Page 69 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“How? You said yourself that video is worthless on its own.”

“I know what I said. But now I have more than that. I’ll be back. Since you don’t have a phone for me to call, stay here. Don’t talk to him. Just... I want this as much as you do. I need it more, even. I’m not gonna say trust me, but if you can’t do that at least please just stay the fuck right here until I come back,” I say, draining my vodka tonic and heading toward the door.

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes and nods in agreement.

“And lock the door,” I say as I walk out of 203 and really hope I make it back.

27

ANNA

She’s crazy if she thinks I’m going to sit here and wait while she tries to play the hero. It’s too late for that. I don’t need saving while she finally decides to do the right thing. I’m getting my phone, and I’m going to the police with the video myself. She could be in on it for all I know. Why show me this damning video now? Maybe she’s the one who was jealous of Callum, and maybe she’s the one who gave Lily the overdose, and they’re working together. What the hell do I know?

I had to have dropped it outside the window. I was upside down; it must have fallen out of my pocket. I have to at least look before I do anything else. I need a copy of that video for myself. I don’t know where she’s going or what she plans to do. I just don’t know who I can trust.

It’s dark outside now, and nobody is around. The only light is from the sparkling blue of the lights beneath the pool water and a scattering of stars. A feeling of static electricity runs through me as I dodge the sprinklers hissing into life and cross the grassy clearing on the side of the building to slip behind it and look for my phone.

The screen is still on the ground, and I feel a flood of relief because maybe he hasn’t gone into the bedroom or noticed the open window. The heat in the apartment is stifling anyway, so he probably wouldn’t notice an open window in another room—maybe not until he goes to bed. He’s probably tinkering with the AC.

There is only the orange glow of a window next door to Callum’s casting a small triangle of light on the grass below his bedroom, and so I have to feel on my hands and knees for my phone. It’s damp, and fresh-cut weeds cling to my bare knees as I crawl in the darkness. It has to be here.

Then, suddenly, I feel a sharp pain, and I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe! I clutch my neck and feel something there—a cord, a rope, something—pressing into my throat. I claw at it desperately, and I try to scream. I open my mouth to scream for help, but no sound comes out. I begin to flail my arms, reaching for anything around me to hold on to or push against. I kick behind me and make contact with something. Someone? But I’m helpless.

I see a constellation of stars behind my eyes, and everything goes black.

When I wake up, it’s still dark, and it takes me a few minutes to remember what happened and figure out where I am. We’re moving. I hear the soft hum of tires and feel the rhythmic seams of the road beneath me. I’m in the trunk of a car. My head throbs, and it hurts to blink. Is this Callum’s doing? Does he think he killed me? I don’t know whether to scream or play dead. I don’t know how long we’ve been driving.

Oh, my God. I can’t breathe in here. My hands are tied with something, and I can’t move. My mind reels, and I try to think of a way out, but how can there be a way out of this? Nobody knows I’m here. I think about what Callum did to Lily and what he did to Henry. And he got away with it. There’s no proof beyond a video that’s easily dismissed as the ravings of a troubled man.

I scream. I know it’s futile, but I need to try to get him to stop. I can’t let him get me to where he has planned. I need to stop him—get him off plan, off guard. I start to flail my body and kick behind me. I try to use all my core strength to slam my heels into the back seat so he can feel the impact, but I’m weak. I can’t do it. My limbs feel heavy and fatigued. He’s given me something to sedate me. I can’t kick, it all feels like quicksand. So I scream. I scream until my voice goes hoarse, and finally, after what seems like hours but is maybe only minutes, I feel the car slow and then stop.

Every muscle in my body aches and tenses as I wait to see if he’ll open the trunk door. But nothing happens, and I feel tears begin to fall and pool around my cheek, pressed heavy against the dirty carpet of the trunk floor.

I must fall asleep or lose consciousness again, because it seems like hours pass before I hear anything, and then all of a sudden, a click, and the trunk releases and opens. Callum stands there looming over me in the darkness.

He doesn’t say anything, which is more unsettling than if he started shouting orders. He’s eerily quiet and just shakes his head as he watches me climb out. He sees the fear in my eyes, and the way I cower from him when he takes a step toward me, and he seems not to be enjoying it. He seems almost inconvenienced.

“Goddammit,” he says, and I see that we are way out in the middle of nowhere. There’s a cliff only a few yards behind me, with the Rio Grande below the rocky fall downward. It’s exactly like the place Henry fell—it’s exactly like the place he was dumped, I mean. By this monster.

“I gave you every opportunity to get out. Jesus. I left threats at your door, locked you in a storage unit for Christ’s sake. I literally pushed you away because I didn’t want it to come to this.” He slams the ball of his hand onto the hood of his car.

Those threats were him. He didn’t want me to get close and figure anything out, so he tried to scare me away. I almost ask stupid questions—why did you act like my friend? Why did you kiss me back? Why did you say nice things about Henry? But I know the answer. He couldn’t scare me away, so he changed tactics. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Isn’t that how the saying goes?

“I won’t tell anyone,” I say pathetically.

“I know you won’t,” he says, and for the first time, that clean-shaven, woodsy cologned, sparkly-eyed guy looks like a totally different person. His eyes look dead, his face ashen and creased. How did I miss this? How did I overlook so many things—in Henry, in Callum...in myself? I tried to see them the way I wanted them to be.

“He betrayed you, I know. I’m sure what happened to Lily was an accident. And whoever hurt Henry—” I stop. I don’t know if he found out I saw the video. Cass told him something maybe, but how much? Maybe I can still lie my way out of this and play dumb? I have to at least try.

“You don’t have to do this. If you say you didn’t hurt Henry, then I believe you. There’s no proof,” I say, my voice shaking. I stand behind the car, my hands bound behind me, and he sits on a tree stump a few feet in front of me and looks me up and down as if he’s deciding how this will go.

“I’m not playing games. I know you saw the video. It’s cute, whatever you’re trying to do, but I’m not someone you can manipulate,” he says. Then he walks to the back seat, and I tense, not knowing what he’ll do, but he grabs a beer from a cooler and goes and sits back down. A beer. It’s unreal.

“The video doesn’t prove anything. There’s no physical evidence. He’s not here to—” I stop. I switch gears. “A video is not enough, and I wasn’t there. I have no proof against you. You don’t have to do this.”

He smiles, swigs his beer, and stares at me. “That’s cute. You know my wife used to say cute things like that—I mean, you know, total fucking lies, to get what she wanted. Do you know I live like a fucking homeless person because all of her medical bills were hemorrhaging our bank account? We used to have a beautiful house and a life and then, bam!”

I jump out of my skin when he smashes the glass bottle to bits to punctuate his sentence.

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