Love Game (10 page)

“Do you think the other room has recliners and cable TV?” I asked Bridget.

“I don’t know. My panic-room experience is limited.”

“It would be typical to get trapped in the
Silence of the Lambs
room while the other group is lounging in the lap of luxury, free to come and go as they please,” Ruth grumbled.

We let that thought hang in the air for a minute. “Trapped in the
Silence of the Lambs
room” didn’t sound all that appealing, and, again, the mystery of just what was happening outside and why we were locked in weighed heavily on us. The mounting anxiety was palpable. It wasn’t easy to be patient and even less easy to remain calm.

I caught Ruth eyeing the door. I hoped she wasn’t going to charge it again. I didn’t think her old bones could handle the impact another time. Remington took a step toward her, probably getting ready to contain her if she freaked out. I couldn’t figure him out. He
was as cool as a cucumber and barely uttered a word. Was he some James Bond type, ready with a plan to protect us all, or was he an overgrown dumb stud muffin who was too stupid to talk?

As if to answer, Bridget’s stomach growled. “I didn’t eat breakfast,” she explained. “And I was up all night.”

“Mavis has cupcakes,” Lucy said.

“And cable TV,” I added stupidly.

“Are you sure you don’t have a phone?” Lucy asked Luanda.

“At least send out your psychic vibes and get some help,” Ruth told her.

“That’s not how psychic vibes work,” Luanda said, and bit her nails. Ruth snorted and adjusted her housedress. “I sense a lot of negativity in this room,” Luanda whined, working hard on chewing through the nail of her ring finger.

“Really? You sense negativity?” Lucy shrieked. “Because, darlin’, I think it’s time I told you a thing or two about negativity.”

“Lucy, please,” I said. “We need to save oxygen.” The room had gotten distinctly warmer, and I began to pant ever so slightly. What if we died there in the basement, suffocating in the airtight room? Suffocation was a lousy way to die—better probably than Ebola, but still really, really lousy.

The panic room was working. I was panicking real well now.

“I want to be old,” I told Bridget. “Like really old. Like
Guinness World Records
old.”

“You say that now, but when it takes you an hour and a half to take a crap and you need a handful of
pills to bend down and tie your shoes, you’ll think different,” Ruth said.

Lucy crossed her arms, like she was holding herself back, and she probably was. Luanda took up all her attention. The fact that we were locked in a panic room didn’t faze her at all.

“They probably called the fire department already. It shouldn’t be much longer,” Remington said, towering over us. His voice was deep, rich, and silky and floated through the room, touching us all. Maybe he was closer to James Bond than to a dumb stud muffin, I thought optimistically.

Despite his calm demeanor, Remington felt along the edges of the door, as if looking for a weakness in the structure, any way to get free.

“I’m sure the air is running out,” I said.

“Maybe we can get more air to come out of that vent,” Luanda said.

We followed Luanda’s line of sight to a spot on the wall just under the high ceiling. Sure enough, there was a vent about a foot wide.

“Air!” I yelled, and jumped up, sending pain shooting from my foot through my body.

“I can’t reach it,” Remington said, stretching his hands toward the vent. “Would you climb up on my shoulders?” he asked me.

My eyes flashed to his shoulders: massive, muscly, and the color of hazelnut creamer. Yum. I broke out into a fit of giggles, which rose to a fever pitch and finally settled down to loud snorting.

“For the love of Pete,” Ruth grumbled. “Get a grip on yourself, girl.” She wagged her finger at Remington
and demanded, “Hey, genius, why on earth did you pick danger-prone Daphne?”

Ruth had a point. I probably shouldn’t have been his first choice, not with the nylon boot, but it delighted me to think of climbing all over Detective Cumberbatch, and for the moment I forgot that I was probably going to suffocate to death. Besides, there might be some real air through that vent, and I wanted to get my mouth as close to it as possible.

Remington crouched down in front of me. “All aboard,” he said. I swallowed another fit of giggles and hitched myself onto his shoulders, wrapping my legs around his neck. He secured me, gripping my thighs, and stood up straight like he was carrying a small child, not a full-grown, corn-fed woman.

“What do you see?” he asked as I peered through the vent.

“Nothing. Dark.” But there was definitely air. I gulped it greedily. At least we wouldn’t die like that, but then my imagination went to all the other ways we could die. How long could we go without water? I wondered if Ruth would eat me.

“Can you hear anything?” he asked.

“No.” But then I heard a distinct murmuring. I shushed our group and pressed my ear to the grate. Yep, there were voices on the other side.

“Hello!” I hollered into the vent. “Hello! Hello! We’re trapped!”

The murmuring got louder, followed by a scraping sound, like something large was being moved across the floor.

“I knew they had furniture,” I said.

“Ask when they’re going to open the door,” Ruth commanded.

“Tell them to call the fire department,” Bridget told me.

“Tell them I’m getting calls from the other side,” Luanda said, then rolled her eyes back and started to hum.

“Hello! You all right?” A voice came through the vent. It sounded just like Katharine Hepburn.

“I think Mrs. Arbuthnot is speaking,” I told our group. “Get help! We’re stuck in here!” I yelled into the vent.

“We’re stuck, too!” Mrs. Arbuthnot yelled back. “No way out!”

“The flipper locked us in,” a male voice shouted from the other side. I assumed he was one of the two buyers. “Rellik is crazy!”

