Addy’s desk sat at the back of the room, and she couldn’t see the front door of the office from where she was sitting. She heard the door open. Footsteps moved along the spaces created within the warren of little office cubicles. It wasn’t until after she called out “Hello” and no one answered that she realized she should have locked the door behind her. Anyone who was supposed to be there would have a key to get inside.
“Hello,” she called out again.
A scrape sounded against one of the desks, but not as though a bag or purse was being set down. More like something heavy had been pulled over the surface.
Addy’s anxious mind flashed to what she’d seen earlier when she entered Trina’s apartment: Trina’s neck, covered in a necklace of bruises, and Trina’s vacant eyes staring out at nothing. For a second, Addy tried to convince herself the sound could be another graduate student stumbling around while lost in thought, but her body wouldn’t listen. Instead, Addy’s heart slammed against her ribs, demanding she do something besides sit and wait to be attacked.
Adrenaline raced underneath her skin, energizing her weary body. Her mind screamed inside her head. This office is a coffin, it said. You need to get out.
Addy craned her neck to see above the cubicle dividers, but she was too petite and would need to move her chair back and stand in order to see above them.
She carefully began to push the legs of her chair away from the desk, her hands trembling. She tried not to make a sound. The scrape came again, this time deeper in pitch.
And closer to Addy’s desk.
Addy froze, her legs cramped in a half-crouch inches above the chair seat. Her knees made a hollow crack as they knocked against each other. Fear threatened to overcome her.
She caught a glimpse of either dark hair or a sweatshirt hood poking above her sight line. She couldn’t tell which.
Addy assessed the pathway to the office’s secondary door leading her out of the office and into the main corridors of the building. The door was almost directly opposite to the main entrance, and much closer to Addy’s side of the office. It opened directly into the outer hallway shared with other departments. The English department, which shared the floor with the Psychology department, always ran on a later schedule, and she’d be bound to find some people milling around.
If she could just get to the door.
Based on the scraping sounds, the intruder was coming in from her right, so this was her one chance to break away and escape.
Addy shoved back her chair fully, not caring this time about any sound it made, and fell to her knees, thinking if she got down they wouldn’t be able to see her as easily. She crawled along the ground, the coarse industrial carpet digging into her knees and tearing at the tights she had on underneath her denim skirt. Her palms sweated damp handprints into the carpet.
When Addy was halfway to the door, she realized she’d forgotten her purse. She still had her coat wrapped around her shoulders. At least she could go outside and make it home without freezing. What she wouldn’t give to have Eve’s kind face looking back at her now, instead of this terror lodged inside her.
The scraping sound had stopped. Addy didn’t dare look up or stand to see where the person was within the office. She kept crawling towards the door. A slim shaft of bright light came from the outer office somewhere, shining through the frosted-glass partition next to the doorframe.
And then she was there, at the door. No one was near her. Addy was going to get out. She’d head straight to the English department, where she’d have safety in numbers.
Addy felt a disorienting relief as she reached for the knob. What if no one was actually chasing her? It was probably just some other graduate student, zombified from reading their advisor’s research articles for too long. She hadn’t really seen them, and no one had threatened her. A brittleness settled over her body. How did children grow up in war zones? How did human beings cope with seeing their friends shot on the battlefield or next to them on their way to school? People coped with so much, and yet here Addy was suffocating from the stress of the last few days. All the trauma of the last week was getting to her, making her paranoid.
Addy resolved to go home to Eve, have her listen to what she’d been through, and let her make her a cup of sweet tea and tuck her in with a blanket. Oh, how Addy wished she could call her mother right now.
She turned the knob to open the secondary door, but it wouldn’t move. Quickly, Addy checked the lock on the door and found it wasn’t engaged. Addy tried again, but nothing happened.
Someone must have jammed the second door before entering through the main entrance to the office.
The realization hit Addy like a punch to her chest.
None of this was an accident. It wasn’t a misunderstanding. She wasn’t paranoid.
She was in danger.
“Where are you going?” a voice said. A fragrance assaulted Addy’s nostrils. Pungent. Cheap.
The lights in the office went out. Only the soft glow through the frosted glass of the door illuminated the space around Addy. Everything else was pitch black.
