by Deanna Chase
The first bite was heaven. Hot beef and melted cheese and crispy bacon, with juice running down my fingers and a tiny rivulet snaking beside my lips…. I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to moan out loud.
“Hey,” Melissa said. “Isn’t that your Jason?”
I whirled around without thinking.
So much for cool. So much for suave. So much for calm and self-possessed and witty and urbane. If my whiplash motion had not drawn his eyes to me, my explosion of coughing would have. Five Guys burgers made a perfect meal, but they were lousy down the windpipe.
When I was finally able to breathe again, I saw the true extent of the disaster. My Imaginary Boyfriend was not merely sitting in the same dive-y restaurant that I shared with Melissa. He hadn’t just seen me choke on a bite of hamburger the size of a pack of cards. He wasn’t only privy to my dirt-streaked arms and my stained t-shirt.
He was eating with another woman.
A woman who, even seated, clearly had the body of a classically-trained ballerina. She was tall and thin—willowy is the phrase that you read in books. She had soft brown hair with chunks of buttery blonde that I could tell weren’t highlights—that was her own naturally perfect coloring. Her eyes were pale blue, framed by the longest, darkest lashes that Lady Maybelline had ever touched.
Who was I kidding? Maybelline? That woman didn’t buy her cosmetics at a drugstore. Even Sephora was too downscale for her. She probably had colors mixed by hand at some boutique in New York. But the most astonishing thing about her mascara? It was totally, completely waterproof.
The woman was crying.
And that made me even more jealous of her. Not only was she sitting across the table from my Imaginary Boyfriend. Not only did she have a body to die for and a face to match. Not only did she have more elegance in her elongated pinky than I had in my entire body. But she could cry without her nose turning red and her face going blotchy. I hated her.
“Don’t look!” I hissed to Melissa. Well, as much as anyone could hiss a command that had no S’s in it. I made a big show of eating a French fry. One little French fry. One that wouldn’t put too many inches on my hips. “What are they doing?”
“How can I know, if you won’t let me look?”
“Melissa,” I warned, swallowing some Diet Coke as I tried to wash away the scratchy feeling left over from choking.
She gave in with a grin. “He’s offering her his napkin. She’s wiping her nose. No. She’s dabbing at her nose. My God, she looks like a princess.”
“I don’t need to hear that!” I stuffed three emergency fries into my mouth, and the salty, steamy potato almost drowned out the report.
“Hurry up,” Melissa said with a sudden urgency. “Finish that bite. They’re coming this way.”
I gulped and swallowed and even found a second to take a sip of soda. By the time Jason stopped by our table, I’d pasted a smile on my lips, but it felt fake to me. An Imaginary Smile for an Imaginary Boyfriend.
“Jane,” he said, and my heart leaped somewhere up to the vicinity of my larynx.
“Jason,” I managed before prompting, “Um, I think you’ve met my friend, Melissa. Melissa White.” I needed to find out the name of the woman who was with him.
He nodded. Almost as an afterthought, he turned toward the spectral creature who drifted behind him. “Jane, Melissa, this is Ekaterina Ivanova.”
Ekaterina Ivanova? Just like some Russian princess. Like Anastasia’s long-lost grand-daughter. I waited for her to extend her hand, but she didn’t. It was just as well. My own chewed nails and greasy fingertips would have defiled her forever. She inclined her head toward us, and I felt as if the very Queen of the Wilis had deigned to acknowledge our existence. She said, “Jason, I need to leave,” and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
He shrugged and smiled at me, and I told myself that there were volumes behind that grin. He would rather sit with Melissa and me. He would prefer to help himself to some of our fries. He wanted to joke and relax with real women, rather than his ice statue of a companion.
Melissa came unstuck first. “It was nice meeting you,” she said to Ekaterina. “Good to see you again, Jason.”
I muttered something, and then they were gone. “Who do you think she is?” I asked, before the door had closed behind them.
“I don’t know, but she definitely wasn’t happy.”
