Locked Doors (9 page)

They started out discussing their law firm where Todd had just made partner and Beth had been a legal administrator for five years.
 
At first they resisted the gossip but
Womble
& Sloop was a rowdy firm and the fodder was bottomless and irresistible.
 
This transitioned into a brief exchange on their philosophies of employment and how neither of them knew anyone whose work afforded absolute fulfillment.
 
They posited finally that the ideal job did exist but that finding it was such an excruciating chore most people preferred instead to suffer moderate unhappiness over an entire career.
   

Toward the end of dinner, as they dipped melon balls and strawberries into a pot of scalding chocolate, the conversation took an intimate turn.
 
They sat close, basked in prolonged eye contact, and compared only the idyllic slivers of their childhoods.
 

Beth knew that Todd had been recently divorced.
 
He was well aware that her husband had disappeared seven years ago through some mysterious connection to Andrew Thomas.
 
But neither came within a hundred miles of the other’s baggage.

After dinner Todd took her home.
 
It was eleven o’clock and cruising north up a vacated I-77, Beth watched the pavement pass, mesmeric in the headlights.
 
Riding with Todd she felt foreign to herself in a fresh and frightening way.
 
Like the start of college and autumn.
 
Not a thirty-eight-year-old single mother of two.

She came very near to holding his hand.
 

She wanted to.
 

Had he reached out she would not have pulled away.
 

But the part of her that had lived eleven years with another man and bore his children and experienced the loss of him quietly objected.
 
So she kept her hands flat against her newly-purchased sleek black A-line, partly out of fear, mostly out of respect, thinking,
Next time perhaps but not tonight Walter.
       

Now Beth had climbed out of bed and come downstairs where she stood at the kitchen sink looking through the window at the black waters of Lake Norman, the moon high and lambent, an ivory sun in a navy sky.
 

The lake was no longer smooth.
 
An easy wind had put ripples through that black plate of water and disturbed the reflection of the moon.
 
Beth could hear the fluttering leaves and see them spiraling down out of sleeping trees into the frosting grass.
 

Next door, the
Worthingtons
’ rope swing had begun to sway—some wayward specter revisiting a childhood haunt at this wee hour of the morning.
 

The clock on the stove read 1:39.
 

She took a glass from the cabinet and filled it from a bottle of water.
 
Following those wonderful glasses of shiraz that had accompanied her supper, she was parched and downed the glass in one long gulp.

Instead of returning to bed, Beth walked through the dining room into the den and curled up on the sofa beneath an afghan.
 
She wasn’t remotely tired and this exacerbated her realization that it was now Monday and she would be staggering into work in six short hours.
 

Moonlight streamed through the French doors leading out onto the deck where the shadows cast by Adirondack chairs lengthened as the moon moved across the sky.
 

She wore an old satin teddy Walter had given her years ago for Valentine’s Day.
 
Because all the lights were off downstairs, when she crinkled the fabric the blue crackling of static electricity was visible as it danced in the satin.

She ruminated on Walter.
 
He was more vivid in her mind than he’d been in a long while.
 
What she felt toward him wasn’t sadness or nostalgia or even love.
 
It was beyond an emotion she could name.
 
She thought of him now as light and time and energy—a being her earthbound soul could not begin to comprehend.
 
Did he watch her now? she wondered.
 
From some unfathomable dimension?
 
She had the warmest inkling they would meet again as pure souls in the space between stars.
 
They would communicate their essences to one another and luminously merge, becoming a single brilliant entity.
 
This was her afterlife, to be with him again in some inconceivable form.

Beth heard the footfalls of one of her children upstairs.
 
Rising from the sofa, she walked into the foyer, the hardwood floor cool, dusty beneath her bare feet.
 
She climbed the carpeted staircase to the second floor and upon nearing the top felt the insomnia begin to abate and her eyes grow leaden.
 
She was tired of thinking.
 
Perhaps she would sleep now.
 

The stairs bisected the second floor hallway.
 

To her left the corridor extended past two linen closets and Jenna’s bedroom and terminated at the closed door of the bathroom, behind which John David urinated hard into the toilet.

Beth went right toward her bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.
 
Passing another pair of closets and the playroom, she approached the open doorway of John David’s bedroom.
 
