from bed and went downstairs to find Michael. He was in the cellar, and I leaned into the safe room’s hidden doorway to call down Ms. Tosatti’s news. He told me I should take a shower and go pick up the boxes. He was worried about me, concerned I wasn’t handling the mounting stress very well, that I was withdrawing, hiding. I knew what he really wanted was for me to get cleaned up and out of the house. It seemed easier to do as he suggested than to argue, so I did.

  When I got to the library, Ms. Tosatti had already left for the day, but the librarian behind the reference desk knew exactly where the cartons were. She even got a high school kid shelving books to carry them to the car for me and patted my shoulder encouragingly as we left the building.

  The kid didn’t say anything, but he kept throwing furtive glances in my direction, then turning quickly when I met his eye. Murder was a rarity in Lexington, and everyone in town must know by now what had happened at Harden House—or at least know as much as anyone would ever know. It occurred to me that a granddaughter killing her grandmother was pretty rare anywhere, that anyone who read a newspaper or watched television must be aware of what Beth had done. I supposed I was going to have to accept my fifteen minutes of macabre fame, but I pretended I didn’t notice the boy’s stares.

  When I got home, I set the cartons next to the ones Michael had brought up from the cellar less than two weeks before. I sat on the couch and watched the boxes at my feet as if I believed they might suddenly stand up and walk away or start spitting snakes. The sound of hammering in the cellar reverberated through the floor boards, and I pressed my damp palms to my jeans. Hammering, not shoveling, I reminded myself. Michael working on the safe room floor, not a ghost digging a tunnel.

  Inspecting the contents of the cartons seemed less scary than thinking about the ghost, so I knelt down and began rummaging. As Gram had said, there didn’t appear to be anything that was all that sexy. Mostly illegible letters and equally illegible account books, but there was a recipe book—called a receipt book—that had belonged to Charlotte Harden and a few family photos. It was amazing to think that Gram had let this stuff go without going through it. Gram before and after Tubman Park.

  I was well into the second box when I found a small, leather-bound book filled with a tiny, neat script. A journal of some sort. Apparently quite old. “August 28, 1858,” I read. “Today is my seventeenth birthday …” My eyes raced down the page, and I gasped when I saw the words, “I am Sarah Abigail Harden, daughter of Stanton Elijah Harden and Charlotte Abbott Harden …” Sarah Harden had written a diary. A diary which might contain everything I had longed to know—and everything I didn’t want to.

  I sat back down on the couch and looked at the small book in my hands. Pulled and repelled. Frightened and enthralled. Could this tell me if Sarah had ever been able to help the black man’s brothers? Who her husband had been, and what had happened to him? If the ghost I believed I had seen had anything to do with actual events at Harden House?

  There was nothing to do but read it, and once I began, I didn’t stop until I had finished. I read about Lewis Campbell and Wendell Parker and the Buffrum-Chase Ball. I read about Sarah’s hopes and dreams and how everything had changed when a runaway slave named Silas Person appeared at the door of Harden House. I read about why the root closet—canning cupboard—was so small and what the east and west parlors had been used for. At one point, Michael came upstairs for a beer, and although I wanted more than anything to tell him what
I had found, I couldn’t bear to stop reading long enough to explain. I blew him a kiss, and he returned to the cellar.

  I read about the charm bag and why there were mounds of dirt on the cellar floor. I read of the tortured decisions Sarah was called upon to make, of their disastrous results. I read of the hypocrisy of the Colonel, the great abolitionist of whom we were all so proud. And yes, I learned about Sarah’s inability to help Silas’ brothers and who her husband had been. I remained surprisingly calm until the end of the diary, and then my hands began to tremble and it was difficult to follow the words. But I read on.

  “Michael!” I yelled down the cellar stairs as soon as I had read the final page. Within seconds, he came bounding into the kitchen.

  “What?” he demanded, grabbing me by the shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  I handed him the diary. Without a word—wonderful man that he is—he sat down and began to read. I didn’t interrupt him. I paced silently around the house, trying to understand the ramifications of all Sarah had written. I walked through the east parlor and into the west. Silas. Sarah. Ulysses. The Colonel. The bloodlines that crossed in my veins. I was proud to be descended from Silas and Sarah, proud of the risks they had been willing to take for love and for fairness. I was ashamed of the Colonel. And ashamed of myself.

  Silas Person, my ghost and my great-great-great-grandfather, who had been killed by my great-great-great-great grandfather. Silas Person, who had come north in search of freedom and instead found both love and death. Silas Person, dead almost one-hundred-fifty years, who had saved my life two days ago.

  I climbed the stairs and peered into the open door of the safe room, reliving the dream in which I had stood on this spot and looked down through this opening and saw a man bleeding to death on the floor. Silas Person had bled to death. He had been on that ground below. What I had seen had actually taken place. “Silas still waits for his brothers. He digs his tunnel by night and sleeps by day, just as he did before Papa killed him.” I had seen him do that, heard him do that. “Silas is as enslaved in death as he was in life.” I had seen this, too.