I take a peek into one of the rooms, squinting to see. The walls are lined in black and white subway tiles. There’s a bathtub against the far wall, and even in the faint light, I can detect that it’s ringed with deep brown stains.
I keep going. Toward the very end of hall, between two of the tub rooms, there’s a rusted metal door in the wall with a handle, which must open onto a laundry chute once used for towels and robes. Directly in front of me is a square empty room, identical to the one I entered through earlier. It might have once been a lounge or even a storage space. Light struggles to find its way in through a set of small, smudged windows. There’s a door to the outside here, too, but this one is padlocked shut.
I can’t for the life of me figure out who would want to hold an event in this building. It’s less like an old bathhouse and more like a haunted sanatorium.
From far off, I hear the dull drone of Sandra’s voice as she converses on the phone. I set the swag bag down on the windowsill, and pluck out the yellow tissue paper. Inside I discover a few gift certificates, a miniature bottle of white wine, a lip gloss, and one of the candles Sandra was buying the day I bumped into her in town.
I pull it out from the bag. “Sandalwood,” a sticker on the glass holder says. I’m not sure why, but I bring it to my nose and smell. It’s exotic and woodsy . . . and somehow familiar.
And then I realize. It’s the same scent I noticed that day in Guy’s bedroom.
Chapter 24
Instinctively my hand flies to my mouth and I press it there, my thoughts in a tangle. It can’t mean anything, I decide. Tons of people must like sandalwood. Just because Sandra has picked this candle for the swag bag doesn’t mean she once brought one like it to Guy’s bedroom. It doesn’t prove she was sleeping with my husband.
Still, it scares me. I’ve felt uneasy, I realize, from the moment I walked in the door of this hellhole. I drop the candle back into the bag and quickly stuff the tissue paper over it. I don’t care anymore about guaranteeing that Sandra says the right thing to Corcoran. All I want is to get out of here as fast as I can.
I step from the room and hurry back toward the lobby. Halfway there, I hear Sandra speak again, her voice drifting down the long, dim corridor. I freeze and listen.
“Yes, yes,” she says, clearly still on the phone. “But I really need to hop off. Someone’s stopped by to see me.”
Her words trigger a memory—Sandra dropping by the house that day to welcome me to the neighborhood. I was on the screened-in porch when she knocked at the door, napping and not looking forward to the dinner party we were hosting later. She presented me with the bag of brochures . . . and I gave her a copy of Twenty Choices, one I retrieved from the box in the spare room upstairs.
And then Derek’s words echo in my head, the comment he made earlier when we were discussing who might have taken the money: It had to be someone who was there on that Thursday.
All this time I’ve focused on the people who were there that night. Eve and the waiters. The dinner guests. Even Guy. But the money had been sitting in the desk since midday. It was there when Sandra stopped by the house and I trudged upstairs to grab the book for her. She was alone downstairs on Thursday for at least five minutes. I didn’t look in the drawer until after the dinner.
Is she the one? The one who took the cash and left the matches behind? Because she was screwing my husband and wanted to do her best to make me come unhinged?
Is she the one who played the fire sound into my phone and tore the lock off the door to the screened porch?
My heart’s racing now. I really need to get out of here. I force myself forward, my breath stuck in my chest. As I reach the lobby, Sandra is dropping her cell phone into her purse.
“There you are,” she says, smiling. “I was worried you’d fallen into one of those old tubs back there and couldn’t get out.”
“No, just browsing.” I’m so rattled, I can’t get the right words to come out of my mouth.
“Browsing?” She chuckles lightly, as if amused by the odd phrasing I’ve chosen.
“I mean, just looking. Looking at the rooms.”
“What do you think?”
“Interesting.” I flick my gaze briefly off her face toward the front entrance. For the first time, I see that there are at least six feet of link chain coiled around the handles of the two doors. The only way out that I know of is down the corridor I came along earlier. But Sandra’s stationed in the direct path to that corridor, and I’m going to have to maneuver around her to escape. I have to appear calm, I tell myself. I can’t let on that I’m freaked.
“So many people passed through here years ago,” she says, throwing her arm out in gesture. “They thought taking the waters would cure what ailed them.”
“Did it do any good?”