And yet the rooms are named after parts in his dead wife’s favorite poem, a poem that clearly meant a great deal to both of them. So maybe he did want to hurt people? But why, Nina demands of herself, why when he was such a rational man would he bother to do that?
“Please proceed to the vestibule immediately,” Bathsheba repeats.
“Or what?” Nina screams back at the voice. “You’ll try to kill me in here again? Good luck, I know all the answers to this one now, don’t I?”
After all, Nina considers what can they actually do to her. Make her hot again perhaps, make her wet again?
“I want to know who you are! And why you’re doing this! Did you know my father? Did he build this? What is it?”
Nina looks around at the whiteness on all sides. But no answer comes.
Her questions hang awkward in the air.
She could of course answer them herself. Why would anybody do something like this?
Because they can, because awful, evil people have always existed and sometimes you can’t tell they’re awful and sometimes those people turn out to be someone’s lovely loving clever cuddly dad.
As she watches the vestibule door begin to close she does not move, she simply watches as the green-lit corridor beyond it slips from sight, the door sealing over it. And with that the room Nina is in plunges into darkness.
After a moment of silence Bathsheba’s voice fills the pitch blackness surrounding her.
“Sensory deprivation initiated. Three hours and fifty-nine minutes remaining.”
The only sounds after that are Nina’s terrified breaths.
CHAPTER 30
MARIA
M aria sips her coffee as she watches the office building across from her. London is cold. And though she is wrapped up warm against the chill, she shivers in spite of herself.
She knows she isn’t at her best, she’s still recovering from her injuries, from her rapid weight loss and trauma. She should be in bed somewhere, she should be recovering, family and loved ones surrounding her. But she has no family, not really, and the last thing she wants is people surrounding her.
No doubt that’s one of the reasons she was chosen for the job in the first place. She fit the profile of a missing person perfectly, a woman working abroad on short contracts, a woman who—having quit Cornell after just one year—is evidently unreliable. A woman with friends in different states, with busy lives of their own and an understanding of their friend’s innate unpredictability. Maria knows she might have been missing for months, even years without someone assuming the worst. And when they did, would this tie-less short-term woman be remembered at all by the few people she came into contact with on the island where she was last seen? Most likely not. She had wandered into her own entrapment without even realizing what an easy mark she had been.
Her joints ache as she places the coffee cup back down on the table, but her hands no longer shake constantly. She is making progress, and that’s good enough for her.
It has only been a week now since she ran blood-soaked from that house and let the warm Caribbean Sea wash away the external traces of what happened to her. But the internal traces are still there, the bruises, cuts, and burns beneath her clothes are still there, and in her mind Maria is still in that house. Perhaps she always will be, the house blending in her psyche with that barely remembered past, blending again with the loss of her parents, blending with the never-ending struggle to live in a world she knows is not built for women as certain and driven as her.
You have to tread water just to stay afloat.
But she would rather be there in her mind, still in the Darién Gap, still in the house, than dead. This will not be the end of her, these people.
She looks back at the thin glass building opposite as people come and go. Maria saw the woman enter this morning, the woman who showed her around the house, the woman with the too-tight chignon. Her name is Lucinda Hooper, and she works in some capacity for a blue-chip wealth management firm. Maria has been watching the building for three days now, from the comfort of the quiet brasserie opposite. Hidden under the safety of awnings and blocked from view by a sculptural outdoor heating unit and understated topiary, she has watched. A book propped up in front of her, to a passing eye she is just a tourist with a new favorite café. She switches locations on the hour and takes up the same view at each.
The woman arrives and leaves at the same time each day, slipping promptly at 6 P.M. into a town car that takes her back to her home, a coral-pink gated house on Millionaire’s Row in Notting Hill. A housekeeper appears to let herself in, daily, an hour after Lucinda’s departure, and leaves again an hour before Lucinda returns home.
No other visitors have come to the house, as far as Maria has seen, and no one else appears to live there with her, except a small bouncy copper-haired cocker spaniel that she promptly walks for forty-five minutes as soon as she gets home every evening.
Maria’s eyes flick back up to the office building as a group of men enter the revolving doors, a woman in the lobby extending a hand to greet them in turn. It isn’t Lucinda.
Maria hoped to see her with somebody, to extend her knowledge of who else might be involved in what happened to her out on Gorda, but so far all she has to go on is Lucinda.
And tonight, she will be paying her a home visit.
—
MARIA SITS IN HER NONDESCRIPT silver-gray hire car and waits.
