It happens lightning-quick. He closes the distance between us, and his hand is around my throat, and the breath is crushed out of me. Panic, heavy and black, sits in my chest. Saliva builds in my throat. Can’t breathe.
Fred’s eyes, stony and impenetrable, swim in my vision. “You’re right,” he says. He is totally calm now as he tightens his fingers around my throat. My vision shrinks to a single point: those eyes. For a second, everything goes dark—blink—and then he is there again, staring at me, speaking in that lullaby-voice. “You aren’t my dog. But you will still learn to sit when I tell you. You will still learn to obey.”
“Hello? Anyone here?”
The voice echoes from the foyer. Instantly Fred releases me. I suck in a breath, then start to cough. My eyes are stinging. My lungs stutter in my chest, trying to suck in air.
“Hello?”
The door swings open and Debbie Sayer, my mother’s hairdresser, bursts into the room. “Oh!” she says, and stops. Her face reddens when she sees Fred and me. “Mayor Hargrove,” she says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. . . .”
“You didn’t interrupt,” Fred says. “I was on my way out.”
“We had an appointment,” Debbie adds uncertainly. She looks at me. I swipe a hand across my eyes; it comes away damp. “We were going to talk styles for the wedding. . . . I didn’t get the time wrong, did I?”
The wedding: It seems absurd now, a bad joke. This is my promised path: with this monster, who can smile in one moment and squeeze my throat in the next. I feel tears pushing at my eyes again and press my palms against my eyelids, willing them back.
“No.” My throat is raw. “You’re right.”
“Are you all right?” Debbie asks me.
“Hana suffers from allergies,” Fred answers smoothly, before I’ve had a chance to respond. “I’ve told her a hundred times to get a prescription. . . .” He reaches out and takes my hand, squeezes my fingers—too hard, but not so much that Debbie will notice. “She’s very stubborn.”
He withdraws his hand. I bring my aching fingers behind my back, flexing them, still fighting the urge to cry. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Fred says, directing a smile toward me. “You haven’t forgotten about the cocktail party, have you?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I say, refusing to look at him.
“Good.” He crosses the room. In the hall, I hear him begin to whistle.
Debbie begins chattering the moment he is out of earshot. “You’re so lucky. Henry—that’s my pair, you know—looks as though he’s had his face squashed by a rock.” She laughs. “He’s a good match for me, though. We’re big supporters of your husband—or soon-to-be, I guess we should say. Big supporters.”
She places a blow dryer, two brushes, and a translucent bag of pins side by side on top of the thank-you cards and the photographs, which she has not noticed. “You know, Henry met your husband just recently at a fund-raiser. Where is my hair spray?”
I close my eyes. Maybe this is all a dream—Debbie, the wedding, Fred. Maybe I’ll wake up, and it will be last summer, or two summers ago, or five: before any of this was real.
“I knew he would make a great mayor. Didn’t mind Hargrove Senior, and I’m sure he did his best, but if you want my opinion, he was just a little soft. He actually wanted the Crypts torn apart. . . .” She shakes her head. “I say, bury them there and let them rot.”
I snap suddenly to attention. “What?”
She descends on me with her hairbrush, tugging and pulling. “Don’t get me wrong—I liked Hargrove Senior. But I think he had the wrong idea about certain kinds of people.”
“No, no.” I swallow. “What did you say after that?”
She tilts my chin forcefully up toward the light and examines me. “Well, I think they should be left to rot in the Crypts—criminals, I mean, and sick people.” She begins looping hair, experimenting with the way it falls.
Stupid. I’ve been so stupid.
“And then you think of the way he died.” Debbie has returned to the subject of Fred’s father; he died January 12, the day of the Incidents, after the bombs went off in the Crypts. The whole eastern facade was blown clean away; prisoners suddenly found themselves in cells with no walls, and yards with no fences. There was a mass insurrection; Fred’s father arrived with the police, and died trying to restore order.
My ideas come hard and fast, like a thick snow, building a white wall I can’t get above or around.
Bluebeard kept a locked room, a secret space where he stashed his wives. . . . Locked doors, heavy bolts, women rotting in stone prisons . . .
Possible. It’s possible. It fits. It would explain the note, and why she wasn’t in CORE’s system. She might have been invalidated. Some prisoners are. Their identities, their histories, their whole lives are erased. Poof. A single keystroke, a metal door sliding shut, and it’s as though they never existed.