Chapter 19 Faye

When Faye first moved to Vermont, that very first week, she'd woken up in the middle of the night, certain she heard a sound from inside her single dorm room. When she reached for her nightstand to get her glasses, she couldn't find them. She'd leaped out of bed, but the room was all strange shadows and at that moment she was sure, every cell in her body was sure, that there was someone in her room who was going to kill her. She lunged across the room at the light switch and with the light on saw there was no killer.

She crawled around on her hands and knees for twenty-five minutes before finally finding the glasses slipped behind a bureau. Faye didn't sleep at all for the rest of the night. Her worst fear had always been the loss of her glasses. When she stood on a balcony high on a tall building, she would feel pins and needles in her legs, but the fear wasn't falling, never falling. The thing she could picture happening was her glasses sliding off her nose and tumbling down to the distant sidewalk, leaving her blinded. Her mother had suggested contact lenses when she was younger—"they'll make sports easier"—but that was so silly; what did she care about sports?

Now, the door shut behind her and she was on her hands and knees in perfect blackness and the others had convinced themselves she'd killed Kip and Soraya, but none of that was as terrifying as not being able to see.

"She'll get out of there eventually and then she'll come for us," she could hear Umu say. The walls of the room didn't go all the way up to the ceiling. Faye remembered that now. They were high, ten feet maybe, but the concrete ceiling was higher, and the space was filled in with more metal grating. "If we do it now, we'll know we're safe."

"We don't have to do anything right this second," Davey said. "Let's all take a minute to get our heads straight. I'm still stuck back at science girl being a murderer."

"If anyone is going to know about poison, it's going to be science girl," Mary said.

Faye crawled forward, sweeping her hands in front of her in a wide arc. She had her phone in her pocket, so she pulled it out and turned on the light. It was no use. Shadows and blurs. She reached for something that could have been her glasses and found it was a darker spot on the floor, nothing more.

"But she's only a physicist," Umu said, in a voice that was meant to imitate Faye's. She paused from her searching and sat back on her heels. She was wrong. Her worst fear wasn't losing her glasses. Her worst fear was learning that everyone really was mocking her behind her back, the way she always imagined they were.

"Let's keep our focus here," Davey said. "How would we even do it? Who would? You won't catch me volunteering."

That they were talking about her—about ending her life—with all the seriousness of an argument about who would take out the trash was almost enough to make her give up entirely. To go to the door and offer her throat.

If Beans were here, he'd have barked and growled in her defense. He was too little for any real impact, but she'd have had someone on her side. Faye came down here to make friends, but these people weren't her friends. She had no friends. For a long time, she'd had Beans but since April, she hadn't even had him. When he was dying, Faye begged her mother to lend her the money for a plane ticket home, but her pleas were refused.

"He's a dog, Faye. We all love him, but he is just a dog."

A few days later, her mother sent her a picture of a gray-bearded Beans (when did he get so gray?) sleeping on his big red pillow. Or, not sleeping, as it turned out. So, since April, Faye had no one to protect her from the big dogs.

"I don't love the idea either, but it's us or it's her," Mary said.

Faye reached up to wipe a tear from her face. Crying wouldn't get her anywhere, but how could she not cry? She lay down on the floor. She was so hungry her head was wobbling, she was exhausted, and she didn't want to battle anymore, but there was nothing to do but to keep listening to what they said. Knowing their plans might be the only way to protect herself in the end.

The cold concrete against her cheek was a relief. A small pleasure. The floor was filthy with dust and dirt, but she didn't care. She'd be no worse off than she already was if she allowed herself to get dirty.

"This is insanity," Davey said. "Which is saying a lot because this whole night has been insanity. Obviously, we're not going to kill her."

Faye raised her head. Had he said it? Was he on her side?

"Are you working with her?" Umu said. "Is that why you're—"

"Stop it, Umu," he said.

Faye sat up so she could hear better, and when she put her hand down to shift her weight, she felt it. The cool familiarity of steel and polycarbonate.

She hugged the glasses to her chest before putting them back on her face, and she was suddenly awake again, her head unclouded and her will to make it out of this basement restored.

"She's secure in there," Davey said. "There's no opening the door against the barricade unless she suddenly gains a hundred pounds of muscle. It's a few hours until morning."

Faye put her glasses on and swept the light across the room. There was so much power in clear vision. If she'd been born in another time, her nearsightedness would have been a death sentence, but she was certain now she'd survive this place.

"The police will come in the morning," Davey said. "We don't have to do anything or decide anything because we've done what's needed. She's locked in there and all we have to do is wait."