The scraping sound came again, so close it was difficult for Addy to tell if it came from in front or behind her.
Addy felt breath on her cheek. She was trapped.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN JOYCE
The text Joyce was waiting for arrived just as she was about to leave for her meeting with Susan. It was from another “friend,” but at least this one was truly a man with benefits. Unlike Ralph. Or Randy. Whatever his name was.
Joyce read the message, which confirmed what she’d been hoping. She had one errand to run, but it wouldn’t take long and would make her life easier in the end.
Afterwards, finally at the park, Joyce felt the weight of the gun in her bag like a phantom child she carried; dense, familiar, and needy. She hadn’t shot the gun in a very long time, and even then it was just at the firing range, but it was a talisman for this meeting with Susan that she couldn’t go without. Joyce hoped she wouldn’t have to use it, but simply knowing it was there, snug in her purse, was a comfort.
Clara was the one who’d bought it for Joyce, years and years ago now, after she’d discovered in her housekeeping that Joyce was in the habit of meeting with sometimes less than savory men. She’d been surprisingly accepting of Joyce’s indiscretions, not appealing to Joyce’s sense of loyalty or fidelity, but Clara remained insistent that Joyce have some form of protection.
‘Not all men are as kind as your husband,’ she’d told Joyce, and although Joyce’s initial reaction had been to respond with a sarcastic comment, she’d recognized the truth of Clara’s words and kept her mouth shut while Clara explained. It so happened Clara had a cousin who traded guns out of the back of his van, and for two hundred dollars she could get Joyce an unmarked handgun.
Joyce met the cousin, with Clara in tow, in the alley behind the diner in the center of town, and although the price point was good, Joyce decided to go the legal route. The cousin had a squirrelly look to him, his eyes shifting right to left even though nothing was moving around in the alley. Instead, Joyce applied for a conceal/carry license at the gun shop on the freeway outside town. Being an upper-class white woman in America with no criminal record, Joyce was carrying a loaded Smith and Wesson pistol in her purse before the end of the week—with the safety on, of course.
“Is your cousin one of the men who isn’t as nice as my husband?” Joyce had asked Clara after the alleyway meeting.
“Oh, yes,” Clara replied.
Joyce spotted Susan almost a block away. Her shiny blonde hair fell in a sharp line along her chin, and she wore a bright-pink coat for their meeting. It struck Joyce as rather strange, that a sister would think to pack multiple coats when traveling to sort out her murdered brother’s affairs.
Although Joyce might have been inclined towards the same sort of sartorial planning. When life hurtles out of control, what you put on (or in) your own body is sometimes the only bit you can take hold of.
Joyce joined Susan and slipped her arm through the younger woman’s. “How are you?” she asked.
Despite her sleek exterior, Susan’s face looked ravaged. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her foundation had seeped into the cracks around her eyes and mouth, aging her. Some of her makeup was smeared onto the white neckline of her silk blouse.
She looked like a woman in the throes of grief.
“I’ve been better.” Susan gave a small conciliatory laugh and wiped at her eyes with a handkerchief. “It’s all just so much, you know.”
“I don’t think I can imagine what you’re going through right now,” Joyce replied. The two of them started walking around the perimeter trail of the park. The sun was out, and despite the chill of winter it was pleasant in the sunshine.
“The police contacted me earlier this morning, just before I called you. They had a suspect in Dermot’s murder, the woman you told me about yesterday—”
“Trina?” Joyce’s throat tightened. The past tense of Susan’s statement pricked at her composure. She knew Trina was dead, but Susan didn’t know that. Simon was already being questioned at the police station about it. The meaning of Trina’s death was more slippery than Joyce had anticipated.
The gun’s weight offered a welcome pressure to her left side as she and Susan continued their walk, balancing Joyce’s momentary wave of dizziness.
“Yes, Catriona Dell. The professor at the university. They said she’d had a history of imbalance, recently, just like you told me.”
“Had?” Joyce caught the word and threw it back at Susan this time.
“Well, that’s why I wanted to meet with you. That’s why the police were calling me. This suspect of theirs was found dead in her apartment yesterday.”
