Page 41 of Bitter House

The day Don came to the house, everything changed.

He wasn’t going to leave, not without his wife and son. That’s what he told me. As if they were his property. That’s the problem with men like that. They think the entire world belongs to them.

I’d wanted to keep her safe. I’d hired an attorney for her to help with the divorce. I’d told her my story, eventually.

But it wasn’t enough. He was at my door, and I knew then from the look in his eyes, even if I kept her locked inside my house, Don wasn’t like Reggie. He didn’t want money. He wanted them.

And I couldn’t let that happen.

The first time I ever held my husband’s gun was the night I killed a man. And I’d do it again.

In a heartbeat.

CHAPTER TWENTY

BRIDGET

We stare down into the dark hole in the ground. The air is cool and musty, more earthy than the basement. I’m brought back to digging up the garden grave, the way the mud seemed to permeate my every sense. I can feel it between my teeth as if I’m the one buried.

“Should we go down there?” I ask.

“No,” Cole says, too quickly. “No. We have no idea what’s down there. It’s not the basement. There could be snakes or rats, and that's the best-case scenario.”

I swallow. “What’s the worst?”

His dark eyes meet mine slowly, almost like he doesn’t want to look at me. “That whoever is writing these letters is counting on us going down there. Whether that’s because they’re down there waiting on us or they know what is, I’m not sure. But we can’t go down there, Bridget.” He uses his phone’s flashlight to scan the ground below us. A small metal ladder leads the few feet to the damp ground. There are cobwebs in every direction, gnats flying toward the light. He sticks his head into the tunnel, shining the light this way and that. “Besides that, the tunnels could collapse. We have no idea how old this is or where it leads.”

“Maybe it’s not a tunnel at all. We can’t see far into it. What if it’s, like, a safe room or a storm cellar?” I suggest as the idea occurs to me. “In a house like this, they probably had the money to install something like that.”

“A storm cellar, maybe, but still, they had the basement. It was sort of unnecessary. And if it’s a safe room, I’d think there would be more precautions.” He stands, leaning past me to close the door. “Either way, it’s not safe.”

“But the letter writer was right again.”

He nods, and neither of us have to say anything for him to know I’m thinking about my parents now. I swallow, drying my eyes and smearing mud across my cheeks.

“We just have two more letters,” I point out, looking down. “Once we have all the information, we’ll tell the police everything.”

“Agreed.” He runs his foot across the door. “We should probably put the containers back over this. Just in case.”

The insinuation is chilling: just in case someone from inside the tunnels were to try to get into our house. In case they climbed the ladder and pushed open the door. In case they walked into our house. Came for us. Killed us.

Suddenly I’m a child, picturing werewolves and slime monsters crawling up from the tunnel.

We push the containers back into place, weighing down the door with several hundred pounds of stuff, and make our way back upstairs, leaving the light on this time.

I can’t get to the shower fast enough.

* * *

That evening, I’m completely and utterly exhausted, and I use every chance I get to peer out the back windows to look toward the garden as if I expect to see the skeleton hand popping up from the dirt.

As I pull Jane’s chicken enchiladas from the oven, the warm, delicious scent fills my nose, and I try to focus only on that. Cole is back at the dinner table, finishing up what he was working on this morning, when I carry our plates over to him and place them down.

He looks surprised when I set his meal in front of him.

“You made dinner?”

“Well, Jane made dinner. I heated it up.” I sink into my chair across from him, and he closes his laptop before picking up his fork.

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