He doesn't want to tell them that he believes me, but he believes me, she thought. He'll take my side and he'll keep me safe and he'll get me out of here.

If Umu responded, or if Mary did, then Faye didn't hear it. She heard voices, sure, but they were shrinking. There were footsteps. Someone was wearing hard-soled shoes, and the sound of them against the concrete floor announced that she was being left to herself and that whatever they decided to do with her or to her, they would decide where she couldn't hear them.

Faye didn't throw herself against the door once the voices receded. She had vision and she had quiet, and she needed time to figure out what to do. The room was maybe thirty feet across. It wasn't a place where she had spent any time. It was Ronald's domain, or the domain of the faculty member curating the library's next exhibition. It was the only space in the basement without bookshelves crammed in at odd angles. There were a few book trucks piled with materials, some cartons stacked up in the corner, and a giant wood table in the center of the room that held the remnants of someone's work for the day, mostly a stack of maps being prepared for an upcoming exhibition. She'd seen the selection when they were being pulled downstairs to prepare. There was one that showed a Viking settlement on Newfoundland that Faye had ridden in the elevator with, and she'd marveled at the proof that Columbus hadn't been the first of the European settlers—a piece of paper that showed it definitively. But later that night, she'd looked up the map and found it had been proven to be a forgery all the way back in 1973. The idea that she'd been so enamored by a fake made her doubt the whole mission of the library. Could they believe anything they saw on the pages here?

Soraya was dead. Faye had scarcely a moment to breathe since hearing the crash, and now that she was alone and in the quiet, the weight of the news pressed against her chest. If Kip wasn't dead, they'd all have pointed a finger right at him. It's always the boyfriend or the husband. Crime procedurals on television taught her that rule as a child, but the guilt would be especially apparent in the case of this particular boyfriend. Could Davey have killed her? Could Umu or Mary?

Faye had to put her phone down on the table. She shook her hands to keep them from trembling. What was it about her that would ever make someone believe she could be a killer? Her fingernails were cut short and unvarnished. A necessity of her job. A flake of polish could damage a sample, a long fingernail risked piercing a glove. Soraya's nails were a soft pink. Mary's were long and rounded and painted navy blue. She didn't remember what Umu's looked like, but she'd bet they were pretty, too. Maybe they wouldn't hate her so much if she were groomed and beautiful like they were.

Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. She balled them into fists and held them against her cheeks. Kip and Soraya and Ro are dead and there'll be more if you don't get yourself out of this room, she told herself. If she let herself dwell on the fact that the next body might be hers, that they might be coming back to kill her from some misguided sense of self-preservation, that Soraya's killer was setting her up to be the next to go, then she'd never get her head straight enough or her hands steady enough to even shine her light forward. No, the truth was that Kip and Soraya were dead because someone had killed them and Faye needed to get out of here to make the blood stop flowing.

There had been quiet long enough, and she was filled with enough resolve that she got herself up and finally went to try the door. It was old, like everything in this place. Had it been installed recently, she might have been able to bust right through it. Everything new was cheap and disposable, but this door had been built to last forever, and when she pushed her weight against it, it gave slightly against the doorjamb, but then held fast.

Maybe they don't think you killed anyone, the pernicious voice inside her head said. Maybe they hate you so much that they locked you in here to be free of you.

Once, in the second grade, a group of girls invited her to play a game of hide-and-seek in the schoolyard. One of the girls, Christina, who had beautiful hair that was always in a perfect braid, whispered a suggestion that she hide behind a storage shed, so Faye gleefully did just that and she stayed there, hidden, for the full lunch hour before realizing at the bell that all the other girls had been playing jump rope instead and no one ever had any intention of coming to find her.

But that wasn't what was happening here. If she discounted Davey's ridiculous suggestion that it had been an accident, then at least one of them, whoever had killed Soraya, knew her to be innocent of that crime. It wasn't simple teasing that had her trapped in this room. She needed to act. She'd seen Umu grabbing for something before they'd pushed her into the room, but she had no idea what was blocking the door. If she could see what she was up against, she stood a better chance of getting past it.

That big, heavy table beckoned to her. She got behind it and gave it a push. Nothing happened. She was so hungry, so tired, that she might as well have been pawing at the thing like a kitten. She stood back, took a breath, shook her shaking hands again, and then heaved herself against the table.

