Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  “This is very Alice in Wonderland,” Jason said.

  “I was thinking more Tales from the Crypt. ‘Behind one of these doors is a million dollars. Behind one of them is a flesh-eating ghoul.’”

  “What’s the one set in an insane asylum?” We were both a little punchy, as if we were approaching the finish line of a scavenger hunt. The clerk walked ahead, trying his best to ignore us, and Jason dug his elbow into my side as we passed door number 302.

  “Just a few more . . . here it is,” the clerk said, stopping in front of our unit and turning the handle. The light flickered on inside automatically as the door opened, revealing a dingy white interior. “Want to take a look?”

  “Absolutely,” Jason said with fake enthusiasm. He stepped into the box and pretended to admire the scuffed white walls. “Honey, come check this out. Roomy.”

  “You’re free to start moving things in right away.”

  “We absolutely will,” I said, joining Jason and putting an arm around his waist as he threw his around my shoulder.

  “Great.” The clerk looked relieved to be rid of us. “Let me show you how to set up the keypad, and I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Keypad?” Jason released my shoulder, his tone suddenly deadly serious.

  “Each unit is locked with a motion-sensor alarm, controlled by the keypad on the handle, with a code that only you have access to,” the clerk said proudly just as I realized I hadn’t seen a single padlock on any of the doors. “We take your security very seriously. Those other self-storage places, where you bring your own lock, they get broken into all the time. People just cut the locks with bolt cutters.”

  Suddenly, the fourteen inches of steel in my purse felt very, very heavy.

  Jason watched politely as the clerk showed him how to set his code, only once throwing a glance back toward me with something like panic.

  “How are we going to get in?” I whispered when the clerk had gone down the elevator.

  “Just give me a second to think,” he said, rubbing his closed eyes with his fingers.

  “Come back inside, there are cameras out there.”

  Jason followed me into the unit. Then his head snapped up. “Cameras! Do you think we could get our hands on security footage of her keying in the code?”

  “Even if they keep the security tapes long enough, we’d have no idea how to find the right one,” I pointed out.

  He frowned. “Well, there must be a master code. The building manager has to be able to get in, right?”

  “Right. So how would we get the master code?”

  “Maybe you can go flirt with Delrick,” Jason suggested. “Distract him while I snoop around his desk.”

  “Or maybe he’s gay, and you can go flirt with him,” I snapped. “Anyway, after your hardcore lovey-dovey routine, that’s going to be a tough sell for either of us.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m just thinking out loud here.” He looked at the bank of doors. “Our unit is on the same side of the hall as hers. What about cutting through the walls?”

  “You really want to tunnel through seventeen storage units between ours and hers?” Jason was getting frustrated, but I went on. “Besides, he said the alarm was hooked up to a motion sensor. That means any movement inside will set it off, not just the door opening.”

  “Well, maybe we should just give up, then!” Jason exploded. “Unless you have a brilliant idea.”

  “I might,” I said. “Hang on a second.” I opened my purse, handed him the bolt cutters, which were getting in the way, and dug out my black makeup bag. “Let’s go take a look.”

  We walked down the silent white hallway to the door marked 302 and squinted at the keypad. Jason reached out a hand to touch the buttons.

  “No!” I yelped and slapped his hand away. “Stay back there.” I unzipped my makeup bag and pulled out a blush palette that had shattered a long time ago when I dropped it on a bathroom floor. It was an expensive brand, and I had carefully hoarded the glittery pink powder in its black compact, carrying an extra-soft brush with me that wouldn’t pick up too much at once. I dipped the brush carefully in the compact, shook off the excess powder, then applied it lightly to the keypad. Leaning over, I blew gently.

  “Look.” Most of the blush had scattered, leaving a granule here and there. Only three buttons looked different: 2, 6, and 8 were frosted with dark pink powder where fingers had pressed them repeatedly, leaving layers of prints, the whorls of which were faintly discernible around the edges.

  “Okay, cool,” Jason said. “But there’s one problem. It’s a four-number code.”

