Local Woman Missing: A Novel of Domestic SuspensePaperback

PART ONE

DELILAH

NOW

I hear footsteps. They move across the ceiling above my head. My eyes follow the sound, but there ain’t nothing to see ’cause it’s just footsteps. That don’t matter none, though, because the sound of them alone is enough to make my heart race, my legs shake, to make something inside my neck thump like a heartbeat.

It’s the lady coming, I know, ’cause hers are the bare feet while the man always wears shoes. There’s something more light about her footsteps than his. They don’t pound on the floor like the man’s do. His footsteps are loud and low, like a rumble of thunder at night.

The man is upstairs now, too, ’cause I hear the lady talking to him. I hear her ugly, huffy voice say that it’s time to give us some food. She says it like she’s teed off about something we’ve done, though we’ve done nothing, not so far as I can tell.

At the top of the stairs, the latch unlocks. The door jerks suddenly open, revealing a scrap of light that hurts my eyes. I squint, see her standing there in her ugly robe and her ugly slippers, her skinny legs knobby-kneed and bruised. Her hair is mussed up. There’s a scowl on her face. She’s sore ’cause she’s got to feed Gus and me.

The lady bends at the waist, drops something to the floor with a clang. If she sees me hiding in the shadows, she don’t look at me.

This place where they keep us is shaped like a box. There’s four walls with a staircase that runs up the dead center of them. I know ’cause I’ve felt every inch of them rough, rutty walls with my bare hands, looking for a way out. I’ve counted the steps from corner to corner. There’s fifteen, give or take a few, depending on the size of my steps and if my feet have been growing or not. My feet have, in fact, been growing ’cause those shoes I came with no longer fit right. They stopped fitting a long time ago. I can barely get my big toe in them now. I don’t wear no shoes down here anymore ’cause I stopped wearing those ones when they hurt. I got one pair of clothes. I don’t know where they came from but they ain’t the same clothes I was wearing when I got to this place. Those stopped fitting a long time ago and then the lady went and got me new ones. She was put out about it, same as she’s put out about having to feed Gus and me.

I wear these same clothes every day. I don’t know what exactly they look like ’cause of how dark it is down here. But I do know that it’s baggy pants and a shirt that’s too short in the sleeves ’cause I’m forever trying to pull them down when I’m cold. When my stink reaches the lady’s nose, she makes me stand cold and naked in front of Gus while she washes my pants and shirt. She’s got words for me when she does. Ungrateful little bitch, ’cause then she’s sore she’s got to clean my clothes.

It’s pitch-black where we are. The kind of black your eyes can’t ever get used to because it’s so dang black. Every now and again, I run my hand in front of my eyes. I look for movement but there ain’t none. If I didn’t know better, I’d think my hand was gone, that it up and left my body, that it somehow tore itself off of me. But that would’ve hurt and there would have been blood. Not that I would have seen the blood on account of how black it is down here, but I would have felt the wetness of it. I would have felt the pain of my hand getting tore from my body.

Gus and I play chicken with ourselves sometimes. We walk from wall to wall in the darkness, see if we’ll chicken out before we run face-first into the wall. Rules are we got to keep our hands at our sides. It’s cheating if we feel with our hands first.

The lady calls down from the top of the stairs, her voice prickly like thorns on rosebushes. “This ain’t no restaurant and I ain’t no waitress. If you wanna eat, you’ve got to come get it for yourself,” she says.

The door slams shut. A lock clicks and there are the footsteps again, drawing away.

The lady wouldn’t bother feeding Gus and me but the man makes her do it ’cause he ain’t gonna have no blood on his hands. I’ve heard him say that before. For a long while, I tried to make myself not eat, but I turned dizzy and weak because of it. Then the pain in my belly got to be so bad that I had to eat. I figured there had to be a better way to die than starving myself to death. That hurt too much.

But all that was before Gus came. Because after he did, I didn’t want to die no more, ’cause if I did, then Gus would be alone. And I didn’t want Gus to wind up in this place all alone.

I push myself up off the floor now. The floor is rock hard and cold. It’s so hard that if I sit in the same spot long enough, it makes it so I can’t feel my rear end. The whole darn thing goes numb, and then after numb, it tingles. My legs are worn out, which don’t make no sense ’cause they don’t do much of anything except sit still. They’ve got no reason to be tired, but I think that’s why they’re so tired. They’ve plumb forgotten how to walk and to run.

I slog to the top of the stairs, one step at a time. There ain’t no light coming into this place where they keep Gus and me. We’re underground. There’s no windows here, and that crack of light that should be at the bottom of the door ain’t there. The man and the lady that live upstairs are keeping the light all to themselves, sharing none with Gus and me.

I feel my way up the stairs. I’ve done it so many times I know what I’m doing. I don’t need to see. I count the steps. There’s twelve of them. They’re made of wood so rough sometimes I get splinters in my feet just from walking on them. I don’t ever see the splinters but I feel the sting of them. I know that they’re there. Momma used to pull splinters out of my hands and feet with the tweezers. I think of these splinters living in my skin forever and it makes me wonder if they fall out all on their own, or if they stay where they’re at, turning me little by little into a porcupine.

There’s a dog bowl waiting at the top of the steps for Gus and me to share. I don’t see it, either, but I feel it in my hands, the smooth round finish of the dish. There was a dog in this house once. But not no more. Now the dog’s gone. I used to hear it barking. I used to hear the scratch of nails on the ceiling above me, and would make believe the dog was gonna open the door one day and set me free. Either that or eat me alive ’cause it was a big mean dog, from the sound of it.

The lady didn’t like it when the dog barked. She’d tell the man to shut it up—either you shut it up or I will—and then one day the barking and the scratching disappeared just like that, and now the dog’s gone. I never did lay eyes on that dog, but I imagined it was a dog like Clifford, big and red, on account of the gigantic bark.