“She must be Russian. Did you hear that accent? Didn’t she sound Russian to you?”
“I could barely hear her speak.”
“She’s Russian, though.” I heard the words tumbling out of my mouth, faster and faster, as if I needed to reassure myself. “She must be one of his grad students. A lot of Russians study American history. You know, there’s a whole tradition of foreign students specializing in the colonies. Alexis de Tocqueville wasn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last.”
“De Tocqueville was French.” Melissa took advantage of my distraction to snatch the last of the fries from the greasy paper sack.
“You know what I mean.”
“We’re in Georgetown, Jane. The man is a professor at Mid-Atlantic. Probably half the people he knows are academics.”
“Did you see her mascara?”
“Yep.” Melissa downed the last bite of her burger before she nodded. “It probably cost more than a month of your pay at the Peabridge.”
“Who bothers with mascara on the weekends, anyway?”
“On the weekends?” Melissa batted her eyelashes at me. I could not think of a time when I’d seen her wearing mascara. Or lipstick. Or blush, foundation, or eyeliner. She always said they just melted down her face while she worked at the bakery.
I sighed and set aside the vision of the Ice Queen. She probably specialized in early women’s suffrage movements. She looked the type.
“Are you through?” I asked Melissa, already collecting our spent napkins and plastic cups of ketchup.
She nodded and tossed her pristine napkin onto the tray. I tried not to compare it to my stained one. Well, how was a girl supposed to stay neat while eating a burger? Didn’t it show a healthy appetite to let the juices run down your wrists?
We walked back to the cottage, and I was pleased to see that our hard labor had withstood the test of time. If anything, the surfaces glinted more in the afternoon light. “OK,” I said after taking a deep breath. “Time to do the actual moving in.”
“It should only take two trips.”
Melissa was much better at spatial relationships than I. That must have been a skill that she developed during all those years of choosing the right mixing bowl, of finding the correct Tupperware for leftovers. Back at my old apartment, she made us slide the Lincoln’s front seats up as far as they would go before she wedged in all of my possessions—first onto the car’s huge back seat, then into the trunk. There wasn’t all that much, actually. After all, I’d been a starving grad student for years, and my library job hadn’t paid a fortune, even before my salary was gutted by the board. Before the London Disaster, I’d spent most of my time hanging out at Scott’s apartment, watching his TV, eating off his plates, using his household appliances.
Mostly, I had clothes. Black clothes. Clothes that I could mix and match in an instant, with a generous apportionment of handmade jewelry to accessorize. My collection ran to necklaces and earrings, although I’d invested heavily in brooches when they were popular a couple of years back. Most of my holdings were cheap, scavenged at yard sales and art fairs, but a few were true treasures, garnered in museum shops and tiny galleries around town. What could I say? A girl has her weaknesses.
In the end, though, we had to run a third trip back to my old place. Neither Melissa nor I trusted Stupid Fish on a car seat with any other belongings.
Stupid Fish was the world’s oldest neon tetra. He’d been a college graduation gift from Scott. He’d lasted through English grad school, library school, even through London. When I found out about Scott and the British slut, I almost flushed Stupid Fi
sh. But it was hardly the tetra’s fault that he’d been purchased by a jerk.
And so he lived on. Stupid Fish the Superannuated Tetra. Stupid Fish, who had a ten-gallon tank all to himself, because I wasn’t about to compound my mistakes by getting him any little fishy companions. Not at this late date.
We moved the tank by emptying out half the water. Melissa carried it to the car (she’d always been stronger than I). She’d even thought to bring a cookie sheet to cover the tank and keep the water from sloshing out as we drove across town for the last time. After she carried it into the house and set it on the counter in the kitchen, I added some spring water and watched Stupid Fish swim around. As ready as I was to be out of the fish business, I was pleased to see that he made the move without obvious trauma.
Before long, Melissa decided to head home. She lived above Cake Walk, the bakery that she owned, down by the canal that ran through Georgetown. Mornings started at an ungodly hour for her. I thanked her a million times for helping me with the move, and she shrugged it off, like best friends do.
