Chapter 2 - The Room Below the Floor
The guest room on the second floor was locked.
I stood before the white four-panel door, my hand on the brass knob. It turned a quarter-inch and struck the deadbolt with a dull, hollow *clack*.
"Where is the key, Mom?"
Helen leaned against the wainscoting, her breath hitching in her chest. Her forehead was slick with a thin sheen of cold sweat. She shook her head, not looking at the door, but looking down at the floral runner beneath her bare, swollen feet.
"That isn't... that isn't where they put me, Audrey."
A cold draft seemed to blow straight through the plaster wall. "What do you mean? This is the guest suite. I furnished it before I left. The orthopedic mattress. The walk-in shower with the teak bench."
"Brooke wanted it," Helen whispered. Her voice was barely loud enough to compete with the hum of the central heating unit. "She said her apartment in the Fan had black mold. She moved in four days after you flew to Kodiak. Reid gave her the suite because it had the private balcony."
I didn't answer. I didn't shout. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my multi-tool, and flipped out the heavy flat-head screwdriver blade. I jammed it between the jamb and the brass strike plate, braced my boot against the frame, and heaved.
The dry heart-pine splintered with a sound like a rifle shot.
The door swung inward.
The room smelled of expensive tuberose perfume, dry shampoo, and unwashed laundry. Brooke’s clothes were strewn across the four-thousand-dollar Swedish mattress I had purchased specifically to support my mother’s damaged lumbar spine. Designer shopping bags from the boutique on Cary Street were stacked three deep against the wall—bags paid for with the supplementary Visa card I had just severed.
The walk-in shower, designed with low-threshold entry for an elderly woman with an arthritic knee, was filled with Brooke’s tanning lotions and silk robes hanging from the brass grab rails.
My mother’s hand touched my elbow. "Don't, Audrey. Please. I don't want to sleep in here anyway. It smells like her."
"Where did they put you, Mom?"
Helen turned her face toward the shadows at the end of the second-floor hallway, past the linen closets, toward the narrow service stairs that led down into the utility scullery behind the kitchen.
And then lower still.
"No," I said. My jaw clamped so hard a molar clicked. "No."
"It's warm by the furnace," she said, her voice small, attempting a terrible, heartbreaking cheerfulness that made my stomach heave. "It really is, Audrey. Douglas put down that piece of carpet from the old den. And Reid bought me that little space heater. He said... he said with my knee, it was safer if I didn't have to navigate the big stairs every day."
I didn't wait for her to finish. I moved down the service stairs, taking them three at a time, through the back scullery, past the pantry where twenty-four cases of San Pellegrino were stacked beside three cases of vintage port, to the heavy, unpainted door that led into the basement.
The Richmond basement had been dug in 1924. It was dry for an old cellar, but it was still a cellar. The walls were whitewashed granite rubble. The floor was rough-poured concrete, pitted and uneven.
At the far corner, nestled between the high-efficiency boiler I had installed two years ago and the water filtration manifold, was a twin-sized cot.
It was not even an orthopedic cot. It was an army-surplus canvas fold-out, sagging in the center like an old hammock.
On it lay a single brown wool blanket—the kind sold at surplus stores for twelve dollars—and a pillow without a case, stained with the circular yellow rings of dried sweat. Beside the cot was a milk crate turned on its side. On top of the crate sat a plastic tumbler with an inch of murky tap water, a strip of generic acetaminophen with three pills left, and a small, cracked transistor radio with a piece of Scotch tape holding the battery door shut.
There was no window. There was only the single sixty-watt bare bulb hanging from an exposed BX cable, dangling above the cot like an interrogation lamp.
And the cold.
Even with the boiler running, the concrete floor sucked the heat out of the air like a thermal sink. I dropped to my knees on the rough slab. My palms immediately felt the damp, freezing chill that rises from the Virginia clay in late November.
My mother had been sleeping here.
For six weeks. With a torn meniscus and an unhealed tibial plateau fracture.
I buried my face in my hands. The leather of my work gloves smelled of aviation fuel and the frozen salt of the Bering Sea. I had been six thousand miles away, earning twenty-two thousand dollars a month, proud of my competence, proud of my capacity to build facilities that could preserve hundreds of tons of food, while five feet beneath my own dining room, my mother had been sleeping on a canvas cot like an abandoned stray.
"Audrey?"
She was standing at the bottom of the wooden cellar stairs, clinging to the rough-cut handrail with both hands, her injured leg dangling uselessly behind her.
"I’m sorry," she whispered. "I know you wanted me to be happy here."
I stood up. I walked across the concrete, picked her up into my arms—she weighed almost nothing, her ribcage sharp and fragile beneath the thin cotton duster—and carried her back up the stairs.
I didn't stop in the kitchen.
I didn't look at the dining room, where Reid was furiously scraping butter and lentils into a garbage bag while Pamela stood over him with a glass of tap water, her hands fluttering in useless outrage.
I carried my mother straight out the heavy oak front door, down the slate steps of the portico, and out to my truck—the old, indestructible F-250 I kept parked in the alley garage.
"Audrey!" Reid came sprinting out onto the porch, shoeless, his gray socks darkening instantly against the damp brick walkway. "Where are you taking her? Audrey, talk to me! We can discuss this like civilized adults! You can't just come in here and blow up our lives because your mother didn't like her room!"
I laid Helen gently across the front bench seat of the truck, buckled her seatbelt, and pulled my spare fleece jacket over her shoulders.
Then I turned to face my husband.
The streetlights of Monument Avenue caught the sharp angles of his face. He had the kind of looks that sold speculative real estate—symmetrical, confident, teeth straightened by expensive orthodontics, eyes that suggested deep competence until you asked him to show the calculations behind his assertions.
"Civilized adults," I repeated.
"Yes! Civilized!" He caught my arm. "Look, we had an agreement. The Alaska job was supposed to clear Tyler’s bridge loan. We talked about this!"
I looked down at his hand on my sleeve.
"Take your hand off me, Reid."
Something in my tone made him release his grip. He stepped back, his chest heaving, his bare socks soaking through with the autumn sleet that was just beginning to drift down through the bald cypress trees.
"The bridge loan," I said. "Tyler’s loan for the spec house in Goochland."
"He was going to lose the lot, Audrey! He’s my brother! You had the cash flow from the Arctic Cold contract. We were just balancing things until the spring closing!"
"And Mrs. Gable?" I asked. "The seven hundred and fifty dollars a month I wired specifically to her LLC for my mother’s physical therapy and daily meals?"
Reid swallowed. The streetlamp flickered overhead, casting a shadow that cut his face in half.
"We needed the liquidity for the lumber deposit," he muttered, looking past my ear toward the street. "Your mother was fine. She said she liked the quiet downstairs. Brooke checked on her every afternoon."
"Brooke didn't check on her," I said. "Brooke left her to eat sour lentils off the floor."
"She made a mess! She spilled an entire pot of soup on the Persian runner! Pamela had to get it dry-cleaned—"
I didn't wait to hear the rest. I climbed into the cab of the truck, slammed the heavy steel door, and turned the key. The 7.3-liter diesel engine roared to life with a deep, concussive rumble that drowned out Reid’s voice entirely.
May you like
I dropped the transmission into reverse, backed out of the driveway, and left him standing on the wet sidewalk, an empty man in greasy socks, screaming into the exhaust fumes.
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