Before leaving on her date with Todd she’d made J.D. promise to clean it up.

She stopped at his doorway and peeked inside.
 
Though it was dark, she could see that the floor was still buried in clothes and toys.
 
J.D. and Jenna had been playing Risk since they came home from church.
 
The game board rested at the foot of the bed, framed by dirty blue jeans.

Beth drew a sudden breath.

John David was sleeping in his bed.
 

She heard the bathroom door creak open.
 

Turning, she looked down the corridor.
 

With the bathroom light now switched off she could only see the silhouette of a tall dark form standing in the bathroom doorway.
 

So it was Jenna in there.

“Hey, sweetie,” Beth called out, her voice betraying scraps of doubt.
 

The form at the other end of the hallway did not move or respond.
 

“Jenna?
 
What’s wrong, Jenna?”
 

Beth’s heart thudded against her sternum.
 

Behind her John David mumbled incoherently.
 
She closed the door to his bedroom, a salty metallic taste coating her throat with the flavor of adrenaline and dread.

She was ten steps from her bedroom door.
 

Gun in closet.
 
Top shelf.
 
Nike shoebox.
 
Think it’s loaded.
  

Stepping out into the middle of the hall, she began to backpedal slowly toward her room, squinting through the darkness at the motionless shadow, thinking,
I haven’t fired that gun in seven years.
 
I don’t know if I remember how.
 

Her hand grasped the doorknob.
 
She turned it, backing through the threshold into the master bedroom.
 

The shadow remained at the other end of the hall.

Phone or gun?
 

She could scarcely catch a sufficient breath.
 
Some part of her wondered, prayed that this was a recurrence of one of those awful dreams she’d suffered in the wake of Walter’s death.

Much as she hated to let that thing out of her sight she was impotent without a weapon.
 
Beth turned and moved deftly to the bedside table.
 
She lifted the phone.
 
Jesus, no.
 
The line was dead and her cell phone was downstairs in her purse.
 

Beth slid back the door to the closet as the unmistakable resonance of thick-soled
bootsteps
filled the hallway.
 

She hyperventilated.
 

Do not faint.
 

Standing on her tiptoes, Beth reached for the top shelf and grabbed the shoebox with her fingertips and pried it open.
 
It contained a box of bullets but the .38 was gone.
 
She noticed other boxes on the floor at her feet—he’d been rummaging while she was downstairs.
 

The footsteps stopped.
 

The house was silent.
 

A wave of trembles swept through her, sapping the strength from her legs, forcing her to the floor.
 
The thought of her children stood her up again and she walked to the doorway of her bedroom and peered down the hall.
 

It was empty now.

“I’ve called nine-one-one on my cell phone!” she yelled.
 
“And I’m holding a shotgun and I’m not afraid to use it!”

“Mom?” Jenna called out.

“Jenna!” Beth screamed.
 

In a knee-length flannel nightgown her daughter stepped from her bedroom into the hallway.
 
Jenna was taller than Beth now, prettier.
 
She’d inherited her daddy’s good looks and athleticism, missed her mother’s plainness.

“Why are you yelling, Mom?”

“Get back in your room and lock the door!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Now,
goddammit
!”
 

Jenna ran crying into her room and slammed the door.
 

“I don’t want to shoot you but I will,” Beth hollered at the darkness.
 

“How can you shoot me when I have your gun?” a calm masculine voice inquired.
 

The shadow emerged from the playroom and walked toward her.

Beth flicked the light switch on the wall.
 

The hallway lit up, burning her eyes and flooding the shadow with color and texture.
 

The man who approached her had long black hair, a face whiter than a china doll, and smiling red lips.
 
He tracked
bootprints
of blood across her hardwood floor.
 
It speckled his face, darkened his jeans and long-sleeved black T-shirt.

Beth sank down onto the floor, immobilized with terror.
 

Luther came and stood over her, said, “I haven’t hurt your children and I won’t long as you’re compliant.”

Beth saw the ivory hilted knife in his right hand.
 
It had seen use tonight.
 

Jenna’s door opened.
 
The young girl poked her head out.
 

“I’m all right, baby,” Beth said, her voice breaking.
 
“Stay in your room.”
 

Luther turned and gazed at the teenager.

“Obey your mother.”

“Why are you doing this?” Jenna cried.