She walked down the garden path, and I was alone in my new home.
I strolled from room to room, a little amazed by the amount of space that was mine. It was the height of luxury to have separate rooms—I had lived in studio apartments for all the years since I’d flown Gran’s nest. I made a cup of tea and sipped it while curled up on my hunter green sofa.
I realized that I was exhausted. After all, I’d been up since dawn, packing up my old place, readying this one. It was time to go to bed, so that I could make it to work on time the next morning. Monday was a prime Jason day, and I wanted to be rested.
I changed into my preferred sleepwear, a pair of men’s flannel pajamas cut off at the knees, so faded that I could barely make out their black watch plaid. Making one more tour of my home, I turned off all the lights before climbing into the feather bed and putting my glasses on the nightstand. I lay back on my pillow and closed my eyes, but before I could drift off to sleep, I remembered the chilly feeling that I’d encountered walking around the cottage in the past.
That was not the right thing to think of.
I told myself to relax. I told myself to give in to the bone-deep exhaustion in my arms and legs. I told myself to go through the multiplication table, to bore my brain to sleep.
Around six times seven is forty-two, I gave up. I put on my glasses and found the fuzzy bunny slippers that Gran had given me for my last birthday. I smiled at their floppy ears the way I always did. I walked into the bathroom, grateful that Melissa had latched the decorative shutters over the single window, keeping night-time spooks from peering in at me. I filled my toothbrush cup with water and made myself swallow slowly, all the time looking in the mirror and telling myself how foolish I was being.
When I set the cup back on the counter, I saw that one of the tiles was cobalt blue, darker than all the others, as if it had been replaced some time in the past. I touched it, and to my surprise, it pivoted easily to reveal a cubbyhole. As I peered closer, I saw that there was a brass cup hook planted in the top of the space. And dangling from the hook was a key.
It wasn’t a large key, no longer than the one that worked my new deadbolt. But it was the strangest key I’d ever seen. It was forged out of black iron. Instead of little jagged zigzags of teeth, it had a sturdy black rectangle with an intricate shape cut out of the middle. I slipped it from the hook, and it was heavier in my palm than it should have been.
I could hear my blood pounding in my ears. Stop it, I said. There is nothing spooky or mysterious about this key. It must fit some door around the house. A lot of homes had hiding places, built before people trusted banks, before they poured their life savings into stocks and bonds.
Nevertheless, I turned on every light as I walked out to the living room. The cottage must have blazed in the middle of the Peabridge gardens like a centenarian’s birthday cake. I didn’t waste my time in the kitchen. Surely, I would have found a secret door when I cleaned that morning. The bedroom walls were bare, too, and there was nothing suspicious in my tiny closet. The bathroom, the hallway, the living room—all straightforward lath-and-plaster walls.
And then I saw it.
The basement door. The basement, which I was going to let live in peace, with its spiders and its mice and whatever else had scurried down there for shelter.
But there was the door, right off the living room. It had an iron lock. An iron lock that matched the key in my now-trembling hand. The clammy feeling washed over me again, nearly knocking me over with its force.
I found my purse on the coffee table and dug out my cell phone. I punched in a 9 and a 1. The phone whined in my hand, as if I’d brought it too close to a computer screen. The noise grated on my nerves, making me even more aware of the potential danger that lurked below. My left thumb hovered over the 1 again as I set the key in the lock. Filling my lungs and biting down on my lip, I turned the key and opened the door.
Chapter 3
I fumbled for the light switch in the place I expected it to be, at the top of the stairs, but there wasn’t one. Gripping my cell phone closer and feeling more than a little foolish, I swept my fingers in front of my face, swiping blindly into the darkness, hoping to find a cord or chain for an overhead light. Nothing.
The phone glowed green, shedding just enough light from its picture panel that I could make out the stairs beneath my feet. When I moved to the next step, though, weird shadows ganged up on me, and I had to stifle a shout.
Light. I needed more light.
