her press the switch, watched it turn red.
“Tell me about Ann,” she said, wanting him to remember the
woman he’d loved, distract him from her. Why had Ann left him?
Had there been another man? Why hadn’t she taken Sam with her?
So what if Tyler had tried to fight for custody? Sam was still her
child, not his. But she had just run away without him.
Tyler was still watching the coffeemaker. She watched him
breathe in the aroma. Finally, he said, “She was beautiful. She’d
been married to a guy who left her the minute he found out she
was pregnant. We hooked up kind of by accident. She couldn’t get
the gasoline cap off her car. I helped her. Then we went to
Pollyanna’s Restaurant.” He shrugged. “We got married a couple
months later.”
“What happened?”
He said nothing for a very long time. “The coffee’s ready.”
She poured each of them a cup.
He took a drink, then shrugged. “She was happy and then she
wasn’t. She left. Nothing more, Becca. Listen, I swear I’ll make you
happy. You won’t ever want to leave. We can have more kids, yours
and mine. Sam was Ann’s kid anyway.”
“I’m going to marry Adam.”
He threw the coffee at her. He roared to his feet, sending the
wooden chair crashing against the wall, and shouted, “No, you’re
not going to marry that goddamned bastard! You’re mine, do you
hear me? You’re mine, you damned bitch!”
The coffee wasn’t scalding anymore, thank God, but it hurt,
splashing on her neck, on the front of her shirt, soaking through to
her skin.
He leapt toward her, his hands out.
“No, Tyler.” She ran, but he was blocking any escape out the
back door. There was no place to go except down to the basement.
But she’d be trapped down there. No, wait, there was another small
entry on the far side of the basement where long-ago Marleys had
had their winter cords of wood dumped. She saw it all in a flash,
and ran to the basement door, jerked it open, then pulled it closed
behind her. She locked it, flipped on the light, saw the naked bulb
dangling from the ceiling by a thin wire, even as she heard him
pulling on the knob on the other side, yelling, calling her horrible
names, telling her that he would get her, that she wouldn’t leave
him, not ever.
She ran down the wooden stairs. She looked at the wall where
she’d found Sam propped up, bound and gagged, then at the far
wall that still gaped open from when the skeleton had fallen out of
it after that storm.
She heard the basement door splinter. Then he was on the stairs.
She pulled and jerked at the rusted latch that held the small trapdoor
down. It was about chest high. Move, move, but she was
shrieking it in her mind, not out loud. What the hell was going on
with him? It had happened so quickly. He had snapped, just
snapped, and turned into a wild man. Oh God, a crazy man.
She heard his feet clattering to the bottom steps. The latch
wouldn’t give. She was trapped. She turned to see him running
across the concrete floor. He came to a stop. He was panting. Then
he smiled at her.
“I nailed that trapdoor shut last week. It was dangerous. I didn’t
think we should take the chance that a kid could open it and fall
through. Maybe hurt himself. Maybe even kill himself.”
“Tyler,” she said. Be calm, be calm. “What’s going on here? Why
are you acting like this? Why this rage? At me? Why?”
He said, all calm and serious, and he actually waved his finger at
her, like a lecturing teacher, “You’re like the others, Becca. I hoped
you would be different, I would have wagered everything that you
were different, that you weren’t like Ann, that faithless bitch who
wanted to leave me, wanted to take Sam and go far away from me.”
“Why did she want to leave you,Tyler?”
He shrugged. “She thought I was smothering her, but that was
just in her mind, of course. I loved her, wanted to make her and