Whoever is doing this thought of everything. Well, almost everything. They didn’t bank on the Korean man leaving her messages.
Or maybe he’s part of it?
To ask who the note leaver was would be to ask who the one locking her in here might be—and ultimately, what either had to do with her father.
She listens to the silence of the house. She is locked in—but to what end?
She scans the walls of the guest room for mirrors and quickly finds one seamlessly embedded in the wall. Now that she thinks about it, most rooms in the house have mirrored walls or mirrors of some sort.
There will be a camera behind each, she doesn’t doubt it. The house is a kind of set, filming the inhabitants. She sits down on the chest of drawers and stares at the mirror opposite, her wet hair and slack expression catching her eye and forcing her to look at herself afresh. Why would someone want to watch her: a thirty-something, recently bereaved English professor with no family and no life?
Did her father film people in this house? Is that what this is? Was he a terrible, terrible person and this is how she’s going to find out?
Nina slips herself down off the chest of drawers and walks over to the mirror, as if proximity to the lens through which this person might be watching might help her glean more.
The thing is, she thinks, my father is dead and whoever is doing this clearly isn’t.
Her father built this house, she has no doubt about that. Its name and Bathsheba’s name are proof enough that her father had a hand in whatever this is—but he is dead. He cannot be doing this to her directly. Someone else is, either at his direction or in order to show her firsthand what kind of man her father really was.
A fresh dread spreads through her, like ink in water. What kind of man was he, to have a locked house full of cameras?
She snaps out of her reverie and wanders back into the living room once more, taking in the scene with fresh eyes.
Her father named the house after an opening move. The room downstairs was the bait to action for her and however many other people. She swallows hard at the thought of other people trapped here, filmed— other women. Are there other women still here, down there?
She casts her eyes with dread across to the staircase. Downstairs the locked-door tone sounds again as if deliberately calling to her.
The answers will be just down the stairs, she knows that. Whether she wants them or not.
A secondary thought occurs to Nina, sending a bright jolt of hope shooting through her. She asked Joe to come, and though the terrace outside is empty she feels certain he will get here soon. She said enough in her message to cause concern, especially if Joe can’t reach her and can’t enter the property. He does not seem like the kind of man who would simply walk away and assume she is fine when everything points in the opposite direction.
He will make his way up here. He will find her. He will call someone and they will get her out.
The tone beeps again downstairs and she knows with certainty that they want her to go down there. That’s how they want this to go. And every fiber of her body tells her not to. Better to wait here for Joe. Or James even?
She tries to recall the last message she left James, and whether it might cause him enough concern to make him fly out to Gorda to check on her over the weekend.
She realizes shamefully that she knows nothing about James really: does he have children, a wife, a husband, or a partner? She has no idea. But it seems unlikely he will charter a flight on the basis of a slightly concerning voicemail message. When he does realize that he can’t get hold of her he might alert the island authorities to perhaps check on the house— but there is no guarantee that that will happen before Monday. As far as he is concerned, her calls are work calls, and work happens Monday through Friday. Monday will come, but not soon enough. A shadow thought passes over her: perhaps James is in some way responsible for this, if he is aware of what this house is, or has been.
But she pushes the thought away. Joe will come first.
And she will leave him a note.
She turns from the terrace doors and heads to the stationery drawer in the side console behind the sofa, rooting out a pen and paper and a small roll of Scotch tape. She quickly scrawls a message then heads back to the terrace doors to affix it to the glass, its letters facing out onto the terrace.
Nina stops suddenly in her tracks, a thought occurring that sends a shiver down her spine. Joe helped build this house too. What if he is in some way connected, if he knows what is down there?
She stops the thought. She forces herself to recall elements of their meeting earlier that day. Joe is not a bad person, she tells herself. And in spite of this the simultaneous thought surfaces, in Nina’s mind, that she spent a lifetime with her father and thought the same of him. Yet here she is trapped in a house of his making.
She physically shakes off the thought and turns on her heels to head back across the room toward the staircase, then down into the basement.
Once she has left the room, the camera behind the living room mirror whirs, zooming in on the note left hanging on the glass, the sun backlighting the reversed words so that anyone looking can clearly read:
Joe, call the police! Not a joke.
Something weird is happening here.
The house is a trap. Be careful. Stuck inside.
