She grows silent. I am mesmerized by the motion of that gold chain as she twists it back and forth.
"I woke up in the hospital. I hurt so much. But I didn't care, because I knew one thing: If I was still alive, that meant he was dead. I looked over and Peter was sitting next to my bed. When he saw I was awake, he reached over and took my hand. We just sat there for an hour, not saying anything.
"The sheriff told me what had happened a few hours later." Tears come to her eyes. "It was Peter. He had heard my screams. He burst into the room just as Keith was about to cut my throat. He killed him. He killed his father to save me."
She hugs herself, looks lost. "Do you have any idea of the kinds of emotions that go through you at something like that? After all those years and what I'd been through? The relief was almost unbearable. And then to find out that my son was my son, that in the end he chose me over his father." Tears continue to run down her cheeks. "I was certain I had lost him forever. Excuse me for a moment."
She stands up and totters over to a shelf where a box of tissues sit. She brings the box over, extracting one to wipe her eyes with as she sits back down.
"I'm sorry about that."
"Don't be," I say to her. I mean it. What this woman went through, it's unimaginable. Some would look at her with contempt for putting up with that abuse over so many years. For not being strong. I like to think I'm wiser than they are. Patricia dabs her eyes with the tissue and pulls herself together.
"I healed up, and we came home. It was a good time. Peter doted on me. Dinner was no longer an hour of silence, where no one spoke. We were . . ." Her voice trails off. "We were a family." Her face falls, the grimness and bitterness seeping back in like a black mask. "It didn't last long."
Her hand goes back to the gold chain again. Twisting, turning. "He still went down into the basement every night. He'd spend hours down there. I'd never been allowed inside, didn't know what he did in there. But I was scared. It was something he had done with his father, and part of me knew nothing good could result from it.
"Months went by with me worrying about that basement. But I didn't do anything about it. I was--what is that term for ignoring a truth you don't want to be true?"
"I think you mean denial," James says.
"That's it. I was in denial. Can you blame me? Keith, my longtime living nightmare, was dead. I had my son back. Life was good." She rubs her forehead with a hand. "But I suppose that something inside me had toughened up somewhere along the way. Too much time went by, too many nights where I couldn't get that basement out of my head. One day when he was at school, I decided it was time to go down and look.
"Keith had always kept his key to the basement door hidden under a lamp in his bedroom. He thought I didn't know, but I did. So that day I went and got it, and I went to the basement door and unlocked it.
"I stood for a long time at the top of the stairs, looking down into the darkness. Wrestling with myself. Then I turned on the light and I went down those stairs."
She stops speaking for so long that I am afraid she has lost sense of the here and now, that she is trapped in that past moment. I almost reach out to touch her arm when she begins speaking again.
"I waited for him to come home from school. When he came in the door, I told him that I'd gone into the basement. What I'd found. I told him that he'd saved my life and set me free, and that he was my son. So I wouldn't tell. But I told him I could no longer let him live under my roof.
"I wasn't sure if he would believe me, at first. About not telling what I'd found, I mean." Her smile is bemused. "I suppose there was something, some part of him, that loved me. I don't know if it was because I was his mother, or if it was because he felt that he needed something he could hold on to, something that would remind him he was still a human being. Whichever it was, he barely said a word. He packed up his things, grabbed a few items from the basement, kissed me on the cheek, and told me he loved me and understood--and walked out the door. I haven't seen him since. It's been almost thirty years."
Tears are running down her cheeks again. She looks up at Don Rawlings. "When I read about that poor girl and saw that Peter was a suspect, I knew he had to have done it. It fit, you see. With what I found in the basement." She wrings her hands. "I know I should have said something. Should have come forward. But I . . . he'd saved my life. He was my son. I know none of those things makes it right. It seemed right at the time, somehow. Now . . ." She sighs a sigh that seems to contain decades of exhaustion. "Now I'm old. And I'm tired. Tired of all the pain and secrets and nightmares."
"What did you see in the basement, Patricia?" I ask her. She looks into my eyes, fiddling with the gold necklace.
"Go and see for yourself. I haven't opened that door for nearly thirty years. It's time to open it now."
She pulls the necklace I have been watching her twist up over her head. Attached to it is a large key. She hands it to me.
"Go ahead. Open that door. It's time to let the sunlight in."
54
I BELIEVE WHAT Patricia has said. That no one has entered through this door for a long, long time. The lock resists the turn of the key. It probably hasn't been opened for almost thirty years. Alan works on it, alternating between being a picture of concentration and cursing like a mine worker.
"Ah . . ." he says, followed by the click of the lock. "Got it."
He stands up and swings the door wide. I see a set of wooden stairs, leading down into darkness. For the first time, the question occurs to me.
"Patricia, this is California. This house didn't come with this basement. Did Keith put it in?"
"His grandfather did." She points to the left side of the door. "Do you see the discoloration on the wall there? Keith said a fake shelf on hinges used to hide the door. I don't know why he ever took it off." She is standing back, away from the opening to the basement. Afraid.
"You'll find that the stairway leads down to a walkway. The basement is not actually right underneath the house. Keith said his grandfather built it that way on purpose. Due to the earthquakes."
"Have you been down there since the '91 quake?" Jenny asks.
"I haven't been down there since that day. Light is on the wall to the right. Be careful." She heads back to the living room at a fast pace. Not a run, but close.
Jenny looks over at me, eyebrows raised. "That's not good, Smoky. There's a reason we don't have basements in California. Reasons called
'seismic events.' It might not be safe down there."
I think about what she's saying. But only for a minute. "I can't wait, Jenny. I need to see what's in that basement."
She looks at me for a second, and nods. "Me too." A faint smile. "But you go first."
I head down the stairs, followed by everyone else. The clopping sound of shoes on wood is muffled the farther down we go. I assume it is the dirt around and above us, natural soundproofing. It is cool down here. Cool, quiet, and alone.
It's as Patricia said. At the bottom of the stairs, we find ourselves in a narrow hallway of concrete. Approximately twenty feet away, I can see a shadow in the shape of a door. It takes just a few moments to reach, and I see a light switch outside it. I turn on the light and all of us enter.
"Wow," James says. "Will you look at all that?"
It is a large room, about five hundred square feet. Nothing about it is decorated or distinct. It's a thing of gray concrete, stark lighting, and utilitarian furniture.