Chapter 10
Curtis reached my side gate and pulled a key from his pocket.
I had changed that lock three weeks earlier. I remembered standing in the driveway with the new deadbolt in my hands, reading the instructions, testing the key twice before I trusted it. My old key had gone into the trash that same day. Nobody else had a copy. Nobody.
Curtis's key turned. The gate swung open.
I stared at him. "How?"
He didn't answer. He waved the two security men through. They were big, broad-shouldered men in dark private-security uniforms, and they moved like they had done this before. One of them carried a folded tarp under his arm.
Grace was already climbing my fence. She hauled herself up the rail in her good shoes, her perfect hair coming loose, and dropped onto my side of the yard with a gasp. She grabbed my arm.
"Do not go through the front door," she said.
"Why? What are you talking about?"
"Because that is how the bags get inside."
She pulled me toward the back of the house. Behind us, Curtis was shouting at the security men, pointing at the patio, at the torn bag, at the folders I still held. I had a phone full of video evidence and a pocket full of forged documents, and all I could do was follow a sixty-four-year-old woman in ruined shoes around the corner of my own house.
She stopped at the basement window. The wooden frame had been painted shut for decades. The paint was so thick and old it looked like tree bark. When Curtis had stood in my basement earlier and demanded I open the door, when he had gone straight to the painted cabinet and photographed it, I had never questioned any of it. Now Grace bent down, picked up a loose stone from the flower bed, and struck one corner of the frame.
The entire frame swung inward on silent hinges. It was not a window at all. It was a door built to look like a sealed window, and it had never been attached to the wall.
Behind it was a narrow passage descending into darkness, barely wide enough for one person. Cold air rose from below, and with it came the smell I knew too well β the sour, sweet smell of garbage that had filled my kitchen and my living room for two months. My knees went weak.
"You first," Grace said. "It gets wider."
I shone my phone light down the passage. Concrete steps led below the level of my basement, then leveled into a corridor with old rusted pipes running along the ceiling. The floor was scattered with empty black garbage bags, flattened and folded, dozens of them, the same bags that had appeared in my kitchen, my hallway, my bedroom.
I descended the steps, and Grace followed, pulling the false window shut behind us. It closed without a sound.
The corridor ran under both our houses. After thirty feet it opened into a low concrete room beneath my basement. My light swept across it and my stomach turned over. Shelves lined the walls, and on the shelves were homeowner files in neat labeled rows. Removed mailboxes, pried off front porches. Medication containers. A bundle of house keys on a single metal ring. Photographs taken through bedroom windows β I saw my own kitchen in one of them, me at the table with my head in my hands, taken on a night I had been alone and crying and certain I was losing my mind.
A row of monitors stood on a long workbench. My living room filled one screen, live and empty, my couch and the rug I had replaced. Grace's kitchen filled another. A third showed a woman I knew, and my blood went cold. Officer Paula Reed sat bound to a chair in a room I did not recognize, her hands tied to the armrests, her head down. An address had been written on the wall behind her in thick black marker. I read it twice to be certain. It was the vacant house formerly owned by Henry Marsh.
Grace stared at the screen, her hand over her mouth. "I didn't know they had her," she whispered. "I swear to you, Thomas. I thought she was only on leave."
Footsteps echoed from the corridor behind us. The security men had found the false window. They were coming down the passage.
"Come on," Grace said, and pulled me deeper into the dark room. I kept my phone light low and my free hand on the damp concrete wall, and I did not look back at the monitors.