It did.
“Hold on, I’ll come to you. We can walk through the park and talk. It might be easier for you than sitting at the café.”
“All right,” Susan acquiesced.
Joyce told her she’d be there in five minutes. She knew the park well from walks she’d taken with Simon. There was also a public bathroom made of red brick, where she’d met a few men over the years for fun in the dark. Most of the time it had actually been nice, despite the dampness of the concrete floor.
“Just stay put. I’m coming.”
Clara walked in as Joyce hung up. “Can I help you, Mrs. M?”
“Where’d you put my gun the last time you cleaned it?”
Clara gave her a knowing smile. “Exactly where you prefer me to put it.” Clara walked to the wedding photo of Joyce and Simon hanging in the front hallway, only to swing it aside and reveal the safe behind it.
The code, of course, was Joyce’s wedding anniversary.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX ADDY
She didn’t want to be here. The psychology department office felt abandoned after 5pm, with most of the faculty clearing out and the staff gone as of 4:30. The days were short and the building had few windows to begin with, so most of the hallways and communal areas were almost blacked out by the time Addy made it to the office after waiting at Trina’s apartment for the police to arrive and for them to interview her.
Everything felt surreal, like she was moving through a fine and suffocating mist. When she passed a fellow grad student who was leaving for the day Addy could barely keep herself from screaming out “Trina is dead!” instead of the passive smile and head nod she managed to eke out. While she’d stood at the scene, wrapped in a metal emergency blanket from the EMS who’d arrived with really nothing to do except comfort her and offer condolences before taking a smoke break out back, she’d succumbed to the habit of checking her email and noted two from her advisor, with increasing urgency asking for results prior to her revisions being posted to the committee.
In academia, not even death could slow the cogs of bureaucracy. Addy turned the key in her shared grad student office and flipped on the light. The department packed twenty students into a windowless office built comfortably for four. Dividers and shared desk space where you signed out time was supposedly the answer. Usually someone was cranking away at one of the old desktops in the office, but no one was there, sitting in the dark coding data or polishing citations.
Addy wished she wasn’t alone.
She could have gone back to her apartment, but she wasn’t ready to face seeing her excessively chipper roommate, Eve, who would likely be making a vegan stir-fry in their kitchen and want to know how Addy’s day was. She’d been avoiding Eve as much as possible since everything with Dermot went down, but Addy couldn’t hold out forever, and she didn’t feel emotionally or physically capable of watching Eve’s smiling face deteriorate into genuine pain as Addy told her about today. Eve would want to hold her hand and sit on the couch together while she asked Addy gentle questions and assessed whether she was okay or needed further support. Eve might suggest Addy text a crisis helpline.
Addy couldn’t handle any of it. Focusing on her data, on crossing the finish line of her graduate program, would be a welcome distraction. This is what she needed to get through the next twenty-four hours—science, determination, grit. She kept telling herself that on the way over to campus. And one day she could tell her children how she’d finished her dissertation despite her recent lover being murdered and finding her would-be friend and faculty member dead in her apartment.
On second thought, perhaps she’d never tell anyone about this.
Addy settled into her shared desk, brushed crumbs from someone’s granola bar off the fake wood surface and into a garbage basket, and clicked into her account. She needed to do some analyses, and the department wouldn’t pay for her to get a personal license on her laptop for the program she used.
It was cold in the office, as though the heat had been turned down at the end of the day, and Addy pulled her coat around her shoulders. It didn’t register to Addy that her weary body might simply be in shock.
A half hour passed without her mind cracking open at the horror of it all, and she managed to work through two of the points on her revision checklist. The data appeared to be behaving itself, and she remembered to click the right boxes in the analysis to manage to keep the results printing the way she needed to without having to resize everything for her dissertation. The world might be digital, but the graduate school still measured margins with a ruler to ensure doctoral candidates followed their designated minutiae.
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.