The table jolted forward so radically that Faye was momentarily frightened it had come alive. The work materials on the tabletop, some acid-free cardboard, a professional-looking pair of scissors, and even a giant steel paper cutter, were displaced and clattered to the floor. The stack of giant maps slipped off more slowly, but they hit the floor, too. Good riddance. The paper cutter hit with such violence that Faye leaped back from the sound, but she caught her breath and everything was quiet again. Her phone had fallen and when she picked it up, she picked up the scissors with it. A tool, she told herself. They weren't a weapon, they were a tool. A ten-inch-long insurance policy should she need to cut a string or pop a balloon to get out of the basement. Nothing more.

The work wasn't nearly done. She'd succeeded in sliding the table a couple of feet forward and had made a terrible mess and a clatter in the process, but something about it had enlivened her and the rest was easier. She wasn't any less hungry or tired, but knowing for certain that the table would move for her, that it wasn't impossible, meant she got some distance with every push.

She was horribly thirsty by the time she got the table against the wall. She'd been so fixated on her hunger all night that she'd scarcely had time to think about her thirst, but the exertion brought it to the fore, and she thought again about that ear of corn and how satisfying it would be to pop the kernels between her teeth and suck the juice from them. Maybe this is nearly over, she thought, and there'll be food and drink waiting for me back in the arena.

Her sense of accomplishment at having moved the table was dulling her senses. The ordeal was nowhere near over.

Faye tucked her phone into her back pocket with the scissors so she could hoist herself up onto the table. It was exactly as high as she needed it to be, giving her just enough lift to peer over the edge of the wall through the grating to the other side. Once up at the top, she found she didn't need the light from her phone at all. There was an exit sign just on the other side of the grating, illuminating an out-of-reach stairwell that she'd never noticed because she'd never before been in the basement in an emergency. The sign gave off just enough red light to see the floor below it, and at her angle, she could see that the others had crammed a shipping skid underneath the handle of her door and it was only that awkwardly placed piece of wood that was keeping her captive.

That wasn't all she saw. Sitting on the floor by the door, arms wrapped around her knees, was Mary.

In the red light, Faye could see the shine of Mary's hair, the outline of her profile, and the steady movement of her breath. Where were the others? Why was she alone? If they'd decided that one of them should guard the door, then they did so without saying a word where she could hear them. Or it wasn't too late to seek a newer world. They hadn't shut her in here because they thought she was a killer. It was a long prank, all a signal of their new friendship, the blood and the bodies no more real than in a movie, the harm no more severe than a second-grade prank about hide-and-seek.

A foolish idea. Painfully foolish. Of course the blood was real. She could smell it on herself.

"Why aren't you with the others, Mary?" Faye whispered, but Mary couldn't hear her, so they stayed as they were, observer and observed, each in possession of their secrets.

Faye had hardly thought about Mary all night. Davey had been running around trying to stay in control of his event, Soraya needed hand-holding through her bad trip, Umu had been screaming bloody murder, and Mary hadn't needed anything at all, which made it especially strange that she had separated herself from the others. Faye tried to see the night through Mary's eyes. Was she keeping guard of the door? Was she sitting on the floor because she'd hallucinated some monster out in the stacks? Was she trying to block out the sights and sounds of terror like Soraya?

There were no clues. She sat there, silent, and Faye would have called out to her if not for the possibility that Mary's intention when she chose the seat was to follow through on Umu's promise that they would kill Faye before the night was through.

Would she have stayed there the rest of the night, watching Mary, unmoving? Perhaps. The fear and sense of self-preservation were strong enough that she might have timed her breath to coincide with Mary's and gone into a sort of trance. If Mary had never moved, it might have been easier. But eventually she did. She shifted her weight to retrieve something from the back pocket of her jeans.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, your secret movements make me wary, Faye thought, and any brief respite she had from fear was over the moment she saw what Mary removed from her pocket.

"Ro couldn't have done this." Umu had sworn it over and over again and they'd brushed off her denials as the ravings of someone who had taken too much, someone who was loyal to a friend she had misjudged, but she'd been right all along. Ro hadn't done it.

There were two ways the night could have gone. After Kip died, they could have moved slowly. They could have examined the actions of everyone who was in the basement in the minutes and hours leading up to his death, and they would have seen the answer plainly. They'd still be locked in with a killer, but they might have spared two lives. In the other version, the one that transpired in the end, they pointed fingers and chased after the ones who were least familiar to them, who least seemed like they belonged in the basement.

"We're all such idiots," Faye whispered to herself.

The exit sign didn't cast a lot of light. The shine of Mary's hair. The outline of her profile. The steady rhythm of her breath. And the little plastic baggie, still containing the square of acid that she'd told the rest of them she ingested hours ago.

