The White Angel Murder

60

She felt dampness at first. Like being wrapped in a wet towel. Then there was the sensation of the hard floor against her back and the thick dust in the air that made her nostrils itch.

Zoe’s eyes fluttered open. The light hurt and she squinted until her eyes adjusted. The first thing in her view was an unfinished ceiling. Water pipes and electrical cords in between thick wooden panels and fiberglass. She felt the pounding of her head on the right side and instinctively reached her hand up to find the stickiness of dried blood behind her ear.

She looked around, her neck stiff. It was dark but there was light coming through a door at the top of a set of stairs and she sat quietly and stared at the light. She remembered the mall and closing the registers … she went to her car … and then she woke up here. As she tried to sit up she felt pain in her feet and looked down to see that they had been tied together securely with a length of plastic. She tried pulling it off but it was wrapped so tightly she couldn’t get her fingers underneath the straps to get a good grip. She worked at it for a long time before giving up and crawling over to the wall. She pulled herself up using a built-in shelf.

There was a children’s bike in the corner, red with white trim. It was covered in dust and the wheels were flat. Behind that was a shelf packed with all manner of things. Glass jars filled with nails and screws, tools, old books, broken photo frames … it appeared to her to be more like garbage than storage.

She ran her fingers along the edge of the wall and a splinter broke off a shelf and embedded itself in her thumb. She put her thumb in her mouth and sucked on it and as she did a loud thud made her jump.

Her back was flat against the wall and she held her breath. There were more sounds and then something being dragged. It was coming from the ceiling and she realized she was in a basement.

The sounds stopped and she felt the warm trickle of urine down her leg. She choked back tears as she realized what had happened and continued to run her hands along the wall; looking for a door, though she knew now that she wouldn’t find one. As she made her way to the other side of the room, she felt something hard and loose and it jingled. They were chains hanging from the ceiling.

She collapsed onto the floor, her hand covering her mouth, and began weeping. She cried and then prayed. She hadn’t always been good about going to church or following any commandments. But she prayed now harder than she ever had before. She promised that if God took her home, she would start going to church more and stop having sex with Brian.

After what seemed like hours all the noises upstairs stopped and she stood up. Slowly, she made her way to the stairs. The steps were wooden and creaked loudly as she crawled flat on her belly.

There were maybe twenty and it took her a great length of time to get to the top. She looked underneath the door. The crack between the floor and the bottom of the door was wide and she could see red carpet. There was a couch against the back wall and to the right, maybe six or seven feet, was a thick door.

Zoe reached up and tried the doorknob. It was heavy and greasy to the touch. She tried turning it one way and then another but it wouldn’t budge. She put her face back down to the bottom of the door and tried to look to the far edge to see if she could see anything.

A pair of boots suddenly appeared in front of the door and made her gasp and pull away.