“Call for help! Call for help!” Ruth cried. “What’s wrong with people? Usually they’re all over their cellphones, can’t live without them. It’s beep this and beep that. I can’t get people to stop with their goddamned cellphones in my shop, and now suddenly nobody has a phone? Nowadays you can do everything with a phone. You can go to college with a phone, you can give birth with a phone. Where the hell’s all the phones?”

I was about to remind the group in the other room about their phones, when a loud noise came through the vent, followed by screams.

“Are you okay?” I asked, and was answered by more screaming. It went on like that for a good couple of minutes. They screamed and screamed until finally they were silent again.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lucy said.

“Mrs. Arbuthnot?” I asked, but the voices were gone and in their place was a machine-like noise, as if they were driving a Volkswagen around in the other room.

“Can you see anything at all?” Remington asked.

I pressed my face up to the vent and squinted. I could make out a light on the other side, which seemed to dance and buckle.

“I think the light is getting brighter,” I said, pressing my face harder against the grate. The mechanical, motor-like sound was getting louder, too. “I think I see something. I think it’s a duck beak.”

“A what?” Ruth asked.

I smashed my face as much I could against the vent. “Yeah, a duck beak,” I said. The light kept getting brighter and the sound louder, until suddenly the light went out and it became completely dark in the vent.

“What the—” I said, and flinched backward, but it was too late. The duck’s beak opened and threw up all over me, its heavy vomit spitting through the vent with remarkable force, covering my face and blinding me.

I screamed, gagging on the duck vomit and throwing myself off-balance. To his credit, Remington caught me before I fell. He grabbed my thighs in a viselike grip, but my butt slipped off his shoulders, leaving me to hang halfway down his back. I squirmed and shimmied until finally I got a firm hold on Remington. But now I was facing the other way, upside down, his face planted deep in my crotch.

“This would be embarrassing if I didn’t have duck vomit on my face,” I said.

“It’s still embarrassing,” Ruth noted.

“I don’t think it’s duck vomit,” Bridget said.

I wiped my eyes as best I could with Grandma’s jacket, and Remington let me down gently, cupping my buttocks with his hands and lifting me away from his face. The duck vomit—or whatever it was—was squirting out of the vent, spitting at regular intervals. Remington scooped some off my face and rolled it between his fingers.

“Plaster,” he said.

“That crazy bastard is filling the panic room with plaster?” Ruth asked no one in particular.

“Are you sure it’s not duck vomit?” I asked.

“I’m ready to leave now!” Luanda announced, and threw herself at the door with amazing force. The impact knocked her out, and she fell to the floor unconscious. I envied her. I would have loved to be unconscious.

Dots of plaster had settled on Luanda’s face, making her look like she had a cheek full of white moles. I probably looked a lot worse. I was covered in the stuff, and it was starting to set.

“I’m thinking this isn’t good,” I said.

THERE WAS
a lot of panicking. Everyone was making noise at the same time, except for Luanda, who was either still knocked out or had just decided it was better to feign sleep. Remington was also silent, which wasn’t new for him. Still, I would have
liked him to snap into action. I mean, what would Captain Kirk do?

Without any idea how to extricate us from what looked like a really horrible death, we concentrated on our fate and the crazy psycho killer Michael Rellik: How evil and crazy must he be to lock us up and plaster us to death? What had we ever done to him? From the sound of it, he had already finished off the group in the other room. What kind of monster murders cupcake bakers?

What kind of monster murders a matchmaker?

I grabbed one of Remington’s large arms. “Did you hear that?” I asked him.

“What?”

“Somebody shrieked.”

“I’m pretty sure that was you,” he said.

“No it wasn’t.”

“I’m pretty sure it was.”

Without comment, he raised his hands to my chest and grazed his knuckles over my breasts. Despite my fear of dying, my body reacted to his touch. I gasped, and my insides melted like chocolate left out in the sun.

“Is this the moment for that?” I asked him, but my body was telling me it was. It didn’t mind at all that I was getting felt up minutes before I was going to die, stuck in a dungeon with my two best friends, a loony psychic woman, and Ruth.

Remington arched an eyebrow and moved his hands to the center of my chest. He pinched the metal tag of my jacket’s zipper and pulled it slowly down.

What was he thinking? Did he honestly believe I would get naked right there in the panic room? Inside
my mind, I was protesting heartily, but outside, I allowed him to unzip me and remove my jacket, leaving me in my T-shirt.

“Hop back on,” he told me, holding my jacket in his hand.

“Excuse me?”

“On my shoulders. Here we go.” He knelt down and maneuvered me onto him. “Stick it in the grate,” he instructed, handing back the jacket.

“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

I weaved Grandma’s velour tracksuit jacket in and out of the slats in the grate, jamming up the plaster perfectly. In fact, the plaster helped to seal the vent shut.

Remington put me down, and Bridget, Lucy, Ruth, and I embraced in a jumping-up-and-down group hug.

“You’re a genius, nerdy fella,” Ruth told Remington, but he was busy inspecting the door again. In a flash of realization, I understood why he wasn’t celebrating. We had effectively shut off our only supply of oxygen.

I approached him, making a show of taking lint off my shirt. “On a horror-movie scale, are we leaning toward
Saw III
or are we merely at a
Scanners
level?” I whispered.

He stopped studying the door and faced me. His dreamy, big dark eyes oozed into my reproductive system and started it up like a crank on an old-timey car. He was beautiful in the most traditional he-man definition of the word. But he was serious. Deadly serious, with an emphasis on the deadly. I gulped.