Chapter 2 - The Bedroom of Horrors
The main floor was immaculate. The hardwood floors gleamed with lemon wax; a fresh spruce wreath hung above the gas fireplace; a seventy-inch flatscreen television sat perched on an imported oak credenza that hadn’t been there four years ago. Everything looked affluent, comfortable, and thoroughly subsidized by the money I had wired from Edmonton before the accident.
“Where is her room?” I asked, keeping Elena held tightly against my ribs. Her fingers had hooked into my shirt, gripping the flannel with the desperate strength of a drowning person.
Margaret waved a hand dismissively. “Now, Daniel, don’t cause a fuss. She’s been comfortable in the basement annex. It’s cool, helps with her... episodes. You know how hysterical she became after you left.”
I didn't answer. I walked past the living room, through the kitchen, and kicked open the basement door.
“Daniel, wait!” Brianna called out, her voice pitching up in panic. “It’s cluttered down there! Travis hasn’t had time to organize his gym equipment!”
I descended the unfinished wooden stairs into the darkness. The air down here did not smell like cinnamon. It smelled of stagnant damp, raw sewage, and the unmistakable, sour odor of human misery.
At the far corner of the basement, beyond Travis’s shiny squat rack and rows of protein powder tubs, sat an old coal cellar. The heavy wood-plank door had a slide bolt installed on the *outside*—a brass sliding latch, fastened with a padlock that hung unclasped from the bracket.
I kicked the door open.
Inside, there was no window. A single bare bulb hung from an exposed wire. On the cold, cracked concrete floor lay a stained foam mattress without sheets, covered only by a rough horse blanket stiff with grease. In the corner sat a five-gallon plastic bucket with a lid, serving as a latrine.
Beside the mattress, lined up with heartbreaking precision, were three items: a plastic bottle filled with tap water, an old paperback bible with half the cover torn away, and a tiny, square photograph of me taken on our wedding day. The photograph was wrinkled from being held, the edges softened into lint by desperate thumbing.
“She chose to stay down here,” Margaret’s voice drifted down the stairs, calm and reasonable, as she descended slowly, holding the handrail. “She said the light hurt her eyes, Daniel. She had a nervous breakdown when the bank notified us of your debts. She wouldn't eat upstairs. She threw plates. Ask Travis.”
I turned around slowly. Elena had buried her face entirely into my neck, her whole body shivering in rhythmic, violent convulsions.
“You locked her in a cellar, Mother.”
“For her own safety!” Margaret snapped, though her tone quickly rounded into sweet conciliation as she remembered the million dollars. “You don't understand the burden it was, Daniel. You were miles away, sending sporadic checks, and then the checks stopped! We had to sell my mother’s silver just to keep the heat running! She was stealing food from the pantry at night—gorging herself while Brianna and I went without! We had to put a latch on the door to keep her from wandering out into the traffic. We saved her life!”
I looked down at the floor near the mattress. There, scratched into the grey lime of the wall with what looked like an iron nail, were dozens of small, faint tally marks. Groups of five. Hundreds of them.
“Travis,” I called out.
My brother appeared at the bottom of the stairs, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his designer sweatpants. “Yeah, man?”
“Go upstairs and bring down two fresh bath towels, a clean pair of sweatpants, and a thick sweater. Not Brianna’s cast-offs. Go into my old bedroom closet. My old flannel robes are still in the cedar chest.”
Travis hesitated, his eyes darting to Margaret. “Look, bro, we don't really want her tracking dirt through the upstairs bathrooms. The master bath was just retiled—”
“Travis,” I said. The single word came out so low, so saturated with cold, venomous authority that he instinctively stepped back, his boot heel catching the bottom riser. “Do it now. Or I walk back out that front door, get into my rental, and the settlement money stays in an offshore trust you will never touch with a ten-foot pole.”
The transformation was comical. Travis’s smirk dissolved into an oily grin. “Hey, relax, Danny! Nobody’s fighting you. We’re on the same team here. I’ll grab the towels. Fresh from the dryer.”
He bounded up the stairs two at a time.
I carried Elena into the downstairs half-bath—the small, unheated water closet beside the furnace. I turned on the tap. The water ran rust-colored for several seconds before clearing into a tepid stream. I sat Elena on the closed lid of the toilet, knelt before her, and took off her shoes.
She wasn't wearing socks. Her feet were swollen, purple with chilblains, the skin cracked open at the heels and oozing clear lymph.
“Elena,” I murmured, wetting a paper towel.
She flinched as I touched her ankle, her amber eyes wide, pupils dilated in terror. “They told me you were dead,” she whispered, her voice barely a scrape against sandpaper. “They brought a letter. With a red seal from the hospital. Margaret burned your clothes in the incinerator out back.”
My heart stopped, then resumed with heavy, sledgehammer beats against my ribs.
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“I’m alive,” I told her, holding her cracked, freezing hands against my cheeks so she could feel the heat of my blood, the stubble on my jaw, the tears that I could no longer hold back. “I’m alive, El. And I’m going to tear their lives down to the foundations.”
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