“Are we locked in?” I asked, horrified.
“It looks like it,” he said. “It’s been broken for as long as I can remember.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Hold on a sec,” he said.
He shuffled around the room, opening and closing cabinets until I heard him strike a match. A candle came to life, filling the room with light.
“Much better,” Alex said.
“Now what?”
“Texting Cole to come get us out,” he said, walking around the small room while holding up his phone. “Crap. I can’t find any service.” He snapped it shut and shoved it back in his pocket.
“I left mine upstairs,” I said, feeling guilty.
“It’s okay. You didn’t know.”
“So what are we going to do?” I asked.
“We’ll have to wait until Cole finds us, but in the meantime…”
He grabbed a wooden barrel and placed it in the middle of the room. The candle was put in the center, and he pulled two chairs up, making a table for us to sit at. Then he went over to one of the cabinets and started searching through the shelves.
“Now what are you doing?” I asked him, carefully sitting down on the rickety folding chair.
“Looking for these!” he said, grinning like he’d won the lottery. In his hands was a beat-up deck of cards. He came back over to the table, pulling them out of the flimsy cardboard box as he walked. “I use to sit in here and watch my dad fix things when I was a little kid. When he got frustrated with something he couldn’t fix, he would pull these out and teach me to play different card games.”
“So your dad fixes stuff but never thought to repair the lock on the door?”
“He’s tried.” Alex sat down, and the candlelight made shadows flicker across the angles of his face. “I never said he was good at it, and the man’s way too stubborn to replace the handle, so more often than not, we just ended up playing cards.”
“That’s nice,” I said, cocking my head so I could see the image on the back of the cards. It looked familiar, and sure enough, when Alex held them up for me to examine, the New York skyline was plastered there. The reminder of home was so unexpected that my chest went tight. “I wish my dad could have taught me stuff like that when I was little.”
“Why didn’t he?” Alex asked. He was shuffling now, his hands moving back and forth as he blended the deck together.
I gripped the edge of the barrel, trying to think of the best way to answer. In all honesty, my dad didn’t have much time when I was growing up. Sebastian Howard was a busy man with lots of work, and whenever he came home, it was only to lock himself in his office. I looked away from Alex. I wanted nothing more than to be sincere, but the last thing I needed was to give the Walters another reason to feel sorry for me.
I shrugged and said, “We weren’t much of a game family. Watching movies was more our thing.”
Alex leaned in. “I’ll teach you something,” he said.
He dealt quickly, explaining the rules as he went. Picking up my hand, I decided that the cards were older than I’d originally thought. Each one was bent and grubby. The ace of spades was sticky with what looked like grape jelly, and I could feel the grime on my fingers.
For my first few turns, I concentrated on grasping the rules and nothing more. Occasionally I would ask Alex about one of his moves and he would answer, but other than those few words, we played silently. He won the first round, but by then I’d caught on to the strategy and was confident that I could beat him in the next round. This time I dealt, and after arranging my hand, I asked Alex the question that had been bothering me since this morning.
“So, are you still mad at me?” I asked as he reached for the top card from the remaining deck. He paused and looked up at me. “Because if you are, now’s a pretty good time to talk about it.”
“I guess not,” he said. Then, after a long moment, “But I would really like to know what Mary said to you.”
“This is about you and me, not her.”
Before anything more could pass between us, I heard a distant shout.
“Where the hell are you guys?” It was Cole from somewhere in the basement.
Alex rushed over to the locked door. “Over here,” he shouted.
After a few minutes of searching in the dark, Cole found the key his dad kept on a hook outside the workroom and unlocked it. His hair was still dripping from the rain and his shirt clung to his shoulders, revealing the definition of muscle beneath, but he hadn’t been able to get the power back on.
Much to my annoyance, as we headed back upstairs with a few candles in hand, Alex told Cole how I’d locked us in the workroom.
“Don’t worry, Jackie,” Cole said, still laughing at me as we stepped into the kitchen. “We’ll protect you from all those scary monsters.”