She came around another bend, and found that the passage ended there. The tunnel was closed up with a sheet of wood.
So she hadn’t been going in circles after all.
She traced her fingers across the surrounding walls. She felt what seemed to be a small door, like the one she’d entered through from the bedroom closet in the other room.
Where did it lead?
Sitting on her knees, she grabbed the edges of the hatch, and pulled it open. Cautiously, she looked outside.
She was in a closet that looked exactly like the one in the other bedroom. The door hung open, soft gray light coming inside.
She inched out of the tunnel, into the closet, and out of there, into the room beyond.
No one was out here waiting for her. They must not have heard her crawling around.
The room was empty, and had two windows-there were no boards on those windows, she noted-and there was another, normal-size door just ahead. That door was partway open, and appeared to lead to another room.
Before going any farther, she brushed dust out of her hair and off the front of her clothes, holding back a sneeze. She also made sure she had the cell phone in her pocket and hadn’t dropped it during her journey.
Then, she tiptoed to the door. It led to another bedroom. That one had a window, with no wood on it. A bathroom stood off to her right.
Yet another door stood on the other side of the room, half open. Faint light came from outside.
She crept to the doorway, and found it opened into a long, shadowed hall. Two closed doors stood in the middle of the hallway, one on the right, one on the left. Light came from behind the door on the left. A staircase was at the end of the hall.
She remembered Giant carrying her up some steps when he’d first brought her into the house. That meant Giant was in the room where the light was coming from.
She chewed her lip, thinking.
The tunnel had taken her all the way around to the other side of the house. But to get out, she would have to go down those stairs, and to get to them, she had to pass the room in which Giant was sleeping.
Keeping her eyes on the door, she stepped lightly along the carpet.
Like a ghost, she thought.
She passed by the room, and Giant didn’t come out after her.
Reaching the staircase, she peered over the railing. The stairs ended near the front door. No one was down there from what she could see, but a pale glow came from somewhere out of sight.
Mr. Leon might be down there. He moved so fast she doubted she could outrun him.
She would have to take her chances.
She moved to the far edge of the steps. If they were like the stairs at her house, the far edge was where the steps would make the least amount of creaky noise. Whenever she had to sneak around at home, usually coming down from her room to go to the kitchen to get just a little extra taste of whatever delicious dessert Mom had baked, she would stay way to the far side of the stairs, and Mom never heard her.
Like a ghost, she thought again, and began to creep downward, one hand trailing along the dusty railing. She risked a look over her shoulder, and didn’t see Giant coming.
As she neared the bottom, she peeked over the railing again. All clear.
Finally, she reached the floor.
The light she’d seen came from the end of the hallway. It looked like a kitchen back there. She saw a plastic chair that matched the one Giant had been sitting on, and a big blue cooler standing on the floor, like the one Daddy put in their trunk when they went on family picnics in the park.
There was another short hallway not far from the staircase. It ended at another closed door, and light shone underneath. A big piece of wood lay on the floor in front of the door.
Mom is in there. She could feel it.
Mom would want her to get out, and get help.
She went to the front door. It was locked. She slowly turned the dead bolt, praying that it was quiet.
No one came running after her.
She twisted the knob, and pulled open the door. Cold wind and rain swept inside. She would probably get sick going out there without a jacket, but she figured her mother wouldn’t mind if she did, just this one time.
She carefully shut the door behind her.
Outdoors at last, raindrops on her face, breathing in the cool fresh air, she thought about the shaggy-haired man she had seen from outside the bedroom window, the man with the dogs who had run into the forest as if afraid of her, and she decided that anyone who loved dogs was someone who would help her.
62
I killed my mother.
As Leon’s confession rebounded through Simone’s thoughts, the sweet wine turned sour on her tongue, and her stomach clenched so tightly she feared she might vomit.
But somehow, she maintained a cool facade. She continued rubbing the tip of her shoe against his thigh, and she kept her facial expression interested, nonjudgmental.
“How did it happen?” she asked, pleased that her voice was steady, fascinated.
“I said earlier that she OD’d.” He squinted, tapped ashes onto the floor. “I was being disingenuous, my moms was an addict of various vices, she sucked the glass dick, smoked a joint, did some heroin, hit the bottle, whatever she could get her hands on, that was her thing, you dig, that was her life, her raison d’etre. Your moms spent her days teaching class and fantasizing about white picket fences and two point five munchkins with the principal. My moms spent hers drunk off her ass or doped up, lying in bed like a beached whale, fantasizing about her next hit of whatever she could get off on.
“So one summer afternoon, when I was eighteen, we had a brouhaha, a real battle royale, ’cause she wouldn’t let me use her car. Normally I had my own wheels, did my own thing, but my Cutlass was in the shop at the time, and all I wanted was a little fuckin’ understanding, you know? But Moms’ Saturday-love boyfriend, some popcorn-eating punk named Tyrone, was supposed to be coming to the casa later, and she wanted to have her car for him to drive if he wanted to. Talk about ridiculous, stupid, absurd, right? Tyrone had his own whip, but when he’d come see my mother and then want to go somewhere else afterward on his own, he’d drive her car. He was playing her, probably running the same lame game on three or four different dumb bitches just like my moms, but Moms couldn’t see it. I had business to handle at the time, big money moves to make, a major score on the horizon, and she wouldn’t let me use her car because of this trifling Negro.
“That did it for me. Eighteen years of dealing with her bullshit boiled over, and I wasn’t gonna deal with her anymore. Next day, when she was out with that punk-ass Tyrone, I dug into her heroin stash, and I laced that shit up with fentanyl, created a combustible mix we called magic, and I hooked it up so potent I knew it would blow up a mushroom cloud in her fuckin’ mind like Hiroshima.
“Later that night, Moms hit it. Within fifteen minutes, she went into seizure. I waited it out a bit and then called 911, for appearances’ sake, but by the time the paramedics got there, she was on a boat floating across the river Styx. They declared her dead by OD.”
Leon took a drag on his cigarette and expelled a column of smoke to the ceiling.
“There you go, darling, true confessions,” he said.
Simone sat still and silent. Stunned. She had heard many disturbing stories in her years of practicing therapy, but never a confession of cold, premeditated murder. She couldn’t come up with adequate words.
Leon glanced at his cup, discovered that it was empty. With a mumbled curse, he flung it across the room.
“Why so quiet?” He turned a hot glare on her. “You scared of me now?”
“How do you feel about what you did?” she asked, finally finding her voice.