  “So she repeated a number.”

  “Which one?”

  I squinted and looked closer. One of the prints was much darker than the other two. “I’d say it’s the eight, by the look of it.”

  “Two-six-eight-eight.”

  “Or two-eight-six-eight,” I said. “Or eight-two-six-eight, or . . .”

  “So how do we know which one it is? We can’t just start trying them out. The alarm’ll go off. And who knows how many combinations you can make out of those four—”

  “Twelve,” I said. I’d been scribbling on the back of a receipt I’d found in my purse.

  “What is that, a factorial?” Jason squinted over my shoulder. “That’s ninth-grade math. You remember Mrs. Farber’s class?”

  “No, dummy. I just listed them all out.” I looked at the four-digit combinations and thought. It reminded me of looking at Carl’s Runnr data with Amanda, searching for the pattern and coming up with Game of Thrones. What was the pattern here? Which one of these would Amanda have picked, and why? “I bet it’s a word.”

  “Or it’s totally random, filed away in a password-protection app,” Jason said.

  I remembered writing my number on a napkin for her the night we met. “You know Amanda. She doesn’t even use social media. She wouldn’t trust a program like that. I bet she’d come up with a word she could remember instead.”

  “So the numbers would correspond to letters?” Jason frowned and looked at the ceiling. “If two is B . . . and six is F . . . and eight is H? B, F, H, H? What can you spell with B, F, H, H?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Get out your phone.”

  He pulled out his phone, and I pulled up the keypad screen and pointed to the tiny letters below each number.

  “The phone keypad? That’ll take forever,” he protested. “With twelve number combinations, and then each number could stand for one of three letters . . . how many possible combinations is that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t remember enough from Mrs. Farber’s class to even take a guess. So we should get started.”

  We went back to our unit, and I found a scrap of paper for Jason to write on, thinking that sometimes it pays to be a little woman with a big, messy purse. I split the list of twelve numbers in half, gave six to Jason and kept six for myself.

  “This is going to take forever,” Jason complained.

  Handing him a pen and uncapping an eyeliner pencil for me to write with, I said, “The good news is, there aren’t going to be that many letter combinations that make actual words.”

  There were even fewer than I’d thought there would be, but Jason was right, it was slow going. At the end of an hour, we had the following words:

  AUNT, BUNT, AUTO, TUNA, BOUT, CUNT

  “Obviously, you know which one I think it should be,” Jason said.

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Well, what else? Does she have nieces and nephews? Is she really into tuna?” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Wait a minute, does she have a boat?”

  “It can’t be B-O-A-T, B and A are both on the two and there’s only one of those.” I looked over the list, feeling sure we had missed some letter combinations. I stared at the phone keys. “B-O-T-T? Is that a word? How about N-A-T-T?”

  “No and no.”

  I looked again and blinked. A cold feeling started up in the pit of my stomach. It couldn’t be, but suddenly I knew the ans
wer. “Try six-two-eight-eight.”

  “What’s the word?”

  “I just have a hunch. Key it in.”

  “Tell me the word first.”

  “Look, either it’s right or it isn’t. But there’s nothing on that list that makes any sense,” I said. “Just key it in. Otherwise we’ll be here all day.”

  “You key it in.”

  I took a deep breath, approached the keypad, and hovered my fingers for a moment over the three smudgy numbers, waiting to feel some special warmth from them, some confirmation that I was right. Then I punched them in quickly and stood back.

  The red light by the handle turned green and there was a quiet but satisfying click. I turned the handle and the light inside Amanda’s storage unit came on.

  Jason and I stood staring into the unit for a second. Then we both started yelling and jumping up and down. He leaned over and gave me a bear hug, picking me up and setting me back down again. “What’s the password?”

  “It’s Matt,” I said, suddenly sober. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “What, because of my brother?” He frowned momentarily, then recovered. “There are a lot of Matts in the world, Dana.”