Swearing under my breath, I retreated to the kitchen. After I set the phone down on the counter, it only took a moment to pull my box of thunderstorm supplies from beneath the sink. During the spring and summer, Washington saw its share of major thunderstorms, and my old apartment had lost power at least once a month. I’d become an expert at arranging candles to maximize the reflection of light off a book (candles lasted longer than flashlight batteries), and I had invested in pure beeswax to reduce unsightly drips and splatters. I dug out a fat taper from beneath the cans of tuna (emergency dinner) and the water spray-bottle (emergency air conditioner.) I found the Zippo lighter at the bottom of the box and returned to the basement stairs.
I was so nervous that it took me three tries to get the Zippo to catch. When I finally had the candle burning, I tossed the extinguished lighter over to the braided rug. Raising the flame in front of my face, I sheltered it from drafts with my 9-1-1-poised cell. I could hear the phone’s angry static, resonating down the basement stairs.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought to myself. That, unfortunately, made me think of the Merchant of Venice’s pound of flesh, which of course turned my mind to blood, to my own blood pouring down the stairs. Then, all I could imagine was the fairy tale Bluebeard: the domineering pirate who gives his lady-love free reign throughout his castle, but demands only that she avoid the tower room, the one filled with blood.
I shook my head and raised the candle higher. Even though my voice quavered, I counted out loud as I moved down the steps. “One. Two. Three.”
I wouldn’t have started counting, if I’d known there were thirteen steps. Like I needed any more harbingers of bad luck.
The air in the basement was cold, and I thought about running back to my bedroom for a sweater. I was honest enough, though, to admit that I’d never make it back downstairs if I gave myself that chance to escape. Instead, I held the candle out toward the walls and looked around.
And then I laughed aloud.
I was staring at books. Rows and rows of books. They filled their mahogany shelves. They leaned against each other like plastic drink stirrers in a trendy martini bar. They were tossed onto the floor as if some temperamental undergrad had grown tired of studying for finals. I finally dared to take a deep breath, and I was comforted by the rich, familiar scent of leather.
Pleased at the treasure trove despite my now-laughable fears, I took another step into the basement room. My slip
pered feet settled onto something soft and yielding, and I looked down at the most luxurious rug I’d ever seen in my life. I didn’t know anything about carpets, but this one glinted in the candlelight with a soft sheen that whispered silk. The pattern was a riot of crimson and indigo; intricate twists and turns were woven into the design to tease my eyes into thinking that I could make out meaningful shapes.
A wooden reading stand occupied the center of the room. It was made out of the same dark wood as the bookshelves, finished with the same soft gleam. The surface was slanted toward me, and I was reminded of those high end architect’s desks that seem like they’d be the ultimate in elegance and sophistication, but which I’d always feared would lead to a strained neck, a backache, and a checkbook full of buyer’s remorse.
A single book rested on the stand. Its leather cover was stained and weathered, as if it had been caught in more than one rainstorm. Its pages rippled between the covers, sheets heavier than ordinary paper. Parchment, then. I looked for a title on the spine, but there was none.
My search took me to the side of the stand, and I discovered a statue crouching beside the high table. It looked like one of those Egyptian cats with its tail curled around its front paws, a guardian from a mummy’s tomb, but it was huge. The thing came up to my waist, and as I took a step back, the cat’s eyes seemed to stare out at me, somber and unblinking. They were made of glass or plastic or something, and they glittered as they reflected my candle. I resisted the urge to put my hand on its head.
I was afraid that it might be warm to the touch.
Instead, I looked around the rest of the room. In addition to a couple of thousand haphazardly strewn books, there was a large hump-backed chest in the far corner. It looked like a steamer trunk, with peeling leather and a broken padlock that made me think of the Titanic.
And there, against the far wall, was an armoire. One door stood open, revealing a tangle of clothes—velvet and satin and a twisting length of feather boa. Both the trunk and the armoire were made of the same mahogany wood as the shelves and book stand. They were all bare of any decoration, any initials, any design that might hint at who had owned them or left them there.