The basement door was a thousand feet tall. That’s how I remember it. Constructed of gray steel from a time when things were built to last. It made such a heavy clunking sound when Cory locked it behind me. I can still hear it. Hours down there in the dark, pounding on the door, no one coming to help. Then stumbling through the dusty rooms, hands scrabbling for a light switch and never finding anything except cobwebs and doorways leading into more rooms. The basement and the dark were endless.
Mom found me eventually. She’d been angry from what I recall. Not at Cory so much, though I think he’d gotten a stern look. I shouldn’t have been playing down there. Irresponsible. How had it looked to everyone when she couldn’t find me? Her hand had been cold on my arm, clutching me all the way down the hill as she steered me home.
Deep breath in. Out.
I ignored the church and focused again on the house up the street before smiling at the stars glittering on their dark blanket. I crossed the drive to my house. It sat kitty-corner from Dad’s place, a simple slab-on-grade with big windows in the living room I liked to read by when it was cold or rainy. They also gave me a good view, easy to look out and see if Dad was awake when he should’ve been sleeping or if he was finally starting the landscaping project my mother had hounded him about when she’d still been able to hound.
Up the stairs to the front door. I gave the neighborhood one last look. Perfect in the night. My problem is I’m a romantic—at least that’s what my editor always says. Happy endings are fine, Andy, but not every thriller should have so much closure. Less tied up with bows, more interpretation for the reader. Yeah, okay, I guess. But I like to think things have a way of working out, a natural order sometimes disguised as chaos. For the most part I thought everything would be okay. Maybe that’s why I’d be seriously searching for a new line of employment soon. Publishing wasn’t a sure thing, so I had a distinct feeling bartending or perhaps pushing a broom at the paper mill in the center of town was in my near future if the latest story idea didn’t pan out.
So be it. I was where I needed to be. That was the important thing.
I pulled open the storm door. Something drifted down and landed at my feet. A note. It had been folded neatly in half and tucked there sometime after I’d gone over to Dad’s for the evening. I picked it up and stepped inside the house, flipping on the entry light. The note was typed, only two lines long:
I know about you and Rachel. You will stop seeing her. Don’t ruin her or her family’s life.
Do as I say or else.
Deep breath. In and out.
2
I read the note perhaps twenty times before walking to the nearest chair and sinking into it.
I’d turned on only the one light, and I sat partially in shadow near the dining room table. It’s how I felt, half in reality, half in disbelief.
How? That was the first question. How did someone find out about Rachel and me? Just as quickly I thought, Does it matter? Not really. Someone knew despite how careful we’d been over the last six months. It didn’t matter we’d left our houses at different times, met at different hotels, motels, parks where she’d climbed into my car or I’d climbed into hers. Someone knew, and now the best thing in my life was over.
Rachel August Worth.
A year younger than me in school. I’d seen her for the first time struggling to climb the jungle gym in fifth grade. Skinny, shy, fading freckles from summer. I’d always thought she was pretty in a delicate way. The way you might admire a statue behind glass.
We’d see each other in church. She sat in the frontmost pew with her mom and dad alongside David Barren and his parents. The two most powerful families in Sandford. More money between them than in any other ten households in town combined. The Worths owned two clothing stores and the movie theater. The Barrens had a hotel, a hardware store, and three restaurants. Prominent in the church. Active in the city council. Leaving their marks on the community one board meeting at a time.
It was no surprise to anyone that they maneuvered their children together just like any of the other projects they undertook. Thin, quiet, waifish, brittle Rachel nudged toward charismatic, loud, smug, handsome David. A match made in heaven, or as close as their parents could afford to it.
The last time I saw Rachel before moving back to look after Dad was at my sister’s funeral. She’d whispered condolences to me in the receiving line. I’d barely heard her over the sound of my grief. My particular sorrow sounded like the rustling of plastic covering the hole in the side of the church where the stained glass had been before I’d put a rock through it in a drunken haze a few nights prior.