  It was true. There were a lot of Matts in the world. But only one of them was my third name, the shadow hanging over my relationship with Jason, and the key to whatever bond I’d once shared with Amanda. I shook off the coincidence. “Maybe we’ll find out more about Amanda’s Matt inside. Let’s see what’s in there.”

  We walked in, squeezing into the path between two banks of boxes, and shut the door behind us. The latch clicked. The light went out. It was pitch-dark.

  21

  “Hang on.”

  A dim blue light illuminated the underside of Jason’s face and his hand, his index finger tracing a pattern on the surface of his phone. Then he found the flashlight button, and the light blossomed outward into a fat white cone that made the square of the ceiling glow and threw violent shadows on the walls behind towers of boxes. As Jason moved, the shadows swung crazily, and every time I blinked, I saw the afterimage of the phone’s bright rectangle burned on my retinas.

  The storage unit was the same size as ours, but Amanda’s possessions had the odd effect of making it seem bigger. The boxes were stacked almost to the ceiling, and a few large pieces of furniture caught the light—I made out the nubby texture of an upended sofa, the pressboard back of a dresser. A couple of narrow, crooked aisles penetrated the wall of stuff to allow access to the boxes at the back. Maybe it was the shadows leaping on the walls, but it was easy to imagine the lumpish shapes extending indefinitely in either direction, the twisted aisles snaking through them like a labyrinth. A place to get lost in. My chest tightened suddenly, and I felt short of breath.

  “Does the door—”

  “The inner handle doesn’t lock,” Jason said impatiently. “Otherwise people would get stuck in here all the time.”

  The thought wasn’t as comforting as it should have been, but I forced myself not to dwell on it. “Right. Where do we start?”

  “Just look for the box marked ‘Amanda’s Darkest Secrets.’ Shouldn’t be too hard to find.” Jason’s tone was sarcastic, but I knew him well enough to detect that he, too, was unnerved. In the artificial midnight of the storage unit, it was easy to forget that it was eight o’clock in the morning outside. Somehow the bright and antiseptic hall made it feel even darker and lonelier in the unit, like the inside of a mouth.

  “Let’s just start opening boxes,” I said. “We’ll start with the ones up here and work our way back.” I pulled out the X-Acto knives and handed one to Jason.

  “Cheers.” He took it and knelt down by a large box, and I did the same, using the display light from my phone to illuminate corners Jason’s flashlight left in shadow.

  My first box was labeled KITCHEN in black Sharpie, and, sure enough, the nest of crumpled-up newspapers inside seemed to hold only pots and pans. As a gesture toward thoroughness I unlidded a few pots and was rewarded with more newspapers. “What have you got?”

  “Dishes. And a salad spinner.”

  Curious, I held my phone close to one of the newspaper scraps. “January second, over a year ago. When did you say you met Amanda?”

  “Pilot season,” he said shortly. “March of last year, maybe? And she was fired from Runnr in December.”

  “Huh. So she moved to L.A. and put her stuff in storage right away. What was she doing between January and March?”

  “Apparently eating gritty, unspun salads,” Jason said, tossing the plastic bowl back in a box. “Come on, we have to move faster.”

  We worked silently after that. After a few more kitchen boxes I gave up on looking through the whole box and started trusting the labels. Amanda was nothing if not organized; she might have moved quickly after her exile from Runnr, but she hadn’t thrown her stuff into boxes any which way. Still, I couldn’t suppress a mild disappointment at seeing her possessions collected in such a prosaic and orderly fashion. It wasn’t just that a boxful of kitchen appliances doesn’t tell you much about a person’s deepest motives for stalking you and your new boyfriend; it was that the appliances themselves were on the dull side. Amanda must have made good money, and the settlement from the suit must have been substantial as well. Drawing my finger back in pain from an inadequately wrapped blade that turned out to belong to a Cuisinart food processor, I admitted to myself that I’d been hoping for something more glamorous. I mean, I had a Cuisinart.

