The Forgotten Room

36

In the old, wood-timbered Victorian on Perry Street, Pamela Flood sat in the small upstairs space she liked to call her dressing room, self-conscious before a mirror, applying makeup. She rarely did this, and even tonight applied only the bare minimum, but it felt an effort worth making. She had no siblings, and after the death of her father she had the house — with its strange crooked corridors, its back stairs and somnolent rooms of obscure functionality — to herself. The benefit of this — perhaps the only benefit — was that she could assign any number of spaces to her personal whims: hence, the dressing room.

It was quarter to nine in the evening, just about her favorite hour, windows open to the cool night breeze and the sleepy residential street, quiet save the soft droning of insects. A glass of iced tea with a sprig of peppermint sat at her right elbow, and a Charles Mingus CD was playing.

She was looking forward to her date with Jeremy Logan, and to what would no doubt be a marvelous dinner. She was also looking forward — as she privately admitted with a faint tingle of anticipation — to what might happen afterward. It wasn’t easy, meeting people in a place like Newport. In a resort town, you always felt like a bug under glass. She wouldn’t allow herself to get mixed up with clients and, living here all her life as she’d done, she felt she knew all the eligible bachelors too well, as former schoolmates and current neighbors, to ever consider them romantic material. Tourists, or the dot-com billionaires who showed up to display their yachts and pretend to drop in on the Jazz Festival…? Forget it.

That left a pretty small field of opportunity.

…What was that noise? A rap at the front door, perhaps?

She stood up, turned down the CD, and made her way to the head of the stairs, listening. But there was nothing. She glanced at her watch: Jeremy wouldn’t be here for another twenty minutes, at least.

Look at her: nervous as a high schooler about to attend the junior prom. Even so, she had a habit of turning up music until it was just loud enough to miss the phone or the doorbell. Not good for somebody who relied on clients and referrals for her livelihood. She returned to the makeup table and turned up the volume again, just not quite so much this time.

As she sat down, she reminded herself not to forget to bring along the business card she’d promised Jeremy. After rediscovering it, she’d been careful to put it away where she’d remember it: the rambling house, with its piles of books, drafting paper, and architectural drawings, had a way of sucking things in and hiding them away.

As she began applying lipstick, her thoughts turned again to Logan. Funny how her first impressions of him had been so colored by suspicion and alarm. And then, after learning whom he was, she’d gone to the Blue Lobster, determined to meet but not to like him. That, she knew in retrospect, was probably a reaction to his high profile: her New England puritanism would never allow her to date somebody who’d been on the cover of People, especially given a profession so tailor-made for publicity as his. But despite everything, he’d won her over. Not that he’d tried — and maybe that was part of it. No: he’d come in with no attitude, friendly, modest, even self-deprecating, a little reserved when it came to discussing his own work. And he was entertaining, in a droll sort of way. The fact he was good-looking only helped wear down her natural defenses.

But it wasn’t until their dinner at Joe’s that she’d really begun to take him seriously. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He was clearly intellectual: you got the sense that, every time he spoke, a lot more thought had gone into his reply than you could glean from just the words. What you saw on the surface was just the tip of a very intriguing iceberg. But there was more than that: it was the way he looked at you when you spoke, almost as if he comprehended your feelings better than you did yourself — and as a result she had never felt judged that evening…only understood.

At least, that’s how it had seemed to her. And she felt certain that, after a long candlelight dinner at Sub Rosa, she’d know for sure whether…

Was that a bump she’d just heard? Standing once again, she turned off the CD. It seemed to have come from downstairs. But then, with the music on, she couldn’t be sure — it might have come from the street.

She stood in the dressing room, listening. She glanced at her watch again: still not quite nine. There had been a rash of burglaries over the past few months, but they’d always taken place in the early hours of the morning.

As she hesitated in the soft golden light, there came another noise: the squeak of an old floorboard somewhere in one of the rooms below.

Pamela took a quick, appraising glance at herself in the mirror: Jeremy didn’t seem the type to just let himself in, but she wanted to look good just in case. She glanced around for her cell phone, found it, held it at the ready — also just in case.

She returned to the landing, descended halfway down the stairs. “Jeremy?” she called out. “You know it’s bad form to enter a woman’s boudoir without getting an invitation first.”

No answer.

Now she descended the rest of the stairs and walked past the parlor, past the dining room, turning on lights along the crooked passages until she reached the kitchen. Here she stopped and frowned. The back door was open. That was odd. Newport was a friendly place, but she knew enough to always keep her doors locked after dark.

She closed and locked the door. Then she glanced at her cell phone, made sure the 911 speed dial was ready, and moved silently into the kitchen, switching on the light as she did.

Everything seemed to be in order: the new refrigerator; the old stove that her mother had made so many wonderful meals on; the kitchen table, the day’s mail at one end and the single place setting at the other. It was just as she’d left it after cleaning up from lunch.

It was then that she smelled smoke.

It was faint, but acrid, and she’d learned to take that smell seriously. The wiring in the house was very old, but she’d put off updating it because of the cost. One of the fuses was probably overheating. Because of the power-hungry equipment in her office, she’d put in a couple of 20 amp fuses into the 15 amp circuits. Since the fuses were the old T type, this was possible. She knew it was potentially dangerous, but she’d only had problems once, and ever since she’d been careful not to run the office equipment while the air conditioner was on. There didn’t seem too much load running in the house that evening. But just to be sure, she’d check the fuse box and replace any 20 amp fuses with those of correct size. She didn’t need to be warned three times: next week, she’d bite the bullet and get an electrician in for an estimate.

Preoccupied with these thoughts, she had opened the door to the basement, preparing to open the fuse box that was set into the wall at the top of the stairs. Then she stopped, rooted in place by shock.

A fire was raging in the basement: black smoke roiling furiously up the stairs, yellow tongues of flame curling and darting toward her in a way that, despite the violence, was almost caressing. As she watched, a second gout of smoke and flame suddenly appeared by the wiring junction on the far basement wall.

She whirled around, fumbling with the phone, preparing to call the fire department. As she did so, a dark figure darted out from behind the pantry door and wrapped a tweed-clad arm around her head, immediately cutting off her screams. Pamela’s arms shot up reflexively and her cell phone went shooting across the room.

The figure began dragging her out of the kitchen, away from the windows and deeper into the house. For the briefest of instants, Pamela was too surprised to struggle. But then she began to fight in earnest, yelling through the fabric that pressed over her mouth, biting, beating at the figure with her fists.

For a moment, the fury of her attack seemed to surprise the intruder. The grip loosened and Pamela twisted around, preparing to counterattack. But just then, a damp cloth was jammed hard against her mouth and nostrils. A sour chemical stench assailed her. Blackness began crowding in from the corners of her vision. She twisted again, kicking desperately, trying her utmost to cry for help, but with every intake of breath her limbs grew heavier and more stupid.

One lurch at a time, she was dragged farther away from the back door, and freedom. The last thing she saw before darkness overtook her was an orange tracery of flame, now eating its way across the kitchen wall, consuming the old wooden house with incredible speed.