She shook her head.
“I went to the room,” she confessed. “But it all felt too weird. I’m not . . . I don’t know. It’s not my style, you know? I like Kristen, and even though he said . . . anyway, no, I didn’t.” I nodded again, thinking that was the end of it, but then she added, “He was actually quite sweet. And sad. Not like he normally is at all. I actually considered . . . but then . . .”
Her face tightened, all the tenderness that had been there a moment before now turning into something else entirely. Again she checked the doorway and stooped, as if trying to make herself small, before she leaned in and whispered.
“He called me Melissa. Not once. Four or five times. He said I looked like her and being with me would be like being with her. Freaked me out. I mean, I was insulted, you know, because he obviously wasn’t really interested in me, but it was more than that. It scared me. He’s, like, obsessed with her. Asked me to sit like her. Talk like her. I couldn’t deal, so I took off.”
“And he was . . .”
“Not happy,” she said with a bleak smile. “But then you’d already figured that out, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the butchered underwear strewn about her bedroom floor. “I think I had.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
I took a health and environmental science class in college. It was mostly pretty dull stuff, but one of the case studies stuck with me. A Minnesota family in the nineties started getting frequent bouts of what they thought was flu: lethargy, occasional nausea, disorientation, an inability to focus, and memory loss. They were treated and released over and over, with doctors considering chronic fatigue syndrome to be the leading possible cause of their symptoms. This went on for three years. In that time the kids’ grades crashed, the father lost his job, and the mother became so depressed with her failure to complete even simple tasks that she became suicidal. The only time they improved was when they went away on vacation, but as soon as they got home, their symptoms would creep back in. Almost five years after the syndrome began, a random home improvement revealed a leak in the exhaust line of their furnace. Prompt blood tests confirmed that the cause of all their sickness was chronic exposure to low levels of carbon monoxide.
Cases where the dosage was much higher—when people stayed with a running car in the garage, say, or when they used a charcoal stove indoors—had more dramatic and alarming results, frequently leading to unconsciousness within ten or fifteen minutes and death in twice that. The gas is light and odorless. Most people don’t notice it even as they start to succumb to symptoms.
I stare at the hose on the stairs, and I know why we have been so tired, so woozy, so forgetful. I had thought we were being drugged, but we weren’t. We were being poisoned.
Marcus is upstairs. So are Gretchen and Kristen and Brad. I have no idea if they are alive.
I run clumsily to the front door, but it has been locked with a key. I follow the hose down the cellar stairs to the generator, past the scuba gear, not thinking about who might be down here, stumbling and falling on the steps. My skinned knees flare and my shattered left hand shrieks with pain as I land awkwardly on it, but I get up and blunder over to the throbbing yellow generator and shut it off. The exhaust line has been fitted to the hose and fastened in place with pipe grips.
The gas is light. That means it will rise, and the sealed windows of the villa that make it so stuffy will hold it. The second and third stories are now a gas chamber. I look at the scuba gear, but I don’t have time to mess with regulators. Instead I snatch up the small tank of pure emergency oxygen, then turn to the tools and garden implements. I pick up a picklike mattock, but it’s too heavy to wield one-handed. Among the dust and cobwebs is a ball-peen hammer, the kind with the rounded striking head.
That will have to do.
I hit the wall hard with my left shoulder as I navigate the spiral back to the foyer but keep going, breathing as shallowly as I can while I climb. I can’t smell the poison. I can’t taste it. But I know it’s there and that there’s nothing I can do that will keep it out. The air is probably loaded already, which means I have only a few minutes of consciousness. Maybe not even that.
I round the corner onto the landing of the third floor at a ragged trot and make for Marcus’s door. I weave as I walk, listing like a rowboat taking on water, and fall heavily against the door. It is locked. They all will be, a precaution against whoever broke into Gretchen’s room. I set the oxygen tank down but waste no time knocking. There is a good chance they are already unconscious or worse.
I swing the hammer wildly at the door handle, hitting, missing, hitting again, using all the strength I still have. The handle buckles but the latch holds, so I try charging with my right shoulder. The first hit is too close to the hinge, but the second, with a blundering run from the top of the stairs, splinters the wood around the faceplate, and the door judders open.
Marcus is motionless on the bed, wearing the shorts I saw him in the night before, the sheets kicked haphazardly aside, lying on his belly, his face buried in the pillow. He always slept like that. I don’t wait to check his pulse or breathing but stride across the room, hammer raised.
The energy of my step drives the swing of the hammer, and the window explodes.
I lean out into the night and suck in the air. It’s cold as deep water, and it fills my lungs like life. I use the hammerhead to clear as much of the glass from the frame as I can, but as soon as I try to pull Marcus closer, it’s clear that I can’t do it with one hand. I should be distraught, emotionally overwhelmed, but all my remaining mental strength has been honed to a fine point, to completing a single set of things I need to do, and I feel nothing. I take another breath of the air outside, then go back into the hall and down one flight.
After the impenetrable darkness of the cellars, the dusk up here barely slows me down. I go to Gretchen’s room next, still feeling unsteady, but I crash into the door like a battering ram, turning my shoulder into it at the last second. The latch holds, but the door itself cracks along a seam where I hit it. I use the hammer to clear the wood, then reach in and unlatch the door.
Gretchen is huddled on the bed under a protective mound of blankets. I practically throw the hammer through her window, take another breath past the shattered remains, and turn around, only then seeing that there is another figure curled up on the floor beside the bed. I bend, trying to get my eyes to focus.
It’s Kristen.
Dimly, I think another piece of the puzzle has slotted into place.
But I can’t abandon Brad, even if Kristen wants nothing more to do with him. I go back out, moving down the hall to the last door. I’m flagging now. I can feel it, and it’s not just tiredness. My movement is sloppy, my balance precarious, and my mind is wandering. It’s the gas. It’s in my lungs, my blood. I hit the door to Brad’s room, but I’ve lost all the punch I had a moment ago, and it holds. I try again to no avail. I’m suddenly impossibly tired. It’s like being carried away on a thick black river and wanting nothing more than to float with the current. I try once more, but my shoulder charge is weak and uneven. I hit my face against the jamb and collapse to my knees.