In the darkness, the weight of the realization brought Faye to her knees. She didn't want to take her eyes off Mary, but she feared if she didn't get off her feet she'd fall right off the table and make herself easy prey. "Ro wouldn't have taken the drugs that he'd poisoned himself"—wasn't that what Umu said? Isn't that why Faye stood accused of killing Kip?

A different Faye, one who hadn't lived through three deaths in a single night, might have tried to explain away the drugs Mary was holding. Maybe she got an extra baggie. Maybe she was holding the drugs for someone else. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But no. There was only one explanation. Mary took the backpack full of phones to the door while the rest of them were swallowing their tabs so she didn't have to take her dose in front of them. Mary didn't take her tab because Mary murdered Kip.

Faye didn't feel quite steady enough to get to her feet, but what choice did she have? Davey and Umu were off alone, and they had no idea what Mary was capable of. What she might do to Faye, or what she might have planned for them. She held the wall and put one foot on the table, hands on her knee, the way she'd been taught to get upright on a pair of ice skates as a child. When you're unsteady—her skating instructor, a beautiful teenager with curly brown hair that she wore loose under her hockey helmet, explained. When you're unsteady you don't go looking for something to grab on to. You rely on your own body. You put one skate on the ice and you put your hand on your knee and you put all your focus into staying upright.

Up she went, and she was back to peering over the wall, feeling steadier than she had been. The red light from the exit sign that had been so helpful now shone sinister. Mary's hair, Mary's profile, framed in that angry red glow. The quality of the light wasn't the only thing that had changed. Mary's breathing had, too. She wasn't slow and steady and still any longer. She was crying.

Still seated on the floor with her back against the wall, Mary held the bag in her palm and her shoulders wobbled up and down in time with her raggedy breaths. Every so often a sob would float up and over the wall to Faye's ears. The red light reflected off the tears that stained Mary's cheeks and, rather than make her a sympathetic figure, the tears made her all the more terrifying. What did she have to cry about? What she'd done? Or what she had yet to do? The hours of the night stretched before them, and Mary's tears reflected in that awful red light were an omen that the danger wasn't behind them yet.

Mary turned to wipe her tears on her sleeve and for a moment, the fullness of her face was illuminated to Faye. It was obvious now as it should have been all night; she wasn't high. She was totally clear-eyed. Even through her tears, her face wasn't fixed in a grimace like Soraya's or Umu's had been when they saw what frightened them. She was crying, but somehow she still seemed impassive. Like she knew what she had to do next.

When Mary got to her feet, Faye nearly fell off the table. Did she know she was being watched? Did she know Faye had seen her terrible secret? Mary might have had every reason to kill Kip and Soraya. Whatever unspeakable thing drove her to do it was the only thing that acted as protection for Faye; she had no quarrel with Mary. But if Mary saw her watching, if Mary knew that Faye could announce her guilt to the others, then there was no way Faye was safe.

She stayed in her crouch to keep her head below the top of that wall. If Mary only looked up now, if she hadn't already sensed that she was being watched, she'd see nothing. If she did know Faye was there, if she was planning to remove the barricade on the door and burst through and end Faye's life as she had already ended two others, then Faye would have no warning.

Her hands, her hands were shaking again and her heart was beating so loudly she could hear nothing else. Where were Davey and Umu? If she was spared, did it mean they weren't?

The red light from the exit sign didn't make it over the wall, and she didn't dare turn her flashlight on or give any indication she was moving. Crouched on that table in perfect darkness, willing her heart to beat more quietly, she thought again about the longest day of the year and how she'd missed it. If this was the end, then she'd have spent her last summer solstice doing laundry in a basement. She thought of Ro, who would never see the sun rise or fall again because of the violent action of her hand. Mary's guilt revealed an awful truth—Ro's innocence. Faye had killed an innocent man. All that hate Umu glared at her with? It wasn't enough.

There was no rustling of clothing, no padding of footsteps, no intake of breath, no noise at all to suggest that Mary was still moving. Was she standing there, tears now dry, having disposed of her evidence? Had she sunk back to the floor to resume her contemplation? Faye slid her phone out of her pocket to look at the time. It was nearly two. Five hours at the very least before anyone came for them. Five hours was an eternity. Her terror was absolute but so was her certainty there would be more death if she didn't act. She rose from her crouch slowly so she wouldn't make a sound. She held her breath, and even the drumbeat of her deafening heart quieted as the top of her head and then her eyes crested the wall to fall back upon Mary and see what she was doing.

Nothing, the answer was nothing. The red light from the exit sign still bathed the area in crimson light, but there was no one there to see. Mary was gone.