  I had been imagining some kind of fall from glory for Amanda—a fabulously rich Silicon Valley lifestyle snatched from her during the Runnr debacle and then her ensuing wrath. But by the time I unearthed three pairs of nearly identical worn black boots in a box marked CLOSET, I’d begun to realize that the story Amanda’s objects were telling was not one of a person who cared about expensive things. Her taste was subdued; the motorcycle jacket she wore even in muggy Austin weather was probably her nicest possession.

  Where were the yearbooks, the photographs, the old diaries? Where was the stuff that made her human? We were here to get revenge on Amanda, and she herself had told me how to do it: Find something she cares about. What did Amanda care about?

  Jason was having no luck either. “This is bullshit,” he said. “There’s nothing here. I just looked through three hall-closet boxes. Unless she strangles her victims with extension cords and then melts them with the acid from triple-A batteries, I’m not sure we’ve got anything here.”

  “Just keep going,” I said. “There’s no other way to get through all this stuff.”

  “Fine.” He stood up and groaned as his knees popped audibly. “But I’m starting over from the back end.” He dusted off his hands on his jeans. “I bet that’s where all the good stuff is. At the very least, a vibrator.”

  “Wait!” I said, but he had already picked up his phone and was making his way back through one of the narrow aisles. The shadows in my half of the unit leaped all the way up the wall, and then everything vanished as Jason went behind the tallest stack.

  “I’ll meet you in the middle,” he called.

  “Thanks a lot,” I muttered as I waited for my eyes to adjust to my disposable phone’s puny glow.

  For a few minutes the only sounds were the scuffing of cardboard boxes as Jason brushed against them, punctuated by an occasional yelp of frustration as he banged his knee. “There’s so much stuff piled up, I’m not even sure I can get to the back,” he said, and then: “Ohhh. Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  “Dana, come here. You have to see this.”

  I got to my knees with some difficulty and used my feeble phone light to pick my way in between the boxes. I saw what he meant about the piles getting higher and denser; at one point the path bottlenecked and I couldn’t figure out how to get any farther back, but then I noticed a tiny throughway to my left. I could see Jason’s phone light in the triangle formed by a rolled-up rug leaning against the stack of boxes, and a
s I stooped to avoid hitting my head, I saw that the rug formed a kind of doorway, on the other side of which Jason was standing, holding his phone aloft.

  We stood together in a clearing about four feet deep and running the length of the back of the unit. By the light of his phone, I could see a futon against the wall, neatly made up with a pillow and coverlet and an extra blanket; a small desk and chair were pushed up against the opposite wall. Four high-powered flashlights were lined up on the floor near our feet, where they could be accessed quickly and rotated out easily. A small, battery-operated minifridge by the futon doubled as a nightstand. The scene was unbelievably creepy, like stumbling on the abandoned nest of some predator in the woods. If it had been messy or squalid, it might have simply looked pathetic. But something about the excruciating neatness of the little lair made it seem like a perfectly executed step in some elaborate plan.

  “She was living in a storage unit,” I said, too dumbfounded to keep from stating the obvious. “Why on earth . . .” I touched the bed gingerly and then withdrew my fingers with a shudder. “I mean, she must have had plenty of money after her settlement.” What did Amanda care about? Cross comfort and basic hygiene off the list.

  But Jason had moved closer to the bed, still holding his phone aloft, and now he made a strangled noise in his throat. There was a row of pictures arranged neatly on the wall above the bed in a Scotch-taped grid: photographs of women, most of them selfies printed out from social media sites. Jason stared at them.

  “Exes,” he said, looking like he was about to throw up. “Mine. Jesus, she’s obsessed. This goes back all the way to high school. Remember Lizzie Reynolds? She’s the one who dumped me right before prom.” He looked at me. “This is, like, serial-killer behavior, Dana.”

  “Well, it’s a lot worse than the app.” At least we had the answer to what she cared about. I leaned in for a closer look and gasped. “Oh my God, Kim.” Somehow seeing a familiar face in the rows of pictures brought home how disturbing our discovery really was.