Inside the dog bowl is something mushy like oatmeal. I take it back downstairs. I sit on the cold, hard floor, lean against a concrete wall. I offer some to Gus but he says no. He says he ain’t hungry. I try and eat, but the mush is nasty. My insides feel like they might hurl it all back up. I keep eating, anyway, but with each bite, it gets harder to swallow. I have to force myself to do it. I do it only so that my belly don’t hurt later on, ’cause there’s no telling when the lady will bring us more food. My mouth salivates, and not in a good way. Rather, it salivates in that way it does right before you’re about to throw up. I gag on the mush, vomit into my mouth and then swallow it back down. I try to make Gus eat some, but still he won’t. I can’t blame him. Sometimes starving is better than having to eat that lady’s food.

They’ve got a little toilet down here for Gus and me. It’s where we do our business in the dark, hoping and praying the man and the lady don’t come down when we’re on the pot. Gus and I have an agreement. When he goes, I go in the other corner and hum so I can’t hear nothing. When I go, he does the same. There ain’t no toilet paper in this place. There’s no place to wash our hands, or any other part of us for that matter. We’re dirty as all get-out, but things like that don’t matter no more, except for when our filth makes the lady mad.

We don’t get to take no real bath in this place. But every now and again a bucket of soapy cold water arrives and we’re expected to strip down naked, to use our hands to scrub ourselves clean, to stand there cold and wet while we air-dry.

It’s damp down here where they keep us, a cold, sticky wet like sweat, the kind that don’t ever go away. The water oozes through the walls and trickles down sometimes, when it’s raining hard outside. The rainwater pools on the floor beside me, making puddles. I walk in them puddles with my bare feet.

In the dark, I hear something else splashing in them puddles sometimes. I hear something scratching its tiny claws on the floor and walls. I know that something is there, something I can’t see. I got ideas, but I don’t know for sure what it is.

I do know for sure that there are spiders and silverfish down here. I don’t ever see them, either, but sometimes, when I try and sleep, I feel their stealth legs slink across my skin. I could scream, but it wouldn’t do any good. I leave them be. I’m sure they don’t want to be here any more than me.

I’m not alone down here, not since Gus came. It makes it better, knowing I’m not ever alone and that someone is here to bear witness to all the things the lady does to me. It’s usually the lady doing the hurting, ’cause she don’t got an ounce of goodness in her. The man has maybe an ounce ’cause sometimes when the lady ain’t home he’ll bring down a special treat, like a hard candy or something. Gus and I are always grateful, but in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder why he’s being kind.

I don’t know how old I am. I don’t know how long they’ve been keeping me here.

All the time I’m cold. But the lady upstairs couldn’t give two hoots about that. I told her once that I was cold and she got angry, called me things like ornery and ingrate, words that I didn’t know what they mean.

She calls me many things. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think my name was just as easily Twit or Dipshit as it is Delilah.

Come get your dinner, Dipshit.

Stop your whining, you little twit.

The man went and brought me a blanket. He let me sleep with it one night but then he went and took it away again so that the lady didn’t find out what he’d done.

I don’t know the difference between daytime and nighttime anymore. Long ago, light meant day and dark meant night, but not down here it don’t. Now it’s just all dark all the time. I sleep as much as I can because what else is there to do with my time than talk to Gus and play chicken with the walls? Sometimes I can’t even talk to Gus ’cause that lady gets mad at us. She screams down the stairs at me to stop my yammering before she shuts me up for good. Gus only ever whispers ’cause he’s scared of getting in trouble. Gus is a fraidy-cat, not that I can blame him. Gus is the good one. I’m the one who’s bad. I’m the one always getting into trouble.

I tried to keep track of how many days I’d been down here. But there was no way of doing that seeing as I couldn’t tell my daytimes from my nights. I gave that up long ago.

The sounds upstairs are my best measure of time. The man and the lady are loud now, trash talk mostly ’cause they ain’t ever nice to each other. I like it better when they’re loud, ’cause when they’re quarreling with each other, then nobody’s paying any attention to Gus and me. It’s when they’re quiet that I’m scared most of all.

I set the dog bowl aside. I did the best that I could. If I try and eat any more I will vomit. I offer some more to Gus but he says no. I’m not sure how Gus has made it this long on account of how little he eats. I never get a good look at him in the darkness, but I imagine he’s all skin and bones. I’ve caught glimpses of him when the door opens upstairs and we get a quick scrap of light. He’s got brown hair. He’s taller than me. I think he’d have a nice smile but Gus probably don’t ever smile. Neither do I.

The spoon chimes against the bowl. I reach down and take ahold of it in my hand. For whatever reason, I get to thinking of the way that lady comes downstairs sometimes. I don’t like that none. She only comes when she’s hopping mad and looking for someone to take her anger out on.

Gus must hear the jingle of the spoon. He asks what I’m doing with it. Sometimes I think Gus can read my mind.

“I’m keeping it,” I say.

Gus tells me that a round spoon isn’t going to do nothing to hurt no one, if that’s what I’ve got my mind set on, which it is.

“You’re just gonna get yourself in trouble for not giving the lady back her spoon,” he says. I can’t ever see the expression on his face, but I imagine he’s worrying about what I’m gonna do. Gus always worries.

I tell him, “If I can figure out a way to make it sharp, it’ll hurt.”

I’m banking on that lady being so soft in the head she’ll forget all about the spoon when she comes to get her bowl. I put the rest of the mush down the toilet so she don’t get angry and call us names for not finishing her food that she made. I put the empty bowl at the top of them steps and start thinking on how I’m going to make this round spoon sharp as a spear.